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?
Article misses to mention that in past revolutions the potential value was in the people. With AI the potential value is inside objects (computers) so it is easier to control and centralize, easier than value in humans. No one said more advanced models in the future will be available to anyone. I feel like this revolution will go opposite way, we will go back to mercantillism or whatever.
You can focus on the word, but the substance is actually what I was more interested in.
Most people living today take it for granted that modern "work" is the way it is and the way it should be. Few people have the context of understanding that modern work, where you directly trade labor for money and money for the goods and services you need to live, and where your identity and social standing is largely based on your profession, is something only a minority of human beings have experienced.
In my experience, most people seem to treat human development as a one-way spear of progress. The dawn of agriculture, the industrial revolution, etc. are all just stops on a linear path that is the right path.
But maybe it's just a dead end. "Primitive" hunter-gatherer societies survived for way longer than our modern-day society has existed, and things aren't looking so promising for us right now.
I'm sure that many aspects of work and specialization are as old as humanity itself. Don't you think there was one guy in the tribe who was really good at starting fires, one woman who knew where to find the good berries, one guy who was the best at fixing spears, and some people who weren't that good at anything so they just joined the effort wherever they were needed? You don't have to have a physical exchange of currency or a 40hr desk job for that to be true.
You can read up on hunter-gatherer societies if you're interested.
Labor and specialization are not unique to modern-day work. Both hunter-gatherer societies and our modern industrial society have labor and specialization. But they function in completely different ways.
Specialization in industrial society is much more complex whereas in hunter-gatherer societies it is generally based on age and gender. Hunter-gatherer societies are generally more egalitarian, there is more skill overlap between members of the group, expertise is leveraged in less formal and less institutionalized ways, learning is more distributed and knowledge is more likely to be treated as communal.
My comment was clearly looking at the historical and anthropological context, and raising the philosophical question about whether modern work is ideal and ever was sustainable.
But if you want to have a less philosophical and more pragmatic discussion, I'd raise the issue of the billions of people who count themselves among the "working poor." For billions of people, modern work doesn't guarantee that you won't be poor.
Agreed, but so far the picture painted around mass AI adoption looks like it will make that situation worse not better. So until a viable alternative is produced people will be very concerned about loosing work.
People should consider the possibility that a viable alternative isn't coming, and that humanity is entering a very dark period (on multiple fronts) that there's no guarantee it will survive.
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.
I think you did not read the post, or else missed its point entirely. VGR speaks directly to the induced demand of greater access to intelligence, namely, that people may redouble their efforts given that now so many more things are within reach with the aid of AI.
Surely it will also free people up to apply their intelligence (or stupidity) towards other things.
It's concerning because there is already way too much 'intelligence' in this society and most of it is used to propagate falsehoods, irrationality and to manipulate others in counter-productive ways. I hope AI educates people and doesn't merely steer them down deeper into their echo-chambers. That said, I also really hope that AI doesn't just bring everyone into alignment and agreement about ideas which aren't true. There are significant threats with both extremes.
> I hope AI educates people and doesn't merely steer them down deeper into their echo-chambers.
Honestly, it feels like there is exceptionally little incentive to learn anything deeply anymore because the payoff might never be there.
I know, I know, do it because you love it or you find it interesting. Sure, I will to the degree that I love it or find it interesting. But I find even the incentives on that have changed weirdly enough.
Well, regarding manual labour. Putting aisde the "is working with AI drying out your brain" discussion... Quite frankly, even fast touch-typists like me will never outpace an LLM write a few obvious functions... Isn't that also more or less the same thing as being freed of manual labour. How much of the thinking/design process your outsource to your LLM is a totally different discussion. See vibe-coding vs "pair" programming. But all that aside, I very much feel like LLMs are pretty much saving me a lot of manual typing.
>But what do people do to produce things when intellectual labour is automated?
They do what AI can't do, entrepreneurialism, because AI doesn't have property rights. Like back to the 1800s when most Americans were self-employed, not working for large corporations, because corporate cog-in-the-machine work can be done better by AI. With AI it's far easier to run your own business than at any time in history.
Are you really arguing the singular benefit of being human that AI can't take away is a specific concept of law?
And then say that running your business with AI is easier than ever?
So if we are reduced to running our own business, and AI can do that pretty good, what do we do?
If he is that does seem like a reasonable claim. There is precedent in concepts like citizenship, for example. Property rights. Inheritance. A lot of things give people advantages purely because that is how the legal superstructure works without reference to any inherent imbalance in economic or social power.
> back to the 1800s when most Americans were self-employed
They were mainly wage employees and factory workers by the end of that century due to industrialization. And "AI" is the industrialization of intellectual work.
> far easier to run your own business than at any time in history.
But let me play the devil's advocate and argue the point: who will the business sell to, if most people are not in a position with wealth to spare to buy from your business?
... What do you believe 1800 America was like? Because it was govt backed credit sales, land grants and pre emption rights that gave the land to people. The "self employment" was subsistence agriculture on the granted land in the frontier. The land was granted by a mechanism very similar to the volkisch lebensraum.
Clearly a relevant and replicable analogy to AI making entrepreneurship easier /s
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?
Yes, if you look at the examples the author used such as Indian cotton or tobacco as drivers of increased voluntary labor, both of those carried immediate intangible value as status symbols or bragging rights on top of their material value. It further stratified society which led to more people wanting more stuff and... on and on. What is this cognitive surplus value going to bring? I don't get it.
I guess their point is that, for example-- instead of requiring heaps of study and a genius mind to learn to how to reverse engineer complex things over the course of years, their intelligence can go to something that... AI can't do yet?
Out of curiosity, where did he say that? FWIW I ran the first half through Pangram (truncated to use free credits) and it said 73% AI, evenly interspersed. (I have no idea how much truncation breaks their algorithm.)
There is an "about" page on their blog where author discusses extensively (probably written by AI as well) about how most of his writing is AI-written.
The ??? is capital power. If both human mind and muscle have lesser value then what matters is the capital you possess. Can be financial capital or other kinds of capital. Indeed this is the default in many less developed countries.
For many here the answer seems to be that everyone will be product manager or a capitalist (one suspects the people saying this are product managers and capitalists).
A nice article by bosses for bosses that tells a nice clean story that goes to great lengths to avoid any confrontations with any part of reality that might make them uncomfortable.
Nah, it wouldn’t even make them uncomfortable. But there are enough underlings that need to believe this in order to comfortably perpetuate the system.
The problem with AI if compared to capitalism is that we start where the same players that won capitalism starts as winners and the rest of us cannot enter the race.
AI is not a ”fair” resource. Normal people cannot compete. We can rent capacity of the ones owning the data centres. But we will never have access to the best models. Never be able to afford outbound data centres. We can at any moment lose access to the resource. And the ones controlling the resource will be in control of everything. And it will be privately held. Fantastic.
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.
If AI delivers what accelerationists wants it to deliver you don't need to find a "meaning", you need a complete revamp of the financial, economical and political systems
The meaning you're looking for is living, enjoying life. We already have more books anyone could ever read in a lifetime. Same with movies, tv shows, documents or games. You have whole planet to travel around and explore. You have few billions of humans you can interact and socialize with...
I really do not understand why so many people are afraid of not working... meaning of my life was never to work for someone, that was always only means to finance my life.
Yeah right. Just a few hundred million dollars (that’s really not a lot!) will allow to live a joyful life! Why even spend these years working somewhere?
sorry I honestly don't understand what you meant (english is not my first language). do you imply that person needs few hundred million dollars to live? because if so I don't agree, you really don't need that much money to be happy. sure I'm living a comfortable life from money I earn, but I could live will far far less money and still be happy.
sure, that is true, but that is what I'm saying. if AI will take over intellectual work and robots manual work (in the future) then our current system will have no other option than completely change.
The entire debate is, how exactly can it change. Because I see zero signs pointing towards the rosy future you mentioned, rather contrary. I only see the current AI overlords hoarding power, hoarding money, and the plebs fighting more and more for scraps - against each other or/and later in uprisings against those technofeudalists and their few selected minions. And when the AI gets advanced enough, I see less future even for the minions, and also less chances of the uprising winning against a robot army. Will the humans survive? Maybe, but after a violent culling. And not even that I see guaranteed, depending on the future alignment of the AGI (or whatever it will be called). But all this bleakness is based on today's inaction of the politics/people towards the bad actors, so I really hope we can still steer it away.
"Our current system is broken and will have no other option than to completely change" is a scary future not an exciting one
There has never been a time in our history where excess labour has been treated with any grace, and I think it's rather delusional to think that will start suddenly now.
>AI does the stuff better than us in every category
Current AI is never going to do better than us in every category, it can only do better in us in categories where it's possible to generate an infinite amount of verifiable synthetic data (math and programming). AI is still just as bad at sales, marketing, writing and anything involving human subjective appeal as it was a year ago. And it's fundamentally handicapped in being unable to acquire new domain knowledge that doesn't fit in a few hundred thousand tokens of context.
> Current AI is never going to do better than us in every category, it can only do better in us in categories where it's possible to generate an infinite amount of verifiable synthetic data (math and programming).
Even if this turns out to be true, I don't think it will necessarily matter.
So much money was already burned, by so powerful people in incestuous relationship with governments, that I don't think this is an important point anymore.
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.
A CEO always just had to write “optimize profits”.
But IMHO what humans do is turn their intentions into reality using tools.
Intention is human, reality is perceived by humans. I feel that you need humans in the whole chain to communicate with reality (the context) and serve as translators and drivers for our tools.
Sorry that I can’t put more precise words here, but I am somehow convinced that there is a fundamental mechanism here that limits the reach of AI.
> As international trade expanded, ordinary Britons began developing tastes for goods that had previously been luxuries reserved for the wealthy. Tobacco, tea, sugar, and colorful Indian cottons were among the commodities that helped create a new consumer culture. People began wanting things that were neither necessities of subsistence nor traditional markers of aristocratic status. And they were willing to voluntarily work harder to get them.
Well, look at that. An essay about the benefits of slave trade and colonialism, while making no mention of slave labor or oppressed people.
I’m gonna go eat my banana which was produced by an invisible matter producer that doesn’t require power, and think about what I could be thinking about.
For starters, it has always been the merchant class that lobbied for monopoly and restrictions on trade. This fits the AI companies even better considering the recent pushes towards restrictions.
The industrious Revolution is also quite contested in its reasons. Falling wages in the period could very well account for the need to work more hours.
That said I consider myself a humanist and as such I want to believe that more intelligence available to humanity can only be a good thing if it is accessible in a fair way.
Capitalism right now and always has worked as designed a few winners a lot of people in "jobs" that are bordering on being a slave. Just that now they have technology colonialist like the Spanish or brit's or later us did not have. An error is also that colonialism has never stopped. Just because we don't have boats. You can now call it neo colonialism with trade deals from big power full states with big armies forcing smaller countries on there trade deals.
Maybe this is just me being old and/or crazy, but I can't assume these phenomenon to be causes anymore and I can't help suspecting it might be a mere symptom. Maybe there are groups of people reverting from capitalism back into mercantilism due to diminishing and deteriorating state of production and economy, and that new old mindset is just being applied to everything, now including AI policies.
I think the question of our times is, "Of what use is intelligence?"
I can give you an example from my interactions with people in the space industry.
For the longest time, missions have had a minimum viable skill set problem. The people who become astronauts via (what will be seen as) the classical programs are chosen for their intelligence, adaptability, and resilience.
There's a joke amongst people who've gone through the selection process to become one that the ideal astronaut candidate is an Antarctic shark doctor helicopter pilot physicist.
They're usually subject matter experts in something, and then are given extensive training in everything else. It doesn't matter if you're not a doctor, but if you're going to be more than two days away from civilization, then you're going to learn how to do a tracheotomy for intubation. Because what if it's the doctor who is severely injured?
As long as the crew size is below the size of a small town, there isn't much overlap in expertise, and the amount of knowhow and practical expertise you have to bring to the field is staggering.
AI changes that calculus. You can now give outbound astronauts all of human medical literature, medical equipment, and a specially shaped model that knows the crew, their expertise, and how they did in training.
If the crew doctor goes down, or there is a significant casaulty event, then the crew doesn't have to wait for minutes at a time to get painfully slow instructions from mission control. They can use the machine to augment their training to find creative solutions to the problem with the inventory they have on hand.
The speed of light delay made such devices impractical... until now. Astronauts can be the hands or the robots. The machines can provide the specialized expertise. This makes the exploration of our solar system a much more feasible endeavor.
Instead of sending 6 to 10 people, we can send 3 to 5 highly capable people (including a flight surgeon), and augment their expertise with specialized models. AI lets us carry human expertise with us to the stars.
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 (not thinking in general), so people will be freed up for currently unimaginable cognitive pursuits.
That's a facile, superficial "argument" that is currently being made by everyone who is pro-AI when confronted with any claim of AI pushing humans out of the economy.
At this point in time, it's reasonable to dismiss the argument rather than engaging it, because each time this argument is made the proponent of the argument is completely mute on the fact that humans work to eat.
That's a big underlying counterargument, and no one making the argument is engaging with the counter-argument, they are instead setting up strawman counter-arguments.
> 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 cognitive 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).
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.
If I'm being very cynical I think people at the AI labs suspect they're going to shrink the market for productive labor but are fine with that since they'll capture a larger share of profits, as perpetual rent-seekers for all intellectual production. They also have this hope that there will imminently be a lot less of us around (they telegraph fear of this outcome, but that feels insincere).
>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.
It is correct. The richest 10% now earn 53% of global income. The top 10% average income/bottom 50% average income ratio has went from 18x to 38x in the last 200 years.
It's not mutually exclusive with enormous relative improvement at the bottom, from where people were to where they are now. China and India have all but ended open defecation and there's running water in places we'd never dream of a generation ago. Diseases are being eradicated saving huge numbers of lives.
Rich got richer contains zero information about how poor people fared - even accounting for relative numbers in your claim.
The point is not that the poor aren't better off. They undoubtedly are.
It's the it's the nature of mercantilist systems to leave only scraps for the people at the bottom. The absolute bare minimum to stave off revolution in good times.
This is merely the nature of the beast.
We're way better off in capitalism than other systems (as you can see); but to assume that we just had better ideas like the article suggests to get there is laughable.
Capitalism was enabled by a superstructure of world power that, we must remember, very nearly didn't make it.
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 a LLM wrote 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.
the clowns selling the non-deterministic black box of bullshit are relentless in their touting of benefits while failing to demonstrate actual usefulness.
Disagree only because I think LLMs write more coherently. It had to be written by a human since it read like unadulterated doodoo. Nothing in the article can be tested for truth-value. A bunch of metaphors are invoked. Sentences like these make no sense to me.
> The returns on attention rise, and with them the incentive to pay attention.
> We might call this a cognitive industrious revolution, preceding and perhaps enabling a fuller AI industrial revolution
> 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?
Article misses to mention that in past revolutions the potential value was in the people. With AI the potential value is inside objects (computers) so it is easier to control and centralize, easier than value in humans. No one said more advanced models in the future will be available to anyone. I feel like this revolution will go opposite way, we will go back to mercantillism or whatever.
While somewhat controversial, a different perspective: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society
Modern concepts of "work" and how we relate to work are quite new and it's just an assumption that we're "on the right path."
Seems like an exceptionally silly premise that boils down to: affluence as a concept is relative.
Well of course it is.
You can focus on the word, but the substance is actually what I was more interested in.
Most people living today take it for granted that modern "work" is the way it is and the way it should be. Few people have the context of understanding that modern work, where you directly trade labor for money and money for the goods and services you need to live, and where your identity and social standing is largely based on your profession, is something only a minority of human beings have experienced.
In my experience, most people seem to treat human development as a one-way spear of progress. The dawn of agriculture, the industrial revolution, etc. are all just stops on a linear path that is the right path.
But maybe it's just a dead end. "Primitive" hunter-gatherer societies survived for way longer than our modern-day society has existed, and things aren't looking so promising for us right now.
I'm sure that many aspects of work and specialization are as old as humanity itself. Don't you think there was one guy in the tribe who was really good at starting fires, one woman who knew where to find the good berries, one guy who was the best at fixing spears, and some people who weren't that good at anything so they just joined the effort wherever they were needed? You don't have to have a physical exchange of currency or a 40hr desk job for that to be true.
You can read up on hunter-gatherer societies if you're interested.
Labor and specialization are not unique to modern-day work. Both hunter-gatherer societies and our modern industrial society have labor and specialization. But they function in completely different ways.
Specialization in industrial society is much more complex whereas in hunter-gatherer societies it is generally based on age and gender. Hunter-gatherer societies are generally more egalitarian, there is more skill overlap between members of the group, expertise is leveraged in less formal and less institutionalized ways, learning is more distributed and knowledge is more likely to be treated as communal.
> Most people living today take it for granted that modern "work" is the way it is and the way it should be.
Which is understandable when the alternative is generally poverty.
My comment was clearly looking at the historical and anthropological context, and raising the philosophical question about whether modern work is ideal and ever was sustainable.
But if you want to have a less philosophical and more pragmatic discussion, I'd raise the issue of the billions of people who count themselves among the "working poor." For billions of people, modern work doesn't guarantee that you won't be poor.
Agreed, but so far the picture painted around mass AI adoption looks like it will make that situation worse not better. So until a viable alternative is produced people will be very concerned about loosing work.
People should consider the possibility that a viable alternative isn't coming, and that humanity is entering a very dark period (on multiple fronts) that there's no guarantee it will survive.
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.
> 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?
Nailed it! It’s a too powerful resource to be privately held.
I think you did not read the post, or else missed its point entirely. VGR speaks directly to the induced demand of greater access to intelligence, namely, that people may redouble their efforts given that now so many more things are within reach with the aid of AI.
> What will we produce in a post AI world?
Sports games. Plays. Concerts. Sex work.
Take your pick.
Everyone can't be a jester. Entertainment is an inherently asymmetrical profession in terms of creator per consumer.
Well that's all there will be to do.
Surely it will also free people up to apply their intelligence (or stupidity) towards other things.
It's concerning because there is already way too much 'intelligence' in this society and most of it is used to propagate falsehoods, irrationality and to manipulate others in counter-productive ways. I hope AI educates people and doesn't merely steer them down deeper into their echo-chambers. That said, I also really hope that AI doesn't just bring everyone into alignment and agreement about ideas which aren't true. There are significant threats with both extremes.
> I hope AI educates people and doesn't merely steer them down deeper into their echo-chambers.
Honestly, it feels like there is exceptionally little incentive to learn anything deeply anymore because the payoff might never be there.
I know, I know, do it because you love it or you find it interesting. Sure, I will to the degree that I love it or find it interesting. But I find even the incentives on that have changed weirdly enough.
Well, regarding manual labour. Putting aisde the "is working with AI drying out your brain" discussion... Quite frankly, even fast touch-typists like me will never outpace an LLM write a few obvious functions... Isn't that also more or less the same thing as being freed of manual labour. How much of the thinking/design process your outsource to your LLM is a totally different discussion. See vibe-coding vs "pair" programming. But all that aside, I very much feel like LLMs are pretty much saving me a lot of manual typing.
You could out-type other prompters though. Words Per Minute might end up back on my resume yet!
>But what do people do to produce things when intellectual labour is automated?
They do what AI can't do, entrepreneurialism, because AI doesn't have property rights. Like back to the 1800s when most Americans were self-employed, not working for large corporations, because corporate cog-in-the-machine work can be done better by AI. With AI it's far easier to run your own business than at any time in history.
Are you really arguing the singular benefit of being human that AI can't take away is a specific concept of law? And then say that running your business with AI is easier than ever? So if we are reduced to running our own business, and AI can do that pretty good, what do we do?
If he is that does seem like a reasonable claim. There is precedent in concepts like citizenship, for example. Property rights. Inheritance. A lot of things give people advantages purely because that is how the legal superstructure works without reference to any inherent imbalance in economic or social power.
> back to the 1800s when most Americans were self-employed
They were mainly wage employees and factory workers by the end of that century due to industrialization. And "AI" is the industrialization of intellectual work.
> far easier to run your own business than at any time in history.
But let me play the devil's advocate and argue the point: who will the business sell to, if most people are not in a position with wealth to spare to buy from your business?
... What do you believe 1800 America was like? Because it was govt backed credit sales, land grants and pre emption rights that gave the land to people. The "self employment" was subsistence agriculture on the granted land in the frontier. The land was granted by a mechanism very similar to the volkisch lebensraum.
Clearly a relevant and replicable analogy to AI making entrepreneurship easier /s
Your version of 1800s North America is a myth.
150IQ comment
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?
Will power seems to have become the new differentiator.
Yes, if you look at the examples the author used such as Indian cotton or tobacco as drivers of increased voluntary labor, both of those carried immediate intangible value as status symbols or bragging rights on top of their material value. It further stratified society which led to more people wanting more stuff and... on and on. What is this cognitive surplus value going to bring? I don't get it.
I guess their point is that, for example-- instead of requiring heaps of study and a genius mind to learn to how to reverse engineer complex things over the course of years, their intelligence can go to something that... AI can't do yet?
The author declares that it is fully written by AI using a few prompts. So, not surprising that the whole article is so weak at the core.
Out of curiosity, where did he say that? FWIW I ran the first half through Pangram (truncated to use free credits) and it said 73% AI, evenly interspersed. (I have no idea how much truncation breaks their algorithm.)
There is an "about" page on their blog where author discusses extensively (probably written by AI as well) about how most of his writing is AI-written.
I'm curious myself, in fact I was kind of relieved to read a long, well written article and just thought it felt human. I hope I'm right
The ??? is capital power. If both human mind and muscle have lesser value then what matters is the capital you possess. Can be financial capital or other kinds of capital. Indeed this is the default in many less developed countries.
For many here the answer seems to be that everyone will be product manager or a capitalist (one suspects the people saying this are product managers and capitalists).
I mean some argue the 3d is creativity.
But I am sure people had the same question marks back then, for what's comes next
A nice article by bosses for bosses that tells a nice clean story that goes to great lengths to avoid any confrontations with any part of reality that might make them uncomfortable.
Nah, it wouldn’t even make them uncomfortable. But there are enough underlings that need to believe this in order to comfortably perpetuate the system.
The problem with AI if compared to capitalism is that we start where the same players that won capitalism starts as winners and the rest of us cannot enter the race.
AI is not a ”fair” resource. Normal people cannot compete. We can rent capacity of the ones owning the data centres. But we will never have access to the best models. Never be able to afford outbound data centres. We can at any moment lose access to the resource. And the ones controlling the resource will be in control of everything. And it will be privately held. Fantastic.
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.
If AI delivers what accelerationists wants it to deliver you don't need to find a "meaning", you need a complete revamp of the financial, economical and political systems
The meaning you're looking for is living, enjoying life. We already have more books anyone could ever read in a lifetime. Same with movies, tv shows, documents or games. You have whole planet to travel around and explore. You have few billions of humans you can interact and socialize with... I really do not understand why so many people are afraid of not working... meaning of my life was never to work for someone, that was always only means to finance my life.
Yeah right. Just a few hundred million dollars (that’s really not a lot!) will allow to live a joyful life! Why even spend these years working somewhere?
sorry I honestly don't understand what you meant (english is not my first language). do you imply that person needs few hundred million dollars to live? because if so I don't agree, you really don't need that much money to be happy. sure I'm living a comfortable life from money I earn, but I could live will far far less money and still be happy.
If you don't work then you don't have any means to live on. Our current system is going to break down completely before that changes.
sure, that is true, but that is what I'm saying. if AI will take over intellectual work and robots manual work (in the future) then our current system will have no other option than completely change.
The entire debate is, how exactly can it change. Because I see zero signs pointing towards the rosy future you mentioned, rather contrary. I only see the current AI overlords hoarding power, hoarding money, and the plebs fighting more and more for scraps - against each other or/and later in uprisings against those technofeudalists and their few selected minions. And when the AI gets advanced enough, I see less future even for the minions, and also less chances of the uprising winning against a robot army. Will the humans survive? Maybe, but after a violent culling. And not even that I see guaranteed, depending on the future alignment of the AGI (or whatever it will be called). But all this bleakness is based on today's inaction of the politics/people towards the bad actors, so I really hope we can still steer it away.
"Our current system is broken and will have no other option than to completely change" is a scary future not an exciting one
There has never been a time in our history where excess labour has been treated with any grace, and I think it's rather delusional to think that will start suddenly now.
>AI does the stuff better than us in every category
Current AI is never going to do better than us in every category, it can only do better in us in categories where it's possible to generate an infinite amount of verifiable synthetic data (math and programming). AI is still just as bad at sales, marketing, writing and anything involving human subjective appeal as it was a year ago. And it's fundamentally handicapped in being unable to acquire new domain knowledge that doesn't fit in a few hundred thousand tokens of context.
> Current AI is never going to do better than us in every category, it can only do better in us in categories where it's possible to generate an infinite amount of verifiable synthetic data (math and programming).
Even if this turns out to be true, I don't think it will necessarily matter.
So much money was already burned, by so powerful people in incestuous relationship with governments, that I don't think this is an important point anymore.
> AI is still just as bad at sales, marketing, writing and anything involving human subjective appeal as it was a year ago.
All of these have objective metrics (units sold, clicks, likes, etc) and are thus verifiable in principle.
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.
So if I'm reading you right, the question is, is the context that matters a consumer, a government, or a business?
If a CEO just needs to write "optimise profits" ...
A CEO always just had to write “optimize profits”.
But IMHO what humans do is turn their intentions into reality using tools.
Intention is human, reality is perceived by humans. I feel that you need humans in the whole chain to communicate with reality (the context) and serve as translators and drivers for our tools.
Sorry that I can’t put more precise words here, but I am somehow convinced that there is a fundamental mechanism here that limits the reach of AI.
> As international trade expanded, ordinary Britons began developing tastes for goods that had previously been luxuries reserved for the wealthy. Tobacco, tea, sugar, and colorful Indian cottons were among the commodities that helped create a new consumer culture. People began wanting things that were neither necessities of subsistence nor traditional markers of aristocratic status. And they were willing to voluntarily work harder to get them.
Well, look at that. An essay about the benefits of slave trade and colonialism, while making no mention of slave labor or oppressed people.
I’m gonna go eat my banana which was produced by an invisible matter producer that doesn’t require power, and think about what I could be thinking about.
A lot of the facts are shaky at best.
For starters, it has always been the merchant class that lobbied for monopoly and restrictions on trade. This fits the AI companies even better considering the recent pushes towards restrictions.
The industrious Revolution is also quite contested in its reasons. Falling wages in the period could very well account for the need to work more hours.
That said I consider myself a humanist and as such I want to believe that more intelligence available to humanity can only be a good thing if it is accessible in a fair way.
Thankfully capitalism didn't have any negative consequences.
Capitalism right now and always has worked as designed a few winners a lot of people in "jobs" that are bordering on being a slave. Just that now they have technology colonialist like the Spanish or brit's or later us did not have. An error is also that colonialism has never stopped. Just because we don't have boats. You can now call it neo colonialism with trade deals from big power full states with big armies forcing smaller countries on there trade deals.
Maybe this is just me being old and/or crazy, but I can't assume these phenomenon to be causes anymore and I can't help suspecting it might be a mere symptom. Maybe there are groups of people reverting from capitalism back into mercantilism due to diminishing and deteriorating state of production and economy, and that new old mindset is just being applied to everything, now including AI policies.
The british flag on the boat, as if britain would play any role in current times.
Britain as one of the most aggressive nations ever roaming this world actually fits since this is also where Manchester capitalism was born.
This proves that brother has never done farming.
I think the question of our times is, "Of what use is intelligence?"
I can give you an example from my interactions with people in the space industry.
For the longest time, missions have had a minimum viable skill set problem. The people who become astronauts via (what will be seen as) the classical programs are chosen for their intelligence, adaptability, and resilience.
There's a joke amongst people who've gone through the selection process to become one that the ideal astronaut candidate is an Antarctic shark doctor helicopter pilot physicist.
They're usually subject matter experts in something, and then are given extensive training in everything else. It doesn't matter if you're not a doctor, but if you're going to be more than two days away from civilization, then you're going to learn how to do a tracheotomy for intubation. Because what if it's the doctor who is severely injured?
As long as the crew size is below the size of a small town, there isn't much overlap in expertise, and the amount of knowhow and practical expertise you have to bring to the field is staggering.
AI changes that calculus. You can now give outbound astronauts all of human medical literature, medical equipment, and a specially shaped model that knows the crew, their expertise, and how they did in training.
If the crew doctor goes down, or there is a significant casaulty event, then the crew doesn't have to wait for minutes at a time to get painfully slow instructions from mission control. They can use the machine to augment their training to find creative solutions to the problem with the inventory they have on hand.
NASA has always wanted such systems in play. It's why for the longest time NASA has been spending money on robotic surgeons. But it took these LLMs to make these kinds of missions practical. https://spinoff.nasa.gov/spinoff2000/hm1.htm https://www-robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/what-we-do/research-tasks/...
The speed of light delay made such devices impractical... until now. Astronauts can be the hands or the robots. The machines can provide the specialized expertise. This makes the exploration of our solar system a much more feasible endeavor.
Instead of sending 6 to 10 people, we can send 3 to 5 highly capable people (including a flight surgeon), and augment their expertise with specialized models. AI lets us carry human expertise with us to the stars.
This author apparently never saw a hype train he didn't want to get on.
Have we Unlocked Civilizational Hypercomplexity with Ethereum yet?
Feels like another cryptocurrency to AI pivoter. But hey, credit where credit's due, dude knows how to hustle.
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 (not thinking in general), so people will be freed up for currently unimaginable cognitive pursuits.
That's a facile, superficial "argument" that is currently being made by everyone who is pro-AI when confronted with any claim of AI pushing humans out of the economy.
At this point in time, it's reasonable to dismiss the argument rather than engaging it, because each time this argument is made the proponent of the argument is completely mute on the fact that humans work to eat.
That's a big underlying counterargument, and no one making the argument is engaging with the counter-argument, they are instead setting up strawman counter-arguments.
> 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 cognitive 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).
> people will be freed up for currently unimaginable cognitive pursuits.
54% of U.S. adults read below a sixth-grade level.
Category error in thinking of this article
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.
If I'm being very cynical I think people at the AI labs suspect they're going to shrink the market for productive labor but are fine with that since they'll capture a larger share of profits, as perpetual rent-seekers for all intellectual production. They also have this hope that there will imminently be a lot less of us around (they telegraph fear of this outcome, but that feels insincere).
>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.
It is correct. The richest 10% now earn 53% of global income. The top 10% average income/bottom 50% average income ratio has went from 18x to 38x in the last 200 years.
Ratios gonna ratio.
It's not mutually exclusive with enormous relative improvement at the bottom, from where people were to where they are now. China and India have all but ended open defecation and there's running water in places we'd never dream of a generation ago. Diseases are being eradicated saving huge numbers of lives.
Rich got richer contains zero information about how poor people fared - even accounting for relative numbers in your claim.
The point is not that the poor aren't better off. They undoubtedly are.
It's the it's the nature of mercantilist systems to leave only scraps for the people at the bottom. The absolute bare minimum to stave off revolution in good times.
This is merely the nature of the beast.
We're way better off in capitalism than other systems (as you can see); but to assume that we just had better ideas like the article suggests to get there is laughable.
Capitalism was enabled by a superstructure of world power that, we must remember, very nearly didn't make it.
Leaving Omelas &c.
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 a LLM wrote 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.
the clowns selling the non-deterministic black box of bullshit are relentless in their touting of benefits while failing to demonstrate actual usefulness.
> Now replace wealth with intelligence, and mercantilism with cognitive mercantilism
I love when it’s clear somebody wrote “Write an intelligent blog post that sounds smart. Reference this book and AI. Make no mistakes.” to a chat bot
Disagree only because I think LLMs write more coherently. It had to be written by a human since it read like unadulterated doodoo. Nothing in the article can be tested for truth-value. A bunch of metaphors are invoked. Sentences like these make no sense to me.
> The returns on attention rise, and with them the incentive to pay attention.
> We might call this a cognitive industrious revolution, preceding and perhaps enabling a fuller AI industrial revolution
Yet another "disgusting ludites" post NOT advocating for the 6 hour work day despite espousing all the arguments in favor a 6 hour work day.
Coward.
> 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.
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ai panic is dumb, because just like "capitalism" it didn't replace the value of human input, only relocated it.
i'm happy to hear arguments from the misanthropes why for the first time in history this will not be the case.
You seem to be mistaken, the misanthropes are the owners of capital who want to leverage AI to get rid of pesky thinking meat.