This post seems to be haphazardly proposing that big tech will inevitably make everyone's lives miserable. And by working for them, you are enabling this.
It offers no constructive alternative and the author (yes, I know who he is) seems to have no issue with Google hosting their email.
It's hard to take this too seriously (even if there is some legitimate worry here)
This is a real threat that is not discussed enough. If labor could be completely automated, then the value and political power of workers tends to zero.
> Have you considered not participating? If you participate, we all lose. We will either all be in the underclass together or not.
This has been suggested a bunch of times in the comments of HN as well as on other social media, but what exactly would that look like?
As this seems like the ultimate prisoner dilemma and the winning solution there is always be first to make a deal, even if we accept the premise of AI turning us all into an underclass (a prediction often made with revolutionary technology I might add).
The premise is economically incoherent because labor is not a single task category that technology can delete. It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises.
This is the lump of labor fallacy- the belief that there’s a fixed amount of economically valuable work that technology and capital can eliminate through automation or capital accumulation instead of transforming it.
Middle class status anxiety manifesting as a rhetoric about neofeudalism.
The post industrial revolution jobs market from 1880-1940s was pretty crappy for labor, and we have no idea how things turned out for the average displaced workers. We do know that there were whole sections of towns called skid rows, we know that there were flop houses. We know huge sections of men lived in boarding homes, and women stayed living with their parents. We've read things like Steinbeck and get a glimpse of the life of desperation at the time.
Don't let people fool you that the labor market will look like post WW2 America. It will look like 1880-1940s, during which there were huge labor fights and things were so bad there were 2 world wars.
Honest question, if large portions of labor are automated or marginalized who ultimately buys the goods and services that companies produce? Markets depend on consumers having purchasing power. It seems economically rational to keep the average worker making just enough to afford goods and services over the long term.
We can see this logic reflected at times in business history. Ford paid workers double the daily wage so they could afford the cars they built and Costco pays employees 50% more than Walmart. They're not doing these things out of the goodness of their heart but out of greed to increase long term profits.
I partly agree, but where this analogy breaks down, and what the neofeudal rulers are too shortsighted to realize, is that if lower classes don't have income to spend, there will be nobody to buy their products, and the entire economy collapses. Proposals to address this like UBI are a pipe dream.
I couldn't disagree more. Throughout history, higher productivity leads to a higher quality of life for everyone.
Yes, the transition can be painful and some people will lose out and face hard career changes.
But overall, the multiplicative power of investment only increases, helping to make everything cheaper, and everyone richer.
People focus too much on their own small part of experience - like Claude Code replacing CRUD developers. Without appreciating that the LLM revolution (and broader AI like AlphaFold) also includes PhD students that don't need to lose time programming tooling, interns that might have spent their time on tooling that can now use LLMs to learn faster and actually contribute to their fields, disadvantaged students that can learn more directly and in a personal way, without it being dependent on their physical location.
All of this means you get more experimentation, more ideas, and more successes.
Sometimes people just need to touch (literal) grass
No gpt18Pro won't cost $1Bi dollars. The buck (or the bubble) will stop somewhere.
I'd be more worried for the people making trades run 1ms faster, they literally create no value to the world that is not something their own peers believe it
There are billions of people not knowing and not caring about what is chatgpt and while it might hit them hard, humans are more flexible and less impressionable than most people think (I mean, some people think it's the other way as well and they might be right in some situations)
Let's say that somehow we end up in a world where capital is the only thing separating one set of humans from the other, and that separation is large, and the overwhelming majority of humans are in the underclass.
Such situations usually correct themselves violently.
All this talk of neofeudalism and yet not a single bushel of corn has been taken by my lord!
Capital leads to class difference, often immense class difference, which is not a claim against our society as primarily capitalistic but in favor of it. If you took away all the food grown in America and the clothes woven in Bangladesh and the laptops manufactured in China, there would be no Amazon, no Google, no Microsoft, no "technofeudalism." The economic base is still defined by the exchange of commodities, its just that the US does not produce many industrial goods anymore, so the US economy is mostly a service based economy. Chinese citizens do not experience their lifeworld in terms of service based industries, they are surrounded by mass markets and complex factories and very material evidence of mechanization which we often do not see directly in the West, only the end product. So to many Americans it feels like they live in a magical society where they click some keys on their laptop and food and clothes and whatever they need shows up on their doorstep--but there are real workers out there tooling all the machines and developing all the architecture to make those things appear, to reduce the basic struggles of life to give time for greater and more advanced forms of social organization beyond the need to survive.
This is not what peasants had; for them, despite having a relatively complex existence, a bad season could and often would kill their entire family. Or a raiding band would take all their food, or they'd die of the plague...life was far more tenuous, and the basic made of production was not commodity production, it was growing food and animal husbandry. International trade, artisanal crafts, and capital improvements on industrial production were nowhere near the level they were in even the early modern period. Nothing about our contemporary society resembles this way of living.
Addendum: The claim that somehow everyone in tech could just "stop," like consciously decide to stop creating things, is absurd. Amazon is very good at what it does, but it does not have exclusive control over the trade of all goods in the whole world. Rakuten is a major competitor in Japan, there are many other companies that have strong holds in their local markets. You take a Bolt in Germany, not an Uber. Chinese users can query DeepSeek, which is surely more proficient in Mandarin than ChatGPT. Even if a state uses its sovereign power to artificially control industry, it only slows the development of capital, since other states may allow their own companies and technologies to flourish, like China is doing now with its electric vehicles. If Amazon does not meet its projections, it fails, its employees all lose their jobs, Jeff Bezos might even go bankrupt. There is a constant pressure of competition.
As a worker, your goal should not be to arbitrarily stop working--you may not enrich others but you certainly won't be enriching yourself either. The goal should be to capture far more wealth that is the result of your labor. This is only possible through labor organizing, which does not permanently cease the means of production, it only takes control of them. But business continues and people still produce things and do services and enjoy the wealth of those things and services. One should basically desire to live in a wealthy, prosperous society. This article does nothing but ask workers to go into voluntary poverty; it is reactionary and backwards.
Also, my p(doom) is 1.0-epsilon under the status quo without AGI/ASI, due to old age and disease. Under some assumptions, self-interest says that I may as well roll the dice.
George Hotz’s post-capitalist decoherence wasn’t in my 2026 bingo card.
I wonder if he came up with this view before or after working for big tech in different capacities and using Gmail.
He’s not wrong though, but he’s in a weird position to say that. Also, this post isn’t constructive in any possible way.
Markets needs regulation to keep them open. Monopolists understand that and thus they buy policy and sponsor narratives in order to abolish market regulation, or reach a "rules for thee, but not for me", or prevent incumbents from entering the market by means of Regulatory Capture. But capitalism needs competition. So they slowly kill their own lands, and thus they need to cross borders to keep eating.
If one feels morally compelled to pay with their own income to stop these parasites, hats of to them. It is nasty that people are being put in this position. They need support from a society. Society needs information and debate about real issues, which requires them to be free from the barrage of falsehoods and yellow journalism. And possible it would help to have a Roosevelt, but culture is the biggest hindrance to change.
I don't have enough time to explain the many reasons why that post is wrong, but some of them are:
- "In the future, when labor is fully marginalized..." Hasn't happened in the history of the world, not going to happen in the future either. Some forms of labor were replaced by machines, which then gave rise to new types of jobs, such as building and maintaining the machines. The human cost cannot be neglected, because many people do find it difficult to retrain to other jobs. But on the whole, there are more jobs and higher-paying jobs now than there were a hundred years ago. Higher-paying not just in absolute financial terms, but also in terms of what can be purchased with that money. The richest man of the 19th century couldn't buy an air-conditioned house, not with all his millions.
- "GPT$$$ is surely smart enough to separate you from whatever you have..." Assumes an unbounded growth curve in the "smarts" of AI, and worse than that, assumes that that AI will take the form of an LLM. This is laughable. LLMs will not ever achieve AGI; they are simply not capable of it. If AGI is achievable at all (which I doubt), it will come from one of the currently-neglected avenues of research whose funding is currently being neglected because LLMs are sucking all the metaphorical oxygen out of the room.
- "the neofeudal world": assumes that all companies are like that. Yes, there are many companies that suck to work for because they treat their workers as mere cogs in a machine, instead of as human beings. But not all companies operate that way. If you are being treated as a cog in a machine, start looking for opportunities to jump ship to a better working environment. I've worked in both types of places, and I would be willing to take a big pay cut to work for company that didn't treat me as a cog. They're out there, but it might take some looking. Tip: ask employees what it's like working for the comapny, don't just take the interviewers' word at face value.
51 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 54.4 ms ] threadIt offers no constructive alternative and the author (yes, I know who he is) seems to have no issue with Google hosting their email.
It's hard to take this too seriously (even if there is some legitimate worry here)
This has been suggested a bunch of times in the comments of HN as well as on other social media, but what exactly would that look like?
As this seems like the ultimate prisoner dilemma and the winning solution there is always be first to make a deal, even if we accept the premise of AI turning us all into an underclass (a prediction often made with revolutionary technology I might add).
capitalism is artificial intelligence. we dont control capitalism, capitalism controls us and through us builds its next vessel
This is the lump of labor fallacy- the belief that there’s a fixed amount of economically valuable work that technology and capital can eliminate through automation or capital accumulation instead of transforming it.
Middle class status anxiety manifesting as a rhetoric about neofeudalism.
The post industrial revolution jobs market from 1880-1940s was pretty crappy for labor, and we have no idea how things turned out for the average displaced workers. We do know that there were whole sections of towns called skid rows, we know that there were flop houses. We know huge sections of men lived in boarding homes, and women stayed living with their parents. We've read things like Steinbeck and get a glimpse of the life of desperation at the time.
Don't let people fool you that the labor market will look like post WW2 America. It will look like 1880-1940s, during which there were huge labor fights and things were so bad there were 2 world wars.
We can see this logic reflected at times in business history. Ford paid workers double the daily wage so they could afford the cars they built and Costco pays employees 50% more than Walmart. They're not doing these things out of the goodness of their heart but out of greed to increase long term profits.
Yes, the transition can be painful and some people will lose out and face hard career changes.
But overall, the multiplicative power of investment only increases, helping to make everything cheaper, and everyone richer.
People focus too much on their own small part of experience - like Claude Code replacing CRUD developers. Without appreciating that the LLM revolution (and broader AI like AlphaFold) also includes PhD students that don't need to lose time programming tooling, interns that might have spent their time on tooling that can now use LLMs to learn faster and actually contribute to their fields, disadvantaged students that can learn more directly and in a personal way, without it being dependent on their physical location.
All of this means you get more experimentation, more ideas, and more successes.
No gpt18Pro won't cost $1Bi dollars. The buck (or the bubble) will stop somewhere.
I'd be more worried for the people making trades run 1ms faster, they literally create no value to the world that is not something their own peers believe it
There are billions of people not knowing and not caring about what is chatgpt and while it might hit them hard, humans are more flexible and less impressionable than most people think (I mean, some people think it's the other way as well and they might be right in some situations)
Such situations usually correct themselves violently.
> capital is the only force,
be squared with
> A pile of money will buy you nothing in the neofeudal world.
and
> didn’t operate on capitalist principles
? Capital being the driving force is the very definition of capitalism. It's even in its name!
Capital leads to class difference, often immense class difference, which is not a claim against our society as primarily capitalistic but in favor of it. If you took away all the food grown in America and the clothes woven in Bangladesh and the laptops manufactured in China, there would be no Amazon, no Google, no Microsoft, no "technofeudalism." The economic base is still defined by the exchange of commodities, its just that the US does not produce many industrial goods anymore, so the US economy is mostly a service based economy. Chinese citizens do not experience their lifeworld in terms of service based industries, they are surrounded by mass markets and complex factories and very material evidence of mechanization which we often do not see directly in the West, only the end product. So to many Americans it feels like they live in a magical society where they click some keys on their laptop and food and clothes and whatever they need shows up on their doorstep--but there are real workers out there tooling all the machines and developing all the architecture to make those things appear, to reduce the basic struggles of life to give time for greater and more advanced forms of social organization beyond the need to survive.
This is not what peasants had; for them, despite having a relatively complex existence, a bad season could and often would kill their entire family. Or a raiding band would take all their food, or they'd die of the plague...life was far more tenuous, and the basic made of production was not commodity production, it was growing food and animal husbandry. International trade, artisanal crafts, and capital improvements on industrial production were nowhere near the level they were in even the early modern period. Nothing about our contemporary society resembles this way of living.
Addendum: The claim that somehow everyone in tech could just "stop," like consciously decide to stop creating things, is absurd. Amazon is very good at what it does, but it does not have exclusive control over the trade of all goods in the whole world. Rakuten is a major competitor in Japan, there are many other companies that have strong holds in their local markets. You take a Bolt in Germany, not an Uber. Chinese users can query DeepSeek, which is surely more proficient in Mandarin than ChatGPT. Even if a state uses its sovereign power to artificially control industry, it only slows the development of capital, since other states may allow their own companies and technologies to flourish, like China is doing now with its electric vehicles. If Amazon does not meet its projections, it fails, its employees all lose their jobs, Jeff Bezos might even go bankrupt. There is a constant pressure of competition.
As a worker, your goal should not be to arbitrarily stop working--you may not enrich others but you certainly won't be enriching yourself either. The goal should be to capture far more wealth that is the result of your labor. This is only possible through labor organizing, which does not permanently cease the means of production, it only takes control of them. But business continues and people still produce things and do services and enjoy the wealth of those things and services. One should basically desire to live in a wealthy, prosperous society. This article does nothing but ask workers to go into voluntary poverty; it is reactionary and backwards.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/plentiful-high-paying-jobs-in-...
Also, my p(doom) is 1.0-epsilon under the status quo without AGI/ASI, due to old age and disease. Under some assumptions, self-interest says that I may as well roll the dice.
He’s not wrong though, but he’s in a weird position to say that. Also, this post isn’t constructive in any possible way.
If one feels morally compelled to pay with their own income to stop these parasites, hats of to them. It is nasty that people are being put in this position. They need support from a society. Society needs information and debate about real issues, which requires them to be free from the barrage of falsehoods and yellow journalism. And possible it would help to have a Roosevelt, but culture is the biggest hindrance to change.
- "In the future, when labor is fully marginalized..." Hasn't happened in the history of the world, not going to happen in the future either. Some forms of labor were replaced by machines, which then gave rise to new types of jobs, such as building and maintaining the machines. The human cost cannot be neglected, because many people do find it difficult to retrain to other jobs. But on the whole, there are more jobs and higher-paying jobs now than there were a hundred years ago. Higher-paying not just in absolute financial terms, but also in terms of what can be purchased with that money. The richest man of the 19th century couldn't buy an air-conditioned house, not with all his millions.
- "GPT$$$ is surely smart enough to separate you from whatever you have..." Assumes an unbounded growth curve in the "smarts" of AI, and worse than that, assumes that that AI will take the form of an LLM. This is laughable. LLMs will not ever achieve AGI; they are simply not capable of it. If AGI is achievable at all (which I doubt), it will come from one of the currently-neglected avenues of research whose funding is currently being neglected because LLMs are sucking all the metaphorical oxygen out of the room.
- "the neofeudal world": assumes that all companies are like that. Yes, there are many companies that suck to work for because they treat their workers as mere cogs in a machine, instead of as human beings. But not all companies operate that way. If you are being treated as a cog in a machine, start looking for opportunities to jump ship to a better working environment. I've worked in both types of places, and I would be willing to take a big pay cut to work for company that didn't treat me as a cog. They're out there, but it might take some looking. Tip: ask employees what it's like working for the comapny, don't just take the interviewers' word at face value.
A: participate and have a chance to not be part of a perpetual underclass
B: for moral reasons, don't participate, be part of the underclass
I kinda would have hoped for
C: <something> to stop this from happening
Otherwise it's the worst sales-pitch ever