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You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

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101–110 of 251 posts

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#101
I think the article is mixing together multiple things while at the same time having an underlying bedrock of truth. The system as it stands is not viable and people need to rebel at least in how they vote but I don't think AI is the real issue here.

The system is flawed for different reasons. Tolerance for high vertical integration and oligopolies have seriously damaged the efficiency of the market and limited people's ability to disrupt. Capital concentration has created a new form of aristocracy. They have successfully lobbied to significantly weaken the mechanisms supposed to spread this money, notably inheritance tax. The Supreme Court has significantly altered how democracy functions by lifting limits on fundings and given far too much power to the richest.

The last forty years have basically torn down all the foundations Tocqueville saw as fundamental to the success of the young USA. People should fight to get things back on track.

AI is mostly incidental in that. It doesn't matter if AI temporary concentrates some wealth if the mechanisms for it to then be spread again are in place.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#102
Had a comment listing specific reasons why that post is wrong, but I just realized a generic reason. I see two broad spectra of opinion on AI. One is "LLMs are the greatest thing ever!!!11!1!eleventy! They will usher in the post-scarcity economy!" The other is "LLMs will eat the world! We're doomed! Doooooooooooooomed!!!" In my opinion, both are wrong, because both assume unbounded potential for LLMs that just isn't justified by the facts. Look at how much trouble you have getting good code out of an LLM, for example. The fact that you simply cannot rely on LLM output but have to carefully scrutinize it for mistakes isn't going to go away, because of the fundamental reality of what an LLM is. So why would you assume that LLMs would be reliable in other areas? This is a new-and-improved version of Gell-Mann Amnesia, replacing newspapers with LLMs: people know LLMs aren't reliable in the field they personally specialize in (I've seen, on a lawyer's blog, examples of other lawyers who submitted LLM-written court papers with hallucinated citations; Courts take a, shall we say, dim view of such things). But then those same people go and assume that the LLMs are going to take over the world in other fields.

It's not always the case that given an opinion, both extremes are wrong. But in this specific case, it certainly is. Neither the "LLMs will usher in the post-scarcity economy" view nor the "LLMs will doom everyone to unemployment" view (which are remarkably closer to each other than it would appear at first glance) are correct. LLMs are a useful tool with inherent, fundamental limitations that mean that they will never be able to do everything. AGI is currently a pipe dream, and LLMs are not going to be the technology that achieves it.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#103

Sometimes people just need to touch (literal) grass No gpt18Pro won't cost $1Bi dollars. The buck (or the bubble) will stop somewhere. I'd be more worried for the people making trades run 1ms faster, they literally create no value to the world that is not something their own peers believe it There are billions of people not knowing and not caring about what is chatgpt and while it might hit them hard, humans are more…

> The buck (or the bubble) will stop somewhere. Why?

Every bubble in history has popped

But if you disagree I have an NFT to sell you

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#104

Let's say that somehow we end up in a world where capital is the only thing separating one set of humans from the other, and that separation is large, and the overwhelming majority of humans are in the underclass. Such situations usually correct themselves violently.

Brazil would like to have a word with you.

I find it surprising if Brazil meets this criteria:

> capital is the only thing separating one set of humans from the other, and that separation is large, and the overwhelming majority of humans are in the underclass.

Obviously, it's a matter of degree. You could reasonably argue that any capitalist society meets the criteria depending on your definition of "large", and depending on how you interpret the "capital is the only [sic] thing" part

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#105
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, you can still do everything you could yesterday. You can still hand-weave cloth and sell it if you want to, just like your ancestors could do three hundred years ago; you'll simply have to do it three thousand times faster than your ancestors did to exchange that labor for a loaf of bread, because even though bread is cheaper than it used to be, your customer's next best alternative is an automatic loom, and t…

I'm pretty sure you're literally just wrong on that one - no special knowledge of the weaving market but it seems people do still make a living from hand-weaving fabric. Eg, I found https://loomandstars.com/collections/handwoven-fabrics - they claim to have a shop in New York. They can probably afford bread - bread is quite cheap. The issue is if bread becomes insanely cheap and cloth becomes insanely cheap, then a v…

It is a luxury good like Art, which is an elevated form of labor that is only possible on account of the development of technology like the automated loom, which provides clothes for most people at almost no cost, affording some lucky individuals the leisure time to do things like hand weave cloth or argue about capitalism on Hacker News.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's vogue on HN to sometimes criticize critically so I want to try and be as constructive as possible: I work for one of these companies. I also have pay bills to pay. I'd like to understand what a real, good alternative is. Frontier labs such as Google DeepMind are not just going to shutter their doors because 10% of the peons dropped their jobs. I believe, at least, that we should be demanding political accountabi…

>Frontier labs such as Google DeepMind are not just going to shutter their doors because 10% of the peons dropped their jobs. What about 20%? 50%? 90%? 100%?

[dead]

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#108
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Big tech is making everyone's life miserable: I understand that sentiment, but it's very one-sided. I enjoy having the worlds knowledge at my fingertips. I enjoy being able to video-call my family from anywhere in the world at any time. I enjoy never being lost cause I always have a map showing where I am. I enjoy having group chats with all my different social groups, big and small. I enjoy being able to easily wo…

> None of the above was possible just 20 years ago. Most of those things were actually possible. In many cases they weren’t as convenient, but as a child of the 80s I can tell you that life wasn’t like the dark ages before we all got smart phones. In any case, I don’t think anyone here is arguing against technological progress. What we’re saying is that big tech has been too powerful, and too unregulated, for far too…

I think you'll find that most of the texts you can access right now are not available at your local library.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#109
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not making my life miserable. I definitely wouldn't want to go back to the tech we had in the 90s. You don't have to use social media. Advertising is annoying but it's not really any worse than TV ads back in the day.

You don't think the political situation is a teensy bit worse now?

The political situation is absurd, but its clear that people are far more resilient against state control, so in some ways its improving.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#110

All this talk of neofeudalism and yet not a single bushel of corn has been taken by my lord! Capital leads to class difference, often immense class difference, which is not a claim against our society as primarily capitalistic but in favor of it. If you took away all the food grown in America and the clothes woven in Bangladesh and the laptops manufactured in China, there would be no Amazon, no Google, no Microsoft,…

The "feudal" part implies the productive assets of the 21st century are monopolized and owned by Big Tech, and even the capital class has to pay rent for access to this.

It doesn't mean people are literally serfs on their lords manor growing substance crops. Are you serious?

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