The AI boom is really a race to own the future of human labor, a safety pioneer says

• Computer science professor Roman Yampolskiy said the AI boom is a bet on future labor.
• He said investors expect AI agents to deliver "free labor" at a massive scale.
• Most computer-based jobs are at risk as AI advances faster than past tech waves, he said.

The soaring valuations of AI companies aren't just a bet on better software.

They're a wager on who will control human labor in the future, according to Roman Yampolskiy, a University of Louisville computer science professor who was one of the first academics to warn about AI's risks.

As artificial intelligence moves from tools to increasingly autonomous agents, Yampolskiy said markets are pricing in a radical shift: machines providing "free labor" at scale.

"You go from having tools to having agents with humanlike capability that really represents free labor," Yampolskiy told the UK's LBC radio station in a recent interview. "Free labor — cognitive free labor, physical labor."

That dynamic, he said, helps explain why investors are willing to pay lofty valuations for AI companies even before many of them have established clear business models.

"If a company valuation is a hundred billion today, it's actually a small bet on having access to that free labor," he told LBC.

In comments later to Business Insider, he said that "once a model is trained and deployed, copying its capabilities across millions of tasks is mostly compute, not salaries."

Markets, he added, tend to underestimate how abruptly change can arrive.

"When quality crosses a usability threshold, substitution can be abrupt," he said. "Wage value can collapse faster than institutions can adapt."

Jobs at risk — and why this time is different

Yampolskiy told LBC that any job performed entirely on a computer is vulnerable to automation; he offered up programming, accounting, tax preparation, and web design as examples.

While automation may initially remove only the most tedious tasks, entire roles could disappear over time, he said.

"In five years, we'll have capability to automate all cognitive labor and a lot of physical labor," he said during the interview, pointing to rapid advances in robotics.

What makes this technological wave different, Yampolskiy told Business Insider, is that AI targets "the general substrate of cognitive work itself," rather than specific tasks.

Past technologies have created new jobs that require uniquely human skills; this time, he said, the frontier keeps moving.

"The new categories become automatable shortly after they appear," he said.

He expects adoption to be slowed by regulation, liability, and organizational inertia — but ultimately driven by competitive pressure and cost-cutting.

"Firms adopt whatever lowers costs and increases speed once reliability is good enough," he said.

A divided debate over AI and jobs

Yampolskiy, who has previously said AI could leave 99% of workers jobless by 2030, joins a growing chorus of AI experts and tech leaders predicting that the technology could wipe out vast swaths of work.

Geoffrey Hinton, the computer scientist known as "the godfather of AI," has said that AI could replace "many, many jobs" as early as 2026, while AI pioneer Stuart Russell has warned that societies may face up to 80% unemployment.

But others disagree.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and former Meta AI chief Yann LeCun have said AI will change jobs rather than eliminate them, while executives like JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon and Zoom's Eric Yuan have predicted the technology could reshape work and shorten the workweek instead of erasing employment.

Yampolskiy sees a bigger risk. Once societies become dependent on AI as critical infrastructure, he said, slowing down may no longer be a real option.

"Dependency creates lock-in," he told Business Insider.

"Once AI becomes critical infrastructure," he said, "risk tolerance increases by necessity rather than choice. In that state, control failures become more likely precisely because the option to pause, audit, or roll back is no longer viable."