Who Prices Cognitive Labor in the Age of Agents? Compute-Anchored Wages
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 mark...
| Authors | Siqi Zhu |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 7 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 8 May 2026 |
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