If we compared AI capabilities against humans with no access to tools, such as the internet, we would probably find that AI already outperformed humans at many or most cognitive tasks we perform at work. But of course this is not a helpful comparison and doesn’t tell us much about AI’s economic impacts. We are nothing without our tools. And yet, many predictions about the impact of “AGI” are based on hypothetical human-AI comparisons in which the humans have internet access but no AI access. This kind of comparison is equally irrelevant. The real question is humans + AI vs AI alone. In such a comparison, AI isn’t going to outperform human-AI pairs, except in narrow, computationally heavy domains like games where speed is paramount and having a human in the picture only slows things down.* So whether or not AI will replace humans comes down to factors beyond accuracy — things like accountability, the ability to handle unknown unknowns, and potential preferences of customers and other workers to interact with a human, all weighed against the cost of employing a human. This is not to say that AI won’t displace jobs. But looking at capability benchmarks and going straight to claims about job loss is completely naive. * There are many studies where workers incorrectly override AI too often, but that’s because they received no training in when to override and when not to, which is an essential skill in AI-enabled workflows.