I know people are painful. I won’t deny that. After all I am also people. And I also know that almost every other creature, except dogs, would love to have a world free of people. I clearly recall visiting, living in, and leaving places in the world and thinking, ‘What an amazingly beautiful place this is. If only there weren’t any people here.’ Indian tiger tourism is an example. But this article is not about tigers or tourism. This is a question which I am putting out there for someone to please explain to me.

It began with a friend sending me the following tweets or Xs. Take a look.

yesterday: anthropic’s ceo predicted world’s first single person billion dollar company. 2024: we started building the economic layer powering it. the first single person billion dollar company wont look like a traditional startup. no employees. no pitch decks. no cap table. just one person. coordinating labor, capital, execution with agents. scaling with AI. users own it. agents run it. capx powers it. these aren’t tools. they’re singe person companies. agent native businesses built by AI builders co-owned by the users who use them. the AI builder economy is here. where solo builders vibecode their way into companies. some will hit $10K/month. few will hit $1M. and one will build a billion dollar company. capx will power them all. the app store for agent apps. the robinhood for their tokens. all under one roof. Capx

I can almost see him drooling and more while writing this tweet.  My question is, ‘What will this single person billion-dollar company build?’

Here’s another tweet.

Anthropic researchers: “Even if AI progress completely stalls today and we don’t reach AGI… the current systems are already capable of automating ALL white-collar jobs within the next 5 five years” It’s over.

This one is not drooling. I think he just had an ……… ‘It’s over’, he says. For who? Obviously not for him, or he wouldn’t say that so glibly.

Let me illustrate with an example of how any economy works. GE Appliances produces refrigerators. For this it pays workers good salaries to build the refrigerators. These refrigerators are stocked in Walmart, Home Depot, Costco and so on. Who buys them? The same workers who built them. That enables GE to make a profit and build more refrigerators. And it enables the workers to have nice refrigerators in their homes and feed their kids ice cream, while paying their mortgages, food and utility bills and so on.

Now in the new AI scenario, you have a factory with no workers. You have robots which are 3D printing refrigerators and so the production of refrigerators has gone from say, 20 per hour to 20,000 and the cost has come down to $10 for a refrigerator. But who will buy them? Because the worker who was earning a living building refrigerators is now a homeless man with a shopping cart with all his worldly belongings in it, sleeping in a shop entrance in the night. He may have $10 to buy a refrigerator but he has nowhere to put it because he lost his house because he couldn’t pay the mortgage. To add to that you now have to stock millions of refrigerators. You can say that the solution to the stocking issue is to print on demand. But to demand, the person must have the money to pay which he gets by working, which he can’t get now as he has no work. So, who will buy the product?

In any economy, there are producers of goods and services, who employ people and pay them. These people are the buyers of the goods and services, and their money goes back to the producers. That is the virtuous cycle of any economy. If you remove one player from that cycle, the cycle breaks down and so does the economy.

Then you have someone like Marc Andreessen who has this to say:

Marc Andreessen explains how AI will amplify productivity to such an extent that the cost of everything from building a house to curing cancer will fall to a penny

To which I say: The cost of producing it may be a penny. But I am willing to bet my last penny that it will not be sold for a penny. And that is what matters. My question is, if you kill people’s capacity to buy by kicking them out of their jobs and replacing them with AI, robots or whatever, then who will buy your sexy products?

I see that there is someone on Twitter, who echoes what I said:

Geoffrey Miller Apr 14, 2024  This propaganda from the AI industry that AI will inevitably lead to a fully automated luxury communist utopia is the most cynical, sociopathic gaslighting I have ever witnessed. Pro tip: they will not share their windfalls with others. Why would they?

The point that I am making is that unless we think holistically, we are going to find ourselves in a lot of hot water. Things don’t happen in isolation. Actions have reactions which are equal and opposite – Newton’s Law.

In my view the problem lies with two things: how we define or measure the economic well-being of a society and with the gross overestimation of the value of so-called productivity. Let me explain. Take the first one. What if instead of defining a society based on the top 1% we chose to define it based on the bottom 50%? What if instead of counting the number of mansions, Bugattis and Ferraris, we counted the number of homeless people? What if instead of counting the number of billionaires reported in the Financial Times, we counted the number of people sleeping on park benches using the Financial Times as their blanket? What if instead of having TV shows about the lives of the Kardashians and other denizens of Beverly Hills, we had TV shows based on the life of the little family sleeping in a tent under the bridge in LA? How would our world look? Not so nice perhaps, but much more real. Then it would become impossible to ignore all those millions who make up what we call our civilization. The character of a nation is not defined by its elites and their lifestyles. But by how that nation takes care of its weakest and most vulnerable.

The second thing is the overvaluation of productivity. The Holy Rule seems to be: “More and more for less and less.” Since labor wage tends to be a major cost, the focus is to try to eliminate it. AI aided automation gives the unique opportunity to do so and everyone is chasing that. I want to give two examples to illustrate that using productivity/unit blindly as our life-goal is a very bad idea.

Firstly, if we use this rule, then how can we evaluate original art, research, discovery, and invention? Michelangelo didn’t evaluate his work based on his ability to cover more square feet of ceiling per minute with paint than the next artist. And neither would you. When you look at his work on the ceiling of Sistine Chapel you are not thinking, ‘If he had used AI, he could have produced that in five minutes.’ You are marveling at the beauty and intricacy of his work, and you don’t care how long he took to do it. That it is unique is what gives it value.

Self-driving trucks will not only get rid of drivers but will reduce turnaround time because the truck can drive continuously without the driver having to take rest. The trucks will be safer, have fewer accidents, and will enhance profitability. What we don’t ask is, ‘For whom?’

Because converting all 16 wheelers in America today means that 5 million truck drivers will be out of work. Multiply that by 5 for average family size and you have affected up to 25 million voting citizens. These people will suddenly go from being household with incomes of between US $ 80-100 per annum to zero. But with the same bills, mortgages, utilities, health insurance, car payments, kids school fees, education loans, and let’s not forget food, but without the ability to pay for them. The AI propagandists glibly talk about retraining truck drivers and anyone who AI throws out on the street.

My question is, ‘Who will train them and in what?’ Weaving baskets won’t do. In the case of truck drivers it must be something that will give them an income to match the one they used to have so that they can continue to live in the style to which they had become accustomed. That is the twist in the tale that nobody has any clue about, but they don’t want to admit that. Without this you will simply have destroyed the lives of 25 million people so that trucking company owners can make more money. Believe me, these people will not silently disappear into thin air making it slightly thicker. They will first vote. Then they will fight. They will protest, riot, even kill. There will be civil war. Because you can’t simply wish away most of the population because they have suddenly become inconvenient for the top 1%.

Let me tell you a story which illustrates what I mean. In 1985, when I was studying at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, our Professor of Organization Behaviour (OB) Area was Prof. Pulin Garg. One day he told us a very interesting story which has remained in my mind all these decades. He said that Ford Foundation, did a project to help village farmers in India to enhance crop yields by using metal plowshares instead of their traditional wooden ones. They adopted a village in Uttar Pradesh and set up their experimental and control plots. The experimental plots were plowed using metal plowshares, made from cast iron, while the control plots were plowed in the traditional way using wooden plows. They monitored the crops over three cycles and proved to the villagers that simply by using the metal plowshare, their yield would be enhanced by over 20%. I won’t go into the scientific details of why this happens here but will suffice to say that this benefit was made clear to the villagers. 

The day before they were to leave the village, the Ford Foundation people called for a meeting with the village Panchayat (governing council of elders) and asked them if they were happy with the experiment and believed that the use of metal plowshares would benefit them. The Panchayat members and all the villagers agreed that they had watched this experiment and had no doubt about the benefit of the metal plowshare. The Ford Foundation people were delighted and as a parting gift, gave the village a metal plowshare for each farmer. The villagers were very grateful and thanked them profusely for their generosity.

Three years later, Ford Foundation returned to the village to assess their project to see how successfully it was functioning. To their complete astonishment they discovered that nobody was using the metal plowshares. They asked the Mukhya (head of the Panchayat) what had been done with the plowshares that they had gifted the village with. They were taken to a storage hut and shown the plowshares, carefully wrapped in sackcloth and stacked in one corner. 

‘They are safe Sir’, said the Mukhya.

‘But why are you not using them. We came all this way to teach you this better way of farming. We proved to you that this way is better, and you all agreed. We gave you the plowshares as a gift so that you wouldn’t need to spend any money to buy them. But you are still not using them, why?’ The Americans hit the proverbial Indian stonewall. I am convinced that stonewalling was invented in India because nobody does it better than us. ‘Sir we are so grateful to you for coming all the way from America to teach us. You are Mahan (great) people. We are nothing compared to you. Yet you took all this trouble for us. We are very grateful to you.’

The Ford Foundation project leader tried his best to get an answer out of the Mukhya but any Indian who knows our culture and the trouble we have with direct rejection or criticism will understand, he got nowhere. This is where my professor came into the picture. When he heard this story, he offered to go to the village and find out what was really going on. Ford Foundation needed an answer for their project report, so they hired Pulin. And therefore, one afternoon Pulin arrived in the village. Let me tell you in Pulin’s own words what he told us about this entire incident. It is a fascinating story which shows how culture trumps everything else.

Pulin told us, ‘I arrived in the village and the Mukhya welcomed me. Naturally we don’t simply start asking questions as soon as we arrive. So, I drank the water they gave me, then tea. I was honored by being invited to stay with the Mukhya in his home but opted for an empty house which they used for guests (usually Revenue Department officials) because when a stranger stays in a Jat home, it is a lot of hardship on the women, who are in purdah (veiled). I had a bath and changed into a new dhoti (Prof. Pulin Garg always wore a dhoti, even in the IIMA) and we met for dinner. We chatted about everything under the moon except the Ford Foundation experiment. They knew why I was there, but the propriety of the culture must be maintained. You don’t ask the guest any questions and the guest will not tell you why he is there until the basic hospitality is over.

After the evening meal was over, we sat and smoked a hookah when I opened the topic. ‘I believe the Americans were here to show you some new farming ways!’

‘Jee Sahib, such nice people. They came all the way from America to teach us how to plow our fields.’

‘What did they do?’

‘They took two fields for their experiment………….(he gave Pulin a detailed description of the entire experiment and admitted that the yield was 20% higher with metal plowshares)

‘Are you happy with what they showed you and are you using the new plowshares?’

‘Jee Sahib, we are convinced that their method is superior, but we can’t use the metal plowshares.’

‘Why can’t you use them? Is there any problem with the design? Is it difficult to use them? What is the problem?’

‘Sahib, there is nothing wrong with the design and it is not difficult to use them. But we have another problem if we use them.’

‘What problem?’

‘Sahib, we have a family of carpenters in our village. If we use the metal plowshares, they will lose their livelihood. So, we decided to remain with our traditional method because their well-being is our responsibility.’

Pulin told us, ‘Then I made the biggest blooper of my career. I spoke to them like a management consultant. I said to them, ‘But that is simple. You will get a 20% higher yield. Out of that just pay them what they normally earn by sharpening your wooden plows.

The Mukhya looked at him with a mixture of amusement and pity and said, ‘Sahib you are one of us, but it seems you don’t understand us. Forgive me for saying it, but you are not in touch with your culture. We can’t do what you said.’

‘Why not?’ Pulin was not one to accept defeat so easily.

‘Because Sahib, they are artisans (Kareegar) not beggars (Bhikari). We can’t simply give them money. They won’t take it. It is not a matter of money. It is a matter of dignity and pride. Izzat ka sawal hai Sahib. They are our brothers, and we can’t do this to them.’

And that is the core conundrum that AI evangelists will need to solve. Using AI to speed up processes, database searches, data-mining, generating alternatives, What-If Analysis and so on is useful and will work. But when it translates into replacing people we are looking at and people’s livelihoods, and well-being. Now that is another ballgame, which I would be very hesitant to deal with in the glib fashion that a lot of keyboard warriors on Twitter and LinkedIn seem to be doing. Helping people to work faster, easier, and more productively is one thing and most welcome. But taking away their livelihood is another matter. People will fight back and rightly so. I will leave you to imagine the possible scenarios. One is here:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/11/24069251/waymo-driverless-taxi-fire-vandalized-video-san-francisco-china-town

This one happened in San Francisco and should serve as a warning of how things can go wrong because all those shiny, AI champions forgot that there are other people in this world. And that they are at least as important as you.

I have nothing against AI or any technology for that matter. All I am saying is that we must remember that we live in an interconnected world in which we must learn to consider the effects of our actions on others. That is the meaning of social responsibility. Of citizenship. Of humanity.

I think it is good to remind and remember that at the end of the day, it is not about the technology or efficiency of using it. It is about why we use it at all. We use it for our benefit and the benefit of our families.

If that seems to be threatened, then we are looking at some ‘interesting times’, in the context of the Chinese curse, ‘May you have an interesting time.’