Technology

The current state of LLMs is not the end of development. Right now, they're sloppy and they consume a lot of resources to function, but future iterations will be better at it, will compute faster, and use fewer resources. Hopefully, we will have escaped the disease that is capitalism before we get there, and the gains in productivity can be shared alike with everyone, rather than a select few.

An industrial revolution expert on Wired pointed out the quality of products improved with power looms and assembly lines and the countless other inventions that rose with mass-produced steel. AI has had a few successes in science by making discoveries that humans hadn't yet, but other than that, we're seeing AI slop, vibecoding, etc. produces worse results than when human beings do it all by hand.

The horror of this moment is not that AI will someday out perform humans in complex and creative labor, and do it affordably. It's that corporations and billionaires believe they can force that moment to the present if they throw enough money and resources at it. And they're doing this specifically and brazenly with the intention of shutting out the majority of the human race as if this were an Ayn Rand fantasy.

And they're blind to the consequences of trying, which can break the global economy (and the global ecology).

Yup. Like I also said. It might not be LLMs. The same was once true of steam engines, which were great at long distances perhaps but were huge, heavy, expensive and complicated and required a team of people to operate. Horses became even more valuable for their last mile stuff. It took time before the internal combustion engine and 4 stroke compression suddenly made engine power smaller, cheaper, more efficient and easy to operate by a single person. In 1918, the US for example had 27 million head of horse, by 1960 it was 3 million. All I'm saying is that it will happen. When? I have no idea.