The Real AI Question Is Who Does the Work, Not Whether a Machine Can

Asking whether a machine can do a given job is the wrong frame for understanding artificial intelligence (AI), the Financial Times argues. The more consequential shift is that AI tools move work onto the consumer, creating what the column calls a self-service economy in which tasks once performed by paid staff are handed to the customer.

The pattern resembles earlier rounds of automation, from cash machines to self-checkout, where the technology did not eliminate a function so much as transfer it to the end user. Applied broadly, AI could lower measured business costs while quietly raising the time and effort demanded of customers, a redistribution that standard productivity statistics tend to miss.

For companies, the appeal is margin. For the wider economy, the argument suggests that the gains from AI may be unevenly shared between firms that capture the savings and the consumers and workers who absorb the displaced effort.