821–830 of 1001 posts
The article doesn't seem to take his train of thought quite far enough. If AI suddenly makes it possible for a law firm to be run with a skeleton crew, then what's stopping all those people you fired from starting new law companies, where AI also does most of the work, and competing with you for the same market? And ultimately, if AI gets to be so good that it can competently do a lawyer's job, what reason do big law…
The price of their work will go down and it might not be economical to do it at all. Theirs skills (as also many IT skills) will not be needed at that scale. In the same way as typing on a typewriter was a skill that gave economic opportunity not so long time ago. Now everything is an email and part of it is speech to text. When something becomes a commodity, the skilled providers need to find something new to sell o…
This article puts into words a lot of things that had been on my mind as missing in AI discourse. Most significantly, actually considering the _systemic consequences_ of the promised AI future, how it interacts with political economy, an actual critical look (instead of accepting the "Western meta-narrative of modernity" at face value). And maybe more importantly, it articulates really clearly how damaging the restru…
Let's do it. What policies to propose?
The article doesn't seem to take his train of thought quite far enough. If AI suddenly makes it possible for a law firm to be run with a skeleton crew, then what's stopping all those people you fired from starting new law companies, where AI also does most of the work, and competing with you for the same market? And ultimately, if AI gets to be so good that it can competently do a lawyer's job, what reason do big law…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You realize that the limit of this is that the only people worth existing is the people with capital? > I foresee a wave of entrepreneurship coming. AI will empower more people to provide useful services directly to other people, with less middlemen and menial work, and more direct problem solving. Why do I need to buy products/services from this startups when I can just reverse engineer their product and use all my…
> only people worth existing is the people with capital? replying to this with my thoughts IMO The missing link is that, as long as humans still have political power, that is the basis of their economic power under the new system. The reason is that it is a continuation of the dynamic we see now in western decadence - politicians bribe the populace for votes. So on one side you have the market for political support,…
The article doesn't seem to take his train of thought quite far enough. If AI suddenly makes it possible for a law firm to be run with a skeleton crew, then what's stopping all those people you fired from starting new law companies, where AI also does most of the work, and competing with you for the same market? And ultimately, if AI gets to be so good that it can competently do a lawyer's job, what reason do big law…
> If AI suddenly makes it possible for a law firm to be run with a skeleton crew, then what's stopping all those people you fired from starting new law companies, where AI also does most of the work, and competing with you for the same market? Money. They won't have the money to pay for the tokens, or the best models, because they'll be unemployed. They also won't have the connections to get the clients. When you're…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> only people worth existing is the people with capital? replying to this with my thoughts IMO The missing link is that, as long as humans still have political power, that is the basis of their economic power under the new system. The reason is that it is a continuation of the dynamic we see now in western decadence - politicians bribe the populace for votes. So on one side you have the market for political support,…
Historically when people had no power they held violent riots to reassert that they do. Happened as recently as Jan 6 2021 (unsuccessfully that time).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, bullshit. Shareholders will literally always think the company overhired. Every single person on this website has lived through at least one instance of firing an employee and distributing his workload to the leftover employees who are usually already overworked. Shareholders see you as useless meat to dispose, the ideal number of employees to them is ZERO.
They don’t always think that, since sometimes share prices decrease as the result of layoffs, which would indicate they think it’s a bad decision.
And guess what: stock prices going down is just reallocating capital somewhere else.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We can take your train of thought further still. If AI ever becomes super good at lawyering, why would we even need law firms and lawyers at all? We could feed legislation and constitution into the model and have it argue against other lawyer bots in court in front of a judge bot.
Not buying the judge not part. A human being judged by a non-human will be very far in the future. Bots can’t be held accountable. It’s also an “us vs. them”, for some people it’s hard to accept being judged by a different gender, ethnicity, etc. A bot telling you to go to prison? Tough sell.
I know this isn't exactly related, so maybe a low value comment, but it itches in my mind. Years ago I talked with a recruiter at Facebook and they bragged about how many floors of developers they had working on Messenger in just one location (Seattle). What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger? I mean, really? I feel like in a way, AI just adds to that weird situation of overcapacity. M…
> Maybe we were already oversupplied with talent. In which case why the heck were we still hiring more, more, more developers? Before the AI craze, Musk chopped an awful lot of headcount at Twitter, right, and proved it was overkill, has that panned out? I don't think it's a matter of oversupply, it's a matter of allocation of resources. Are there more developers than what there would need to be in a hypothetically o…
He then wrapped x in xAI where effectively they are developing new features in x. So that now we effectively don’t really know what the head count is.