There has been a lot of recent data points on how AI agents will automate away most of the knowledge work and cause mass unemployment.
But a fundamental paradox is that AI, at least today, is still indeterministic. This is why Gen AI is so valuable – exactly because of their ability to handle indeterministic input. But this indeterministic nature is not always desired, not at every level of a serious workflow.
Just think about humans – you employ a human instead of machine because of their agency and the indeterminism. But to manage a team of humans, you need deterministic workflows, e.g. expense reports, IT security measures. It’s not about how intelligent the humans are, but the deterministic measures are a necessary mechanism to prevent errors, whether intentional or not.
This will hold true for AI. In no way humans will let agents run without a harness in serious workflows, no matter how intelligent they are.
That means even when agents are very cheap to run, for serious workflows, the cost of running agents will still be non-zero. Just like TSMC need to plan carefully when building new factories/plants even though once built, these factories are run automatically.
The cost of AI is the cost of designing and building the factory.