AI代理不等于劳动力,其薪酬由算力成本决定。
Who Prices Cognitive Labor in the Age of Agents? Compute-Anchored Wages
- 将代理视为算力转化认知劳动的技术,而非人力替代品。
- 提出算力锚定工资模型,人类工资受算力租金与效率限制。
- 适合研究算力经济、劳动力市场变革的政策制定者与学者。
直觉认为AI代理可低成本复制,导致认知劳动供给弹性大,压低人类工资。我们指出该框架机制错误但结论部分正确:代理并非劳动,而是将算力资本 $K_c$ 转化为有效认知劳动 $L_A$ 的生产技术。一旦理解这一点,均衡工资的弹性供给锚点从劳动力市场转移至算力资本市场。基于经典要素定价框架,我们推导出算力锚定工资(CAW)上限:在人类与代理认知劳动可替代的任务中,竞争性人类工资被 $λ·k·r_c$ 限定,其中 $r_c$ 为算力租金,$k$ 为每单位有效代理认知劳动的算力强度,$λ$ 为人机相对生产力。通过常替代弹性(CES)聚合推广结果,区分替代与互补任务,并讨论要素分配影响。结论明确:认知劳动的价格决定者不再是劳动力市场。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
A natural intuition about the economics of AI agents is that, because agents can be replicated at very low marginal cost, agent labor may be supplied highly elastically, placing downward pressure on cognitive-labor wages when it closely substitutes for human labor. We argue this framing is wrong in mechanism but partially correct in conclusion, and that the correction matters for both theory and policy. \textbf{Agents are not labor; they are a production technology that converts compute capital $K_c$ into effective units of cognitive labor $L_A$.} Once this is recognized, the elastic-supply margin that anchors the equilibrium wage migrates from the labor market to the compute capital market. Building on the classic factor-pricing framework \citep{mankiw2020}, we derive a \emph{Compute-Anchored Wage} (CAW) bound stating that, on tasks where human and agent-produced cognitive labor are substitutes, the competitive human wage is bounded above by $λ\cdot k \cdot r_c$, where $r_c$ is the rental rate of compute capital, $k$ is the compute intensity of one effective agent-produced cognitive labor unit, and $λ$ is the relative human-to-agent productivity. We generalize the result through constant elasticity of substitution (CES) aggregation, separate substitutable from complementary tasks, and discuss factor-share consequences. The conclusion is concise: \emph{the price-setter for cognitive labor is no longer the labor market.}
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。