Comment by pigpop
6 days ago
This is such a defeatist and low agency take. "means of production" are not a limited resource like gold that you have to extract from natural sources or divvy up. They are fundamentally skill and knowledge that anyone can attain and put to use, maybe not on the same scale as a well funded business but even those businesses had to start somewhere in order to grow to the size they are now. So rather than casting aspersions on them, your time would be better spent learning how you too can create some means of production and start producing value.
AI companies are trying to mechanize skill and knowledge and to own the infrastructure around it. If they succeed, your suggestion does not work. Even if they can't succeed, they will try because that's the most obvious path to maximizing profit for them.
Also about "creating" means of production, these companies actively try to sabotage this as another profit maximization strategy. They buy all the ram, so others cannot compete. They buy startups who succeed, so they stop competing.
It's not aspersions, it's just describing the phenomenon.
Even if I take your suggestion to heart, once my company would be big enough, if I wanted to optimize for profit, I would have to do the same as these companies.
The end result is concentrated power.
You think AI tech doesn't use rare earth metals?
Rare earth metals aren't rare, it's a misnomer.
Depends on how you define rare. Also irrelevant — the only thing important to the argument is that they are "limited resources."