If your time to you is worth savin’
And you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’
Simply put, and perhaps more relevant than ever before – the times are indeed A-Changin’. Let us consider the notion of remote work and it’s potential market disruption by AI.
Why this isn’t just a return to the office.
Recent research from EpochAI ‘The economic consequences of automating remote work’ from January 2025 forecasts an aggressive expansion of demand for AI Inference, where 34% of remote work labor tasks are automated, fueling demand for 250 Million NVIDIA H100 GPU equivalents. This automation of labor (powered by Agentic AI and Inference) would see a doubling of US GDP, enabled by the introduction of potentially tens of billions of ‘remote workers’ (Agentic AI) running Inference on AI Infrastructure in Data Centers (up to 250M NVIDIA H100 GPUs). See Figure 1 below for the forecast scenarios. 
“This growth could be achieved by increasing the number of remote workers in the economy by a factor of 100-1000, which could occur if tens of billions of digital workers were hosted in data centers.”
Figure 1: EpochAI forecast for US GDP growth and factor increase in remote workers (here represented by AI Agents that are performing labor tasks currently executed by US labor force).
Source: The economic consequences of automating remote work Accessed January 16th, 2025.
How much inference would this require?
Per EpochAI; “At an inference cost of, say, 10^14 FLOP/s per worker, creating ten billion digital workers that run continuously would require a compute stock capable of performing 10^24 FLOP/s. This would be the equivalent of roughly 250 million H100s performing work in parallel at maximum efficiency. While this is an enormous amount of compute by today’s standards, current projections of chip capacity support the notion that such a scenario could be achieved in the early 2030s.”
Whilst the research from EpochAI represents a complex thought experiment on the future of remote work – it clearly demonstrates an essential truth. The AI revolution is a paradigmatic shift which affects every facet of human existence, and therefore will necessitate radical transformations of the economic, societal and cultural fabric which underpins human civilization.
Why should you care?
We are no longer bound by human knowledge generation, size of the labor force, or other similar structural constraints related to our collective ability to think about problems, design solutions, and implement them in the real world. What happens if we can infinitely scale the size of the labor force? What if the labor force no longer has to perform menial, repetitive, time-consuming tasks?
As a civilization, humans have continually strived to expand the constraints that govern our ability to shape the world in our image, according to our needs and desires. AI represents a pivotal technological revolution which will enable unfathomable positive change – completely altering the future trajectory of our species.
Imagine A World Without Boundaries – a world where humans can increasingly delegate linear inputs (hours worked per worker to generate GDP growth and economic productivity, as in the case of this thought experiment) and focus on non-linear outcomes.
Human creativity knows no bounds, and we are moving towards a world where historic boundaries to accelerating our future are transcended. The Second Renaissance moves ever closer, a moment where civilizational renewal takes place, and existing paradigms are supplanted by a world without boundaries.
