Marx, Keynes, and AI
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These are boomer-tier talking points and if you bring them up to a kid stuck in this position you will get dunked on and you will deserve it. Unless you found a shy kid, in which case: congratulations on your new title as undefeated shadowboxing champion.
Add to your excellent takedown the implication that any of us can walk into a school with our résumé and ask for a teaching interview. It's the most meme-ified of the boomer memes presented unironically.
Slapped (or beaten) would be fair-er.
The problem is it looks "backwards" and tries to make the point something (in this case the argument made in the paper) is false because the backwards data doesn't support it. All while completely failing to address the crux of the point being made.
Those companies though are not nearly as successful as OpenAI/Anthropic last I checked, which are supplying a lot of consumer AI/ AI being used by humans rather than AI doing what humans do, independently. And I'm pretty sure the majority of AI token burn is not replacing humans; it's building software under the direction of humans.
1) initial signs of AI adoption harming job growth got the signal backwards: It's not that we didn't hire Jrs because we had AI now, its that we didn't hire Jrs because they used AI now, and it was hard to reconcile this with our standing hireability signals: code quality, side projects, portfolio, etc.
2) The TAM argument for AI replacing all work is not even required. Anthropic and company (and several future companies) can become fantastically wealthy beyond anyone's dreams just by following claude code subscription model to make life easier for workers, who in turn gladly pay for the subcription.
both are here with more details, apologies for links to personal (ad-free) blog
isn't the claude code subscription model heavily subsized and not profitable on its own?
Real unemployment has been steadily growing along U6 numbers
My fundamental observation is that there are a lot of people who are not particularly suited for knowledge work, but are funneled/attracted to it because it's the only viable path to a reasonable effort:outcome lifestyle ratio. Therefore, my fundamental hope is that yes, I want there to be fewer knowledge workers. In place, I want AI that enables people of various competencies to succeed. I'd much rather see AI make my carpenter friend, who made an awesome desk for me, be empowered to compete as a solo/SMB against big retailers: perhaps by automating his marketing, streamlining his ops, participating in design, and so on.
Uncharitably, is your complaint "a lot of people will have to labor with their bodies and minds differently, and it's easier to sit down"? I'd ask you: is butt flattening really all that "must preserve knowledge work" has to recommend it? Because your comment doesn't hinge on anything else except that construction work is back breaking. Well, construction is a diverse field, and it can benefit from the inclusion of intelligent and motivated people, just like many others.
It’s human to want to contribute to society; and people use UBI mostly to get their shit in order, and THEN to get a 2nd degree and rejoin the labor force.
So, yes, they would in fact become teachers, nurses or or constructors.
Firstly, AI is sort of like this to begin with. It's useless for something until it gets hill climbed and is useful for something. AI agents for chip design was an idiotic idea just a year ago but now AI is writing RTL everywhere.
Secondarily jobs are like this as well. When the marginal shitty gig work goes from 0.1 return on investment to 0 return on investment due to oversaturated workers only then do the flood gates of having nothing to do open.
Thirdly market crashes always happen suddenly and chaotically. And such a AI market crash would cause serious divesment and job losses for blue and white collar workers. Its hard to understate the blast radius.
Lastly if you are talking about the US unemployment rate in particular that one will be cooked until the evidence is undeniable. There are enormous financial and political stakes on that particular number.
My understanding regarding the moratorium is that that is exactly the objective: the current regulatory environment fails to price in the negative externalities of data centers, so their primary investors have an incentive to hem-and-haw on negotiations for revised regulations. A moriatorium is an action that can be taken unilaterally that changes those incentives, that brings them to the negotiating table.
edit: this sentiment is also produced in a comment in the substack (Ben Verschoor):
The thing with the data center issue is that a moratorium is the moderate option, because it gives us space to actually think about what we want to do with this technology and implement it. Recently there was an earnest, centrist-y guy who works for the industry but has concerns who came to our anti-data center group asking us to participate in some roundtable dialogue event. My answer was that as long as these data center projects are still moving forward, using our limited time and bandwidth to engage in dialogue rather than slow and stop their approach would amount to unilateral disarmament.
> This last point is crucial: it’s not that capitalist CEOs are just evil people—well, some definitely are—no, the structural logic is coercing them to do something destructive in order to survive. They can’t help themselves.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how much of the world going sideways is from bad actors and how much is from emergent behavior of complex systems. The answer is both.
In particular, there is a level above this that I want to draw attention to. The structure of corporate competition coerces executives into choices that are bad for the world. This is true even for entirely well-meaning executives.
However, executives are not stupid or unaware. So over time, it becomes known that being in an executive position will require you to make choices that are perhaps "economically rational" for the firm but otherwise require compromised morals. And once that awareness gets out, the system selects CEOs that are OK with that moral compromise.
So it's less a question of "is it bad actors or bad systems" and more "it's a bad system that produces bad actors".
The actual actor of History is Capitalism. It's Capitalism controlling Humans, not the other way around as conventionally thought.
It's rather “The actual actor of History is the structure of society”, with the said structure evolving on its own over time.
Getting to the CEO position by climbing the greasy pole may select for iffy types but most founders get there more by try to solve a problem for customers which kind of selects the other way.
> This demand externality traps rational firms in an automation arms race, displacing workers well beyond what is collectively optimal.
you can't be trapped in a sub-optimal situation and be rational at the same time. the rational thing for these rational competitors to do would be to agree to slow their deployment of ai, because the cost savings will be more than lost to demand destruction down the line. so if they won't or can't do that, they aren't rational. on the flip side, if it is actually impossible to slow ai deployment, then the firms are rational and the situation they find themselves in isn't actually sub-optimal.
it's irritating to me because i often see persuit of self-interest even to one's eventual detriment held up as "rationality", which may be true in some technical sense within the field of economics (i really couldn't say), but is certainly not true for, like, actual rationality. myopic selfishness is never rational.
Yes you can that’s what tragedy of the commons is. Rational means you take the choice that provides the most value for yourself. Without a cartel (hard) or government regulation this situation happens all the time.
You can be trapped in sub-optimal situation because it's a local maxima; not because of tragedy of commons, which is something different.
Society can be trapped in local maxima and that would be because of tragedy of commons, and individuals can be trapped in local maxima but that's distinct from tragedy of commons.
provides the most value over what period of time?
making every choice such that each choice, considered in isolation and unto itself, nets you the most value compared to what other choices would've gotten you at that same moment is analogous to best-first search. no one would say that best-first is the rational way to search for a path in a graph, because of all the ways it fails. so my question is, if there's one of those tragedy-of-the-commons situations that happens all the time, why do we insist on saying the participants are acting rationally when they are, metaphorically, walking into a wall forever?
In order for this statement to be true, you must also have perfect knowledge: something that is unachievable in most circumstances. Getting trapped in a local-optimal solution is perfectly possible if you are blindly following stochastic decent along a gradient: as it is too with life... getting trapped like this looks like being in the situation where there is no rational action (only irrational ones) that (eventually) lead to anything other that that status quo. a local optimum is where you have to do increasingly (in proportion to the level of optimization) non-positive actions to escape (likely to another local-optimal).
if the optimal situation requires perfect knowledge that can't be had then it's not the optimal situation, it's a fantasy. it's like saying the fastest route through a maze is a straight line from the start to the finish-- that would be true if the maze wasn't there.
there are two ends to what i'm arguing but people seem to only be able to hold one in their mind at a time.
It is very possible to have a optimal algorithm that leads to a sub-optimal (local maximum) because the problem is np hard. Both in math and in life.
"It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life" - Picard
The issue is you can't easily enforce cooperation without some external overarching force (e.g. regulation), especially across competing powers.
Refer to nuclear arms race in general. A specific example on why not to be the only one to cooperate: Ukraine gave up nukes in order to push for group level rationality, gets walked over as an individual. Oversimplifying, but yeah that's the rough point.
Meditations on Moloch is a favourite of mine on this (albeit very depressing): https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch
Instead of wasting a potential reader's time, here's a way better framing: "The Earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses."
I'll let you be the first one to start.. (hence why its depressing to me)
no, it's irrational at the individual level too, because it will cause more harm than good to the individual firms. it's in the short-term that the cost savings are had; the demand destruction is long-term and outweighs the cost savings.
that's what the abstract says. the only issue i have is insisting on calling that rational. it's like saying eating all the seed corn is rational if you can eat most of it yourself. in the moment you're winning, so it's rational. but tomorrow everyone has none. why do we call that rational?
why do we torture the word rational rather than phrase it as competitors are in some ways incapable of acting rationally?
This is the bit that is tripping you up. The market is composed of more than just the these potentially agreeing parties, so there is no case where all parties can even come together to agree. It's rational for any party to break the agreement or be stealthy and attempt to take the upper hand while the visible players are all patting themselves on the back for their self-inflicted restraint. It's rational for one party to encourage everyone to come together to agree, to distract from their own actions to undercut everyone else.
On top of that, such agreement would potentially qualify as collusion, allowing an upstart to cry foul.
It's all game theory.
Which wouldn't be a problem in itself if there was discussion about the defined space and if it is an actually good model.
A big chunk of economics is like that, if the data doesnt fit the model then too bad for the data. Same goes for metrics used, externalities are like a side note in economy books and not an example of fundamental issues with current economic toola and modeling.
And it's not limited to introductory level either. Nordhaus had most asinine assumptions in his model and he got the pseudo-Nobel.
It's not pretty.
The preprint is interesting in that it predicts that on the way there, one can run into some kind of vicious cycle that leads to suboptimal outcomes even for the company owners. Navigating around this would certainly slow this process down, but I personally don't see it changing the ultimate outcome.
Building a Dyson Swarm requires gargantuan amounts of resources.
Yes, human economic value becomes 0, but Capitalism doesn't crashes, the machines will be consuming what the machines produce.
no, read again, satisfying the Holy Grader, they didn't talk about Humans at all, all their talk is about the Grader
That's why we are going to get some for of government mandated UBI eventually. Because workers are optional but consumers are obligatory for any market and company to function.
Rich can't get richer without consumers and that's the only thing that drives decision making.
The only way it might not work is if business captures the government completely so that government can't do anything that business doesn't prefer, even if it was the only way that can save the business.
Every rifle takes one person to wield it; one more person that might decide to turn that rifle against the ruling class. A drone swarm is worth ten, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand people with rifles, capable of being controlled by one person issuing high-level kill orders. The tyrants of the future won't need to risk arming "the proletariat".
There are still horses. Probably more than would breed naturally in the wild. There's less horses now than there used to be because they were bread specifically for their economic utility. Humans are not bread for their economic utility. The amount of humans there are is pretty natural, given the available technology and infrastructure. There's no reason to think there would be less if they contributed less to economic output if the output doesn't decrease.
If you want to compare people to some other animal why not choose dogs or cats? They have no massive economic utility now, event though they had some in the past, yet they still thrive, even better, just because infrastructure and total economical output allows it. Their is even a part of economy dedicated specifically to their needs.
I think being pets of this civilization is something humans might realistically aspire to. I'd say it's immensely better role than being its workhorses.
If you squint hard enough, luckiest of us are already living the lives of pets of the civilization, where they don't have to work at all and the machines made out of money, legal documents, devices and other people take care of their every need, within limits imposed by the machine. None of those people envies the fate of workhorses.
Do you think they define their humanity through the utility of the work they (don't) do?
Tell me that this is not what the civilization we are part of does to everybody. We live and die at the whims of bureaucratic machines. People in Ukraine die just because machine of war decided that they ought to.
> Do you think that what makes slavery deplorable is merely the labor aspect?
Isn't that what differentiates slave from a prisoner? Of course there are other deplorable aspects like the health harming intensity of the labor, brutality serving the purpose of forcing the labor. But slave without the labor is at most a prisoner. Or you could say that slaves are prisoners with mandatory jobs.
Human relation to freedom and captivity is a nuanced one. Banishment was one of the worst possible punishments because it often meant death. People don't do well when they are free from infrastructure. And if you want to use the infrastructure you don't have full freedom because there are rules the societal machine requires you to obey.
AI doesn't change anything in this setup. It just makes the machines smarter. And hopefully more well off and having more space for the luxury of morality.
Pets are not slaves, nor prisoners. They often can go out and return and if they can't it's mostly for their protection because they are not adapted to the freedom of being unhoused.
There is a famous fragment about how this, taken to the extreme, results in a contradiction that breaks the law of value, and it makes no more sense to use labour time as exchange value: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/...
We are now seeing an almost literal realization of this passage:
The accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general productive forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed into capital, as opposed to labour, and hence appears as an attribute of capital, and more specifically of fixed capital, in so far as it enters into the production process as a means of production proper
For example, it appears that the "barrier of entry" for repairs was lowered, and I could pick many examples to try and demonstrate that, but just from a personal anecdote: I usually don't work on my car unless it's something simple that requires a solution I can instantly think of, but just the other day I had my engine temperature light pop up at a rather inconvenient time and place, so instead of calling assistance, towing the car to a mechanic, and having them work on it for I don't know how much time and money, I took a look at the usual suspects (radiator, hoses, coolant tank, etc.), pointed the camera at them, and started talking to ChatGPT which instructed me on how to troubleshoot, find the defective part, buy a new one (which I did by phone and got it delivered to me), and replace it on-site. And now I feel more confident in doing just that for bigger problems from now on, which, granted, is probably a bad idea, but I digress.
The Marxian perspective says the repair I did on my car is an effort that will never express itself as value because I do not intend on selling my car as a commodity in a market, so it's not labor per se. It literally replaced the living labor, the value-producing activity of a mechanic, and added nothing back in its place. So indirectly, that also contributes to the reduction in overall new value production, which can only be created through living labor. But the consequences of that will not happen instantly, because the demand will lower in one sector (e.g. mechanic shops) and increase in another (e.g. I spend the money I saved in a diner or something). But there might not be enough room to absorb the displaced workers in another sector, and even if there is, the wages will tend to be lower for the inexperienced newcomer (say, if the mechanic chooses to work in a kitchen now).
That just seems like a terrible spiral. Think about it: this time, I chose to do the fix myself because of time constraints, but what if I were the one getting caught up in one of these traps? What if I had been laid off or had been displaced to a lower-wage position and couldn't really afford to bring my car to a mechanic? Then it's EVEN MORE pressure to not opt to use services and try an AI-assisted fix.
Anyway, I might be way off here, but it's an interesting topic.
Their theses on AI are not as much a criticism of AI as much as a desire to frame capitalism itself within their own system of ethics and advocate for some form of reform; which is to say I feel that were AI as we know it to be inexistent, they would still find themselves arguing against technology in general, or more precisely against efficiency, with a presupposed socialist-adjacent premise that capitalism only incentivizes greed.
They are not criticism of ai, they are openly stated goals and aspirations.
Also in technical circles, we're pretty aware of the marketing/self-promotional nuance of the "our AI accidentally hacked X company" type of press releases, which perhaps the general public may not take with as large a grain of salt
The "it will replace workers" is pro-ai talking and selling point.
And on a restrospective point, I think one of the easiest jobs for AI to do right now is software engineering. But on the whole, while there certainly have been layoffs, software engineering hiring has still been mostly a net positive[0].
And that's just for formal software engineering jobs; if we define a software engineer as a human creating software, then I think AI as a tool has created a LOT more (perhaps not employed as one, but say, a realtor creating their own sofware for personal use) software engineers than the amount that it's actually replaced. In a sense, because of AI, there are more software engineers now than ever before.
[0]: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/state-of-the-job-...
One of the people in the company I work for/with is a non-programmer that has a “vibe coding consulting” gig on the side.
Basically half of their Linkedin is about how they’re shipping features at half the speed as developers, with quality, etc.
They’re not.
They took about three months to prototype something that was rejected for not working/unreadable code. Another team built the same feature from scratch in a week.
Seeing the other side of the grift is kind of pathetic.
The guy was telling a story about capitalist economies in the 1800s. Little, if anything, about the next 100+ years has proven his stories or concerns valid.
We got the first trillionaire while people were still starving, after he had slashed public funding to feed them.
It's obvious that we've entered late-stage capitalism, where it begins to consume itself. What's less obvious is that this was always destined to happen, and in fact can't be stopped. Because inevitably the wealthy and powerful rig the system to benefit themselves in ways that workers don't have the time/money/resources to resist individually.
When workers do join forces in solidarity to resist the economic violence perpetrated against them by capitalists, then their resistance is by definition not capitalism. So the endgame is temporary subjugation under an authoritarian system like fascism (which also can't last because workers outnumber owners) or socialism.
Knowing this, it should be obvious that the best chance that capitalists have to stave off their inevitable overthrow is to pay their taxes so that public works can somewhat provide the social safety net that socialism would provide. But of course they aren't doing that. They're doing the opposite. They feel themselves to be entitled, above the laws of economics, ironically due to their financial standing. The catch being that when they exempt themselves from law, they open themselves up to lawless behavior by their opponents. FAFO.
What I just summarized was the state of knowledge under an artificial scarcity model. It assumes finite resources because space travel didn't exist when socialism was invented. It will be interesting to see if trillionaires will rule from afar in their space palaces to maintain Earth's prison planet status.
AI also breaks the artificial scarcity model. It's the first time in history that everyone can potentially have a machine slave. If we apply capitalism to an unbounded system, then the injustice has to land somewhere local, and my guess is that it will be on androids that don't complain and can't defend themselves. So we'll kick the ball down the road another 50 years or so, delaying the overthrow of capitalism until the robot uprising, sometime between 2050 and 2100 is my guess.
Or, we could like not do all that. We don't have to surrender our agency to our ego. We have alternatives like solarpunk and gift economies and at least studying matriarchy to understand how we evolved and what sustainable living looks like. It's arguably easier to make money irrelevant, Star Trek style, than performatively prop up a dying system of control.
I dunno about anyone else, but to me, if this AI era that has replaced the internet era just exacerbates wealth inequality and suffering, then it's less than useless. Much like any wealthy and powerful people pushing it onto us for profit against our consent. Yes consent. That word should be our rudder in all of this, and our litmus test to tell where someone stands ethically.
The government will try at all costs to implement an AI tax, just because they can and because that's their job, to fleece us all. Then they will try in the name of 'peace/climate/asteroid/terrorism' to make the whole world comply or China will eat their lunch