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0 pointsjmull3y ago0 comments

> Trickle down economics" don't work. Industrialization waves wrecked the lives of many many millions of people over the centuries, while the people owning the factories eventually got richer than aristocracy as they kept the price of the sold goods barely cheap enough to be a bit cheaper than manual production and pocketed the immense difference in production cost.

(1) trickle-down economics-style policies aren’t the only way to harness the (presumed) increased productivity of LLMs like chatgpt.

(2) I don’t see how you can argue that standards of living have decreased since the start of the industrial revolution and subsequent technological developments.

Certainly, the question of how to distribute the benefits of wide-spread LLM use is very important, since it could be done well or could be done terribly. But there’s no reason to just assume terrible is the only option.

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mschuster913y ago

> (1) trickle-down economics-style policies aren’t the only way to harness the (presumed) increased productivity of LLMs like chatgpt.

There is no reason to believe that the rich classes will act differently than at any time before in human history. To the contrary, union busting laws have eroded the standing that the worker class had even a few decades ago.

> (2) I don’t see how you can argue that standards of living have decreased since the start of the industrial revolution and subsequent technological developments.

Yes, on a societal whole standards of living have risen, but a) millions of people have suffered regardless (e.g. it has been shown that those graduating during the recent economic crises face significant income losses over their lifetimes) and b) other metrics (ownership of assets like houses, financial savings) have gone dow hill at the same time.

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