The AI Utopia Is Off: How Algorithms Started Eating Workers' Incomes

Remember how we were promised that artificial intelligence would free humanity from drudgery and we would all live in a digital paradise? The heads of the biggest tech giants keep insisting, with enviable persistence, on an "age of abundance" in which the cost of services falls to zero and our prosperity soars. In his manifestos, Sam Altman paints a future in which intelligence becomes such a cheap and universally available commodity that it will supposedly solve social inequality automatically. But while we wait for this golden age, reality is serving up very different numbers. It turns out AI is so far much better at shrinking your bank balance than at creating universal prosperity.

The logic of the Silicon Valley visionaries is simple: if neural networks make production more efficient, goods get cheaper and everyone's purchasing power grows. But this tidy theory collides with the harsh practice of capitalism. Recent labor market research, including data from large freelance platforms such as Upwork and Fiverr, shows a worrying trend. Generative models hit first at the incomes of specialists whose work can now be partly automated. We are not seeing wages rise thanks to "increased productivity"; we are seeing a sharp drop in rates for copywriters, translators and graphic designers.

Instead of paying experienced professionals for their expertise and their skill with new tools, companies are starting to use AI as leverage to cut pay. This is classic deskilling, wrapped in the pretty packaging of technological progress. Why hire a top specialist when you can take a newcomer with a ChatGPT subscription and pay them three times less? The result may be slightly worse, but for a business "good enough" for pennies is often preferable to "perfect" at full price. The irony is that AI doesn't merely replace people; it devalues skills they spent decades building.

The situation in IT and the creative industries is starting to resemble what happened to factory workers in the last century, but on steroids. Employees are now asked to do five times more for the same pay, and sometimes for less. Where automation once touched physical labor, the cognitive layer is now under attack. Faith in an "age of abundance" currently looks like a convenient screen behind which corporations optimize their margins. The benefits go to the owners of the algorithms and a narrow layer of "AI wizards" who tune them. For everyone else, AI is becoming a tool of brutal competition for survival.

Moreover, many experts are starting to ask whether this whole boom is just another bubble. AI startup valuations have soared, but the real impact on the economy so far amounts only to lower staffing costs. If the bubble bursts, we will be left in a world where the old career ladders are broken and the new ones lead into the dead end of low-paid "fine-tuning" of neural networks. The expectation that the market will fix everything by itself and create new high-paying jobs looks, for now, like dangerous and unfounded optimism.

It is time to stop taking at their word people whose fortunes depend directly on the hype around their products. A real "age of abundance" will arrive only when the fruits of automation are distributed fairly rather than settling in the pockets of shareholders of the world's five largest companies. For now, we only see technology making the rich even richer and turning skilled labor into a cheap consumable. We stand on the threshold of a serious social shift, and it looks nothing like the fairy tale told to us at launches of new models.

Bottom line: The promised abundance so far materializes only in AI corporations' profit reports. For the average professional, AI is not wings on the back but a weight on the legs in salary negotiations. Are we ready for a world where intelligence costs pennies and human labor even less?