As I’m reading this, I’m thinking about how in 1980. It was imagined that everyone needed to learn how to program in BASIC or COBOL, and that the way computers would become ubiquitous would be that everybody would be writing program programs for them. That turned out to be a quaint and optimistic idea.
It seems like the pitch today is that every company that has a software-like need will be able to use AI to manifest that software into existence, or more generally, to manifest some kind of custom solution into existence. I don’t buy it. Coding the software has never been the true bottleneck, anyone who’s done a hackathon project knows that part can be done quickly. It’s the specifying and the maintenance that is the hard part.
To me, the only way this will actually bear the fruit it’s promising is if they can deliver essentially AGI in a box. A company will pay to rent some units of compute that they can speak to like a person and describe the needs, and it will do anything - solve any problem - a remote worker could do. IF this is delivered, indeed it does invalidate virtually all business models overnight, as whoever hits AGI will price this rental X%[1] below what it would cost to hire humans for similar work, breaking capitalism entirely.
[1] X = 80% below on day 1 as they’ll be so flush with VC cash, and they’d plan to raise the price later. Of course, society will collapse before then because of said breaking of capitalism itself.
I suppose it depends on your perspective. I guess I mean broken kind of in the gaming sense, where a gameplay mechanic is 'broken' if you can exploit it to completely subvert the entire intended way it's supposed to work.
You could argue that capitalism was very not broken in 1960, when you could get a job at 18 selling shoes, driving a cab, or delivering milk or whatever, and support a family of five on your salary, save for retirement, and go on yearly vacations.
It's arguably somewhat broken today, when gestures around things are like this.
I'd say it would be entirely broken if AGI means a few hundred billionaires who have ownership stakes in an AI company simply capture all the wealth in the world while most of the rest starve, but the robots help you put down the peasant uprisings and farm and raise crops for you.
I agree with you though that technically, capitalism will still be 'going strong' unless the peasants are able to overpower the AI robot billionaire industrial complex and burn it all down.
As I’m reading this, I’m thinking about how in 1980. It was imagined that everyone needed to learn how to program in BASIC or COBOL, and that the way computers would become ubiquitous would be that everybody would be writing program programs for them. That turned out to be a quaint and optimistic idea.
It seems like the pitch today is that every company that has a software-like need will be able to use AI to manifest that software into existence, or more generally, to manifest some kind of custom solution into existence. I don’t buy it. Coding the software has never been the true bottleneck, anyone who’s done a hackathon project knows that part can be done quickly. It’s the specifying and the maintenance that is the hard part.
To me, the only way this will actually bear the fruit it’s promising is if they can deliver essentially AGI in a box. A company will pay to rent some units of compute that they can speak to like a person and describe the needs, and it will do anything - solve any problem - a remote worker could do. IF this is delivered, indeed it does invalidate virtually all business models overnight, as whoever hits AGI will price this rental X%[1] below what it would cost to hire humans for similar work, breaking capitalism entirely.
[1] X = 80% below on day 1 as they’ll be so flush with VC cash, and they’d plan to raise the price later. Of course, society will collapse before then because of said breaking of capitalism itself.