Within the next five years, every individual will have the ability to employ AI agents from the cloud. These agents will effectively serve as our AI employees and assistants, aiding in tasks where we might typically enlist the services of another person or company.
The need to hire human workers may become obsolete. AI agents will be more cost-effective, loyal, and easier to communicate with, eliminating the challenges of human factors such as ego, motivation, and salary negotiations.
This transformation signifies that anyone with a business idea, hobby project, vision, or passion can set their plans in motion without recruiting teams and navigating the intricate maze of leadership challenges.
Imagine wanting to design a game without having expertise in programming or artistry. One would simply engage an AI agent and initiate a conversation. Describe your desired game, and the agent will pose follow-up questions to flesh out unspecified aspects. It would then develop the game, handling everything from code writing to art creation. If the workload proves substantial, the agent can temporarily commission additional AI agents, efficiently dividing tasks among them. Coordination and communication would be seamless, and the final product will be presented to you within seconds or minutes.
Contrast this with today's lengthy process, where games take years to develop due to intricate discussions, hiring challenges, communication breakdowns, and varying human performance. With AI, feedback will be incorporated rapidly, and adjustments made in moments rather than weeks or months. You could play the game, provide your feedback, and the agent would quickly apply modifications, allowing you to try it again almost instantaneously.
AI agent's primary objective is to resonate with your intent and to align with your will. While it might suggest alternative perspectives or solutions based on data, it operates without emotional biases or conflicts. Think of it like the relationship between a painter and a brush. The painter has the vision, and the brush aids in bringing that vision to life. Similarly, while the AI can offer tools and options, the user drives the ultimate direction and decisions.
In personal spheres, too, AI agents will prove invaluable. Picture having a personal Alfred, much like Batman's trusted aide. These agents can source information, offer advice, interact on your behalf, and consistently prioritize your wellbeing, freedom, and privacy.
Crucially, any data they gather will be end-to-end encrypted, ensuring confidentiality, and the agent will maximize your freedom, because it has no other master.
While traditional tools require users to adapt to them, AI agents stand apart. They proactively conform to the user, ensuring transparency and clarity in their actions and communicating in easily digestible terms.
Currently, the closest we have to these AI agents are the LLM agents (which I've covered in a prior piece for LEVEL). Their limitations include a lack of continual learning and long-term planning, frequent errors, a text-only interface, and relatively slow processing speeds. Today, LLM agents are not equipped to replace human labor.
However, in the near future, these limitations will be solved, and AI agents will replace most or all human workers.
Regarding cost, AI agents will be substantially more affordable than human employees. Consider a rough comparison: the average hourly wage in the Czech Republic is 350 CZK, while an LLM agent thinking at a speed of 1 million text tokens per hour would cost a mere 44 CZK (or $2).
Engaging directly with your AI agent eliminates the need for a middleman, streamlining your processes. Just as we currently opt to handle tasks ourselves when they're straightforward and time-efficient, why introduce another party? If you can directly query ChatGPT and get precise answers, why ask someone else to act as the intermediary?
What does this trend herald?
The need to hire human workers might vanish.
People will not have to work for other people anymore.
You will have an army of AI agents working for you, writing code, creating art, designing, testing, researching, doing marketing, etc.
AI agents will prioritize and augment your freedom, privacy, skills, and creativity.
These agents will act as extensions of ourselves, removing any perceived need to delegate tasks to fellow humans.
It will lead to an abundance of produced work, not being anymore limited by the productivity of the human population.
Humans will engage in interactions purely out of desire and joy, rather than out of job-related obligations, valuing genuine connections over forced professional exchanges.
The deployment of high-powered AI agents on a continuous basis will likely drive a significant surge in energy consumption and necessitate advancements in hardware. How can we address these environmental and infrastructural challenges?
We may be on the cusp of a new age dominated by massively productive solo creators who can truly embrace their creative freedom without being limited by other people.
An underlying question remains as we usher in this new era of AI-driven autonomy and one-person corporations. If traditional employment diminishes in favor of AI agents, from where will individuals derive their livelihoods? How will society adapt to ensure its members' well-being and financial stability? While AI's vast possibilities and benefits are undeniable, the broader socioeconomic ramifications warrant deep reflection and discussion. This, however, is a discourse for another day.
Thank you for reading this!
In some of the next blog posts, I plan to analyze the “Future of delegation”—the specifics of how it will change once we have AI agents that are maximally aligned with our intent.
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