I think this analogy breaks down when considering that the agricultural revolution gave regular people more time to demand new things, but also more time to produce new things, and thus maintained or even increased their economic leverage
> My inability to produce food is economically almost irrelevant. What matters is that I can consume it, enjoy it, develop tastes for it, and devote my energies to other things.
What the author misses is that what mattered more was that people could now produce more things. People were free from manual labour to perform intellectual labour. But what do people do to produce things when intellectual labour is automated? And with emboddied AI, skilled manual labour too?
You need to produce things to be able to reap the fruits of economic progress. Thats what most working people did after the agricultural revolution. What will we produce in a post AI world? And if only the people who own AI will be able to produce things, then why would they give us any power or leverage in the economy?
I suspect the author would respond with some form of "displaced people without capital will take on roles in the relational economy, or as human liability for the robots." I agree the material leverage of such jobs seems radically diminished.
People need to think about the future now, it is more urgent than before, we have to decide what to do with our life when (assuming a positive future rather than skynet) AI does the stuff better than us in every category. We have to find a meaning. I know this comment isn't directly related to the AI trades, but every subject regarding AI keeps reminding me of the future we are not ready. I can't imagine what type of professions completely made unnecessary by AI in the following 5 years.
The analogy between farm work and intelligence work breaks down at their transition continuation, which the author missed, I believe.
When the people were were freed from farm labour, due to farm automation, people could find another economic activity which required the other capacity of humans - intelligence.
The transition from muscle-power work to mind-work was meaningful, as both muscle and mind were attributes of humans, creating demand for humans having mind power instead of muscle power.
But the continuation of that transition breaks down. Muscle power -> Mind power -> ???
Those 3 questions marks at the end are what's scaring people, and what is threatening the stability of the transition from mind work. If both muscle power and mond power are not things of value, how would the humanity progress to create value? Who buys it? Why do they buy it? Who hires whom? Why?
we can draw another parallel like this simpleton of an "author":
let's say smartphone. They are so smart! we can replace all the word intelligence in his thesis by smartness.
This dude think because some marketing team put the word "Intelligence" on LLM , it is it.
Since it probably write most of the words in this "essay"... which is just word salad, replacing "capitalism" by "AI" in the work of someone else ( a "clever" LLM trick , who like taking something existing, and replace one word at the time); since the lack of any insight in this article, we can conclude, that the LLM who help wrote it, has clearly no ressemblance with any intelligence.
I think the article is insightful. I want to contribute my perspective:
1. when an AI starts working on a task, it is within a human context, someone pays and decides to assign that work to AI
2. while it performs work on the task it continuously needs to interact with the context in order to act and observe the feedback
3. at the end of work, the outcomes remain in context, including gains, losses, costs, risks and liability.
So AI is great but can't do the beginning, middle and end of a task. They belong to context, which is us, the AI users. Context is maximally distributed, every human, team, or company that uses AI is a context, they are relational and indexical. You can't have my context, for example - you can't eat for me, or learn for me. Some things must loop back. Especially consequences of AI work. That is irreducible, AI can't improve to grow a skin like us. Its own skin is user base gain/loss, competition with other AI providers and dancing for investors. Every AI usage context is not theirs and they can't own it.
What happens to companies is that their investors expect AI usage already, their competitors use it to compete with them and fast follow, and customers use AI agents to arbitrate their buying opportunities. So even if they did nothing AI related they find themselves in a new world where.
1. anything visible can be easily imitated - code, text, media, and AI agents - I call it the fast follow effect
2. any apparent arbitrage opportunity will be quickly crowded by fast followers removing profit from it
3. AI it self is competitive and the whole stack is fungible - models, harnesses, tools, they can all be replaced easily, what matters more is the project context data which is usually a git backed folder on local disk
So my theory is that AI won't make anyone "rich". Instead we have a musical chairs moment. AI removes distinctiveness from everyone of us. Every time I use AI for myself it is just great and amazing. When others use it, they make our own work seem little and not as impressive. Companies are caught in a Red Queen effect, have to work harder just to stay in place.
And here I find the answer to what will we do with all our free time - compete, run for our own musical chair. We need to find our own niches again, they are now under rapid change. We will invest as much energy as needed to do it, we are ready to pay a lot of effort to differentiate back. But we can't predict it just as you can't predict where the ball in a football match will go 1 minute later, it depends on what every other player is doing.
Hate taking down these articles, but this is a very, very bad take. Rationalists always fall down on human behavior.
There is a comforting fairy tale popular among tech optimists: that human history is driven by mental upgrades that trickle down to the masses.
The first part of that sentence is absolutely true. The second part has a much darker side that optimists conveniently ignore.
1. Mercantilism is alive and well. Please see Hormuz, Straight of.
2. Mercantilist rent-seeking is alive and well, just at a layer up of abstraction. See Google, Meta, Microsoft. No single player can compete with them. Ones that somehow manage to even threaten get bought.
3. Tech doesn't solve issues broadly: a modern worker with a battery-powered chainsaw has more productive power than an 18th-century frontier settler. Yet we still have homelessness. Riddle me this, techno-optimist.
But you'll say, we're overall better off. Of course we are. But the gains have BY AND LARGE gone to the wealthiest individuals and countries. The idea that the dude can eat a variety of incredibly rare food sits on the backs of billions of impoverished people who don't spend time in our air conditioned offices on MacBooks.
Great men and discoveries move the world (see Musk, Elon) but their exploits spread wealth HIGHLY unevenly, and big nation states want to steal it in the most mercantile way possible - by forcing and scaling up supply (look at China for cars, steel, and basically any advanced manufacturing right now).
One man intelligence will be a boon for people with agency. But it's HIGHLY unlikely to undo the superstructure which captured the rules of mercantilism AND capitalism at the same time.
>But the gains have BY AND LARGE gone to the wealthiest individuals and countries.
This is simply false, the average Chinese or Indian is incredibly better off now than they were 100 or 500 years ago. In fact for the past decade many of the wealthiest countries (many Western European countries, and Japan) have seen barely any growth in living standards at all, GDP-per-capita growth has been concentrated in developing countries.
The TLDR take: now that humans are no longer required for thinking, we will switch to something other than usage of our brains.
Eating, apparently, is completely optional for humans :-/
Just a thing to remember: our intelligence made us the apex predator on this planet. Is there any reason to believe that a superior intelligence, whether man-made or extraterrestrial, won't become the apex predator?
That’s not really what it’s saying. The analogy it draws is between subsistence farmers and subsistence thinkers aka white collar workers/paper pushers etc. The argument would be that repetitive, brainless thinking will no longer be required (not thinking in general), so people will be freed up for currently unimaginable cognitive pursuits.
> The argument would be that repetitive, brainless thinking will no longer be required, so people will be freed up for currently unimaginable cognitive pursuits.
Like what?
1. AI isn't going to stop at "repetitive, brainless thinking," just ask the math professors.
2. Even if that's true, is everyone capable of these "currently unimaginable cognitive pursuits"? Oh, there will still be intellectual work for the top-0.1% smartest people is little consolation to the other 99.9%.
3. That argument is basically trying to console people with a combination of "trust us" and the underpants gnome business plan ("1. Collect underpants, 2. ?, 3. Profit).
> Capitalism emerged when people began discovering that wealth could be created rather than merely captured, and that ordinary people could be sources of demand and initiative rather than merely labor to be commanded as a factor of production.
A worker under capitalism is exactly just another commodity commanded by capital. Only competing power centers like unions makes it not one-sided.
I dunno about “demand and initiative”. Is this how capitalism started, or are we jumping ahead to the post-WWII USA where the socialists and capitalists had won concessions from the bougies so that a “middle class” came about?
> The early capitalist worker voluntarily increased annual working days from 250 to 300 because a new universe of desirable goods had become accessible.
The weekly working hours increased for many who moved to the factories of the cities. Labor organizing is what lead to the two-day weekend.
> We are moving toward a world in which an ordinary person can command quantities and varieties of intelligence that would previously have required teams of highly trained specialists. Just as I can enjoy food without knowing how to farm, I can increasingly enjoy the products of intelligence without knowing how to produce them myself.
Some people are incapable of seeing power dynamics. An ordinary person might fear AI because of the explicit threats against his or her job.
How does power work? In this case it works by concentrating compute and access to the vaunted frontier models.
Another thing is the part about “hoarding”. AI is exactly about hoarding. Labor built the intelligence of centuries. Now AI wants to close that off.
I think this analogy breaks down when considering that the agricultural revolution gave regular people more time to demand new things, but also more time to produce new things, and thus maintained or even increased their economic leverage
> My inability to produce food is economically almost irrelevant. What matters is that I can consume it, enjoy it, develop tastes for it, and devote my energies to other things.
What the author misses is that what mattered more was that people could now produce more things. People were free from manual labour to perform intellectual labour. But what do people do to produce things when intellectual labour is automated? And with emboddied AI, skilled manual labour too?
You need to produce things to be able to reap the fruits of economic progress. Thats what most working people did after the agricultural revolution. What will we produce in a post AI world? And if only the people who own AI will be able to produce things, then why would they give us any power or leverage in the economy?
I suspect the author would respond with some form of "displaced people without capital will take on roles in the relational economy, or as human liability for the robots." I agree the material leverage of such jobs seems radically diminished.
People need to think about the future now, it is more urgent than before, we have to decide what to do with our life when (assuming a positive future rather than skynet) AI does the stuff better than us in every category. We have to find a meaning. I know this comment isn't directly related to the AI trades, but every subject regarding AI keeps reminding me of the future we are not ready. I can't imagine what type of professions completely made unnecessary by AI in the following 5 years.
The analogy between farm work and intelligence work breaks down at their transition continuation, which the author missed, I believe.
When the people were were freed from farm labour, due to farm automation, people could find another economic activity which required the other capacity of humans - intelligence.
The transition from muscle-power work to mind-work was meaningful, as both muscle and mind were attributes of humans, creating demand for humans having mind power instead of muscle power.
But the continuation of that transition breaks down. Muscle power -> Mind power -> ???
Those 3 questions marks at the end are what's scaring people, and what is threatening the stability of the transition from mind work. If both muscle power and mond power are not things of value, how would the humanity progress to create value? Who buys it? Why do they buy it? Who hires whom? Why?
we can draw another parallel like this simpleton of an "author":
let's say smartphone. They are so smart! we can replace all the word intelligence in his thesis by smartness. This dude think because some marketing team put the word "Intelligence" on LLM , it is it. Since it probably write most of the words in this "essay"... which is just word salad, replacing "capitalism" by "AI" in the work of someone else ( a "clever" LLM trick , who like taking something existing, and replace one word at the time); since the lack of any insight in this article, we can conclude, that the LLM who help wrote it, has clearly no ressemblance with any intelligence.
I think the article is insightful. I want to contribute my perspective:
1. when an AI starts working on a task, it is within a human context, someone pays and decides to assign that work to AI
2. while it performs work on the task it continuously needs to interact with the context in order to act and observe the feedback
3. at the end of work, the outcomes remain in context, including gains, losses, costs, risks and liability.
So AI is great but can't do the beginning, middle and end of a task. They belong to context, which is us, the AI users. Context is maximally distributed, every human, team, or company that uses AI is a context, they are relational and indexical. You can't have my context, for example - you can't eat for me, or learn for me. Some things must loop back. Especially consequences of AI work. That is irreducible, AI can't improve to grow a skin like us. Its own skin is user base gain/loss, competition with other AI providers and dancing for investors. Every AI usage context is not theirs and they can't own it.
What happens to companies is that their investors expect AI usage already, their competitors use it to compete with them and fast follow, and customers use AI agents to arbitrate their buying opportunities. So even if they did nothing AI related they find themselves in a new world where.
1. anything visible can be easily imitated - code, text, media, and AI agents - I call it the fast follow effect
2. any apparent arbitrage opportunity will be quickly crowded by fast followers removing profit from it
3. AI it self is competitive and the whole stack is fungible - models, harnesses, tools, they can all be replaced easily, what matters more is the project context data which is usually a git backed folder on local disk
So my theory is that AI won't make anyone "rich". Instead we have a musical chairs moment. AI removes distinctiveness from everyone of us. Every time I use AI for myself it is just great and amazing. When others use it, they make our own work seem little and not as impressive. Companies are caught in a Red Queen effect, have to work harder just to stay in place.
And here I find the answer to what will we do with all our free time - compete, run for our own musical chair. We need to find our own niches again, they are now under rapid change. We will invest as much energy as needed to do it, we are ready to pay a lot of effort to differentiate back. But we can't predict it just as you can't predict where the ball in a football match will go 1 minute later, it depends on what every other player is doing.
The british flag on the boat, as if britain would play any role in current times.
This proves that brother has never done farming.
Hate taking down these articles, but this is a very, very bad take. Rationalists always fall down on human behavior.
There is a comforting fairy tale popular among tech optimists: that human history is driven by mental upgrades that trickle down to the masses.
The first part of that sentence is absolutely true. The second part has a much darker side that optimists conveniently ignore.
1. Mercantilism is alive and well. Please see Hormuz, Straight of. 2. Mercantilist rent-seeking is alive and well, just at a layer up of abstraction. See Google, Meta, Microsoft. No single player can compete with them. Ones that somehow manage to even threaten get bought. 3. Tech doesn't solve issues broadly: a modern worker with a battery-powered chainsaw has more productive power than an 18th-century frontier settler. Yet we still have homelessness. Riddle me this, techno-optimist.
But you'll say, we're overall better off. Of course we are. But the gains have BY AND LARGE gone to the wealthiest individuals and countries. The idea that the dude can eat a variety of incredibly rare food sits on the backs of billions of impoverished people who don't spend time in our air conditioned offices on MacBooks.
Great men and discoveries move the world (see Musk, Elon) but their exploits spread wealth HIGHLY unevenly, and big nation states want to steal it in the most mercantile way possible - by forcing and scaling up supply (look at China for cars, steel, and basically any advanced manufacturing right now).
One man intelligence will be a boon for people with agency. But it's HIGHLY unlikely to undo the superstructure which captured the rules of mercantilism AND capitalism at the same time.
>But the gains have BY AND LARGE gone to the wealthiest individuals and countries.
This is simply false, the average Chinese or Indian is incredibly better off now than they were 100 or 500 years ago. In fact for the past decade many of the wealthiest countries (many Western European countries, and Japan) have seen barely any growth in living standards at all, GDP-per-capita growth has been concentrated in developing countries.
The TLDR take: now that humans are no longer required for thinking, we will switch to something other than usage of our brains.
Eating, apparently, is completely optional for humans :-/
Just a thing to remember: our intelligence made us the apex predator on this planet. Is there any reason to believe that a superior intelligence, whether man-made or extraterrestrial, won't become the apex predator?
That’s not really what it’s saying. The analogy it draws is between subsistence farmers and subsistence thinkers aka white collar workers/paper pushers etc. The argument would be that repetitive, brainless thinking will no longer be required (not thinking in general), so people will be freed up for currently unimaginable cognitive pursuits.
> The argument would be that repetitive, brainless thinking will no longer be required, so people will be freed up for currently unimaginable cognitive pursuits.
Like what?
1. AI isn't going to stop at "repetitive, brainless thinking," just ask the math professors.
2. Even if that's true, is everyone capable of these "currently unimaginable cognitive pursuits"? Oh, there will still be intellectual work for the top-0.1% smartest people is little consolation to the other 99.9%.
3. That argument is basically trying to console people with a combination of "trust us" and the underpants gnome business plan ("1. Collect underpants, 2. ?, 3. Profit).
Thankfully capitalism didn't have any negative consequences.
> Capitalism emerged when people began discovering that wealth could be created rather than merely captured, and that ordinary people could be sources of demand and initiative rather than merely labor to be commanded as a factor of production.
A worker under capitalism is exactly just another commodity commanded by capital. Only competing power centers like unions makes it not one-sided.
I dunno about “demand and initiative”. Is this how capitalism started, or are we jumping ahead to the post-WWII USA where the socialists and capitalists had won concessions from the bougies so that a “middle class” came about?
> The early capitalist worker voluntarily increased annual working days from 250 to 300 because a new universe of desirable goods had become accessible.
The weekly working hours increased for many who moved to the factories of the cities. Labor organizing is what lead to the two-day weekend.
> We are moving toward a world in which an ordinary person can command quantities and varieties of intelligence that would previously have required teams of highly trained specialists. Just as I can enjoy food without knowing how to farm, I can increasingly enjoy the products of intelligence without knowing how to produce them myself.
Some people are incapable of seeing power dynamics. An ordinary person might fear AI because of the explicit threats against his or her job.
How does power work? In this case it works by concentrating compute and access to the vaunted frontier models.
Another thing is the part about “hoarding”. AI is exactly about hoarding. Labor built the intelligence of centuries. Now AI wants to close that off.
> Labor organizing is what lead to the two-day weekend.
And the 8 hour work day. And, for miners, being able to have their lunch break above ground.