Comment by howunfortunate
6 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.
The ChatGPT beta launched in 2022 with GPT 3.5 and 4 years later we have strong models from a bevy of organizations. It's as if Google launched in 1998 and by 2002 there were a dozen search engines competitive with or better than the original Google.
One of the common tasks LLMs are being trained to do is write software, which includes writing software for developing LLMs. That's reducing the cost to build alternative models and to run the ones that have already been trained and released. Many of these models aren't from America at all, so American billionaires don't get to decide how they're used. The competition is fiercer, and the potential for American monopolies or oligopolies is lower, than with technological waves of the recent past (e.g. mobile phone operating systems, search engines, social networking sites).
That doesn't really address what I was responding to, though, namely if the cost of intellectual labor is approximately 0. Yes, there is a possible outcome where a lower cost of developing software (which is not the only or even really most worthwhile intellectual activity) increases the amount of software and woohoo now more people can do more stuff and make more money. That might even be more likely. But if the cost of intellectual labor is nothing, well, that really doesn't add up very fast and all that's left is non intellectual labor. I suppose that people can start new companies to sell some new version of tomorrow's garbage, but not everyone wants to do that.
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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.
My point does not require equal distribution.
Two things are true at once: (1) wealth distribution has become less equal and (2) the poor of today are far, far, far richer than ever before in history in absolute terms. When the abundance line goes vertical, even the scraps from the table are meaty.
And if cognitive labor becomes ~free don't expect physical labor to automatically be valuable. The bottleneck for physical automation is, at the end of the day, cognitive.
None of this is an argument FOR inequality btw. Just saying that distribution of resources and total resources are two different things.
>> 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.
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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.