> The business leaders pumping all this money of course don’t understand the technology. True enough! > They’re doing this for exactly one reason: They think

> The business leaders pumping all this money of course don’t understand the technology. True enough! > They’re doing this for exactly one reason: They think they can discard armies of employees and replace them with LLM services, at the cost of shipping shittier products. I imagine that they believe they can discard armies of employees and replace them with LLM services, shipping products at either the same level of quality for the same price or for a lower level of quality at a lower price. > The first real cost is hypothetical: What if those business leaders are correct and they can gleefully dispose of millions of employees? I am absolutely certain that when Tim Bray needs a ditch dug on his property, he does not insist that the contractors use spoons. I am pretty sure that he does not insist that the timber for his house be hand-sawn only. I am pretty sure that he does not drive a horse and buggy. I am pretty sure that he does not grow all his own food by hand, nor does he require that all his food be grown by subsistence farmers. I am absolutely certain that the computers he uses for work and play are not hand-built from raw inputs like sand and rubber trees, but are instead the end product of a massive industrial supply chain no single man can hold in his head. I think well enough of him that I expect he is not gleeful at the thought of how many more jobs he could create if only he abstained from all technology developed after, say, 753 B.C.; why will he not extend that same grace to business executives? I’m being a bit ridiculous, but that’s kind of the point. Technological innovations free up labour for more productive uses. If you go back far enough, most of our ancestors lived miserable, short lives of back-breaking effort. It wasn’t until the 1920 census that the majority of Americans lived in cities. There’s no ‘mental stench’ (to use his infelicitous phrase) involved in using technology to reduce the amount of precious human labour required to achieve an end. Desktop publishing made high-quality output accessible to a much larger number of people than before; so too has generative AI.