For almost all businesses these days, distribution (getting customers to know about your product and have access to it) is much harder than actually creating the product.
There are gatekeepers to getting audience - whether it is is supermarkets, search engines, big players in the ad tech industry, well established websites, and traditional media. And they all see profitability of businesses benefiting from them for distribution as money left on the table.
An individual consumer doesn't derive any benefit from companies missing out on automation opportunities.
Would you prefer to buy screws that are individually made on a lathe?
They weren’t cheap soups, but they sure were good.
A high end soup and an affordable soup might be serving two different markets.
There will not be a "quality" dial that you get to tweak to decide on your perfect quality of soup. There will be graduations, and you will be stuck with whatever the store provides. If you want medium quality soup, but the store only carries 3 brands of soup (because unlike in your utopia somebody actually has to maintain an inventory and relationships with their supply chain) and your favourite brand decides to bottom out their quality. It's not "good actually" because of economic whatever. Your soup just sucks now.
Oh but "the market will eventually provide a new brand" is a terrible strategy when they start spicing the soup with lead to give it cinnamon flavor or whatever.
I'm not an ethereal being. I'm a human, I need it to be good now. Not in theory land.
> they start spicing the soup with lead to give it cinnamon flavor or whatever
Like, we all know lead is bad, and we all know that humans are unscrupulous, but at least the human putting lead in the soup knows they're being unscrupulous at that time (probably). For an AI it would just be an entirely favorable optimization.
We're going to find out how far we can trust them, and the limits of that trust will determine where the people need to be.
- consolidation, such that there are only a few different choices of soup
- a race to the bottom in quality
- poisoning
These are all possibilities under our current system, and we have mechanisms (laws and market competition) which limit the extent to which they occur.
What is it about extreme automation technology that you think will increase these prevalence of these issues? By what mechanisms will these issues occur more frequently (rather than less frequently), as production technology becomes more capable?
A lot of people think wealth inequality isn't a big deal, but I disagree. The more proportion of money a select few have in comparison to everyone else, the higher the likelihood those select few can mold society to their whim. Corruption thrives off of wealth inequality. Without it, it cannot exist.
This is a decent point, but you're describing the world we already live in, no? I mean, we already have significant automation, significant wealth inequality, significant ability for control of money to affect legislation and culture.
But we (in the US at least) generally have abundant access to food which is safe to eat.
> Corruption thrives off of wealth inequality. Without it, it cannot exist.
Corruption can exist without wealth inequality.
Consider a city where teachers and politicians earn the exact same salary (and the same ability to build wealth over time). You might think this eliminates the potential for corruption, but imagine a scenario where politicians heavily rely on teachers' unions for their election campaigns. In this case, politicians might make decisions that benefit the unions (e.g. no performance standards, lifetime tenure, long holidays, keeping underenrolled schools open) in exchange for their support, even if those decisions don't optimize for student achievement (or whatever else taxpayers want schools to promote).
I personally think a far more likely scenario is that small businesses of one or a few people become vastly more commonplace. They will be able to do a lot more by themselves, including with less expertise in areas they may not have a lot of knowledge in. I don't think regular employees today should see LLMs as competition, rather they should see it as a tool they can use to level the playing field against current CEOs.
LLMs aren't some magic silver bullet to elevate people out of poverty. Lack of access to capital is an extreme restriction on what most people can actually accomplish on their own, it doesn't matter if they have the worlds best LLM helping them or not.
It doesn't matter if you use an LLM to build the most brilliant business in the world if you can't afford to buy real world things to do real world business
Also, Historically when regular people decide to level the playing field against the ultra wealthy, they use violence
I don't think anyone should be expecting LLMs to be the great equalizer. The great equalizer has always been violent and probably always will be violence.
I don't think that was your point but pressed screws got way better properties than cut screws.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
“The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment” – Warren G. Bennis.
I want this idea to be drawn to an extreme where I can't buy soup or anything for that matter. Sure I will starve and die soon, but I feel the kind of burning the world will go through will be fun to watch. With tears of course.
This already exists.
> Just lease a fully-automated factory and a bunch of AI workers,
The current solution is not “fully automated”, but it can be fairly hands off for the owner.
> and you're instantly shipping and making money!
… but this is the hard part. Just because you can make soup doesn’t mean anyone will buy it.
Marketing and distribution are very real challenges in markets like this, and the players in those markets will put tremendous pressure on the owner via their costs such that the owner doesn’t make money unless they commit to producing a relatively high level of volume.
Source: My family members who have retail food product lines.