Energy is just one component of cost per unit of work, and in most modern economies it's a very small one.
Industry has always traded energy efficiency for productivity. Excavators burn huge amounts of fuel compared to humans with shovels, data centers consume megawatts compared to the brain's ~20W, and forklifts are nowhere near biologically efficient. They still win because the economic cost per unit of work is lower.
In the case of AI the key difference is how the systems scale.
Human labor scales linearly: if you want 10x more output, you hire 10x more workers, and the cost scales roughly the same. A human brain might run on ~20W, but each worker is still €20–€50+ per hour and can only do one task at a time.
AI systems scale more like software infrastructure. Once the model and servers exist, the marginal cost of additional tasks is mostly compute and electricity. A data center might burn far more energy than a human brain per task, but it can handle thousands or millions of tasks in parallel and run 24/7. The cost per task can end up being cents even if the system is much less energy efficient "per brain".
Labor is expensive because you're not just paying for the task. You're paying for the worker's entire life infrastructure. Wages have to cover housing, food, healthcare, transportation, retirement, taxes, etc.., So the price of labor largely reflects the cost of sustaining a human being in society, not just the marginal cost of performing the work
Everyone cites some niche "human-only" jobs to argue AI won't replace labor. But most of the economy runs on things like document processing, logistics, retail, and factories. High-volume, repeatable, rule-driven tasks, and in those areas, we're already on the brink of full automation. Autonomous retail stores, delivery fleets, and smart factories are either here or imminent. It's not about AI scratching backs, it's about replacing jobs that move trillions of dollars.
Sure, top-tier researchers, system engineers, and other highly skilled knowledge workers will still be in demand, but for mass labor disruption, AI doesn't need to beat them, it only needs to outperform the average human
There’s a difference between "safety matters" and “safety is the primary constraint".
Most companies manage risk to an acceptable level while optimizing for speed and cost. Aerospace companies optimize for minimizing catastrophic failure, even at extreme expense.
Treating a potential GDPR fine as equivalent to a flight-control failure ignores that society, regulators, and markets treat those risks very differently.
The inconvenience and economic cost of your Discord messages leaking is not the same category of harm as your pacemaker controller failing.
And because the majority of economic activity sits in that lower-criticality category, it would not be surprising if highly specialized, safety-critical human software engineering becomes more of a niche, while much of routine software development becomes increasingly automated or commoditized.
That's a very anthropocentric view. Technology isn't a series of deliberate inventions by us, but an autonomous, self-organizing process. The development of a spear, a bow, or a computer is an evolutionary step in a chain of technological solutions that use humans as their temporary biological medium.
The human brain is not the starting point or center of this process. It is itself a product of biological evolution, a temporary information-processing system. Its limitations such as imperfect memory, are simply constraints of its biological origin. The tools we develop, from writing to digital storage are not just supplements to human ability, but the next stage in a system that is moving beyond its biological origins to find more efficient non-biological forms of information storage and processing.
Human pride in creation is a misinterpretation. We are not the masters of technology. We're just the vehicle of it. Part of a larger process of technological self-improvement that is now moving towards an era where it might no longer require us
In the case of AI the key difference is how the systems scale. Human labor scales linearly: if you want 10x more output, you hire 10x more workers, and the cost scales roughly the same. A human brain might run on ~20W, but each worker is still €20–€50+ per hour and can only do one task at a time. AI systems scale more like software infrastructure. Once the model and servers exist, the marginal cost of additional tasks is mostly compute and electricity. A data center might burn far more energy than a human brain per task, but it can handle thousands or millions of tasks in parallel and run 24/7. The cost per task can end up being cents even if the system is much less energy efficient "per brain".
Labor is expensive because you're not just paying for the task. You're paying for the worker's entire life infrastructure. Wages have to cover housing, food, healthcare, transportation, retirement, taxes, etc.., So the price of labor largely reflects the cost of sustaining a human being in society, not just the marginal cost of performing the work