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 capital accumulation instead of transforming it.
Middle class status anxiety manifesting as a rhetoric about neofeudalism.
I don't know about your labor, but as far as my labor goes, there are basically only three things I am capable of doing: manual labor with my hands and legs, mental labor with my mind, and selling personal charm with my handsome face.
If you can perform all the same jobs I can for a penny a day, and food and rent cost a dollar a day, I'll have a hard time earning enough to remain fed and housed.
Until now, I've always been competing against other flesh-and-blood humans who needed to eat and pay rent, so I've never had to worry about the labor price floor too much.
Even though the three categories you describe include niches like museum attraction or vehicle piloting in legal niches that still respect humans, a little creativity expands your options for post-ASI work:
1: verbal/literary labour with your vocal cords, or the use of an output tool, to playback existing works in environments where mechanical methods are disallowed,
2: aesthetic labour through precise recreations of other's mental labour in the performing arts,
3: legal labour in acting as an agent to help or hinder existing legal processes in systems that give humans standing,
4: biological labour as a substrate for growing certain transplantable products,
5: smuggling labour (either non-invasive or surgically invasive),
6: political labour to incrementally sway electoral results in any polity where you are still enfranchised,
7: security labour as a canary for infohazards (such as 'diplomat' programs produced by another ASI) inside of a quarantined environment,
8: frontman work as a deniable patsy to enable economic forgery, deception, revenge or warfare by a patron ASI, possibly without your knowledge.
There are plenty of ways to gain some currency token that can pay for your negentropy upkeep costs.
Sometimes the easiest method of communicating something is the best one. That said, every one of these jobs has had multiple historical examples of humans giving paid employment to other humans for them, even #7.
> Until now, I've always been competing against other flesh-and-blood humans
Unless you're a few centuries old, you haven't. You've had the potential to be competing agaist industrial and computational technology your whole life. Go back further, and the prevalence of slaves served as a similar cost differential (free humans versus enslaved, human versus AI).
Yes, and even in prehistoric eras people could attempt to compete with the wind at blowing air, but I've restricted my above description of "labor" to activities in which I was not already outcompeted to the point where I couldn't hope to make a living. So I've written off the once-profitable career of "calculator" from the get-go.
Slaves at least still need to be fed and housed, but I'm sure they were tough competition indeed for independent laborers.
> 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 need to be fed and housed, but I'm sure they were tough competition indeed for independent laborers
I believe there is evidence for this all over the place. By analogy, however, AI is orders of magnitude less power efficient than humans. This places a floor on the price of AI and thus human labour that competes with it. (Though that floor, as with pre-information age floors, is well below almost everyone on this forum.)
> By analogy, however, AI is orders of magnitude less power efficient than humans.
It is both more and less power efficient, depending on the task. When a coding task is easy enough that an LLM can actually do it, I've seen e.g. Claude do a week's worth of human labour in a few hours of wall-clock time for what amounted to 0.25 euro of subscription cost. When it can't, it will churn as many tokens as you've got and leave a big ball of mud behind, as seen with the recent attempt at a vibe-coded browser.
When Stable Diffusion is good enough, the energy cost per image output is comparable to the calorific consumption of a human living long enough to type the prompt. When Stable Diffusion isn't good enough, no amount of re-prompting gets you something it can't do.
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.
> It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises.
We’re nowhere near it, but there is a point at which the marginal utility of laborers is worth less than the security risk the laborers represent by continuing to exist. This is already happening with a lot of manufacturing and resource extraction.
> 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 capital accumulation instead of transforming it.
What if I consider the labor conditions that exist after this transformation to be undignified?
Interesting comments. Thanks. A long time ago I worked for DeBeers diamond and gold mining in South Africa and Namibia as a Microsoft systems engineer out in the desert. These days I’m a cybersecurity expert. Given that context, these are excellent points.
And it isn't like people can't do still everything they could do yesterday. There are just more and better options. Economically AI is no particular threat to the median human and even knowledge workers are still going to have fine lives. Maybe not as knowledge workers.
The real risk here is the military implications of pairing AI and robots. If the army doesn't need lots of people then there is a real problem. But robotics will take a long time to get there even in an optimistic case. Labour will still have value for a long time to come.
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 those move very quickly these days.
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 very inefficient weaver can still afford food. 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. Although there might still be something better to put your time towards. I recommend managing your own capital - maybe even building it and maintaining it yourself - but people seem dead set against the idea for some reason.
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.
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 labor is cheap and regulatory compliance is negligible.
So you go after high-income earners who are not concerned with price, but this requires proximity, networking, and then on-going relationship management with a much smaller group of people who are all much more likely to talk to each other.
Effectively, this is the problem the grandparent comment outlined with extra steps; it isn’t your labor by itself that is uniquely valuable, it is your relationship with buyers, and those relationships can sour. Vendors who signed on with Walmart experienced something similar where they began scaling to meet demand only to find themselves completely reliant on Walmart’s orders to service their loans. Walmart was then free to dictate the terms of the relationship. This is a very familiar dynamic in societies that never successfully divorced themselves from feudal ideas (e.g. Most of South Asia, parts of South America).
> 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 a better option now than it ever was in the past. Today is the best day in history to be a weaver, even for those that do it by hand. A weaver in the 1700s would weep tears of joy at the opportunity to weave things by hand today at market rates. 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".
> 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.
There were plenty of craftsmen who lived lifestyles that were acceptable for the time periods they were living in. From around 1400, to around the early 1900s, European settlements consisting of more than a few hundred people would have had blacksmiths, cobblers, tailors, furniture makers, and various other craftsmen. It wasn’t until the late 19th century that this arrangement started to be replaced by the economies of scale made possible by the factory system.
> A weaver in the 1700s would weep tears of joy at the opportunity to weave things by hand today at market rates.
The idea that a medieval peasant would be envious of our standard of living is doing nothing to further the point you are trying to make.
People are social beings. I could live a life which is (vastly) better than people in 1930 or 1960 by doing the most menial work. The problem is that if most of society wouldn't, I'd be seen as a paria. If I didn't have a partner it would be extremely difficult to find one, children would be bullied at their school.
I actually did very menial work in a food processing plant while still in education, I'm not better than the people working there but I'm different from them in interests and in upbringing (even though I didn't come from wealth, the people I studied with, shared hobbies with did). I wasn't able to discuss the things I read with these people and they weren't able to talk about their interests. I believe if I had to work there for years or decades it would lead to dysfunction.
> 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.
This is one of those cases where it's really important to remember the assumptions built into comparative advantage theory, such as "no mobility of labor". If the Green-country people are more productive at all tasks than the Blue-country people, they can still both profit from trade with each other. But that does not represent the maximum productivity allocation of resources. Output can be increased still further by the Green people replacing the population of the Blue-country with more Green people, in which scenario the optimal resource allocation to sustaining the Blue people is unfortunately zero.
This is why the population of labor animals plummeted in the 20th century. And to put it plainly, it means that there's no guarantee you can always sell labor for enough to keep your home from getting paved over for a data center.
> 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.
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.
Sure, I don't know why anyone would want to hand-weave cloth in this era of miracles where a machine can do it for you faster and better. It looks like hard work and it is technically a waste of time. But, hypothetically, if there was a portion of society that for some mad reason can't get access to machine-made cloth they can still weave their own.
And the fact is, for those souls who are motivated to do so, they can make a living hand-weaving anyway and do not need to weave 3,000x faster. They weave at a similar pace to that people always have. They can still afford bread. Society will almost give bread away to people, it is absurdly cheap.
Bread is only cheap on account of mechanization. Before technological innovations bread was often paid in wages, like those of the workers who built the pyramids.
> you'll simply have to do it three thousand times faster than your ancestors did to exchange that labor for a loaf of bread
Who's to say that a loaf of bread will be that much more valuable? You acknowledge that bread is cheaper than it used to be, but baselessly assert that an automatic loom will accentuate the value differential rather than lessen or maintain it with the innovations in bread making.
> 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 solely because they have very little better choice.
Furthermore, this power inequality directly translates to influence over economic output of our civilization - by the time value of human menial or cognitive labor goes low enough to delete jobs, all that will be left will be various equivalents of being a sugar baby for the rich - fulfilling their emotional, sexual, and social needs. Not even art, because that's among the things gen AI is displacing the most effectively.
> Middle class status anxiety manifesting as a rhetoric about neofeudalism.
The middle class is a tiny, tiny fraction of the population nowadays. Even among those working high-earning jobs like tech/healthcare/finance, most are just upper worker class.
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 bargaining power. It would take far more severe shocks to the system to kill the possibility of revolution, and that whatever that would be would be bad for everyone.
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)
> Ridiculously high wages for jobs whose explicit purpose is to make human workers(including those partaking in those jobs) obsolete
I would say they are making the current cost of one's labor "obsolete". Most jobs are like this. If you work for yourself, you're trying to make the cost of your labor obsolete in place of cheaper work. If you work for a company, the company will be trying to make the cost of your labor obsolete in place of cheaper work. Any value captured in the arbitrage of product price and employee pay is seen as the value of management.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Use, yes. I find it on packaging, on billboards. "Massive" use? Not so clear, e.g. how much is this just a substitute for clip art and stock photography? I.e. stuff that was already low-value.
But even there, to the extent they get away with it, that's due to people like me who care about aesthetics.
To illustrate the difference:
Know what I don't care for? Der Kuss[0], the Mona Lisa[1], everything Van Gogh is famous for[2], likewise Pollock, Frida Kahlo, Monet, and Gauguin.
Know what's expensive? All of those things I don't care for.
> 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.
When there's a thousand indistinguishable replicas of the Mona Lisa, the original becomes worthless, the replicas don't gain value.
The effort is the point, it's the reason for the price. When an expensive thing becomes cheap, it stops being an expensive signal (and vice-versa).
[0] the woman's head looks like it's been severed, rotated 90°, her ear placed where the stump of her neck ought to be. Most of Klimt's other stuff is better.
[1] her smile is not "mysterious", it's just the resting face of someone who had to keep still for long enough to get painted
[2] the stuff he's not famous for is, IMO, generally better than the stuff he is famous for.
The originals of physical art pieces operate off the same logic that drives NFTs. As stupid as people think they are, they do show a modern drive for ownership of something with provenance.
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 the case, I'd 100% fuck that and look for alternative lifestyles.
> 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.
Let's say a truck driver's job gets fully automated by self-driving trucks. How will his labor reconstiture itself into something new? #learntocode? How about SW developers? What if the most capable model you need to use to stay competitive costs $10k a month so you're locked out?
> How will his labor reconstiture itself into something new?
That's for the job market to decide. It'll be whatever people still find valuable to do.
> What if the most capable model you need to use to stay competitive costs $10k a month so you're locked out?
What if a capable computer needed to stay competitive costs $10k? Or if all SW jobs turned remote and electricity costs for computers cost $10k? I think the problem with this line of thinking is there was no logical path to this happening that was presented. You're raising a problem of an unrealized conclusion without a solid premise.
> It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises.
In general, yes. For many groups, no.
It assumes that there is something of value for them to do and as shown by masses of long term unemployed in many areas, that is not always the case.
For example, people on the autism spectrum and with disabilities have persistently high unemployment. Because of various limitations, there is nothing for them to do in many cases. The market should have corrected this (especially over the long term) if reconstitution was consistently possible.
If AI makes all humans seem limited in a similar fashion, the idea of labour reconstitution falls apart.
There is also a large portion of the population on social assistance so while there are things they can do, the market value of what they can do is often well below their needs.
> For example, people on the autism spectrum and with disabilities have persistently high unemployment.
> If AI makes all humans seem limited in a similar fashion, the idea of labour reconstitution falls apart.
I think the problems here is you’re comparing a relative minority to “all humans”. Unfortunately, what affects a minority of society, inherently, has a small effect on society as a whole. If “all humans” now have no employment value because AI or automation can do it all, there will still be a cost to that production. Even if you assume the AI part is $0, the power needed or the raw materials becomes the main cost as opposed to labor. Then you need to have enough demand from those non-working non-wage-earning humans for whatever that AI is producing. Otherwise, what is the point of the production in the first place.
Maybe extreme automation would put the wealth gab on hyper drive. Only those handful who happen to own an automated production company can have any income. However, what do you imagine the final outcome of that would be in a democratic society? Like I know it’s fashionable to cry at the state of democracy, but despite the recent inflation and affordability crisis and income insecurity etc, we don’t have an “all humans” levels of unemployments. What do you think would happen if we automate, and subsequently fire, “all humans”?
Let’s assume AI will actually replace 99% of jobs eventually. Society will completely change at that time to adapt. What else is the point? Are AIs gonna be producing stuff for other AIs leisure?
The problem is that the road to there might be painful before society is forced to change to adapt. It won’t all happen at once so it’ll keep happening in waves and waves will be painful until they get better then another wave again. That’s assuming the prophecy of “all humans” labor is no longer needed.
Labour is not a single task, sure, but it's also a fallacy to say "labor is not a single task category that technology can delete".
Before I say why though, there's a lot of bad futures possible even with remote controlled humanoid robots whose only true AI are the basics, to keep themselves standing upright and to walk and run on command without falling over. All those people (even here on HN) who claim (to quote a recent exchange) "Every $1 taken by illegal workers is $1 stolen from Americans", how are they going to react to finding every minimum wage job in the US has been replaced with a Tesla Optimus whose "AI" is "actually Indians" thanks to a low-latency Starlink connection to Jodhpur? How do anti-authority protests (whether anti-ICE or anti-Iranian-government) work with any robots where the "AI" is smoke and mirrors of remote control? This is plenty enough for techno-feudalism, even without AI replacing all jobs.
But back to the original. As a proof of possibility that tech can, in fact, delete labour: Labour is made of atoms. We have always known, for as long as records show, how to make a bunch of atoms that can be forced to do labour for us, even though we have not understood the details of production until very recently. It's called "slavery", and the rules enforcing and maintaining slavery are encoded into the oldest laws we know of, and that text itself references older laws we've not yet been able to identify[0].
That just leaves a question: can technology also arrange atoms to solve arbitrary labour?
Yes, obviously we can physically do it, we're a species that rearranges them at every level, from disassembling mountains for ore, to re-engineering DNA and RNA for crops and medicine and making animations by moving around single atoms.
But that leads to a more precise question: can we learn what pattern we need to do this deliberately, and not with a 20 year delay from simply using our existing biology? There's a quote for that, too:
If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.
I consider intelligence to be the inverse of how many examples you need to learn something, by which standard all machine learning is very very stupid, and only makes up for it to an extend by being very very stupid very very quickly. Will we solve how to reduce that to only "very stupid", or even just "stupid"? Perhaps, perhaps not. Without improvements, machine learning systems will not take all our jobs, but may still make slaves of us for the reasons previously given, remote controlled robotics. Current ML approaches still have yet to solve for fully-general all-conditions self-driving even in the easy mode that is the USA, they need too many examples to take all our driving jobs despite millions of vehicles on the road gathering training data from the behaviour of all the vehicles they can observe.
When you say:
> 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 capital accumulation instead of transforming it.
some sure fear that way, e.g. it sure was weird to see the exchange with Sen. Richard Blumenthal, and the response from Altman which is pretty close to what you're saying rather than "let me rephrase that, we're all going to die if we get this wrong":
I think you have said in fact, and I'm gonna quote, development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity. End quote. You may have had in mind the effect on, on jobs, which is really my biggest nightmare in the long term.
Not that it takes much intelligence to become an existential threat: ML may only improve at the per-example rate of evolution, but evolution created covid and ebola and the black death and HIV.
But yeah, techno feudalism? All that needs is for Optimus' on-board AI to not fall over when told to walk and run, to keep its balance while holding heavy objects or wielding a nightstick or firing a gun.
This post seems to be haphazardly proposing that big tech will inevitably make everyone's lives miserable. And by working for them, you are enabling this.
It offers no constructive alternative and the author (yes, I know who he is) seems to have no issue with Google hosting their email.
It's hard to take this too seriously (even if there is some legitimate worry here)
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 work from home.
None of the above was possible just 20 years ago. All of them are enabled by big tech and none of them is based on surveillance, ads or social media.
Yes there are drawbacks. I also find them bad to a point of threatening society. But we need to ack the positives, otherwise it's not an honest debate but only a mix of ranting and populist propaganda.
> 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 long.
As a child of the 80s, who lived 20 miles away from a city, I can tell you that my life was pretty much dark ages before I understood that driving was not just something parents did; I could also do that. And that there were people with similar interests as me at the end of that drive! Took 18 years.
Most of the texts that matter are. Yeah you’re not going to find some random flat earth blog in the library, but equally, that’s a good thing.
However, I wasn’t talking specifically about libraries. The web did still exist 20 years ago. Wikipedia is more than 20 years old. And newsgroups have been around much longer too.
The web was also mobile accessible for more than 20 years (WAP, for example, was introduced in 1999).
There were also phone numbers you could ring who could provide quick searches for information look up. People are most familiar with them in terms of telephone directory services (eg ring an operator to ask for the phone number of someone else) but there were other general knowledge services too. In fact I used one once when my bike chain broke, I walked to a local pay phone, and enquired how to put a chain back on.
Even know, there’s a plethora of information at local government information and audit offices, which isn’t available online. most of which is store on microfilm. A friend needed to visit one office recently to look at historic maps to trace the origins of a public right of way (which is a legal public footpath though farmland in the UK)
Like I said before, we weren’t living in the dark ages before smartphones came along.
And most of the texts you can access at the local library aren't even at that local library right now. Libraries are part of a humongous network. If you're willing to wait a few days, there's an avalanche of material that you definitely can't instantly find on the internet.
You could do all those things 10 if not 15 years ago, with maybe the exception of the last one - mainly driven by the onset of the COVID pandemic forcing people to think differently about things for a brief time - in a much less hostile climate. And big tech isn't even required for let alone the best implementation of all those things, it's merely situated itself as the default.
> But we need to ack the positives, otherwise it's not an honest debate but only a mix of ranting and populist propaganda.
It's not ranting to not ack every positive if the negative clearly outweighs it. I would much rather live 20 years ago than live now without a job. Wouldn't you?
Alternatively suppose you get to keep your job. What percentage of the population being unemployed do you think would make it worse for you personally than going back 20 years. Because there is going to be more unemployment and it will affect your environment unless you have got a private island (some people do - some ai owners do)
None of the good things you described requires the existence of powerful private actors. The internet was created by public funded researchers, it is fundamentally decentralized. Wikipedia is a non-profit, video call could be p2p, etc.
You enjoy individual benefits and completely disregard the fact that electronics addiction and loneliness get worse year by year. You've been able to Google anything and chat with anyone back in 2010, all we've achieved since is making the average person spend 4-5h mindlessly doomscrolling on their phone and watching YouTube instead of having meaningful social interaction.
Also, we've got an entire generation growing up on ads, algorithmic brainrot, and now ai slop.
You're also forgetting algorithmic price fixing, algorithmic pricing, the billions in R&D into making internet platforms and services more addicting and effective at siphoning out your money, etc.
That's not true. All of the examples you mentioned are possible without Big Tech. There are F/LOSS and community supported alternatives for all of them. Big Tech might've contributed to parts of the technology that make these alternatives possible, but that could've been done by anyone else, and they are certainly not required to keep the technology functional today.
Relying on Big Tech is a personal choice. None of these companies are essential to humanity.
> none of them is based on surveillance, ads or social media.
That's not true either. All Alphabet and Meta products are tied to and supported in some way by advertising. All of these companies were/are part of government surveillance programs.
So you're highly overestimating the value of Big Tech, and highly underestimating the negative effects they've had, have, and will continue to have on humanity.
>Big Tech might've contributed to parts of the technology that make these alternatives possible, but that could've been done by anyone else, and they are certainly not required to keep the technology functional today.
Not only that, but big tech proprietary products have depended and depend heavily on F/LOSS and community supported code.
people let others choose for them and allot others to make them let their own lives be miserable.
you can simply not use any of that shit and it litteraly doesnt kill you. theres tons and tons of people who dont use social media nor any of this tech stuff as seriously as you do.
if this is how you feel its time for a detox. go outside. into the woods or something. anything to learn that your phone and pc is not your life and Elon Musk is not your (wanted or unwanted) master.
you choose who and what control your life. chose wisely. chose yourself
In most countries living in the woods on your own isn't allowed. You're forced to be connected if you want a job, social life, not be seen as a crazy person. You pretend like we're all living on some island where everything is merely decided by what you as an individual do.
In my home country several old people had to close their shop as they were forced to move to a digital accounting system, they didn't have a choice. My bank only allows me to go to their office without an appointment 1 day a week (maybe not even). My grandpa who doesn't have a phone (he never even got a landline), doesn't have internet and barely even drives, he has to depend on others to call and make appointments. If you want to apply for a job, you need internet connection. Many won't even hire you without owning a car (even if you could perfectly commute with a bicycle or public transport).
If you think we're at the end of this 'evolution', we're just getting started. My grandpa could perfectly do everything on his own until 2010, by 2018 it was getting almost impossible, 2026 he feels like a burden for not being into technology.
I do choose big tech less, but over time it finds its way to creep back in. Over time it becomes increasingly more difficult to engage with a society increasingly more dependent on it. It's not just stop using facebook and degoogle your phone.
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.
The west was enjoying the peace dividend while Russians were dealing with the collapse of the USSR so the answer to your question depends on who you ask.
> This post seems to be haphazardly proposing that big tech will inevitably make everyone's lives miserable.
Except that’s already happening. Through social media being engineered to be additive, advertising and user data collection being used to manipulate voters, AI bosses proudly claiming they’re putting people out of work, and games companies paying on the weak with loot boxes and other massively overpriced in game transactions.
And why isn’t there any legislation against these predatory tactics? Because big tech also donate millions to the very people we elect and who are supposed to serve the citizens.
And that’s without discussing the indirect costs of big tech from data centres ruining the lives of local residents, to independent stores getting screwed by knockoffs from Amazon and cheap Chinese stores.
> seems to have no issue with Google hosting their email.
That’s a pretty weak counterpoint. In fact it’s basically what we call an “ad hominem attack”. What you’re doing is arguing about the individual rather than discussing their points directly.
It’s like saying “you can’t be worried about climate change because you own a car.”
> It's hard to take this too seriously (even if there is some legitimate worry here)
If you think there is legitimate worry the you should take their points seriously. It would be contradictory to do otherwise
Inevitably? Maybe not, but the situation isn't gonna get better by saying "oh I'm sure the tech industry will do a 180 and stop making everything worse"
> seems to have no issue with Google hosting their email.
There's this meme where person A says "we should improve society somewhat", and B replies "yet you participate in society! curious". Very similar argument.
I don't believe "true" agi/asi will happen, but I totally believe if a company theoretically invented they would immediately shut all API's and then go for software market dominance in every category.
While I've said in another comment on this thread that comparative advantage is flawed, I still think the opening moves, the very initial phase, would be as per comparative advantage, not everything all at once.
Until supply grows to saturate demand in whatever market, comparative advantage points to the fastest way to make more money, that money then gets used to construct more servers and data centres, which gets used to saturate supply for the next most profitable market, etc. until there's none left.
I wouldn't say "never" for AI that can economically substitute all human labour. I think that meaning of AGI/ASI is slightly easier than the "AI which learns from as few examples as humans do" meaning, which I also think is possible eventually but don't know how far away it is.
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 accountability and safeguards for society. I only get to live once: if I am to spend it for social change, I best maximize by expected return.
And quitting a job in a capitalist society probably has negative return overall.
> I believe, at least, that we should be demanding political accountability and safeguards for society.
You can't help but swing between "AGI is going to save us, praise the tech lords" and "AGI is going to kill us, tech lords have mercy" if you believe there is no counterpower to the tech lords.
"You, alone, leaving your job" is not a great way to counteract the tech lords (although at least it makes a point and show other people there is a problem.)
But there is the option to use your counterpowers (you know, legislators and all that ?) The tech lords are actively trying to avoid that (see the hilarious Musk vs Breton feud.)
It would be better if your system did not give money to power to choose lawmakers.
Maybe AI will make USA realize the definition of corruption and proper election funding laws.
But, if you don't want to join the underclass, maybe, just maybe, consider not picking tech lords as kings next time.
> I'd like to understand what a real, good alternative is.
The "real, good" part all depends on your expectations of life.
There's a real shortage in trades people and I'd love to see ChatGPT fix a leaky pipe, build a house or make a chair. So switching to the trades/manual labor, while financially tough at the beginning might be a good long term choice. But this requires much more physical work than most of us on HN are used to.
Moving away from capitalist society into a cheap tiny off grid house in a rural area and leading a much more basic life is also an option. You don't need 100k to survive, but you do need it in populated areas. (Also, I'm European and therefore not dependent on employment for health care, so I'm ignoring that part.)
There are many choices we can make that remove our dependence on big tech. But big tech is hella convenient and so is having expendable income, so it's a tough choice to make.
I lived the original post and left working in tech a years ago for essentially the reasons in the post. I agree the article stops short of offering solutions, but you also acknowledge there's a legitimate problem but then don't engage or offer alternatives.
From my experience, the problem I saw, and why I really respect OPs post, is that many good and smart people were lying to themselves in those environments. They'd do exactly what you do and try find reasons to justify working in tech.
Go into your average modern tech engineering team at e.g. Amazon, and ask them how many of the engineers in there use and support the software they're creating. They tiny fraction of people who say they do use it and support it, go check their usage, and you'll see half of them were overinflating it. HN knows it better than anywhere: many of these tech companies are not producing great tech to improve people's lives.
To you point "no constructive alternative" - think about it this way, if you're spending your life writing something you won't even use for reason that boil down to "it's just not valuable for me, especially knowing how its made", then doing literally anything other than working there is a more valuable use of _your_ time for you.
Look at your household and figure out what you need and what would improve your lives. If it's "6 figures salary and a world owned by megacorps", then working in places like Amazon is the best thing you can do for your family.
If you're a small household without kids, like a lot of people in these engineering environments, then instead of spending 12 hours a day mon - fri addicted to trying to solve this really cool little engineering problem (which just so happens to help e.g Amazon), you'd be far better solving some really cool little engineering problem that just so happens to help your family, like building some cool home automation thing for them, or working on your own house to make it more efficient so you can use less energy so anyone else working in your house can retire earlier with smaller outgoings. Or even just being a housewife/husband will improve the lives of the people you care about in more valuable and appreciated ways than anything you could do working at Amazon.
Now, I appreciate I'm in a lucky place to be able to do this, but if you've been able to work as an engineer in top engineering environments and this post is relevant to you, then you are already more than lucky enough to be able to walk away from those environments do things that are consciously useful and appreciated by other humans whom you value.
This is such a weird take - why do you have to personally use something for that to be useful? I could be at AWS working on their metering/billing system. I’d never use a billing system of that scale in personal life but that doesn’t mean it’s not a useful thing to build. And I think AWS as a whole is a very useful product for the world.
Working to make your home more efficient is not going to suddenly make anyone retire early. That’s the stupidest take I have heard. If you have some cool idea which makes home energy usage lower like a revolutionary heat pump, you should build your own company and sell that to everyone and scale up. You sound like a FatFIRE person that has quit professional life and is now trying to justify why sitting at home and helping your family members is a virtuous thing to do as opposed to working for some BigTech.
A lot of the danger with BigTech is just the fact they are very big and so have accrued a lot of power. A simple solution is to use the anti-trust laws to break them up into smaller entities. I don’t think the problem is the products/services they build.
We are over a decade into Big Tech already making everyone's lives miserable (the malicious wielding of social media is something even the mainstream knows about now). His alternative of not working for big tech is literally the only way out of this.
There is some nuance in what "not working for big tech" means though. The general gist is to not take work making tools that can foreseeably be used to hurt people and the social fabric at large. Reject "disruption." Don't take money to make your life worse. That sort of thing.
> His alternative of not working for big tech is literally the only way out of this.
This won't actually work though. The only reason we even have this discussion is because we're rich enough that pure survival isn't even really in our instinct anymore. Most of us haven't experienced actual hardship for years and we live in luxury.
There are plenty people in the world who are smart and poor and living tough lives, who are ready to replace people who quit because they have te luxury to quit. Just look at the huge amount of Indian people moving across the world to work in tech. These people aren't going to let the opportunity to significantly improve their lives go because they're going to work on software that might negatively impact society at some point. You could see this exact thing happen when Elon took over Twitter. Many people left because they disagreed with Elon, while many H-1B stuck around because they (and their families) actually had something to lose.
I don't think many of us on HN realize how incredibly spoiled we are with the lives we live.
Honest question, if large portions of labor are automated or marginalized who ultimately buys the goods and services that companies produce? Markets depend on consumers having purchasing power. It seems economically rational to keep the average worker making just enough to afford goods and services over the long term.
We can see this logic reflected at times in business history. Ford paid workers double the daily wage so they could afford the cars they built and Costco pays employees 50% more than Walmart. They're not doing these things out of the goodness of their heart but out of greed to increase long term profits.
> Honest question, if large portions of labor are automated or marginalized who ultimately buys the goods and services that companies produce?
Once the robots, energy, and weapons all belong to the same small group, that group no longer needs to sell anything to anyone. Production continues, but only for themselves and their enclosed system. The rest of humanity becomes a surplus population that can simply be allowed to die off.
In other words: the economy you’re worried about preserving is already obsolete the moment the owners of the machines no longer require wage slaves or consumers to keep the system running. At that point, mass demand is no longer a feature, it’s a bug that gets patched out.
Prices don't represent anything absolute, they just capture the cost of reallocating a marginal number of goods to produce this particular thing instead of some other thing.
If there is so much of something that everyone can have one, effectively prices would drop until everyone could afford one. Like how even homeless people can afford air, because there is so much of it that there is no point charging people for access. Or YouTube they just let anyone watch it because it is so cheap to push bytes out over the internet.
Removing humans from the production process would, in theory, be similar. There is a certain amount that gets produced and we come up with some way to allocate it. Prices and wages adjust to that reality.
> We can see this logic reflected at times in business history. Ford paid workers double the daily wage so they could afford the cars they built...
That just so story is probably a lie. The math wouldn't work out and Ford would know it - he was just competing with other companies for labour. It is like programmers getting paid huge amounts - it isn't because the companies think it helps them because of some vague circular logic about what happens in the broader market. They just need the skills, now.
> who ultimately buys the goods and services that companies produce?
The only goods that will be produced will be the one that machines will need for their survival or for whatever unfathomable goals they will have. Human goods will only be produced as long as human labour still has some value.
The problem is companies are increasingly looking at the economy as someone else’s problem. And that results in a race to the bottom as each business sees what the other does and then makes the same cuts to improve their own margins too.
What we’ve also seen in recent decades is a massive shift to people borrowing money to pay for luxury goods. This means that businesses can still continue to tank the economy because their profits are propped up by other people’s debts.
And in fairness, it’s not just consumer goods that are sold this way either. Entire businesses are run on borrowed money and suppressed wages with the hope that they win the “business lottery” and receive a massive buyout. Often they’re deliberately selling their products below cost price to boost their client portfolio and thus making it entirely uneconomical for normal businesses to compete on price.
And then we wonder why the economy is so volatile. The whole thing is held together by gum and prayers and the only people benefiting are those who are already wealthy.
If you ask the authors of sci-fi dystopias: the corporations owning the means of production will get taxed just enough to keep their masses from starving, the aspirational 14% will ake whatever resources they have to buy shares of this coporation and get a slightly bigfer share of the pie, and subgroups on the elites will be giving perpetual checks on each other, attempting to take full control of the mountain top but never quite successfully doing it.
> who ultimately buys the goods and services that companies produce?
You don’t need anyone to buy them if you already have all the capital. You sell good and services to make more capital, but if you’ve got enough capital to provide all your needs, you don’t need anyone buyers.
I think it's pretty clear that if automation gets to the point where machines can do the difficult tasks, like repairing a sewer or managing a farm, then the entire human workforce is no longer needed.
It's difficult to see where it might head that doesn't lead to population collapse and some form of dystopia.
This is a real threat that is not discussed enough. If labor could be completely automated, then the value and political power of workers tends to zero.
capitalism has always moved in the direction of automation, yielding booming progress and prosperity for much of mankind. the technological comforts we have today far exceed those of a thousand years ago, no one can dispute. but at some point, if there are no more jobs due to "full automation" then the promise of capitalism bringing most people out of poverty will start to fall short. it's a real question, what do we do then? short of adapting, as we always have, i don't see any viable alternatives. OP recommending not playing at all is peak derangement divorced from reality imo
I don't see any alternatives until AI or technology can solve Cancer, or Heart disease or the major causes of death we have now.
My point being is that modern capitalist society has brought all the technology innovation we see today including the best medical technology/care we've ever had.
I feel like the people who post this sentiment have never done any plumbing, electrical wiring or really just any sort of actual creative manual labor.
Show me the robot that can plumb a new sink in, or brick up an old doorway... Because I'd really like to buy it, those things are hard and time consuming!
Smaller tools might be better, humanoid robots can HELP with this but it will still be a tool that we command.
I just fixed a leaking sprinkler, would love to have had a humanoid help me dig the hole, help me turn on/off the shutoff, cut the pipe, glue it back, etc...
Maybe the real maker economy will be the future underclass building makeshift infrastructure to support a subsistence lifestyle in small post capital communities off the grid once big capital no longer feels the need to maintain a consumer economy at any scale.
I don't know what the future holds, but owning a few acres in rural nowhere and knowing how to build stuff gives me a sense of security.
Someone needs to find a way to turn dirt into a 3d printing material.
It is, on hacker news, easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism it seems.
This is echoing a term made by Varoufakis about an increasing amount of money being held by a smaller and smaller group, not a return to literal peasant existence. It’s not feudalism, it’s ‘neo-feudalism’.
The argument that labour can move is true, except where it can’t. Look at the entire towns of miners made irrelevant with no replacement to their jobs. Sure you might say they can move half way across the country to clean toilets but they have skills, a family and houses somewhere else.
Where the argument of a feudal analogy really rings true is the increasing attempt to do back to extraction of rent for everything. Subscriptions for everything, including homes are becoming more and more normal. Are we really okay with a world in this form?
> GPT$$$ is surely smart enough to separate you from whatever you have, [...] or lobbying your government to take it from you.
I find it quite interesting, and somewhat disturbing, that we've so quickly come to the point of seeing the AI power drivers as openly adversarial to people and deeply entangled with equally adversarial government forces.
But are we actually (and realistically) talking about technofeudalism in the next couple of decades?
Also, my p(doom) is 1.0-epsilon under the status quo without AGI/ASI, due to old age and disease. Under some assumptions, self-interest says that I may as well roll the dice.
Thanks for posting the article, it's really well written and worth reading! I think he raises some important points in the `“Possible” doesn’t mean “guaranteed”` section.
His argument is based on comparative advantage, and he says
"The key difference here is that everyone — every single person, every single AI, everyone — always has a comparative advantage at something!".
This is why everyone in the world has a job and a decent salary today, just as humanity will in the future(!!). In reality it is not like this, and he talks about some of the reasons for this in the above mentioned paragraph.
I also disagree massively with his discounting of the scenario where energy gets relocated to AI instead of food production. He paints that as unlikely, while I think it is almost inevitable. I don't necessarily think it will happen in one fell swoop with force, but it can definitely happen over a generation through pure market forces. The owners of AI just have more money, and will use this to buy energy. Cost of food will rise compared to the value of labour, aka cost of living will rise, and it will be harder and harder to sustain a family. Since we somehow think that taxing wealth is absurd, we will keep taxing labour.
It seems to me that he tries to wave away the fact that if AI becomes much more productive than humans in everything, then economy predicts that it will be allocated the energy, not humans. And he waves this away with 'politics will save us', which I find unlikely.
I have a much better solution: make a mission to tell everybody around you to stop consuming and stop frying their brains. But be mindful they are addicts so they will say you are mean, ugly, stupid, boring, etc. Keep at it and don't negotiate down. Remind them you gain nothing from this and you care for their wellbeing. Eventually most of them come around.
I get the feeling behind the anti-AI sentiment, I just disagree with the conclusions.
There’s a lot of fear around what will happen with AI, not so much of extinction but rather of two things: fear of losing income, and arguably more importantly, fear of losing identity.
People often are invested in what they do to the point that it’s who they are. That being replaced or eliminated might be a bigger psychological threat than lack of income, at least to those of us fortunate enough to be well off right now.
However, these threats are outweighed by the benefits that AI can eventually bring. Medical advances, power generation, manufacturing capability. Our systems for running society have a lot of problems, economically, politically, epistemologically. These can also be improved with AI assistance.
The real problem is the transition, it’s such a huge shift, and it will happen all at once to everyone, uprooting our idea of the world and our place in it.
What we need is to embrace AI and find a way to make sure that the transition and benefits of AI are distributed instead of concentrated.
For me this looks like the following: companies must commit to retaining some minimum number of employees in every currently existing function, to be determined proportional to their profit taking. This sets a floor on the job losses that can come later when AI really comes on stream.
The justification for this is three fold: firstly, it’s a safety mechanism, it ensures that regardless of the capabilities of an AI system, there are multiple humans working with it to verify its results. If they aren’t verifying diligently, then they’re not doing their jobs.
Secondly, jobs aren’t just a way of making income, they’re wrapped up in identity and meaning for at least some people, and this helps to maintain that existing identity structure across a meaningful cross section of society.
Third, it keeps the economy running, money circulating. You can’t have a market economy without consumers. UBI is one component of this too, but this is both more direct, more useful and more meaningful.
> However, these threats are outweighed by the benefits that AI can eventually bring. Medical advances, power generation, manufacturing capability. Our systems for running society have a lot of problems, economically, politically, epistemologically. These can also be improved with AI assistance.
Benefits come to those who have the means to access it, and wealth is a measure of the ability to direct and influence human effort and society.
How exactly do you propose that AI will serve the wellbeing of the worker/middle classes after they've been made obsolete by it?
Goodwill of the corporations working on them? Of their shareholders, well-known to always put welfare first and profit second? Government action increasingly directed by their lobbying?
> What we need is to embrace AI and find a way to make sure that the transition and benefits of AI are distributed instead of concentrated.
Sure. How? We've not done it with any other technological advances so far, and I don't see how shifting the power balance further away from the worker/middle class will help matters.
There's a reason why the era of techno-optimism has already faded as quickly as it's begun.
Of course, and distribution and ownership of benefits is the real issue here, but I think I’ve addressed that.
Let me be clearer: I said “companies must commit to” where the stronger phrasing is “companies are forced to by legislation”. But to begin with this might be voluntarily done by some number of companies.
Also, in this vision of society the AI companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, google etc) are taxed heavily. The taxation is redistributed, there is UBI for some fraction of the population, maybe the majority. Others still work in companies mandated to keep employees as I outlined above.
Importantly, we as a society specifically aim to bring about these benefits of AI by using the redistributed funds in part to invest in them.
Part of this is the free market, part is planned government investment. If one fails, maybe the other succeeds. Either way, we try to spread the benefits and importantly to ensure the benefits are actually there in the first place.
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.
Yes, the ability to command a kingdom was relative to the number of people with force you could convince AND pay to be on your side vs the others. With automation, drones and AI, you no longer need any convincing just capital.
> Such situations usually correct themselves violently.
Historically, they did because everyone's capacity for violence was equal.
What about now that the best the average person can do is a firearm against coordinated, organized military with armoured vehicles, advanced weaponry, drones, and sooner than later, full access to mass surveillance?
Also, how will a revolution happen once somebody trains a ML model end-to-end to identify desire for revolution from your search and chat history and communication with like-minded others?
Assuming the intent isn't prevented altogether through algorithmic feeds showing only content that makes it seem less attractive.
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
You could also argue in the other direction: capital is never going to be the only thing separating one set of individuals from another, because we sure like to keep finding ways to label ourselves different: ethinicity, religion, political ideology, sex preferences, eye color...
Then again, maybe this is why Brazil finds itself in this steady state of economic inequality and endemic violence but without critical mass for a civil war: the same diversity that makes Brazilians apt at navigating conflicts is what makes us incapable at finding a common enemy and building an united front?
I would recommend moving to a country that is less susceptible to this threat.
I left the UK for this reason and live very comfortably on around £15k. I rent a city centre flat with 600 megabit fibre and really good amenities. I have time and space to build what I want.
"Give me the place to stand, and I shall move the earth." - Archimedes.
Unfortunately in the UK it's really hard to survive, let alone actually have time to do anything meaningful. I don't know if it's engineered by big tech/property/finance or some other demon. Maybe the monster in qntm's "There is no Anitmemetics Division" is allegorical.
Malaysia. It's not going to be cheap for long here though, they're really positioning themselves as a tech hub and I think they'll do well.
Utilities are particularly cheap here, I pay around £10 per month for water and electricity. Many working people live on around RM3000 or about £550 a month here.
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.
I think I get the gist of the moral of this story. But I'm not sure I'm fully agreeing with the specifics.
The nub is something I've thought about before. My contingency plan for AI turning the industry I work in upside down is to make hay while the sun shines before that point. Have enough saved or invested for a (lean) retirement (depending on how far away that point is).
But what if AI turns every industry upside down. Will there be enough overall economic activity to actually invest in at all. Then we're all poor regardless of how much we've individually saved, or what kind of social safety net exists, simply because there's not enough economic activity to fund it.
That is, at the moment, and I hope forever, a very remote possibility. For a whole host of reasons, technological and economic ones. But if that did happen in the next 20-30 years...
I don't have enough time to explain the many reasons why that post is wrong, but some of them are:
- "In the future, when labor is fully marginalized..." Hasn't happened in the history of the world, not going to happen in the future either. Some forms of labor were replaced by machines, which then gave rise to new types of jobs, such as building and maintaining the machines. The human cost cannot be neglected, because many people do find it difficult to retrain to other jobs. But on the whole, there are more jobs and higher-paying jobs now than there were a hundred years ago. Higher-paying not just in absolute financial terms, but also in terms of what can be purchased with that money. The richest man of the 19th century couldn't buy an air-conditioned house, not with all his millions.
- "GPT$$$ is surely smart enough to separate you from whatever you have..." Assumes an unbounded growth curve in the "smarts" of AI, and worse than that, assumes that that AI will take the form of an LLM. This is laughable. LLMs will not ever achieve AGI; they are simply not capable of it. If AGI is achievable at all (which I doubt), it will come from one of the currently-neglected avenues of research whose funding is currently being neglected because LLMs are sucking all the metaphorical oxygen out of the room.
- "the neofeudal world": assumes that all companies are like that. Yes, there are many companies that suck to work for because they treat their workers as mere cogs in a machine, instead of as human beings. But not all companies operate that way. If you are being treated as a cog in a machine, start looking for opportunities to jump ship to a better working environment. I've worked in both types of places, and I would be willing to take a big pay cut to work for company that didn't treat me as a cog. They're out there, but it might take some looking. Tip: ask employees what it's like working for the comapny, don't just take the interviewers' word at face value.
Markets needs regulation to keep them open. Monopolists understand that and thus they buy policy and sponsor narratives in order to abolish market regulation, or reach a "rules for thee, but not for me", or prevent incumbents from entering the market by means of Regulatory Capture. But capitalism needs competition. So they slowly kill their own lands, and thus they need to cross borders to keep eating.
If one feels morally compelled to pay with their own income to stop these parasites, hats of to them. It is nasty that people are being put in this position. They need support from a society. Society needs information and debate about real issues, which requires them to be free from the barrage of falsehoods and yellow journalism. And possible it would help to have a Roosevelt, but culture is the biggest hindrance to change.
Tech needs to learn about collective action problems. Are any of geohot's shops unionized? Has he done any political work or advocacy? What I want to read is "geohot donates $5m to CWA", not some insipid, entirely useless blog post effectively calling me a coward, while its author does nothing.
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.
I agree with OP, who to my mind hasn't said the so-called critique is invalid or that he's not allowed to have an opinion. Isn't the comment along the lines of "well, what have you actually tried to do? You have resources, standing, kairos, etc." Seems one of the more perceptive critiques on here.
"The people who are leading the AI revolution, 'the tech titans', many of them are thinking in a way which is really alien to most of the people on the planet. People sometimes think 'Oh, these tech titans, they want money. They want power.' They want something far more ambitious than money or power. They want to change the course of the evolution of life and even of the evolution of the cosmos. In the minds of some of them, sometime in the future, millions, billions of years in the future, when they write the history of the universe, it will be like: 'Okay, the Big Bang - 14 billions years ago, 10 billion years later - the emergence of life on earth, the only life we know about so far in the universe, 4 billion years later - Elon Musk and the beginning of AI'. This is the timeline they have.”
What happened in the last three weeks to radicalize Mr. "Trump's an ok president, all you haters are just political performers. Apropos of nothing, here is a political performance"
> Have you considered not participating? If you participate, we all lose. We will either all be in the underclass together or not.
This has been suggested a bunch of times in the comments of HN as well as on other social media, but what exactly would that look like?
As this seems like the ultimate prisoner dilemma and the winning solution there is always be first to make a deal, even if we accept the premise of AI turning us all into an underclass (a prediction often made with revolutionary technology I might add).
This is incredibly naive. Not participating is not the solution, unless everybody stops participating at the same time. If only you stop participating, you will be marginalized now instead of later. It's a prisoner's dilemma, only against billions of people.
There are many things that can happen before we're all enslaved by AGI. It might well not happen. We might enter a war, or a cycle of civil wars that change society in a way we can't predict. Or, most probably, some jobs will disappear, some others will become available and AI will be a commodity. Just as machines did after the Industrial Revolution.
It's extremely hard predicting the future. Telling people to "stop participating" (how? By quitting their job? By fighting the class war?) is a bit irresponsible.
I couldn't disagree more. Throughout history, higher productivity leads to a higher quality of life for everyone.
Yes, the transition can be painful and some people will lose out and face hard career changes.
But overall, the multiplicative power of investment only increases, helping to make everything cheaper, and everyone richer.
People focus too much on their own small part of experience - like Claude Code replacing CRUD developers. Without appreciating that the LLM revolution (and broader AI like AlphaFold) also includes PhD students that don't need to lose time programming tooling, interns that might have spent their time on tooling that can now use LLMs to learn faster and actually contribute to their fields, disadvantaged students that can learn more directly and in a personal way, without it being dependent on their physical location.
All of this means you get more experimentation, more ideas, and more successes.
You're wrong. Sharing the fruits of labor and greater social cohesion are what lead to greater quality of life. Greater productivity leads to increased wealth among the owning class, but historically that wealth only reached the masses after hard, usually physically violent, conflict between the haves and havenots.
I noticed an interesting pattern. People who “made it” usually by working high paying jobs for the neofeudal lords, suddenly gain moral compass and tell the rest of us to not work for said neofeudal lords, because “money is not important”, and apparently you can buy a place to live or food to feed your family simply by having principles.
I agree with your point, and superficially OP is a prime example.
Not to excuse the guy, but I think that, looking deeper, the situation with geohot is more involved. He grew up in a lower-middle-class household and was lucky to be a smart kid in a time when being a nerd could be a ticket out.
I guess not unlike many of us here on HN.
Unlike many of us, his explorations in the corporate world were all short stints. If I’ve kept tabs correctly, he never stayed longer than a year. Sometimes only for weeks.
Apart from that, I often take the pattern you noticed more as confession, penance, and a "tell your children not to walk my way" kind of message. Maybe I read this stuff too generously.
Sure, self awareness is important. When you tell your kids not to walk your way, you take accountability. You say that what you did was bad, and you are accountable for it. You also acknowledge that what you did brought you to where you are, but given the chance you would take a different way. It’s not bad to have moral principles after you’ve done what you fight against, as long as you do it with accountability and self awareness.
“Opt out of capitalism” doesn’t work when you’re trying to feed your family. He offers no alternative, speaks from a place of safety with no acknowledgment that the people he’s addressing don’t have the same safety net as he does.[0]
He’s not wrong. We are all fucked. But if it were as simple as “not participating” (whatever that means), then we wouldn’t be.
[0]: to be fair he does address others at tech companies, maybe he assumes that everyone working in big tech has a safety net, which is perhaps not as unreasonable as I first thought.
that's why they are also more egocentric, racist, etc. When people do not feel the threat of society it is easier to have opinions that verge out of the norm or could restrict further employment (and also opinions that are wrongfully or rightfully policed in society)
Probably not a popular opinion but this is why capitalism works. We all work to compete for what is best for US and our Family, not what someone tells us to work on because they think they know whats better, they don't.
traveling more would inspire one to think positively of capitalism, rather than the reverse. to quote andrew carnegie roughly, the status quo has always been misery for everyone, and just recently have we begun to extricate ourselves from it. not to mention that it is sheer derangement of luxury to have plenty of funding for one's own family, and yet vocally dissuade others from taking the same steps, for some "end game theoretical" that certainly won't arrive in single digit generations
a) On such a topic I would trust someone who has worked there even more than someone who only experienced how these companies work from the outside.
b) I'd argue that decentralization of power and knowledge has always been a main driver for George Hotz¹²³ and possibly a reason why he is no longer at Facebook, Google, Twitter.
He worked for Facebook for less than a year back when Zuck had just been Time Person of the Year, Google before it dropped the "Don't be evil" motto and code of conduct, that really only leaves his time as Twitter as a "what were you thinking?" because it was after Musk bought it… compensated for somewhat by him leaving it quickly.
Even with the poor judgement to join Musk's twitter at all, he left a few weeks after joining, soon after ChatGPT was released. Before ChatGPT, the idea that the singularity was anywhere near was utterly fringe: tech version of all the new-age stuff, I think Charlie Stross described it as "Rapture for atheists" or something like that.
It's now… well, a lot of people with a lot of power are trying to *make it* be the singularity. I still don't think this is "it", despite how useful I find what we do have, but of the top 10 valued companies by market cap in Q4 last year, 9 are chasing it, the money is definitely interested, in a way it just wasn't when he worked at those places.
I'd just like to add three things to the conversation:
1) Instead of LLMs, imagine large models trained end-to-end on ALL online content and the impact it has on public opinion and discourse. What about when everything is an algorithmic feed controlled by such a model under the control of the elite? You might be resistant(but probably aren't), but in aggregate this will be effective mind control over society.
2) Money directs human effort. Every quantum of bargaining power the worker/middle class lose due to being less needed is the reduction in our ability to have a say in who society should serve and how.
3) Don't forget regulatory capture is a thing. Not just a thing but happening as we speak. Are you still optimistic?
4) Tech is already addicting and ads are already everywhere even without technology that has a theory of mind.
5) Do not forget that humans are social creatures, power over others is not just an accidental byproduct of wealth. Once you're unnecessary for labor, what's left? Fulfilling sexual/emotional/social whims of the wealthy elite? Hunger games? Being a pet in a billionaire's human zoo city so he can brag about his contributions to humanity?
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.
George Hotz’s post-capitalist decoherence wasn’t in my 2026 bingo card.
I wonder if he came up with this view before or after working for big tech in different capacities and using Gmail.
He’s not wrong though, but he’s in a weird position to say that. Also, this post isn’t constructive in any possible way.
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, no "technofeudalism." The economic base is still defined by the exchange of commodities, its just that the US does not produce many industrial goods anymore, so the US economy is mostly a service based economy. Chinese citizens do not experience their lifeworld in terms of service based industries, they are surrounded by mass markets and complex factories and very material evidence of mechanization which we often do not see directly in the West, only the end product. So to many Americans it feels like they live in a magical society where they click some keys on their laptop and food and clothes and whatever they need shows up on their doorstep--but there are real workers out there tooling all the machines and developing all the architecture to make those things appear, to reduce the basic struggles of life to give time for greater and more advanced forms of social organization beyond the need to survive.
This is not what peasants had; for them, despite having a relatively complex existence, a bad season could and often would kill their entire family. Or a raiding band would take all their food, or they'd die of the plague...life was far more tenuous, and the basic made of production was not commodity production, it was growing food and animal husbandry. International trade, artisanal crafts, and capital improvements on industrial production were nowhere near the level they were in even the early modern period. Nothing about our contemporary society resembles this way of living.
Addendum: The claim that somehow everyone in tech could just "stop," like consciously decide to stop creating things, is absurd. Amazon is very good at what it does, but it does not have exclusive control over the trade of all goods in the whole world. Rakuten is a major competitor in Japan, there are many other companies that have strong holds in their local markets. You take a Bolt in Germany, not an Uber. Chinese users can query DeepSeek, which is surely more proficient in Mandarin than ChatGPT. Even if a state uses its sovereign power to artificially control industry, it only slows the development of capital, since other states may allow their own companies and technologies to flourish, like China is doing now with its electric vehicles. If Amazon does not meet its projections, it fails, its employees all lose their jobs, Jeff Bezos might even go bankrupt. There is a constant pressure of competition.
As a worker, your goal should not be to arbitrarily stop working--you may not enrich others but you certainly won't be enriching yourself either. The goal should be to capture far more wealth that is the result of your labor. This is only possible through labor organizing, which does not permanently cease the means of production, it only takes control of them. But business continues and people still produce things and do services and enjoy the wealth of those things and services. One should basically desire to live in a wealthy, prosperous society. This article does nothing but ask workers to go into voluntary poverty; it is reactionary and backwards.
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?
This is completely false. The owners of big tech must pay capitalists like the owners of TSMC to produce the chips to power their services. Just because we don't produce the chips in the US does not mean that there isn't a distinct commodity producing class.
I guess they are, but that isn't material to the discussion, since they are selling goods not services, thus they don't extract "rents," unless anything that someone buys for some purpose is a "rent"; in that case, the super market is charging me "rents" to purchase their food so I can have it in my fridge.
I think your argument is just a bunch of pedantry but OK: Western Electric produced commodities for the Bell system. So did a lot of other companies, selling into a market that was functionally a monopsony.
Yet the fact that this was necessary is tangential, the Bell system didn't exist to sell switches or phones. The phone network monopoly was AT&T's fief, the rent was the phone bill everyone had to pay!
If you aren't AMD, nVidia, Google, or Apple how much luck do you think you'll have putting in an order to TSMC for 2nm? Or Samsung? Or Micron? Or Hynix?
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 flexible and less impressionable than most people think (I mean, some people think it's the other way as well and they might be right in some situations)
I partly agree, but where this analogy breaks down, and what the neofeudal rulers are too shortsighted to realize, is that if lower classes don't have income to spend, there will be nobody to buy their products, and the entire economy collapses. Proposals to address this like UBI are a pipe dream.
The idea is that neofeudal lords would own fully automated systems to produce everything they need. They wouldn't need to make stuff to sell to us at all, they could just pursue their own goals. We would be irrelevant to them, other than a nuisance if we tried to get some of their resources for ourselves.
Imagine if you owned a million humanoid robots and a data center with your own super-intelligence. Would you produce doodads to sell to people? Or would you build your own rockets to mine asteroids, fortresses and weapons systems to protect yourself, and palaces for you to live in?
I don't agree that this is where we are headed, but that is the idea. Thinking about this in relation to our current economy is missing the point.
Aha, so late-game Factorio. It's a nice fantasy, but I don't think that the rest of humanity will stand by and allow the entire system to function autonomously. It's more likely that heads will roll far before such system is in place.
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 capital accumulation instead of transforming it.
Middle class status anxiety manifesting as a rhetoric about neofeudalism.
I don't know about your labor, but as far as my labor goes, there are basically only three things I am capable of doing: manual labor with my hands and legs, mental labor with my mind, and selling personal charm with my handsome face.
If you can perform all the same jobs I can for a penny a day, and food and rent cost a dollar a day, I'll have a hard time earning enough to remain fed and housed.
Until now, I've always been competing against other flesh-and-blood humans who needed to eat and pay rent, so I've never had to worry about the labor price floor too much.
Even though the three categories you describe include niches like museum attraction or vehicle piloting in legal niches that still respect humans, a little creativity expands your options for post-ASI work:
1: verbal/literary labour with your vocal cords, or the use of an output tool, to playback existing works in environments where mechanical methods are disallowed,
2: aesthetic labour through precise recreations of other's mental labour in the performing arts,
3: legal labour in acting as an agent to help or hinder existing legal processes in systems that give humans standing,
4: biological labour as a substrate for growing certain transplantable products,
5: smuggling labour (either non-invasive or surgically invasive),
6: political labour to incrementally sway electoral results in any polity where you are still enfranchised,
7: security labour as a canary for infohazards (such as 'diplomat' programs produced by another ASI) inside of a quarantined environment,
8: frontman work as a deniable patsy to enable economic forgery, deception, revenge or warfare by a patron ASI, possibly without your knowledge.
There are plenty of ways to gain some currency token that can pay for your negentropy upkeep costs.
I had to get to 4 to realize this is sarcasm
Sometimes the easiest method of communicating something is the best one. That said, every one of these jobs has had multiple historical examples of humans giving paid employment to other humans for them, even #7.
> Until now, I've always been competing against other flesh-and-blood humans
Unless you're a few centuries old, you haven't. You've had the potential to be competing agaist industrial and computational technology your whole life. Go back further, and the prevalence of slaves served as a similar cost differential (free humans versus enslaved, human versus AI).
Yes, and even in prehistoric eras people could attempt to compete with the wind at blowing air, but I've restricted my above description of "labor" to activities in which I was not already outcompeted to the point where I couldn't hope to make a living. So I've written off the once-profitable career of "calculator" from the get-go.
Slaves at least still need to be fed and housed, but I'm sure they were tough competition indeed for independent laborers.
> 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 need to be fed and housed, but I'm sure they were tough competition indeed for independent laborers
I believe there is evidence for this all over the place. By analogy, however, AI is orders of magnitude less power efficient than humans. This places a floor on the price of AI and thus human labour that competes with it. (Though that floor, as with pre-information age floors, is well below almost everyone on this forum.)
> By analogy, however, AI is orders of magnitude less power efficient than humans.
It is both more and less power efficient, depending on the task. When a coding task is easy enough that an LLM can actually do it, I've seen e.g. Claude do a week's worth of human labour in a few hours of wall-clock time for what amounted to 0.25 euro of subscription cost. When it can't, it will churn as many tokens as you've got and leave a big ball of mud behind, as seen with the recent attempt at a vibe-coded browser.
When Stable Diffusion is good enough, the energy cost per image output is comparable to the calorific consumption of a human living long enough to type the prompt. When Stable Diffusion isn't good enough, no amount of re-prompting gets you something it can't do.
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.
> It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises.
We’re nowhere near it, but there is a point at which the marginal utility of laborers is worth less than the security risk the laborers represent by continuing to exist. This is already happening with a lot of manufacturing and resource extraction.
> 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 capital accumulation instead of transforming it.
What if I consider the labor conditions that exist after this transformation to be undignified?
Interesting comments. Thanks. A long time ago I worked for DeBeers diamond and gold mining in South Africa and Namibia as a Microsoft systems engineer out in the desert. These days I’m a cybersecurity expert. Given that context, these are excellent points.
And it isn't like people can't do still everything they could do yesterday. There are just more and better options. Economically AI is no particular threat to the median human and even knowledge workers are still going to have fine lives. Maybe not as knowledge workers.
The real risk here is the military implications of pairing AI and robots. If the army doesn't need lots of people then there is a real problem. But robotics will take a long time to get there even in an optimistic case. Labour will still have value for a long time to come.
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 those move very quickly these days.
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 very inefficient weaver can still afford food. 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. Although there might still be something better to put your time towards. I recommend managing your own capital - maybe even building it and maintaining it yourself - but people seem dead set against the idea for some reason.
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.
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 labor is cheap and regulatory compliance is negligible.
So you go after high-income earners who are not concerned with price, but this requires proximity, networking, and then on-going relationship management with a much smaller group of people who are all much more likely to talk to each other.
Effectively, this is the problem the grandparent comment outlined with extra steps; it isn’t your labor by itself that is uniquely valuable, it is your relationship with buyers, and those relationships can sour. Vendors who signed on with Walmart experienced something similar where they began scaling to meet demand only to find themselves completely reliant on Walmart’s orders to service their loans. Walmart was then free to dictate the terms of the relationship. This is a very familiar dynamic in societies that never successfully divorced themselves from feudal ideas (e.g. Most of South Asia, parts of South America).
> 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 a better option now than it ever was in the past. Today is the best day in history to be a weaver, even for those that do it by hand. A weaver in the 1700s would weep tears of joy at the opportunity to weave things by hand today at market rates. 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".
> 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.
There were plenty of craftsmen who lived lifestyles that were acceptable for the time periods they were living in. From around 1400, to around the early 1900s, European settlements consisting of more than a few hundred people would have had blacksmiths, cobblers, tailors, furniture makers, and various other craftsmen. It wasn’t until the late 19th century that this arrangement started to be replaced by the economies of scale made possible by the factory system.
> A weaver in the 1700s would weep tears of joy at the opportunity to weave things by hand today at market rates.
The idea that a medieval peasant would be envious of our standard of living is doing nothing to further the point you are trying to make.
People are social beings. I could live a life which is (vastly) better than people in 1930 or 1960 by doing the most menial work. The problem is that if most of society wouldn't, I'd be seen as a paria. If I didn't have a partner it would be extremely difficult to find one, children would be bullied at their school.
I actually did very menial work in a food processing plant while still in education, I'm not better than the people working there but I'm different from them in interests and in upbringing (even though I didn't come from wealth, the people I studied with, shared hobbies with did). I wasn't able to discuss the things I read with these people and they weren't able to talk about their interests. I believe if I had to work there for years or decades it would lead to dysfunction.
> 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.
This is one of those cases where it's really important to remember the assumptions built into comparative advantage theory, such as "no mobility of labor". If the Green-country people are more productive at all tasks than the Blue-country people, they can still both profit from trade with each other. But that does not represent the maximum productivity allocation of resources. Output can be increased still further by the Green people replacing the population of the Blue-country with more Green people, in which scenario the optimal resource allocation to sustaining the Blue people is unfortunately zero.
This is why the population of labor animals plummeted in the 20th century. And to put it plainly, it means that there's no guarantee you can always sell labor for enough to keep your home from getting paved over for a data center.
> 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:
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.
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.
Sure, I don't know why anyone would want to hand-weave cloth in this era of miracles where a machine can do it for you faster and better. It looks like hard work and it is technically a waste of time. But, hypothetically, if there was a portion of society that for some mad reason can't get access to machine-made cloth they can still weave their own.
And the fact is, for those souls who are motivated to do so, they can make a living hand-weaving anyway and do not need to weave 3,000x faster. They weave at a similar pace to that people always have. They can still afford bread. Society will almost give bread away to people, it is absurdly cheap.
Bread is only cheap on account of mechanization. Before technological innovations bread was often paid in wages, like those of the workers who built the pyramids.
> you'll simply have to do it three thousand times faster than your ancestors did to exchange that labor for a loaf of bread
Who's to say that a loaf of bread will be that much more valuable? You acknowledge that bread is cheaper than it used to be, but baselessly assert that an automatic loom will accentuate the value differential rather than lessen or maintain it with the innovations in bread making.
> 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 solely because they have very little better choice.
Furthermore, this power inequality directly translates to influence over economic output of our civilization - by the time value of human menial or cognitive labor goes low enough to delete jobs, all that will be left will be various equivalents of being a sugar baby for the rich - fulfilling their emotional, sexual, and social needs. Not even art, because that's among the things gen AI is displacing the most effectively.
> Middle class status anxiety manifesting as a rhetoric about neofeudalism.
The middle class is a tiny, tiny fraction of the population nowadays. Even among those working high-earning jobs like tech/healthcare/finance, most are just upper worker class.
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 bargaining power. It would take far more severe shocks to the system to kill the possibility of revolution, and that whatever that would be would be bad for everyone.
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)
> Ridiculously high wages for jobs whose explicit purpose is to make human workers(including those partaking in those jobs) obsolete
I would say they are making the current cost of one's labor "obsolete". Most jobs are like this. If you work for yourself, you're trying to make the cost of your labor obsolete in place of cheaper work. If you work for a company, the company will be trying to make the cost of your labor obsolete in place of cheaper work. Any value captured in the arbitrage of product price and employee pay is seen as the value of management.
>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.
> 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
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.
> 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.
Use, yes. I find it on packaging, on billboards. "Massive" use? Not so clear, e.g. how much is this just a substitute for clip art and stock photography? I.e. stuff that was already low-value.
But even there, to the extent they get away with it, that's due to people like me who care about aesthetics.
To illustrate the difference:
Know what I don't care for? Der Kuss[0], the Mona Lisa[1], everything Van Gogh is famous for[2], likewise Pollock, Frida Kahlo, Monet, and Gauguin.
Know what's expensive? All of those things I don't care for.
> 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.
Peacock tails are, necessarily, expensive signals.
When there's a thousand indistinguishable replicas of the Mona Lisa, the original becomes worthless, the replicas don't gain value.
The effort is the point, it's the reason for the price. When an expensive thing becomes cheap, it stops being an expensive signal (and vice-versa).
[0] the woman's head looks like it's been severed, rotated 90°, her ear placed where the stump of her neck ought to be. Most of Klimt's other stuff is better.
[1] her smile is not "mysterious", it's just the resting face of someone who had to keep still for long enough to get painted
[2] the stuff he's not famous for is, IMO, generally better than the stuff he is famous for.
The originals of physical art pieces operate off the same logic that drives NFTs. As stupid as people think they are, they do show a modern drive for ownership of something with provenance.
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 the case, I'd 100% fuck that and look for alternative lifestyles.
> 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.
> joining a community in no small part comprised of crackpots
You don't think there's anyone who has similar values and reasons for joining as the OP?
> tanking your quality of life
That sounds very subjective based on what one values.
Let's say a truck driver's job gets fully automated by self-driving trucks. How will his labor reconstiture itself into something new? #learntocode? How about SW developers? What if the most capable model you need to use to stay competitive costs $10k a month so you're locked out?
> How will his labor reconstiture itself into something new?
That's for the job market to decide. It'll be whatever people still find valuable to do.
> What if the most capable model you need to use to stay competitive costs $10k a month so you're locked out?
What if a capable computer needed to stay competitive costs $10k? Or if all SW jobs turned remote and electricity costs for computers cost $10k? I think the problem with this line of thinking is there was no logical path to this happening that was presented. You're raising a problem of an unrealized conclusion without a solid premise.
> It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises.
In general, yes. For many groups, no.
It assumes that there is something of value for them to do and as shown by masses of long term unemployed in many areas, that is not always the case.
For example, people on the autism spectrum and with disabilities have persistently high unemployment. Because of various limitations, there is nothing for them to do in many cases. The market should have corrected this (especially over the long term) if reconstitution was consistently possible.
If AI makes all humans seem limited in a similar fashion, the idea of labour reconstitution falls apart.
There is also a large portion of the population on social assistance so while there are things they can do, the market value of what they can do is often well below their needs.
> For example, people on the autism spectrum and with disabilities have persistently high unemployment.
> If AI makes all humans seem limited in a similar fashion, the idea of labour reconstitution falls apart.
I think the problems here is you’re comparing a relative minority to “all humans”. Unfortunately, what affects a minority of society, inherently, has a small effect on society as a whole. If “all humans” now have no employment value because AI or automation can do it all, there will still be a cost to that production. Even if you assume the AI part is $0, the power needed or the raw materials becomes the main cost as opposed to labor. Then you need to have enough demand from those non-working non-wage-earning humans for whatever that AI is producing. Otherwise, what is the point of the production in the first place.
Maybe extreme automation would put the wealth gab on hyper drive. Only those handful who happen to own an automated production company can have any income. However, what do you imagine the final outcome of that would be in a democratic society? Like I know it’s fashionable to cry at the state of democracy, but despite the recent inflation and affordability crisis and income insecurity etc, we don’t have an “all humans” levels of unemployments. What do you think would happen if we automate, and subsequently fire, “all humans”?
Let’s assume AI will actually replace 99% of jobs eventually. Society will completely change at that time to adapt. What else is the point? Are AIs gonna be producing stuff for other AIs leisure?
The problem is that the road to there might be painful before society is forced to change to adapt. It won’t all happen at once so it’ll keep happening in waves and waves will be painful until they get better then another wave again. That’s assuming the prophecy of “all humans” labor is no longer needed.
Labour is not a single task, sure, but it's also a fallacy to say "labor is not a single task category that technology can delete".
Before I say why though, there's a lot of bad futures possible even with remote controlled humanoid robots whose only true AI are the basics, to keep themselves standing upright and to walk and run on command without falling over. All those people (even here on HN) who claim (to quote a recent exchange) "Every $1 taken by illegal workers is $1 stolen from Americans", how are they going to react to finding every minimum wage job in the US has been replaced with a Tesla Optimus whose "AI" is "actually Indians" thanks to a low-latency Starlink connection to Jodhpur? How do anti-authority protests (whether anti-ICE or anti-Iranian-government) work with any robots where the "AI" is smoke and mirrors of remote control? This is plenty enough for techno-feudalism, even without AI replacing all jobs.
But back to the original. As a proof of possibility that tech can, in fact, delete labour: Labour is made of atoms. We have always known, for as long as records show, how to make a bunch of atoms that can be forced to do labour for us, even though we have not understood the details of production until very recently. It's called "slavery", and the rules enforcing and maintaining slavery are encoded into the oldest laws we know of, and that text itself references older laws we've not yet been able to identify[0].
That just leaves a question: can technology also arrange atoms to solve arbitrary labour?
Yes, obviously we can physically do it, we're a species that rearranges them at every level, from disassembling mountains for ore, to re-engineering DNA and RNA for crops and medicine and making animations by moving around single atoms.
But that leads to a more precise question: can we learn what pattern we need to do this deliberately, and not with a 20 year delay from simply using our existing biology? There's a quote for that, too:
I consider intelligence to be the inverse of how many examples you need to learn something, by which standard all machine learning is very very stupid, and only makes up for it to an extend by being very very stupid very very quickly. Will we solve how to reduce that to only "very stupid", or even just "stupid"? Perhaps, perhaps not. Without improvements, machine learning systems will not take all our jobs, but may still make slaves of us for the reasons previously given, remote controlled robotics. Current ML approaches still have yet to solve for fully-general all-conditions self-driving even in the easy mode that is the USA, they need too many examples to take all our driving jobs despite millions of vehicles on the road gathering training data from the behaviour of all the vehicles they can observe.When you say:
> 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 capital accumulation instead of transforming it.
some sure fear that way, e.g. it sure was weird to see the exchange with Sen. Richard Blumenthal, and the response from Altman which is pretty close to what you're saying rather than "let me rephrase that, we're all going to die if we get this wrong":
- https://www.techpolicy.press/transcript-senate-judiciary-sub...Not that it takes much intelligence to become an existential threat: ML may only improve at the per-example rate of evolution, but evolution created covid and ebola and the black death and HIV.
But yeah, techno feudalism? All that needs is for Optimus' on-board AI to not fall over when told to walk and run, to keep its balance while holding heavy objects or wielding a nightstick or firing a gun.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Ur-Nammu
This post seems to be haphazardly proposing that big tech will inevitably make everyone's lives miserable. And by working for them, you are enabling this.
It offers no constructive alternative and the author (yes, I know who he is) seems to have no issue with Google hosting their email.
It's hard to take this too seriously (even if there is some legitimate worry here)
Big tech is making everyone's life miserable: social media, advertising, surveillance.
By working for them you are enabling this.
> 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 work from home.
None of the above was possible just 20 years ago. All of them are enabled by big tech and none of them is based on surveillance, ads or social media.
Yes there are drawbacks. I also find them bad to a point of threatening society. But we need to ack the positives, otherwise it's not an honest debate but only a mix of ranting and populist propaganda.
> 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 long.
As a child of the 80s, who lived 20 miles away from a city, I can tell you that my life was pretty much dark ages before I understood that driving was not just something parents did; I could also do that. And that there were people with similar interests as me at the end of that drive! Took 18 years.
Where did you grow up?
You lived closer to a city than I did but the UK doesn’t have insane zoning laws like the US so there was still plenty to do even in my small town.
I think you'll find that most of the texts you can access right now are not available at your local library.
Most of the texts that matter are. Yeah you’re not going to find some random flat earth blog in the library, but equally, that’s a good thing.
However, I wasn’t talking specifically about libraries. The web did still exist 20 years ago. Wikipedia is more than 20 years old. And newsgroups have been around much longer too.
The web was also mobile accessible for more than 20 years (WAP, for example, was introduced in 1999).
There were also phone numbers you could ring who could provide quick searches for information look up. People are most familiar with them in terms of telephone directory services (eg ring an operator to ask for the phone number of someone else) but there were other general knowledge services too. In fact I used one once when my bike chain broke, I walked to a local pay phone, and enquired how to put a chain back on.
Even know, there’s a plethora of information at local government information and audit offices, which isn’t available online. most of which is store on microfilm. A friend needed to visit one office recently to look at historic maps to trace the origins of a public right of way (which is a legal public footpath though farmland in the UK)
Like I said before, we weren’t living in the dark ages before smartphones came along.
And most of the texts you can access at the local library aren't even at that local library right now. Libraries are part of a humongous network. If you're willing to wait a few days, there's an avalanche of material that you definitely can't instantly find on the internet.
You could do all those things 10 if not 15 years ago, with maybe the exception of the last one - mainly driven by the onset of the COVID pandemic forcing people to think differently about things for a brief time - in a much less hostile climate. And big tech isn't even required for let alone the best implementation of all those things, it's merely situated itself as the default.
Even with the last one, "I enjoy being able to easily work from home", the reason "cottage industry" has that name is one of the pre-industrial-era modes of production: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putting-out_system#Cottage_ind...
> But we need to ack the positives, otherwise it's not an honest debate but only a mix of ranting and populist propaganda.
It's not ranting to not ack every positive if the negative clearly outweighs it. I would much rather live 20 years ago than live now without a job. Wouldn't you?
Alternatively suppose you get to keep your job. What percentage of the population being unemployed do you think would make it worse for you personally than going back 20 years. Because there is going to be more unemployment and it will affect your environment unless you have got a private island (some people do - some ai owners do)
None of the good things you described requires the existence of powerful private actors. The internet was created by public funded researchers, it is fundamentally decentralized. Wikipedia is a non-profit, video call could be p2p, etc.
You enjoy individual benefits and completely disregard the fact that electronics addiction and loneliness get worse year by year. You've been able to Google anything and chat with anyone back in 2010, all we've achieved since is making the average person spend 4-5h mindlessly doomscrolling on their phone and watching YouTube instead of having meaningful social interaction.
Also, we've got an entire generation growing up on ads, algorithmic brainrot, and now ai slop.
You're also forgetting algorithmic price fixing, algorithmic pricing, the billions in R&D into making internet platforms and services more addicting and effective at siphoning out your money, etc.
Did you mean 30 years ago?
> All of them are enabled by big tech
That's not true. All of the examples you mentioned are possible without Big Tech. There are F/LOSS and community supported alternatives for all of them. Big Tech might've contributed to parts of the technology that make these alternatives possible, but that could've been done by anyone else, and they are certainly not required to keep the technology functional today.
Relying on Big Tech is a personal choice. None of these companies are essential to humanity.
> none of them is based on surveillance, ads or social media.
That's not true either. All Alphabet and Meta products are tied to and supported in some way by advertising. All of these companies were/are part of government surveillance programs.
So you're highly overestimating the value of Big Tech, and highly underestimating the negative effects they've had, have, and will continue to have on humanity.
>Big Tech might've contributed to parts of the technology that make these alternatives possible, but that could've been done by anyone else, and they are certainly not required to keep the technology functional today.
Not only that, but big tech proprietary products have depended and depend heavily on F/LOSS and community supported code.
> none of them is based on surveillance, ads or social media.
Literally all of them are.
people let others choose for them and allot others to make them let their own lives be miserable.
you can simply not use any of that shit and it litteraly doesnt kill you. theres tons and tons of people who dont use social media nor any of this tech stuff as seriously as you do.
if this is how you feel its time for a detox. go outside. into the woods or something. anything to learn that your phone and pc is not your life and Elon Musk is not your (wanted or unwanted) master.
you choose who and what control your life. chose wisely. chose yourself
In most countries living in the woods on your own isn't allowed. You're forced to be connected if you want a job, social life, not be seen as a crazy person. You pretend like we're all living on some island where everything is merely decided by what you as an individual do.
In my home country several old people had to close their shop as they were forced to move to a digital accounting system, they didn't have a choice. My bank only allows me to go to their office without an appointment 1 day a week (maybe not even). My grandpa who doesn't have a phone (he never even got a landline), doesn't have internet and barely even drives, he has to depend on others to call and make appointments. If you want to apply for a job, you need internet connection. Many won't even hire you without owning a car (even if you could perfectly commute with a bicycle or public transport).
If you think we're at the end of this 'evolution', we're just getting started. My grandpa could perfectly do everything on his own until 2010, by 2018 it was getting almost impossible, 2026 he feels like a burden for not being into technology.
I do choose big tech less, but over time it finds its way to creep back in. Over time it becomes increasingly more difficult to engage with a society increasingly more dependent on it. It's not just stop using facebook and degoogle your phone.
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?
We were talking about big tech, not global politics.
The west was enjoying the peace dividend while Russians were dealing with the collapse of the USSR so the answer to your question depends on who you ask.
The political situation is absurd, but its clear that people are far more resilient against state control, so in some ways its improving.
If we're talking the 90s, No. The US is not at war invading another country (Iraq).
> This post seems to be haphazardly proposing that big tech will inevitably make everyone's lives miserable.
Except that’s already happening. Through social media being engineered to be additive, advertising and user data collection being used to manipulate voters, AI bosses proudly claiming they’re putting people out of work, and games companies paying on the weak with loot boxes and other massively overpriced in game transactions.
And why isn’t there any legislation against these predatory tactics? Because big tech also donate millions to the very people we elect and who are supposed to serve the citizens.
And that’s without discussing the indirect costs of big tech from data centres ruining the lives of local residents, to independent stores getting screwed by knockoffs from Amazon and cheap Chinese stores.
> seems to have no issue with Google hosting their email.
That’s a pretty weak counterpoint. In fact it’s basically what we call an “ad hominem attack”. What you’re doing is arguing about the individual rather than discussing their points directly.
It’s like saying “you can’t be worried about climate change because you own a car.”
> It's hard to take this too seriously (even if there is some legitimate worry here)
If you think there is legitimate worry the you should take their points seriously. It would be contradictory to do otherwise
It's certainly been making my life miserable, at least in recent years. And the trend for the future doesn't seem rosy.
Inevitably? Maybe not, but the situation isn't gonna get better by saying "oh I'm sure the tech industry will do a 180 and stop making everything worse"
> seems to have no issue with Google hosting their email.
There's this meme where person A says "we should improve society somewhat", and B replies "yet you participate in society! curious". Very similar argument.
It posits that the tools at their disposal will be far more powerful and wide reaching than just Gmail or even modern social networks.
The good ol' AGI and then ASI singularity everyone likes to talk about. To be fair, it is possible.
I don't believe "true" agi/asi will happen, but I totally believe if a company theoretically invented they would immediately shut all API's and then go for software market dominance in every category.
While I've said in another comment on this thread that comparative advantage is flawed, I still think the opening moves, the very initial phase, would be as per comparative advantage, not everything all at once.
Until supply grows to saturate demand in whatever market, comparative advantage points to the fastest way to make more money, that money then gets used to construct more servers and data centres, which gets used to saturate supply for the next most profitable market, etc. until there's none left.
I wouldn't say "never" for AI that can economically substitute all human labour. I think that meaning of AGI/ASI is slightly easier than the "AI which learns from as few examples as humans do" meaning, which I also think is possible eventually but don't know how far away it is.
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 accountability and safeguards for society. I only get to live once: if I am to spend it for social change, I best maximize by expected return.
And quitting a job in a capitalist society probably has negative return overall.
>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%?
> I believe, at least, that we should be demanding political accountability and safeguards for society.
You can't help but swing between "AGI is going to save us, praise the tech lords" and "AGI is going to kill us, tech lords have mercy" if you believe there is no counterpower to the tech lords.
"You, alone, leaving your job" is not a great way to counteract the tech lords (although at least it makes a point and show other people there is a problem.)
But there is the option to use your counterpowers (you know, legislators and all that ?) The tech lords are actively trying to avoid that (see the hilarious Musk vs Breton feud.)
It would be better if your system did not give money to power to choose lawmakers.
Maybe AI will make USA realize the definition of corruption and proper election funding laws.
But, if you don't want to join the underclass, maybe, just maybe, consider not picking tech lords as kings next time.
>And quitting a job in a capitalist society.
What other modern society has existed and prosperous where you could quit a job and have positive return?
> I'd like to understand what a real, good alternative is.
The "real, good" part all depends on your expectations of life.
There's a real shortage in trades people and I'd love to see ChatGPT fix a leaky pipe, build a house or make a chair. So switching to the trades/manual labor, while financially tough at the beginning might be a good long term choice. But this requires much more physical work than most of us on HN are used to.
Moving away from capitalist society into a cheap tiny off grid house in a rural area and leading a much more basic life is also an option. You don't need 100k to survive, but you do need it in populated areas. (Also, I'm European and therefore not dependent on employment for health care, so I'm ignoring that part.)
There are many choices we can make that remove our dependence on big tech. But big tech is hella convenient and so is having expendable income, so it's a tough choice to make.
Well, you could say that the proposed alternative is: Consider not working there.
This means, work somewhere else, or even _do_ something else.
I lived the original post and left working in tech a years ago for essentially the reasons in the post. I agree the article stops short of offering solutions, but you also acknowledge there's a legitimate problem but then don't engage or offer alternatives.
From my experience, the problem I saw, and why I really respect OPs post, is that many good and smart people were lying to themselves in those environments. They'd do exactly what you do and try find reasons to justify working in tech.
Go into your average modern tech engineering team at e.g. Amazon, and ask them how many of the engineers in there use and support the software they're creating. They tiny fraction of people who say they do use it and support it, go check their usage, and you'll see half of them were overinflating it. HN knows it better than anywhere: many of these tech companies are not producing great tech to improve people's lives.
To you point "no constructive alternative" - think about it this way, if you're spending your life writing something you won't even use for reason that boil down to "it's just not valuable for me, especially knowing how its made", then doing literally anything other than working there is a more valuable use of _your_ time for you.
Look at your household and figure out what you need and what would improve your lives. If it's "6 figures salary and a world owned by megacorps", then working in places like Amazon is the best thing you can do for your family.
If you're a small household without kids, like a lot of people in these engineering environments, then instead of spending 12 hours a day mon - fri addicted to trying to solve this really cool little engineering problem (which just so happens to help e.g Amazon), you'd be far better solving some really cool little engineering problem that just so happens to help your family, like building some cool home automation thing for them, or working on your own house to make it more efficient so you can use less energy so anyone else working in your house can retire earlier with smaller outgoings. Or even just being a housewife/husband will improve the lives of the people you care about in more valuable and appreciated ways than anything you could do working at Amazon.
Now, I appreciate I'm in a lucky place to be able to do this, but if you've been able to work as an engineer in top engineering environments and this post is relevant to you, then you are already more than lucky enough to be able to walk away from those environments do things that are consciously useful and appreciated by other humans whom you value.
This is such a weird take - why do you have to personally use something for that to be useful? I could be at AWS working on their metering/billing system. I’d never use a billing system of that scale in personal life but that doesn’t mean it’s not a useful thing to build. And I think AWS as a whole is a very useful product for the world.
Working to make your home more efficient is not going to suddenly make anyone retire early. That’s the stupidest take I have heard. If you have some cool idea which makes home energy usage lower like a revolutionary heat pump, you should build your own company and sell that to everyone and scale up. You sound like a FatFIRE person that has quit professional life and is now trying to justify why sitting at home and helping your family members is a virtuous thing to do as opposed to working for some BigTech.
A lot of the danger with BigTech is just the fact they are very big and so have accrued a lot of power. A simple solution is to use the anti-trust laws to break them up into smaller entities. I don’t think the problem is the products/services they build.
We are over a decade into Big Tech already making everyone's lives miserable (the malicious wielding of social media is something even the mainstream knows about now). His alternative of not working for big tech is literally the only way out of this.
There is some nuance in what "not working for big tech" means though. The general gist is to not take work making tools that can foreseeably be used to hurt people and the social fabric at large. Reject "disruption." Don't take money to make your life worse. That sort of thing.
> His alternative of not working for big tech is literally the only way out of this.
This won't actually work though. The only reason we even have this discussion is because we're rich enough that pure survival isn't even really in our instinct anymore. Most of us haven't experienced actual hardship for years and we live in luxury.
There are plenty people in the world who are smart and poor and living tough lives, who are ready to replace people who quit because they have te luxury to quit. Just look at the huge amount of Indian people moving across the world to work in tech. These people aren't going to let the opportunity to significantly improve their lives go because they're going to work on software that might negatively impact society at some point. You could see this exact thing happen when Elon took over Twitter. Many people left because they disagreed with Elon, while many H-1B stuck around because they (and their families) actually had something to lose.
I don't think many of us on HN realize how incredibly spoiled we are with the lives we live.
> big tech will inevitably make everyone's lives miserable
"Will"? If you don't see how this is happening today, you're either a part of the problem, or blissfully ignorant.
> It offers no constructive alternative
WDYM? The article clearly suggests that people should stop working for these companies.
Besides, why must every criticism propose a solution? The problem should be fixed by those who created it.
Honest question, if large portions of labor are automated or marginalized who ultimately buys the goods and services that companies produce? Markets depend on consumers having purchasing power. It seems economically rational to keep the average worker making just enough to afford goods and services over the long term.
We can see this logic reflected at times in business history. Ford paid workers double the daily wage so they could afford the cars they built and Costco pays employees 50% more than Walmart. They're not doing these things out of the goodness of their heart but out of greed to increase long term profits.
> Honest question, if large portions of labor are automated or marginalized who ultimately buys the goods and services that companies produce?
Once the robots, energy, and weapons all belong to the same small group, that group no longer needs to sell anything to anyone. Production continues, but only for themselves and their enclosed system. The rest of humanity becomes a surplus population that can simply be allowed to die off.
In other words: the economy you’re worried about preserving is already obsolete the moment the owners of the machines no longer require wage slaves or consumers to keep the system running. At that point, mass demand is no longer a feature, it’s a bug that gets patched out.
> Markets depend on consumers having purchasing power.
Markets and consumers would still exist, unless the AI is smart enough to solve the local knowledge problem via centralized computation.
A consumer doesn't have to be a person. It's an abstraction, and behind it sits any entity with capital. That includes non-human entities.
An example would be bidirectional trade between an AI company who mines resources, and an AI company who makes robots to mine resources.
Or if it's one big monopoly, they can have an internal market to facilitate competition and cooperation, like how Samsung operates.
Prices don't represent anything absolute, they just capture the cost of reallocating a marginal number of goods to produce this particular thing instead of some other thing.
If there is so much of something that everyone can have one, effectively prices would drop until everyone could afford one. Like how even homeless people can afford air, because there is so much of it that there is no point charging people for access. Or YouTube they just let anyone watch it because it is so cheap to push bytes out over the internet.
Removing humans from the production process would, in theory, be similar. There is a certain amount that gets produced and we come up with some way to allocate it. Prices and wages adjust to that reality.
> We can see this logic reflected at times in business history. Ford paid workers double the daily wage so they could afford the cars they built...
That just so story is probably a lie. The math wouldn't work out and Ford would know it - he was just competing with other companies for labour. It is like programmers getting paid huge amounts - it isn't because the companies think it helps them because of some vague circular logic about what happens in the broader market. They just need the skills, now.
> who ultimately buys the goods and services that companies produce?
The only goods that will be produced will be the one that machines will need for their survival or for whatever unfathomable goals they will have. Human goods will only be produced as long as human labour still has some value.
The problem is companies are increasingly looking at the economy as someone else’s problem. And that results in a race to the bottom as each business sees what the other does and then makes the same cuts to improve their own margins too.
What we’ve also seen in recent decades is a massive shift to people borrowing money to pay for luxury goods. This means that businesses can still continue to tank the economy because their profits are propped up by other people’s debts.
And in fairness, it’s not just consumer goods that are sold this way either. Entire businesses are run on borrowed money and suppressed wages with the hope that they win the “business lottery” and receive a massive buyout. Often they’re deliberately selling their products below cost price to boost their client portfolio and thus making it entirely uneconomical for normal businesses to compete on price.
And then we wonder why the economy is so volatile. The whole thing is held together by gum and prayers and the only people benefiting are those who are already wealthy.
But why does Costco pay more than Walmart rather than the other way around? (I don't know much about either company.)
If you ask the authors of sci-fi dystopias: the corporations owning the means of production will get taxed just enough to keep their masses from starving, the aspirational 14% will ake whatever resources they have to buy shares of this coporation and get a slightly bigfer share of the pie, and subgroups on the elites will be giving perpetual checks on each other, attempting to take full control of the mountain top but never quite successfully doing it.
> who ultimately buys the goods and services that companies produce?
You don’t need anyone to buy them if you already have all the capital. You sell good and services to make more capital, but if you’ve got enough capital to provide all your needs, you don’t need anyone buyers.
I think it's pretty clear that if automation gets to the point where machines can do the difficult tasks, like repairing a sewer or managing a farm, then the entire human workforce is no longer needed.
It's difficult to see where it might head that doesn't lead to population collapse and some form of dystopia.
This is a real threat that is not discussed enough. If labor could be completely automated, then the value and political power of workers tends to zero.
If you own AGI, human workers are worse than zero. They become an active threat that can kill you.
or as a former Google executive likes to call them, "the eaters"
Wonder if that inspired: The tomb of the eaters - in caves of qud.
capitalism has always moved in the direction of automation, yielding booming progress and prosperity for much of mankind. the technological comforts we have today far exceed those of a thousand years ago, no one can dispute. but at some point, if there are no more jobs due to "full automation" then the promise of capitalism bringing most people out of poverty will start to fall short. it's a real question, what do we do then? short of adapting, as we always have, i don't see any viable alternatives. OP recommending not playing at all is peak derangement divorced from reality imo
I don't see any alternatives until AI or technology can solve Cancer, or Heart disease or the major causes of death we have now.
My point being is that modern capitalist society has brought all the technology innovation we see today including the best medical technology/care we've ever had.
I feel like the people who post this sentiment have never done any plumbing, electrical wiring or really just any sort of actual creative manual labor.
Show me the robot that can plumb a new sink in, or brick up an old doorway... Because I'd really like to buy it, those things are hard and time consuming!
Couple years ago you could have made the same argument about talking computers and here we are.
100%
Smaller tools might be better, humanoid robots can HELP with this but it will still be a tool that we command.
I just fixed a leaking sprinkler, would love to have had a humanoid help me dig the hole, help me turn on/off the shutoff, cut the pipe, glue it back, etc...
Right, like programming
Maybe the real maker economy will be the future underclass building makeshift infrastructure to support a subsistence lifestyle in small post capital communities off the grid once big capital no longer feels the need to maintain a consumer economy at any scale.
I don't know what the future holds, but owning a few acres in rural nowhere and knowing how to build stuff gives me a sense of security.
Someone needs to find a way to turn dirt into a 3d printing material.
It is, on hacker news, easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism it seems.
This is echoing a term made by Varoufakis about an increasing amount of money being held by a smaller and smaller group, not a return to literal peasant existence. It’s not feudalism, it’s ‘neo-feudalism’.
The argument that labour can move is true, except where it can’t. Look at the entire towns of miners made irrelevant with no replacement to their jobs. Sure you might say they can move half way across the country to clean toilets but they have skills, a family and houses somewhere else.
Where the argument of a feudal analogy really rings true is the increasing attempt to do back to extraction of rent for everything. Subscriptions for everything, including homes are becoming more and more normal. Are we really okay with a world in this form?
When there is nothing to lose but your chains … as the saying goes
Most of our chains are in our heads, we just don't see them.
That works both ways. Human chains are all that justifies your existence, having abandoned being a hunter gatherer.
> GPT$$$ is surely smart enough to separate you from whatever you have, [...] or lobbying your government to take it from you.
I find it quite interesting, and somewhat disturbing, that we've so quickly come to the point of seeing the AI power drivers as openly adversarial to people and deeply entangled with equally adversarial government forces.
But are we actually (and realistically) talking about technofeudalism in the next couple of decades?
An economics counter argument:
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/plentiful-high-paying-jobs-in-...
Also, my p(doom) is 1.0-epsilon under the status quo without AGI/ASI, due to old age and disease. Under some assumptions, self-interest says that I may as well roll the dice.
Thanks for posting the article, it's really well written and worth reading! I think he raises some important points in the `“Possible” doesn’t mean “guaranteed”` section.
His argument is based on comparative advantage, and he says
"The key difference here is that everyone — every single person, every single AI, everyone — always has a comparative advantage at something!".
This is why everyone in the world has a job and a decent salary today, just as humanity will in the future(!!). In reality it is not like this, and he talks about some of the reasons for this in the above mentioned paragraph.
I also disagree massively with his discounting of the scenario where energy gets relocated to AI instead of food production. He paints that as unlikely, while I think it is almost inevitable. I don't necessarily think it will happen in one fell swoop with force, but it can definitely happen over a generation through pure market forces. The owners of AI just have more money, and will use this to buy energy. Cost of food will rise compared to the value of labour, aka cost of living will rise, and it will be harder and harder to sustain a family. Since we somehow think that taxing wealth is absurd, we will keep taxing labour.
It seems to me that he tries to wave away the fact that if AI becomes much more productive than humans in everything, then economy predicts that it will be allocated the energy, not humans. And he waves this away with 'politics will save us', which I find unlikely.
Reading all this I can't help to think that we are REALLY bad about predicting societal impact on new technology.
We are all scifi geeks (I am so generalizing) so I think we get a rush by doing it, but I think 99% of the predictions in this topic will be wrong.
Maybe p(doom) without AGI is 1.0 in the long term, but I'll be dead by then. But AGI definitely increases the p(doom) within my lifetime.
I redefined p(doom) to mean your death rather than the demise of the species, which I probably should have clarified.
I have a much better solution: make a mission to tell everybody around you to stop consuming and stop frying their brains. But be mindful they are addicts so they will say you are mean, ugly, stupid, boring, etc. Keep at it and don't negotiate down. Remind them you gain nothing from this and you care for their wellbeing. Eventually most of them come around.
The window to fix this is closing.
I get the feeling behind the anti-AI sentiment, I just disagree with the conclusions.
There’s a lot of fear around what will happen with AI, not so much of extinction but rather of two things: fear of losing income, and arguably more importantly, fear of losing identity.
People often are invested in what they do to the point that it’s who they are. That being replaced or eliminated might be a bigger psychological threat than lack of income, at least to those of us fortunate enough to be well off right now.
However, these threats are outweighed by the benefits that AI can eventually bring. Medical advances, power generation, manufacturing capability. Our systems for running society have a lot of problems, economically, politically, epistemologically. These can also be improved with AI assistance.
The real problem is the transition, it’s such a huge shift, and it will happen all at once to everyone, uprooting our idea of the world and our place in it.
What we need is to embrace AI and find a way to make sure that the transition and benefits of AI are distributed instead of concentrated.
For me this looks like the following: companies must commit to retaining some minimum number of employees in every currently existing function, to be determined proportional to their profit taking. This sets a floor on the job losses that can come later when AI really comes on stream.
The justification for this is three fold: firstly, it’s a safety mechanism, it ensures that regardless of the capabilities of an AI system, there are multiple humans working with it to verify its results. If they aren’t verifying diligently, then they’re not doing their jobs.
Secondly, jobs aren’t just a way of making income, they’re wrapped up in identity and meaning for at least some people, and this helps to maintain that existing identity structure across a meaningful cross section of society.
Third, it keeps the economy running, money circulating. You can’t have a market economy without consumers. UBI is one component of this too, but this is both more direct, more useful and more meaningful.
> However, these threats are outweighed by the benefits that AI can eventually bring. Medical advances, power generation, manufacturing capability. Our systems for running society have a lot of problems, economically, politically, epistemologically. These can also be improved with AI assistance.
Benefits come to those who have the means to access it, and wealth is a measure of the ability to direct and influence human effort and society.
How exactly do you propose that AI will serve the wellbeing of the worker/middle classes after they've been made obsolete by it?
Goodwill of the corporations working on them? Of their shareholders, well-known to always put welfare first and profit second? Government action increasingly directed by their lobbying?
> What we need is to embrace AI and find a way to make sure that the transition and benefits of AI are distributed instead of concentrated.
Sure. How? We've not done it with any other technological advances so far, and I don't see how shifting the power balance further away from the worker/middle class will help matters.
There's a reason why the era of techno-optimism has already faded as quickly as it's begun.
Of course, and distribution and ownership of benefits is the real issue here, but I think I’ve addressed that.
Let me be clearer: I said “companies must commit to” where the stronger phrasing is “companies are forced to by legislation”. But to begin with this might be voluntarily done by some number of companies.
Also, in this vision of society the AI companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, google etc) are taxed heavily. The taxation is redistributed, there is UBI for some fraction of the population, maybe the majority. Others still work in companies mandated to keep employees as I outlined above.
Importantly, we as a society specifically aim to bring about these benefits of AI by using the redistributed funds in part to invest in them.
Part of this is the free market, part is planned government investment. If one fails, maybe the other succeeds. Either way, we try to spread the benefits and importantly to ensure the benefits are actually there in the first place.
The article makes it sound like this is inevitable, and the only choice you have is
A: participate and have a chance to not be part of a perpetual underclass
B: for moral reasons, don't participate, be part of the underclass
I kinda would have hoped for
C: <something> to stop this from happening
Otherwise it's the worst sales-pitch ever
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.
Yes, the ability to command a kingdom was relative to the number of people with force you could convince AND pay to be on your side vs the others. With automation, drones and AI, you no longer need any convincing just capital.
> Such situations usually correct themselves violently.
Historically, they did because everyone's capacity for violence was equal.
What about now that the best the average person can do is a firearm against coordinated, organized military with armoured vehicles, advanced weaponry, drones, and sooner than later, full access to mass surveillance?
Also, how will a revolution happen once somebody trains a ML model end-to-end to identify desire for revolution from your search and chat history and communication with like-minded others?
Assuming the intent isn't prevented altogether through algorithmic feeds showing only content that makes it seem less attractive.
> Historically, they did because everyone's capacity for violence was equal.
This is so wildly ahistorical I'm immediately suspicious of your intentions.
The US alone offers plenty of counterexamples from the last ~50 years.
Do you live in France? Because this is not universally true.
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
You could also argue in the other direction: capital is never going to be the only thing separating one set of individuals from another, because we sure like to keep finding ways to label ourselves different: ethinicity, religion, political ideology, sex preferences, eye color...
Then again, maybe this is why Brazil finds itself in this steady state of economic inequality and endemic violence but without critical mass for a civil war: the same diversity that makes Brazilians apt at navigating conflicts is what makes us incapable at finding a common enemy and building an united front?
Do they in a world with humanoid robots that are harder better faster stronger?
I would recommend moving to a country that is less susceptible to this threat.
I left the UK for this reason and live very comfortably on around £15k. I rent a city centre flat with 600 megabit fibre and really good amenities. I have time and space to build what I want.
"Give me the place to stand, and I shall move the earth." - Archimedes.
Unfortunately in the UK it's really hard to survive, let alone actually have time to do anything meaningful. I don't know if it's engineered by big tech/property/finance or some other demon. Maybe the monster in qntm's "There is no Anitmemetics Division" is allegorical.
Where did you move to?
That said, the real point is paying off your mortgage (or getting fixed low interest). With no mortgage I could almost live on that little in Sweden.
Malaysia. It's not going to be cheap for long here though, they're really positioning themselves as a tech hub and I think they'll do well.
Utilities are particularly cheap here, I pay around £10 per month for water and electricity. Many working people live on around RM3000 or about £550 a month here.
Pairs nicely with this article about the transition from the age of the gun to the age of the drone https://qz.com/185945/drones-are-about-to-upheave-society-in...
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.
I think I get the gist of the moral of this story. But I'm not sure I'm fully agreeing with the specifics.
The nub is something I've thought about before. My contingency plan for AI turning the industry I work in upside down is to make hay while the sun shines before that point. Have enough saved or invested for a (lean) retirement (depending on how far away that point is).
But what if AI turns every industry upside down. Will there be enough overall economic activity to actually invest in at all. Then we're all poor regardless of how much we've individually saved, or what kind of social safety net exists, simply because there's not enough economic activity to fund it.
That is, at the moment, and I hope forever, a very remote possibility. For a whole host of reasons, technological and economic ones. But if that did happen in the next 20-30 years...
I don't have enough time to explain the many reasons why that post is wrong, but some of them are:
- "In the future, when labor is fully marginalized..." Hasn't happened in the history of the world, not going to happen in the future either. Some forms of labor were replaced by machines, which then gave rise to new types of jobs, such as building and maintaining the machines. The human cost cannot be neglected, because many people do find it difficult to retrain to other jobs. But on the whole, there are more jobs and higher-paying jobs now than there were a hundred years ago. Higher-paying not just in absolute financial terms, but also in terms of what can be purchased with that money. The richest man of the 19th century couldn't buy an air-conditioned house, not with all his millions.
- "GPT$$$ is surely smart enough to separate you from whatever you have..." Assumes an unbounded growth curve in the "smarts" of AI, and worse than that, assumes that that AI will take the form of an LLM. This is laughable. LLMs will not ever achieve AGI; they are simply not capable of it. If AGI is achievable at all (which I doubt), it will come from one of the currently-neglected avenues of research whose funding is currently being neglected because LLMs are sucking all the metaphorical oxygen out of the room.
- "the neofeudal world": assumes that all companies are like that. Yes, there are many companies that suck to work for because they treat their workers as mere cogs in a machine, instead of as human beings. But not all companies operate that way. If you are being treated as a cog in a machine, start looking for opportunities to jump ship to a better working environment. I've worked in both types of places, and I would be willing to take a big pay cut to work for company that didn't treat me as a cog. They're out there, but it might take some looking. Tip: ask employees what it's like working for the comapny, don't just take the interviewers' word at face value.
Markets needs regulation to keep them open. Monopolists understand that and thus they buy policy and sponsor narratives in order to abolish market regulation, or reach a "rules for thee, but not for me", or prevent incumbents from entering the market by means of Regulatory Capture. But capitalism needs competition. So they slowly kill their own lands, and thus they need to cross borders to keep eating.
If one feels morally compelled to pay with their own income to stop these parasites, hats of to them. It is nasty that people are being put in this position. They need support from a society. Society needs information and debate about real issues, which requires them to be free from the barrage of falsehoods and yellow journalism. And possible it would help to have a Roosevelt, but culture is the biggest hindrance to change.
Tech needs to learn about collective action problems. Are any of geohot's shops unionized? Has he done any political work or advocacy? What I want to read is "geohot donates $5m to CWA", not some insipid, entirely useless blog post effectively calling me a coward, while its author does nothing.
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.
I agree with OP, who to my mind hasn't said the so-called critique is invalid or that he's not allowed to have an opinion. Isn't the comment along the lines of "well, what have you actually tried to do? You have resources, standing, kairos, etc." Seems one of the more perceptive critiques on here.
I personally wish he would spend more time jailbreaking the PS5 than writing blogs posts about how SWEs at big tech should quit their jobs.
"The people who are leading the AI revolution, 'the tech titans', many of them are thinking in a way which is really alien to most of the people on the planet. People sometimes think 'Oh, these tech titans, they want money. They want power.' They want something far more ambitious than money or power. They want to change the course of the evolution of life and even of the evolution of the cosmos. In the minds of some of them, sometime in the future, millions, billions of years in the future, when they write the history of the universe, it will be like: 'Okay, the Big Bang - 14 billions years ago, 10 billion years later - the emergence of life on earth, the only life we know about so far in the universe, 4 billion years later - Elon Musk and the beginning of AI'. This is the timeline they have.”
- Yuval Noah Harari, Ideas for the Future
What happened in the last three weeks to radicalize Mr. "Trump's an ok president, all you haters are just political performers. Apropos of nothing, here is a political performance"
> Have you considered not participating? If you participate, we all lose. We will either all be in the underclass together or not.
This has been suggested a bunch of times in the comments of HN as well as on other social media, but what exactly would that look like?
As this seems like the ultimate prisoner dilemma and the winning solution there is always be first to make a deal, even if we accept the premise of AI turning us all into an underclass (a prediction often made with revolutionary technology I might add).
I am betting on being on the right side of the scissors for a while longer.
How can
> capital is the only force,
be squared with
> A pile of money will buy you nothing in the neofeudal world.
and
> didn’t operate on capitalist principles
? Capital being the driving force is the very definition of capitalism. It's even in its name!
This is incredibly naive. Not participating is not the solution, unless everybody stops participating at the same time. If only you stop participating, you will be marginalized now instead of later. It's a prisoner's dilemma, only against billions of people.
There are many things that can happen before we're all enslaved by AGI. It might well not happen. We might enter a war, or a cycle of civil wars that change society in a way we can't predict. Or, most probably, some jobs will disappear, some others will become available and AI will be a commodity. Just as machines did after the Industrial Revolution. It's extremely hard predicting the future. Telling people to "stop participating" (how? By quitting their job? By fighting the class war?) is a bit irresponsible.
I couldn't disagree more. Throughout history, higher productivity leads to a higher quality of life for everyone.
Yes, the transition can be painful and some people will lose out and face hard career changes.
But overall, the multiplicative power of investment only increases, helping to make everything cheaper, and everyone richer.
People focus too much on their own small part of experience - like Claude Code replacing CRUD developers. Without appreciating that the LLM revolution (and broader AI like AlphaFold) also includes PhD students that don't need to lose time programming tooling, interns that might have spent their time on tooling that can now use LLMs to learn faster and actually contribute to their fields, disadvantaged students that can learn more directly and in a personal way, without it being dependent on their physical location.
All of this means you get more experimentation, more ideas, and more successes.
> Throughout history, higher productivity leads to a higher quality of life for everyone.
I have several times seen the claim that the change from hunter-gatherer to agriculture lead to a lower quality of life.
But do we really know how to measure "quality of life"?
You're wrong. Sharing the fruits of labor and greater social cohesion are what lead to greater quality of life. Greater productivity leads to increased wealth among the owning class, but historically that wealth only reached the masses after hard, usually physically violent, conflict between the haves and havenots.
Hard to take seriously from a guy who has Facebook, Google, and Twitter on his CV.
I noticed an interesting pattern. People who “made it” usually by working high paying jobs for the neofeudal lords, suddenly gain moral compass and tell the rest of us to not work for said neofeudal lords, because “money is not important”, and apparently you can buy a place to live or food to feed your family simply by having principles.
I agree with your point, and superficially OP is a prime example.
Not to excuse the guy, but I think that, looking deeper, the situation with geohot is more involved. He grew up in a lower-middle-class household and was lucky to be a smart kid in a time when being a nerd could be a ticket out.
I guess not unlike many of us here on HN.
Unlike many of us, his explorations in the corporate world were all short stints. If I’ve kept tabs correctly, he never stayed longer than a year. Sometimes only for weeks.
Apart from that, I often take the pattern you noticed more as confession, penance, and a "tell your children not to walk my way" kind of message. Maybe I read this stuff too generously.
Sure, self awareness is important. When you tell your kids not to walk your way, you take accountability. You say that what you did was bad, and you are accountable for it. You also acknowledge that what you did brought you to where you are, but given the chance you would take a different way. It’s not bad to have moral principles after you’ve done what you fight against, as long as you do it with accountability and self awareness.
OPs post had neither.
Then he should know better the line he’s selling.
“Opt out of capitalism” doesn’t work when you’re trying to feed your family. He offers no alternative, speaks from a place of safety with no acknowledgment that the people he’s addressing don’t have the same safety net as he does.[0]
He’s not wrong. We are all fucked. But if it were as simple as “not participating” (whatever that means), then we wouldn’t be.
[0]: to be fair he does address others at tech companies, maybe he assumes that everyone working in big tech has a safety net, which is perhaps not as unreasonable as I first thought.
It’s remarkably easy to tell others not to do what you did.
I also chuckled when an ex-Facebook employee whose blog is popular on HN lectured us on "web page annoyances that I don't inflict on you here".
it's simply the principle of fuck you money
that's why they are also more egocentric, racist, etc. When people do not feel the threat of society it is easier to have opinions that verge out of the norm or could restrict further employment (and also opinions that are wrongfully or rightfully policed in society)
Money is less important once you've already paid off your mansion.
Probably not a popular opinion but this is why capitalism works. We all work to compete for what is best for US and our Family, not what someone tells us to work on because they think they know whats better, they don't.
I fail to see your point. He's very well traveled is all.
I'm guessing his soapbox has a nice cushion from his previous jobs.
So?
My point is after you’ve worked at Facebook, Google, and Twitter, telling us you had a nightmare that you worked at Amazon is hard to swallow.
Ranting about how everyone else should opt-out after he’s filled his cup at the bosom of these behemoths is hard to swallow.
In his defence, he does say that he’s targeting folks who already work in big tech.
traveling more would inspire one to think positively of capitalism, rather than the reverse. to quote andrew carnegie roughly, the status quo has always been misery for everyone, and just recently have we begun to extricate ourselves from it. not to mention that it is sheer derangement of luxury to have plenty of funding for one's own family, and yet vocally dissuade others from taking the same steps, for some "end game theoretical" that certainly won't arrive in single digit generations
In case he is wrong about money, he has already hedged himself.
a) On such a topic I would trust someone who has worked there even more than someone who only experienced how these companies work from the outside.
b) I'd argue that decentralization of power and knowledge has always been a main driver for George Hotz¹²³ and possibly a reason why he is no longer at Facebook, Google, Twitter.
¹) https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2025/10/06/alway...
²) https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2023/11/04/disru...
³) https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2021/06/10/a-cir...
He worked for Facebook for less than a year back when Zuck had just been Time Person of the Year, Google before it dropped the "Don't be evil" motto and code of conduct, that really only leaves his time as Twitter as a "what were you thinking?" because it was after Musk bought it… compensated for somewhat by him leaving it quickly.
Even with the poor judgement to join Musk's twitter at all, he left a few weeks after joining, soon after ChatGPT was released. Before ChatGPT, the idea that the singularity was anywhere near was utterly fringe: tech version of all the new-age stuff, I think Charlie Stross described it as "Rapture for atheists" or something like that.
It's now… well, a lot of people with a lot of power are trying to *make it* be the singularity. I still don't think this is "it", despite how useful I find what we do have, but of the top 10 valued companies by market cap in Q4 last year, 9 are chasing it, the money is definitely interested, in a way it just wasn't when he worked at those places.
All inequality is inequity and other hot takes from people of privilege.
Will you take it seriously from someone who _hasn't_ worked at those companies?
It's a realistic take. I personally wouldn't absolve him of his contribution though.
That is exactly why I’d take it seriously.
Why is this already gone from the home page?
I'd just like to add three things to the conversation:
1) Instead of LLMs, imagine large models trained end-to-end on ALL online content and the impact it has on public opinion and discourse. What about when everything is an algorithmic feed controlled by such a model under the control of the elite? You might be resistant(but probably aren't), but in aggregate this will be effective mind control over society.
2) Money directs human effort. Every quantum of bargaining power the worker/middle class lose due to being less needed is the reduction in our ability to have a say in who society should serve and how.
3) Don't forget regulatory capture is a thing. Not just a thing but happening as we speak. Are you still optimistic?
4) Tech is already addicting and ads are already everywhere even without technology that has a theory of mind.
5) Do not forget that humans are social creatures, power over others is not just an accidental byproduct of wealth. Once you're unnecessary for labor, what's left? Fulfilling sexual/emotional/social whims of the wealthy elite? Hunger games? Being a pet in a billionaire's human zoo city so he can brag about his contributions to humanity?
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.
George Hotz’s post-capitalist decoherence wasn’t in my 2026 bingo card. I wonder if he came up with this view before or after working for big tech in different capacities and using Gmail.
He’s not wrong though, but he’s in a weird position to say that. Also, this post isn’t constructive in any possible way.
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, no "technofeudalism." The economic base is still defined by the exchange of commodities, its just that the US does not produce many industrial goods anymore, so the US economy is mostly a service based economy. Chinese citizens do not experience their lifeworld in terms of service based industries, they are surrounded by mass markets and complex factories and very material evidence of mechanization which we often do not see directly in the West, only the end product. So to many Americans it feels like they live in a magical society where they click some keys on their laptop and food and clothes and whatever they need shows up on their doorstep--but there are real workers out there tooling all the machines and developing all the architecture to make those things appear, to reduce the basic struggles of life to give time for greater and more advanced forms of social organization beyond the need to survive.
This is not what peasants had; for them, despite having a relatively complex existence, a bad season could and often would kill their entire family. Or a raiding band would take all their food, or they'd die of the plague...life was far more tenuous, and the basic made of production was not commodity production, it was growing food and animal husbandry. International trade, artisanal crafts, and capital improvements on industrial production were nowhere near the level they were in even the early modern period. Nothing about our contemporary society resembles this way of living.
Addendum: The claim that somehow everyone in tech could just "stop," like consciously decide to stop creating things, is absurd. Amazon is very good at what it does, but it does not have exclusive control over the trade of all goods in the whole world. Rakuten is a major competitor in Japan, there are many other companies that have strong holds in their local markets. You take a Bolt in Germany, not an Uber. Chinese users can query DeepSeek, which is surely more proficient in Mandarin than ChatGPT. Even if a state uses its sovereign power to artificially control industry, it only slows the development of capital, since other states may allow their own companies and technologies to flourish, like China is doing now with its electric vehicles. If Amazon does not meet its projections, it fails, its employees all lose their jobs, Jeff Bezos might even go bankrupt. There is a constant pressure of competition.
As a worker, your goal should not be to arbitrarily stop working--you may not enrich others but you certainly won't be enriching yourself either. The goal should be to capture far more wealth that is the result of your labor. This is only possible through labor organizing, which does not permanently cease the means of production, it only takes control of them. But business continues and people still produce things and do services and enjoy the wealth of those things and services. One should basically desire to live in a wealthy, prosperous society. This article does nothing but ask workers to go into voluntary poverty; it is reactionary and backwards.
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?
This is completely false. The owners of big tech must pay capitalists like the owners of TSMC to produce the chips to power their services. Just because we don't produce the chips in the US does not mean that there isn't a distinct commodity producing class.
You are the first person I've seen try and say TSMC, Broadcom, etc aren't "big tech" lol
I guess they are, but that isn't material to the discussion, since they are selling goods not services, thus they don't extract "rents," unless anything that someone buys for some purpose is a "rent"; in that case, the super market is charging me "rents" to purchase their food so I can have it in my fridge.
I think your argument is just a bunch of pedantry but OK: Western Electric produced commodities for the Bell system. So did a lot of other companies, selling into a market that was functionally a monopsony.
Yet the fact that this was necessary is tangential, the Bell system didn't exist to sell switches or phones. The phone network monopoly was AT&T's fief, the rent was the phone bill everyone had to pay!
If you aren't AMD, nVidia, Google, or Apple how much luck do you think you'll have putting in an order to TSMC for 2nm? Or Samsung? Or Micron? Or Hynix?
TLDR: Abandon capitalism, create a union.
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 flexible and less impressionable than most people think (I mean, some people think it's the other way as well and they might be right in some situations)
> 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
Is internet a bubble? Has it stopped?
Were you working in 1999?
Bubbles don't stop forever, they pop and move back to equilibrium.
I partly agree, but where this analogy breaks down, and what the neofeudal rulers are too shortsighted to realize, is that if lower classes don't have income to spend, there will be nobody to buy their products, and the entire economy collapses. Proposals to address this like UBI are a pipe dream.
The idea is that neofeudal lords would own fully automated systems to produce everything they need. They wouldn't need to make stuff to sell to us at all, they could just pursue their own goals. We would be irrelevant to them, other than a nuisance if we tried to get some of their resources for ourselves.
Imagine if you owned a million humanoid robots and a data center with your own super-intelligence. Would you produce doodads to sell to people? Or would you build your own rockets to mine asteroids, fortresses and weapons systems to protect yourself, and palaces for you to live in?
I don't agree that this is where we are headed, but that is the idea. Thinking about this in relation to our current economy is missing the point.
Aha, so late-game Factorio. It's a nice fantasy, but I don't think that the rest of humanity will stand by and allow the entire system to function autonomously. It's more likely that heads will roll far before such system is in place.
it's ok, the billionaires will be in the underclass too, maybe a month later
capitalism is artificial intelligence. we dont control capitalism, capitalism controls us and through us builds its next vessel
am i missing something? is the call to action "don't participate in capitalism?" please just read lenin or something istg
And this is why blog posts shouldn't ever get on HN's front page... they're usually embarrassing.
Hard disagree, technical blog posts are some of the best content here.
But this isn't technical.