What kinds of results are there?
When considering what kinds of results can be produced by algorithms, we first need to think about what kinds of results there are. The most obvious place to start is often the best:
Non-Physical results. Text, images, sound recordings, risk mitigation, love, hate, belonging, excitement, dignity.
Physical results. Cars, food, spaceships, watches, computers.
Physical goods are clearly less likely to be produced at zero cost and in zero time. Even if you could automate the production of a car, the materials going into the car cost money. The materials need to be shipped to the factory and mined as well. There is an intricate chain of prior results upon which an "automatic" process rest. Food is another example. You could possibly automate the production of crops, as is increasingly the case. But you still need time, seeds, water, fertilizer etc. etc. The production of these results is still, and will remain, the realm of the capitalist. With enough startup capital, you can climb into an industry and compete, because you can always make something cheaper and faster. There is a non-zero asymptote associated to the cost and time required to produce these results.
The first three items in the nonphysical result list are clearly more prone to being produced at zero cost and in zero time. You can now write a 4000-word essay using ChatGPT at approximately zero cost and in an instant. The same is valid for images, songs, sound recordings, and videos. All you need to produce them are text prompts. I'm sure these algorithms have a random capability where they can produce intelligible information sequences with no prompt at all. The capitalist is at a loss here. Investing enormous amounts of capital to produce an accurate book or a piece of software does not necessarily lead to the ability to complete. He cannot compete on price and time, as these have already collapsed to zero.
Now we come to the non-information based non-physical results. Risk mitigation, love, hate, belonging, excitement, and dignity. These are all feelings and emotions. Life insurance will not prevent you from dying, but it makes your imminent death bother you less. They only exist as far as they can be experienced. Can an algorithm bestow dignity upon someone? I don't think so. Dignity and love require human intent. A machine telling you that you are special will not make you feel loved. Someone you admire telling you you're special will definitely make you feel loved.
Intent is therefore a central theme in the Age of the Last Movers. A machine cannot intend to do something, because we, as humans, define intent as the thing that makes humans do something. We have defined robots out of this realm.
