Artificial Intelligence (vs Human Labor): The Full-Cost Picture

Everyone says AI is cheaper than humans. But are we comparing against the fully loaded cost of AI yet? A human employee’s cost is visible – salary, benefits, office space, training. AI’s costs are largely hidden in the background: token/inference fees, GPUs, data center CAPEX, electricity, cooling, model retraining, QA layers, and compliance overhead. Humans are expensive visibly. AI is expensive invisibly. So, we ask – are we witnessing true structural efficiency – or are we still in the subsidized adoption phase of AI?