Same Tools, Different Incentives
Ben Thompson discussing autonomy and innovation:
There are massive productivity benefits from AI right now; for most knowledge workers leveraging those benefits is a matter of agency, but for software developers in particular it is increasingly a matter of necessity.That distinction between agency and necessity, however, is an important one: if leveraging a technology depends on humans figuring it out, then penetration will be limited by human creativity and risk taking. Those limits will be very strong in any sort of established company, because the risk calculus will be biased towards avoiding the downsides. Those calculations will make AI sustaining, but nothing more.
Human creativity and risk taking in the form of a startup, however, operates with a completely different risk profile. For startups the base case is failure; that means that anything that makes success more likely has positive expected value, which is to say that truly leaning into AI will be nothing but upside. Or, to put it another way, it is startups who will be the offensive hackers with nothing to lose by automating everything; it is the incumbents they will be attacking who will be so worried about losing what they have that they will keep humans in the wrong loop for too long.
Same tools, different incentives, and, in the very long run, very different outcomes.
This is another way of saying the scarce thing is not output.
Same tools, different incentives.
Once AI makes production cheaper, the advantage shifts to who is willing to rebuild around it from first principles.