undefined | Better HN

0 pointsmajormajor25d ago0 comments

> I foresee a wave of entrepreneurship coming. AI will empower more people to provide useful services directly to other people, with less middlemen and menial work, and more direct problem solving.

Why doesn't this extend one step further? Many of those "service provider" people no longer are needed? If you're a consultant for domain X, and you used to work at Big Consulting, and they fire you to replace you with AI... soon the customer will hire neither your new provider, or Big Consulting, and just use AI directly, if it's that good.

Certain professions have legal/regulatory protections, but thesis (a) "entrepreneurs replace big incumbent service providers" doesn't seem necessarily more stable compared to thesis (b) "the people who need the knowledge have their AI do it themselves". In order for (a) to be true without (b), the AI tools themselves have to be good enough to make the concentration of specialized knowledge and institutional expertise/history no longer critical; but not good enough that the would-be-entreprenurial-middleman's own specialized knowledge can't also be replaced.

0 comments

1 comments · 1 top-level

projectazorian25d ago

> If you're a consultant for domain X, and you used to work at Big Consulting, and they fire you to replace you with AI... soon the customer will hire neither your new provider, or Big Consulting, and just use AI directly, if it's that good.

Most consulting is not some flashy 25 year old Ivy grad putting together a slide deck that says “fire people,” it usually involves either gathering (or providing) extensive domain knowledge much of which is in forms not legible to AI (or at least in forms that can’t be encapsulated at a context level that doesn’t cause unacceptable quality drops.) Often there are compliance mandates involved that have real teeth. So again I think there will still be plenty of humans involved.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse