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There is a reason that Substack abandoned their once so principled stance against ads last week—you can only scale premium subscriptions to a certain point. To make a content catalog competitive, you have to offer an emotionally charged, ad-subsidized access point.
“AI Agents will replace human workers” Let’s talk about that. Here’s a philosophical question an economist might ask: Why do companies even employ people? Why do they spend tons of money on paychecks, benefits, offices, and a million other things to employ people? After all, if markets are efficient, shouldn’t it always be cheaper to outsource your operations to the best available external provider? Ronald Coase’s Theory of the Firm proposed a brutally practical answer: Because the cost of using the market (finding vendors, negotiating, coordinating) is often higher than doing it inside the org. In other words: Outsourcing often has lots of hidden costs. This idea matters because while we’ve clearly established that AI can produce individual pieces of code or content materially cheaper than human beings, we have yet to show that the coordination costs actually decrease within a firm. AI Agents are doing tasks efficiently; but we still have the same costs for human employees to coordinate the AI agents’ work and align it with the goals of the company’s leadership. If you believe in the theory that AI allows companies to be much smaller than before, you are actually saying that you think internal coordination costs are going to dramatically decrease. Otherwise every additional meeting gets exponentially more expensive as your staff get more and more leverage out of their time spent. Allow me to ask this question in another way: What happens when “the market competitor” isn’t another vendor or headcount but a meter - AI agents that can log in, click, remember, and obey rules? If metered compute + a little supervision costs less than new payroll or new vendors for the same reliability, the rational move is unfancy: don’t hire someone; meter an AI agent. So AI Agents won’t replace humans when they can do tasks better or faster than humans (they already can in many cases). They will replace humans when coordination time between AI agents & the company using the agents falls below the status quo.
Got a 3,500 word banger coming out tomorrow. Represents months of interviews, customer calls, and late night writing by me. The age of robots has come.
OpenAI banned racist MLK videos on Sora (as they should) But they're now allowing erotica And still plenty of other racist content Seems contradictory, right? Well, social platforms benefit from allowing content that goes right up to the line (and sometimes over it) Whichever platform allows users go the furthest to the right on this chart gets a massive boost in viewership