7 ms·

It's very unclear to me. The key question is on direction of LLMs. Right now, LLMs are taking over human jobs. If the cost of silicon+power < cost of human bei

It's very unclear to me. The key question is on direction of LLMs. Right now, LLMs are taking over human jobs. If the cost of silicon+power < cost of human being doing the same work, what rational reason is there to employ a human being? If this applies to SWEs, lawyers, business analysts, many research scientists, .... this situation could persist for a long, long time. While capital costs less than the inputs of labor (nominal food, housing, etc.), there is no need for labor. The key question is about continued progress in models, and of the tooling around them: - Plateau: Old silicon obsoletes in due course - Rise quickly: Old silicon maintains value for a long time

paulhebert 3mo ago
> what rational reason is there to employ a human being? To maintain a functioning society and social contract? Is wanting low unemployment in our society not rational?
- Earw0rm 3mo ago
  It's ethnically rational, and morally right. However. It's not rational relative to the short-term incentives of a typical corporation or investment vehicle. PE, VC, fund managers aren't paid to give a fuck about the social contract. Literally not in their job description.
- hackyhacky 3mo ago
  Correct. Unfortunately, that's not how capitalism makes decisions.
  - tirant 3mo ago
    Capitalism does not decide anything. Capitalism allows individuals to take decisions in a free market. If you want to complain about selfishness then do it on selfish individuals, which by the way, are present in all types of economic systems.
    - goatlover 3mo ago
      Which includes SCOTUS recognizing corporations as persons.
    - hackyhacky 3mo ago
      > Capitalism allows individuals to take decisions in a free market. Capitalism provides a set of incentives that shape how people make decisions. Anyone can be selfish, but selfishness in capitalist society has a particular shape. To ignore the external incentives when looking at human behavior is horribly naive and shortsighted, but is frequently done by capitalism-apologists who seek to disregard any criticism of their favorite incentive system.
- donaldjbiden 3mo ago
  [dead]
- ben_w 3mo ago
  > Is wanting low unemployment in our society not rational? Only conditionally on there being bad consequences for high unemployment. I don't particularly trust politicians, but there's a whole host of hypothetical scenarios about futures where work is essentially optional. Unfortunately, they're all either in the sci-fi or religion sections of the book store: Despite people occasionally investigating UBI, the efforts to research UBI seriously have the same problems that Marx had with literal Communism, in that there's an obvious difference between any partial transition as compared to a global transition, and we don't have a completely disconnected parallel world to be a petri dish for us to test the economic outcomes on.
fluidcruft 3mo ago
What I don't understand is if nobody has jobs, who's paying the machines to do anything? So okay cool you don't need people to design and build cars. Who's going to buy the cars and where exactly are they finding money? But see also the "radiologists driving to work" meme for why I think tech in general is currently getting high off their own farts.
- saulpw 3mo ago
  Rich people become the only consumers.
  - andy_ppp 3mo ago
    Yes, the plan seems to be anti human in the extreme. Why do you need the plebs if they can be entirely replaced by AI? But the question then becomes why does the AI (and before that their security detail in a post money world) need billionaires?
    - iugtmkbdfil834 3mo ago
      This likely is the tertiary reason as to why llms are so heavily kneecapped. Granted, at this point, projects do exist to remove those arbitrary restrictions, but the effort that goes into it suggests it is a real concern.
- somenameforme 3mo ago
  The overwhelming majority of the labor force remains service, manual labor, and other such stuff that LLMs will have no real effect on. So the economy will be fine, but I do agree with you from a different angle. The entire goal of LLMs seems self destructive. If they're successful then the endgame is completely removing the barriers to entry to producing software and other digital tech. But if we do reach that endgame then the value of tech is going to plummet because there will be absolutely no barriers to entry to compete, or even just individuals homebrewing up what they need on demand. Like imagine there was something you could buy where you insert some lumber, give it some passable description of furniture, and it outputs it. And you paid $20/month for access to this. And this was all being bankrolled by the furniture industry? I mean, sure guys - it's much appreciated, but I don't think I've ever seen anybody so enthusiastic about digging their own grave. I think it's already obvious that the gazillion dollars of API calls isn't going to materialize - it seems the handful of companies that trialed that are already reversing course hard. And in the future where LLMs are successful, that'd be even more true.

paulhebert 3mo ago

> what rational reason is there to employ a human being? To maintain a functioning society and social contract? Is wanting low unemployment in our society not rational?

Earw0rm 3mo ago
It's ethnically rational, and morally right. However. It's not rational relative to the short-term incentives of a typical corporation or investment vehicle. PE, VC, fund managers aren't paid to give a fuck about the social contract. Literally not in their job description.
hackyhacky 3mo ago
Correct. Unfortunately, that's not how capitalism makes decisions.
- tirant 3mo ago
  Capitalism does not decide anything. Capitalism allows individuals to take decisions in a free market. If you want to complain about selfishness then do it on selfish individuals, which by the way, are present in all types of economic systems.
  - goatlover 3mo ago
    Which includes SCOTUS recognizing corporations as persons.
  - hackyhacky 3mo ago
    > Capitalism allows individuals to take decisions in a free market. Capitalism provides a set of incentives that shape how people make decisions. Anyone can be selfish, but selfishness in capitalist society has a particular shape. To ignore the external incentives when looking at human behavior is horribly naive and shortsighted, but is frequently done by capitalism-apologists who seek to disregard any criticism of their favorite incentive system.
donaldjbiden 3mo ago
[dead]
ben_w 3mo ago
> Is wanting low unemployment in our society not rational? Only conditionally on there being bad consequences for high unemployment. I don't particularly trust politicians, but there's a whole host of hypothetical scenarios about futures where work is essentially optional. Unfortunately, they're all either in the sci-fi or religion sections of the book store: Despite people occasionally investigating UBI, the efforts to research UBI seriously have the same problems that Marx had with literal Communism, in that there's an obvious difference between any partial transition as compared to a global transition, and we don't have a completely disconnected parallel world to be a petri dish for us to test the economic outcomes on.

fluidcruft 3mo ago

What I don't understand is if nobody has jobs, who's paying the machines to do anything? So okay cool you don't need people to design and build cars. Who's going to buy the cars and where exactly are they finding money? But see also the "radiologists driving to work" meme for why I think tech in general is currently getting high off their own farts.

saulpw 3mo ago
Rich people become the only consumers.
- andy_ppp 3mo ago
  Yes, the plan seems to be anti human in the extreme. Why do you need the plebs if they can be entirely replaced by AI? But the question then becomes why does the AI (and before that their security detail in a post money world) need billionaires?
  - iugtmkbdfil834 3mo ago
    This likely is the tertiary reason as to why llms are so heavily kneecapped. Granted, at this point, projects do exist to remove those arbitrary restrictions, but the effort that goes into it suggests it is a real concern.
somenameforme 3mo ago
The overwhelming majority of the labor force remains service, manual labor, and other such stuff that LLMs will have no real effect on. So the economy will be fine, but I do agree with you from a different angle. The entire goal of LLMs seems self destructive. If they're successful then the endgame is completely removing the barriers to entry to producing software and other digital tech. But if we do reach that endgame then the value of tech is going to plummet because there will be absolutely no barriers to entry to compete, or even just individuals homebrewing up what they need on demand. Like imagine there was something you could buy where you insert some lumber, give it some passable description of furniture, and it outputs it. And you paid $20/month for access to this. And this was all being bankrolled by the furniture industry? I mean, sure guys - it's much appreciated, but I don't think I've ever seen anybody so enthusiastic about digging their own grave. I think it's already obvious that the gazillion dollars of API calls isn't going to materialize - it seems the handful of companies that trialed that are already reversing course hard. And in the future where LLMs are successful, that'd be even more true.