If I'm buying soup, I'd prefer the manufacturer, the retailer, and any other part of the supply chain to be as efficient as possible, so they can compete in the market to offer me soup of a given quality at the lowest possible cost.
An individual consumer doesn't derive any benefit from companies missing out on automation opportunities.
Would you prefer to buy screws that are individually made on a lathe?
You're picturing a utopia at the limit of some idealized world. Try and take a second to return to planet earth.
There will not be a "quality" dial that you get to tweak to decide on your perfect quality of soup. There will be graduations, and you will be stuck with whatever the store provides. If you want medium quality soup, but the store only carries 3 brands of soup (because unlike in your utopia somebody actually has to maintain an inventory and relationships with their supply chain) and your favourite brand decides to bottom out their quality. It's not "good actually" because of economic whatever. Your soup just sucks now.
Oh but "the market will eventually provide a new brand" is a terrible strategy when they start spicing the soup with lead to give it cinnamon flavor or whatever.
I'm not an ethereal being. I'm a human, I need it to be good now. Not in theory land.
The wild thing is that they'll probably find entirely novel versions of this:
> they start spicing the soup with lead to give it cinnamon flavor or whatever
Like, we all know lead is bad, and we all know that humans are unscrupulous, but at least the human putting lead in the soup knows they're being unscrupulous at that time (probably). For an AI it would just be an entirely favorable optimization.
We're going to find out how far we can trust them, and the limits of that trust will determine where the people need to be.
You describe three potential undesirable outcomes:
- consolidation, such that there are only a few different choices of soup
- a race to the bottom in quality
- poisoning
These are all possibilities under our current system, and we have mechanisms (laws and market competition) which limit the extent to which they occur.
What is it about extreme automation technology that you think will increase these prevalence of these issues? By what mechanisms will these issues occur more frequently (rather than less frequently), as production technology becomes more capable?
Automation returns more power (abstract) to the owning class, which will make inequality more severe over time, which then results in said owning class having enough power to change legislation and market dynamics to their own desires. So, in turn - more poisoning, less quality, and more consolidation.
A lot of people think wealth inequality isn't a big deal, but I disagree. The more proportion of money a select few have in comparison to everyone else, the higher the likelihood those select few can mold society to their whim. Corruption thrives off of wealth inequality. Without it, it cannot exist.
> Automation returns more power (abstract) to the owning class
This is a decent point, but you're describing the world we already live in, no? I mean, we already have significant automation, significant wealth inequality, significant ability for control of money to affect legislation and culture.
But we (in the US at least) generally have abundant access to food which is safe to eat.
> Corruption thrives off of wealth inequality. Without it, it cannot exist.
Corruption can exist without wealth inequality.
Consider a city where teachers and politicians earn the exact same salary (and the same ability to build wealth over time). You might think this eliminates the potential for corruption, but imagine a scenario where politicians heavily rely on teachers' unions for their election campaigns. In this case, politicians might make decisions that benefit the unions (e.g. no performance standards, lifetime tenure, long holidays, keeping underenrolled schools open) in exchange for their support, even if those decisions don't optimize for student achievement (or whatever else taxpayers want schools to promote).
I'd prefer not to live in a fully automated society where shareholders and CEOs reap all the profits while the rest of us scrape by on just enough UBI to prevent a revolution.
I don't understand this scenario. If everyone is on UBI then most people are essentially near poverty. Where are these CEOs deriving all of their profit from?
I personally think a far more likely scenario is that small businesses of one or a few people become vastly more commonplace. They will be able to do a lot more by themselves, including with less expertise in areas they may not have a lot of knowledge in. I don't think regular employees today should see LLMs as competition, rather they should see it as a tool they can use to level the playing field against current CEOs.
> I don't think regular employees today should see LLMs as competition, rather they should see it as a tool they can use to level the playing field against current CEOs.
LLMs aren't some magic silver bullet to elevate people out of poverty. Lack of access to capital is an extreme restriction on what most people can actually accomplish on their own, it doesn't matter if they have the worlds best LLM helping them or not.
It doesn't matter if you use an LLM to build the most brilliant business in the world if you can't afford to buy real world things to do real world business
Also, Historically when regular people decide to level the playing field against the ultra wealthy, they use violence
I don't think anyone should be expecting LLMs to be the great equalizer. The great equalizer has always been violent and probably always will be violence.
An individual consumer doesn't derive any benefit from companies missing out on automation opportunities.
Would you prefer to buy screws that are individually made on a lathe?