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You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

geohot.github.io

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Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#171

Post by JumpCrisscross »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #162
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've restricted my above description of "labor" to activities in which I was not already outcompeted Then you've constructed a tautology. Humans remain competitive in various applications of their labour, broadly defined, despite entire categories having become uncompetitive. If we exempt those categories then the historical record looks static. But only because we defined away the change. > Slaves at least still n…

My point of concern is that this domain may shrink to the empty set. There is no law of economics that says this will, with certainty, not happen. And while AI might be less power efficient than me on some tasks, power is cheap enough that I don't think the energy price floor affords my continued survival.

> concern is that this domain may shrink to the empty set

My argument is this is, as presented, baseless.

> power is cheap enough that I don't think the energy price floor affords my continued survival

Again, slaves were cheap enough. Industry is cheap enough. Yet global labour rates remain far from homogenous.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#172

Post by ben_w »

Llamamoe wrote: post #97
mmaunder wrote: post #19

The premise is economically incoherent because labor is not a single task category that technology can delete. It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises. This is the lump of labor fallacy- the belief that there’s a fixed amount of economically valuable work that technology and capital can eliminate through automation or…

> It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises. Even if, AI is going to tank the bargaining power of the working class even harder than it already is. It's already the reality for many that they're working for minimum wage, in toxic environments, with no benefits, and more overtime than legal in places that regulate it sole…

> Not even art, because that's among the things gen AI is displacing the most effectively.

Kinda, but also no.

Yes, there's a lot of people (including me) who genuinely enjoy the output of these models; but art isn't only aesthetics, I observe it also being a peacock's tail, where the cost is the entire point.

Why are originals more valuable than reproductions? Nobody who understands the tech can seriously claim that a robot with suitable brush and paints is incapable of perfectly reproducing any old masterwork down to the individual brush strokes — of course a robot can do that, the hardest part of that is compiling the list of requisite brush strokes, but that too can be automated.

But such a copy, and lets say the paints were chemically perfect and also some blend of plant and petroleum derivatives so as to fool even a carbon-dating test, would never command as much money as the original unless someone deliberately mixed them up so that nobody would even know which was which.

However, I don't know that this would ever help the masses. Perhaps a quadrillionaire in a space mansion would like to buy all of Earth and all the people on it, but that doesn't mean we'd get any better than being forced to LARP whatever folly* they chose for us.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folly

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#173

Post by Llamamoe »

camgunz wrote: post #157
Llamamoe wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you raise the bar for being allowed to speak about a very real concern that high, nobody will be left to spread and debate the idea in the first place.

geohot's not a regular joe, he's founded multiple companies and is a leader in our community. This is like a general being like "why are you letting the enemy win?" while he sits comfortably in his study managing his cigar collection.

I still don't think it precludes him from having this opinion. Could he be doing more? Sure, but having found success in this system doesn't make his criticisms of it invalid.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#174

Post by Llamamoe »

DiscourseFan wrote: post #119
Llamamoe wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises. Even if, AI is going to tank the bargaining power of the working class even harder than it already is. It's already the reality for many that they're working for minimum wage, in toxic environments, with no benefits, and more overtime than legal in places that regulate it sole…

You think that these ridiculously high wages that companies like Mercor are paying for data generation are "tanking" bargaining power? Its the complete opposite: there is now a massive sector of highly skilled, specialized labor that produces the very data which trains these models, a task that will not end as long as there is demand for newer and better and more specially trained models. That is a massive amount of…

Ridiculously high wages for jobs whose explicit purpose is to make human workers(including those partaking in those jobs) obsolete. THE reason why they pay so high is because their end-goal is not having to pay anyone anymore ever again. (or at least, only pay a comparatively tiny amount of people for producing the data)

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#175

Post by ben_w »

roenxi wrote: post #85
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #67

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 runs in to comparative advantage theory eventually - just because someone else is much more efficient than you at literally everything doesn't mean you can't still do something inefficiently and set up a win-win situation.

Comparative advantage has some assumptions built in, which can be violated in practice, especially by technology, especially when you can (we can't yet in general but can in specific domains) build compute and power supplies for that compute for less than it costs to raise a human to the point of being economically productive.

There's a few isolated tribes around the world, most famously North Sentinel Island. They have nothing to trade with us, nothing we want to buy. We let them be because even their land itself isn't important to us. They could be educated the way anyone else is and become as productive as any of us, but even people interested in taking slaves wouldn't bother with the effort required.

> I dunno why geohotz thinks in this article that shares in a granary are a bad idea, someone has to profit from storing food. May as well be me. I'll do it if he won't. I like granaries.

Because:

  When the grain is produced by machines, the peasants are cut out of the loop.
Trump, Exxon Mobil, Venezuela. Exxon Mobil says Venezuela is "uninvestable", the comments I see say they've got legitimate reasons to fear that any investments they do make would just get seized by some future government.

Same applies.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#176

Post by Llamamoe »

ben_w wrote: post #172
Llamamoe wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises. Even if, AI is going to tank the bargaining power of the working class even harder than it already is. It's already the reality for many that they're working for minimum wage, in toxic environments, with no benefits, and more overtime than legal in places that regulate it sole…

> Not even art, because that's among the things gen AI is displacing the most effectively. Kinda, but also no. Yes, there's a lot of people (including me) who genuinely enjoy the output of these models; but art isn't only aesthetics, I observe it also being a peacock's tail, where the cost is the entire point. Why are originals more valuable than reproductions? Nobody who understands the tech can seriously claim that…

People boycott AI art in indie games, music, etc. but it's still finding massive use everywhere across most industries, and by and large companies are getting away with it.

> would never command as much money as the original unless someone deliberately mixed them up so that nobody would even know which was which.

That is based on current sensibilities which are capable of change. Give it 20 years of PR campaigns and who knows where we end up.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#177

Post by Llamamoe »

anal_reactor wrote: post #143
Llamamoe wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises. Even if, AI is going to tank the bargaining power of the working class even harder than it already is. It's already the reality for many that they're working for minimum wage, in toxic environments, with no benefits, and more overtime than legal in places that regulate it sole…

The answer is obvious: abandon civilisation, join the Amish. Big Tech cannot ruin your life if you simply don't participate in the capitalistic market. I mean sure, it's difficult to live completely off-grid, but in modern world, it's a long way before you starve to death. What I'm saying is, I have a cozy bullshit job that gives me the perspective of someday not being in the working class anymore. But if that wasn't…

> Big Tech cannot ruin your life if you simply don't participate in the capitalistic market. I mean sure, it's difficult to live completely off-grid, but in modern world, it's a long way before you starve to death.

You still have to pay taxes, and doing this means giving up on a lot of your existing human connection, joining a community in no small part comprised of crackpots, tanking your quality of life, and losing your influence over the future of broader society.

Furthermore, it's a personal solution to a systemic problem. It'll work for a few people, but it's not a fix.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#178

Post by ben_w »

roenxi wrote: post #158
lurk2 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mass market handcrafts are no longer a viable means of subsistence anywhere in the West. You can still produce things like handwoven cloth, bespoke rocking chairs, and novelty birdhouses, but you market them primarily to an upscale clientele. It’s next to impossible to compete on price when the average consumer is basing their idea of what a thing is worth on products being assembled by machinery in countries where l…

> Mass market handcrafts are no longer a viable means of subsistence anywhere in the West. Mass market handicrafts have never been a viable means of subsistence anywhere, ever, if we benchmark against what I think a reasonable lifestyle looks like. That is why we stopped doing things that way. Nevertheless mass market handicrafts are still a theoretical option. It hasn't become a worse option over time, it is in fact…

> They would say things like "wow, I can afford a much better life than in the 1700s with my weaving skills", "what just happened to me? What was that time portal?" and "maybe I should learn to code, they earn even more money than I do".

By Christ’s bones, where am I set now? This town’s all noise and hurrying. Aye, cloth fetches money, they say so; but meat costs dear, and a room dearer yet.

I weave as I ever did. My hands know the work. But the buyer stands far off, and sends his price by another man, and I must take it, for what choice have I? At home we knew who cheated us, and who’d answer for it. Here, a man shrugs and says, ‘That’s the market.’ I know not the fellow called Market, but he rules harder than any master I’ve known.

The loom is quick, I’ll grant it. Too quick. Three men’s work in one frame, and the rest turned loose. They’ll not thank thee for cheap cloth.

And thou say’st a man may earn bread by "code"? Is that writ-work then, like tallies and ledgers? If so, God help him when the ink runs dry. A loom at least makes cloth a body can wear.

Thou tell’st me I live better. Maybe. I eat white bread. But I sleep light, and when work stops, there’s naught beneath me.

--

The past makes for more interesting stories; the present, I find, has all the limits of setting a short story in Iain M Banks' The Culture, where too many solutions already exist to every drama, and we've not internalised how easy the solutions are.

But that combinatorial explosion of complexity, beyond our own grasp… that itself is scary for many, it leaves us open to exploitation we can't well counter. The internet connects us all, but 2 billion online means being exposed to 20 million people who are top-percentile psychopaths, it's not all good.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#179

Post by mlrtime »

Llamamoe wrote: post #174
DiscourseFan wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think that these ridiculously high wages that companies like Mercor are paying for data generation are "tanking" bargaining power? Its the complete opposite: there is now a massive sector of highly skilled, specialized labor that produces the very data which trains these models, a task that will not end as long as there is demand for newer and better and more specially trained models. That is a massive amount of…

Ridiculously high wages for jobs whose explicit purpose is to make human workers(including those partaking in those jobs) obsolete. THE reason why they pay so high is because their end-goal is not having to pay anyone anymore ever again. (or at least, only pay a comparatively tiny amount of people for producing the data)

>HE reason why they pay so high is because their end-goal is not having to pay anyone anymore ever again.

NO, the reason the pay is so high is because there are few people that can do it AND it brings value for the company.

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