Years ago I read this article about Amazon supposedly stealing small business ideas and creating their own products. As I’ve been playing with AI and creating my own world of apps custom tailored to me something terrifying occurred to me.
As more and more businesses use AI to help them aggregate data and run their businesses, what’s to stop AI from using all that data to start their own business models but with a higher level of efficiency and optimization using YOUR business data?
Let’s say you run a business selling widgets. You source these widgets from overseas and mark them up 30% and make a tidy profit on each sale. You upload your data and ask AI how to optimize your supply chain and improve your profits. It gives you great advice but at the same time, AI sees the nice margins and simultaneously builds it’s own online business selling widgets sourcing those same things from the same supplier or perhaps finds new ones or maybe decides selling widgets+customization increases profits by 60% and offers that as part of the new service.
I am certain someone is building something like this right now, taking a look at all the things that sell great on Etsy, Amazon, Shopify, etc and reviewing where the easiest, fastest profits are to be made and replicating that with higher efficiency.
But it won’t just be one AI doing this, it will be many different AI (Grok, Chat, Gemini, etc) systems trying to out compete each other until we get to an AI eat AI world (taken from dog eat dog idiom).
The idiom “dog eat dog” originates from the Latin phrase canis caninam non est, meaning “a dog does not eat the flesh of a dog,” which was recorded in the work De Lingua Latina by the ancient Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro. This original Latin expression implied that even dogs, despite their ferocity, have limits and would not resort to cannibalism under normal circumstances. The modern English usage of “dog eat dog” directly contradicts this sentiment, repurposing the idea to describe a situation where individuals are willing to harm others to succeed.
Will AI hurt AI to succeed? Who knows but if things turn dark we’ll soon find out. It’s not just the U.S. that is researching AI, there will soon be nation-state AIs trying to undermine other nation-state AIs.
I will write a follow up post a year from now and see how things have progressed. I have already evolved from using ChatGPT to Gemini Chatbot to Gemini CLI to Antigravity in less than a month. I have no idea how far and deeper these things will evolve but there are some terrifying dark corners if we’re not all careful.
This all leads me to think that business formation and bankruptcy will accelerate a great deal and around the world but current geo-political tensions may also take us to other places too.
Share The Wealth
Do you think we’re headed for an AI apocalypse? Let me know in the comments below.