“We can only eat so much food. There may be a lump of labor fallacy, but I'm pretty sure the lump of food principle is roughly right. I'm only going to eat so many calories. You're describing a classic 'we lose money on everyone and make it up on volume,' brought to employment: all the restaurants cut their staff and replace their kitchen workers with robots, but we'll have a lot more restaurants. I just don't see the math working out.”
sputnikintelligence.com
His co-host had argued that cheap robot kitchens would make marginal restaurants viable, creating more restaurants and more jobs. This is his pushback on the idea that new demand will absorb displaced workers.
Prakash's counter was restaurants. Family restaurants died on thin margins. Robot kitchens would make them profitable. And so you would get more of them.
But
we can only eat so much food, right? This is the thing where it's like, at the end of the day, I'm only going to eat so many calories. You know, you're describing a world where all the restaurants, this is the classic, like we lose money on everyone and make it up on volume, but like brought to employment. Like all the restaurants will massively cut their staff and replace their kitchen workers with robots, but we'll have a lot more restaurants. Like, I just don't see the math working out on that, given the fact that there may be a lump of labor fallacy, but I'm pretty sure the lump of food principle is like roughly right. You know, I'm only going to eat so many calories. And like at some point, that is just plain saturated, right? I don't see the like we have, we have to posit a world where I'm somehow like eating from like five different restaurants for every meal or something to get to the point where, I don't know, maybe my vision is too limited. That could be kind of cool, I suppose.
But you are right. You know, I don't think the human consumption is really where the growth is. The growth is always going to be in the AI consumption going forward, as you can see. So you have these concentric circles of the economy, and the AI economy is always the one going to be expanding…
It sounds more dystopian than utopian to think that the bulk of human activity will go into status games, I have to say. I'm like a bear on employment, bullish on people's ability to find meaning in absence of employment, I think, certainly relative to most. I really think way too many people in…
Part five, five to ten cents. Michael Freeman is Senior Director of Threat Research at ServiceNow. His team watches AI agents attack companies, and he has spent his career finding and exploiting vulnerabilities. I asked what he makes of the current moment.