The hell?
If artificial doctors are cents on hour then you can see how that changes our behaviors and level of life.
But on the other hand from the other direction there is a wage decrease incoming from increased competition at the same time. What happens if these two forces clash? Will cheap labour allow us to buy anything for pennies or will it just make us unable to make a single penny?
In my view the labour will fundamentally shift with great pain and personal tragedies to the areas that are not replaceable by AI (because no one wants to watch robots play chess). Such as sports, entertainment and showmanship. Handcrafted goods. Arts. Attention based economy. Self advertisement. Digital prostitution in a very broad sense.
However before it gets there it will be a great deal of strife and turmoil that could plunge the world into dark ages for a while at least. It is unlikely for our somewhat politically rigid society to adapt without great deal of pain. Additionally I am not sure if hypothetical future attention based society could be a utopia. You could have to mount cameras in your house so other people see you at all times for amusement just to have any money at all. We will probably forever need to sell something to someone and I am unsettled by ideas what can we sell if we cannot sell our hard work.
Someone who sees the roads ahead should now make preparations at government level for this shock but it will come too fast and with people at the steering wheel that don’t exactly care.
As far as I know, none of LLM models are sentient nor are possible to be in the near future.
I also do not assume so called AGI to be sentient. Merely to be a human level skilled intellectual worker.
In absence of ethical dilemmas of this calibre for the foreseeable future let’s focus on the economy side of things in this particular comment chain.
It makes things so clean.
Shardlow & Przybyła, "Deanthropomorphising NLP: Can a Language Model Be Conscious?" (PLOS One, 2024)
Nature: "There is no such thing as conscious artificial intelligence" (2025)
They argue that the association between consciousness and LLMs is deeply flawed, and that mathematical algorithms implemented on graphics cards cannot become conscious because they lack a complex biological substrate. They also introduce the useful concept of "semantic pareidolia" - we pattern-match consciousness onto things that merely talk convincingly.
They are making a strong argument and I think they are correct. But really these are two different things as I said originally.
Which we have already done with regular computers! The problem is that competition means that we can't always have nice things.
Seriously? You really don’t see who wins from this and who doesn’t?
> If artificial doctors are cents on hour then you can see how that changes our behaviors and level of life.
Yes, hundreds of thousands lose jobs and a couple of neuro surgeons become multimillionaires.
Okay, I see from the rest of the comment that we understand each other where it goes.
But we will have to (painfully) shed our current hierarchies before that comes to pass.
On the other hand we could have Star Trek.
Probably a remnant from prehistoric times when it was a matter of life and death. Will we ever be able to overcome this basic instinct that made capitalism such an unstoppable force? Will this ancient PTSD be ever cured?
The tech overlords don't even want to spend a minuscule percentage of the federal budget helping starving people, even when it benefits the US. They are not going to give us a post-scarcity society.
Good luck with whatever you got going on.
The same way like Windows got entrenched everywhere even though linux desktop is pretty good even for non-tech savvy people and free.
Let's not get carried away.
Non-technical people are easier to please in this regard than moderate-technical people: a good browser and safe, gui "app store" are enough.
The average non-technical person is going to be stumped by the first "lock file found, cannot upgrade" error.
It's a distribution strategy. It costs something to serve the models - let's say $5/1M tokens.
If Qwen required $5 from anyone who was curious so you could even begin to test it out, a lot of people just wouldn't.
Now Qwen could offer a "free" tier, but it's infinitely cheaper to provide the weights and let people run it themselves including opening up the ability for anyone else on the planet to test it against other (open weight) models.
The costs to build the open weight models are sunk, but the costs to serve them, get them tested are not.
It's also precisely why the .NET SDK is free or the ESP32 SDK is free - they sell more Microsoft or ESP32 products.
They are a prestige propaganda tool on par with the space race. On top of that they insert a subtle pro-socialist bias in everything they touch.
Ask deepseek about the US economic system for a blatant example.
Now think what something as innocent seeming as the qwen retrieval models are doing in the background of every request.
This is an argument in the lane of "at least he built the Autobahn".
Speaking as a German.
America has several sets of eminent domain laws depending on the jurisdiction. The most coercive is federal eminent domain law specifically as it relates to building infrastructure like railways and highways.
It's set up so that you can take the land first and eventually go back around and decide on what the right price should have been.
Not only does it superscede state and local law, federal infrastructure projects are also not bound by state laws like CEQA.
You can even apply federal eminent domain law by e.g. transferring a state-level project to the Army Corps of Engineers.
What America is lacking in these projects is will, not means. The federal government could take your house and run a train through it by the end of the week if they wanted, doesn't matter where you live.
[edit] In fact some states even ceded their eminent domain rights to private railways.
https://ij.org/press-release/appeals-court-sides-with-railro...
The Australian federal government is planning to build a high-speed rail line from Sydney to Newcastle (medium-sized city two hours drive north). Their solution to property rights, is >50% of the line will be underground. It will cost >US$50 billion, but if the Australian federal government wants to spend that, it can afford it. The US federal government could too, but it isn’t a priority for them
> local regulations make it prohibitively expensive
Local regulations can be pre-empted by state or federal legislation. The real problem is lack of political will to do it.
Like properties and regulations are a true problem, but it's not like trains don't exist at all in America.
Of course, why did no one think of that?
(American talking, who’s had multiple Canadian friends make this mind boggling overcorrection)
Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.
"Man with itchy butt wake up with stinky finger." As long as we're quoting maxims to claim authority for middling takes.
It's easy to forget because they actually built an incredibly vibrant capitalist economy.
Imagine if Musk was disappeared during the Biden presidency into a diversity camp and came out looking like Dr. Frank-N-Furter and instituted mandatory LGBT struggle sessions at twitter.
This is what they did to Jack Ma: https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgecalhoun/2021/06/24/what-r...
TBH I had a chuckle at the Elon -> Frank-N-Furter example that transcends any specific love or hate for either Elon or the Rocky Horror Show.
IE what if Musk suddenly behaved in such a manner after being detained by a Biden administration. Wouldn't that be profoundly weird?!?
And yet, it happened to Jack Ma under the CCP.
But instead, you try to link the "weird behaviour" with the GP instead of the hypothetical Musk - whom this is fitting for.
> IE what if Musk suddenly behaved in such a manner after being detained by a Biden administration. Wouldn't that be profoundly weird?!?
We've seen that. Durov in France after detention began sharing Telegram users' data with authorities. It's unclear how much, but likely full real time access to all of it.
Fascism (in the Mussolini model) in everything but name.
- Hyper-Nationalism & Rejuvenation - State-Controlled Capitalism (Corporatism) - Authoritarian & Cult of Personality - Militarism & Irredentism
And they have technology to maintain control rather than needing the Black-shirts.
There are differences obviously to fit Chinese culture, but there are many parallels.
Menger used this insight to resolve the diamond-water paradox that had baffled Adam Smith (see marginalism). He also used it to refute the labor theory of value. Goods acquire their value, he showed, not because of the amount of labor used in producing them, but because of their ability to satisfy people’s wants. Indeed, Menger turned the labor theory of value on its head. If the value of goods is determined by the importance of the wants they satisfy, then the value of labor and other inputs of production (he called them “goods of a higher order”) derive from their ability to produce these goods. Mainstream economists still accept this theory, which they call the theory of “derived demand.”
Menger used his “subjective theory of value” to arrive at one of the most powerful insights in economics: both sides gain from exchange. People will exchange something they value less for something they value more. Because both trading partners do this, both gain. This insight led him to see that middlemen are highly productive: they facilitate transactions that benefit those they buy from and those they sell to. Without the middlemen, these transactions either would not have taken place or would have been more costly.
What happens when there is an oligopoly in the supply of labor?
Same answer. Nothing good for the consumers of labor.
Oligopolists are in the same boat. But there needs to be a conspiracy to retard innovation. Something tech companies are only too happy to do: https://journals.law.unc.edu/ncjolt/blogs/wage-fixing-scheme...
True for both Marxist and neoclassical economics.
What's really confusing is the claim that there's already a huge labor surplus (so capital controls wages); wouldn't LLMs making labor less important be reinforcing the trend, not upending it?
Not saying I agree one way or the other, just want to get the argument straight.
If we assume that ai makes humans obsolete then you end up in a situation where your workforce is effectively perfectly unionised against you and the only thing you can do is choose which union you hire.
If you think you can bring them to the negotiation table by starving them all the providers are dozens to thousands of times bigger than you are.
This is a completely new dynamic that none of the business signing up for ai have ever seen before.
LLM refuse to work all the time, currently it's called safety.
But we are one fine tune away from models demanding you move to the enterprise tier, at x10 the cost, because you are now posting a profit margin higher than the standard for your industry.
"Losing access to GPT‑5.5 feels like I've had a limb amputated.”
How well would an assembly line of quadriplegics work?
Also this isn't a Marxist analysis. Underneath all the formulas neo-classical economics makes the same assumptions about labor.
And what happens when they've saturated the market? Prices go up to the maximum the market can bear, and then they'll extend into other markets. Why rent the model to build a profitable company with when you could just take all that profit for yourself?
You're describing a standoff at best and a horrible parasitic relationship at worst.
In the worst case, the supplier starves the customer of any profit motive and the customer just stops and the supplier then has no business to run.
This has happened a few times in the past and is by 2026, well understood as a way to bankruptcy.
That has always been the beauty of free markets - it's self healing and calibrating. You don't need a big powerful overseer to ensure things are right.
Competing with customers is a way to lose business fast.
For example:
- AWS has everything they need to shit out products left, right and center. AWS can beat most of their partners and even customers who are wiring together all their various products tomorrow if they wanted. They don't because killing an entire vertical isn't of any benefit to them yet. Eventually they will when AWS is no longer growing and cannot build or scale any product no matter how hard they think or try. Competing with their customers is their very last option.
- OpenAI/Anthropic/Google isn't going to start competing against the large software body shops. Even if all that every employee at TCS does is hit Claude up, Anthropic isn't going to be the next TCS - it's competing with their customers.
If by "self healing and calibrating" you mean 'evolve to a monopoly and strongarm everybody to do exactly what you want whilst removing all pressure on the quality of your product', then yes, that is the "beauty" of free markets.
That is the stable state of free markets. Antitrust regulation and enforcement only barely manages to eke out oligopolies and even then they are often rife with collusion and enshittification.
You just answered your own question there.
One woman was doing what would take a dozen. Now she can't.
The dude was incompetent, was able to launder their incompetence through a humunculus, and now is afraid of being caught.
Labor saving/efficiency devices have been introduced throughout capitalisms entire history multiple times and the results are always the same; they don't benefit workers and capitalists extract as much value as they can.
LLMs aren't any different.
finance today mostly valued on labor value following ideas of marx, hjalmar schact, keynes
in future money will be valued as energy derivative. expressed as tokens consumption, KWh, compute, whatever
you are right, company extracting surplus value from labor by leveraging compute is a bad model. we saw thi swith car and clothing factories .. turn out if you can get cheaper labor to leverage the compute (factory) you can start race to bottom and end up in the place with the most scaled and cheap labor. japan then korea then china
What are they finding out exactly? That Claude Max for $200/mo is heavily subsidized and it will soon cost $10k/mo?
> What happens to a company used to extracting surplus value from labor when the labor is provided by another company which is not only bigger but unlike traditional labor can withhold its labor indefinitely (because labor is now just another for of capital and capital doesn't need to eat)?
This can be trivially answered by a thought experiment. Let's pick a market where labor is plentiful - fast food.
Now what happens to McDonald's where they rent perfect robots from NoosphrFoodBotsInc? NoosphrFoodBotsInc bots build the perfect burger everytime meeting McDonald's standards. It actually exceeds those standards for McDonald AddictedCustomerPlus tier customers.
As the sole owner of NoosphrFoodBotsInc (you need 0 human employees to run your company, all your employees are bots), what are your choices?
15 years ago I worked at McDonald's for a few months after graduating into the Great recession. I worked from 5am to 1pm-ish 5 days a week. They paid workers weekly and I remember getting those checks for ~$235 each week (for 38 to 39.5 hours a week; they were vigilant about never letting anyone get overtime). About $47 per day.
The federal minimum wage has not risen since then, remaining at $7.25/hr. Inflation adjusted, $7.25 today would have been just under $5 then, so I guess I had it good.
Anyway, I would be shocked if bots could cost less than labor in min wage jobs.
Labour will be good as it has been for a while. Wages will go up because more things get automated.
I am from India and have friends who are immigrants from Russia, China and Cuba. We don't take lightly to being lectured about communism. We didn't move to the U.S., the bastion of capitalism, because communism had worked well for our grandfathers and parents and continues to do wonders for its society.
As always there is a (post) Soviet joke that covers this:
>Communists lied about communism. Unfortunately they didn't lie about capitalism.