Agentic systems will be able to automate everything that has to do with rational thought
And: Why would anyone even want to increase their number of readers by 2x or even 100x?
This is a response to the post “Do you actually want to be 10x agentic or 95th percentile? [for most people, I suspect the answer is no]” in r/slatestarcodex by Reddit user michaelmf.
I absolutely agree! I also believe that, in the most general sense, all this agentic automation will only happen for one domain of tasks: those tasks which people feel obliged to do, but actually hate.
The most basic obligation is always „earning money“. Whether you‘re an entrepreneur who‘s either greedy or who has greedy investors who want a 100x ROI, or you‘re a regular employee who gets meaningless tasks from their boss. Tasks which are anywhere on the spectrum between „feeling apathetic about them“ and „bringing one straight into burnout“.
But when you genuinely enjoy working on something and have no external pressure to achieve results and outputs, if you‘re just „in flow“, then you don‘t want any automation. If you go into this people pleasing mode of serving anyone (especially algorithms in regards to digital content creation), then you will be miserable eventually.
I‘ve been delving quite deeply into economic transition periods recently and I see many parallels with the origins of the industrialization in England. But: With today‘s agentic systems, we‘re not primarily automating manual work, but instead what you might call „thought work“. We‘re not automating just for the fun of it, we‘re automating simply because it‘s more economical and it brings more money. When an agent doesn‘t effectively bring you more money, you‘re only using it like a toy.
In the grand scheme of things, the industrialization didn‘t create or destroy any jobs, it just forced people to take on new kinds of jobs, either due to opportunism or due to economic necessity.
Agentic systems will be able to automate everything that has to do with rational thought. And that‘s quite a lot of things! It‘s pretty much all types of hard and easy labor ever, because the economic systems themselves work most smoothly if all its participants are acting rationally. Not in terms of optimizing any single market participant‘s financial gains, but in terms of providing goods and services where they‘re needed when they‘re needed, reliably.
In that sense, I see agents as an economic liberation, because they have the potential to liberate us from just working for the economy and instead leveraging the economy to just radically improve quality of life into dimensions we don‘t even dare to think about yet.
And coming back to the blogging example: Why would anyone even want to increase their number of readers by 2x or even 100x? I only see three options:
economic necessity, i.e. someone sees this as their only or preferred way to earn money
greed, i.e. someone just wants more money for the sake of it, whether it‘s for consumerism or just because they can only derive a sense of self-worth based on a larger number on their bank account
narcissism, i.e. someone doesn‘t care about the money, but just wants to be famous for the sake of it, because they are afraid of irrelevance.