The Inevitable Evil that is Capitalism
Look, I’m not trying to look like a Communist, but this
from, the head of Standard Chartered Bank dubbing workers likely to lose their jobs to AI as “lower value human capital” shows exactly what CEOs in this sector think. He’s shed some crocodile tears of course, but if AI isn’t to be, and also seen to be, a benefit to society, some legislation or civil disobedience may be necessary.
from, the head of Standard Chartered Bank dubbing workers likely to lose their jobs to AI as “lower value human capital” shows exactly what CEOs in this sector think. He’s shed some crocodile tears of course, but if AI isn’t to be, and also seen to be, a benefit to society, some legislation or civil disobedience may be necessary.
Comments
Then there is Robotics.
When you think about it Communism arose doing a critical part of the industrial revolution.
Such revolutions will happen when major changes in the way we work.
People will need to adjust. How is the question.
A couple of ideas have been floated.
One is to give everyone a guaranteed livable income for the rest of their lives. They can go ahead and continue to work.
Another idea is to tax AI producers and drop the tax for the bottom 50% of the working population.
Maybe a combination of both.
Excuse me, My Waymo is here.
My last employer has a “People, Communications and Workplaces”.
I get the sense that we will drift into a trend of replacing people with AI until there is a catastrophic failure at a medium-large company, at which point there'll be a rush to re-hire the collective expertise that was lost.
I hope the decision making regarding failed and failing organisations has not been taken over by AI by then. In economic interests of course.
Fruit
Vegetables
Bread
Human Resources (Soylent Green)...
In our company people with questions and problems are encouraged to go and see The Rogue. No department, just a member of staff who would like to get on with his real job.
Isn't that basically what Marx argued, that capitalism would inevitably revert to feudalism as capital consolidated into the hands of a few owners? Seems like we're there again.
Is it landlords all the way down?
Indeed. It is possible - or perhaps likely - that the AI economy leads to a rent-seeking economy. That will impoverish most of us and make a small number of people very rich.
'Rent-seeking behaviour' is a specific economic term and it is a distorting and detrimental effect on the overall economy. Basic equilibrium economics is all about supply and demand and with goods the idea is that a producer makes something and then sells it. But if, as a producer you can lease what you make rather than sell it, there is the potential to make more money but it reduces overall productivity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
There are lots of examples. We used to buy software and then own it. Now, lots of software you cannot actually buy; you buy a licence that you have to renew every month or year to keep using. So many products depend on the on-going contracts to be usable. This is not necessarily a bad thing but it can reduce competition and lock in consumers for years.
With AI, the owners of the hardware and large language models have huge power in the market place. If AI becomes a critical service with pay-as-you-go access then you have a model that will hugely concentrate wealth. Add in a reduced demand for labour and you have a recipe for extreme inequality. It's one thing to think this will happen because of market forces, it's quite another to welcome it.
AFZ
A little like climate change, no?
Hence [warning - techy speak] Broadcom ending all perpetual licence sales of VMWare products, and not offering support contracts for existing ones - you have to buy a subscription now and bin your existing licences to remain supported.
I do think, though, that founding ones' view of the world through any sort of 'isms' or abstractions is very much a major contributor, whether 'capitalism', 'communism', 'socialism', 'feudalism', 'neo-liberalism', 'fascism' and lumping the proponents of one's favoured or unfavoured ideologies as their respective '...'ists' or whatever. It makes that so much easier to do and to whitewash one's conscience.
I believe the maxim 'you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs' has been around since at least the eighteenth century, but it has been much favoured as a justification by the selfish and ideologically powerful in every different guise since.
I think this is fairly simplistic, flattens out a lot of things, essentially amounts to an appeal to ignorance, and runs together a number of terms, one of which was used largely after the fact (feudalism). Being "against all ideologies" is in itself an ideological stance (and mostly an unexamined one).
I agree with at least a lot of this.
Is this not a similar argument to guns don’t kill people. Proper capitalism keeps some me up and pushes some down. Moderated capitalism is perhaps the best way.
As well as the questions of competition and regulation, whether AI as a service leads to a concentration of wealth in the longer term also depends on the extent to which it becomes a technology that can be profitably employed by the companies and businesses that use it, which is a question that has yet to be answered convincingly.
So sanitation, communications, education, technology, transportation, defense, resource extraction and refinement, trade nodes, energy, water, health services, and large scale agriculture should be owned, operated and managed by the nation's People who share equally in the management, operation, income and expense from use of the infrastucture. Instead of politicians we should elect managers. Theft and corruption should be capital offenses.
Things that use that infrastructure should be developed, invested in, owned and operated by individuals and collective enterprises that respond to the needs of the People. If at any point that enterprise approaches a level of operation that equals any one of the infrastructure sectors, a 51% majority ownership of the enterprise should pass to the People, and should be treated as critical infrastructure for the good of all.
Food and clean water, dignified shelter, climate and season appropriate clothing, education, medical care and efficient transportation I regard as basic human rights that should be administered by a rotating board of directors who are elected from a pool of managers who have previously served with distinction in any infrastructure sector.
Everyone should be free to develop their gifts and talents as they see fit, and to participate in whatever enterprise or infrastructure project that most interests them. Sanitation frontline workers should be at the top of the pay scale, because without sanitation, we have nothing else - our ability to function as a society grinds to a halt as trash, filth, disease and disorder accumulates. CEO and board member pay should be capped at 90% of a sanitation worker.
This is just a kind of rough sketch. In my "other body" in "another place" that I visit periodically in an "out of body" state, the society I participate in, in that dimension wherever it is, functions somewhat like this. It feels good to be there when I'm there. I suppose I must be fairly highly ranked there because my job in that place is to maintain a beautiful communal spa-type facility and that includes cleaning toilets. But the work feels like an honor and a privelege and so I'm proud of my work and my standards.
AFF
I've certainly heard the argument from the early 20th century that early "progressives" like Teddy Roosevelt liked to dangle the threat of communist revolution in front of capitalists to persuade them to invest in things like public libraries and other services.
I even have a copy of this particular poster outside of my bathroom as a reminder.
I don't. I was speaking in very broad brushes and hence simplified somewhat. However the potential for rent-seeking is surely blatantly obvious in this context.
I use Office 2010 for lots of work I do on computers I own. The hospital/university systems - which have later versions - have no issues with this and generally speaking, the files from Word, Excel and PowerPoint work across the machines without hassle.* I purchased my Office 2010 licence** a long time ago and have kept using the software despite various hardware changes.
Conversely there is a statistics package that I have used for my research that has become a major problem.*** The licence belongs to the Uni and the cost of the annual renewals became prohibitive so there was a move away. That's very hard to do, mid-project and the uni IT team supported it really well but the package just stops working once a year. That's completely independent of upgrades. It just stops unless you pay.
However, if you think about it, even perpetual licences are vulnerable to rent seeking. The software companies don't make software for you to use. They copy the one, they already sold to me. And you get the same. Essentially no work, a whole new unit sold. It literally costs a software company pennies to make a product they charge you and me £100 for.
Of course, that's only true for the second copy that they sell onwards. The first one may cost millions to develop. There's a reason we have IP and copyright etc. I am not trying to make a moral point here, it's irrelevant whether this is ethical or not. It's irrelevant how you measure risk and reward here. The point is simply that rent-seeking distorts the market and can be very damaging economically. Software is a sector deeply vulnerable to rent-seeking.
The risk of AI is obvious. If AI becomes the only economically viable and/or practically viable way of doing certain things and the owners of that technology charge on a perpetual and excessive basis for access whilst at the same time employing very fewer workers, then, that's really dangerous.
AFZ
*fact of life in hospitals and academia that I do a lot of work on my own computers. It is very rare for my employer to provide me with hardware.
**I actually got a lot of MS licences direct from MS through a developer scheme which worked out as incredibly good value and meant that I went from Office 2007 to 2010 on multiple machines I owned absolutely free. So I didn't strictly 'buy it' but that's just a nerdy aside. However it does also reflect the very fluid and complex pricing structures used. I can't remember what the cash-price was then but if I'd bought them retail each one would have been over £100 each and MS gave me 10 for free.
***It's not SPSS (yuk****)
****YMMV, of course.
No new wealth has been created, but Microsoft is able to maximise profits by leveraging the lock-in effect of their platform.
See also Adobe.
I use Vegas Pro for editing. They have both models, lease and perpetual.
Professionally, Adobe Acrobat Pro is absolutely essential. It's the only reliable tool for redacting documents. But it costs £100+ annually per licence. I do wonder how much public investment would be required to sustain open source alternatives to these pseudo-monopolies. I believe some EU governments have moved over to primarily Linux-based systems. One thing I can't decide if it's altruism or playing the long game is the like of Adobe supplying cheap or free licences to schools. The core Adobe suite (Photoshop, Final Cut Pro) is available to schools at ~£20 per head annually and the more limited Adobe Express suite is free. The flip side is that schools then teach these "industry standard" products and give the industry a ready supply of experienced users. If schools were all teaching using GIMP I suspect industry would start to move away from Photoshop too.
It wouldn't. It'd just whine that schools weren't preparing students for the real world and leave positions unfilled rather than taking the risk of training someone, based on the way industry behaves in every other similar situation.
This would also be the large thriving software ecosystem on which the majority of the internet runs. The internet probably being the foremost wealth-creating (cf wealth-transferring) technology of the last 50 years.
All these years on, I really didn't think I would still be hearing these kind of arguments from Microsoft users continuing to blame the system for choices made by people responsible for procurement in large, especially institutionalised, sectors of society.
Having just retired from the most institutionalised sector of British society, and in the IT sector too, I know exactly what you mean.
This is the level of thought that contributes to the Post Office “Horizon” system scandal: to think, I so nearly ended up working on that.
The same goes for music streaming. They remove stuff from the system.
Yes but the new version rarely adds anything you actually need (bar basic OS support), and actual consumer tech support is virtually non-existent, because it was long outsourced and then mechanised.
Main point of "supported" for us is "patched".
My editing software often does. I can’t speak for much else.
My music software does. Stuff like Word/Excel/Powerpoint far less so, and yeah corporates get it so that its patched (though patched doesn't map very closely to patchable).
Sorry, but, whilst you're not wrong, if fact, you are very right, you're missing the point.
I clarified above that software (however packaged up) does not necessarily mean rent-seeking. But that it can. And the move to short term licencing makes this worse. Adobe is a great example. I love many of their products but the business model they have moved to is definitely market-distorting.
To reiterate- *some* software licences beautifully illustrate what rent-seeking is and how it affects the market. AI systems are very vulnerable to the same pattern.
AFZ
Mrs LB was trying to get prizes donated from local businesses for our annual village fete. It occurred to me that for some businesses this came at a real "face value" cost - free MOT at the local garage for example. Others much less so - the cost of doing business for them is very much detached from the number of actual customers - cinema tickets or 10 pin bowling -for example; unless the screening/aisles are actually full, making more of the product available costs little or nothing - which is very like software licence sales, or for that matter, record sales.
Pharmaceuticals is a classic one - the marginal cost of production is often tiny but the cost of development is enormous.
The difference in the case of most pharmaceuticals is the mechanism of patents allows for the appearance of generics some way down the line.
I was thinking about this further. The story of the WWW illustrates my point even more. Sir Tim Berners-Lee went to great lengths to ensure the protocols were open and available to all to prevent rent-seeking and profiteering. Where do we find the AI equivalent of Sir Tim???
There are quite a lot of freely available AI models that can be downloaded. The problem is that AI is horribly consumptive of computing power and, consequently, energy. It's actually, contrary to many of the recent examples in this thread, something with a comparatively high marginal cost.
The issue of the duration of licences doesn't seem very significant in itself, compared to the cost of licences and/or the restrictions they impose on the user (the terms and conditions), but both of these vary widely in the software sector. Just because a market allows for the sale of premium products at premium prices doesn't mean it's being captured by rent-seeking producers.
Returning to a previous point: I think that consumers are more likely to get locked in because of closed (proprietary) standards, than because of the way they pay for software. This is relevant to your next point.
The story of the WWW illustrates a different point from software, being about standards rather than licences. The two protocols that enable the World Wide Web, HTTP and HTML, are both open standards - neither of them are subject to licensing.
PDF, developed by Adobe, has been an open standard since 2008. You can read, create and edit PDF documents using a wide range of software. So, if someone wants to redact a PDF document, they have a wide range of choices, as you'd expect to find in a functioning marketplace.
As Arethosemyfeet points out, there are many open source AI models, etc, available - see, for example:
https://huggingface.co/blog/daya-shankar/open-source-llms
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_open-source_artificial_intelligence_software
With service agreements, and short periods over which they would update/patch, the model of buying the software as a saleable good, and replacing it when it had become obsolete/malfunctioned, and renting it for as long as it was needed, in whatever form the provider wished to provide, was blurred.
It is, however, fundamental, because there is now no fixed state in which the software is sold, no standard to which the manufacturer can be held in terms of whether or not it is actually saleable, because the thing (be it service or artefact) being provided is constantly mutable. This makes it harder for consumer protection legislation to apply to the software market. If not actually impossible. We just go on paying, in faith that the supplier will go on supplying something that works. Furthermore, we have no control over what we get each time, and no guarantee that it will be anything like what we rented last time.