Posted by ianand 5 hours ago
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.
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'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.
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
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.
Coward.
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.
And the 8 hour work day. And, for miners, being able to have their lunch break above ground.
i'm happy to hear arguments from the misanthropes why for the first time in history this will not be the case.