But this is a good thing for egalitarians. It offsets one of the most unfair aspects of the knowledge economy: that some people get to have much more fulfilling and remunerative careers than average people because they were lucky enough to be born smart.
It's actually the opposite. People who are "born smart", will leverage AI to get more knowledgeable even faster, use it to learn new things faster, use it to churn through data to find patterns and opportunities, and use it to do labor for them, so they can make even more money than those not born smart, who will just use AI to ask it what's 3x3 and if the earth is flat.
There is one thing worth pointing out here though. Being smart doesn't necessarily mean you've got the ability to make money from said intelligence.
Like on average it probably helps, but if your interests don't lie in what makes money in the current economy, then even being the next Einstein won't really change much. If you're a genius that wants to help teach people in a school or university, you're going to make a lot less money than if your interests lay in setting up a business or getting into finance.
AI can help you do things faster, but it won't make you financially successful if the things you're interested in don't have a lot of economic demand.
It’s more of a barrier than a sufficient condition. I know a bunch of smart people who just have no interest in a renumerative career. But I don’t know anybody who has a lucrative white collar job who isn’t at least top 10% cognitively.
Inequalities have been growing for a while now, either we have less and less smart people, or it just does not work like you think it works, probably because your take is super naive and barely scratches the surface of first order effects while ignoring everything else
>either we have less and less smart people, or it just does not work like you think it works
How do you think I think it works?
All I said was that AI will increase inequality as smart people will use it as an amplifier of their skills and intelect to get wealthier. The rampant inequality we already had before AI is mostly due to government fiscal policies revolving around endless currency inflation increasing assets prices of asset holders while devaluing wages and savings of the working class, but this is a entirely different topic I didn't cover because I was only talking about what smart people will do with AI to get wealthier, the same way how home computers and the internet allowed smart people to become wealthier 20+ years ago. You then spinning this into some accusations I never said without a an argument to back it up, feels in bad faith and breaking HN rules.
Also, even smart people can also become/remain poor because it takes more than just raw intellect to get wealthy, even with AI, but in general, smart people are orders of magnitude more likely to become financially successful than dumb people, fact.
> probably because your take is super naive and barely scratches the surface of first order effects while ignoring everything else
Please, explain what you think my take and what I'm ignoring. Because i feel like you missed my point entirely and are going on tangents parallel mostly unrelated to what I said. Or do you enjoy throwing accusations in disagreement without a counter argument to back up your PoV?
You seem to think "being smart" will matter in a society which doesn't need the labor output of "smart people". You'll be lumped in with all the rest. Nothing will matter but who controls the capital now.
>You seem to think "being smart" will matter in a society which doesn't need the labor output of "smart people". You'll be lumped in with all the rest.
And you seem to think "being smart" just means being another replaceable college-educated white-collar corporate drone dependent on someone giving you the job you want, while mine and the general accepted definition of a "smart" person is one that can make their desired outcome happen regardless of circumstances, education and place of employment, and hence avoid being "lumped in with all the rest" because they always find a way out of any difficult situation to come out on top, both personally and financially.
Like a friend of mine without even a highschool degree became a tree surgeon and his business is making enough money now that rivals the rates of tech and finance bros in London. That's what being smart is. You adapt and find lucrative opportunities on the market.
> Nothing will matter but who controls the capital now.
When was this ever NOT the case? Without inherited generational wealth you're at the mercy of the capital/asset owning class to make a living.
> Like a friend of mine without even a highschool degree became a tree surgeon and his business is making enough money now that rivals the rates of tech and finance bros in London
Intelligent or "smarts" is not measured by how successful you are or how much money you make.
Also great for your friend, but no one would hire him to do that if machines could do it for them
> When was this ever NOT the case? Without inherited generational wealth you're at the mercy of the capital/asset owning class to make a living.
What are you talking about? The capital class always relied on the professional class just as much. A wealthy person who owns a machine shop relies on machinists to make money. :/
Yeah, but what if we are at the point we don’t need machinists any more?
The rich get richer, even if you’re enriched solely with an above-average intelligence. The bar for break even just moved up. If the US thought 13 million unemployed/underemployed people was problem, just wait until it’s 30 million. They could afford a 10% drag on the economy, who wants to bet they can double it to 20%?
It's actually the opposite and more complicated than that. AI-developed nootropics and germline editing will saturate human intelligence across individuals.
> AI-developed nootropics and germline editing will saturate human intelligence across individuals.
This is a forum, not a Bayesian-updating machine. So common courtesy is for you to take up the burden of proof for your own statements. Why do you think this is the null?
Very little of the economy belongs to people who were "born wealthy." Most rich people these days come from upper middle class, cognitive elite families or small business owners, not generational wealth.
The most important number is that 50% of consumer spending is attributable to the top 10%. That's Google engineers driving up the price of everything from housing, to cars, to Disney World tickets. The income levels of this group has grown several times faster since 1970 than the median income. That directly hurts the middle class, which is out-competed for the same scarce resources.
You just claimed that AI will eliminate the cognitive elite.
All that leaves is born wealthy and small business owners. The small business owners aren't going to last long if their only potential customers are the generationally wealthy and the working class.
> You just claimed that AI will eliminate the cognitive elite
I took your statement as referring to the current situation, not the future.
> All that leaves is born wealthy and small business owners.
What do you mean by that precisely? If the purchasing power of the cognitive elite collapses, it will make everything more affordable for everyone else. The generationally wealthy aren’t competing with you for housing in the Maryland suburbs.
> Most rich people these days come from upper middle class, cognitive elite families or small business owners, not generational wealth.
That group is called "born wealthy". They are not smarter or more intelligent, they are born with advantages.
> The most important number is that 50% of consumer spending is attributable to the top 10%. That's Google engineers driving up the price of everything from housing, to cars, to Disney World tickets.
No, that is K shaped economy whose rules were designed to favor the richest for multiple decades.
> That group is called "born wealthy". They are not smarter or more intelligent, they are born with advantages
They’re much smarter, more intelligent, more conscientious, have more impulse control, etc.
> No, that is K shaped economy
The “K-shaped economy” is just a label for what happens in a market with scarcity when the 90th percentile income rises twice as fast as the median income over 50 years: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/stories/20.... There’s no “rules” that cause it. It’s just supply and demand.
> They’re much smarter, more intelligent, more conscientious, have more impulse control, etc.
You made that up.
And yes, K-shaped economy is the label for what I described. And then I described what caused it last few decades. And no, it was not caused by "supply and demand". It was caused by policy changes.
Yes. People’s unhappiness about the economic trajectory since the 1970s is due principally to the growing divergence between skilled knowledge workers and everyone else. Normal people can’t afford a house in the middle class neighborhood where I grew up because it’s been overtaken by Google engineers, not “billionaires.”
I’d also point out that our current “revenge of the nerds” economy is an aberration. The returns to individual intelligence weren’t nearly as significant before the knowledge economy, and before the knowledge economy started geographically segregating people by IQ. Your small town in Iowa used to just have high IQ people who had nothing better to do than help run the town or operate some local business or government agency. Average people benefited from that. I suspect a lot of the malaise afflicting the Rust Belt today is that most of the smart people left, leaving the social infrastructure strained by their absence.
I would. Furthermore, relatively kneecapping these people would probably be a long term good thing for our societal progress arc. The politics of people who have not known struggle for material comfort has been, to quote uncle Ted out of context, a disaster for the human race.
Like there's a reason every goddamn populist movement shits on "coastal elites" or "liberal white woman" or "wall street and the MBA banker class" some other boogeyman group that is invariably cut from a subset of these people. It's because the stuff they peddle is, typically bad if not fundamentally then the flavor they are peddling.
I'm sure this take will be wildly unpopular around here but I don't care.
If anything - it seems that AI is _attacking_ the things the elite have. Elite people have private tutors/expert networks, now people do too for $20/month. What if the cost of education collapses to zero? It already sort of was - I learned to program on a ~$1,000 computer while Google engineers had access to $100s of millions of hardware, and it was enough.
Also, open-weight models are powerful and relatively cheap to run. So it's not like OpenAI can just close the doors (short of extremely strict regulation which seems to be a lost cause).
How dependent you are and how much value you get out of it are not linked as a metric. You can be smart and get a ton of value out of it, yet still be entirely dependent on it. Just like a sporty person can be dependent on a car since running a marathon to work each day is illusionary.
I believe all people will become dependent on it. And then the rent will be jacked up. Everything else wouldn't fit with the dominant capitalist incentive to always maximize extraction and suffering.
It seems to me that historically there was a high water mark for what people were able to accomplish on their own and all people, dumb to smart, fell somewhere at or below that high water mark.
My opinion is that our current generation of A.I. will just raise the high water mark for what's possible.
Until we have AGI, ASI, or Recursively improving AI....A.I. in it's current form is a tool that adds a constant to some peoples intelligence and an exponent to other peoples intelligence...and many people of all intelligences refuse to use it.
But this is a good thing for egalitarians. It offsets one of the most unfair aspects of the knowledge economy: that some people get to have much more fulfilling and remunerative careers than average people because they were lucky enough to be born smart.
It's actually the opposite. People who are "born smart", will leverage AI to get more knowledgeable even faster, use it to learn new things faster, use it to churn through data to find patterns and opportunities, and use it to do labor for them, so they can make even more money than those not born smart, who will just use AI to ask it what's 3x3 and if the earth is flat.
There is one thing worth pointing out here though. Being smart doesn't necessarily mean you've got the ability to make money from said intelligence.
Like on average it probably helps, but if your interests don't lie in what makes money in the current economy, then even being the next Einstein won't really change much. If you're a genius that wants to help teach people in a school or university, you're going to make a lot less money than if your interests lay in setting up a business or getting into finance.
AI can help you do things faster, but it won't make you financially successful if the things you're interested in don't have a lot of economic demand.
It’s more of a barrier than a sufficient condition. I know a bunch of smart people who just have no interest in a renumerative career. But I don’t know anybody who has a lucrative white collar job who isn’t at least top 10% cognitively.
Inequalities have been growing for a while now, either we have less and less smart people, or it just does not work like you think it works, probably because your take is super naive and barely scratches the surface of first order effects while ignoring everything else
>Inequalities have been growing for a while now
I never said it hasn't.
>either we have less and less smart people, or it just does not work like you think it works
How do you think I think it works?
All I said was that AI will increase inequality as smart people will use it as an amplifier of their skills and intelect to get wealthier. The rampant inequality we already had before AI is mostly due to government fiscal policies revolving around endless currency inflation increasing assets prices of asset holders while devaluing wages and savings of the working class, but this is a entirely different topic I didn't cover because I was only talking about what smart people will do with AI to get wealthier, the same way how home computers and the internet allowed smart people to become wealthier 20+ years ago. You then spinning this into some accusations I never said without a an argument to back it up, feels in bad faith and breaking HN rules.
Also, even smart people can also become/remain poor because it takes more than just raw intellect to get wealthy, even with AI, but in general, smart people are orders of magnitude more likely to become financially successful than dumb people, fact.
> probably because your take is super naive and barely scratches the surface of first order effects while ignoring everything else
Please, explain what you think my take and what I'm ignoring. Because i feel like you missed my point entirely and are going on tangents parallel mostly unrelated to what I said. Or do you enjoy throwing accusations in disagreement without a counter argument to back up your PoV?
You seem to think "being smart" will matter in a society which doesn't need the labor output of "smart people". You'll be lumped in with all the rest. Nothing will matter but who controls the capital now.
>You seem to think "being smart" will matter in a society which doesn't need the labor output of "smart people". You'll be lumped in with all the rest.
And you seem to think "being smart" just means being another replaceable college-educated white-collar corporate drone dependent on someone giving you the job you want, while mine and the general accepted definition of a "smart" person is one that can make their desired outcome happen regardless of circumstances, education and place of employment, and hence avoid being "lumped in with all the rest" because they always find a way out of any difficult situation to come out on top, both personally and financially.
Like a friend of mine without even a highschool degree became a tree surgeon and his business is making enough money now that rivals the rates of tech and finance bros in London. That's what being smart is. You adapt and find lucrative opportunities on the market.
> Nothing will matter but who controls the capital now.
When was this ever NOT the case? Without inherited generational wealth you're at the mercy of the capital/asset owning class to make a living.
No, general accepted definition of "smart" is not "whoever is capable to amass the most money/power/manipulate with no regards to anything else".
> because they always find a way out of any difficult situation to come out on top, both personally and financially.
Most of those are sociopaths, narcissists and such. Just saying.
> Like a friend of mine without even a highschool degree became a tree surgeon and his business is making enough money now that rivals the rates of tech and finance bros in London
Intelligent or "smarts" is not measured by how successful you are or how much money you make.
Also great for your friend, but no one would hire him to do that if machines could do it for them
> When was this ever NOT the case? Without inherited generational wealth you're at the mercy of the capital/asset owning class to make a living.
What are you talking about? The capital class always relied on the professional class just as much. A wealthy person who owns a machine shop relies on machinists to make money. :/
Yeah, but what if we are at the point we don’t need machinists any more?
The rich get richer, even if you’re enriched solely with an above-average intelligence. The bar for break even just moved up. If the US thought 13 million unemployed/underemployed people was problem, just wait until it’s 30 million. They could afford a 10% drag on the economy, who wants to bet they can double it to 20%?
It's actually the opposite and more complicated than that. AI-developed nootropics and germline editing will saturate human intelligence across individuals.
If only popping pills were the easy hack to people getting smarter.
That's like saying drinking coffee will make people go faster.
It's like saying anabolic steroids increase performance.
I really would like to know what kind of drugs they place in the Bay Area water supply that produce comments like this.
If you find out, please let me know, because I feel like the filter in my pitcher isn't getting all of them.
And distribution and will to take bioenhancements is equal across all intelligences?
That is the null hypothesis, yes. Do you have evidence otherwise?
A good portion of people hate A.I. and won't even use it...they won't use a computer program to enhance their intellience, much less taking a pill...
This is an inference, not evidence. It doesn't meet my epistemic standard necessary to reject the null hypothesis.
Good for you. But you introduced this statement:
> AI-developed nootropics and germline editing will saturate human intelligence across individuals.
This is a forum, not a Bayesian-updating machine. So common courtesy is for you to take up the burden of proof for your own statements. Why do you think this is the null?
Not at all. It destroys the only aspects of the economy that don't simply hand everything to the people who were lucky enough to be born wealthy.
Very little of the economy belongs to people who were "born wealthy." Most rich people these days come from upper middle class, cognitive elite families or small business owners, not generational wealth.
The most important number is that 50% of consumer spending is attributable to the top 10%. That's Google engineers driving up the price of everything from housing, to cars, to Disney World tickets. The income levels of this group has grown several times faster since 1970 than the median income. That directly hurts the middle class, which is out-competed for the same scarce resources.
You just claimed that AI will eliminate the cognitive elite.
All that leaves is born wealthy and small business owners. The small business owners aren't going to last long if their only potential customers are the generationally wealthy and the working class.
> You just claimed that AI will eliminate the cognitive elite
I took your statement as referring to the current situation, not the future.
> All that leaves is born wealthy and small business owners.
What do you mean by that precisely? If the purchasing power of the cognitive elite collapses, it will make everything more affordable for everyone else. The generationally wealthy aren’t competing with you for housing in the Maryland suburbs.
> Most rich people these days come from upper middle class, cognitive elite families or small business owners, not generational wealth.
That group is called "born wealthy". They are not smarter or more intelligent, they are born with advantages.
> The most important number is that 50% of consumer spending is attributable to the top 10%. That's Google engineers driving up the price of everything from housing, to cars, to Disney World tickets.
No, that is K shaped economy whose rules were designed to favor the richest for multiple decades.
> That group is called "born wealthy". They are not smarter or more intelligent, they are born with advantages
They’re much smarter, more intelligent, more conscientious, have more impulse control, etc.
> No, that is K shaped economy
The “K-shaped economy” is just a label for what happens in a market with scarcity when the 90th percentile income rises twice as fast as the median income over 50 years: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/stories/20.... There’s no “rules” that cause it. It’s just supply and demand.
> They’re much smarter, more intelligent, more conscientious, have more impulse control, etc.
You made that up.
And yes, K-shaped economy is the label for what I described. And then I described what caused it last few decades. And no, it was not caused by "supply and demand". It was caused by policy changes.
“Very little of the economy belongs to people who are ‘born wealthy.’ They’re actually just born into wealthy, connected families.”
You mean, it proletarianizes yet another stratum of skilled laborer.
Yes. People’s unhappiness about the economic trajectory since the 1970s is due principally to the growing divergence between skilled knowledge workers and everyone else. Normal people can’t afford a house in the middle class neighborhood where I grew up because it’s been overtaken by Google engineers, not “billionaires.”
So you support a leveling-down measure?
I’m just describing what I think will happen.
I’d also point out that our current “revenge of the nerds” economy is an aberration. The returns to individual intelligence weren’t nearly as significant before the knowledge economy, and before the knowledge economy started geographically segregating people by IQ. Your small town in Iowa used to just have high IQ people who had nothing better to do than help run the town or operate some local business or government agency. Average people benefited from that. I suspect a lot of the malaise afflicting the Rust Belt today is that most of the smart people left, leaving the social infrastructure strained by their absence.
I would. Furthermore, relatively kneecapping these people would probably be a long term good thing for our societal progress arc. The politics of people who have not known struggle for material comfort has been, to quote uncle Ted out of context, a disaster for the human race.
Like there's a reason every goddamn populist movement shits on "coastal elites" or "liberal white woman" or "wall street and the MBA banker class" some other boogeyman group that is invariably cut from a subset of these people. It's because the stuff they peddle is, typically bad if not fundamentally then the flavor they are peddling.
I'm sure this take will be wildly unpopular around here but I don't care.
[dead]
This is a weird article.
If anything - it seems that AI is _attacking_ the things the elite have. Elite people have private tutors/expert networks, now people do too for $20/month. What if the cost of education collapses to zero? It already sort of was - I learned to program on a ~$1,000 computer while Google engineers had access to $100s of millions of hardware, and it was enough.
Also, open-weight models are powerful and relatively cheap to run. So it's not like OpenAI can just close the doors (short of extremely strict regulation which seems to be a lost cause).
The effect if LLMs is not linear. It's metaphorically x^2.
Smart people will be more effective. Average people will remain average. Dumb people will become dependent on it.
x < 1
How dependent you are and how much value you get out of it are not linked as a metric. You can be smart and get a ton of value out of it, yet still be entirely dependent on it. Just like a sporty person can be dependent on a car since running a marathon to work each day is illusionary.
I believe all people will become dependent on it. And then the rent will be jacked up. Everything else wouldn't fit with the dominant capitalist incentive to always maximize extraction and suffering.
It was not meritocracy. And the thing that cane for whatever merit based advantages were was not AI, but capture of politics by moneyed interests.
K shaped economy is not result of AI.
AI may be coming for meritocracy, but capital got there first.
It seems to me that historically there was a high water mark for what people were able to accomplish on their own and all people, dumb to smart, fell somewhere at or below that high water mark.
My opinion is that our current generation of A.I. will just raise the high water mark for what's possible.
Until we have AGI, ASI, or Recursively improving AI....A.I. in it's current form is a tool that adds a constant to some peoples intelligence and an exponent to other peoples intelligence...and many people of all intelligences refuse to use it.