I'm neither agreeing with or disagreeing with the author's stance. But this tension crosses the line of "I have an opinion" to "I have an opinion that impacts my livelihood".
And I'm witnessing a lot of it.
If it doesn't pan out, the thing evaporates in a bubble, your job goes back to normal. If it does, your job is toast no matter what (and seemingly many jobs). If software is primarily supply constrained, that will eventually change.
Lately I'm more inclined to believe the latter is true, but I think skeptics are often hedging like this.
Seriously? One sixth of the U.S. population is food-insecure. You don't think that basic income would fix that?
Food insecurity could be fixed now if it wasn't a politically divisive issue. There's no reason to believe UBI won't be even more divisive.
But I don't see how we are forcing people to be low class with UBI (as opposed to having them unemployed or doing precarious work that doesn't pay even the basic needs).
For example, let's say I buy vegetables. With UBI, I might spend some time to grow my own. Or buy from a neighbor who expands his production.
It's true that price of labor might rise with UBI, but that can only rise to the share of labor as input. It will also force to replace labor-intensive products with capital-intensive (automation), which is a good thing.
So while it may solve the problem for people who are food insecure, it will create a problem for those who were better off with good paying jobs. You can't just reduce 95%+ of the population to simply meeting basic needs and not facing serious societal discontent.
I also dislike the future that would result in. Heck, I want to go back to pre-iPhone.
Saying "I became a farmer/owner/operator by getting close to the soil and using a manual soil tiller to learn about the soil. Using a tractor means there are no entry-level agriculture jobs anymore" would've been just as valid 200 years ago. So why is it different this time?
Difference 1: The tools themselves only exist due to rampant exploitation of vast intellectual resources that were created, catalogued, and published with the intent to help people learn, not machines. And this was frequently done against the explicit expressed wishes of the holders and creators of those resources.
Difference 2: The tools do not work deterministically. Every run of a prompt is effectively pulling a lever on a slot machine. Sometimes you win, sometimes you don't. However just like a good slot machine, the developers behind them have put a number of little touches and "features" that change nothing about the underlying machinery and instead explicitly target psychological weak points to build trust and confidence in said tools.
Difference 3: The tools do not work reliably. Agents are a complete shitshow but even if you strictly work in the confines of a chat bot, it will occasionally just make shit up, in our industry that means: code that does not compile and run. Hallucination has been a consistent issue since day 1 of this tech and probably the most impactful to user experience overall, and despite these facts it hasn't been solved in the subsequent 3 years whatsoever. It is by every account I've read, an intractable problem because these are machines that are fundamentally designed to make approximate representations of final products that look plausible, not that function correctly. That is a big distinction and it matters.
Difference 4: Saturation. Despite your assertion above, there was virtually no drive to prevent the ascent of tractors. Tractors were in high demand basically as soon as they were available, barring some ups and downs as the technology was fully built out and proven. The advent of motor vehicles as a whole completely redesigned our cities and to a great degree, society itself. Horses are still around today but as a hobby for monied people. Despite all of the above, Silicon Valley is simply tripping over itself, pouring literally billions of dollars into these things, and putting them in every product category whether it makes sense or not. This engenders a lack of trust, not just for the ethics of the tool itself, but whether OpenAI and company actually think this is good, or weather it simply must be good or the entire show is going to come crashing down around them. Instead of a product vision, where a company is setting out to solve specific problems with well made solutions, we have a few companies who feel distinctly desperate, trying to get their product in front of as many eyes as humanly possible, irrespective of it's ability to add any value at all to what those eyes are looking at.
We didn't have every company and every government in the world spending trillions of dollars to completely reorganize society and technology around tractors, and to force them into every possible aspect of our lives whether people want them or not, to the point that tractors are all but existentially necessary to maintain our technological civilization.
We didn't have billionaires with deeply entrenched political interests believing in a cult of neo-fascist "tractor accelerationism."
We didn't have people forming parasocial relationships with tractors so deep and profound that they superceded their relationships with real people, and subsumed their own identities. Tractors didn't gaslight people into insanity and suicide. There's no such thing as "tractor psychosis." No one committed murder to pacify the Tractor Basilisk.
Tractors didn't flood every form of media with misinformation and slop that in a decade's time will make subjective reality and history utterly indecipherable from its own gibberish.
No one believed that tractors would lead to a perfect post-scarcity utopia... somehow. But only when everyone submits to tractors and the new world order that tractors will create and accepts that tractors are the new reality and that they just have to learn to live with that, regardless of any harm they might do.
No one forgot how to farm because they used tractors. There was no mass loss of farming knowledge or "deskilling," or degradation of cognitive or social abilities that came with using tractors.
There was no one complaining about how utterly meaningless farming had become now that tractors came along, but they themselves had become so addicted to tractor-maxxing that they couldn't simply stop.
And on top of that, no one wanted to replace farmers entirely with tractors, just because tractors didn't need to be paid. And then the plumbers. And the architects. And the cooks. And the doctors. And eventually the judges, police and politicians.
LLMs are very obviously not the tractors of the information age. If they were, Hacker News wouldn't be consumed by them. People wouldn't talk about them with the same awe and passion usually reserved for religion.
However behind it all most token usage is driven by automating TPS reports and writing code [1]. In that dominant token usage context, the LLM is clearly just a boring old tractor.
Yes, some people are falling in love with their tractor because of an existing technology that has opened us up to that possibility, but that doesn't change the fact that the tractor is mostly being used to till the farm and that our algorithm driven media environment no longer allows coverage of that because its too boring.
[1]: https://www.anthropic.com/research/economic-index-june-2026-...
There are a few caveats to this that everyone seems to leap over, one very important one is that the a priori control of production, land, and natural resources is not egalitarian, and there's no reason to really believe it would become egalitarian even if people could in theory produce everything they wanted/needed for themselves.
But even barring that, we live in a world with finite natural resources. And that by itself should be a serious concern for anyone who sees this as a possibility. I get that optimists also seem to believe that technology we don't have like dyson spheres, asteroid mining, intergalactic travel, etc. will solve any resource scarcity concerns, but that is not a given, and developing any of those things would still rely on our planets natural resources to even bootstrap.
We live in a world that can't even coordinate the safe development of models or nuclear anti-proliferation, and already experiences rampant injustice surrounding use of our planets natural resources, which does not bode well for the future.
And even if we did end up in a world where these problems were solved, advanced models posed no threat to our existence, etc. they would not be solved instantaneously, and would likely cause catastrophic changes to society and massive amounts of suffering. We can solve scarcity of basic needs and access to medical care, decarbonization, etc. today. Without the use of AI. We do not need to go through years of suffering because tech execs want their play things.
I was lucky enough to be thrust through this in 2023 by DALLE-2, but the body of the normal distribution is just starting to pass the rubicon, month by month, day by day... Lowkey agonizing watch so many people go through something so relatable, only to turn to primal, nationalistic urges and downright epistemic denialism.
The culture is robust already, too -- I have no illusion that the obvious arrival in ASI will change much of anything, just like evolution didn't end up killing the church like some feared. They'll simply fold that into the interwoven chitin of cherry-picked facts and party lines, accumulated over their years in the echo chamber. Any headline that seems like it should obviously pierce the veil instead gets used to reinforce it (e.g. "Oh they claim AI solved a math problem, now?? They must really be getting desparate to hide the hoax if they're willing to go that far!")
This forum bans politics and I really don't want to start a whole thing, but I guess I'll just float the anecdote that I learned about this theory of Echo Chambers in am baby epistemology course, where the example given was the MAGA movement. Take that as you will.
I don't think you need to be skeptical of the tech to think that. The question there is: given the moral character of the people in charge of big companies, what do you think will happen if they can replace all labor with cheap machines? If AI can do the thinking they had to pay humans for, and robots can do the menial tasks they had to pay humans for, they don't need the common man for anything. People like you and I are at very real risk of being in a permanent underclass if these AI dreams come to fruition.
It already is for quite a few. We have something that's very useful and gaining improvements as time goes on. Probably not fast/good enough for some companies with wild expectations, but there's no doubt that this thing is here to stay.
I don't make as much money as others though. I should totally write python and join some fintech
Programmers now: "Oh no, holy shit, what am I going to do as the market forces us to be a bunch of fucking gremlins. Too bad I threw away the power of collective bargaining"
It seems people keep forgetting why unions formed in the first place. Given a chance a company of any size will fully optimize for its own profit regardless of how awful the side effects are to individuals, the environment, and society at large.
This is a side effect of capital accumulation. There's no one to buy the products (as low/middle class gets squeezed) so no reason to invest. Instead, oligarchs hold money in assets and compete over control, ultimately with violence.
Instead, I think that doctors and lawyers have it right: they effectively have the authority to decide who's allowed to practice the profession, so ChatGPT can't write you prescriptions or defend you in court.