Cognitive Mercantilism: AI panic resembles fears of early capitalism
contraptions.venkateshrao.com
contraptions.venkateshrao.com
> My inability to produce food is economically almost irrelevant. What matters is that I can consume it, enjoy it, develop tastes for it, and devote my energies to other things.
What the author misses is that what mattered more was that people could now produce more things. People were free from manual labour to perform intellectual labour. But what do people do to produce things when intellectual labour is automated? And with emboddied AI, skilled manual labour too?
You need to produce things to be able to reap the fruits of economic progress. Thats what most working people did after the agricultural revolution. What will we produce in a post AI world? And if only the people who own AI will be able to produce things, then why would they give us any power or leverage in the economy?
Modern concepts of "work" and how we relate to work are quite new and it's just an assumption that we're "on the right path."
Well of course it is.
Most people living today take it for granted that modern "work" is the way it is and the way it should be. Few people have the context of understanding that modern work, where you directly trade labor for money and money for the goods and services you need to live, and where your identity and social standing is largely based on your profession, is something only a minority of human beings have experienced.
In my experience, most people seem to treat human development as a one-way spear of progress. The dawn of agriculture, the industrial revolution, etc. are all just stops on a linear path that is the right path.
But maybe it's just a dead end. "Primitive" hunter-gatherer societies survived for way longer than our modern-day society has existed, and things aren't looking so promising for us right now.
You're assuming "human development" is some dark force that controls humans but it's not controllable by them, I would describe this as a slightly amusing occultist belief.
Of course, the exact opposite is true, if humans fail to maintain the straight spear of progress it will be their fault and folly, because, objectively, it isn't even hard to maintain.
The folly is believing that humans are the tip of the only branch that matters to the tree.
Upwards of 99% of all species that have ever existed on earth are now extinct. Human life is so special and important to us because...we're human. But our survival is not guaranteed, and for all of our truly unique attributes and advantages, we're statistically just as likely to reach the same outcome as the vast, vast majority of every other species.
And? The only conclusion I can draw, is that humans need to stop warring with each other and focus on global security and prosperity for all, even if there's only 1% chance of achieving it, that's where all of our efforts should go... but I'm not a death-cult believer, so what do I know.
> The folly is believing that humans are the tip of the only branch that matters to the tree.
Your "tree" resembles a Kali of mass-murder with the consciousness and agency necessary to exterminate any life on earth. Actually it's just chance and the chances are both favorable for humans and highly improvable with sufficient effort - that isn't hard to see when death-cult thinking is done away with.
I'd love for that too, but there's very little evidence to support the notion that this is going to happen.
None of my comments here have celebrated my somber expectations for humanity, so the mere fact that you've basically called me a "death-cult believer" simply because I'm less hopeful about our prospects is itself evidence of just how unrealistic Utopia is.
I mean, if we can't even keep from denigrating random strangers in online discussions, what makes you think we're going to stop fighting and figuring out how we can take care of each other?
I gather, because of my insinuations your faith in humanity sank to a new low? It took too little, too fast, what happened to "sticks and stones"? Being too sensitive is the foundation of conflict, it prevents the straight talk necessary for mutual understanding.
> None of my comments here have celebrated my somber expectations for humanity
Your expectations for humanity can only be based on what you expect from yourself, a person who projects his lack of positive ideas to all of humanity should at least be aware of that fact and not try to project the same despair to everyone else - this suggestion should not be viewed as controversial or offensive.
> what makes you think we're going to stop fighting and figuring out how we can take care of each other?
The fact that we haven't explored the vast majority of available options. It will happen when we stop confusing singing Kumbaya with just living in peace - two vastly different notions, e.g. the fact that someone felt offended doesn't mean he should go to war...
No, your insinuations simply confirmed what I've observed throughout life: even people with the highest of ideals and noblest of visions engage in the behavior that works in opposition to the world they want, and they're just as apt to blame others for the conflict they help stoke.
You can call people who have a different world view names, like "death-cult believers", but it should be patently obvious to you that this contributes nothing to the conversation and is far more likely to create the very animosity and conflict you complain about than it is peaceful, useful dialog.
And by the way, pretending that people should live by "sticks and stones" and telling yourself people who don't agree with you are just too "sensitive" is just a way for you to avoid taking responsibility for your contribution to the imperfect world you live in.
People offended by the truth don't work in opposition to good ideas, they're useless anyway, the sooner they reveal their inability to engage with anything of significance - the better.
> And by the way, pretending that people should live by "sticks and stones" and telling yourself people who don't agree with you are just too "sensitive"
I referred to "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me". Apparently, you're unaware of this expression which reveals a lot about you.
People changing the subject to how offended they are, correlates with their lack of sensible ideas. It also correlates with the desire to divert the conversation into insignificant personal posturing and away from anything productive. I'm glad you illustrated that point here.
Your comments here are both humorous and sad. To believe you love humanity while having such disdain for your fellow human beings who constitute it simply because many of them won't agree with your "truth".
The good news is you can take solace in the fact that you're in good company. Many of the world's greatest atrocities have been instigated by individuals who were convinced that saving the world required dealing with large groups of people they thought "useless" and "unproductive".
As I said, the quicker, the merrier - because both are true and understanding that saves time for more productive endeavors.
Why do you keep whining anyway, if there's no hope for humanity, there's no hope for you either, as a confused part of it, it's that simple. Just stay away and don't muddy the waters as some hypersensitive primadonna, with apologies to primadonnas everywhere.
> To believe you love humanity while having such disdain for your fellow human beings
What disdain? You see disdain where there are jobs to be done, but it's all in your head. You're the definition of self-fulfilling prophecy, you've locked yourself in your own prison of despair and hypersensitivity, nobody is doing anything to you, but you keep whining and being "sad', craving to lock everyone in your self-built prison too, out of envy.
Speaking of "saving time" and "productive endeavors"...
If you believe what you've written, the most useful thing you could do is to reflect on why you've chosen to spend your time interacting with me.
I mean, I didn't engage you. You responded to a comment of mine, and then you proceeded to keep engaging in what is clearly a dead-end dialog with a useless internet stranger. There must be a reason for that, no?
I don't have to reflect, I knew why before I started.
> You responded to a comment of mine, and then you proceeded to keep engaging in what is clearly a dead-end dialog with a useless internet stranger.
The "dead-end dialog" should be your point of view, you're the one who thinks that some external force determines the fate of humans regardless of what they think or do. Doing nothing makes sense only within that point of view.
> There must be a reason for that, no?
Of course there is, if I think that something can be done to improve the human condition I would try to study the impediments to it. One of those is the doomerism which is now in vogue and also used by people with much higher social standing than the usual internet strangers.
But what are you "studying"? You haven't actually tried to engage with my perspective in a good-faith manner. You haven't asked any questions, and questions are critical for any serious study.
Instead, you denigrated me for my perspective from your very first comment ("death-cult believer"), suggested people like me are "useless", claimed I am unable "to engage with anything of significance", and even admitted that this is not a productive endeavor.
With all due respect, it seems to me you should worry less about improving the human condition in the abstract and prioritize how you might actually make a real contribution to the human condition. Because name-calling, belittling and arguing don't make the world a better place, and certainly aren't aligned to the ideal of peace, security and prosperity for all.
My humble suggestion: the simplest and most immediate way you could improve the world around you is to consider how you treat the people you interact with.
Good day.
No good faith manners are possible with your style of arguing, you didn't answer any of my arguments but you did divert the conversation away from the real issues we started with and into "I'm so injured because you're such a bad person" posturing. Next, I had to figure out how far it'd go and if anything new would come out of it.
> Instead, you denigrated me for my perspective from your very first comment ("death-cult believer")
Nothing new came out, you kept doing it and you will keep doing till the end of times you so desire.
However, while talking to you, I did come across some useful new perspectives, so I'm satisfied with the results and I thank you for your participation, really, I mean it.
Labor and specialization are not unique to modern-day work. Both hunter-gatherer societies and our modern industrial society have labor and specialization. But they function in completely different ways.
Specialization in industrial society is much more complex whereas in hunter-gatherer societies it is generally based on age and gender. Hunter-gatherer societies are generally more egalitarian, there is more skill overlap between members of the group, expertise is leveraged in less formal and less institutionalized ways, learning is more distributed and knowledge is more likely to be treated as communal.
Which is understandable when the alternative is generally poverty.
But if you want to have a less philosophical and more pragmatic discussion, I'd raise the issue of the billions of people who count themselves among the "working poor." For billions of people, modern work doesn't guarantee that you won't be poor.
Nailed it! It’s a too powerful resource to be privately held.
It's concerning because there is already way too much 'intelligence' in this society and most of it is used to propagate falsehoods, irrationality and to manipulate others in counter-productive ways. I hope AI educates people and doesn't merely steer them down deeper into their echo-chambers. That said, I also really hope that AI doesn't just bring everyone into alignment and agreement about ideas which aren't true. There are significant threats with both extremes.
Honestly, it feels like there is exceptionally little incentive to learn anything deeply anymore because the payoff might never be there.
I know, I know, do it because you love it or you find it interesting. Sure, I will to the degree that I love it or find it interesting. But I find even the incentives on that have changed weirdly enough.
If AI keeps going the way the author thinks (which isnt guaranteed) then there will come a point where the productivity of those who can afford to have access to AI will start becoming infinitely more than those who do not, and then those without AI are locked in the permanent underclass. Not much is within your reach then
They do what AI can't do, entrepreneurialism, because AI doesn't have property rights. Like back to the 1800s when most Americans were self-employed, not working for large corporations, because corporate cog-in-the-machine work can be done better by AI. With AI it's far easier to run your own business than at any time in history.
They were mainly wage employees and factory workers by the end of that century due to industrialization. And "AI" is the industrialization of intellectual work.
But let me play the devil's advocate and argue the point: who will the business sell to, if most people are not in a position with wealth to spare to buy from your business?
Clearly a relevant and replicable analogy to AI making entrepreneurship easier /s
Your version of 1800s North America is a myth.
Sports games. Plays. Concerts. Sex work.
Take your pick.
When the people were were freed from farm labour, due to farm automation, people could find another economic activity which required the other capacity of humans - intelligence.
The transition from muscle-power work to mind-work was meaningful, as both muscle and mind were attributes of humans, creating demand for humans having mind power instead of muscle power.
But the continuation of that transition breaks down. Muscle power -> Mind power -> ???
Those 3 questions marks at the end are what's scaring people, and what is threatening the stability of the transition from mind work. If both muscle power and mond power are not things of value, how would the humanity progress to create value? Who buys it? Why do they buy it? Who hires whom? Why?
I guess their point is that, for example-- instead of requiring heaps of study and a genius mind to learn to how to reverse engineer complex things over the course of years, their intelligence can go to something that... AI can't do yet?
But I am sure people had the same question marks back then, for what's comes next
It was not obvious then that "mind power" was something that everyone could use - or even that a large fraction of the population could use.
Well, look at that. An essay about the benefits of slave trade and colonialism, while making no mention of slave labor or oppressed people.
From the site’s about page. Well, it’s good enough to nerd snipe the HN community.
AI is not a ”fair” resource. Normal people cannot compete. We can rent capacity of the ones owning the data centres. But we will never have access to the best models. Never be able to afford outbound data centres. We can at any moment lose access to the resource. And the ones controlling the resource will be in control of everything. And it will be privately held. Fantastic.
Current AI is never going to do better than us in every category, it can only do better in us in categories where it's possible to generate an infinite amount of verifiable synthetic data (math and programming). AI is still just as bad at sales, marketing, writing and anything involving human subjective appeal as it was a year ago. And it's fundamentally handicapped in being unable to acquire new domain knowledge that doesn't fit in a few hundred thousand tokens of context.
Even if this turns out to be true, I don't think it will necessarily matter.
So much money was already burned, by so powerful people in incestuous relationship with governments, that I don't think this is an important point anymore.
All of these have objective metrics (units sold, clicks, likes, etc) and are thus verifiable in principle.
most countries around the world still have democracy, so voting the the solution. what I don't know is how to fight populism... because that is the achilles heel of democracy... for now, spreading the knowledge is probably all we can do, people have to (and will in time) learn who can be trusted and who cannot.
but honestly I don't buy into sci-fi "AI will kill us all or enslave us" premise. that is only our anthropomorphisation of the artificial intelligence. what I see as more probably that AI could rule us in stead of the human politics that rule us now. why not have LLM political parties that could be voted? each one with open weights and transparent prompts? without emotion, corruption and greed? wouldn't that be better than current situation?
There has never been a time in our history where excess labour has been treated with any grace, and I think it's rather delusional to think that will start suddenly now.
1. when an AI starts working on a task, it is within a human context, someone pays and decides to assign that work to AI
2. while it performs work on the task it continuously needs to interact with the context in order to act and observe the feedback
3. at the end of work, the outcomes remain in context, including gains, losses, costs, risks and liability.
So AI is great but can't do the beginning, middle and end of a task. They belong to context, which is us, the AI users. Context is maximally distributed, every human, team, or company that uses AI is a context, they are relational and indexical. You can't have my context, for example - you can't eat for me, or learn for me. Some things must loop back. Especially consequences of AI work. That is irreducible, AI can't improve to grow a skin like us. Its own skin is user base gain/loss, competition with other AI providers and dancing for investors. Every AI usage context is not theirs and they can't own it.
What happens to companies is that their investors expect AI usage already, their competitors use it to compete with them and fast follow, and customers use AI agents to arbitrate their buying opportunities. So even if they did nothing AI related they find themselves in a new world where.
1. anything visible can be easily imitated - code, text, media, and AI agents - I call it the fast follow effect
2. any apparent arbitrage opportunity will be quickly crowded by fast followers removing profit from it
3. AI it self is competitive and the whole stack is fungible - models, harnesses, tools, they can all be replaced easily, what matters more is the project context data which is usually a git backed folder on local disk
So my theory is that AI won't make anyone "rich". Instead we have a musical chairs moment. AI removes distinctiveness from everyone of us. Every time I use AI for myself it is just great and amazing. When others use it, they make our own work seem little and not as impressive. Companies are caught in a Red Queen effect, have to work harder just to stay in place.
And here I find the answer to what will we do with all our free time - compete, run for our own musical chair. We need to find our own niches again, they are now under rapid change. We will invest as much energy as needed to do it, we are ready to pay a lot of effort to differentiate back. But we can't predict it just as you can't predict where the ball in a football match will go 1 minute later, it depends on what every other player is doing.
If a CEO just needs to write "optimise profits" ...
But IMHO what humans do is turn their intentions into reality using tools.
Intention is human, reality is perceived by humans. I feel that you need humans in the whole chain to communicate with reality (the context) and serve as translators and drivers for our tools.
Sorry that I can’t put more precise words here, but I am somehow convinced that there is a fundamental mechanism here that limits the reach of AI.
For starters, it has always been the merchant class that lobbied for monopoly and restrictions on trade. This fits the AI companies even better considering the recent pushes towards restrictions.
The industrious Revolution is also quite contested in its reasons. Falling wages in the period could very well account for the need to work more hours.
That said I consider myself a humanist and as such I want to believe that more intelligence available to humanity can only be a good thing if it is accessible in a fair way.
Have we Unlocked Civilizational Hypercomplexity with Ethereum yet?
Feels like another cryptocurrency to AI pivoter. But hey, credit where credit's due, dude knows how to hustle.
Eating, apparently, is completely optional for humans :-/
Just a thing to remember: our intelligence made us the apex predator on this planet. Is there any reason to believe that a superior intelligence, whether man-made or extraterrestrial, won't become the apex predator?
That's a facile, superficial "argument" that is currently being made by everyone who is pro-AI when confronted with any claim of AI pushing humans out of the economy.
At this point in time, it's reasonable to dismiss the argument rather than engaging it, because each time this argument is made the proponent of the argument is completely mute on the fact that humans work to eat.
That's a big underlying counterargument, and no one making the argument is engaging with the counter-argument, they are instead setting up strawman counter-arguments.
Will that analogy hold? Who knows. But it’s more than a facile AI bro saying AI is bringing us a utopia. The article even raises a key part of the analogy: the transition to industry and capitalism (and the resulting freed up labor) led to an unprecedented wave of revolutions and death.
54% of U.S. adults read below a sixth-grade level.
Like what?
1. AI isn't going to stop at "repetitive, brainless thinking," just ask the math professors.
2. Even if that's true, is everyone capable of these "currently unimaginable cognitive pursuits"? Oh, there will still be cognitive work for the top-0.1% smartest people is little consolation to the other 99.9%.
3. That argument is basically trying to console people with a combination of "trust us" and the underpants gnome business plan ("1. Collect underpants, 2. ?, 3. Profit).
2. A major and weird point of the article argues that most people are “stupid” because of a lack of incentives for intellectual labor. If you know you’re not that top 1%, why bother in school? If you’ve already missed the window for a fancy white collar job, why bother “thinking”? In this view, AI could have a democratizing effect on intellectual labor.
3. That does seem to be the upshot, but the author doesn’t seem to be very sympathetic to AI execs either (basically calling them rent seekers still in the mercantilist mindset despite developing the “transformative technology”). Still article doesn’t offer any path forward.
There is a comforting fairy tale popular among tech optimists: that human history is driven by mental upgrades that trickle down to the masses.
The first part of that sentence is absolutely true. The second part has a much darker side that optimists conveniently ignore.
1. Mercantilism is alive and well. Please see Hormuz, Straight of. 2. Mercantilist rent-seeking is alive and well, just at a layer up of abstraction. See Google, Meta, Microsoft. No single player can compete with them. Ones that somehow manage to even threaten get bought. 3. Tech doesn't solve issues broadly: a modern worker with a battery-powered chainsaw has more productive power than an 18th-century frontier settler. Yet we still have homelessness. Riddle me this, techno-optimist.
But you'll say, we're overall better off. Of course we are. But the gains have BY AND LARGE gone to the wealthiest individuals and countries. The idea that the dude can eat a variety of incredibly rare food sits on the backs of billions of impoverished people who don't spend time in our air conditioned offices on MacBooks.
Great men and discoveries move the world (see Musk, Elon) but their exploits spread wealth HIGHLY unevenly, and big nation states want to steal it in the most mercantile way possible - by forcing and scaling up supply (look at China for cars, steel, and basically any advanced manufacturing right now).
One man intelligence will be a boon for people with agency. But it's HIGHLY unlikely to undo the superstructure which captured the rules of mercantilism AND capitalism at the same time.
This is simply false, the average Chinese or Indian is incredibly better off now than they were 100 or 500 years ago. In fact for the past decade many of the wealthiest countries (many Western European countries, and Japan) have seen barely any growth in living standards at all, GDP-per-capita growth has been concentrated in developing countries.
It's not mutually exclusive with enormous relative improvement at the bottom, from where people were to where they are now. China and India have all but ended open defecation and there's running water in places we'd never dream of a generation ago. Diseases are being eradicated saving huge numbers of lives.
Rich got richer contains zero information about how poor people fared - even accounting for relative numbers in your claim.
It's the it's the nature of mercantilist systems to leave only scraps for the people at the bottom. The absolute bare minimum to stave off revolution in good times.
This is merely the nature of the beast.
We're way better off in capitalism than other systems (as you can see); but to assume that we just had better ideas like the article suggests to get there is laughable.
Capitalism was enabled by a superstructure of world power that, we must remember, very nearly didn't make it.
Leaving Omelas &c.
I can give you an example from my interactions with people in the space industry.
For the longest time, missions have had a minimum viable skill set problem. The people who become astronauts via (what will be seen as) the classical programs are chosen for their intelligence, adaptability, and resilience.
There's a joke amongst people who've gone through the selection process to become one that the ideal astronaut candidate is an Antarctic shark doctor helicopter pilot physicist.
They're usually subject matter experts in something, and then are given extensive training in everything else. It doesn't matter if you're not a doctor, but if you're going to be more than two days away from civilization, then you're going to learn how to do a tracheotomy for intubation. Because what if it's the doctor who is severely injured?
As long as the crew size is below the size of a small town, there isn't much overlap in expertise, and the amount of knowhow and practical expertise you have to bring to the field is staggering.
AI changes that calculus. You can now give outbound astronauts all of human medical literature, medical equipment, and a specially shaped model that knows the crew, their expertise, and how they did in training.
If the crew doctor goes down, or there is a significant casaulty event, then the crew doesn't have to wait for minutes at a time to get painfully slow instructions from mission control. They can use the machine to augment their training to find creative solutions to the problem with the inventory they have on hand.
NASA has always wanted such systems in play. It's why for the longest time NASA has been spending money on robotic surgeons. But it took these LLMs to make these kinds of missions practical. https://spinoff.nasa.gov/spinoff2000/hm1.htm https://www-robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/what-we-do/research-tasks/...
The speed of light delay made such devices impractical... until now. Astronauts can be the hands or the robots. The machines can provide the specialized expertise. This makes the exploration of our solar system a much more feasible endeavor.
Instead of sending 6 to 10 people, we can send 3 to 5 highly capable people (including a flight surgeon), and augment their expertise with specialized models. AI lets us carry human expertise with us to the stars.
As long as you ignore the ecological damage from data centers and the jobs lost by AI -yeah, it's all sunshine and roses over here!
I love when it’s clear somebody wrote “Write an intelligent blog post that sounds smart. Reference this book and AI. Make no mistakes.” to a chat bot
> The returns on attention rise, and with them the incentive to pay attention.
> We might call this a cognitive industrious revolution, preceding and perhaps enabling a fuller AI industrial revolution
A worker under capitalism is exactly just another commodity commanded by capital. Only competing power centers like unions makes it not one-sided.
I dunno about “demand and initiative”. Is this how capitalism started, or are we jumping ahead to the post-WWII USA where the socialists and capitalists had won concessions from the bougies so that a “middle class” came about?
> The early capitalist worker voluntarily increased annual working days from 250 to 300 because a new universe of desirable goods had become accessible.
The weekly working hours increased for many who moved to the factories of the cities. Labor organizing is what lead to the two-day weekend.
> We are moving toward a world in which an ordinary person can command quantities and varieties of intelligence that would previously have required teams of highly trained specialists. Just as I can enjoy food without knowing how to farm, I can increasingly enjoy the products of intelligence without knowing how to produce them myself.
Some people are incapable of seeing power dynamics. An ordinary person might fear AI because of the explicit threats against his or her job.
How does power work? In this case it works by concentrating compute and access to the vaunted frontier models.
Another thing is the part about “hoarding”. AI is exactly about hoarding. Labor built the intelligence of centuries. Now AI wants to close that off.
And the 8 hour work day. And, for miners, being able to have their lunch break above ground.
Coward.
let's say smartphone. They are so smart! we can replace all the word intelligence in his thesis by smartness.
This dude think because some marketing team put the word "Intelligence" on LLM , it is it.
Since a LLM wrote most of the words in this "essay"... which is just word salad, replacing "capitalism" by "AI" in the work of someone else ( a "clever" LLM trick , who like taking something existing, and replace one word at the time); since the lack of any insight in this article, we can conclude, that the LLM who help wrote it, has clearly no ressemblance with any intelligence.
i'm happy to hear arguments from the misanthropes why for the first time in history this will not be the case.