Steve Troughton-SmithI'm pretty convinced now that in the near future you'll be able to deploy an entire 'company in a box' of AI agents, with the equivalent to domain experts in programming, design, sound design and music, marketing, and more, that will feasibly compete with the average startup. The OpenClaw cultists^Wfans will tell you they're already doing this, today, on Mac minis. If you think this is hyperbole or kool-aid pyramid-scheme nonsense, I suspect you're not even remotely prepared for what's to come
Warner Crocker@stroughtonsmith I think you're correct. But given rising chip and compute costs, we'll all probably have to seek VC funding to afford it.
@WarnerCrocker I think the billionaires intend to replace us; consumers only.
Jeff@stroughtonsmith @WarnerCrocker Their goal is to get to "the top" and then replace everyone below them with something automated to improve the bottom line. #money
John Gordon đ·@stroughtonsmith @WarnerCrocker Yup. Workers are the fly in the ointment for them. They canât enjoy their lifestyle without people to cook, clean, drive, fly and make stuff for them. Iâm sure thatâs the motivation for EMâs recent obsession with robotics instead of EVs.
@stroughtonsmith FWIW, as someone who's been a registered Apple Dev for roughly 20 years or so, but has never officially created an app/game in Xcode ever.. I'm happy to say that the recent Xcode betas have helped me create a game and get it to actually work! I'm amazed. Didn't type one line of code, and still needs a lot of work, but hopefully TestFlight is in my future!
@stroughtonsmith I'd also like to note that I'm doing this while trying to stick with the totally free option, and not upgrading to a paid plan.
cĂ©line didone@[email protected] I donât think youâre wrong but that sounds pretty depressing to me. If thatâs the case, then whatâs the point of almost any economic activity?
If any person can roll their own âxâ thatâs good enough, it doesnât sound like thereâs a lot of incentive for anyone to make something great. âBusinessâ gets reduced to an arms race of ai interfacing with ai.
If any person can roll their own âxâ thatâs good enough, it doesnât sound like thereâs a lot of incentive for anyone to make something great. âBusinessâ gets reduced to an arms race of ai interfacing with ai.
Gabriel N@stroughtonsmith Make Industry Non-human Again
Iâll give you that it may happen, and it will be easy to distinguish between the MINA and non MINA startups.
A startup is not a company, though. It does not have the same requirements or goals.
How much time until the whole thing collapses under structural mediocrity, utter lack of creativity and the eventual decline in the creation of new knowledge in the domains that you mentioned?
Kirk Reynolds@stroughtonsmith on a smaller scale this is very possible with subagents today. Working on some projects after being laid off. I have dedicated programmer, QA and PM agents using Gitea (overkill, GitHub is probably better) to track work/issues/PR. With CI/CD i get an artifact/app to test and validate.
Kyle Hughes@stroughtonsmith I think you are directionally correct but I also think this is âfaster horsesâ framing. For the same reason we wonât have trillions of apps: if the friction goes away then the shape of the whole familiar system also goes away. There wonât be millions of companies-in-a-box because there wonât be any economic value in any of that because it will be a commodity. There is no way to prepare for a world where capital replaces labor; if that happens then the future is now determined.
@kyle I'm thinking more of a short time frame, not the distant horizon. The complete industrial collapse comes later đ
@stroughtonsmith Understood. It will be a wild⊠6 months.
Frank O'Dwyer@stroughtonsmith why stop there? You could imagine deploying âincubator in a boxâ, give it some money, and have it deploy a fleet of startups with agentic CEOs and product managers and so on, with only the prompt âmake number go up!â
(Not sure which effect is supposed to win out though - all those startups should in theory eat tokens while having about ~0 value individually, as they would probably be competing with zillions of other similar automated enshittifiers? đ )
Taylor Hadden@stroughtonsmith Perhaps. This begs the question: what is the average startup doing? Most fail. Most don't produce anything of appreciable value.
The idea of this being commodified can sound dire, but it also might be a good thing. How many good ideas are never explored because the originator of the thought lacks the capitalâmonetary, human or otherwiseâto take action on that idea? Reducing the cost of shots-on-goal seems like a good thing.
@stroughtonsmith There's another angle here which is licensing. Under current law, stuff not made by humans is non-copywritable. AI generated assets are, by all current precedent, in the public domain.
If that holds, anything made by the AI-Company-In-A-Box becomes a public good.
@taylorhadden 'if' is doing a lot of heavy lifting here
@stroughtonsmith It would be a dramatic overturning of existing precedent. The largest change to copyright law since Disney stepped on the scale.
I think it would be dangerous and cultural suicide. The chance for cultural and political blowback is significant. So yeah, solid chance OpenAI lobbies for it hard. They and their kin are clearly ghouls.
@stroughtonsmith It's holding so far!
Obviously not a code case, but definitely the same ballpark. Treat AI-created code you generate as public domain! It may well be so!
Jorge Salvador Caffarena@stroughtonsmith if there are no workers, there are no âconsumersâ, only slaves. There is no billionaires if only them have the means to have money. They would need to mighty morph into medieval lords, or embrace universal income for all and utopia for all. But yeah we know that is not something they are going to allow.
Philip Mallegol-Hansen@stroughtonsmith Whether or not something is a pyramid scheme, and whether or not participants find benefit in participating, are orthogonal. It can be both :)