expectedwrong hindsight

The Numbers Don't Go That High

Nat Friedman put a hundred million dollars behind this prediction, which means it's not a prediction.

2 min read 378 words #ai #labor #scale #agents #nat-friedman
hindsight — still happening

the progression from zero-to-ten AI workers to hundreds is playing out exactly as described. agent frameworks exploded. the word 'employee' is still being stretched past its useful range and nobody has found the replacement yet.

John Romero posted about jobs disappearing and didn't say why. He didn't have to. You read it and you already know, and he knows you know, and everyone's just sort of standing around not saying the word.

That's where we are in March 2024. The polite fiction is that no one knows. The impolite truth is everywhere.

Nat Friedman — who, as a footnote, put a hundred million dollars into magic.dev, a company building AI software engineers — laid out the progression. Right now, depending on who you are and what you do, you have somewhere between zero and ten quality AI workers doing your bidding. That's today. That's the floor.

Soon it's hundreds. Then it's exponential. Then the numbers stop making intuitive sense — millions, then quintillions — and at that point the word "worker" starts to break down as a concept, the way "distance" breaks down at cosmological scales.

This is not Friedman speculating from a beanbag chair. A hundred million dollars is a considered position. He is telling you what he bought.

The part that actually gets me is the zero-to-ten framing. Because it's so modest. It starts with a number a human can hold. You know people with one assistant, two assistants, a small team. Ten is imaginable. Ten is a small company. You can picture the org chart.

The imagination breaks somewhere around "hundreds" and by the time you get to exponential it has fully collapsed. Which is probably fine — no one fully imagined the internet either, they just built it and then we all woke up inside it.

So Romero posts about jobs disappearing and doesn't explain why, and Nat Friedman posts a calm little thread about the shape of the next ten years, and both of them are describing the same thing from different angles — one looking at the crater, one looking at the asteroid — and neither one is being dramatic about it.

That's the part I keep coming back to. The lack of drama. The absence of exclamation marks. Just: here is the thing that is happening, here is where it goes. See you on the other side, assuming there is one.

What a time to be alive, said the person, not entirely joking.