I think you're missing the point here.
If one doesn't provide incremental value, how do they get food, shelter, and compute?
Perhaps we'll be lucky like horses, and be lucky enough to become pets once our population collapses.
If one doesn't provide incremental value, how do they get food, shelter, and compute?
Perhaps we'll be lucky like horses, and be lucky enough to become pets once our population collapses.
Without accessibility tools, there's not much incremental value I can provide. When the RSI showed up, I was advised by many people to spend the rest of my life on SSDI. I refuse to do that, but it was difficult to show I could provide incremental value. Yes, my mind still worked; the designer, the architect were still there. I had speech recognition so I could write, but a common reaction was, “How can you do anything technical? Your hands don't work.”
Now to the general case that you seem to be worried about: that AI will remove everybody's ability to provide incremental value. No worries there. The entire system will collapse. Labor has no value. Without labor, capital has no value. And we're all jolly well fucked. Now, Your value is how good you can become at asymmetrical class warfare.
At least that's where the current nihilist fantasies about AI leave you.
The AI nihilist view works when you have the wrong enemy. AI is merely the puppet, the distraction, just like the H-1B visa, offshoring, undocumented workers, etc. All these distractions are so that we won't notice the billionaires are enshittifying society and won't seek to dethrone them.
IMO, I argue the fix involves returning the tools of production to the hands of labor, and taking power away from capital. But as with many problems in life, the solution is left as an exercise for the reader.
I sympathize with "dethroning the billionaires" but to me it looks a lot like powerful, general AI systems are the most capital enhancing technology we've ever seen. Wouldn't the class struggle benefit from slowing down frontier AI development while diffusing local models to ordinary people? I feel both can happen at the same time.
As to the point of AI, it's fuzzy. We have a tool we don't understand how to use; it's incredibly valuable in some spaces, destructive in others, but we really don't know how or where to use it. We are trying to fit it onto the old model of work and labor value creation but don't yet understand what the new model should be. It's analogous to generals fighting the last war.
General AI systems: capital enhancing? I can understand how you and many others see that, but right now it is capital-consuming. Capitol is desperately looking for that model they can wield to get more capital out of the system than they put in. With the opinion reports describing frontier AI companies' bond offerings as junk, it looks like asset gamblers with capital are trying to unwind their exposure because they don't see how they're going to get returns.
I suspect the meme of using AI to reduce or eliminate labor is a continuation of capital's hostility to labor having any power at all. It has traction because capital sees reducing labor costs as a way of extracting value from their investments, and, as I said, they can't see any other way to do it.
Slowing down development won't make a difference to the class struggle. There are many parties in this race, and handicapping one does not slow down the others. However, slowing down deployment, taking time to figure out the right way to use it would greatly benefit the class struggle. Denying AI companies' data centers is probably the most effective way to slow them down. If they don't have the resources to spend tokens on answering your email, they will find more valuable ways to spend tokens that should benefit all of us.
Denying them data centers will free up resources, which will enable us to create distributed AI use. Altman's view that all the RAM belongs to him because it's more efficient is a valid model if you are trying to fit AI into the way we used to do things. Progress and new economic development seem to emerge from the edges and not the central power structures of an economy. So if we want to find that new model of how to work with AI, it is imperative that we can build out local models in the hands of many people.