Is the value in the outcome of receiving medical advice and care, and becoming educated, or is the value just in the co-opting of another human being's attention?
If the value is in the outcome, the means to achieving that aren't of much consequence.
How many of us have a reminiscence that starts “looking back, the most life-changing part of my primary or secondary education was ________,” where the blank is a person, not a curriculum module? How many doctors operate, at least in part, on hunches—on totalities of perception-filtered-through-experience that they can’t fully put into words?
I’m reminded of the recent account of homebound elderly Japanese people relying on the Yakult delivery lady partly for tiny yoghurt drinks, but mainly for a glimmer of human contact [0]. Although I guess that cuts to your point: the value in that example really is just co-opting another human’s attention.
In most of these caring professions, some of the value is in the measurable outcome (bacterial infection? Antibiotic!), but different means really do create different collections of value that don’t fully overlap (fine, I’ll actually lay off the wine because the doctor put the fear of the lord in me).
I guess the optimistic case is, with the rote mechanical aspects automated away, maybe humans have more time to give each other the residual human element…
For me it was a website with turotirals on how to make flash games. It literally launched my career and improved the quality of life for my whole family by an order of magnitude.
I am primarily the naysayer of AI but I admit that current LLMs could have easily replicated the whole website.
To me it’s not the “how” so much as the “what,” though.
I can only speak to my own experience with that sort of thing, but how much of what moved you was the invisible authorial hand behind the tutorials—deciding what’s fun to them to write about, and how to talk about it in a way that clicked with a young you?
I guess, what’s the difference between that website, the official docs for the language in question, the formal spec for the language, the .h files themselves that mechanically define the engine that compiles the language, a big pile of examples of working code in the language…
For that matter what’s the difference between what’s fun to do in the language and what’s boring?
I would grant that LLM tech would probably shine at the grunt work part of “please translate these docs into a grade-school-pitched, engaging, example-driven tutorial website; make it dinosaur themed.” But equally it could pitch it for a billion other audiences, and most will not bear fruit without guidance and refinement. And LLM frontends are already same-y, what will distinguish it to your young eyes? Knowing (or finding out) what’s worth doing is the tricky part—and that’s hard to separate from the humans on the receiving end.
I think about when tiktok made it “easy” to recut songs and memes, and to do basic compositing effects. The “how” required specialized software and serious skill for a long time, then suddenly it didn’t. But when it comes to the “what,” there are still people who are good at using the tools and ones who are bad—ones who make good content and ones who make bad ones… and the difference seems to cleave along the normal human lines: innate talent + practice + persistence.
As the old saw goes, contemporary art: “But I could do that!” “Yeah, but you didn’t.”
Alternatively, as the fox said, “C’est le temps que tu as perdu pour ta rose qui fait ta rose si importante”…
But Baumol's argument, which you introduced to the conversation, is that outcome and process cannot actually be distinguished, even if a distinction in thought is possible among economic theorists.
Pretty much all of humanity's tough problems, the ones we can't seem to make much progress on despite centuries or more of trying, are at their core coordination problems. We only really make progress on those when we can sidestep explicit coordination in some way. Every other kind of problem is usually amenable to technology, and we've solved most of them already, largely in the last 200 years.
How is that Baumol's argument? How is 'outcome' vs 'process' relevant to his argument at all?
'Cost disease' is just the foundational truth that the cost of the output from industries with stagnant productivity will increase due to the fact that the workers in that industry can be more valuable in other industries, reducing the number of relative workers in the stagnant industry.
If you want to make the output from a stagnant industry available to a broader spectrum of the population then you have to improve the productivity of that industry.
There is no way to separate this process from the product of the process.
You're not buying the sound of the music. You can just stream that. As far as that is the product, it has already been automated and scaled so millions of people can hear it at once, whenever they feel like it.
You're buying the sound AND the people sitting in their formal clothes manually moving their strings over a violin, with painstaking accuracy developed through years of manual practice.
You couldn't make a robot do it, for example. You could maybe make a robot play a violin, but that again isn't what the product is.
The product is tied to an expectation of what it is that does not allow for it to be done more effectively.
By contrast manufacturing processes are not tied to this expectation. If I buy a loaf of bread, I don't care whether the wheat was manually harvested or harvested by a huge machine.
It's misguided to focus on one special case of the cost disease problem where human by definition must provide the services, when most of the time this is not the case.
For instance, technology means cancer is more easily treated that it was in the past.
Education, I'm less sure about. A lot of the tech there is very new, it takes time for evidence to build up.
For education, if you know as much as the average Harvard grad, can you give yourself a Harvard degree that will be as readily accepted in a job application or raising funds for a new business?
That Harvard degree will be irrelevant since no one will be hiring humans.
Thats a weird way of describing it.
A machine telling me to exercise and eat right will be ignored, even if the advice is correct. A person I trust taking me aside, looking me in the eye and asking me the same would be taken far more seriously.
OTOH, if you don't need to be persuaded and just want information on how best to go about doing it, then I think it makes little difference where the information comes from as long as it's of reasonable quality.
Turning dozens to hundreds of decisions per week for which the correct decision must be made in nearly every case, into a single decision per week for which the correct choice must be made, has proven wildly more effective than any of that (I mean glp-1 agonists).
If AI displaces human educators, yes, their supply shrinks -- but we can't assume what direction its demand will go.
We've seen this pattern before: as recorded music became free, live performance got more expensive, and therefore much less accessible than it used to be.
What's likely to happen is that "worse" (read: AI) education will become much cheaper, while "better" (read: in-person) education that involves human connection-driven benefits will become much less accessible compared to what it is today.
Most people may be consider it a win. It's certainly not a world I'm looking forward to.
Fields need a large base of participants to produce great ones. This is exactly why software has been so extraordinary over the past 30 years: an unusual concentration of gifted minds across the entire humankind committed themselves to it.
In my view, Bach, Rachmaninoff, Cole Porter equivalents today probably aren't writing symphonies. They've decided to write code for a living. Which is why any Great American Songbook made today won't hold a candle next to one from 1950s.
We're in the greatest era of symphonies IMO, it's just that they're hiding in surprising places; movies, TV shows, games, etc.
I would also point out that composing for a medium like a game or a movie places a great deal of constraints upon the composer, in terms of theme, cost of instrumentation, duration and most importantly: what is safe and palatable for an executive to approve of.
The future is going to suck.
You have just discovered the fully enshittified version of the business model ai companies hope to reach.
The world you're describing is one where the entire economic value of humanity is in reminding the AI to put out the food bowl and refill the water dish at the appropriate time.
It would be funny if the sleepwalkers weren't trying so hard to drag humanity along.
Absorbing information doesn't make you "educated". Learning how to employ knowledge with accountability and trust with beings in the real world is what's important, and a machine can't teach you how to do that.
> or is the value just in the co-opting of another human being's attention?
Why is it "co-opting" if it involves a mutually consenting exchange?
The value comes from applying an expert's wisdom and skill to the problem at hand.
You get neither from LLMs.
There's also the deeper philosophical question of what is the meaning of life, and if there's inherent value in learning outside of what remunerative advantages you reap from it.
You've expressed very clearly what LLMs would have to do in order to be economically transformative.
"If you can get high quality medical advice for effectively nothing, if you can get high quality individualized tutoring for free, that's a pretty big game changer for a lot of people. Prices on these services have been rising to the stratosphere over the past few decades because it's so difficult to increase the productivity of individual medical practitioners and educators. We're entering an era that could finally break this logjam."
It's not that process innovations are lacking, it's that product innovations are perceived as an indignity by most people. Why should one child get an LLM teacher or doctor while others get individualized attention by a skilled human being?