5 ms·

"Baumol's cost disease hurts the lower classes by restricting their access to services like health care and education, and LLMs/agents make it possible to incre

"Baumol's cost disease hurts the lower classes by restricting their access to services like health care and education, and LLMs/agents make it possible to increase productivity in these areas in ways which were once unimaginable." You've expressed very clearly what LLMs would have to do in order to be economically transformative. "If you can get high quality medical advice for effectively nothing, if you can get high quality individualized tutoring for free, that's a pretty big game changer for a lot of people. Prices on these services have been rising to the stratosphere over the past few decades because it's so difficult to increase the productivity of individual medical practitioners and educators. We're entering an era that could finally break this logjam." It's not that process innovations are lacking, it's that product innovations are perceived as an indignity by most people. Why should one child get an LLM teacher or doctor while others get individualized attention by a skilled human being?

somekyle2 7mo ago
It also seems like the value of quality tutoring that doesn't primarily function as social/class signaling goes down as tools capable of automating high quality intellectual work are more widely available.
- mullingitover 7mo ago
  It depends on outcome again: is the value of tutoring the social class elevation, or is it in the outcome of becoming more skilled and knowledgable? There's also the deeper philosophical question of what is the meaning of life, and if there's inherent value in learning outside of what remunerative advantages you reap from it.
mullingitover 7mo ago
> Why should one child get an LLM teacher or doctor while others get individualized attention by a skilled human being? Is the value in the outcome of receiving medical advice and care, and becoming educated, or is the value just in the co-opting of another human being's attention? If the value is in the outcome, the means to achieving that aren't of much consequence.
- alwa 7mo ago
  More subtly, what is an education? What is care? As you point out, the LLMs are (or probably will become) perfectly good at the measurable parts of those services; but I think the residual edge of “good” education/care is more than just the other human’s co-opted attention. How many of us have a reminiscence that starts “looking back, the most life-changing part of my primary or secondary education was ________,” where the blank is a person, not a curriculum module? How many doctors operate, at least in part, on hunches—on totalities of perception-filtered-through-experience that they can’t fully put into words? I’m reminded of the recent account of homebound elderly Japanese people relying on the Yakult delivery lady partly for tiny yoghurt drinks, but mainly for a glimmer of human contact [0]. Although I guess that cuts to your point: the value in that example really is just co-opting another human’s attention. In most of these caring professions, some of the value is in the measurable outcome (bacterial infection? Antibiotic!), but different means really do create different collections of value that don’t fully overlap (fine, I’ll actually lay off the wine because the doctor put the fear of the lord in me). I guess the optimistic case is, with the rote mechanical aspects automated away, maybe humans have more time to give each other the residual human element… [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47287344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47287344
  - sayamqazi 7mo ago
    > How many of us have a reminiscence that starts “looking back, the most life-changing part of my primary or secondary education was ________,” For me it was a website with turotirals on how to make flash games. It literally launched my career and improved the quality of life for my whole family by an order of magnitude. I am primarily the naysayer of AI but I admit that current LLMs could have easily replicated the whole website.
    - alwa 7mo ago
      I love, love that. And if even one of my weird little side projects—including the ones I build with AI-powered tools—connects with a young person like that, I’ll be satisfied. To me it’s not the “how” so much as the “what,” though. I can only speak to my own experience with that sort of thing, but how much of what moved you was the invisible authorial hand behind the tutorials—deciding what’s fun to them to write about, and how to talk about it in a way that clicked with a young you? I guess, what’s the difference between that website, the official docs for the language in question, the formal spec for the language, the .h files themselves that mechanically define the engine that compiles the language, a big pile of examples of working code in the language… For that matter what’s the difference between what’s fun to do in the language and what’s boring? I would grant that LLM tech would probably shine at the grunt work part of “please translate these docs into a grade-school-pitched, engaging, example-driven tutorial website; make it dinosaur themed.” But equally it could pitch it for a billion other audiences, and most will not bear fruit without guidance and refinement. And LLM frontends are already same-y, what will distinguish it to your young eyes? Knowing (or finding out) what’s worth doing is the tricky part—and that’s hard to separate from the humans on the receiving end. I think about when tiktok made it “easy” to recut songs and memes, and to do basic compositing effects. The “how” required specialized software and serious skill for a long time, then suddenly it didn’t. But when it comes to the “what,” there are still people who are good at using the tools and ones who are bad—ones who make good content and ones who make bad ones… and the difference seems to cleave along the normal human lines: innate talent + practice + persistence. As the old saw goes, contemporary art: “But I could do that!” “Yeah, but you didn’t.” Alternatively, as the fox said, “C’est le temps que tu as perdu pour ta rose qui fait ta rose si importante”…
Finnucane 7mo ago
If I described my symptoms to an AI and it suggested a diagnosis, I would defintely get a second opinion.
- mullingitover 7mo ago
  That's reasonable, but don't feel like you're safe letting the humans rest on their laurels. Human medical errors kill thousands upon thousands every year.
NetMageSCW 7mo ago
I feel like lobster’s history might be relevant here - will at some point having a flawed forgetful human being give medical advice be for poor people?

somekyle2 7mo ago

It also seems like the value of quality tutoring that doesn't primarily function as social/class signaling goes down as tools capable of automating high quality intellectual work are more widely available.

mullingitover 7mo ago
It depends on outcome again: is the value of tutoring the social class elevation, or is it in the outcome of becoming more skilled and knowledgable? There's also the deeper philosophical question of what is the meaning of life, and if there's inherent value in learning outside of what remunerative advantages you reap from it.

mullingitover 7mo ago

> Why should one child get an LLM teacher or doctor while others get individualized attention by a skilled human being? Is the value in the outcome of receiving medical advice and care, and becoming educated, or is the value just in the co-opting of another human being's attention? If the value is in the outcome, the means to achieving that aren't of much consequence.

alwa 7mo ago
More subtly, what is an education? What is care? As you point out, the LLMs are (or probably will become) perfectly good at the measurable parts of those services; but I think the residual edge of “good” education/care is more than just the other human’s co-opted attention. How many of us have a reminiscence that starts “looking back, the most life-changing part of my primary or secondary education was ________,” where the blank is a person, not a curriculum module? How many doctors operate, at least in part, on hunches—on totalities of perception-filtered-through-experience that they can’t fully put into words? I’m reminded of the recent account of homebound elderly Japanese people relying on the Yakult delivery lady partly for tiny yoghurt drinks, but mainly for a glimmer of human contact [0]. Although I guess that cuts to your point: the value in that example really is just co-opting another human’s attention. In most of these caring professions, some of the value is in the measurable outcome (bacterial infection? Antibiotic!), but different means really do create different collections of value that don’t fully overlap (fine, I’ll actually lay off the wine because the doctor put the fear of the lord in me). I guess the optimistic case is, with the rote mechanical aspects automated away, maybe humans have more time to give each other the residual human element… [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47287344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47287344
- sayamqazi 7mo ago
  > How many of us have a reminiscence that starts “looking back, the most life-changing part of my primary or secondary education was ________,” For me it was a website with turotirals on how to make flash games. It literally launched my career and improved the quality of life for my whole family by an order of magnitude. I am primarily the naysayer of AI but I admit that current LLMs could have easily replicated the whole website.
  - alwa 7mo ago
    I love, love that. And if even one of my weird little side projects—including the ones I build with AI-powered tools—connects with a young person like that, I’ll be satisfied. To me it’s not the “how” so much as the “what,” though. I can only speak to my own experience with that sort of thing, but how much of what moved you was the invisible authorial hand behind the tutorials—deciding what’s fun to them to write about, and how to talk about it in a way that clicked with a young you? I guess, what’s the difference between that website, the official docs for the language in question, the formal spec for the language, the .h files themselves that mechanically define the engine that compiles the language, a big pile of examples of working code in the language… For that matter what’s the difference between what’s fun to do in the language and what’s boring? I would grant that LLM tech would probably shine at the grunt work part of “please translate these docs into a grade-school-pitched, engaging, example-driven tutorial website; make it dinosaur themed.” But equally it could pitch it for a billion other audiences, and most will not bear fruit without guidance and refinement. And LLM frontends are already same-y, what will distinguish it to your young eyes? Knowing (or finding out) what’s worth doing is the tricky part—and that’s hard to separate from the humans on the receiving end. I think about when tiktok made it “easy” to recut songs and memes, and to do basic compositing effects. The “how” required specialized software and serious skill for a long time, then suddenly it didn’t. But when it comes to the “what,” there are still people who are good at using the tools and ones who are bad—ones who make good content and ones who make bad ones… and the difference seems to cleave along the normal human lines: innate talent + practice + persistence. As the old saw goes, contemporary art: “But I could do that!” “Yeah, but you didn’t.” Alternatively, as the fox said, “C’est le temps que tu as perdu pour ta rose qui fait ta rose si importante”…

Finnucane 7mo ago

If I described my symptoms to an AI and it suggested a diagnosis, I would defintely get a second opinion.

mullingitover 7mo ago
That's reasonable, but don't feel like you're safe letting the humans rest on their laurels. Human medical errors kill thousands upon thousands every year.

NetMageSCW 7mo ago

I feel like lobster’s history might be relevant here - will at some point having a flawed forgetful human being give medical advice be for poor people?