Comment by matthewkayin
2 days ago
What is all of this for if the result is that human beings are "made irrelevant"? If these LLMs truly become as game changing as so many say they will be, then can we agree that it's time to stop thinking that a person's worth equals their economic output?
I agree with you, the problem currently is that the balance of power has shifted so far in favor of the 0.1%. And those people will not want to give up the power that they already have.
I fear for a future where the technocrats win out and we end up in an "Altered Carbon" scenario. We are on the precipice of AI and robotics equalizing the playing field for everyone, but only if the power is held by the people and not the few at the top with the most resources.
Not sure how to steer the ship in that direction, but I do have a few ideas...
> What is all of this for if the result is that human beings are "made irrelevant"?
I think your views on this will radically differ if you earn 200k a year versus 2k a year.
Which is maddening. Too many people lack class consciousness.
An engineer making 200k a year has more in common with someone making 2k a year, than they do with the Elon Musk's of the world.
This delusion is rampant in professional spheres like medicine and tech.
No, that won’t happen, because these tools are being built based on investments in private goods.
It would be something if there were national level LLM tools, owned and operated as commons.
Things that were once operated as commons became private goods. There is no reason that it can't go the other way.
I can't tell if this is satire or end-stage depoliticization in action. Yeah we are just gonna nationalize things again, no big deal.
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It is definitely past time to start thinking outside of the economy.
Although must we deal in "worth" at all at that point? If two people have conflicting visions, it shouldn't be the one who is "worth" more that gets their way, it should be the one whose vision is most appealing to the rest of us.
No, I disagree, and for everyone who bemoans capitalism or the power of money, its important to understand the foundational arguments from which economics is born.
Wants are infinite, and resources limited. Economics is the objective methods to order a system to achieve subjective ends.
For better or worse, money is a medium of exchange and signal of what people are willing to allocate for their needs. Unless you create economic markets, information markets, and political systems that are built to handle the forces being harnessed by society, you have failure states.
In other words, taxes need to bleed of wealth, to ensure that it cannot create advantage in other fields (media, politics), breaking the even playing field in those other economies.
You are begging the question by relying an unproven basis for your argument. Why do economies have to be based on free market capitalism?
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