- Most participants in the economy are creating very little real value. They're shifting things around or temporarily solving problems that are highly localized to the organization they're in.
- There's a lot of unrealized value stored in the corpus of knowledge that AI companies have ingested— the millions of webpages, the scanned books, wikipedia, the blogs and Q&A sites. So even if AI companies are not creating new insights, just the act of locating, filtering, and summarizing knowledge that was already present somewhere in the world is valuable. Indeed, one could use this same argument to declare that Google in 1999 was creating no value, which is of course obviously untrue.
Google created two kinds of value: content discovery via connection (value to the consumer), and market reachability for advertisers. Oh, and also the world's most inconvenient spell check.
AI proposes to solve: a content supply side problem which does not exist, and an analysis problem which also only maybe exists. Really what it does in the best of cases (assuming everything actually works) is drive the cost to produce content to zero, make discovery less trustworthy, make the discovery problem worse, and launder IP. In the best case it is a net negative economic force.
All that said, I believe the original comment is about the fact that the economy exists to serve market participants and AI is not a market participant. It can act as a proxy, but it doesn't buy or sell things in the economic sense. Through that lens, also in the best case the technology erodes demand by reducing economic power of the consumer.
That said, I'm stoked to hear about the next AI web site generator or spam email campaign manager. Lets setup an SPV to get it backed off-balance sheet.
Wow, I didn't think I would find worse economic theory than the labor theory of value. Although this may just be some offshoot's particularly stupid interpretation of LTV that takes its articles of faith and concludes that since machines don't do human labor they must be stealing it from the workers.
>Here, then, is the issue. The gospel of Christ says that progress comes from every individual merging his individuality in sympathy with his neighbors. On the other side, the conviction of the nineteenth century is that progress takes place by virtue of every individual's striving for himself with all his might and trampling his neighbor under foot whenever he gets a chance to do so. This may accurately be called the Gospel of Greed.
“You going to just stare at that coffee?” Lillian asked.
I smiled at being caught in an unguarded state of preoccupation with my dark thoughts. Then I took a sip of the decaf.
“It’s good. Tastes like the real thing,” I said, and this time I was telling the truth.
“Nothing hard about making a good cup of coffee,” Lillian said to this customer as she lit up another cigarette.
And that statement provided something of an answer to my questions about Lillian and her business. Because the coffee at the Metro Diner didn’t have to be as good as it was, nor did the excellent food served there have to be so carefully prepared or so reasonably priced. That was not how we did things where I happened to work. The company that employed me strived only to serve up the cheapest fare that its customers would tolerate, churn it out as fast as possible, and charge as much as they could get away with. If it were possible to do so, the company would sell what all businesses of its kind dream about selling, creating that which all our efforts were tacitly supposed to achieve: the ultimate product –– Nothing. And for this product they would command the ultimate price –– Everything.
Two minutes ago the Church of Satan read this and started their own competing initiative (satire). I’m off to work on the odds-maker model for which one gets there first.
