> It’s funny that perfect capitalism (no payroll expenses) means nobody has money to actually buy any of the goods produced by AI.
When you remember that profit is the measure of unrealized benefit, and look at how profitable capitalists have become, its not clear if, approximately speaking, anyone actually has the "money" to buy any goods now.
In other words, I am not sure this matters. Big business is already effectively working for free, with no realistic way to ever actually derive the benefit that has been promised to it. In theory those promises could be called, but what are the people going to give back in return?
The economy in the 21st century developed world is mostly about acquiring positional goods. Positional goods as "products and services valued primarily for their ability to convey status, prestige, or relative social standing rather than their absolute utility".
We have so much wealth that wealth accumulation itself has become a type of positional good as opposed to the utility of the wealth.
When people in the developed world talk about the economy they are largely talking about their prestige and social standing as opposed to their level of warmth and hunger. Unfortunately, we haven't separated these ideas philosophically so it leads to all kinds of nonsense thinking when it comes to "the economy".
Money is an IOU; debt. People trade things of value for money because you can, later, call the debt and get the exchanged value that was promised in return (food, shelter, yacht, whatever) I'm sure this is obvious.
I am sure it is equally obvious that if I take your promise to give back in kind later when I give you my sandwich, but never collect on it, that I ultimately gave you my sandwich for free.
If you keep collecting more and more IOUs from the people you trade your goods with, realistically you are never going to be able to convert those IOUs into something real. Which is something that the capitalists already contend with. Apple, for example, has umpteen billions of dollars worth of promises that they have no idea how to collect on. In theory they can, but in practice it is never going to happen. What don't they already have? Like when I offered you my sandwich, that is many billions of dollars worth of value that they have given away for free.
Given that Apple, to continue to use it as an example, have been quite happy effectively giving away many billions of dollars worth of value, why not trillions? Is it really going to matter? Money seems like something that matters to peons like us because we need to clear the debt to make sure we are well fed and kept warm, but for capitalists operating at scales that are hard for us to fathom, they are already giving stuff away for free. If they no longer have the cost of labor, they can give even more stuff away for free. Who — from their perspective — cares?
Money is less about personal consumption and more about a voting system for physical reality. When a company holds billions in IOUs, they are holding the power to decide what happens next. That capital allows them to command where the next million tons of aluminum go, which problems engineers solve, and where new infrastructure is built.
Even if they never spend that wealth on luxury, they use it to direct the flow of human effort and raw materials. Giving it away for free would mean surrendering their remote control over global resources. At this scale, it is not about wanting more stuff. It is about the ability to organize the world. Whether those most efficient at accumulating capital should hold such concentrated power remains the central tension between growth and equality.
The gap for me was mapping [continuing to hoard dollars] to [giving away free goods/services], but it makes sense now. I haven't given economics thought at this level. Thank you!
It's really simple: if you crash the market and you are liquid you can buy up all of the assets for pennies. That's pretty much the playbook right now in one part of the world, just the same happened in the former Soviet Union in the 90's.
This doesn't work in the age of AI where producing crappy results is much cheaper than verifying them. While this is the case, metadata will be important to understand if you should even bother verifying the results.
The time needed for an AI patch written with the prompt "now make it as small as possible, clean, and human coded" is as big as reviewing the patch itself.
If this were so, we wouldn’t be seeing such reactions from open source maintainers. The reality is AI makes it cheap to create large PRs with little substance.
I think you’re proving the monopoly argument yourself: if they only way to compete with Google is an innovation that generations of scientists have been working towards, it does paint a grim picture of competition in this space. Besides, are we ignoring Gemini?
Google already used AI and language models before ChatGPT came out. If you wanted a state of the art search / recommendation engine you needed that innovations from scientists already.
That's what I am saying: if you had a better search/rec engine than Google, good luck making it useful without Google's search index, acquired to a large extent thanks to their dominant market position. This doesn't sound like healthy competition. ChatGPT had to change the whole game to be able to compete.
I have a limited understanding of the value Christianity provides. That neither means that Christianity provides no value, nor does it mean that God exists.
> you didn't like this product, you can just choose to not use it
This is an over-simplification. I might like the product, but not be aware of the various ways it violates my privacy. Having laws that make it more risky for companies to do nefarious things makes me more confident that if a product is available in the EU market it doesn't do obviously bad things.
Not necessarily: assuming I've been following Nik for a while, I have reasons to trust his summary more than an LLMs summary. I would understand Nik's biases, and understand why he would focus on one thing over another. Nik would have a reputational incentive to do a good job and not completely misrepresent the book. I would also value Nik's personal, subjective view on the material, having an understanding of his background, and, again, his biases. On the other hand, I would have no idea what an LLM would focus on when summarizing, I would have no reason to trust it (LLMs fail in unpredictable ways), and an LLMs "opinion" is some average over the internet's + annotator's opinions.
The problem is it’s imperfect in very unpredictable ways. Meaning you always need to keep it on a short leash for anything serious, which puts a limit on the productivity boost. And that’s fine, but does this match the level of investment and expectations?
Re cancer: I wonder how significant is the cost of reading the results vs. the logistics of actually running the test
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