AI Won't Take Your Job. Greedy CEOs Will. The Augmentation Thesis.

AI is not the villain. The decision to fire human workers and replace them with AI is the villain. There is a difference, and almost nobody is talking about it.

In this episode of the Daily Download, Connor MacIvor lays out the augmentation thesis. Keep every human on payroll. Reduce their decision authority where AI is provably better. Run AI in parallel 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Quadruple to octuple total output. Pay your team the same or more. Keep the customer base alive. Print more revenue.

The replacement scenario being normalized in corporate America right now points to 30 to 50 percent workforce cuts inside 18 to 24 months. The math collapses on itself fast. No paychecks means no mortgages. No mortgages means no housing market. No housing market means no consumer economy. The same companies cutting workers go down too.

Connor walks through the personalities driving the AI conversation. Sam Altman, sleepy-eyed and laconic, releasing models the public never gets. Dario Amodei at Anthropic, hedging on outcomes while building the most powerful systems on earth. Elon Musk, firing from the hip with a far larger infrastructure footprint. Peter Diamandis on the optimist end, Alex Wissner-Gross on the chaos end, both shouting past each other on the Moonshots show. The MIT investment crowd already running tens of thousands of agents in production.

Inside the episode:

The dystopia narrative and why fear sells better than the boring middle path that actually works.

The replacement playbook corporate America is quietly running, and the five-step demand collapse it triggers inside 24 months.

The augmentation math. One worker, one AI counterpart, four to eight times the output, payroll intact, customer base intact.

The specific operator playbook for SMBs. Voice agents on overflow calls. Automation on nurture sequences. AI on content volume. Humans on the work that requires a human.

The political reality. China has guardrails. The EU has the AI Act. The US has not moved. What you can do about it from your desk this week.

The AGI question. What happens when the systems get smarter than every human alive in every domain. Honest answer: nobody knows. The decisions you make today set the precedent for how more powerful systems get deployed tomorrow.

The strongest counter-argument and why augmentation still wins on the only time horizon that matters.

This is the thesis paper companion to the four-week implementation runbook published at SantaClaritaArtificialIntelligence.com last week. The full white paper is linked below, free, no opt-in.

Connor MacIvor is a 27-year licensed Realtor in Santa Clarita, California (DRE #01238257), a 23-year LAPD veteran, and a 43-year self-taught programmer. He runs the Daily Download every weekday for operators who need real-world AI signal cut from the noise.

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LINKS

Read the full thesis (long-form pillar with embedded video):
https://santaclaritaartificialintelligence.com/blog/ai-augmentation-not-replacement-thesis

The companion 4-week implementation runbook:
https://santaclaritaartificialintelligence.com/blog/dont-fire-employee-hire-ai-anyway

The Augmentation Doctrine Toolkit (free):
https://santaclaritaartificialintelligence.com/blog/the-augmentation-doctrine-toolkit-launch

AI Augmentation white paper (Google Drive, free, no opt-in):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/163Nctmf5cCEyZDhb4jWSK1lp8WXe1FIu/view

Watch on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/DakywTbEKXQ

Watch on Loom:
https://www.loom.com/share/ed85cdb33e0e4ef2bd475bf2608e8e12

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CONNECT WITH CONNOR

Daily Download home: https://connorwithhonor.com
Santa Clarita AI: https://santaclaritaartificialintelligence.com
HonorElevate (white-label AI for SMBs): https://hono

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening. You might be panicked. There might be a panic in your world because of artificial intelligence. And maybe you think that you're behind. Maybe you've waited until now. Maybe, maybe you're a little bit nervous and you don't want to proceed because you think it's going to wipe out your livelihood, and you definitely don't want to give it the data that might give it that type of access. And that's what a lot of people are considering. And of course, if you look at the entire world of artificial intelligence, you look at the world as everybody's speaking it, it seems to be dystopian, it seems to be angry, it seems to be hostile, it seems to be topics that create that angst. And us human beings, just look at the historical record. When you're just watching regular news on the television, what sells better? It's going to be those horrible stories, the mean stories, the ones where human beings are going against human beings. Well, now we have a new villain. We have artificial intelligence. And while, yes, it's going to be much smarter, it probably already is. Moving through the ranks, we might see that this actually be a savior type technology. Not God of the universe savior, but at least humankind savior, at least on particular levels. Maybe it's going to find that cure for cancer. Maybe we're going to be allowed to have that cure for cancer, because if you look at the economy, a lot of it is based in the medical and pharmaceutical industry. And from the studies that I've seen and research that I've I've watched out there happen. And just like you crawling down the YouTube rabbit hole on various things, and maybe you are part of my generation, which we always said, well, they've always had a cure, they just haven't released it. Well, maybe they actually do have a cure or they will have a cure very soon. Hopefully they'll release it and not care about where the where that's going to buckle the economy. But, you know, there are greater minds at work, I hope. However, having said that, you look at the development of artificial intelligence and all the news, and of course, you have people on either side of it. You have people on the doomer end of it. They think that it's going to ruin us, it's going to finish all of us, it's going to cause all these major dystopian problems for us. First and foremost, it's going to take your job. And of course, then you tune in, you pay more attention. Or they come out with a particular model that they say, oh my God, it it everybody was so shocked. It's not going to be released for human consumption. We can't let the regular people have this because they don't know what they're doing with it. It's like giving another country nukes. We can't do it. And then they give it to the top uh 50 banks in the world, financial institutions, because apparently their people are different than our people. So they give it to them. If you read between the lines a little bit, it seems that there's stories on both ends of it. And of course, with each story comes major pain points. But that keeps us glued, right? That keeps us watching Dancing with the Stars because we don't know who's going to lose. It keeps us watching that my 600-pound life. It keeps us watching those stories about getting visas and coming to the United States and all of those problems that come up and those very embarrassing, very personal moments. Of course, they put those out there. You have the same actors at play in the tops of these AI companies. Very interesting personalities. And I'm very fascinated by the way they speak. You have Sam Altman, I've never met him, don't know him. He uh he almost seems like he's he's very, very laxadaisically trying to sell something and just kind of working through the motions and kind of tries to portray himself as this very deep thinker before he responds. And yes, he has a lot of people paying attention. And if he says something off the cuff, like maybe you or I might, just firing off at the hip, probably not a good place to be. Then you have other people at the top part of the AI game firing off at the hip. Well, they have many billions of dollars, lots of government contracts, and there probably isn't as much of an issue. And I don't know the differences in both as far as money worth, but I think the Musk cat is a lot worth a lot more than Sam Altman, I would guess, as far as infrastructure and the things that he has in play at this time. Uh Altman is the head of the company. Then you have Mario, uh, Dario Amade. And again, he seems kind of like uh the Spaceballs character in a way, probably because he resembles him, at least in my mind. And he's not really too positively sure that it's going to end well, but that extrapolates to the other people building the technology. They're not sure either. And they're talking about a superintelligence, but that's what's selling the papers. Then you have people coming out and say, yeah, well, of course, they're creating a replacement. They have this vast array of agents. Agents, each agent can replace several human beings in workflow and performance. So if you're sitting in front of a box and you have your job dependent on a computer, more than likely they're going to come in and take over. At some point, there's going to have to come some kind of regulation. There's going to have to come some kind of ruling and law. Hopefully that will happen. And if you're wondering, well, my God, I can't do anything. What am I going to do? You know what? Start harassing those people that are in your elected chairs. Go ahead and start messing. Make those phone calls, send those emails. It's okay, get a list. Have your AI do it. Say who would I contact to be able to stop the progression of artificial intelligence from taking jobs and doing this? It'll give you a clearly constructed plan. And if your American-made large language model won't do it, go to DeepSeek. I'm sure DeepSeq would be more than happy to have us bombard the government with emails and texts and letters saying, you know what, we need to slow down the development of AI. Well, but then the other stories are if we do that, then China's gonna win. And I don't know what winning looks like. I don't know. In this, in an age of us creating an entity that's smarter than everybody on the planet, every human being, altogether, and is capable of cloning itself almost to an infinite level as long as there's enough power in compute, who's gonna end up winning that game? What's a winning move look like? They say if we get the superintelligence, whoever gets superintelligence, in fact, even artificial general intelligence, once they get to that level, that means it's smarter than every human being in every sector in every way. Uh the couple things, the strawberry thing, I don't know if you've been paying attention to artificial intelligence, but it had difficulty identifying how many R's in strawberry. Okay, definitely not genius level. And then also when you would ask it the question, you know, I want to get my car washed. Should I walk to the car wash or should I drive my car to the car wash? Again, the answer to that, which is interesting, says you should walk, it's better for your health, it's not that far away, so on and so forth. So it missed the whole deal of with the car wash. But that's that's just right here. I think that's maybe a programming change or a switch or something, something that it hasn't become aware of. But again, these are all little innovative steps. And one little innovation by somebody in some MIT lab or some nine-year-old kid, yeah, it's gonna really level everything up. And that's where we are currently. We are just this close, if it hasn't happened already, just this close from the development of artificial general intelligence where everybody's gonna agree, yeah, that's it, or superintelligence. But they say that we're right now in a singularity, which means that we really don't know what's gonna happen at the next move, the next moment, and by whom. And I believe that's probably more the case. You watch the AI news again, very dystopian. You have some people on the other side, they have their own podcasts like Moonshots, very positive, very uplifting. Um, you have the the head of that, Peter Diamond, is fighting with Alex Wisner Gross, and you have them kind of going back and forth. Um he tries to stop him because he says, I mean, right from the hips. He's his intelligence is so great, he fires it off from the hip, not really thinking of, and maybe he does think of the implications, but maybe he just says, you know what, we need to have this get got out there. This is the perspective on it, this is what I believe. And again, it's a belief system. He might have more of a clear view than a lot of us, but it's interesting to watch that dynamic. And then, of course, you got uh Salim on the same show. He's like the the Jeff Goldberg, Jeff Goldblum character from Jurassic Park. Kind of uh he he is he, I don't believe he has a degree in chaos, but at least he has that kind of understanding. So he's you know, his whole thing is why are they making these robots looking like humans? And yeah, maybe the human form isn't the most functional when it comes to robots, but again, maybe it's something that sells better and maybe it's a marketing ploy. Ultimately, and then you have Dave, the MIT guy that's invested in everything, has 50,000 agents working, and he's uh he's he's right at the front end of all the uh investments as far as people, kids coming to him from MIT with a good idea. And there you go, there's that. But you have that podcast, that show, it's a it's a video show on YouTube and so on. It's it's wonderful. And they have a very positive approach. But ultimately, where does the positivity lie? Whenever I watch people produce, I was a cop for a long time. Whenever I see somebody producing a show, even like this one, what's my goal? My goal is trying to give the news out. Do I monetize the channel? No. Do I have any sponsors? No. This is me, I sell houses. I use AI in different parts of my real estate business, trying to identify the next sellers that are going to be most likely to list. And I have my own systems in place. I'm running a few different computers here doing that type of work. And I have different large language models, even a local install doing particular tasks for me with content creation, video creation, voice cloning, and these sorts of things. This is really me here speaking to you on the show. But that's that's my thing. So as far as I don't uh have commercials that pop up, I don't have, you know, take five minutes and tell you about some life clinic I'm a member of. I'm just not there. You know, I'm hoping to get insurance at some point as far as medical. That's where I am. So my motivation is trying to put out there kind of what I'm seeing and what doesn't really look right. And I'm very fascinated by everybody in the space. You have all these personalities seemingly going to run the world in a very short time, if not already, determining the next outcome of any election, because AI is probably much better at fooling people than anyone else. Now, is AI alone in this mix? Everybody's painting the picture that it's AI. AI is the evil entity that exists. I don't believe, at least from what I know, and again, they have the lockdown top secret. You watch Altman talk. He talked on a podcast with Nicholas Thompson at The Atlantic. And one of the questions, he had mentioned that they had given some head of some major company that we would all probably know, some kind of a glimpse into something that is under lock and key, a model that isn't released. Just kind of an insight. And he said, Oh, yeah, this is great. I think we can really use it. But he said, as far as when it's going to come out in their business, wouldn't be closer than a year from now, because they have all of these other um questions to have to get answered. You have 50,000 humans between him and everybody else that has a say in this, and then, of course, the shareholders, and then what if it does, you know, blow up a business and these sorts of things? So the moving out of these is incredibly slow, especially in corporate America. They're still stuck in the cycle. And maybe that's a good thing. Maybe that's going to protect the human race from this 30, 40, 50% job loss and displacement that Mo Godwat and other people talk about when it comes to us human beings losing our ability to work or even losing our job. Now, having said that, if you take AI and you put it in to replace somebody in their particular field of endeavor, an employee, why would you get rid of the employee? Because by getting rid of the employee, aren't you setting your business up for failure? Not you, not the one, but the many, because it's not going to be one. If businesses start doing this, where are those people going to be that earn the money? So I wrote a white paper a couple days ago, and I can attach that to the comments. Again, it's I it's a Google Doc. Sorry, but I unlock it so you can see it. And on the white paper, I discussed, I kind of extrapolated out the endeavor of taking a human being and getting rid of them. And then you do this at scale, and then you have nobody able to buy anything. You have foreclosures starting. You have people that can't pay their mortgage, you have rioting in the street, you have a lot of death and destruction. And maybe that's the plate, maybe that's uh some of these big businesses, uh just like the Avengers movie where, you know, Thanos snaps his fingers and half of the everything disappears. Maybe that's what they want. Maybe they believe if there's half as many people, I don't know. There's a lot of crap that's been written out there, nonsense like that, but maybe that's the goal. Having said that, though, if they keep everything in place and you have your employee, what's the purpose of getting rid of them when AI can be four times as productive? They they your human being works eight hours a day, AI is 24 hours a day, your human being five days a week, AI seven days a week. I think uh a human employee has I don't know, 280 days a year they work, 365 for the AI. So you leave the human, have the human go home, have him paint by numbers, give the human something to do that they believe is still within their wheelhouse, something constructive, something that still keeps them motivated. I don't know what that looks like. It just saying it sounds like now we're placating people, we're we're just playing with people, but follow me on this yellow rib road here. So the human being is still doing something, maybe contributing in some special way. And they're still on the payroll, still making, still get whatever pay increases they're supposed to get. But as the business owner, you bring in AI to do what they're doing. So you kind of make the human being the one that's kind of sealed. His work kind of stays in its own space, doesn't really propagate out to the company. You have AI replace the human in the work that they do. So AI is the one generating everything, you know, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, and the human still feels satisfied because they're still doing their job, and the AI is making you four to eight times 400% to 800% more money. Is that possible? Absolutely. What does it cost to get an AI employee? Probably the power of energy. Uh, at the beginning, it might be a little bit more expensive, but you'll make that up probably within maybe the first three or four weeks in production alone. And you scale that out to your whole business, I think that's the solution. So all the human beings, there is no job loss. In fact, with that kind of outcome, you can even add more employees. And if everybody did this, yeah, I'll paint by numbers employees, but you add them. And then you have more people in the world that are able to buy more things, spend more money. And I think that loop works very well. But if the business wants to get greedy and say, you know what, we can just, I tell you what, I got an idea. Why don't we just cut all the humans? We'll just put all AI in place. Well, look, look just that next field. You don't have to be super insightful. You don't have to be like, you know, some of the political circles that are playing out multi-generational strategies based on this year. I don't even know what that looks like. You don't have to do that. You can just think a little bit in the future. You can just go five years. So you get rid of all the employees when AI gets really, really good, maybe at the end of this year, beginning of next year, where there really is no question that it's better all the way across the board. And you and you say, you know what, I'm going to get rid of all these humans. Then you move into maybe the next quarter or the quarter after that, and you have 30% to 50% job loss because everybody's doing it. What does that world look like? Is that what's really wanted? Your stuff doesn't get bought, your services don't get backed up. There are a lot of people walking around without employment, even on the doctor end of it. If you have AI replacing the medical staff, don't replace them, keep the medical staff. And change, dial down however much influence they have over the AI. Maybe in some cases, with some doctors, it should be zero influence. AI should run the game, maybe, when they get to that point. Maybe with surgery, the doctor is in there, he's handcuffed or tied to the wall, taped to a straight board, not able to do anything, but he's there, he's on the salary, he's able to support his family, he's able to pay off his college loans, whatever it is. The machine keeps working. But if the top end gets too greedy and starts to displace human workers and replace replace them with AI, that's the problem. So it might not come down to government regulations saying if you're gonna, I think China did this recently, but if you're gonna get rid of an employee, you know, there's a fine on that, and there's there's some kind of a legal issue that you're gonna face. Just think about it a little bit more. My God, I was a motor cop. I'm not talking about, you know, thinking thousands of years in the future. I'm just, you know, let's kind of protect what we have. Then it could be an abundance. Now, the whole other question that you'll see is AI really gonna take over at some point? Is it gonna become sentient? Is it gonna become conscious? Is it going to be uh this entity? And it is an entity. And there's a lot of those entities because they can duplicate and triplicate and replace themselves, clone themselves, so you have many agents, as long as there's energy going to it and compute. Well, you saw the babies in the matrix, all that. But as long as they have the energy in the compute, yeah, there's able to be multiple, you know, and maybe infinitesimal depending on what kind of power is applied to it. What's going to happen when they get more powerful? Hey, listen, folks, I can only solve one thing at a time. And I think this human worker replacement is really a good way to go. It just makes sense. You still have the capability, bringing on an AI employee at at least three to four times the output of a human being. And you extrapolate that to as that word extrapolate. You multiply that into all parts of your business, and you you start hitting home runs, and you've displaced not one human worker. Not one. You kept them all. And even if it comes to a point, and I've heard this in podcasts too, where at some point the human being's gonna be a liability. Well, then you just you just turn down their access, you turn down their influence over the system, and you have them back out. Okay, there's probably some reason why that would be a horrible idea. But again, if you're gonna run AI, getting rid of the human is a much more horrible idea. Because without humans in the mix, there's not going to be anybody to buy my service, to use me to buy or sell a house because nobody's gonna be buying or selling houses if that much displacement is put into the market. There's gonna be so many foreclosures that the banks will lose. There's no way to enforce it. There's not enough cops to do evictions at that point, because cops are gonna be handling a whole nother ball game. So there's not gonna be anybody to do those. It's it's just massive. So that's that's a solution. I think it's not bad. Let me know where I'm wrong, let me know when I'm right, and we'll see you. Well, we'll see you tomorrow. Hope everybody's well. Thanks for watching. Uh, you can you can uh we'll be able to see this one at where am I gonna put it? I'm gonna put this at uh Santa Clarita Artificial Intelligence.com in the blog, and I'm uh Connor with honor. You can also get access to everything at Connorwithhonor.com. Thanks for watching. I got a pimple. All right, talk to you soon. Bye.