590 karma · joined August 27, 2017
You say it clearly does not benefit them, but the problem is that nothing is really clear or obvious about it. There are a lot of different puzzle pieces, history, and order of effects that need to be considered which most people don't.
Maybe a better example would be to explain how drug companies are able to cover the cost of research and development, or how Studio Ghibli is able to invest in animating a movie that anyone can sell. Should everyone provide the full suite of services a business needs in order to earn a profit? That seems like an inefficient way to organize the economy. The mechanical engineer also has to be a marketer or else he doesn't deserve to be paid for an invention? How does that make sense?
> Sure, different inventions work differently. What does that matter?
You cut the sentence that answers the question.
Your point was that people that create something valuable are not entitled to stop others from capturing the value of their creation, ostensibly because they “don’t want to do the hard work.” My point is that even if someone did want to do the work, the benefit would go to the people with the money and infrastructure to act on it. In your vision, IBM would just take Windows and slap their name on it. Where would that have left Microsoft?
Computers and cars don’t rely on the intellectual output of others to function. AI still needs people doing the work that it is displacing, but it strips the economic incentive to do it.
We haven't gotten to where we are in the world today by giving the wealthy huge permanent advantages. Look at the explosion in innovation that has happened since public education has become widespread. It used to be only the wealthy that could afford to be educated. Part of what makes capitalism work at all is by not allowing the means to capture value to be monopolized.
Companies aren’t going to hold off on trying to automate tasks AI performs poorly at. They are going to change the task so AI can do it, putting the burden of making up for the deficit on everyone else. The only reason this is able to happen now is because all the competition has been crushed or absorbed.
The fact that Anthropic needs to poke, prod, and guide these models to behave in the desired way does not give the impression of intelligence. It gives the impression of a complicated automaton.