Unit Cost Dominance
The Mathematical Foundation of Economic Transformation
Welcome. This site explains a simple economic principle that, once accepted, reveals the inevitable trajectory of human labor in the age of AI.
What is Unit Cost Dominance?
Unit Cost Dominance (UCD) occurs when AI systems with minimal human verification consistently deliver equivalent or superior results at dramatically lower costs than human-only work.
Human-only work: $20-50/hour
Cost advantage: 20-50x lower
This isn’t theoretical—it’s happening now:
- AI inference costs halve every 18 months while wages rise only with inflation, creating an exponentially widening cost gap
- GPT-4 outperforms median professionals on 80% of benchmarked cognitive tasks
- Human oversight scales logarithmically—5 minutes to verify what took hours to create
- Augmented workers (AI-assisted) consistently outperform non-augmented workers across all metrics
- Customers choose faster, more accurate, cheaper services when available
- No rational business voluntarily pays 20-50x more for equivalent output
- Global competition prevents coordination to maintain higher-cost human work
This applies beyond cognitive work: An AI-augmented plumber with diagnostic tools, AR instructions, and predictive maintenance outperforms a traditional plumber in speed, accuracy, and customer satisfaction. The augmented human becomes the new baseline—making non-augmented work economically obsolete.
Do you accept that Unit Cost Dominance is real and inevitable?
This requires only accepting basic arithmetic and market incentives—not making predictions about the future.
The Mathematical Chain of Consequences
Once you accept Unit Cost Dominance, the rest follows mathematically:
This is the Multiplayer Prisoner’s Dilemma: Everyone knows mass AI adoption eliminates human economic function, but no individual actor can resist without losing competitive position. Defection (adopting AI) dominates cooperation (preserving human work).
No coordination mechanism can solve this:
- Ban AI → Economy dies, capital flees
- Tax AI → Regulatory arbitrage to other jurisdictions
- Slow adoption → Competitors gain decisive advantage
- International agreement → Impossible with competitive pressures and definitional problems
UCD doesn’t require belief in dramatic predictions. It only requires accepting that businesses choose lower costs when quality is equivalent—and that this choice, multiplied across all economic actors, creates systematic effects that no individual actor can control.
Welcome to the inevitability. The question isn’t whether this will happen—it’s how quickly, and what replaces the current system.
Challenging Unit Cost Dominance
To deny UCD, you must provide concrete evidence for at least one of these claims:
- AI verification costs scale linearly or worse (contradicts all empirical evidence showing logarithmic scaling)
- Quality gaps will persist indefinitely (despite rapid improvement in AI capabilities)
- Businesses will voluntarily pay 20-50x more (contradicts basic economic incentives)
- Coordination mechanisms exist to prevent adoption (no evidence of enforceable global agreements)
- Physical work is permanently automation-resistant (ignores augmentation advantages)
Current evidence supports none of these positions. The cost differential is measurable, the quality gap is closing rapidly, and competitive pressure makes adoption inevitable.
UCD doesn’t require belief—it requires refutation with specific, empirical counter-evidence.
Having considered these requirements for denial, do you now accept UCD?
The Reluctant Acceptance
Good. You’ve recognized that denying UCD requires evidence that doesn’t exist. The arithmetic is undeniable—when equivalent quality costs 20-50x less, adoption becomes inevitable.
Your initial resistance was rational—accepting UCD means accepting that current economic structures are temporary. But the mathematics doesn’t care about our preferences.
The Persistent Denial
You’re choosing to deny basic arithmetic. UCD doesn’t require belief in AI capabilities or economic theories—it only requires accepting that businesses prefer equivalent output at 1/20th the cost.
Your denial must rest on one of these empirically unsupported claims:
- Businesses voluntarily pay 20-50x more for equivalent work
- Quality gaps persist despite exponential capability improvement
- Global coordination prevents competitive adoption
- AI costs increase faster than wage inflation
The mathematics operates regardless of acceptance. Competitive markets create cost pressure independent of individual belief. Your denial doesn’t change the game theory.