These are valuable skills, though perhaps nowhere near as valuable as they end up being in a free market.

1. They built the agent and it's somehow competitive. If so, they shouldn't just replace their own job with it, they should replace a lot more jobs and get a lot more rich than one salary.

2. They rent the agent. If so, why would the renting company not rent directly to their boss, maybe even at a business premium?

I see no scenario where there's an "agent to do my work while I keep getting a paycheck."

If 99.99% of other humans will become poor and eventually die, it certainly will change economy a lot.

The people who used to be hired workers? Eh, they still own their ability to work (which is now completely useless in the market economy) and nothing much more so... well, they can go and sleep under the bridge or go extinct or do whatever else peacefully, as long as they don't try to trespass on the private property, sanctity and inviolability of which is obviously crucial for the societal harmony.

So yeah, the global population would probably shrink down to something in the hundreds millions or so in the end, and ironically, the economy may very well end up being self-sustainable and environmentally green and all that nice stuff since it won't have to support the life standards of ~10 billions, although the process of getting there could be quite tumultous.

I don't agree; it's perfectly possible, given chasing0entropy's... let's say 'feature request', that either side might gain that skill level first.

> It wouldn’t surprise me if doing the work itself end-to-end (to a market-ready standard) remains in the uncanny valley for quite some time, while “fuzzier” roles like management can be more readily replaced.

Agreed - and for many of us, that's exactly what seems to be happening. My agent is vaguely closer to the role that a good manager has played for me in the past than it is to the role I myself have played - it keeps better TODO lists than I can, that's for sure. :-)

> It’s like how we all once thought blue collar work would be first, but it turned out that knowledge work is much easier. Right now everyone imagines managers replacing their employees with AI, but we might have the order reversed.

Perfectly stated IMO.