> The best anyone can hope for is a free market, with everything properly priced. But for decades, the American market has not been free. It’s used purposefully added friction to exploit a time asymmetry between the business and you. And due to things like call centers, this has been very profitable for the businesses. Cable companies and insurance rely on the fact that your time is more valuable than theirs. They can hire people in India at scale to waste your time. They can use procedure and big data to design protocols to drive you just to the point of frustration at little cost to them. How often do you diligently check Uber and Lyft and select the cheaper one?

> Enter AI, the great equalizer of time.

I didn't read any futher: this is dumb. If a company has the capability to hire literal people to waste your time, they can deploy more AI than you to waste the time of your AI.

AI doesn't flatten asymmetries, it exacerbates them.

The rent seeking class is more powerful than ever. They have completely captured the world. They picked this peophile, who is going to use nuclear weapons, this weekend.

I'm not sure I buy the "everyone will be AI coding to replace things that cost money with their own apps" idea. I only have so much limited time in my day (and only so many tokens on my claude account per week). It's probably going to make more sense for me to buy a tool that's been given human attention over the span of weeks over something i prompt into existence in a few hours (especially if I need 10 such tools to accomplish something).

This is an extremely sensational take that can't be taken as anything but fan fiction. From "the era of purposefully frustrating humans is over", to "the added bonus of the collapse of the US economy. Frankly, it’s well deserved." and "everyone in the world is rooting for the Chinese models".

The Chinese models are open source because they are not state of the art. Once they catch-up or lead, they will likely close them by a government mandate. Just like Meta was fine with llama being open source but once they started to get close to OpenAI/Google/Claude, they shifted their language to "maybe we won't keep doing that."

The idea that AI will end the "rent-seeking class" that has effectively existed for thousands of years is... not going to happen! The business model just adjusts. And if AI is going to be economy-shaping, the cloud-hosted models will continue evolving beyond what you could ever run at home under the desk.

Like self-driving taxis where the business model is to stop paying drivers so we can pay more to big tech companies. Viva la revolution!

> How often do you diligently check Uber and Lyft and select the cheaper one?

Almost always nowadays lol. Shit I’ve gotten poorer over the past few years.

Let's not gloss over the electrical supply. These chips won't work for free.

> The best anyone can hope for is a free market, with everything properly priced. But for decades, the American market has not been free. It’s used purposefully added friction to exploit a time asymmetry between the business and you.

A free market that is "properly priced" is a not a real state of existence.

Resource and information asymmetry, and the exploitation by the those with resource and information privilege of those without it has been present from the very beginning. A free market is just a tool (among many) to achieve a goal for a society.

For some, that goal is explicitly the concentration of wealth and welfare in very few hands. This is oligarchy.

For others, it's the advantaging the welfare and dignity of their "tribe" at the cost of welfare and dignity to perceived outsiders.

And for yet others, it is the advancement of universal welfare and dignity.

Neither a free market nor socialism gets you any of these. What gets you there are the shared narratives that utilize tools like free markets, regulation, and redistribution.

It seems like the rent seeking class is just moving to selling you access to LLMs in data centers by the token. In the past, the "rent-seeking class" being described here was at least part of the middle class. Now a few billionaires are going to capture all of the value, but the rent-seeking isn't going away.