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 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.