Comment by mountainriver

> AI increases everyone’s knowledge and ultimately productivity. It’s on every person the learn to leverage it. The dynamics don’t need to change, we just move faster and smarter

This is incomplete in key ways: it only increases knowledge if people practice information literacy and validate AI claims, which we know is an unevenly-distributed skill. Similarly, by making it easier to create disinformation and pollute public sources of information, it can make people less knowledgeable at the same time they believe they are more informed. Neither of those problems are new, of course, but they’re moving from artisanal to industrial scale.

Another area where this is begging questions is around resource allocation. The best AI models and integrations cost money and the ability to leverage them requires you to have an opportunity to acquire skills and use them to make a living. The more successfully businesses are able to remove or deprofessionalize jobs, the smaller the pool will be of people who can afford to build skills, compete with those businesses, or contribute to open source software. Twenty years ago, professional translators made a modest white collar income; when AI ate those jobs, the workers didn’t “learn to leverage” AI, they had to find new jobs in different fields and anyone who didn’t have the financial reserves to do that might’ve ended up in a retail job questioning whether it’s even possible to re-enter the professional class. That’s great for people like Bezos until nobody can afford to buy things, but it’s worse for society since it accelerates the process of centralizing money and power.

Open source in particular seems likely to struggle here: with programmers facing financial downturns, fewer people have time to contribute and if AI is being trained on your code, you’re increasingly going to ask whether it’s in your best interests to literally train your replacement.