Assuming token costs will be prohibitive assumes:
A) tokens will be really expensive and B) you need to fund tokens before you have revenue.
Your asserting AI makes the economy more capital intensive, when I think you'll see in practice it's the opposite.
"Intellectual" jobs, that require thought were yet spared, as the only way to use capital for that was just to pay for more meat: see Accenture, CapGemini, IBM, etc. You could carve yourself a spot for some people because it was hard for this capital to reach them. Now that AI, a literal machine that automates thought, is here, the costs for reaching bumfuck nowhere to take the clients away from you has dropped drastically for them, but not for you. They get economies of scale, already established patterns, tools, internal databases. You're starting with hopes, dreams and a $20 Claude sub that runs out at 10AM.
There is not infinite need for lawyers, there being more lawyers does not create more legal opportunities and cases past a certain point, and you're then dependent on other things like there being enough judges.
Robots transformed capital into manual actions and killed most manufacturing jobs save for precious few experts or things that are too expensive to automate still. AI will transform that capital into intellectual labor and crush you, take all opportunities away from you.
The “easy stuff” for someone’s job, is now the AI stuff for someone else’s job. Where you would hire an intern, the potential client is using Claude instead.
The issue is that this breaks the talent / growth pipeline. You can’t have experts if they don’t go through the process of getting trained and working on incrementally harder problems.
"Price go down means more demand" applied blindly is a an economic theory so absurdly shit that even the most apeshit libertarians like Ayn Rand know it isn't true. Don't make me defend Ayn Rand.
You're clinging past: what you is true when human capital counts for something, but what happens when it doesn't? Where the party who can spend the most tokens on the case wins (or has a much greater chance of success)?
Law might not be the best example of that, but (under current trends) a lot of areas will be.
> Your asserting AI makes the economy more capital intensive, when I think you'll see in practice it's the opposite.
You're claiming AI will make the economy more labor intensive? Huh?
Mechanism? New Use Cases become viable.
Just like LED lights and Virtual Machines made light-per-watt and workloads-per-server more efficient, what did we do with that efficiency? We didn't pocket the cash, we turned every billboard and many buildings into JumboTrons, and we made millions of new cheap cloud VMs to run hundreds of thousands of new little businesses that never would have happened.
Look at coding now: People are finishing side projects that they never would have, closing out old bugs or test coverage they never would have, starting side businesses they never would have before.
This is new demand being created before our eyes as the cost of knowledge work drops.
It will never happen. Capitalism works when consumers can choose the best service provider. When there is only one universal service provide (AI), behind various "fronts", it would be catastrophic.
And all the consumers lose catastrophically.
So there should be at least some human component to differentiate between the various "AI" providers.
Those people are usually very talented and work 16/7. And they need to convince other similar people to work for them, usually at a lower-than-market rate.
The premise here is "talented humans working hard" will stop being a valuable thing due to AI.
They're similar to IT, in that you can be successful as a one-man business.
But like 80% shuts down before reaching 2 years as they run out of money.
I don't necessarily agree with that AI is going to be as super productive as people think but if your assumption it is. It is another tool you'll need to be competitive. That last point just doesn't follow if you believe in AI being powerful
