4 ms·

Our "culture" has long been the province of corporations. In prior epochs it was still the product of patronage and power. At least with LLMs we can glimpse an

Our "culture" has long been the province of corporations. In prior epochs it was still the product of patronage and power. At least with LLMs we can glimpse an escape route to that which generations of humans have strived for - a world in which the labor required of each human to lead a flourishing life approaches zero. Instead of fixating on a remedy that seeks to criminalize AI, maybe focus on the relatively rather achievable goal of redistributing LLM gains. Would that not be the most desirable justice? What is your alternative, and would you foreclose the future in the name of a past that never really existed in the first place?

jaybeavers 14d ago
Flourishing life? Where is your data leading to the conclusion that AI models are leading to the world populace leading a ‘flourishing life’? Are taxes on revenue of companies like OpenAI somehow being collected and turned into a UBI and I just didn’t hear about it?
- godwinson__4-8 14d ago
  I said a glimpse. I didn't say it's here now or it would be easy. It is however, achievable. Certainly more so than engaging in the fantasy that we can criminalize LLMs out of existence. And it is likely more desirable than such an effort anyway.
  - bayindirh 14d ago
    Like trickle down economics? We all experience the substance which is trickling down.
  - jaybeavers 14d ago
    Or, perhaps, the companies forming the for profit LLMs could be made to pay a license fee for the copyrighted data they lifted from behind the paywall and then used to form a for profit entity with. Nothing about banning technology. How about enforcing DMCA and then applying a penalty for the knowing theft rather than negotiating a license?
    - bdangubic 14d ago
      This is solid but how many people you reckon would benefit if they paid every single penny for any copyrighted data? I am in my 50's with 30 years in the industry and I know maybe 2 people that might benefit from this... certainly not something general public would benefit from
      - jaybeavers 13d ago
        We’re likely looking at a new world where physical and mental work from humans holds much less value. So if the world still generates value ( think AI inventing new drugs, robots planting and harvesting fields of corn ), who is able to make income? The people who have the capital to purchase and run the systems. So our future world probably looks like a system where effort/knowledge/skill has little to no reward and capital (e.g. inheritance, passive income) has all the reward. So, we can have a world where you are born rich or you live in abject poverty, or we can figure out something else.
        bayindirh 13d ago
        Why more and more stories from "Pump Six and Other Stories" are becoming real step by step?
        godwinson__4-8 13d ago
        You are missing the obvious answer. The state runs the system. Or really at a certain point, the state runs itself. In 100 years or so, the CEO becomes a barbaric relic of the past age, like our ancestors who beat each other over the head with clubs. Nevertheless, such a future will necessarily owe a debt to both. Wealth and states are often connected. In this case if the state is properly aligned (this is what the coming battles are to be about - as they always have been) to be egalitarian, then redistribution can occur unblocked by human enclaves of greed.
        brookst 13d ago
        > We’re likely looking at a new world where physical and mental work from humans holds much less value. Or, perhaps, we're regressing to the mean after a century where this work was over-valued, because companies like Disney succeeded in regulatory capture and created artificial protections to maximize their own revenue. How much money did Bach earn from royalties (ok, there's a pun there, but I mean payment for reproduction of his work)? How much power did Melville have over who published Moby Dick, and where, and how it was used (hint: very little in the US, none at all overseas). We are seeing a weakening of control and revenue extraction from copyrighted works. But on the chart of history, the 1900's were a very anamolous spike in that area. And it saddens me that so much of HN is unhappy about more of a return to the commons. > So if the world still generates value ( think AI inventing new drugs, robots planting and harvesting fields of corn ), who is able to make income? The people who have the capital to purchase and run the systems. On the bright side, I think you're wrong here. Or (as Claude likes to tell me), you're half-wrong. If this were true, it would already be the norm and only big companies could bring new products to market. Yet startups are a thing, and many succeed (more fail, but still. The trick in entrepreneurship and creative work has always been knowing what to ask the system to do. You might as well say that music is dead because the synthesizer and music software companies can produce as much as they want at zero cost. It turns out that owning the means of production only loosely correlates to producing things people want. > So, we can have a world where you are born rich or you live in abject poverty, or we can figure out something else. Already done. There are kids in Africa studying with AI tutors today, getting insight that they would likely never have had access to before. One-person shops are releasing board games and business services that they would never have had the capital to do before. Where you see centralization of capital and control, and the masses reduced to abject poverty... I see the complete collapse of barriers to entry and switching costs in many fields. But who am I? Some random guy. But I've heard very senior execs, at Microsoft and other companies, in absolute panic that the IP and systems they've spent billions of dollars to build over decades of work are suddenly subject to disruption by teenagers who are great at using AI. Seriously, panic. It's a complex subject, and sorry for writing a book, but your prompt apparently got me. None of us know for sure what will happen but I think yours is a needlessly pessimistic view, ironically informed by the exact abuses of th past century that you're worried might not continue.
  - yoz-y 13d ago
    It is achievable in theory yes. But it was also achievable without LLMs and yet, here we are.
- brookst 13d ago
  I mean I'm producing more and better art and software each month than I used to do in a year. I feel like I'm flourishing because of AI. Tell me I'm wrong?
  - jaybeavers 13d ago
    You’re not wrong. Me too. I spend most of my waking hours using AI for new product development. But can you bring it to market and turn it into a reliable revenue stream? And will this still be true in a few years when the duo or trio -opolies corner the AI market enough that the $200 subscriptions go away to be replaced by API pricing only? I’m already seeing my subscription use slow to a crawl during peak hours so I now code before 8 am or after 6 pm. And turning on ‘Opus Fast’ with API pricing is already financially impossible for me as a small business. Ironically, China may be the savior here, with open source models that may be good enough to ‘put the means of production in the hands of the working class’. I mean, is QWEN a 4d chess game to replace capitalism with communism? Who knew (outside of the CCP central committee)?
    - hollerith 13d ago
      >is QWEN a 4d chess game to replace capitalism with communism? No. The Chinese labs pay much less to train their models because they are distilling Western models. Western labs can't do it that way because they'd immediately be sued. They release model weights under permissive licenses to get any attention and usage share at all.
      - jacquesm 13d ago
        > The Chinese labs pay much less to train their models because they distill Western models. That's nonsense.
        hollerith 13d ago
        I'm going to take your comment as a request for supporting details. I believe what I wrote is an accurate summary of information in a report published this month by Anthropic. I haven't seen the report, but have seen this next summary written by someone who I trust to summarize accurately: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-bad-guy-with-an-ai-named-claude?open=false#%C2%A7illicit-fraudulent-distillation https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-bad-guy-with-an-ai-named-c... OpenAI reported similar behavior last year. The assertion that the other (two) leading US models are being distilled in a similar manner is an assumption on my part. Where I wrote, "Claude or another leading US model" I initially had just "Claude", but it felt silly to imply that the same thing is not happening to the other leading US models.
ndsipa_pomu 14d ago
Considering that we don't seem able to appropriately tax the biggest corporations, why do you think we'll suddenly be able to redistribute LLM gains? Far more likely is that wealth and power will become even more concentrated into the hands of the few and the rest of humanity will become effective slaves.
- bdangubic 14d ago
  These doomsday theories sound solid in practice but in order for someone to accumulate a lot of wealth there have to be consumers to chip into this. If we are all slaves, where is that wealth going to come from?!
  - 2frrrr 13d ago
    The Amazon warehouse worker is a modern day slave. Don’t believe me? Try it. I have.
  - ndsipa_pomu 13d ago
    Not necessarily as there are methods to redistribute wealth without the consumers having any choice. Recently, there was the example of the SpaceX IPO listed on Nasdaq (after they changed the rules to allow it). Lots of people have pensions/investments in tracker funds and those funds are essentially forced to buy SpaceX shares. Simple things like "quantitative easing" can result in higher inflation which essentially devalues people's money. The ultra wealthy will typically not have any meaningful percentage of their money in currency, but instead will be in various assets around the world which means that their wealth is not affected by the inflation. There's plenty of other schemes such as the "too big to fail" method of securing handouts from the government.
jacquesm 14d ago
> At least with LLMs we can glimpse an escape route to that which generations of humans have strived for - a world in which the labor required of each human to lead a flourishing life approaches zero. Let me fix that for you: A world in the the value of the labor of each human approaches zero.
- godwinson__4-8 14d ago
  Right, and the consequence is going to be, what? Humans with zero economic value can still vote. They can still mass. They will still have needs. Really the script here writes itself. The historical precedents bound the problem rather well. As always, radical social change will not occur until a wide swath of the population is aligned. In this case, due to their broad economic devaluation. It would be easier if today's knowledge workers stopped deluding themselves into thinking that their standards of living will maintain. Your acknowledgement of the necessary predicate to change is, in that respect, progress in itself. There is little reason why we cannot accelerate the timing of broad consensus if more people so readily came to that conclusion - and resisted the temptation to then find the answer instead in nostalgia about the past.
  - AlexeyBrin 13d ago
    You assume there will still be free elections and democracy. There is also the possibility that the form of government will change into something else.
  - yoz-y 13d ago
    We are not deluding ourselves that we will maintain our standard of living. If the boss’ dream of replacing all workers by AI that does their job poorly but cheaply will be realized. We will go to the gutter with the rest of the economically worthless people. There are many of them today, their needs are not met (but could be, the production output is largely there, but captured) and their political views don’t matter because the votes are captured by populists. I’m sure the powers that are will find a way to go around educated people voting.
    - 13d ago
frtt 14d ago
[flagged]
globalnode 14d ago
In the 50's there were predictions that in 10 years no-one will have to work again because of the advances made in automation, like the washing machine for example. Any predictions of less work this time around are a complete joke.
- godwinson__4-8 13d ago
  For thousands of years humans have dreamed of reaching the stars. Imagine if the astronaut taking Earthrise had looked down upon his planet with such scorn. Human aspirations frequently exceed our capacity for timely predictions. It doesn't make the aspiration any less worthwhile. On a cosmic scale human life is a "complete joke". It is a feature of humanity (which we should cherish) that we nevertheless pursue our lives with interest anyway. You work less than your counterparts centuries ago... on what understanding of history do you imagine your life would be better in the past? Is your life with a washing machine worse? Is the perfect the enemy of the good? What part of "glimpse" is escaping you?
  - globalnode 12d ago
    Nice hopeful commentary there, I do appreciate it but... > You work less than your counterparts centuries ago... do I? I'm not against the tech, I love the tech, I'm just not buying the marketing this time around.
- smackeyacky 13d ago
  When was the last time you saw a Chinese laundry?
  - phpnode 13d ago
    That's the point, those jobs went away, the need for a job didn't. No one seems to know what long term opportunities are going to be created by AI, we only know that it is going to erode existing opportunities.
- Mistletoe 13d ago
  Now the mother and father both have to get jobs, in the future mother, father, and child will get jobs to support the trillionaires.
chrisjj 14d ago
> At least with LLMs we can glimpse an escape route to that which generations of humans have strived for - a world in which the labor required of each human to lead a flourishing life approaches zero. Fantasy lets us glimpse anything.
steele 14d ago
US has been procrastinating reparations for slavery. LLM redistribution can't happen until the capitalism machines recursively solve "sins of our fathers".
Tangurena2 14d ago
> a world in which the labor required of each human to lead a flourishing life approaches zero. The AI bubble is pricing AI stocks so high that the only possible way for them to meet investors expectations is for AI to charge so much that every human & corporation has no money left.
- conmod278 13d ago
  Money will be created to justify the valuation.
deleted 13d ago
[deleted]
whywhywhywhy 13d ago
>a world in which the labor required of each human to lead a flourishing life approaches zero. Just doesn't add up to a world where this benefits, if the thing takes no effort why would someone else pay for it? Feel this with the big influx of people selling vibe coded software, if you could vibe code it why would I ever pay you for it instead of just making my own clone.
Trasmatta 13d ago
Is this "escape route" in the room with us now?
2ahsg1 13d ago
[flagged]

jaybeavers 14d ago

Flourishing life? Where is your data leading to the conclusion that AI models are leading to the world populace leading a ‘flourishing life’? Are taxes on revenue of companies like OpenAI somehow being collected and turned into a UBI and I just didn’t hear about it?

godwinson__4-8 14d ago
I said a glimpse. I didn't say it's here now or it would be easy. It is however, achievable. Certainly more so than engaging in the fantasy that we can criminalize LLMs out of existence. And it is likely more desirable than such an effort anyway.
- bayindirh 14d ago
  Like trickle down economics? We all experience the substance which is trickling down.
- jaybeavers 14d ago
  Or, perhaps, the companies forming the for profit LLMs could be made to pay a license fee for the copyrighted data they lifted from behind the paywall and then used to form a for profit entity with. Nothing about banning technology. How about enforcing DMCA and then applying a penalty for the knowing theft rather than negotiating a license?
  - bdangubic 14d ago
    This is solid but how many people you reckon would benefit if they paid every single penny for any copyrighted data? I am in my 50's with 30 years in the industry and I know maybe 2 people that might benefit from this... certainly not something general public would benefit from
    - jaybeavers 13d ago
      We’re likely looking at a new world where physical and mental work from humans holds much less value. So if the world still generates value ( think AI inventing new drugs, robots planting and harvesting fields of corn ), who is able to make income? The people who have the capital to purchase and run the systems. So our future world probably looks like a system where effort/knowledge/skill has little to no reward and capital (e.g. inheritance, passive income) has all the reward. So, we can have a world where you are born rich or you live in abject poverty, or we can figure out something else.
      - bayindirh 13d ago
        Why more and more stories from "Pump Six and Other Stories" are becoming real step by step?
      - godwinson__4-8 13d ago
        You are missing the obvious answer. The state runs the system. Or really at a certain point, the state runs itself. In 100 years or so, the CEO becomes a barbaric relic of the past age, like our ancestors who beat each other over the head with clubs. Nevertheless, such a future will necessarily owe a debt to both. Wealth and states are often connected. In this case if the state is properly aligned (this is what the coming battles are to be about - as they always have been) to be egalitarian, then redistribution can occur unblocked by human enclaves of greed.
      - brookst 13d ago
        > We’re likely looking at a new world where physical and mental work from humans holds much less value. Or, perhaps, we're regressing to the mean after a century where this work was over-valued, because companies like Disney succeeded in regulatory capture and created artificial protections to maximize their own revenue. How much money did Bach earn from royalties (ok, there's a pun there, but I mean payment for reproduction of his work)? How much power did Melville have over who published Moby Dick, and where, and how it was used (hint: very little in the US, none at all overseas). We are seeing a weakening of control and revenue extraction from copyrighted works. But on the chart of history, the 1900's were a very anamolous spike in that area. And it saddens me that so much of HN is unhappy about more of a return to the commons. > So if the world still generates value ( think AI inventing new drugs, robots planting and harvesting fields of corn ), who is able to make income? The people who have the capital to purchase and run the systems. On the bright side, I think you're wrong here. Or (as Claude likes to tell me), you're half-wrong. If this were true, it would already be the norm and only big companies could bring new products to market. Yet startups are a thing, and many succeed (more fail, but still. The trick in entrepreneurship and creative work has always been knowing what to ask the system to do. You might as well say that music is dead because the synthesizer and music software companies can produce as much as they want at zero cost. It turns out that owning the means of production only loosely correlates to producing things people want. > So, we can have a world where you are born rich or you live in abject poverty, or we can figure out something else. Already done. There are kids in Africa studying with AI tutors today, getting insight that they would likely never have had access to before. One-person shops are releasing board games and business services that they would never have had the capital to do before. Where you see centralization of capital and control, and the masses reduced to abject poverty... I see the complete collapse of barriers to entry and switching costs in many fields. But who am I? Some random guy. But I've heard very senior execs, at Microsoft and other companies, in absolute panic that the IP and systems they've spent billions of dollars to build over decades of work are suddenly subject to disruption by teenagers who are great at using AI. Seriously, panic. It's a complex subject, and sorry for writing a book, but your prompt apparently got me. None of us know for sure what will happen but I think yours is a needlessly pessimistic view, ironically informed by the exact abuses of th past century that you're worried might not continue.
- yoz-y 13d ago
  It is achievable in theory yes. But it was also achievable without LLMs and yet, here we are.
brookst 13d ago
I mean I'm producing more and better art and software each month than I used to do in a year. I feel like I'm flourishing because of AI. Tell me I'm wrong?
- jaybeavers 13d ago
  You’re not wrong. Me too. I spend most of my waking hours using AI for new product development. But can you bring it to market and turn it into a reliable revenue stream? And will this still be true in a few years when the duo or trio -opolies corner the AI market enough that the $200 subscriptions go away to be replaced by API pricing only? I’m already seeing my subscription use slow to a crawl during peak hours so I now code before 8 am or after 6 pm. And turning on ‘Opus Fast’ with API pricing is already financially impossible for me as a small business. Ironically, China may be the savior here, with open source models that may be good enough to ‘put the means of production in the hands of the working class’. I mean, is QWEN a 4d chess game to replace capitalism with communism? Who knew (outside of the CCP central committee)?
  - hollerith 13d ago
    >is QWEN a 4d chess game to replace capitalism with communism? No. The Chinese labs pay much less to train their models because they are distilling Western models. Western labs can't do it that way because they'd immediately be sued. They release model weights under permissive licenses to get any attention and usage share at all.
    - jacquesm 13d ago
      > The Chinese labs pay much less to train their models because they distill Western models. That's nonsense.
      - hollerith 13d ago
        I'm going to take your comment as a request for supporting details. I believe what I wrote is an accurate summary of information in a report published this month by Anthropic. I haven't seen the report, but have seen this next summary written by someone who I trust to summarize accurately: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-bad-guy-with-an-ai-named-claude?open=false#%C2%A7illicit-fraudulent-distillation https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-bad-guy-with-an-ai-named-c... OpenAI reported similar behavior last year. The assertion that the other (two) leading US models are being distilled in a similar manner is an assumption on my part. Where I wrote, "Claude or another leading US model" I initially had just "Claude", but it felt silly to imply that the same thing is not happening to the other leading US models.

ndsipa_pomu 14d ago

Considering that we don't seem able to appropriately tax the biggest corporations, why do you think we'll suddenly be able to redistribute LLM gains? Far more likely is that wealth and power will become even more concentrated into the hands of the few and the rest of humanity will become effective slaves.

bdangubic 14d ago
These doomsday theories sound solid in practice but in order for someone to accumulate a lot of wealth there have to be consumers to chip into this. If we are all slaves, where is that wealth going to come from?!
- 2frrrr 13d ago
  The Amazon warehouse worker is a modern day slave. Don’t believe me? Try it. I have.
- ndsipa_pomu 13d ago
  Not necessarily as there are methods to redistribute wealth without the consumers having any choice. Recently, there was the example of the SpaceX IPO listed on Nasdaq (after they changed the rules to allow it). Lots of people have pensions/investments in tracker funds and those funds are essentially forced to buy SpaceX shares. Simple things like "quantitative easing" can result in higher inflation which essentially devalues people's money. The ultra wealthy will typically not have any meaningful percentage of their money in currency, but instead will be in various assets around the world which means that their wealth is not affected by the inflation. There's plenty of other schemes such as the "too big to fail" method of securing handouts from the government.

jacquesm 14d ago

> At least with LLMs we can glimpse an escape route to that which generations of humans have strived for - a world in which the labor required of each human to lead a flourishing life approaches zero. Let me fix that for you: A world in the the value of the labor of each human approaches zero.

godwinson__4-8 14d ago
Right, and the consequence is going to be, what? Humans with zero economic value can still vote. They can still mass. They will still have needs. Really the script here writes itself. The historical precedents bound the problem rather well. As always, radical social change will not occur until a wide swath of the population is aligned. In this case, due to their broad economic devaluation. It would be easier if today's knowledge workers stopped deluding themselves into thinking that their standards of living will maintain. Your acknowledgement of the necessary predicate to change is, in that respect, progress in itself. There is little reason why we cannot accelerate the timing of broad consensus if more people so readily came to that conclusion - and resisted the temptation to then find the answer instead in nostalgia about the past.
- AlexeyBrin 13d ago
  You assume there will still be free elections and democracy. There is also the possibility that the form of government will change into something else.
- yoz-y 13d ago
  We are not deluding ourselves that we will maintain our standard of living. If the boss’ dream of replacing all workers by AI that does their job poorly but cheaply will be realized. We will go to the gutter with the rest of the economically worthless people. There are many of them today, their needs are not met (but could be, the production output is largely there, but captured) and their political views don’t matter because the votes are captured by populists. I’m sure the powers that are will find a way to go around educated people voting.
  - 13d ago

frtt 14d ago

[flagged]

globalnode 14d ago

In the 50's there were predictions that in 10 years no-one will have to work again because of the advances made in automation, like the washing machine for example. Any predictions of less work this time around are a complete joke.

godwinson__4-8 13d ago
For thousands of years humans have dreamed of reaching the stars. Imagine if the astronaut taking Earthrise had looked down upon his planet with such scorn. Human aspirations frequently exceed our capacity for timely predictions. It doesn't make the aspiration any less worthwhile. On a cosmic scale human life is a "complete joke". It is a feature of humanity (which we should cherish) that we nevertheless pursue our lives with interest anyway. You work less than your counterparts centuries ago... on what understanding of history do you imagine your life would be better in the past? Is your life with a washing machine worse? Is the perfect the enemy of the good? What part of "glimpse" is escaping you?
- globalnode 12d ago
  Nice hopeful commentary there, I do appreciate it but... > You work less than your counterparts centuries ago... do I? I'm not against the tech, I love the tech, I'm just not buying the marketing this time around.
smackeyacky 13d ago
When was the last time you saw a Chinese laundry?
- phpnode 13d ago
  That's the point, those jobs went away, the need for a job didn't. No one seems to know what long term opportunities are going to be created by AI, we only know that it is going to erode existing opportunities.
Mistletoe 13d ago
Now the mother and father both have to get jobs, in the future mother, father, and child will get jobs to support the trillionaires.

chrisjj 14d ago

steele 14d ago

US has been procrastinating reparations for slavery. LLM redistribution can't happen until the capitalism machines recursively solve "sins of our fathers".

Tangurena2 14d ago

> a world in which the labor required of each human to lead a flourishing life approaches zero. The AI bubble is pricing AI stocks so high that the only possible way for them to meet investors expectations is for AI to charge so much that every human & corporation has no money left.

conmod278 13d ago
Money will be created to justify the valuation.

deleted 13d ago

[deleted]

whywhywhywhy 13d ago

>a world in which the labor required of each human to lead a flourishing life approaches zero. Just doesn't add up to a world where this benefits, if the thing takes no effort why would someone else pay for it? Feel this with the big influx of people selling vibe coded software, if you could vibe code it why would I ever pay you for it instead of just making my own clone.

Trasmatta 13d ago

Is this "escape route" in the room with us now?

2ahsg1 13d ago

[flagged]