Hacker News Reader

Comment by skulk | Hacker News Reader

re: questionable legality https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o...

> Moreover it's not hard to think of vaguely similar objections to fertilizers.

It's completely different. If LLM companies pulled this out of thin air it would be also different, but no; they've effectively plundered the commons and locked up all the profit for themselves. If intellectual labor goes the way of agricultural labor, I think humanity will have lost something valuable.

And don't come back with the "farmers would have said the same thing about the industrial revolution!" thing again if you're just going to terminate your thought there. Automating agricultural labor brings vast material benefits for all since it lowers the cost of tangible goods needed for life. I'd challenge you take this one step further and explain why automating intellectual labor will provide similar fruits and is therefore something to cheer for.

View on HN

If we actually do meaningfully automate intellectual labor, we create a world where we have real technical solutions for our toughest problems. Maybe we can get carbon capture and fusion energy working. There’s a theoretical world of abundance for us to explore.

That’s the steel man argument.

FWIW I mostly don’t believe that LLMs are the answer, I don’t think they’re going to reach a high enough level of capability to do this, and I think the current AI companies are problematic in a lot of ways.

I also think LLM use is bad for us and probably harms our thinking abilities. And using it takes away a lot of what it means to be human.

Personally I like both physical and mental difficulty. I like gardening even if I could just buy mass produced flowers. I like riding a bike even though cars are “easier”. I like playing ukulele with my family even though I can barely make a chord, much better than listening to some other real musician, or Suno ai generated songs. I like eating my wife’s sourdough bagels even if they take several hours more than just buying some.

And I think having those regular challenges and achievements make life worth living! And I worry that the AI future that some envision will make much of what we get value from feel meaningless in the same way that writing code by hand is starting to.

Maybe we’ll still be fine in the same way I find meaning in all of those things that I listed above. But damn what a gamble

A better analogy would perhaps be to consider the land the farm uses as the commons (it was before becoming private property)

We can debate the just access to land (commons) and point to Henry George, John Locke, Thomas Payne and others, but still agree that the value produced by the farm comes from the labour put in to refine the common resource into something more useful.

There can be rent seeking and value produced at the same time.

Edit: One can provably extend the rent seeking parts of the analogy in terms of John Deere and Monsanto

"Automating agricultural labor brings vast material benefits for all since it lowers the cost of tangible goods needed for life"

In point of fact a loaf of bread is not significantly cheaper now than it was 40 years ago. What has changed significantly is the total number of participants in the industry is greatly reduced, and the bulk of profits from agriculture accrue to AG services companies. There is no evidence that AI will buck this trend.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com