Cognitive Mercantilism: AI panic resembles fears of early capitalism

> 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?

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?

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.

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.

Well, look at that. An essay about the benefits of slave trade and colonialism, while making no mention of slave labor or oppressed people.

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.

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?

From the site’s about page. Well, it’s good enough to nerd snipe the HN community.

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.

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.

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.

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 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

Coward.

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.

i'm happy to hear arguments from the misanthropes why for the first time in history this will not be the case.