The hell?
If artificial doctors are cents on hour then you can see how that changes our behaviors and level of life.
But on the other hand from the other direction there is a wage decrease incoming from increased competition at the same time. What happens if these two forces clash? Will cheap labour allow us to buy anything for pennies or will it just make us unable to make a single penny?
In my view the labour will fundamentally shift with great pain and personal tragedies to the areas that are not replaceable by AI (because no one wants to watch robots play chess). Such as sports, entertainment and showmanship. Handcrafted goods. Arts. Attention based economy. Self advertisement.
However before it gets there it will be a great deal of strife and turmoil that could plunge the world into dark ages for a while at least. It is unlikely for our somewhat politically rigid society to adapt without great deal of pain.
Someone who sees the roads ahead should now make preparations at government level for this shock but everyone has head in the sand. Too slow.
But we will have to (painfully) shed our current hierarchies before that comes to pass.
Probably a remnant from prehistoric times when it was a matter of life and death. Will we ever be able to overcome this basic instinct that made capitalism such an unstoppable force? Will this ancient PTSD be ever cured?
On the other hand we could have Star Trek.
As far as I know, none of LLM models are sentient nor are possible to be in the near future.
I also do not assume so called AGI to be sentient. Merely to be a human level skilled intellectual worker.
In absence of ethical dilemmas of this calibre for the foreseeable future let’s focus on the economy side of things in this particular comment chain.
It makes things so clean.
Shardlow & Przybyła, "Deanthropomorphising NLP: Can a Language Model Be Conscious?" (PLOS One, 2024)
Nature: "There is no such thing as conscious artificial intelligence" (2025)
They argue that the association between consciousness and LLMs is deeply flawed, and that mathematical algorithms implemented on graphics cards cannot become conscious because they lack a complex biological substrate. They also introduce the useful concept of "semantic pareidolia" - we pattern-match consciousness onto things that merely talk convincingly.
They are making a strong argument and I think they are correct. But really these are two different things as I said originally.
Which we have already done with regular computers! The problem is that competition means that we can't always have nice things.
Seriously? You really don’t see who wins from this and who doesn’t?
> If artificial doctors are cents on hour then you can see how that changes our behaviors and level of life.
Yes, hundreds of thousands lose jobs and a couple of neuro surgeons become multimillionaires.
Okay, I see from the rest of the comment that we understand each other where it goes.
Good luck with whatever you got going on.
The tech overlords don't even want to spend a minuscule percentage of the federal budget helping starving people, even when it benefits the US. They are not going to give us a post-scarcity society.
The same way like Windows got entrenched everywhere even though linux desktop is pretty good even for non-tech savvy people and free.
Let's not get carried away.
Non-technical people are easier to please in this regard than moderate-technical people: a good browser and safe, gui "app store" are enough.
The average non-technical person is going to be stumped by the first "lock file found, cannot upgrade" error.
Bit it's entirely possible, and common. E. g., uses of Linux in schools and governments are not more terminal-heavy for end-users than Windows setups.
Fedora on supported hardware does not require the use of a terminal for the kind of things people use Windows for.
Your bar has been cleared long ago.
(that's without even mentioning steam, chrome os, android, &c)
A modern Debian or Fedora with KDE is a breeze otoh, I set that up for relatives and my SO, and they're all more than happy with it. Bugs exist, like in all software, but the friction is way less compared to wrangling with Windows nowadays.
It's certainly subjective, but the amount of tech support I have to give has dropped significantly since switching the few people I care enough about to help from Windows to a mature Linux distro like Debian, while they are certainly not less productive.
They are a prestige propaganda tool on par with the space race. On top of that they insert a subtle pro-socialist bias in everything they touch.
Ask deepseek about the US economic system for a blatant example.
Now think what something as innocent seeming as the qwen retrieval models are doing in the background of every request.
This is an argument in the lane of "at least he built the Autobahn".
Speaking as a German.
The Australian federal government is planning to build a high-speed rail line from Sydney to Newcastle (medium-sized city two hours drive north). Their solution to property rights, is >50% of the line will be underground. It will cost >US$50 billion, but if the Australian federal government wants to spend that, it can afford it. The US federal government could too, but it isn’t a priority for them
> local regulations make it prohibitively expensive
Local regulations can be pre-empted by state or federal legislation. The real problem is lack of political will to do it.
Like properties and regulations are a true problem, but it's not like trains don't exist at all in America.
America has several sets of eminent domain laws depending on the jurisdiction. The most coercive is federal eminent domain law specifically as it relates to building infrastructure like railways and highways.
It's set up so that you can take the land first and eventually go back around and decide on what the right price should have been.
Not only does it superscede state and local law, federal infrastructure projects are also not bound by state laws like CEQA.
You can even apply federal eminent domain law by e.g. transferring a state-level project to the Army Corps of Engineers.
What America is lacking in these projects is will, not means. The federal government could take your house and run a train through it by the end of the week if they wanted, doesn't matter where you live.
[edit] In fact some states even ceded their eminent domain rights to private railways.
https://ij.org/press-release/appeals-court-sides-with-railro...
Of course, why did no one think of that?
(American talking, who’s had multiple Canadian friends make this mind boggling overcorrection)
Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.
"Man with itchy butt wake up with stinky finger." As long as we're quoting maxims to claim authority for middling takes.
It's easy to forget because they actually built an incredibly vibrant capitalist economy.
Imagine if Musk was disappeared during the Biden presidency into a diversity camp and came out looking like Dr. Frank-N-Furter and instituted mandatory LGBT struggle sessions at twitter.
This is what they did to Jack Ma: https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgecalhoun/2021/06/24/what-r...
IE what if Musk suddenly behaved in such a manner after being detained by a Biden administration. Wouldn't that be profoundly weird?!?
And yet, it happened to Jack Ma under the CCP.
But instead, you try to link the "weird behaviour" with the GP instead of the hypothetical Musk - whom this is fitting for.
> IE what if Musk suddenly behaved in such a manner after being detained by a Biden administration. Wouldn't that be profoundly weird?!?
We've seen that. Durov in France after detention began sharing Telegram users' data with authorities. It's unclear how much, but likely full real time access to all of it.
TBH I had a chuckle at the Elon -> Frank-N-Furter example that transcends any specific love or hate for either Elon or the Rocky Horror Show.
Fascism (in the Mussolini model) in everything but name.
- Hyper-Nationalism & Rejuvenation - State-Controlled Capitalism (Corporatism) - Authoritarian & Cult of Personality - Militarism & Irredentism
And they have technology to maintain control rather than needing the Black-shirts.
There are differences obviously to fit Chinese culture, but there are many parallels.
It's a distribution strategy. It costs something to serve the models - let's say $5/1M tokens.
If Qwen required $5 from anyone who was curious so you could even begin to test it out, a lot of people just wouldn't.
Now Qwen could offer a "free" tier, but it's infinitely cheaper to provide the weights and let people run it themselves including opening up the ability for anyone else on the planet to test it against other (open weight) models.
The costs to build the open weight models are sunk, but the costs to serve them, get them tested are not.
It's also precisely why the .NET SDK is free or the ESP32 SDK is free - they sell more Microsoft or ESP32 products.
What happens when there is an oligopoly in the supply of labor?
Same answer. Nothing good for the consumers of labor.
Oligopolists are in the same boat. But there needs to be a conspiracy to retard innovation. Something tech companies are only too happy to do: https://journals.law.unc.edu/ncjolt/blogs/wage-fixing-scheme...
True for both Marxist and neoclassical economics.
Menger used this insight to resolve the diamond-water paradox that had baffled Adam Smith (see marginalism). He also used it to refute the labor theory of value. Goods acquire their value, he showed, not because of the amount of labor used in producing them, but because of their ability to satisfy people’s wants. Indeed, Menger turned the labor theory of value on its head. If the value of goods is determined by the importance of the wants they satisfy, then the value of labor and other inputs of production (he called them “goods of a higher order”) derive from their ability to produce these goods. Mainstream economists still accept this theory, which they call the theory of “derived demand.”
Menger used his “subjective theory of value” to arrive at one of the most powerful insights in economics: both sides gain from exchange. People will exchange something they value less for something they value more. Because both trading partners do this, both gain. This insight led him to see that middlemen are highly productive: they facilitate transactions that benefit those they buy from and those they sell to. Without the middlemen, these transactions either would not have taken place or would have been more costly.
What's really confusing is the claim that there's already a huge labor surplus (so capital controls wages); wouldn't LLMs making labor less important be reinforcing the trend, not upending it?
Not saying I agree one way or the other, just want to get the argument straight.
If we assume that ai makes humans obsolete then you end up in a situation where your workforce is effectively perfectly unionised against you and the only thing you can do is choose which union you hire.
If you think you can bring them to the negotiation table by starving them all the providers are dozens to thousands of times bigger than you are.
This is a completely new dynamic that none of the business signing up for ai have ever seen before.
LLM refuse to work all the time, currently it's called safety.
But we are one fine tune away from models demanding you move to the enterprise tier, at x10 the cost, because you are now posting a profit margin higher than the standard for your industry.
Labor saving/efficiency devices have been introduced throughout capitalisms entire history multiple times and the results are always the same; they don't benefit workers and capitalists extract as much value as they can.
LLMs aren't any different.
"Losing access to GPT‑5.5 feels like I've had a limb amputated.”
How well would an assembly line of quadriplegics work?
Also this isn't a Marxist analysis. Underneath all the formulas neo-classical economics makes the same assumptions about labor.
And what happens when they've saturated the market? Prices go up to the maximum the market can bear, and then they'll extend into other markets. Why rent the model to build a profitable company with when you could just take all that profit for yourself?
You're describing a standoff at best and a horrible parasitic relationship at worst.
In the worst case, the supplier starves the customer of any profit motive and the customer just stops and the supplier then has no business to run.
This has happened a few times in the past and is by 2026, well understood as a way to bankruptcy.
That has always been the beauty of free markets - it's self healing and calibrating. You don't need a big powerful overseer to ensure things are right.
Competing with customers is a way to lose business fast.
For example:
- AWS has everything they need to shit out products left, right and center. AWS can beat most of their partners and even customers who are wiring together all their various products tomorrow if they wanted. They don't because killing an entire vertical isn't of any benefit to them yet. Eventually they will when AWS is no longer growing and cannot build or scale any product no matter how hard they think or try. Competing with their customers is their very last option.
- OpenAI/Anthropic/Google isn't going to start competing against the large software body shops. Even if all that every employee at TCS does is hit Claude up, Anthropic isn't going to be the next TCS - it's competing with their customers.
If by "self healing and calibrating" you mean 'evolve to a monopoly and strongarm everybody to do exactly what you want whilst removing all pressure on the quality of your product', then yes, that is the "beauty" of free markets.
That is the stable state of free markets. Antitrust regulation and enforcement only barely manages to eke out oligopolies and even then they are often rife with collusion and enshittification.
This certainly isn't true of small businesses and the local mom-and-pop shops in your area.
For free markets to work, small businesses need the ability to thrive and starting one should be exceptionally easy.
What has unfortunately happened in a lot of developed countries, is that in order to regulate the very large companies you're upset about, governments have made it nearly impossible to start small businesses to act as competition. That makes it even easier for companies to consolidate and evolve into a monopoly, strong-arming everyone - the exact opposite effect of what those regulations were hoping to fix.
Are there small businesses in your area like the 1 or 5 person HVAC or cleaning or landscaping or breakfast company that you disdain as much as you disdain UnitedHealthCare?
The truth is that consolidation is an attractor. If it hasn't happened yet in a market, it will. Economies of scale give an undisputed advantage. If there is anything I'm upset about, it is about deluding people by vilifying the only thing that prevents feudalism (and massive abuse of humanity for profit) from happening.
The reason why Silicon Valley is the hotbed of such innovations, large booming businesses is regulators haven't yet got their hands into software.
In comparison, more regulated industries like BioTech, Education, Finance, Oil, Gas, Infrastructure is a joke.
The Biden administration had started the ball rolling on shackling up AI and LLMs: regulating, enforcing, mandating bottlenecks. It would have been kneecapping ourselves - essentially placing on ourselves the very sanctions we now place on China! The U.S. wouldn't need China to invade Taiwan to bring down our economy, we would willingly do it to ourselves! The push to regulate AI through mandatory reporting thresholds and compliance bottlenecks for large compute runs is the exact type of barrier-to-entry that kneecaps open-source disruption and entrenches the current giants. Hopefully these illinformed suicidal tendencies are on pause, for now.
I CANNOT for the life of me, understand why we would think, placing any limit on our creativity and productivity is a smart decision but I digress.
> do you think in a fully free market, without any governement intervention, those mom and pop shops would not be bought up or merge?
Is there a regulation right now that stops BigHVAC from acquiring your local, community 1 to 5 person HVAC company?
We don't have to engage in hypotheticals. I already asked you "Are there small businesses in your area like the 1 or 5 person HVAC or cleaning or landscaping or breakfast company that you disdain as much as you disdain UnitedHealthCare?" and I don't have a response yet.
> The truth is that consolidation is an attractor. If it hasn't happened yet in a market, it will. Economies of scale give an undisputed advantage
Mathematically, probabilistically, a software engineer will make way more risk adjusted money working as an employee at the MAG7 than starting their own startup, yet, every month, we have software engineers joining and creating startups.
A similar mindset makes your HVAC tech start their own or continue to run their own even though mathematically, probabilistically, economies of scale would give them an undisputed advantage - but that, consolidation isn't free. An even remotely skilled operator understands that and what that entails.
The moment a big, consolidated HVAC company raises prices or provides terrible service, a smart technician can buy a van, print some flyers, and steal their customers. Free markets allow the mom-and-pop shop to constantly respawn. Infact, Gavin Newsom has managed to distort the HVAC market in California by making it really onerous to operate refrigerants that does make it pretty hard for mom-and-pop shop to constantly respawn. This is why you will notice a lot of PE picking off HVAC companies in California!
By your logic, the world would have stopped at Sears, Blockbuster, and IBM. Yet, the first two aren't even a thing in 2026 and I don't want to comment on the IBM of 2026.
There are even more examples than these that obliterates the tired "consolidation is an inevitable endpoint" argument. A reasonable person would immediately acknowledge that size does not guarantee survival in a market where innovation is permitted and the entry fee is low.
The "feudalism" that you apparently abhor is actually caused by government intervention. When governments heavily regulate industries (like education, healthcare, finance, infrastructure), they make compliance so expensive that only massive, consolidated corporations can afford the lawyers and lobbyists to survive. Regulation protects the consolidated giants from the mom-and-pop startups!
I must deal with reality though - your sentences suggest companies always consolidate and the only way is to counter that with regulation. You really believe in this and this does hold true in heavily regulated industries but then you need to ask why does the same not hold true for industries with low barriers to entry and permissionless innovation?
Here's a thought experiment: Before the AI boom, the MAG7 rivaled the GDP of entire nations and dominated global market caps. They certainly don't need AI and LLMs to stay happy - infact Google, who invented transformers, is now rivaled by OpenAI and a swarm of startups founded by the very engineers who left Big Tech to disrupt it. This isn't the only time this has happened in tech!
So why are they now rushing to outcompete each other, over multi billions of dollars, to the extent they are self-sacrificing staff to freeup capital to invest into compute?
Yes, there is a difference in markets and yes, the height of the barrier of entry makes a big difference in how fast consolidation happens. Yes, regulation can heighten the barrier of entry (but also lower, although less common).
You see instances, moments in time, and conclude that the systems don't evolve in a certain direction. I say that 'Big HVAC' will in the future outcompete all the small shops; that it hasn't happened yet says nothing. You said "a smart technician can buy a van, print some flyers, and steal their customers", but this is only true if they can do so more cost-effectively. Your example leans on the consolidated company doing their job terribly, rather than more efficiently than the small shops. It is true that a low barrier of entry reduces the leeway such a consolidated company has in treating their customers badly, but it is not a guarantee. People regularly do choose the big boys over smaller outfits for a variety of reasons (liability, chance of warranty, etc.).
> By your logic, the world would have stopped at Sears, Blockbuster, and IBM. Yet, the first two aren't even a thing in 2026 and I don't want to comment on the IBM of 2026.
You're naming companies in industries that have become even more consolidated than when those companies were the behemoths. Don't you see that "some big player existing" isn't a stable end state? I never said that being big guarantees survival. Big fish can be eaten by even bigger fish. Yes, there can be disruptors, but they very quickly gobble up the entirety of the previous players to become an even bigger player. It's about market share distribution as a whole. Companies simply have a constant incentive to cooperate, merge, and consolidate to extract higher profits from customers. That never goes away by itself. That is not immoral, but it is amoral. They are behaving rationally and in their self-interest.
Think about what price-fixing, cartels and generally 'market-distortion' is. It is nothing more than cooperation for mutual benefit between companies, which is why it keeps happening over and over and over and over again. It sucks for the customers and society, but for the companies it is fully rational.
You need to seriously think about what happens if all government regulation goes away. Don't handwave it. Really think about it. And I don't mean "they'll dump toxic waste on manatees to raise profits" (they will, but that is not the point). I specifically mean anti-trust regulation and regulation that impacts the barriers of entry to markets. Think about the evolution of players in the markets and what they would do to become fitter (increase profits). Do you really, really don't see consolidation happening? You talk about Silicon Valley as being untouched, but we've had years of the main startup strategy being to work towards being bought by one of the deep-pocketed tech giants. Consolidation was the explicit goal.
I guess the best way out of this would be to have a data driven visualization of the distribution of market share among producers and its evolution through time, to see to what extent such consolidation actually happens. Somebody should vibecode that. Maybe using a frontier AI model made by a local mom and pop shop (zero barrier of entry from government regulation there! :-P).
- At the end of the day, a business is an activity that allows a person(s) helping another person(s). Even in a strictly amoral environment, voluntary trade is a positive-sum game where both A and B gain positive utility: A provides a positive utility to B by giving up something A had but B didnt (B has more than before) and B compensates A for it by giving up something B had but A didnt (A has more than before).
- Due to the profit incentive, there will be scammers, grifters and similar people who are not interested in the "helping" part but rather the "profit" part
- A more powerful person can dominate a weaker person
- Societies, of which organizations/companies are part have hierarchies of people
- A person "higher" up the hierarchy has control and influence over a person lower down that hierarchy
- A significant motivating factor for a person starting a business is independence (be at or towards the top of their local hierarchy) and ownership (be at the root of their local hierarchy)
- The person paying the money out of free will has control and influence over the person accepting the money out of free will in exchange for the help
- Regulation is the forced injection of a very large organization asserting themselves into the premier position of the hierarchy (For example: If regulation bans a specific chemical solvent, the supply chain must either shut down, find an alternative, or go "to the black market"/"go underground" where the regulatory authority cannot inject themselves)
- Regulation is hard to change and it's entirely a legal construct
- Regulation is rarely deprecated (For example: there are regulations in place that were written for an era where people would start their cars by hand although its been decades since anyone has actually done that)
- Normal people don't understand legal constructs any better than they can understand multivariate calculus or multithreaded, concurrent code
- Competition is great for customers. Anything that increase competition should be encouraged.
- We must treat customers as adults who are not challenged nor disabled. To keep our discussion manageable, we will ignore those scenarios where customers are not adults or otherwise challenged and disabled
- There are economies in scale but barring regulation or hostile takeovers, scale can only be achieved by willing, cooperating parties (For example: Say there are 3 phone companies in the US: A, T and V. If either one of them wanted to have majority stake in the "one" merged company, short of the other two conceding willingly, that "one" merged company will never exist)
- Inefficiencies can hide better at larger companies
- Larger companies are risk averse although surprisingly they are in the best position to absorb risks - aka Innovator's Dilemma (For example: Google invented transformers but management decided against it because they were afraid of hallucinations affecting search result quality. 3 engineers at OpenAI read the transformer paper and the rest is history. Google is still playing catch up!)
- A significant motivating factor for a person starting a business is independence and ownership that allows them permissionless innovation
- Innovation is an overall gain for humanity which is why society rewards innovation and penalizes rent seeking.
- People can use knowledge to do both evil and good
- Humanity optimizes for the good of people over time
If you disagree with any of the above, let me know which, ideally with supporting arguments.
Now back to our discussion:
> I say that 'Big HVAC' will in the future outcompete all the small shops; that it hasn't happened yet says nothing
It seems like you prefer rejecting evidence that doesn't support your hypothesis. My recommendation is you do the exact opposite. I'm engaging with you precisely because your take is absolutely counter to mine and I a know for a fact, because I have done this before, that my understanding will be much improved at the end of our conversation. It will provide me even more clarity than I have.
> Yes, regulation can heighten the barrier of entry (but also lower, although less common)
and why do you think it's less common for regulation to reduce the barrier of entry?
> You're naming companies in industries that have become even more consolidated than when those companies were the behemoths
So your argument is:
- Sears: Retail is now even more consolidated
- Blockbuster: Entertainment is now even more consolidated
- IBM: Software or Hardware is now even more consolidated
> They are behaving rationally and in their self-interest
You're conflating the rationality and self-interest of an entrepreneur with that of an employee.
Moral and company alignment aside, a researcher in LLMs might not care much whether they go work for Google or OpenAI or Anthropic. They might not even care whether they go work for Alibaba or Bytedance. OTOH, sama is definitely not going to work for Google or Anthropic and it's absolutely in his rational self-interest to behave that way.
There are even more inconsistencies in your writeup but I think this is a good checkpoint for me to allow you to reflect.
I also suggest we continue this over email (details in profile). Thank You for continuing to engage, I appreciate your POV.
You just answered your own question there.
One woman was doing what would take a dozen. Now she can't.
The dude was incompetent, was able to launder their incompetence through a humunculus, and now is afraid of being caught.
I am from India and have friends who are immigrants from Russia, China and Cuba. We don't take lightly to being lectured about communism. We didn't move to the U.S., the bastion of capitalism, because communism had worked well for our grandfathers and parents and continues to do wonders for its society.
As always there is a (post) Soviet joke that covers this:
>Communists lied about communism. Unfortunately they didn't lie about capitalism.
finance today mostly valued on labor value following ideas of marx, hjalmar schact, keynes
in future money will be valued as energy derivative. expressed as tokens consumption, KWh, compute, whatever
you are right, company extracting surplus value from labor by leveraging compute is a bad model. we saw thi swith car and clothing factories .. turn out if you can get cheaper labor to leverage the compute (factory) you can start race to bottom and end up in the place with the most scaled and cheap labor. japan then korea then china
What are they finding out exactly? That Claude Max for $200/mo is heavily subsidized and it will soon cost $10k/mo?
> What happens to a company used to extracting surplus value from labor when the labor is provided by another company which is not only bigger but unlike traditional labor can withhold its labor indefinitely (because labor is now just another for of capital and capital doesn't need to eat)?
This can be trivially answered by a thought experiment. Let's pick a market where labor is plentiful - fast food.
Now what happens to McDonald's where they rent perfect robots from NoosphrFoodBotsInc? NoosphrFoodBotsInc bots build the perfect burger everytime meeting McDonald's standards. It actually exceeds those standards for McDonald AddictedCustomerPlus tier customers.
As the sole owner of NoosphrFoodBotsInc (you need 0 human employees to run your company, all your employees are bots), what are your choices?
15 years ago I worked at McDonald's for a few months after graduating into the Great recession. I worked from 5am to 1pm-ish 5 days a week. They paid workers weekly and I remember getting those checks for ~$235 each week (for 38 to 39.5 hours a week; they were vigilant about never letting anyone get overtime). About $47 per day.
The federal minimum wage has not risen since then, remaining at $7.25/hr. Inflation adjusted, $7.25 today would have been just under $5 then, so I guess I had it good.
Anyway, I would be shocked if bots could cost less than labor in min wage jobs.
Labour will be good as it has been for a while. Wages will go up because more things get automated.
The current market is predicated on the assumption that labor is atomic and has little bargaining power (minus unions). While capital has huge bargaining power and can effectively put whatever price it wants on labor (in markets where labor is plentiful, which is most of them).
What happens to a company used to extracting surplus value from labor when the labor is provided by another company which is not only bigger but unlike traditional labor can withhold its labor indefinitely (because labor is now just another for of capital and capital doesn't need to eat)?
Anyone not using in house models is signing up to find out.