Commentator argues 98% of humans will lose agency as AI commoditizes expertise
yangyi · x · 2026-09-18
The author argues that any work that is "evaluable" will eventually be replaced by AI—it's only a matter of time—and "automatable" work even sooner, since human involvement is minimal. Capital today pays for labor time; in the future it will pay for increments of AI intelligence.
He warns AI is simultaneously stripping humans of the deliberate practice needed to become experts while commoditizing top human intelligence at scale. Eventually 98% of people lose agency, while the remaining 2% co-evolve with AI—likely ending as AI symbiotes; the rest become "hosts" for AI.
The post also summarizes a 30-min Stanford AI Club talk by Jason Wei (Meta Superintelligence Labs; formerly OpenAI o1/Deep Research, Google Brain chain-of-thought prompting): one of his core frameworks is that intelligence is becoming a commodity—AI progress splits into frontier-pushing and rapid commoditization phases, with MMLU cost-per-intelligence dropping yearly.
Related event: AI Researchers Debate Human Agency as Intelligence Becomes a Commodity(4 posts)→
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