(Yes, this may be stupid. I agree with you. I'm not saying what should happen. I'm saying what will happen, and that that is really bad.)
It's okay to not think every technology under the sun is a good thing. You don't have to have heart-eyes emojis for the immiseration machine.
Once more for emphasis: you do not have to cheer on the immiseration machine.
And I take it from your use of Marxist terminology that you’re coming from that the perspective. 20th Century Marxists embraced technological advancement, and used that to advance the cause of the proletariat. The REAL immiseration is to embrace paleoconservative ludditism.
I believe AGI can help small businesses have higher margins for the same service level - but lower cost.
It is, however, a really convenient excuse for people who don't regularly think about how people who don't work "above the API" actually exist in the world.
Have you ever run a business that employed other people and relied on operational income rather than venture capital to function?
Because this "obvious play" is a screaming red flag for misunderstanding the fundamentals of how business works when money isn't free and speculative.
You can't be too reactive with talent. If you hired 10 people, you should be figuring out how to make that talent pool as happy and productive as possible, not firing them out of fear at the earliest opportunity.
When said business can replace the employees with tools and AI, they will.
Or maybe you're implying that reducing the costs changes this equation?
If it's like many businesses in the classification world, they aren't lacking for work, so it's more like they'll be able to do 10x the work done by keeping the same number of people.
Why would 50% for 0.1% be different? 30% for 0.01%?
This is the enshittification spiral to which I refer.
If I was paying someone for labeling or classification, and the quality dropped to 90%, 50%, 30% accuracy, I'd quickly fire them.
Why would I subsidize that as a business owner? I can fire 9/10ths of the people who do that job instead.
then OpenAI either discontinue or slightly adjust the model such that it doesn't work now
there goes your business
Yep. If I have 10 people doing Job X, then ChatGPT makes a person doing Job X ten times more productive, I can fire 9 people doing job X and retain the same output, which gives me a temporary profit boost. But wait! My competitor also had 10 people doing Job X, and now they're producing ten times the output of my company!
If ChatGPT/Copilot X made developers working at my company twice as productive, I wouldn't be thinking about firing half of them, I would be thinking about which of the 8000 features and improvements on our backlog we could finally prioritize...
But the poorest and most vulnerable will. It happens every time. This time, we could do better--and we won't.
Eventually, improvements through both technological means but also political ones (worker action says hi) did make things on-net better, but we live in the now and the now is going to simply vaporize an impossibly large set of jobs, particularly in developing countries. Turning one person into an LLM driver to lay off four or nine is not a net benefit.
As just one example: with modern text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and AI parsing, how much of every call center can just go away? Eight of ten? Nine? I have no idea, but it's a lot, and we have neither time nor inclination to prepare, globally or locally, for this.
(edit to add: the most appalling part of this oncoming train, as I have mentioned elsewhere in this thread, is just how shitty a future this one wants so desperately to be. A LLM-driven chatbot or phone system doesn't get tired. It doesn't get "too expensive" to continue to obstruct you and to stiff you. Not only is this primed to seriously hurt people who are below the API, but it's going to make the world suck more for the rest of us, too. Like, sure, "it makes writing code marginally easier"--it's going to make getting a refund for a messed-up Comcast bill an exercise in pain. That doesn't remotely net out, code's already easy enough.)
Can you expand on that?
My impression is that life for the less well-off before the Industrial Revolution was worse.
So in some ways, and in the short term, the Industrial Revolution was better than just-plain-starving, sure. But most of the benefits of the Industrial Revolution accrued to everyone else and the mangled limbs accrued to the poor. It wasn't without significant worker action (and the requisite workers-getting-beat-to-shit-and-killed) that their lot improved materially.
Is subsistence or subsistence+ farming hard? Absolutely. Mind-bogglingly so. But the Industrial Revolution was fucking bad for the people caught at the bottom. Like--read Dickens.
I tend to think we have such global largesse that we could do better. But we won't, and a lot of the commentariat here cheers for never doing better.
I think that captures some of the contradiction in your claims. Yes, cities could be terrible places to live and work. Yet people have moved to them throughout recent history because the alternative is worse.
That said, I don’t disagree with your point that there will be pain associated with this technological jump. I dont know of there will be more or less than with previous jumps. There are some interesting considerations.
One, this one hits knowledge workers who are in the middle class, instead of hitting those who use muscle or hand labor. That may change the outcome.
Two, governments are much more sophisticated and have much better policy tools to deal with disruption. While that doesn’t fix the root, it can help to prevent compounding problems and soften the impact.
Three, the tools that are doing the disrupting appear to be near zero marginal cost, which is different than say a factory which improved efficiency with a large up-front capital investment. This factor probably will make it worse, but I can see possibilities of it making this change less painful too.
Fourth, it isn’t really clear how this will play out. It kinda feels like we have seen the first demonstrations of a steam engine, and are trying to predict the course of the Industrial Revolution.
I think this is a misreading. People who had options didn't urbanize until they had to. When a family had too many sons to split and or when Roman aristocrats or English magnates pushed people off their land or when a bad climate situation made farming impractical, people moved--but it's a very, very recent historical development to urbanize (en masse) when other choices exist.
Yes, the alternatives have been worse and so industrial urbanization became more appealing than starving. Who the hell made them worse and whose progenitors now control the capital needed to destroy ever more labor?
(Don't take not addressing the rest as dismissal--your other points are all within a coherent universe, they're just techno-optimism that I have no reason to share so I have nothing to say to them.)
And of course you are right. But that’s a societal problem, not a technology problem. I would call if societal-optimism to hope that human nature will go away and collective action problems will suddenly disappear, and all boats will be lifted equally.
I’m saying we have a fundamental human responsibility not to burn them for fucking funsies.
Aren’t the comparisons to blue collar labor a little much here?
If I hire 10 people to dig the ditches, and then I get a backhoe, yes, one guy is needed to dig the ditch.
But backhoes are expensive investments, LLMs are not.
LLMs gives everyone of those ditch diggers a backhoe. Now I have an army of backhoes! Unless the world runs out of a need for ditches, time to start a ditch digging empire.
The industrial revolution switched work from almost exclusively manual labor to a more intellectual one while improving manual labor itself (better tools, etc.).
This one is cranking up a notch times 100 by trying to replace basically the human out of the equation altogether (This is the end goal).
It's going to be a really interesting decade tbh.
2) Most if not all employers are not going to let 50% of the work time to go towards non income generating activities.
This means Priya can replace the manager, but manager needs to train Priya for that.
This would be the problem in the new world, people with lesser power (of knowledge) would get crushed.
What skills, exactly, would those be?
Do you? I mean, you and I think you do in order to do a good job, but does that hold water? The last decade or so of technological "progress" in the commercial space should leave few illusions about the willingness to enshittify processes and the interactions between people to save a few bucks.
As tech gets more capable, the human interactions with it are getting worse. And if you hate phone trees now (I do!), GPT4 is going to incredibly enshittify things is adding ever deeper, infinitely patient tools for stalling you when you have to call for things.
Yes, but you will need fewer people. And thas is with the current level of GPT. If the GPTs proficiency increases, fewer and fewer people will be needed. That’s a problem.
1- Hire someone cheaper than Priya and show him to tricks to run GPT-4. Make him work 24/7 non-stop because it's an upgrade from his naan flipping job.
2- Fire Priya.
And then if they have 10 people doing her job, 9 people are out of a job.
If there's one thing that will get automated first, it's coding (taking simple explicit specifications and turning them into code).
Unless she can learn software engineering (understanding problem areas well enough you can devise a detailed spec, and maybe implement it) she'll be out of a job as well with just coding skills.
People who haven't dealt with cheap offshored labor or bootcamp grads from the latest craze don't realize how much that workflow was similar to working with GPT4. Except GPT4 requires no training and gives answers in seconds.
People are still pushing this meme on HN, even after GPT-4?
1) Show Priya how to use GPT4 to do her current job in 1/10th of the time.
2) Let her use part (50%+) of the time saved to learn coding or whatever other skill she needs (not sure coding is it).