Google already has dedicated hardware for running private LLMs: just look at what they're doing on the Google Pixel. The main limiting factor right now is access to hardware that's powerful enough, and especially has enough memory, to run a good LLM, which will happen eventually. Normally, by 2031 we should have devices with 400 GB of RAM, but the current RAM crisis could throw off my calculations...
What's crazy is that productivity per employee just keeps increasing year after year, but successive neoliberal governments continue to lower corporate taxes. They should be doing the exact opposite! Taxes should be raised as productivity increases! AI is just one more tool that gradually increases productivity, among others.
It has a finger on the long term trend of decreasing relevance for labor and increasing relevance for capital as factors of production, but it's certainly not a metric I'd choose and that's why I tried so hard to steer towards something better.
One can imagine a world where productivity increases, the need for old jobs is reduced, but newer, better jobs more than replace them because the economy is experiencing genuine growth. Self-serving capital rhetoric will push you to always imagine it this way, self-serving labor rhetoric will push you to never imagine it this way, but good policy lies in figuring out what's actually happening in aggregate and responding accordingly (the framing I tried to push).
It's not productivity itself; it's the decoupling of productivity from wages. If I'm creating 3 times as much value as my equivalent in 1970, why aren't I getting paid 3 times as much inflation-adjusted money, hmm? It's not even unfair to shareholders - they'd also get 3 times as much as in 1970. But instead they get 10 times as much and I get 0.7 times as much, or something like that. What's the deal?
> If I'm creating 3 times as much value as my equivalent in 1970, why aren't I getting paid 3 times as much inflation-adjusted money, hmm?
Because that increase in productivity comes almost entirely from technology owned by your employer.
To look at it in a contrived example, let's take textiles. There is a textile factory employing weavers who weave fabric by hand, and the factory owners buys a new automated weaving machine that makes the weavers each 3 times more productive. The maker of the machine created the technology, and is paid for it, the owner of the factory made the investment to bring the technology, and profits from it.
This is basically exactly what has happened to modern productivity.
Except in technology where the gains come from my personal investment in skills. I'm spending hours every week keeping up with the field of software engineering. I've been investing in learning my craft since I was 14 or so.
I'd argue the same goes for many types of digital creators, artists, video editors, animators, and so forth.
> Except in technology where the gains come from my personal investment in skills.
Not really. That's essentially a weaver learning to use the new automated weaving machine. That is what you do to remain qualified for the job. Now, if you were a framework or key system creator, building the underlying platforms that get adopted throughout the industry, I would agree. But just learning to use the tooling the the industry creates isn't that different, other than the rate of change you have to keep up with.
A weaver who knows how to use an automated weaving machine produces 3 times as much cloth as one who doesn't, so why don't they get paid 3 times as much? This is the problem of the decoupling of productivity and wages. It started happening at precisely the moment the gold standard was ended - weird.
> A weaver who knows how to use an automated weaving machine produces 3 times as much cloth as one who doesn't, so why don't they get paid 3 times as much?
An automatic weaving machine, operated by a capable operator, produces 3 times as much as a manual weaver. The productivity increase is the machine, not the operator. That's my entire point.
The owner of the machine reaps the surplus, not its operator.
> This is the problem of the decoupling of productivity and wages. It started happening at precisely the moment the gold standard was ended - weird.
You'll get no argument from me about the ills caused by the financialization of the economy, but I don't think that's what's going on here.
>>A weaver who knows how to use an automated weaving machine produces 3 times as much cloth as one who doesn't, so why don't they get paid 3 times as much?
> An automatic weaving machine, operated by a capable operator, produces 3 times as much as a manual weaver. The productivity increase is the machine, not the operator. That's my entire point.
An automatic weaving machine operator, operating a capable machine, produces 3 times as much as the lack of a machine operator. The productivity increase is the operator, not the machine. That's my entire point.
What's different between what I just said and what you just said? Nothing. In fact they can both be true. Both parties can get 3 times as much money as they did previously. Why don't they? Why does one party get 10x and the other party get 0.7x?
If productivity increase is entirely caused by machines, why did it take until 1971 for wages to decouple? The reality is that both workers and owners would like their share to be as high as possible. In 1971, however, owners seized control of the money printer and they never let it go since then.
> Both parties can get 3 times as much money as they did previously.
Increased productivity shifts
the supply curve which will (unless demand has zero elasticity, which is unrealistic) lower the market price of the good. So tripling productivity does not triple the amount of revenue per hour worked.
> Why does one party get 10x and the other party get 0.7x?
Because the people purchasing labor (capital) are able to get the labor they need at that price. Automatic weaving machine operators are trainable, and if they were getting paid 3 times what weavers were paid then people would rush into that space, driving down labor prices—in other words, the supply of automatic weaving machine operators has high elasticity. The demand for automatic weaving machine operators (i.e. the supply of factories full of automatic weaving machines) has much lower elasticity, so capital (demand for labor) gets most of the economic surplus.
It comes down to the capital owners owning the money printer. And nothing else.
I'm aware of a few attempts to create a labour-owned money printer (using the ideas of cryptocurrency) but none that are getting off the ground. Bitcoin is not one - it was a good idea to try, but it got captured by capital just the same as fiat money did.
You can grasp for vague conspiracy theories about “the money printer”, or you can sit down and think about the concrete factors that make demand for labor (i.e. capital investments in buildings and equipment) less elastic than supply for labor. Here are a few:
- It’s fundamentally more difficult to raise and organize millions of dollars to build a factory and fill it with automatic weaving machines than it is for someone to train for a few weeks to become an automatic weaving machine operator.
- Various government regulations, from environmental protections and zoning laws that make it harder to build factories to safety regulations for operating factories, make it harder to open new factories and so decrease the elasticity of labor demand. I want to be explicit here that I am not saying these regulations are bad—but we must recognize the side effects they have.
- Long lead times on capital investments greatly increase the risk of market movements or technological advances making the business plan untenable before it gets off the ground.
- Organizational inertia slows staffing changes. Corporations often make decisions at glacial speeds. Want to hire a new team? Who is going to manage them? Who do they report to? Where will they work? These discussions can take up months, at which point the market has changed and ehhhh maybe we don’t want to hire a new team after all.
- High cost and difficulty of firing people makes hiring for a possibly short-term market opening less attractive. Think union contracts, severance pay, etc. Again, I want to be explicit that I’m not saying these are bad things, but we need to understand the effects they have.
No it’s not. If the increased productivity is realized by multiple industries, then they all compete on price and the price of their goods comes down. That means the consumers of the product capture the gains in productivity.
Farmers using machinery instead of labor has meant cheaper food for everyone, not rich farmers.
I think that if we look at inflation-adjusted productivity, and inflation-adjusted average income, then that would indeed prove increasing inequality, right?
I believe the chart in this link is adjusted by inflation. Showing overall the same trend:
If productivity increases, margins increase. When margins increase any business in a competitive environment will have to lower its prices in response to any other business lowering prices that got those automation gains.
Productivity increases result in lower prices in any competitive market.
True, but good luck getting people to vote for their own interests. It's not hard to fix this. It really isn't. But it's nearly impossible to get through to people. As someone else said, at some point you have to make a choice about where you want to live and do what it takes to get to that place before you drown in the sea of marching morons.
Back in school, I had a teacher who was in charge of installing 3G, 4G, and 5G antennas for a carrier in France. The answer is that the 4G frequency bands are saturated, and they pushed 5G mainly to relieve congestion on the 4G network. Theoretically, 5G has just as much range (maybe even a little bit more with beamforming) on the 700 MHz and 800 MHz bands.
It's a political problem: do we, the people, have a choice in what gets prioritized? I think it's clear that the majority of people don't give a damn about minor improvements in AI and would rather have a better computer, smartphone, or something else for their daily lives than fuel the follies of OpenAI and its competitors. At worst, they can build more fabs simultaneously to have the necessary production for AI within a few years, but reallocating it right now is detrimental and nobody wants that, except for a few members of the crazy elite like Sam Altman or Elon Musk.
I love Kagi's implementation: by default it's disabled, you either have to add a question mark to the search, or click in the interface after searching to generate the summary.
I don't like defending Russia which is a horrible country, but I find it hypocritical to only talk about their imperialism and pretend not to see that the most imperialist country in the world, the one that has started, financed, and participated in the most wars, is the United States, and yet the question of boycotting American companies is never brought up. Google has been intentionally sabotaged in terms of image search and reverse image search; Yandex is literally the best on the market, but Kagi should boycott them because their headquarters are in the wrong country?
The reality is that middle managers are completely useless, but to justify their usefulness they have to force people to come to the office, to reprimand them if they don't strictly follow the schedule, to hold meetings to pretend they're useful by knowing what their team is doing, etc. They have to act as control agents: checking, monitoring, producing unnecessary reporting (a legacy of slavery) just to prove they exist in the organizational chart. The office is a theater where everyone pretends to be busy (especially them), but that's hard if the offices are empty. It's a system where we try to convince ourselves of their usefulness, which pushes them to fill the void in order to maintain a hierarchy that serves more to prevent people from working peacefully than to organize anything.
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