An idea that has been living rent free in my head is that "AI is ultimately nothing but a pure destruction of value". It's promise is unlimited value to everyone on demand; but if everyone can do everything without any effort, it is no longer valuable. Value and scarcity go hand in hand.
I realize the hyperbolic framing of the idea, but none-the-less I haven't been able to get it out of my head. This article feels like it's another piece of the same puzzle.
> Value and scarcity go hand in hand
Not really. The value to a thirsty soul of water in the desert is as high as they value their own life (to some there is little) and have a currency of value to the seller. Still, once thirst is quenched the value to that soul drops nearer to zero.
For an optional good the value only rises to the point that there is excess asset in the inventories of those that would like to add the option.
I would suggest what you are looking for is that some scarcities are shifted by each new technology. Things like the sincere attention of others or more exclusive emotional attachments become relatively more scarce in a goods abundant existence. Earlier, insights on where to apply the tool and to where one should attend become more scarce.
Something you would have to accept if you believe your statement is that you would never value (i.e. need) water again if we could produce far more than we ever could use. Your body's need and use would not cease even if the economics might collapse.
Financializing everything can lead one into foolish conclusions.
When something becomes abundant, we focus on something else which is still scarce. That's human nature. Salt used to be scarce and very valuable, but nowadays who thinks about it?
Is water less valuable because it comes out of a tap almost for no money?
> but if everyone can do everything without any effort, it is no longer valuable
It's called utopia.
But my issue with AI hype is that it's not clear how it will lead to "everyone can do anything." Like how is it going to free up lands so everyone can afford a house with yard if they want?
Everyone productive and working can afford a house with a yard now. You’ll be a few dozen miles from others.
If you want everyone to be able to afford a house with a yard within walking distance of downtown Palo Alto, there aren’t enough of them for everyone that wants to do that, and AI (and utopia) can’t change that. Proximity to others creates scarcity because of basic physical laws. This is why California is expensive.
This is something I always wondered about in Banks’ post-scarcity utopian Culture novels. How do they decide who gets to live next door to the coolest/best restaurant or bar or social gathering place? Does Hub (the AI that runs the habitat, and notionally is the city) simply decide and adjudicate like a dictator or king?
[delayed]
Sorry, but its quite the opposite. Its dystopia considering only the already rich really benefit from it.
I think it is a step towards a money free world. Only if we could invent a food printer.
There is almost zero credible evidence I think you could point to that this even vaguely resembles a credible path that we are on in reality. Sometimes theoretical models don’t match reality and this sure seems to be a good example of that.
Without money what system would be used? Barter? Communism? Warlords?
Price and scarcity go hand in hand, not value and scarcity.
Diamonds are pretty worthless but expensive because they're scarce (putting aside industrial applications), water is extremely valuable but cheap.
No doubt there are some goods where the value is related to price, but these are probably mostly status related goods. e.g. to many buyers, the whole point in a Rolex is that it's expensive.
This conflates use-value and exchange-value. Water to someone dying of thirst has extremely high use-value, while a diamond would in that same moment have nearly no use-value, except for the fact that, as a commodity, the diamond has an exchange-value, and so can be sold to help acquire a source of water.
Price is just a proxy for value. Diamonds do not have inherent utility (to the layman) but they are expensive because we societally ascribe value to them.
You’re arguing semantics, but not really tying it back to OP’s point regarding AI and price and/or value.
I prefer the `price = value = relative wealth != wealth = resources` paradigm. Thus, wars destroy wealth and tech advances create wealth, but that's just me
> An idea that has been living rent free in my head is that "AI is ultimately nothing but a pure destruction of value". It's promise is unlimited value to everyone on demand; but if everyone can do everything without any effort, it is no longer valuable. Value and scarcity go hand in hand.
1) I think it's the destruction of our value, as workers. Without an unthinkable change in society, we'll be discarded.
2) I think it will also destroy the unrealized value of not-yet-created work, first by overwhelming everything with a firehouse mediocre slop, then by disincentivizing the development of human talent and skill (because it will be an easy button that removes the incentives to do that). AI will exceed humans primarily by making humans dumber, not by exceeding humans' present-day capabilities. Eventually creative output will settle at some crappy, derivative level without any peaks that rise above that.
There is a very strong argument that if your work output can be discarded effectively in favor of a firehose of mediocre slop, then it is a moral imperative that we stop employing human beings in those roles as it’s a terrible waste of a human life.
The only people I see handwringing over AI slop replacing their jobs are people who produce things of quality on the level of AI slop. Nobody truly creative seems to feel this way.
> There is a very strong argument that if your work output can be discarded effectively in favor of a firehose of mediocre slop...
> The only people I see handwringing over AI slop replacing their jobs are people who produce things of quality on the level of AI slop. Nobody truly creative seems to feel this way.
Have you ever worked for an American company? They almost always choose slop over quality. Why should an executive hire employ a skilled American software engineer, when he can fire him and hire three offshore engineers who don't really know what they're doing for half the price? Things won't blow up immediately, there's a chance they'll just limp along in a degraded state, and by then executive will be off somewhere else with a bonus in his pocket.
Also, how many people are "truly creative" and how does that compare to the number of people who have to eat?
> then it is a moral imperative that we stop employing human beings in those roles as it’s a terrible waste of a human life.
And what should they do then? Sit around jerking off under a bridge?
There's no "moral imperative" to cast people off into poverty. And that's what will happen: there will be no retraining, no effort to find roles for the displaced people. They'll just be discarded. That's a "terrible waste of a human life."
I think it's a fundemental misunderstanding of value. Things are useful regardless of their price, the price is speculative but if there is a cost producing something (from earth, the mind or AI) the price will not be zero. Scarcity is the basis of value only for things that have no other utility and cost, for example some crypto made just for pump and dump.
Only if you assume that the only kind of value is the ability to be sold for a price. Marx would have a word about use value vs exchange value.
Interestingly OP's idea that "AI destroys value" seems to come at least partly from the labor theory value, which Marx accepted (as most classical economists).
Unfortunately, the labor theory of value is self-contradictory. If you invent a new machine that replaces human labor, it will clearly produce more value, yet human labour is reduced. So this follows that not all value can be attributed to human labor.
What this really breaks down is meritocracy. If you cannot unambiguously attribute "effort" of each individual (her labor) to produced "value", then such attribution cannot be used as a moral guidance anymore.
So this breaks the right-wing idea that the different incomes are somehow deserved. But this is not new, it's just more pronounced with AI, because the last bastion of meritocracy, human intelligence ("I make more because I'm smarter"), is now falling.
Addendum: Although accounts differ on this, Marx seemed to struggle with LTV, IIRC Steve Keen's Debunking Economics shows Marx contradicting himself on it.
> It's [sic] promise is unlimited value to everyone on demand
No, it’s not. This is where your concept fails. AI is a tool, like any other tool. It doesn’t provide unlimited anything, and, furthermore, it needs human inputs and direction to provide anything. “Go make me a profitable startup from scratch” is not a useful prompt.
But that is exactly the promise that the heads of the AI labs are making. Sam Altman is repeatedly saying he wants to be able to ask it "go discover a new branch of physics".
Perhaps it's not how you use LLMs, but it is the promise of AI.
For the record, I make a distinction between LLMs (a current tool that we have today) and AI (a promise of some mystical all-powerful science-fiction entity).
There is nothing intelligent about what we have today, artificial or otherwise.
The business sociopaths need to be able to shit out code and logos and voices and ads for their SaaS crypto casino social media feed fake therapy dating gig worker app, and AI makes it much cheaper to do so. The social value is there, AI lets us do more with less but it's always captured by the few people on top.
I feel a lot less pride in my creative work knowing it can be done much too easily with modern AI. It makes me less eager to create which is quite unfortunate.
I haven’t felt to bad about my creative works being fed into training models. Taken by itself, my creations are minuscule. But it’s very apparent when I look at AI as a whole, having taken from everyone in aggregate.
I feel that.
> It makes me less eager to create which is quite unfortunate.
It's been the exact opposite for me. Coding assistance is a great boon towards productivity simply because otherwise I wouldn't work on any of my old ideas stashed in numerous note taking apps. It's way easier today to go from 0 to something like an MVP, and see if there's something there. If there isn't, not much is lost. But without these tools it would be 0 all across the board.
Perhaps i am a bit odd but i dont understood this take. Why do you do what you do? Why do you create anything?
Since before ai all my tiny little works have been public domain and it tickles me pink when i see something of mine out in the wild.
Journey before destination.
With that said though, the people who press the button and fashion themselves creatives piss me off. Heck anyone who has more than a passing interest in gen ai art disappoints me. After all, what is interesting about printing the Mona Lisa compared to creating your own shitty version by hand?
Journey and destination go hand in hand.
Radio amateurs used to be a thing. Because playing with radios is fun, but also because this provided a way to hear things that otherwise could not be heard.
Do you feel the same way about automatic looms displacing crafters, eg, the Luddites?
Someone needs to maintain and setup those efficient brand new looms. All I hear from AI is the promise that managers and owners will no longer need creative and managerial workers.
AI could be a boon for mankind. it can be a useful tool. We could employ it in a manner which provides more dignity for workers. That is, let them work less hours, have more leisure time etc. That necessitates something which will keep the powers of capital in check, and people don't seem to think that this is possible.
Corporations are just so large and powerful, that people feel hopeless. Byt we could still get together and enact legislation which will override them. Othing is impossible, it just takes some imagination and organisation.
Like Chomsky once said, if the peasants of Haiti could organise and overthrow their government and create a functioning democracy, then surely we can too, with far more advantages.
Haiti's democracy was never, in its storied 200 years of existence, functioning. France saw fit it never did until the damage was irreparable.
AI is getting way too much credit in this article.
There are much much bigger forces that impact society in the way the author describes.
I think that a lot of people are fine with intellectual property theft because most of people don’t have much valuable intellectual property.
No one steals from them.
So far AI companies were settling by throwing VC cash at it so the vocal ones that do have IP will be paid off.
It seems the public is getting tired of these AI slops. No one wants "AI powered" products. How long will the bubble last?
Feels like AI is speed-running us straight into last man (antithesis of Übermensch), where the algorithms make the values and we’re just the training data.
Perhaps sovereign compute is the answer? We have open weights models, as a sort of ‘public commons’ that democratises that layer, but compute is still the bottleneck for big companies..
> Right now, even people who reject meritocracy understand its logic. You develop rare skills, you work hard, you create value, and you capture some of that value.
The premise is that AI does not allow to do this any more, which is completely false. It may not allow to do it in the same way, so its true that some jobs may disappear, but others will be created.
The article is too alarmist by someone who has drank all of the corporate hype. AI is not AGI. AI is an automation tool, like any other that we have invented before. The cool thing is that now we can use natural language as a programming language which was not possible before. If you treat AI as something that can thin k, you will fail again and again. If you treat it as an automation tool, that cannot think you will get all of the benefits.
Here i am talking about work. Of course AI has introduced a new scale of AI slop, and that has other psycological impacts on society.
No it doesn't, because social media already did that. There's nothing left to be broken.
I like the one upping of cynicism here
In the past few decades, I learned to be skeptical of any piece of "true" media because it could be easily be photoshopped by an expert. Yet people still gave credence to a damning photo or soundbite shared around. AI has finally made it so easy to fake things that (I hope) people will re-learn skepticism of all they see/hear.
Likewise, I've felt like the meritocracy story that the author sets up as the "moral foundation" has heavily attenuated in this century. It's still used as the justification in America (I'm rich because I deserve it, you're not rich because you didn't work as hard/smart as me) but it feels like that story is wearing thin. Or that the relative proportion of the luck / ovarian lottery aspect has become so much larger than the skill+hard work aspect.
The trend of the rich getting richer, of them using their power to manipulate the system to further advantage them and theirs at the expense of everyone else, existed before AI burst into the public in '20-21. Maybe, like the fake media, it will finally be the kick people need to let go of the meritocracy trap* and realize we need a change.
* I like the notion of meritocracy, it just seems like America has moved from aiming for that, to using the story of it as an excuse to or opiate for the masses.
Modern society has no moral foundation.
Ownership of things by humans is never a settled question. There is no ideal or correct model for ownership, as ownership itself is unnatural. People went through many models over centuries - famliy/community owneship, monarchies, socialism, capitalism etc. Capitalism is the worst of all, allowing extreme exaggeration of talent differences between people. AI is like back to monarchies.
AI is exposing the myths of talent and erasing differences between humans making them all a uniform array of subjects. However this erasure comes at the cost of return to monarchy style of economic model, where wealth would be moved from common population to the owners of AI or the neo-monarchies.
This piece is wildly optimistic about the outcomes likely from AI on par with the smartest humans, let alone smarter than that. The author seems to think that widespread disbelief in the legitimacy of the system could make a difference, in such a world.
This argument depends on the idea that someone’s creative work output being used for AI training somehow deprives them of benefit from that creative work output - the basic idea behind “copyright infringement is stealing”. This is not to agree that AI training is copyright infringement, just that it depends on the same concept of intellectual property.
I don’t subscribe to this basic idea. Copyrights are a legal fiction designed to prop up an industry. Somehow from that we went to the idea that creative work output is property. It isn’t. It’s a service. This is why “works made for hire” is a thing.
This is the same reason that reasonable people don’t believe that fanfic authors should be jailed.
This stuff is all a bit much. Fan fiction sites are all “creative content lifted without your consent”. You think J K Rowling consented to Harry x Hermione slash fiction? Or Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality? Absolutely non-consensual.
All of this stuff is clearly a highly cherry-picked gymnastic exercise to justify a pre-existing position. Classic Elephant and Rider stuff.
It’s the same as support for the snail darter. Same as the story about how groups shouldn’t go out during COVID but BLM protests are fine. And if by some incredible chance it had been the FSF or Brewster Kahle who had produced GPT then you guys would be talking about how information should be unchained because creative work belongs to all Man.
Couching this blatantly motivated reasoning by quoting past philosophers is just such middle-brow woe-is-me whining. Take one look at yourselves in an honest sense. Do you have any principles or will you slave them all to your outcomes?
And now I must repeat the litany lest one assume that my opposition to this kind of balderdash be construed as some kind of political tribalism:
* I don’t think we should destroy endangered species
* I think COVID wasn’t a hoax and does spread in large groups
* I think people have a right to protest if they are discriminated against and that includes the black people at BLM
* I love the Internet Archive and have donated to them
> Same as the story about how groups shouldn’t go out during COVID but BLM protests are fine.
i don't think you have a good grasp of why that it was ok for outdoor protests to happen but people should not go out into crowded buildings. the chance of you getting sick from a protest is much less than the chance of you getting sick from going to an indoor gathering at say a club. getting sick is not a binary on or off. it's exposure time and magnitude vs. your immune system's defenses.
I don't think you have a good grasp of modeling disease spread and are repeating things you read online without comprehension. Repeated exposure from multi-day protests in large groups of 3 person / sq. m. with multiple tent structures shared by people is not the same as 10,000 people climbing K2 one day at a time.
I think, you're mistaking I.P. and creative effort. Certainly, there must be a reason for people reading, even searching for this stuff, beyond the mention of a well-protected trademark.
I see. What things that I said are no longer coherent when one makes a distinction between IP and creative effort?
Well, let's say, an alternative history novel, is it just ripping off a history textbook or is there more going on?
How about an exact duplicate of the all characters but they have sex with each other?
I'm already talking about how information should be free. The idea that a reader is infringing on the copyright of a work by reading it and learning is ridiculous.
At the same time, if someone designs a robot that prints out copyright-infringing material out of the blue, then they are infringing copyright every time it does so.
I opened 10 PRs in 20 minutes today and it felt great. If I extrapolate that to everything else with a straight line then everything looks good /s
What philosophical foundations are left? Even at the very top the president is corrupt and morally depraved.
Leaders are rarely shining moral beacons.
Are you suggesting that no meaningful distinction can be made in terms of morality between Trump and, say, Biden, Obama, Blair, the Bushes etc.?
Some people will point to their supposed crimes or immoral actions while in office, having to do with execution of their duties as president. Large countries tend to do many questionable things. But the current US administration is pretty unique in terms of its corruption, avoidance of accountability, authoritarian and fascist tendencies, etc.
It's not a useful contribution to the discussion to essentially claim that "they're all the same" without making some sort of case for it.
> But the current US administration is pretty unique in terms of its corruption, avoidance of accountability, authoritarian and fascist tendencies, etc.
I've mostly been reading that since the Bush years. Definitely said against Bush, Obama, Biden, and Trump. In fairness, I don't remember it about Clinton.
That you don't agree with a politician doesn't make him or her particularly worse than others.
I would argue that yes, there’s no meaningful distinction between Biden and Trump. (And perhaps that Trump is more moral than Biden.)
I’d find your argument would be more persuasive if you outlined what you believe Trump had done worse than the others — rather than argument-by-name-calling.
The moral comes from the grassroots as power corrupts.
As long as we wait for a godlike leader for rescue the end result is same as with Stalin, Hitler, Trump, Thiel, Epstein, Musk, ...
The godlikeness can come though in many forms, political (Trump), propaganda (Musk/Zuck7Thiel) or via extortion material and money like Epstein.
A good litmus test for a decision maker is the universal ethical principle mentioned in the article put into concrete and compare everything via the lens of "what if all eight billion of current humans and also the future generations would do this".
Right now nobody's daring to to this but as long as we start asking "who's afraid of the narcissist zillionaire" the world starts to make sense and the solution appears.