While I agree with your materialist assessment here comrade my primary point of contention is the incentive structure present in these tools. As Iris best put it in her comparison to Heidegger’s human-gestalt model, the human-llm gestalt is an ugly one.
We are on the same page as to the failures of the luddites, my argument is that these tools are anti-worker at their core. Even if the tools are cheap and abundant that would not resolve the fact that they alienate workers from their labor to a degree that can only be mitigated with heavy amounts of regulation and restriction. In contrast your position my take is not that an abundance of the tool will democratize its use, its that the only way to use it safely is with a dictatorship of the proletariat.
The issue with LLM’s is that they cut as much muscle as they do fat. Work can take a lot of forms and surplus-value extracting labor and pro-social communal labor are often indistinguishable aside from the motivating force.
There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that work, that is to say “providing some useful function to others based on one’s skills”, has a large number of pro-social benefits. LLM’s abstract an ENORMOUS amount of viable sources of “work” and therefor remove the incentive for people to rely on one another vice the tool.
Currently this is limited to repetitive white-collar work, software engineering, and being a mathematician but it would be foolish to think it stops there.
Humans are social animals and we have no model for what happens when there is no material reason to reach out to or rely on another human other than novelty. Genuinely, it would be better to restrict the use of LLM’s to a select set of applications, weighing the costs and benefits of doing so, than it would be to carte blanche allow them everywhere.
Even in a communist utopia, this would be dangerous. The number one historical cause of violent revolution has been a glut of educated people who are unemployed or underemployed. This has been studied to death and one of the major findings is that it wasn’t about the money, it was about status and identity. LLM’s have the potential to create a population of incredibly educated and incredibly bored people.
Interestingly I also think it’s suicide for capitalism as we know it. Ultimately the system works by having people earn their share by working, and using their income to consume various things (because you want and need more different things than you could possibly ever create on your own). Companies exist because people buy their stuff, and people can buy stuff because they work for it.
If LLMs end up helping build more with less labor while the system stays unchanged, companies get into trouble: while they produce more, less and less people consume their products. So what are they producing for? And how do they make enough money to warrant the production in the first place?
So something has to change anyway. No matter if capitalism or communism. I just don’t see how a fight against LLMs could help, because you can’t wipe away the concept or the means to apply the concept without wiping everything. And bringing upon The End is not a feasible solution to prevent a downfall; it’s merely speeding it up. So I would rather “watch” what happens and hope the system adjusts like it “always” did.
But the incentive structure is only present in the corporate versions of these tools. I’m advocating for building these tools in the open, and we don’t have to mirror what corps are doing. I disagree that these tools are anti-worker at their core, they’re just another form of automation. And we have a concrete example of what happens when this technology is introduced in a rational fashion with China.
Every form of automation will be used to alienate and atomize workers under capitalism, but it’s obviously worse if these tools are also controlled by corporations which will decide who uses these tools and how they use them. While we continue to live under a capitalist regime, open source approach at least helps mitigate the worst ills. On top of that, it directly cuts into the business model of these companies.
Open models are what actually scares them and they state is plainly. We only have to listen to what these companies are saying themselves. They don’t care about boycotts, or some online activism, but they are lobbying to ban open models, and that tells you everything you need to know.
I agree with you that an open-source ecosystem around LLM’s is better than a closed corporate one but my argument is that having such an ecosystem eliminates the lesser of the risks surrounding LLMs.
My contention here is that an open-source environment prevents control of the technology by a small handful of companies but it does not change the relationship between the worker and the LLM, which is the bigger problem.
LLM’s abstract reasoning, there is no higher function that a human can fall back to, they are there for purely substitutive with no replacement or complements. Because of this even a single-proprietorship faces intense labor alienation as a result of using the tool.
To be clear; the genie is out of the bottle. We have no way to go back, and that is horrifying. We are all actively watching entire fields die overnight and it’s not likely to stop any time soon. Every day I mourn another dead craft and I will likely continue doing so until most knowledge work is replaced.
But the elephant in the room here is that the way LLMs are used is just a symptom of the underlying problem. And that’s where the focus needs to be ultimately. However, until that problem can be solved, surrendering these new tools to capitalists would be absurd. There is already a power imbalance, and it would only get worse if we reject technology which the ruling class embraces.
While I agree with your materialist assessment here comrade my primary point of contention is the incentive structure present in these tools. As Iris best put it in her comparison to Heidegger’s human-gestalt model, the human-llm gestalt is an ugly one.
We are on the same page as to the failures of the luddites, my argument is that these tools are anti-worker at their core. Even if the tools are cheap and abundant that would not resolve the fact that they alienate workers from their labor to a degree that can only be mitigated with heavy amounts of regulation and restriction. In contrast your position my take is not that an abundance of the tool will democratize its use, its that the only way to use it safely is with a dictatorship of the proletariat.
This is fun :)
But do we even want to be workers? I don’t. I have to be worker.
We shouldn’t be fighting parts of a broken or rather unfair system, but the system. I don’t want to fight for my place at the bottom of a pit.
The issue with LLM’s is that they cut as much muscle as they do fat. Work can take a lot of forms and surplus-value extracting labor and pro-social communal labor are often indistinguishable aside from the motivating force.
There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that work, that is to say “providing some useful function to others based on one’s skills”, has a large number of pro-social benefits. LLM’s abstract an ENORMOUS amount of viable sources of “work” and therefor remove the incentive for people to rely on one another vice the tool.
Currently this is limited to repetitive white-collar work, software engineering, and being a mathematician but it would be foolish to think it stops there.
Humans are social animals and we have no model for what happens when there is no material reason to reach out to or rely on another human other than novelty. Genuinely, it would be better to restrict the use of LLM’s to a select set of applications, weighing the costs and benefits of doing so, than it would be to carte blanche allow them everywhere.
Even in a communist utopia, this would be dangerous. The number one historical cause of violent revolution has been a glut of educated people who are unemployed or underemployed. This has been studied to death and one of the major findings is that it wasn’t about the money, it was about status and identity. LLM’s have the potential to create a population of incredibly educated and incredibly bored people.
It’s suicide.
Interestingly I also think it’s suicide for capitalism as we know it. Ultimately the system works by having people earn their share by working, and using their income to consume various things (because you want and need more different things than you could possibly ever create on your own). Companies exist because people buy their stuff, and people can buy stuff because they work for it.
If LLMs end up helping build more with less labor while the system stays unchanged, companies get into trouble: while they produce more, less and less people consume their products. So what are they producing for? And how do they make enough money to warrant the production in the first place?
So something has to change anyway. No matter if capitalism or communism. I just don’t see how a fight against LLMs could help, because you can’t wipe away the concept or the means to apply the concept without wiping everything. And bringing upon The End is not a feasible solution to prevent a downfall; it’s merely speeding it up. So I would rather “watch” what happens and hope the system adjusts like it “always” did.
But the incentive structure is only present in the corporate versions of these tools. I’m advocating for building these tools in the open, and we don’t have to mirror what corps are doing. I disagree that these tools are anti-worker at their core, they’re just another form of automation. And we have a concrete example of what happens when this technology is introduced in a rational fashion with China.
Every form of automation will be used to alienate and atomize workers under capitalism, but it’s obviously worse if these tools are also controlled by corporations which will decide who uses these tools and how they use them. While we continue to live under a capitalist regime, open source approach at least helps mitigate the worst ills. On top of that, it directly cuts into the business model of these companies.
Open models are what actually scares them and they state is plainly. We only have to listen to what these companies are saying themselves. They don’t care about boycotts, or some online activism, but they are lobbying to ban open models, and that tells you everything you need to know.
I agree with you that an open-source ecosystem around LLM’s is better than a closed corporate one but my argument is that having such an ecosystem eliminates the lesser of the risks surrounding LLMs.
My contention here is that an open-source environment prevents control of the technology by a small handful of companies but it does not change the relationship between the worker and the LLM, which is the bigger problem.
LLM’s abstract reasoning, there is no higher function that a human can fall back to, they are there for purely substitutive with no replacement or complements. Because of this even a single-proprietorship faces intense labor alienation as a result of using the tool.
To be clear; the genie is out of the bottle. We have no way to go back, and that is horrifying. We are all actively watching entire fields die overnight and it’s not likely to stop any time soon. Every day I mourn another dead craft and I will likely continue doing so until most knowledge work is replaced.
But the elephant in the room here is that the way LLMs are used is just a symptom of the underlying problem. And that’s where the focus needs to be ultimately. However, until that problem can be solved, surrendering these new tools to capitalists would be absurd. There is already a power imbalance, and it would only get worse if we reject technology which the ruling class embraces.