Comment by intuitionist
15 hours ago
I am not a Marxian economic expert but this doesn’t make sense to me. Modulo skill atrophy, the big AI model provider can’t capture that surplus value because its customers can just go back to bidding for human labor instead.
The human labor just said:
"Losing access to GPT‑5.5 feels like I've had a limb amputated.”
How well would an assembly line of quadriplegics work?
Also this isn't a Marxist analysis. Underneath all the formulas neo-classical economics makes the same assumptions about labor.
ChatGPT isn’t literally or figuratively cutting off anybody’s limbs though. It’s more like, the guy on the assembly line had a mech suit, and now he doesn’t have a mech suit, and he’s sad. Skill atrophy is a real concern but unless you assume that nobody is working to maintain those skills it doesn’t change my analysis much.
And soon we expect everyone to have a mech suit, and only a handful of companies can make one, and they rent it to you and can revoke it at any time.
And what happens when they've saturated the market? Prices go up to the maximum the market can bear, and then they'll extend into other markets. Why rent the model to build a profitable company with when you could just take all that profit for yourself?
2 replies →
>It’s more like, the guy on the assembly line had a mech suit, and now he doesn’t have a mech suit
You just answered your own question there.
One woman was doing what would take a dozen. Now she can't.
Are people working to keep their skills up, much? Spending a day a week coding manually or etc?
I think it's more like:
The dude was incompetent, was able to launder their incompetence through a humunculus, and now is afraid of being caught.
The “human labor” is unnamed shill (if they even exist) from a company that produces AI chips. Let’s not get dramatic here.
Nobody is a Marxian economics expert if it helps