Kind of. But the outcomes likely do not benefit the masses. People "accessing AI labor" is just a race to the bottom. Maybe some new tools get made or small businesses get off the ground, but ultimately this "AI labor" is a machine that is owned by capitalists. They dictate its use, and they will give or deny people access to the machine as it benefits them. Maybe they get the masses dependent on AI tools that are currently either free or underpriced, as alternatives to AI wither away unable to compete on cost, then the prices are raised or the product enshittified. Or maybe AI will be massively useful to the surveillance state and data brokers. Maybe AI will simply replace a large percentage of human labor in large corporations, leading to mass unemployment.
I don't fault anyone for trying to find opportunities to provide for themselves and loved ones in this moment by using AI to make a thing. But don't fool yourself into thinking that the AI labor is yours. The capitalists own it, not us.
As someone who has leaned fully into AI tooling this resonates. The current environment is an oligopoly so I'm learning how to leverage someone else's tool. However, in this way, I don't think LLMs are a radical departure from any proprietary other tool (e.g. Photoshop).
Indeed. Do you know how many small consultancies are out there which are "Microsoft shops"? An individual could become a millionaire by founding their own and delivering value for a few high-roller clients.
Nobody says there's no money to make anymore. But the space for that is limited, no matter how many millions hustle, there's only 100 spots in the top 100.
what makes you think that's actually possible? maybe if you really had the connections and sales experience etc...
but also, if that were possible, then why wouldn't prices go down? why would the value of such labor stay so high if the same thing can be done by other individuals?
I saw it happen more back in the day compared to now. Point being, nobody batted an eyelash at being entirely dependent on some company's proprietary tech. It was how money was made in the business.
Software development was a race to the bottom for the majority of developers aside from the major tech companies for a decade. I’m seeing companies on the enterprise/corp dev side - where most developers work - stagnate for a decade and not keep up with inflation in tier 2 cities - again where most developers work.
A Federal intervention is generally not called for unless a State pointedly does not get with some Federal mandate or another. See desegregation in the South for another notable historic example.
Of the Little Rock 9 in Arkansas:
>When integration began on September 4, 1957, the Arkansas National Guard was called in to "preserve the peace". Originally at orders of the governor, they were meant to prevent the black students from entering due to claims that there was "imminent danger of tumult, riot and breach of peace" at the integration. However, President Eisenhower issued Executive order 10730,[18] which federalized the Arkansas National Guard and 1,000 soldiers from the US Army and ordered them to support the integration on September 23 of that year, after which they protected the African American students. The Arkansas National Guard would escort these nine black children inside the school as it became the students' daily routine that year.
Ideally though, this type of intervention should be exceedingly rare or reserved for the most egregious cases. Unfortunately, the present administration sees only the mechanism, and is motivated more by pettiness than any real commitment to Statecraft.
Imagine a tutor that stays with you as long as you need for every concept of math, instead of the class moving on without you and that compounding over years.
Rather than 1 teacher for 30 students, 1 teacher can scale to 30 students to better address Bloom's 2 sigma problem, which discovered students in a 1:2 ratio with a tutor full time ended up in the 98% of students reliably.
LLMs are capable of delivering this outright, or providing serious inroads to it for those capable and willing to do the work beyond going through the motions.
> Imagine a tutor that stays with you as long as you need for every concept of math, instead of the class moving on without you and that compounding over years.
I remember when I was at the uni, the topics I learned the best were the ones I put effort to study by myself at home. Having a tutor with me all the time will actually make me do the bare minimum as there always were other things to do and I would love to skip the hard parts and move forward.
I think I understand a desire for "calm" learning.
I'm not especially interested in learning a language right now. However, I do generally have a distaste for "gamified" learning, and, separately, I feel distracted by things I feel are not very fulfilling, but are addicting (namely, scrolling through news, social media, or videos on my phone).
I won't say what you are building is a mistake. But just based on what you described, if I were interested in learning a language through your app, I would not just be comparing it to other language learning apps, but I would also be comparing it to language textbooks/workbooks, classes at a community college or MOOC, or language courses on DVD/CD/YouTube/etc. I guess I think that apps are good at gamifying things, if that were to be a goal. If you are stripping that away, what makes your app unique compared to all those other resources? How does your app replace or supplement other things?
And to be clear, I imagine there could be plenty of things that make your app unique! I just would want to know what those things are before diving in.
Mmm, kind of. Scarcity is definitely fundamental under capitalism. But what do we do in a theoretical, post-scarcity society?
The digitization of information and media combined with the Internet and widespread use of electronic devices practically means that in some important ways, we are already grappling with post-scarcity in certain fields. 600 years ago, "books" and other texts were rare and valuable, then there was an explosive transformation with the invention of the printing press. But while much easier, there was a still a laborious printing process and a copy of a book was still a valuable thing. Now, a "book" can exist as an .epub and be copied perfectly a million times practically for free. It is similarly true for movies, photos, recorded music, news articles, etc.
As a capitalist society, we've really struggled how to deal with this post-scarcity arrangement. We understand in the abstract that this stuff is important, and that creating it is a laborious process, but we do not really know how to assign copies of those works value (because, once created, they immediately become infinitely abundant). The best idea we've seem to have settled on is articifically creating scarcity by locking the digital works behind paywalls and subscription services that require an account, or maybe DRM paired with a EULA. But I think people generally, and the HN crowd specifically, understand that is a lousy arrangement.
Could energy become so abundant that it is also post-scarcity? Between fusion energy and advancements in solar, wind, and geothermal energy, maybe! It is a tantalizing vision to dream of, but what does that look like under capitalism?
I know what you're getting at, but for the Socratic sake of things, I have bad news! :D
Electricity that is too cheap to meter is possible today. I'm pretty sure that we are technologically capable of producing enough solar panels to supply reasonable energy needs (ignoring AI data center nonsense, for now). I think this is happening already in certain countries, but the economics of it get weird, because even as a public utility, you have to charge something. A market that drives prices down to almost nothing will then cease to exist, and powerful people don't want that to happen.
The real solution is that governments should just build out power capacity and provide electricity as a service to its citizens, like healthcare and education. The solution we'll probably get is some Dickensian torment nexus where orphans are pushed into a meat grinder and our electric bills go up.
I basically agree all value is derived from labor, but a lot of modern economists do not.
There's are an interesting book called "This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom" by Martin Haaglund. Part 2 of the book is really concerned with the Labor Theory of Value, and it articulated it in a way I'd never really understood before. It's hard to summarize in a short post, but here's an essay that engages with the ideas in a span of a few pages: https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/the-revival-of-heg...
Really, I encourage people to check out the book. It was at times challenging, and but always thought-provoking. Even when I found myself disagreeing (I have some fundamental disagreements with part 1), it helped me articulate my own worldview in a way that few books have before. It's something special. Anyway, the book really cemented and clarified my views on the labor theory of value.
I don't think it is a coincidence that the areas with the wealhiest people/corporations are the same areas with the most extreme poverty. The details are, of course, complicated, but zooming way way out, the rich literally drain wealth from those around them.
Thanks for pointing this out. Sorry you're getting downvoted. I visited San Francisco about ten years ago, and seeing a homeless person sheltering themselves under a flag or some sort of merch from a tech company really drove home just how bereft of humanity corporate power centers really are.
I don't fault anyone for trying to find opportunities to provide for themselves and loved ones in this moment by using AI to make a thing. But don't fool yourself into thinking that the AI labor is yours. The capitalists own it, not us.