The Last Gasps of the Rent Seeking Class

Over the past fifty years, the U.S. economy built a giant rent-extraction layer on top of human limitations: things take time, patience runs out, brand familiarity substitutes for diligence, and most people are willing to accept a bad price to avoid more clicks. Trillions of dollars of enterprise value depended on those constraints persisting.

Artificial Friction and Time Asymmetry

Seven years ago, the Google Duplex demo—where an AI called a restaurant to make a reservation—showed the potential to break existing systems. Google eventually realized the implications: no restaurant could handle the volume if AI could automate reservations at scale. Since then, third-party marketplaces have emerged, adding fees to what used to be a simple interaction.

The American market has often used purposefully added friction to exploit the time asymmetry between businesses and consumers. Cable and insurance companies rely on the fact that your time is more valuable than theirs. They scale call centers to waste your time, using big data to design protocols that drive customers to the point of frustration at little cost to the business.

AI: The Great Equalizer

AI is emerging as the great equalizer of time. Human-level AI is becoming accessible to the public, thanks to simplified APIs and the strategic priorities of global players pushing for open-source models. Rather than being locked within proprietary operating systems, these models function best as powerful tools for those who prefer direct control over polished but restrictive interfaces.

In the five-tier AI supply chain—Electricity, Chip Manufacturing, Chip Design/Software, Models, and Applications—the application layer is becoming commoditized. Companies built as simple "GPT wrappers" face immediate obsolescence as open-source alternatives provide similar performance without the rent-seeking overhead.

The Battle for Model Dominance

The model tier is the current battleground. Recent calls for "industry coordination" and regulatory moats are seen by critics as the last gasps of a rent-seeking apparatus. While some Western entities aim for a more efficient extraction system, the rise of high-quality open-source models from international competitors is shifting AI toward becoming a public utility.

When top-tier models are open-sourced, they commoditize the layers above them. This disrupts the status quo of accumulating wealth through artificial barriers and shifts the advantage toward those who provide actual utility in electricity and hardware.

The Future of Interaction

The era of purposefully frustrating humans is ending. Open-source models can now pass the Turing Test and act as personal agents. In the near future, when businesses attempt to reach out via call, email, or ad, they will encounter an AI model acting on behalf of the human, filtering out the noise and friction that once generated profit. The collapse of the rent-seeking economy paves the way for a more direct and efficient reconstruction of how we interact with services.