AI might hand you your job back. Not because it grew a heart - because it got promoted.
Writing this from humid, neon Singapore. At Augmented World Expo I ran into Raag from Snapchat. He dropped a spicy theory: if we want civilization to keep humming - more power, more copper, more lithium, more rockets - every free chip gets drafted into survival work. Energy grids. Industrial robots. Maybe asteroid mining. When compute is rationed, wasting tokens on filler content and cheap design becomes a luxury. Humans - powered by sandwiches, not datacenters - get the low-end work again. 🚀
I had my AI research agent pull the raw numbers, and the story mostly holds up as a stress test, not the base case. Copper isn’t “2x short” by 2035 - the best read is roughly a one‑third gap unless we invest harder. Launch costs fell from tens of thousands per kilo to a few thousand on reusable rockets; the famous 100 per kilo claim isn’t proven. Power demand for AI could roughly double by 2030, but efficiency keeps racing ahead. Inference prices for top models dropped about a magnitude since last year. To hit restaurant‑per‑query, you either write a book in one chat or prices jump 100‑1000x. Possible in a crunch, unlikely as a steady diet.
So what actually happens? Most likely we get a split world. Cheap, everyday AI runs on your own devices and bundled tools. Premium reasoning and long, agentic sessions stay in the cloud - and stay priced like a consultant, not a toy.
If chips and power do get tight, AI drops low‑margin, high‑volume chores first:
- Content farms and spammy design
- Cheap customer chat for small businesses
- Long meeting notes and low‑stakes translation And embodied automation slows where margins are thin: cleaning crews, last‑mile couriers, basic construction helpers.
The catch: for true rationing, multiple pain points must bite at once - chips, memory, power, capital - plus something real in space, not slide decks. Watch for rising API prices, grid caps on datacenters, GPU spot spikes, and an honest‑to‑God demo that returns material from an asteroid.
My call: about half odds we live in the mixed world, roughly a third that efficiency makes AI dirt cheap, and a small slice where compute gets mobilized and humans pick up the slack.
Which job does AI drop first when tokens get pricey - and is this a soothing bedtime story or the future we’re sleepwalking into? ⛏️