Techno-feudalism and the rise of AGI: A future without economic rights?

Did the rise of fire, the wheel, the printing press, manufacturing, and microprocessors also give rise to futures without economic rights? I can download a dozen LLMs today and run them on my own machine. AI may well do the opposite, and democratize information and intelligence in currently unimaginable ways. It's far too early to say.

There was quite a lot of slavery and conquering empires in between the invention of fire and microprocessors, so yes to an extent. Microprocessors haven't put an end to authoritarian regimes or massive wealth inequalities and the corrupting effect that has on politics, unfortunately.

A lot of advances led to bad things, at the same time they led to good things.

Conversely a lot of very bad things led to good things. Worker rights advanced greatly after the plague. A lot of people died but that also mean there was a shortage of labour.

Similarly WWII, advanced women's rights because they were needed to provide vital infrastructure.

Good and bad things have good and bad outcomes, much of what defines if it is good or bad is the balance of outcomes, but it would be foolhardy to classify anything as universally good or bad. Accept the good outcomes of the bad. address the bad outcomes of the good.

The printing press led to more than a century of religious wars in Europe, perhaps even deadlier than WW2 on a per-capita basis.

20 years ago we all thought that the Internet would democratize information and promote human rights. It did democratize information, and that has had both positive and negative consequences. Political extremism and social distrust have increased. Some of the institutions that kept society from falling apart, like local news, have been dramatically weakened. Addiction and social disconnection are real problems.

I’m curious as to why you think this is a good comparison. I hear it a lot but I don’t think it makes as much sense as its promulgators propose. Did fire, the wheel, or any of these other things threaten the very process of human innovation itself? Do you know not see a fundamental difference. People like to say “democratize” all the time but how democratized do you think you would feel if you and anyone you know couldn’t afford a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, much less some hardware and electricity to run your local LLM?

So do you argue that printing press was a net negative for humanity?

>I can download a dozen LLMs today and run them on my own machine

That's because someone, somewhere, invested money in training the models. You are given cooked fish, not fishing rods.

Well the industrial revolution lead to the rise of labor unions and socialism as counteracting force against the increased power it gave capital.

So far, I see no grand leftist resurgence to save us this time around.

Did paint and canvas kill human innovation? Did the photograph? Did digital art?

"The very process of human innovation" will survive, I assure you.

The invention of the scientific method fundamentally changed the very process of human innovation itself.

I would sooner make the argument religion is.

technology serving humans == good

humans serving technology == evil

it's the power structure that determines the morality of technology. & power structures are a technology in and of themselves.

it follows that power structures which serve humans are good, and power structures that control humans are evil.

how do the things You create interact with humans and our power structures?

The individualism of the poor and working class cannot out compete the collectivism of the ultra rich

This is one of the deepest ironies of our era.

I must be upside down about something... Aren't "economic rights" precisely the sort of thing that the wheel or the printing press crested? The right to collect tolls on this road, the right to prevent copies of this book...

The scary thing about AI is that people might end up with the right to do problematic things that were previously infeasible.

The resurgence seen so far has been for the populist right, ones led by the rich and powerful.

Pied pipers leading the masses to their demise with false promises.

> Did the rise of fire, the wheel, the printing press, manufacturing, and microprocessors also give rise to futures without economic rights?

The rise of steam engines did. And the printing press and electrical engines did the opposite.

It's not hard to understand the difference, it's about the minimum size of an economically useful application. If it's large, it creates elites, if it's small, it democratizes the society.

LLMs by their nature have enormous minimal sizes, and the promise to increase by orders of magnitude.