Item — HN Reader

I don't buy these Superintelligence claims from Meta of 'abundance' and 'humans are free to do other things' as they are tied to Wall St and earnings.

It is always abundance for the super rich, scarcity for those in jobs.

How can I be free to do my gardening whenever I want when the landlord is asking for $11K rent in my SF flat?

So eventually they will do the opposite of this 'vision' and put this super intelligence to replace jobs.

Also, what happened to the Metaverse that Meta invested hundreds of billions as per their namesake?

4 comments

> Meta invested hundreds of billions as per their namesake

They bought a shit ton of GPUs before the LLM boom, which gave them a running start on training their own model. Zuck talks about it in an interview with Lex Friedman.

> How can I be free to do my gardening whenever I want when the landlord is asking for $11K rent in my SF flat?

This is the fatal flaw. It's been recognized explicitly for at least 140 years that the price of land rent rises in lockstep with productivity increases, guaranteeing there is no "escape velocity" for the labor class regardless of how good technology gets.

Of course, that's why experts started pushing college/university as the way to find escape, with an understanding that people could use its research facilities to create capital instead of falling into the labor class.

But it was ultimately lost in translation. The layman heard: Go to college/university to become a more appealing laborer to employers. And thus nothing improved for the people; the promises of things like higher income never occurred — incomes have held stagnant.

>people could use its research facilities to create capital

This is just survivorship bias. Of course most people choose the employment route since very few people are gonna become good researchers with valuable ideas, and even fewer of those have the ability to become successful business owners, being a good researcher is not enough.

And money doesn't just rain from the sky, you still need money to make money.

> This is just survivorship bias.

It was forward looking, so survivorship bias doesn't fit. But it may be fair to say that it was unrealistic to think that it was tenable. Reality can certainly give theory a good beating.

> And money doesn't just rain from the sky

If you are going to college to do anything but create capital, the money must be raining from the sky. It would be pretty hard to justify otherwise given that there has been no economic benefit from it. As before, the promise of higher incomes never materialized (obviously, they were promised on the idea of people using college to create capital) — incomes have held stagnant.

>regardless of how good technology gets

Technology increases aren't there so you work less hours for the same pay, they're there so your business owner gets more money form you working the same hours.

If a machine gets invented that can do your job it's not like you can now go home and relax for the rest of your life and still keep receiving your pay cheques. This utopia doesn't exist.

Yes but even this ignores the more important dynamic at play: rent rises to eat nearly all the productivity gains.

If you add technology to your workplace your wages should go up (not to eat all the gains of the technology, but a decent portion via wage competition), but then once your wages go up, the local rent goes up anyway.

> How can I be free to do my gardening whenever I want when the landlord is asking for $11K rent in my SF flat?

You can work his fields in exchange for most of the harvest of course!

Or join a purgatorial society in exchange for free grazing on his land!

The metaverse is an important part for this vision of the future.

With the metaverse it won't matter that you live in a 3x3m cubicle because you will use your VR headset to pretend you live in a spacious and comfortable place.

That's how it was in snow crash anyway, where the term comes from.