Here’s a Jan 25th 2025 quote on X/Twitter (which his firm helped Musk buy) from Marc Anderessen, head of VC firm Andreessen Horowitz/a16z.
“A world in which human wages crash from AI – logically, necessarily – is a world in which productivity growth goes through the roof, and prices for goods and services crash to near zero. Consumer cornucopia. Everything you need and want for pennies.”
This is the world Big Tech is building for us. Given their hold over the current US administration, barring a political revolution - there’s not much to stop them for the next 4 years.
If their power to create that world via AI & robotics is seemingly unstoppable, what about a counter-intuitive idea? Engage them on it seriously. At the very least the transition to this world might need the kind of emergency economic supports the Covid era had.
It seems strange Big Tech is so open about what it intends to do, yet we are still not taking it seriously, despite them saying it all out loud.
Rant:
I agree with you but I’m very tired with all this. I’m becoming old now and I don’t think I can care anymore. Politicians and billionaires have been fucking with us for a long time. With AI they can AND they will create chaos with unemployment and fucking over artists and workers in all the industries. There will not be a futuristic communism where we are all happy. At most we’ll have some kind of crippled UBI where all you can do is buy the crappiest food every month. Our grifting overlords won’t accept anything else and the governments will agree.
Most people around me are literally amazed that ChatGPT can reduce an email to a few words even if done by dropping random words. They don’t want to talk about all the details or what this shit will bring. I say fuck them, I am too old to accept all that crap. I’ll keep on learning while all the people who use ChatGPT or Claude won’t understand what happens. I don’t see anything positive from this. The technical details of all those models are interesting but inapplicable right now, yet everyone fall for the trap of using it at all cost.
ChatGPT is like Facebook: they have money because they have users. The users are guilty too. Humanity has always been lazy, but LLMs gives them the ultimate reason to be lazy, and it won’t end well. At least Idiocracy was funny.
Sorry for the rant.