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Comment by joshmarlow | Hacker News Reader

> make the balance between capital and labor even more uneven.

I think it's interesting to note that as opens source models evolve and proliferate, the capital required for a lot of ventures goes down - which levels the playing field.

When I can talk to one agent-with-a-CAD-integration and have it design a gadget for me and ship the design off to a 3D printer and then have another agent write the code to run on the gadget, I'll be able to build entire ventures that would require VC funding and a team now.

When intellectual capital is democratized, financial capital looses just a bit of power...

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What value do you bring to the venture, though? What makes your venture more likely to succeed than anybody else's, if the barrier is that low? I mean, I'll tell you: if anyone can spend $100 to design the same new gadget, the winner is going to be whoever can spend a million in production (to get economy of scale) and marketing. Currently, financial capital needs your brain, so you can leverage that. But if they can use a brain in the cloud instead, they're going to do just that. Sure, you can use it and design anything you can imagine, but nobody is going to pay you for it unless you, yourself, bring some irreplaceable value to the table.

Since everyone has AI, then it stands that humans still make the difference. That is why I don't think companies will be able to automate software dev too much, they would be cutting the one advantage they could have over their competition.

It stands that humans will make the difference if they can do things that the AI cannot. The more capable the AI gets, however, the less humans will meet that threshold, and they are the ones that will lose out. Capital, on the other hand, will always make a difference.

I can't understand how you reach your conclusion.

At present, if you have financial capital and need intellectual capital you need to find people willing to work for you and pay them a lot of money. With enough progress in AI you can get the intellectual capital from machines instead, for a lot less. What loses value is human intellectual capital. Financial capital just gained a lot of power, it can now substitute for intellectual capital.

Sure, you could pretend this means you'll be able to launch a startup without any employees, and so will everyone. But why wouldn't Sam Altman or whomever just start AI Ycombinator with hundreds of thousands of AI "founders"? Do you really think it would be more "democratic"?

> But why wouldn't Sam Altman or whomever just start AI Ycombinator with hundreds of thousands of AI "founders"? Do you really think it would be more "democratic"?

AI is useful in the same way with Linux

- can run locally

- empowers everyone

- need to bring your own problem

- need to do some of the work yourself

The moral is you need to bring your problem to benefit. The model by itself does not generate much benefits. This means AI benefits are distributed like open source ones.

Those points are true of current AI models, but how sure are you they will remain true as technology evolves?

Maybe you believe that they will always stay true, that there's some ineffable human quality that will never be captured by AI and value creation will always be bottle-necked by humans. That would be nice.

But even if you still need humans in the loop, it's not clear how "democratizing" this would be. It might sound great if in a few years you and everyone else can run an AI on their laptop that is as a good as a great technical co-founder that never sleeps. But note that means that someone who owns a data-center can run the equivalent of the current entire technical staff of Google, Meta, and OpenAI combined. Doesn't sound like a very level playing field.

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