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Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

Yeah this is the thing I think most are missing about LLMs. They're just seeing the current valuation of things and picturing the future as being the same, but with different efficiencies. But as the cost of 'cognitive work' in general starts approach $0, the value of such, in and of itself, is also going to approach $0.

But the economy is in equilibrium which means as this decreases, it's going to change the value of other things, and open the door for new things. Whoever can take what LLMs offer, and then most successfully build on top of that will probably be 'the winner.' I'm not sure exactly what this will translate to in practice, but it seems reasonable to predict that manufacturing is going to be a huge part of it.

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Im not sure this is true:

"But as the cost of 'cognitive work' in general starts approach $0, the value of such, in and of itself, is also going to approach $0."

When the pirate party was big in EU, there was much talk about copying approaching the cost of 0, and therefor we would never pay for copying data, only creating new data.

I guess this all due to copyright law, and it will not disappear anytime soon, but still. I would not be too quick to draw that same conclusion.

I don't think you can draw any conclusion from a party which never became a government, one way or the other.

However, we do have Wikipedia. Wikipedia was never valued at the peak sales price of Encyclopedia Britannica times the number of people online, if it was it would be worth around $16 trillion.

I'd look to the past at similar 'revolutions' and what it did to existing players. For example 'computer' was the name of an occupation that existed for millennia. [1] Yet so complete was the obsolescence that I think most people (certainly including myself) never even realized these people existed, but it's quite obvious once you think about it.

Imagine all the work involved in, for instance, trigonometry and its basic applications in the past. And the later on with the advent of kinematics and so forth. These things involved a lot of computation and so there were literal human calculators whose job it was to work out all of the calculations.

But with the advent of electrical calculators, we literally no longer know that these jobs even existed. It's very easy to see the same in a future where, for instance, computer programs can be efficiently written from description alone. At that point the idea of a 'programmer' would seem like quite an odd concept.

I'd also look at what it did to the value of such work. Now computations, even quite complex, are mostly worth exactly $0. But we built extensive systems on top of those computations that became worth quite a lot indeed!

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)

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