You think that these ridiculously high wages that companies like Mercor are paying for data generation are "tanking" bargaining power? Its the complete opposite: there is now a massive sector of highly skilled, specialized labor that produces the very data which trains these models, a task that will not end as long as there is demand for newer and better and more specially trained models. That is a massive amount of bargaining power. It would take far more severe shocks to the system to kill the possibility of revolution, and that whatever that would be would be bad for everyone.
Ridiculously high wages for jobs whose explicit purpose is to make human workers(including those partaking in those jobs) obsolete. THE reason why they pay so high is because their end-goal is not having to pay anyone anymore ever again. (or at least, only pay a comparatively tiny amount of people for producing the data)
> Ridiculously high wages for jobs whose explicit purpose is to make human workers(including those partaking in those jobs) obsolete
I would say they are making the current cost of one's labor "obsolete". Most jobs are like this. If you work for yourself, you're trying to make the cost of your labor obsolete in place of cheaper work. If you work for a company, the company will be trying to make the cost of your labor obsolete in place of cheaper work. Any value captured in the arbitrage of product price and employee pay is seen as the value of management.
>I would say they are making the current cost of one's labor "obsolete".
That's how it builds to making a market cost obsolete. Especially when the explicit goal is near 100% removal of human labor.
It's like fishing, do it slowly enough (like the dozens of millenia of humanity before the industrial revolution) and fish will repopulate just fine. Do it too fast and you drive fish to extinction. They want to make labor extinct.
Most of the texts that matter are. Yeah you’re not going to find some random flat earth blog in the library, but equally, that’s a good thing.
However, I wasn’t talking specifically about libraries. The web did still exist 20 years ago. Wikipedia is more than 20 years old. And newsgroups have been around much longer too.
The web was also mobile accessible for more than 20 years (WAP, for example, was introduced in 1999).
There were also phone numbers you could ring who could provide quick searches for information look up. People are most familiar with them in terms of telephone directory services (eg ring an operator to ask for the phone number of someone else) but there were other general knowledge services too. In fact I used one once when my bike chain broke, I walked to a local pay phone, and enquired how to put a chain back on.
Even know, there’s a plethora of information at local government information and audit offices, which isn’t available online. most of which is store on microfilm. A friend needed to visit one office recently to look at historic maps to trace the origins of a public right of way (which is a legal public footpath though farmland in the UK)
Like I said before, we weren’t living in the dark ages before smartphones came along.
And most of the texts you can access at the local library aren't even at that local library right now. Libraries are part of a humongous network. If you're willing to wait a few days, there's an avalanche of material that you definitely can't instantly find on the internet.
It is a luxury good like Art, which is an elevated form of labor that is only possible on account of the development of technology like the automated loom, which provides clothes for most people at almost no cost, affording some lucky individuals the leisure time to do things like hand weave cloth or argue about capitalism on Hacker News.
Sure, I don't know why anyone would want to hand-weave cloth in this era of miracles where a machine can do it for you faster and better. It looks like hard work and it is technically a waste of time. But, hypothetically, if there was a portion of society that for some mad reason can't get access to machine-made cloth they can still weave their own.
And the fact is, for those souls who are motivated to do so, they can make a living hand-weaving anyway and do not need to weave 3,000x faster. They weave at a similar pace to that people always have. They can still afford bread. Society will almost give bread away to people, it is absurdly cheap.
At this point it really seems like your taking bread too literally here.
To put it more simply, you won't keep a roof over your head by only selling baskets to your local village these days. You can scale it up, but by that point you need much more than a craftman to maintain a business and keep up with a minimum wage lifestyle.
Bread is only cheap on account of mechanization. Before technological innovations bread was often paid in wages, like those of the workers who built the pyramids.
All this talk of neofeudalism and yet not a single bushel of corn has been taken by my lord!
Capital leads to class difference, often immense class difference, which is not a claim against our society as primarily capitalistic but in favor of it. If you took away all the food grown in America and the clothes woven in Bangladesh and the laptops manufactured in China, there would be no Amazon, no Google, no Microsoft, no "technofeudalism." The economic base is still defined by the exchange of commodities, its just that the US does not produce many industrial goods anymore, so the US economy is mostly a service based economy. Chinese citizens do not experience their lifeworld in terms of service based industries, they are surrounded by mass markets and complex factories and very material evidence of mechanization which we often do not see directly in the West, only the end product. So to many Americans it feels like they live in a magical society where they click some keys on their laptop and food and clothes and whatever they need shows up on their doorstep--but there are real workers out there tooling all the machines and developing all the architecture to make those things appear, to reduce the basic struggles of life to give time for greater and more advanced forms of social organization beyond the need to survive.
This is not what peasants had; for them, despite having a relatively complex existence, a bad season could and often would kill their entire family. Or a raiding band would take all their food, or they'd die of the plague...life was far more tenuous, and the basic made of production was not commodity production, it was growing food and animal husbandry. International trade, artisanal crafts, and capital improvements on industrial production were nowhere near the level they were in even the early modern period. Nothing about our contemporary society resembles this way of living.
Addendum: The claim that somehow everyone in tech could just "stop," like consciously decide to stop creating things, is absurd. Amazon is very good at what it does, but it does not have exclusive control over the trade of all goods in the whole world. Rakuten is a major competitor in Japan, there are many other companies that have strong holds in their local markets. You take a Bolt in Germany, not an Uber. Chinese users can query DeepSeek, which is surely more proficient in Mandarin than ChatGPT. Even if a state uses its sovereign power to artificially control industry, it only slows the development of capital, since other states may allow their own companies and technologies to flourish, like China is doing now with its electric vehicles. If Amazon does not meet its projections, it fails, its employees all lose their jobs, Jeff Bezos might even go bankrupt. There is a constant pressure of competition.
As a worker, your goal should not be to arbitrarily stop working--you may not enrich others but you certainly won't be enriching yourself either. The goal should be to capture far more wealth that is the result of your labor. This is only possible through labor organizing, which does not permanently cease the means of production, it only takes control of them. But business continues and people still produce things and do services and enjoy the wealth of those things and services. One should basically desire to live in a wealthy, prosperous society. This article does nothing but ask workers to go into voluntary poverty; it is reactionary and backwards.
The "feudal" part implies the productive assets of the 21st century are monopolized and owned by Big Tech, and even the capital class has to pay rent for access to this.
It doesn't mean people are literally serfs on their lords manor growing substance crops. Are you serious?
This is completely false. The owners of big tech must pay capitalists like the owners of TSMC to produce the chips to power their services. Just because we don't produce the chips in the US does not mean that there isn't a distinct commodity producing class.
I guess they are, but that isn't material to the discussion, since they are selling goods not services, thus they don't extract "rents," unless anything that someone buys for some purpose is a "rent"; in that case, the super market is charging me "rents" to purchase their food so I can have it in my fridge.
I think your argument is just a bunch of pedantry but OK: Western Electric produced commodities for the Bell system. So did a lot of other companies, selling into a market that was functionally a monopsony.
Yet the fact that this was necessary is tangential, the Bell system didn't exist to sell switches or phones. The phone network monopoly was AT&T's fief, the rent was the phone bill everyone had to pay!
If you aren't AMD, nVidia, Google, or Apple how much luck do you think you'll have putting in an order to TSMC for 2nm? Or Samsung? Or Micron? Or Hynix?
Why is every service considered a “rent”? These services basically depend on commodity production—bell may have had a monopoly on phone service but not on the phones themselves. Or the copper used to manufacture their cables, or the housing which their employees slept in or the food they consumed. Service monopoly =! Neofeudalism, just because it is a more recent phenomenon does not mean its unique, JP Morgan had a rail monopoly, nobody considered his business “Neofeudalism.”
Human society is prone to convulsions, though. Just like the often body requires a shock to become stronger, healthier, societies need to be a push to avoid stagnation and decay. Though its true that you risk permanent injury, if you go too far.
> its true that you risk permanent injury, if you go too far
Guillotining–and violence as a tool of politics more broadly–is pretty much a one-way signal in the historical record (outside civil wars). More concentration of wealth and power. Or anarchy. Either way, the poor and middle class end up worse.
As for my civil-war caveat, even that's starting to look one way in the age of information and globally-mobilised proxy-war assets.
Hitler did not come to power out of a Jacobin movement, he came to power during a time just like our own, when a moderate government was convinced that there was no better alternative to their style of rule. It is dangerous to argue in favor of a stable middle class when history would prove that such forms of society are often fleeting when they do occur. Waves inevitably crash along the shore, which doesn’t mean they aren’t beautiful while they roll along it.
I mean not many private corps are publishing unbiased scientific research papers these days. I think that’s what people are referring to, an entire research division which is mainly or at least often working in the public good.
Anybody who plays poker “optimally” is bound to lose money when they come up against anyone with skill. Once you know the strategy your opponent is employing you can play like you have anything. I believe I’ve won with 7,2 offsuite more than any other hand, because I played like I had the nuts.
This is completely wrong - the entire point of the Nash equilibrium solution (in the context of poker, at least) is that it is, at worst, EV-neutral even when your opponent has perfect knowledge of your strategy.
Your 72o comment indicates you are either playing with very weak players, or have gotten lucky, as in reasonably competitive games playing (and then full bluffing) 72o will be significantly negative EV. Try grinding that strategy at a public 10/20 table and you will be quickly butchered and sent back to the ATM.
There are numerous videos of high level professional poker players winning large hands with incredible bluffs, this whole "Nash equilibrium solution" is nothing more than a conjecture with some symbols thrown in. I will re-iterate, there is no such thing as perfect knowledge when you have imperfect information. If you play "optimally," you will get bluffed out of all your money the moment everyone else at the table figures out what you're doing.
It requires constant feedback, critical evaluation, and checks. This is not AGI, its cognitive augmentation. One that is collective, one that will accelerate human abilities far beyond what the academic establishment is currently capable of, but that is still fundamentally organic. I don't see a problem with this--AGI advocates treat machine intelligence like some sort of God that will smite non-believers and reward the faithful. This is what we tell children so that they won't shit their beds at night, otherwise they get a spanking. The real world is not composed of rewards and punishments.
It does seem that the venn diagram of "roko's basilisk" believers and "AGI is coming within our lifetimes" believers is nearly a circle. Would be nice if there were some less... religious... arguments for AGI's imminence.
I think the “Roko’s Basilisk” thing is mostly a way for readers of Nick Land to explain part of his philosophical perspective without the need for, say, an actual background in philosphy. But the simplicity reduces his nuanced thought into a call for a sheeplike herd—they don’t even need a shepherd! Or perhaps there is, but he is always yet to come…best to stay in line anyway, he might be just around the corner.
> It requires constant feedback, critical evaluation, and checks. This is not AGI, its cognitive augmentation.
To me that doesn't sound qualitatively different from a PhD student. Are they just cognitive augmentation for their mentor?
In any case, I wasn't trying to argue that this system as-is is AGI, but just that it's no longer "ridiculous", and that this to me looks like a herald of AGI, as the portion being done by humans gets smaller and smaller
People would say the same thing about a calculator, or computation in general. Just like any machine it must be constructed purposefully to be useful, and once we require something which exceeds that purpose it must be constructed once again. Only time will tell the limits of human intelligence, now that AI is integrating into society and industry.
>AGI advocates treat machine intelligence like some sort of God that will smite non-believers and reward the faithful.
>The real world is not composed of rewards and punishments.
Most "AGI advocates" say that AGI is coming, sooner rather than later, and it will fundamentally reshape our world. On its own that's purely descriptive. In my experience, most of the alleged "smiting" comes from the skeptics simply being wrong about this. Rarely there's talk of explicit rewards and punishments.
I should be the target audience for this stuff, but I honestly can't name a single person who believes in this "Roko's basilisk" thing. To my knowledge, even the original author abandoned it. There probably are a small handful out there, but I've never seen 'em myself.
Universal claim: all cats are animals
Particular claim: Max is a cat
Singular claim: Max is an animal.
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