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Comment by DiscourseFan | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>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)

>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.

> 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.

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