But now you too can access AI labor. You can use it for yourself directly.
I don't fault anyone for trying to find opportunities to provide for themselves and loved ones in this moment by using AI to make a thing. But don't fool yourself into thinking that the AI labor is yours. The capitalists own it, not us.
but also, if that were possible, then why wouldn't prices go down? why would the value of such labor stay so high if the same thing can be done by other individuals?
I don’t think it is obvious actually that you won’t have to have some expert experience/knowledge/skills to get the most out of these tools.
It already seemed like we were approaching the limit of what it makes sense to develop, with 15 frameworks for the same thing and a new one coming out next week, lots of services offering the same things, and even in games, the glut of games on offer was deafening and crushing game projects of all sizes all over the place.
Now it seems like we're sitting on a tree branch and sawing it off on both sides.
If you state “in 6 months AI will not require that much knowledge to be effective” every year and it hasn’t happened yet then every time it has been stated has been false up to this point.
In 6 months we can come back to this thread and determine the truth value for the premise. I would guess it will be false as it has been historically so far.
Three months ago, we didn't have Opus 4.5, which almost everyone is saying is leaps and bounds better than previous models. MCP and A2A are mostly antiquated. We also didn't have Claude Desktop, which is trying to automate work in general.
Three _weeks_ ago, we didn't have Clawdbot/Openclaw, which people are using to try and automate as much of their lives as possible...and succeeding.
Things are changing outrageously fast in this space.
I think that this has been true, though maybe not quiet a strongly as strongly worded as your quote says it.
The original statement was "Maybe GP is right that at first only skilled developers can wield them to full effect, but it's obviously not going to stop there."
"full effect" is a pretty squishy term.
My more concrete claim (and similar to "Ask again in 6 months. A year.") is the following.
With every new frontier model released [0]:
1. the level of technical expertise required to achieve a given task decreases, or
2. the difficulty/complexity/size of a task that a inexperienced user can accomplish increases.
I think either of these two versions is objectively true looking back and will continue being true going forward. And, the amount that it increases by is not trivial.
[0] or every X months to account for tweaks, new tooling (Claude Code is not even a year old yet!), and new approaches.
Would travel agents have been justified in destroying the Internet so that people couldn't use Expedia?
I guess the right word here is "disenfranchising".
Valuation is a relative thing based mostly of availability. Adding capital makes labor more valuable, not less. This is not the process happening here, and it's not clear what direction the valuation is going.
... even if we take for granted that any of this is really happening.
Certainly, you must realize how much worse life would be for all of us had the Luddites succeeded.
Putting it in today's terms, if the goal of AI is to significantly reduce the labor force so that shareholders can make more money and tech CEOs can become trillionaires, it's understandable why some developers would want to stop it. The idea that the wealth will just trickle down to all the laid off work is economically dubious.
Depends how you look at it.
Trickle down economics has never worked in the way it was advertised to the masses, but it worked fantastically well for the people who pushed (and continue to push) for it.
I'm not a hard socialist or anything, but the economics don't make sense. if there's cheap credit and the money supply perpetually expands without a sink, of course people with the most capital will just compound their wealth.
so much of the "economy" orbits around the capital markets and number going up. it's getting detached from reality. or maybe I'm just missing something.
Related, the word “meritocracy” was coined in a book which was extremely critical of the whole concept. AI thankfully destroys it. Good riddance, don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.
Yes, because fighting for the rights of laborers is obviously what most people hate.
"Except the Luddites didn’t hate machines either—they were gifted artisans resisting a capitalist takeover of the production process that would irreparably harm their communities, weaken their collective bargaining power, and reduce skilled workers to replaceable drones as mechanized as the machines themselves."
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2021/06/the-luddites-wer...