Comment by M4R5H4LL
4 hours ago
From an economic standpoint this is basically machines doing work humans used to do. We’ve already gone through this many times. We built machines that can make stuff orders of magnitude faster than humans, and nobody really argues we should preserve obsolete tools and techniques as a valued human craft. Obviously automation messes with jobs and identity for some people, but historically a large chunk of human labor just gets automated as the tech gets better. So I feel that arguing about whether automation is good or bad in the abstract is a bit beside the point. The more interesting question imho is how people and companies adapt to it, because it’s probably going to happen either way.
I had to create a new account, because HN is protecting their investments and basically making it impossible to post for anyone who is critical of LLMs (said I was crawling, I'm on a dedicated proxy that definitely hasn't ever crawled HN lol).
Automation can be good overall for society, but you also can't ignore the fact that basically all automation has decreased the value of the labor it replaced or subsidized.
This automation isn't necessarily adding value to society. I don't see any software being built that's increasing the quality of people's life, I don't see research being accelerated. There is no economic data to support this either. The economic gains are only reflected in the values of companies who are selling tokens, or have been able to decrease their employee-counts with token allowances.
All I see is people sharing CRUD apps on twitter, 50 clones of the same SaaS, ,people constantly complaining about how their favorite software/OS has more bugs, the cost of hardware and electricity going up and people literally going into psychosis. (I have a list of 70+ people on twitter that I've been adding too that are literally manic and borderline insane because of these tools). I can see LLMs being genuinely useful to society, like helping with real time the blind, and disabled, but noone is doing that! It doesn't make money, automation is for capital owning class, not for the working class.
But hey, at least your favorite LLM shill from that podcast you loved can afford the $20,000/night resort this summer...
I'd be more okay with these mostly useless automation tools if the models were open source and didn't require $500k to run locally, but until then they basically only serve to make existing billionaires pad unnecessary zeros onto their net worth, and help prevent anyone from catching up with them.
I recommend people read this essay by Thomas Pynchon, actually read it, don't judge it by the title: https://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/28/books/is-it-ok-to-be-a-lu...