Capitalism cracks me up. We live under this fantasy that everything we do can be turned into a profitable business. Even the government should be run like a business, right? Like somehow educating a child for 12+ years should be a profitable venture. Or housing the elderly. Or providing a basic service like water, sanitation or electricity that everyone uses at about the same rate. Surely we can stand on each other to turn a buck.<p>I think that AI will be the biggest loss leader ever invented. We'll buy a robot one time for $10,000 that will perform $1 million of mental and physical labor over its lifetime. Except nobody will pay for that $990,000. There will just be this expectation of something for nothing, so the anticipated payment never comes. And it will happen so quickly, so completely, that we'll wonder how it was ever possible to pay people to do all this free stuff.<p>No, the GitHub Copilot model of charging for AI services isn't going to scale. People are going to open source AI and own it themselves and stop paying for goods and services. Why would they when the AI can provide everything they need? AI is the beginning of the end of money. The headline foretells the end of the era of artificial scarcity, because capitalism can't compete with free.