🎭@deepfates
You might think the "agents" thing is just coming for software engineers. Yeah, agents write code, code and code sells a bunch of tokens, But most people's work isn't code, it's memos or decks or whatever.
Why this is false:
Agents can do anything you can do on a computer, and they do it by spending output tokens to write code. The number of keypresses used by a consultant to do a task is not a good measurement of the number of tokens an agent would use.
For example: one "deep research" report might be 20 pages of output tokens. But it also might have required more than 20 pages of output tokens to do all the searches, fetches, PDF parsing and interim summaries that you never even see as the user. It also had to input all the tokens of every document it read in searching — likely more than 20 pages, since the point of the report is to collect and summarize this information.
So now we're at 3x tokens for the final output. That one report is so cheap, and so fast, then now you can do more research than ever. This is valuable! If your business relies on having good information about the world, you can probably find a way to make more money by doing 3 deep research reports and then synthesizing them. More tokens!
Now you've kicked off three deep research reports you deserve a little treat, right? So you fire up your browser agent and tell it go find me some nice linen shirts for summer in my size. Open them in tabs so I can look through. Well your browser agent has to interact with the browser using some kind of tool and you know what that tool is? Code, baby. Tokens.
And the tokens are so cheap. You got to understand. We're spending a lot in the aggregate, but in the moment it is "spend a nickel to for 10 minutes of being literally Superman". Like yes I'll just keep spending nickels actually. I will never stop being Superman at that price.
All knowledge workers will feel this. A lot of you already do, you're just hiding it from your boss so you can have more free time while "working from home". And maybe it's better to protect yourselves from Jevons as long as possible, because once you get the bug it's hard to stop. You realize that you could be creating all of the businesses and projects and art you ever wanted and all you've got to do is put your instructions in the right order and put the nickels in the bag.
I would happily bet against Anthropic's revenue spike being a brief "sugar high". So would most capital allocators! That is because they have already seen that software can eat the world.
White collar knowledge work fundamentally changes in the face of agent economics and entirely new forms of knowledge production?
It's happened already in finance: high frequency trading. Now it's happening in tech: high frequency software. Then we will have high frequency science, high frequency governance, high frequency engineering, high frequency medicine and high frequency law.
Human society is about to be absolutely DDOSed by information at all levels of the stack. Our civilization was never meant to handle this many tokens. If anything can be done on a computer it will be turned into tokens instead of human actions and it will happen faster and in parallel.
This stuff works, it is real, it is getting better. It is going to hit economically and socially this year and nobody is ready and I think it is important to start taking it seriously, instead of finding ever more arbitrary reasons to remain in denial.
