In this scenario the person who wants to be paid owns the output of the agent. So it’s closer to a contractor and subcontractor arrangement than employment.

The AI agents don’t appear to know how & where to be economically productive. That still appears to be a uniquely human domain of expertise.

So the human is there to decide which job is economically productive to take on. The AI is there to execute the day-to-day tasks involved in the job.

It’s symbiotic. The human doesn’t labour unnecessarily. The AI has some avenue of productive output & revenue generating opportunity for OpenAI/Anthropic/whoever.

A question is which side agents will achieve human-level skill at first. It wouldn’t surprise me if doing the work itself end-to-end (to a market-ready standard) remains in the uncanny valley for quite some time, while “fuzzier” roles like management can be more readily replaced.

It’s like how we all once thought blue collar work would be first, but it turned out that knowledge work is much easier. Right now everyone imagines managers replacing their employees with AI, but we might have the order reversed.

How are businesses going to get money if there are no humans that are able to pay for goods?

Lots of us are not cut out for blue collar work.

Can you explain why we pay Sam Altman & Elon Musk? Or Jeff Bezos & Bill Gates? They’re just middlemen collecting money for other people’s labor.