Average Is over with AI
arnoldkling.substack.com
arnoldkling.substack.com
This description of Alpha school might have been up my alley. AI learning certainly was.
Either way, we do need to think about options for self-motivated students.
You are who, what and where you are by virtue of historical accident. The serfs of the Middle Ages sure as shit didn’t want that economy either, nor did the unwashed masses, dying at such an alarming rate of dysentery and cholera that the population of major cities was only sustained through mass migration during industrialization in the 18th and 19th centuries. Nor did more or less any slave during human history.
The last ~150 years of economic freedom and prosperity for a large percentage of the population that has been wide spread across industrialized economies is the exception, not the rule, and the difference is and always has been the fact that industrialized economies have required large amounts of skilled specialists to make the systems they developed work.
If you change that calculus, there is no historical precedent to assume that human societies won’t revert to the mean.
At least many of them fought hard to keep what they liked - plenty of peasant revolts and coming at feudal lords when they overdid it...
Early industrial workers didn't like their economy and conditions either, fought hard, organized, and got many changes to labour laws and conditions.
Us?
But I think you are missing the bigger picture -- its true that LLM's might have a tendency to average out things but even if this is true, everyone needs to keep up.
People who use AI correctly will use it where they would have otherwise produced below average works.
Millions of those fully ok with embracing AI, but superfluous in the economy created it by it, will have to settle for lower income and status too.
That doesn't mean they need to tolerate privileged c*ts who have no worry and millions in the bank be smug about it.
It's great that we're spending all those resources making the world worse. \s
They call it freedom and self determination. I call it co-dependency and learned helplessness. Labor exploitation.
Low skilled in their own right; they have no idea where to start solving their needs so never engage the motor agency.
Learned helplessness so a minority of humanity; first world affluents; out to avoid being responsible for themselves while they scold everyone else via TikTok.
Yes the politicians are awful for their own reasons but so many merely express concerns while carrying on without putting any real effort into solving their exploitative waves. Empty virtue signaling.
There doesn't seem to be much interest in using this to make people work less and engage in the rest of life more, hence the jokes about how somehow, the machines are generating art while folks are still toiling away to make ends meet.
The class division is even in the original message we're responding to: failing to get on the bandwagon or being pushed from it leads to lower income and status despite there being plenty to go around if we only stopped chasing infinite growth.
The only argument I've heard to far about how this is the path to betterment relies on getting past a theoretical hump where AI and robotics go further and can replace most labour, and the upper class giving up it's power over the masses voluntarily instead of going further down the same road we're already on.
I can't speak much for the first, but I think trickle-down economics has better chances of working out than the second (i.e. none).
But I think we both can at least agree on this - AI can actually replace some labour or augment it enough to require some shuffling.
My argument is that if AI brings efficiencies, products become cheaper and cost of living reduces. It's how it always worked - agricultural revolution, industrial revolution and information revolution. Cost of living reduced constantly because efficiency increased.
> upper class giving up it's power over the masses voluntarily
The upper class needs labour to consume their products. So it is in both interests that both labour has more money to spend. What then happens is, people are richer but the upper class gets even more wealth. Everyone benefits.
Two hundred years ago, shirts had to be hand-spun, hand-woven, and hand-sewn, so ordinary people could only own one or two. Now because of automation and factories they are so cheap that poor people have many.
Previously 97% of the workforce was engaged in agriculture, and even in the 20th century, famines killed millions. Now with increased productivity we create so much food that obesity is the defining health crisis of our time.
All classes have been able afford better clothing and more food, not just those owning the means of production.
> instead of going further down the same road we're already on
Even in the last 25 years, we've seen large increases in life expectancy, child mortality fell by more than 50%, 1 billion people left extreme poverty, access to knowledge and education expanded, and more.