Labour

Scott Galloway is the kind of commentator the AI conversation rarely produces: not a researcher, not a founder, not a doomer, not a booster. He is a marketing professor and a serial entrepreneur with a record of correctly reading the corporate stories of the last two decades, and he has spent the last two years pointing at the AI story with increasing concern. The headline of his pitch - that AI was not built for ordinary people and that the rich no longer need them - is provocative on purpose. The argument underneath is more careful, and worth pulling apart on its own terms. ...

TL;DR The marginal cost of AI intelligence is halving roughly every two months and heading toward a level where rationing stops making sense - similar to how bandwidth and storage became effectively unconstrained This will break pricing models built on scarce cognition: anything billed per word, per hour, or per consult faces a hard ceiling set by what machines charge for the same work The Jevons paradox means total cognitive work in the economy likely goes up, not down - cheaper thinking means we apply thinking to far more problems, not the same problems more cheaply Three categories of human work survive: accountability (being the named responsible party), taste (choosing well from infinite AI-generated options), and real-world coupling (a body in a place, a relationship that took years to build) The political question of who captures the surplus and who absorbs the transition cost is still open - it will be decided by institutions and policy, not by the technology itself This is a personal reflection, not a forecast dressed up as one. I am writing about a trend I think is real, but the second-order consequences are guesses, and I am sure some of them are wrong. ...