[noosphr]

The human labor just said:

"Losing access to GPT‑5.5 feels like I've had a limb amputated.”

How well would an assembly line of quadriplegics work?

Also this isn't a Marxist analysis. Underneath all the formulas neo-classical economics makes the same assumptions about labor.

[intuitionist]

ChatGPT isn’t literally or figuratively cutting off anybody’s limbs though. It’s more like, the guy on the assembly line had a mech suit, and now he doesn’t have a mech suit, and he’s sad. Skill atrophy is a real concern but unless you assume that nobody is working to maintain those skills it doesn’t change my analysis much.

[tapoxi]

And soon we expect everyone to have a mech suit, and only a handful of companies can make one, and they rent it to you and can revoke it at any time.

And what happens when they've saturated the market? Prices go up to the maximum the market can bear, and then they'll extend into other markets. Why rent the model to build a profitable company with when you could just take all that profit for yourself?

[subhobroto]

> Why rent the model to build a profitable company with when you could just take all that profit for yourself?

You're describing a standoff at best and a horrible parasitic relationship at worst.

In the worst case, the supplier starves the customer of any profit motive and the customer just stops and the supplier then has no business to run.

This has happened a few times in the past and is by 2026, well understood as a way to bankruptcy.

That has always been the beauty of free markets - it's self healing and calibrating. You don't need a big powerful overseer to ensure things are right.

Competing with customers is a way to lose business fast.

For example:

- AWS has everything they need to shit out products left, right and center. AWS can beat most of their partners and even customers who are wiring together all their various products tomorrow if they wanted. They don't because killing an entire vertical isn't of any benefit to them yet. Eventually they will when AWS is no longer growing and cannot build or scale any product no matter how hard they think or try. Competing with their customers is their very last option.

- OpenAI/Anthropic/Google isn't going to start competing against the large software body shops. Even if all that every employee at TCS does is hit Claude up, Anthropic isn't going to be the next TCS - it's competing with their customers.

[dinfinity]

> That has always been the beauty of free markets - it's self healing and calibrating. You don't need a big powerful overseer to ensure things are right.

If by "self healing and calibrating" you mean 'evolve to a monopoly and strongarm everybody to do exactly what you want whilst removing all pressure on the quality of your product', then yes, that is the "beauty" of free markets.

That is the stable state of free markets. Antitrust regulation and enforcement only barely manages to eke out oligopolies and even then they are often rife with collusion and enshittification.

[subhobroto]

> evolve to a monopoly and strongarm everybody to do exactly what you want whilst removing all pressure on the quality of your product

This certainly isn't true of small businesses and the local mom-and-pop shops in your area.

For free markets to work, small businesses need the ability to thrive and starting one should be exceptionally easy.

What has unfortunately happened in a lot of developed countries, is that in order to regulate the very large companies you're upset about, governments have made it nearly impossible to start small businesses to act as competition. That makes it even easier for companies to consolidate and evolve into a monopoly, strong-arming everyone - the exact opposite effect of what those regulations were hoping to fix.

Are there small businesses in your area like the 1 or 5 person HVAC or cleaning or landscaping or breakfast company that you disdain as much as you disdain UnitedHealthCare?

[dinfinity]

Always the same nonsense. Simple question: do you think in a fully free market, without any governement intervention, those mom and pop shops would not be bought up or merge?

The truth is that consolidation is an attractor. If it hasn't happened yet in a market, it will. Economies of scale give an undisputed advantage. If there is anything I'm upset about, it is about deluding people by vilifying the only thing that prevents feudalism (and massive abuse of humanity for profit) from happening.

[noosphr]

>It’s more like, the guy on the assembly line had a mech suit, and now he doesn’t have a mech suit

You just answered your own question there.

One woman was doing what would take a dozen. Now she can't.

[hackable_sand]

I think it's more like:

The dude was incompetent, was able to launder their incompetence through a humunculus, and now is afraid of being caught.

[kridsdale1]

Oh hey it’s me.

[nemomarx]

Are people working to keep their skills up, much? Spending a day a week coding manually or etc?

[wiseowise]

The “human labor” is unnamed shill (if they even exist) from a company that produces AI chips. Let’s not get dramatic here.