Hazel Weakly

There is a form of delegation that develops the people involved, so that people can continue to contribute and grow. Each individual can contribute what is unique to them, and grow more capable as they do so. Both people, and the community of those people remain alive, lively, and continue to grow. Some people call this paradigm “regenerative”; only living systems regenerate.

There is another form of delegation where the work needed to be done is imposed onto another, in order to exploit and extract value. We are trying to do this with LLMs now, but we also did this during the Industrial Revolution, and before that, humanity enslaved each other to get the labor to extract value out of the land. This value extraction leads to degeneration, something that happens when living systems dies.

While the Industrial Revolution afforded humanity a middle-class, and appeared to distribute the wealth that came about — resulting in better standards of living — it came along with numerous ills that as a society, we still have not really figured out.

I think that, collectively, we figure that the LLMs can do the things no one wants to do, and so _everyone_ can enjoy a better standard of living. I think doing it this way, though, leads to a life without purpose or meaning. I am not at all convinced that LLMs are going to give us back that time … not unless we figure out how to develop AIs that help grow humans instead of replacing them.

The following article is an example of what I mean…