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Comment by guga42k | Hacker News Reader

This tool belongs to somebody (capitalist!) else and in a new world better tools will always win, not individuals anymore. And it feels like to go from being Rembrandt to CVS employee who takes passport pictures - result much better quality and cheaper but no skill and glory.

Interestingly, the dynamics strongly resembles the industrial revolution when from highly skilled manufactures society moved to factories with power machines. And it all came down who owns means of production. Now AI is a new means of production for all white collars jobs and if the industrial revolution taught is the way to go, nothing good will come out of it.

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Nothing good for skilled labor you mean, especially in the short to medium term - just like in the industrial revolution. If the new technology is any good, it will produce desired things (let's say medical breakthroughs?) faster.

I don't particularly like AI, but if AI replaces developers and other knowledge workers, not everyone is worse off, and I don't mean just capital owners.

That’s like thinking that computers will belong to “capitalists.” It’s already clear that AI is going to be a commodity you’ll be able to rent for barely more than the price of electricity.

No matter how cheap it is, people will never be able to come anywhere close to affording what giant corporations can.

I'm somewhere in the middle on that. People used to think that computers would be owned only by large corporations, then home computers appeared and improved. It's getting tight now that logic scaling is mostly exhausted, at least with current operating principles. Even so, new specialized hardware and model improvements may help (for inference). Training seems to be the biggest problem, it seems hard to democratize.

And that's why Alta Vista still reigns supreme in search.

Yeah. Alta Vista died, and now there aren't any large corporations running search.

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