For Silicon Valley, AI isn’t just about replacing some jobs. It’s about replacing all of them | Ed Newton-Rex

AI will do the thinking, robots will do the doing. What place do humans have in this arrangement - and do tech CEOs care?

I recently found myself at a dinner in an upstairs room at a restaurant in San Francisco hosted by a venture capital firm. The after-dinner speaker was a tech veteran who, having sold his AI company for hundreds of millions of dollars, has now turned his hand to investing. He had a simple message for the assembled startup founders: the money you can make in AI isn't limited to the paltry market sizes of previous technology waves. You can replace the world's workers - which means you can capture their salaries. All of them.

Replacing all human labour with AI sounds like the stuff of science fiction. But it is the explicit aim of a growing number of the tech elite - and these are people who lack neither drive nor resources, who have deep pockets and even deeper determination. If they say they want to automate all labour, we should take them at their word.

Ed Newton-Rex is the founder of Fairly Trained, a non-profit that certifies generative AI companies that respect creators' rights, and a visiting scholar at Stanford University