Comment by Llamamoe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Llamamoe | Hacker News Reader

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> It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises.

Even if, AI is going to tank the bargaining power of the working class even harder than it already is.

It's already the reality for many that they're working for minimum wage, in toxic environments, with no benefits, and more overtime than legal in places that regulate it solely because they have very little better choice.

Furthermore, this power inequality directly translates to influence over economic output of our civilization - by the time value of human menial or cognitive labor goes low enough to delete jobs, all that will be left will be various equivalents of being a sugar baby for the rich - fulfilling their emotional, sexual, and social needs. Not even art, because that's among the things gen AI is displacing the most effectively.

> Middle class status anxiety manifesting as a rhetoric about neofeudalism.

The middle class is a tiny, tiny fraction of the population nowadays. Even among those working high-earning jobs like tech/healthcare/finance, most are just upper worker class.

The answer is obvious: abandon civilisation, join the Amish. Big Tech cannot ruin your life if you simply don't participate in the capitalistic market. I mean sure, it's difficult to live completely off-grid, but in modern world, it's a long way before you starve to death.

What I'm saying is, I have a cozy bullshit job that gives me the perspective of someday not being in the working class anymore. But if that wasn't the case, I'd 100% fuck that and look for alternative lifestyles.

> Big Tech cannot ruin your life if you simply don't participate in the capitalistic market. I mean sure, it's difficult to live completely off-grid, but in modern world, it's a long way before you starve to death.

You still have to pay taxes, and doing this means giving up on a lot of your existing human connection, joining a community in no small part comprised of crackpots, tanking your quality of life, and losing your influence over the future of broader society.

Furthermore, it's a personal solution to a systemic problem. It'll work for a few people, but it's not a fix.

> joining a community in no small part comprised of crackpots

You don't think there's anyone who has similar values and reasons for joining as the OP?

> tanking your quality of life

That sounds very subjective based on what one values.

> tanking your quality of life

"Bro I can't wait to go back to being an UberEats delivery driver without any insurance living below minimum wage working all day every single day just to afford to rent half a room and small instant ramen"

the fuck are you talking about.

You think that these ridiculously high wages that companies like Mercor are paying for data generation are "tanking" bargaining power? Its the complete opposite: there is now a massive sector of highly skilled, specialized labor that produces the very data which trains these models, a task that will not end as long as there is demand for newer and better and more specially trained models. That is a massive amount of bargaining power. It would take far more severe shocks to the system to kill the possibility of revolution, and that whatever that would be would be bad for everyone.

>You think that these ridiculously high wages that companies like Mercor are paying for data generation are "tanking" bargaining power? I

Yes. Especially when those "high wages" are for 2nd/3rd rate countries. Aka below the minumim standards of first world countries.

>that will not end as long as there is demand for newer and better and more specially trained models

So it will in a few decades after models become capable of themselves? Aka GAI? Seems like a bad bet to hedge on the grand scale of history.

>It would take far more severe shocks to the system to kill the possibility of revolution

A surveillance state and a few hundred drones will do it.

Ridiculously high wages for jobs whose explicit purpose is to make human workers(including those partaking in those jobs) obsolete. THE reason why they pay so high is because their end-goal is not having to pay anyone anymore ever again. (or at least, only pay a comparatively tiny amount of people for producing the data)

> Ridiculously high wages for jobs whose explicit purpose is to make human workers(including those partaking in those jobs) obsolete

I would say they are making the current cost of one's labor "obsolete". Most jobs are like this. If you work for yourself, you're trying to make the cost of your labor obsolete in place of cheaper work. If you work for a company, the company will be trying to make the cost of your labor obsolete in place of cheaper work. Any value captured in the arbitrage of product price and employee pay is seen as the value of management.

>I would say they are making the current cost of one's labor "obsolete".

That's how it builds to making a market cost obsolete. Especially when the explicit goal is near 100% removal of human labor.

It's like fishing, do it slowly enough (like the dozens of millenia of humanity before the industrial revolution) and fish will repopulate just fine. Do it too fast and you drive fish to extinction. They want to make labor extinct.

>HE reason why they pay so high is because their end-goal is not having to pay anyone anymore ever again.

NO, the reason the pay is so high is because there are few people that can do it AND it brings value for the company.

> Not even art, because that's among the things gen AI is displacing the most effectively.

Kinda, but also no.

Yes, there's a lot of people (including me) who genuinely enjoy the output of these models; but art isn't only aesthetics, I observe it also being a peacock's tail, where the cost is the entire point.

Why are originals more valuable than reproductions? Nobody who understands the tech can seriously claim that a robot with suitable brush and paints is incapable of perfectly reproducing any old masterwork down to the individual brush strokes — of course a robot can do that, the hardest part of that is compiling the list of requisite brush strokes, but that too can be automated.

But such a copy, and lets say the paints were chemically perfect and also some blend of plant and petroleum derivatives so as to fool even a carbon-dating test, would never command as much money as the original unless someone deliberately mixed them up so that nobody would even know which was which.

However, I don't know that this would ever help the masses. Perhaps a quadrillionaire in a space mansion would like to buy all of Earth and all the people on it, but that doesn't mean we'd get any better than being forced to LARP whatever folly* they chose for us.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folly

People boycott AI art in indie games, music, etc. but it's still finding massive use everywhere across most industries, and by and large companies are getting away with it.

> would never command as much money as the original unless someone deliberately mixed them up so that nobody would even know which was which.

That is based on current sensibilities which are capable of change. Give it 20 years of PR campaigns and who knows where we end up.

> People boycott AI art in indie games, music, etc. but it's still finding massive use everywhere across most industries, and by and large companies are getting away with it.

Use, yes. I find it on packaging, on billboards. "Massive" use? Not so clear, e.g. how much is this just a substitute for clip art and stock photography? I.e. stuff that was already low-value.

But even there, to the extent they get away with it, that's due to people like me who care about aesthetics.

To illustrate the difference:

Know what I don't care for? Der Kuss[0], the Mona Lisa[1], everything Van Gogh is famous for[2], likewise Pollock, Frida Kahlo, Monet, and Gauguin.

Know what's expensive? All of those things I don't care for.

> That is based on current sensibilities which are capable of change. Give it 20 years of PR campaigns and who knows where we end up.

Peacock tails are, necessarily, expensive signals.

When there's a thousand indistinguishable replicas of the Mona Lisa, the original becomes worthless, the replicas don't gain value.

The effort is the point, it's the reason for the price. When an expensive thing becomes cheap, it stops being an expensive signal (and vice-versa).

[0] the woman's head looks like it's been severed, rotated 90°, her ear placed where the stump of her neck ought to be. Most of Klimt's other stuff is better.

[1] her smile is not "mysterious", it's just the resting face of someone who had to keep still for long enough to get painted

[2] the stuff he's not famous for is, IMO, generally better than the stuff he is famous for.

The originals of physical art pieces operate off the same logic that drives NFTs. As stupid as people think they are, they do show a modern drive for ownership of something with provenance.

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