Comment by howunfortunate
3 hours ago
> sit around scraping by on minimum-wage-like UBI (if we're so lucky).
If every cognitive task currently done by humans could be done for ~free, our global material abundance would be truly unprecedented, nigh unlimited.
I have many worries about a world where people aren't needed, but "scraping by" does not describe that world in any sense.
> our global material abundance would be truly unprecedented, nigh unlimited.
Serious question, how? Don't the people who own the models and the companies who want to want to use the models to do all the cognitive tasks want to make money? Are they going to give their products and services away for free? There always seems to be this kind of Underpants Gnomes logic about this where 1. We can do things cheaply 2. ??? 3. Material abundance! where step 2 is actually "very rich people give things away for free!". Which requires people like Altman/Thiel/Zuck whoever to have care for other humans and empathy and actual feelings other than a blind Will to Power. If all the cognitive tasks currently done by humans are ~free it seems like the far, far, far, far more likely outcome given who is actually creating and benefiting this nightmare is that all of us do tasks that don't require cognitive ability and subsist on whatever scraps we're given.
They will get a larger share from the value gained by reducing ineffciencies, keeping them still rich .1% but making everyone richer (in terms of resources available) than today.
>> our global material abundance would be truly unprecedented, nigh unlimited.
> There always seems to be this kind of Underpants Gnomes logic about this where 1. We can do things cheaply 2. ??? 3. Material abundance! where step 2 is actually "very rich people give things away for free!". Which requires people like Altman/Thiel/Zuck whoever to have care for other humans and empathy and actual feelings other than a blind Will to Power.
Exactly. The thing keeping us from "global material abundance" isn't really technology, it's ideology. The (by far) dominant global ideology is capitalism, and that simply does not permit "global material abundance" in conditions of extreme automation.
And it's fucking crazy to think the "step 2" is these business-kings will all the suddenly have a change of heart and share their wealth widely and freely, after their entire lives have probably taught them not to do anything of the sort. You can see it with UBI: it's not generosity, its some kind of minimum viable bribe to diffuse the threat of revolt against their wealth.
IMHO, the real "step 2" is some kind of communism. And I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader how likely that is going to happen in our lifetimes [1].
[1] As an aside, I actually see a path to some kind of twisted to communism from highly-automated capitalism over the long term, just not for me or anyone like me. It'll be for the nepo-babies of billionaires, after all the working people have died off or been pushed to the margins. The survivors would be so wealthy that maybe money ceases to have meaning and nepo-baby would own enough "means of production" to support themselves comfortably.
The big problem with this argument is that the current owners of frontier models are actively working against these ideals.
Many people, including myself, would feel very differently if models were open(and not just open weights), compute/resources were cheap enough to enable local access and ownership.
Unfortunately, despite what they may say in press releases, a lot of people in the space are banking on holding a stranglehold over the market and building a regulatory and resource moat to protect their investment.
Of course there is the argument that they deserve some return on the investment in training but lets not forget that it is our work, the work of the commons, that enabled it in the first place. People are frustrated that a small group of people endeavour to control the use of a tool that was created using the work, thoughts and content of us all, often using questionably legal means.