Past, Present, and Future. If you control the means of production you win. Knowledge, skill, and experience are largely irrelevant to the conversation. I’ve held this opinion for quite some time and would be interested to hear alternative perspectives.
That's clearly wrong, because capital doesn't just appear out of thin air. You are ignoring that there's clearly rare skills involved that enable a few to become very successful. Your strawman only applies to the second generation that inherits wealth, and case in point inherited wealth tends to disappear in a couple of generations further proving that skill is required to build and maintain wealth.
> Past, Present, and Future. If you control the means of production you win.
Yeah, but we were talking about only success, not winning.
In the past and the present, you could succeed purely on a combination of skill, talent and labour. This approach looks like it will not work much longer.
We exchange our knowledge, time, and skill for money. If this exchange is no longer viable — because similar value can be accessed via LLM agents — we'll have no way of making money.
I do think some (non-billionaire) people will survive the transition, but the question then becomes: what happens to everyone else?
I don't think history bears this out. If you look at the most successful entrepreneurs of the computer age, none of them started out as owners of capital. Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs: yes, they had some level of privilege and opportunity, but they didn't start out as billionaires. Their success came from their ideas.
Gates famously came from a rich family, but Bezos did too - he used hundreds of thousands of dollars in investments from his immediate family members to get Amazon off the ground. Maybe 1 to 2% of Americans would be able draw that much from their family members if they were to launch a startup. If we define "bootstrapped" wealth as starting from an economic background within one standard deviation of the national average, then he doesn't count.
If the labor -> wealth pipeline is weakening, then the present won't behave like the past, i.e. you would need assets to success since you won't be able to work your way up.
By completely eliminating the need for a human workforce, therefore rendering a majority of humanity obsolete, therefore lots of social inequality, therefore lots of starvation, poverty and death.
When billionaires say "think about the trillions of people that will benefit from AI" and some notion of living in a post scarcity world, they are talking about _their_ descendants, not yours.
> If we're all broke/starving/being exterminated, who will the rich sell to?
Themselves. The economy is a big cycle where money changes hands to drive production i.e. things getting made. AI will simultaneously greatly increase production (especially once humanoid robots are as dexterous as humans) and make the humans whose jobs it will do economically irrelevant.
So the rich will buy and sell very nice things to each other while the rest of us get left out in the cold because we simply cannot compete with the robots. And because they will capture and control all resources (either by law or by force) we won't be able to create a functioning parallel economy either.
> So the rich will buy and sell very nice things to each other while the rest of us get left out in the cold because we simply cannot compete with the robots. And because they will capture and control all resources (either by law or by force) we won't be able to create a functioning parallel economy either.
Here's another framing for you: at this point _there are no longer rich and poor people_. There are fewer people, but we knew that was going to happen as a consequence of declining birthrates. The elderly are taken care of despite an otherwise unsustainable dependency ratio, because robots can manage the actual business of survival. In that world everyone is a member of the nobility by the virtue of being _human_. There are a few holdouts - mostly religious nuts and other cults - but by and large everyone who is willing to accept the machine's gifts has their every material need catered to.
There is no world where legions of filthy rich AI barons lord it over the technologically illiterate peasants, though. How could there be, when literally anyone can plop down $20 and get access to a frontier model? When open weight models trail _at most_ a year behind the closed ones and compute continues to proliferate?
One of the few things we have figured out about AI is that productivity gains are mostly captured by the people using the tools, not the person paying for the model. In other words, using an LLM is a skill and there is still no substitute for the human driving it.
it's so nice watching HN derive fundamental human rights and basic theories of marxism for themselves.
except no, that's probably not whats going to happen, unless you want to explain to me why there have been voices calling for gruesome stuff to happen to the unproductive for the past 20 years ;)
> In 2008, a software developer in San Francisco named Curtis Yarvin, writing under a pseudonym, proposed a horrific solution for people he deemed "not productive": "convert them into biodiesel, which can help power the Muni buses."
> How could there be, when literally anyone can plop down $20 and get access to a frontier model?
For now. And that too at a massively discounted rate to drive adoption.
> When open weight models trail _at most_ a year behind the closed ones and compute continues to proliferate?
Open-weight models require computing power to run. Consumer hardware prices are rising because of AI build-out, so much so that companies that used to serve ordinary consumer markets are switching to serve only datacenters. Megacompute does indeed continue to proliferate.
> One of the few things we have figured out about AI is that productivity gains are mostly captured by the people using the tools, not the person paying for the model. In other words, using an LLM is a skill and there is still no substitute for the human driving it.
Will this be the case in 20 years? Agentic workflows have come as far as they have in about two years of existence. Do you really need the problem between chair and keyboard will be needed after another 10? And do you really think that in 20 years time that we will all be paid to prompt increasingly advanced and independent LLMs?
> everyone who is willing to accept the machine's gifts has their every material need catered to
The way automation is going, knowledge work will be automated first before any physical production processes are. A lot of people will lose their livelihoods before goods in particular become "the machine's gifts". What do you think happens then? Will the capital owners who have captured this reduction in costs reduce prices proportionally? Or will they keep the gains for themselves? Do you think governments around the world will tax the upper class to the point of being able to give everyone their current livelihoods through government benefits?
You are pretty much just describing some sort of fantasy automated communism. Not to mention, in your world, gatekeeping the machines would instantly become the most profitable venture possible.
you should have read marx, owning the means of production is a fundamental requirement for communism, rendering currency obsolete. one thing that's usually left out though, is that the means of production also have to be so stupidly easy to use, that any ordinary human can make use of them.
it's just not going to be you or me who is going to be within that group of ordinary humans.
It's hardly speculative when it is effectively what happened just after the Industrial Revolution, but with more power ceded to capital. In many ways, it's already happening.
No, that was not "effectively what happened" in the Industrial Revolution. That was an enormous change, but it didn't "completely eliminate the need for a human workforce." That's just hype.
Fine, it is not effectively what happened then. It is worse. At least workers are required to run factories (even though working conditions were ridiculously horrible back then). With AI, in maybe 20 years, 95% of all white-collar workers will be economically irrelevant. You won't need accountants, or programmers, or designers. And we can't all become lawyers and surgeons, or tradesmen.
The Industrial Revolution indeed did not completely eliminate the need for a human workforce. The AI Revolution will.