A human's professional salary is no longer determined by the labor market, but by the rental price of a GPU.
Computing power has become the new floor for human compensation. Traditionally, wages fluctuated based on how many people had a specific skill or how much a company needed that expertise. This model suggests that if an AI agent can perform a task, the human worker cannot charge more than the electricity and hardware costs required to run that machine. Employers will soon look at a cloud computing bill rather than a competitor's hiring package to decide what a person is worth. This shift effectively anchors human intellectual value to the falling price of silicon and energy.
Who Prices Cognitive Labor in the Age of Agents? A Position on Compute-Anchored Wages
arXiv · 2605.05558
A natural intuition about the economics of AI agents is that, because agents can be replicated at near-zero marginal cost, they constitute a labor input in infinitely elastic supply, and therefore drive cognitive-labor wages to zero. We argue this framing is wrong in mechanism but partially correct in conclusion, and that the correction matters for both theory and policy. \textbf{Agents are not labor; they are a production technology that converts compute capital $K_c$ into effective units of co