{"id":42930,"date":"2026-01-13T11:41:26","date_gmt":"2026-01-13T11:41:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/the-ai-boom-is-really-a-race-to-own-the-future-of-human-labor-a-safety-pioneer-says\/"},"modified":"2026-01-13T11:41:26","modified_gmt":"2026-01-13T11:41:26","slug":"the-ai-boom-is-really-a-race-to-own-the-future-of-human-labor-a-safety-pioneer-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/the-ai-boom-is-really-a-race-to-own-the-future-of-human-labor-a-safety-pioneer-says\/","title":{"rendered":"The AI boom is really a race to own the future of human labor, a safety pioneer says"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/6964e07d04eda4732f2ee0ac?format=jpeg\" alt=\"Iranian employees at the AI headquarters of the Resalat Qarz Al-Hasanah bank in Kerman, Iran, on May 4, 2025.\"\/><figcaption>AI safety pioneer Roman Yampolskiy says the AI boom is really a race to control &quot;free labor&quot; \u2014 and the future of work itself.<\/p>\n<p>Morteza Nikoubazl\/NurPhoto via Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li>Computer science professor Roman Yampolskiy said the AI boom is a bet on future labor.<\/li>\n<li>He said investors expect AI agents to deliver &quot;free labor&quot; at a massive scale.<\/li>\n<li>Most computer-based jobs are at risk as AI advances faster than past tech waves, he said.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The soaring valuations of AI companies aren&#039;t just a bet on better software.<\/p>\n<p>They&#039;re a wager on who will control human labor in the future, according to Roman Yampolskiy, a University of Louisville computer science professor who was one of the first academics to warn about AI&#039;s risks.<\/p>\n<p>As artificial intelligence moves from tools to increasingly autonomous agents, Yampolskiy said markets are pricing in a radical shift: machines providing &quot;free labor&quot; at scale.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;You go from having tools to having agents with humanlike capability that really represents free labor,&quot; Yampolskiy told the UK&#039;s LBC radio station in a recent interview. &quot;Free labor \u2014 cognitive free labor, physical labor.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>That dynamic, he said, helps explain why investors are willing to pay lofty valuations for AI companies even before many of them have established clear business models.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;If a company valuation is a hundred billion today, it&#039;s actually a small bet on having access to that free labor,&quot; he told LBC.<\/p>\n<p>In comments later to Business Insider, he said that &quot;once a model is trained and deployed, copying its capabilities across millions of tasks is mostly compute, not salaries.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Markets, he added, tend to underestimate how abruptly change can arrive.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;When quality crosses a usability threshold, substitution can be abrupt,&quot; he said. &quot;Wage value can collapse faster than institutions can adapt.&quot;<\/p>\n<h2>Jobs at risk \u2014 and why this time is different<\/h2>\n<p>Yampolskiy told LBC that any job performed entirely on a computer is vulnerable to automation; he offered up programming, accounting, tax preparation, and web design as examples. <\/p>\n<p>While automation may initially remove only the most tedious tasks, entire roles could disappear over time, he said.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;In five years, we&#039;ll have capability to automate all cognitive labor and a lot of physical labor,&quot; he said during the interview, pointing to rapid advances in robotics.<\/p>\n<p>What makes this technological wave different, Yampolskiy told Business Insider, is that AI targets &quot;the general substrate of cognitive work itself,&quot; rather than specific tasks.<\/p>\n<p>Past technologies have created new jobs that require uniquely human skills; this time, he said, the frontier keeps moving.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;The new categories become automatable shortly after they appear,&quot; he said.<\/p>\n<p>He expects adoption to be slowed by regulation, liability, and organizational inertia \u2014 but ultimately driven by competitive pressure and cost-cutting.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Firms adopt whatever lowers costs and increases speed once reliability is good enough,&quot; he said.<\/p>\n<h2>A divided debate over AI and jobs<\/h2>\n<p>Yampolskiy, who has previously said AI could leave 99% of workers jobless by 2030, joins a growing chorus of AI experts and tech leaders predicting that the technology could wipe out vast swaths of work.<\/p>\n<p>Geoffrey Hinton, the computer scientist known as &quot;the godfather of AI,&quot; has said that AI could replace &quot;many, many jobs&quot; as early as 2026, while AI pioneer Stuart Russell has warned that societies may face up to 80% unemployment.<\/p>\n<p>But others disagree.<\/p>\n<p>Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and former Meta AI chief Yann LeCun have said AI will change jobs rather than eliminate them, while executives like JPMorgan&#039;s Jamie Dimon and Zoom&#039;s Eric Yuan have predicted the technology could reshape work and shorten the workweek instead of erasing employment.<\/p>\n<p>Yampolskiy sees a bigger risk. Once societies become dependent on AI as critical infrastructure, he said, slowing down may no longer be a real option.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Dependency creates lock-in,&quot; he told Business Insider.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Once AI becomes critical infrastructure,&quot; he said, &quot;risk tolerance increases by necessity rather than choice. In that state, control failures become more likely precisely because the option to pause, audit, or roll back is no longer viable.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Read the original article on Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>AI safety pioneer Roman Yampolskiy says the AI boom is really a race to control &quot;free labor&quot; \u2014 and the future of work itself. Morteza Nikoubazl\/NurPhoto via Getty Images Computer science professor Roman Yampolskiy said the AI boom is a bet on future labor. He said investors expect AI agents to deliver &quot;free labor&quot; at [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":42931,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-42930","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42930"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42930\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}