Autonomous AI Companies as a Footnote

In an AI guide there is a casual sentence that describes the abolition of human labor. Not as the apocalypse of humanity’s right to exist but it describes it as a feature. The era of autonomous AI companies that operate without human involvement is apparently imminent. What am I even talking about?

I read the sentence myself twice or more. Not because it was complicated but because I could not believe it was just sitting there. Without a comment, without any context that would resolve it. Not even a single word about what it could possibly mean.

I cannot think of a better example right now but imagine someone writes a text about urban planning and mentions in passing that cities will soon no longer need residents. And then moves on to the next paragraph and describes lighting concepts, parking management etc. That is exactly what this reads like.

It reads like a company without people, without management, without clerks, without heart and soul. What remains is a legal entity that makes decisions, signs contracts, earns money and where not a single person gets up in the morning to go to work. This is not the next level of automation but the end of the idea that business has anything to do with people.

And it is presented as a real possibility, or rather as an outlook worth taking seriously as a genuine perspective. The way you keep an eye on the weather, whether it rains or perhaps the sun shines after all.

In thirty years I have heard a lot of technology promises. Cloud, Mobile, Blockchain, everything was supposed to fundamentally and groundbreakingly change everything. As a rule far less changed than announced. Sometimes something did change after all, quietly and silently. So that you only noticed when it was too late.

What irritates me about it is not the prediction. Maybe it is right. It was this subtle tone that startled me. An autonomous AI company is described like an operating system that gets an upgrade. You install it and then everything runs even better. But for whom?

The owner no longer pays salaries, carries no personnel risk and the algorithm does not care about anything anyway. And the people who worked in the old version of that company are quickly forgotten.

This is the part of the debate that occupies me about the entire AI discussion. Big shifts are written small and the existential is packaged so technically that human consequences become footnotes in the triumph of efficiency.

I wonder whether the people writing these texts do it on purpose. Or whether the logic of optimization has become so natural that you no longer think about what you are saying. If the goal is efficiency then the human being is a cost factor. And eliminating the cost factor is not an ethical problem but a technical one. You solve it and celebrate the efficiency gain.

This way of thinking is certainly not meant to be evil. But there are sentences you simply must not write casually. When they are written they need to force the reader into a pause so that he starts to think about it. In the future there will be autonomous AI companies that operate without human involvement would be such a sentence.