However, it’s nearly the same global economy. At some point those issues in faraway places are the foreign policy issues in your localities. This is not a defense or argument in favor of hollowing out local economies.

Sadly, cost arbitrage will remain a thing. One underused avenue to make it a more even playing field, is to exports labour and safety standards from the developed world.

Arbitrage built from factories and sweat shops which have suicide nets should be anathema.

This type of enforcement is well within the realms of possibility. FDA inspectors travel to the source factories in other countries to ensure they are compliant.

Factory conditions in kuala lumpur scarcely reach my ears and we don't live under a single world government. It sounds exactly like in defense or argument in favor of hollowing out local economies.

> One underused avenue to make it a more even playing field, is to exports labour and safety standards from the developed world.

Because that has never been and never will be the point of the outsourcing. The point is to undercut higher wages and bargaining power.

I also don't think it would play out that well. If you are offshoring to country B but forced to use a factory following standards from country A you aren't going to be able to compete against a company from Country B using the best factories from country B. In my view you should either try and beat them at their own game by using equivalent factories or you should not outsource and use innovation to come up with a more efficient factory. Purposefully choosing an inefficient option leads to an inefficient economy.

Why the whole country?

Are all your countrymen equally deserving? Do all of them work as hard, care the same, and give back to their nation the same?

I too, want my nation to “win”, but I want that advantage to be something that we built and something that endures.

They need to win by just being that good, and creating an environment that allows for that to happen.

Since everyone cannot be the best and brightest, I would want a safety net that allows for a society that isn’t constantly in fight or flight.

> offshoring .. best factories from country B.

What typically happens is that factory B will offload work to factories that wont be inspected.

> use innovation to come up with a more efficient factory.

This is what is happening today. We’ve been losing more factory jobs to robotics than outsourcing for a while.

——

When manufacturing jobs are lost, the issue of underemployment and the loss of expertise is what hampers economies. Burger flipping pays far less than Foreman or specialist, and losing manufacturing hubs means no cross pollination and skill development in your populace.

This is all to say I am well aware of the issues, and sympathetic to your greater cause.

However, there is no victory for me in your ‘defeat’. The average citizen in any country has more to gain from the deepening of the middle class globally.

Healthy economies, with actual competition, create a deeper more informed citizenry. This means more people living up to their potential, more ideas, more culture, more resources to solve challenges, and a chance to live up the ideals we seem to be failing.

>The average citizen in any country has more to gain from the deepening of the middle class globally.

The deepening of the middleclass here to me has seemingly meant that more people do jobs that are seen as middle class. At the same time the "middle class" purchasing power when it comes to important thing isn't that far off from that of the lower class of the past. yes they can buy big flat screen tv's for cheap now but more important things have started to become an issue despite rapid technological advancement.

>Healthy economies, with actual competition, create a deeper more informed citizenry. This means more people living up to their potential,

You now compete with a foreign multinational which employs people at a fraction of your local wages. So you no longer compete and there's less real actual competition.

You are drawing a causal line between correlated events.

The middle class globally has been weakened since the 80s.

One of the current issues we are contending with is the fact that wealth has concentrated into fewer and fewer hands.

America recently had a year where the top 10% of earners drove nearly 50% of consumer spending.

We could spend the entirety of the conversation discussing wealth concentration, and it would still be a worthwhile digression.

You can’t have a consumer driven market if the consumers don’t have anything to purchase with.

However, when you dismiss flat screen TVs offhandedly also does your own argument a disservice. By deciding what is important and what is not, you are taking on the role of arbiter of subjective merit.

This is fine, but then you have to also make arguments for how the economic incentives must be aligned to achieve your subjective goals.

——

From what I have said, you should know that I am sympathetic to the motivations behind your argument. I am not sympathetic to bad arguments.

Protectionism is fatal to economies, and simply tanks your drive. The ability of MNCs to just offshore work should be benign, but appears malignant. If work is offshored, it should also result in more productivity or higher productivity in the nation it is offshored from.

You should see higher tax revenues as a result, which should be plowed back into your local economy.

Weirdly, our economies seem to all be becoming more productive, but not much richer.

This is one of the reasons I sincerely recommend exporting labour standards more aggressively. At least you are not at a disadvantage because you have actual labour protections, and it reduces the value of labour arbitrage.

The other issue is retraining doesn’t work at the speed and scales changes happen. Our brains are not flexible enough to retrain miners into programmers and have them find jobs which are equally well paying.

If we had a number for how much retraining we can actually achieve, or how much time it would take, we could figure out how much we can outsource before it becomes impossible to retrain our citizens.

And I'm suggesting wage bargaining power has affected that. Not on it's own. But it has had notable effect.

>By deciding what is important and what is not, you are taking on the role of arbiter of subjective merit.

I am as are you but I think I am far from alone. After all the big societal issues that spark these discussions aren't sparked by a few cents of lipstick and somewhat cheaper screens.

>Protectionism is fatal to economies, and simply tanks your drive.

Various protectionist self-serving policies are part of what made japan a threathening rapidly growing economic power untill the US and Europe strongarmed it with....protectionist policy. It's also what made China the power it is today. Etc

And I don't think anyone can argue it stopped japan, china, etc from innovating.

Show me the ultraliberal free for all that did well and isn't super financialized.

"drive" on the other hand is an ephemeral thing that starts falling apart when it is more clearly defined. I can just as easily argue that my drive is hampered because there's no reason for me to attempt to enter plenty of conceivable fields (and even begin to innovate) where i would compete with a multinational utilizing sweatshop workers in Mali. I can also point at the various industries that got internationally more and more consolidated into fewer and fewer players leading to less innovation and "drive".

>This is one of the reasons I sincerely recommend exporting labour standards more aggressively. At least you are not at a disadvantage because you have actual labour protections, and it reduces the value of labour arbitrage.

I don't get to dictate the labour policies of kuala lumpur, etc and any attempt to would be radically more involved costly and far beyond my small countries scope than simply affecting what companies do locally. It is defending a situation with hypotheticals that rarely happen and when they happen they have often happened badly or shift the problem further.

>The other issue is retraining doesn’t work at the speed and scales changes happen. Our brains are not flexible enough to retrain miners into programmers and have them find jobs which are equally well paying.

I think this idea that everyone in the world can be part of the professional-managerial class (PMC) and this striving towards it is also self defeating. You argue about this from a global perspective but also as if it would be good locally in a more developed place if only those with "less desired jobs" could properly retrain and such as if these same reasonings wouldn't apply there. Those jobs that are leaving are desired to me even if I don't do them all. Those wage setting mechanics for jobs in mining, at a call center, assembling components on an assembly line also indirectly affect those wage setting pressures/purchasing power of the software dev, marketing person, etc

See when its an oversimplification of the case history, we will have divergent conclusions.

India's License Raj resulted in decades of slow growth, till the markets were opened in 1990 and incumbents were forced to shape up. Argentina is another case.

Protectionism here is far too broad a term. There are many things which were needed, such as investment in training, labour, export controls, infrastructure investment, industrial policy and more.

The Japanese market was also open to firms, and they most definitely entered and integrated into that market, so its not a one way street.

China is more egregious in that sense, since it has corporate espionage, state protection, and a market which is not really open to foreign compeition (unless you are a luxury brand).

> Show me the ultra-liberal free-for-all that did well

I am not going to ever make that case, since I don't believe that ever existed or succeeded if it did.

> I can just as easily argue that my dr

Sure, feel free to argue. However there are others who just want to make stuff, and don't spend the time arguing.

> I don't get to dictate the labour policies of kuala lumpur,

Says who? Have you ever seen an outsourcing contract? They include terms on how people should be fired, number of working days, and more. Rules vary according to jurisdiction, however the contract can include whatever terms you like.

> I think this idea that everyone in the world can be part of the professional-managerial class

Where did you get this? I am talking about retraining. You could retrain into naval captains for all I care.

> less desired jobs" could properly retrain

Not what I am saying. I am saying the argument for outsourcing used to be supported by the idea that those who lost employment could be retrained into other domains.

However, there are limits to what retraining can actually achieve, which removes the support this argument provided.

And for an outsourcing contract to be that way there's a certain intent that needs to exist.

Sadly this sounds like par for the course when it comes to tech. Too many messages and requests for help depend on knowing someone in the right slack groups.

At least, that's really the message this sends in my opinion

You're a funny one aren't you...

Meet "Fin" Anthropic's "where support questions go to die" so-called-support bot, created by Intercom but powered by Anthropic.

Maybe it's an internal in-joke in the Anthropic offices ... "Fin" in french means "End".

I don't know anyone who has had a positive experience with "Fin" .... or ever spoken to a human at Anthropic support for that matter, even if you ask "Fin" to escalate.

Customer support and safety are cost centers. It doesn’t scale like software does and no one’s KPIs are going to improve dramatically if you provide support beyond a point.

AI and LLMs are the cool tech, and the most important thing is to push the frontier. Money spent elsewhere is money not spent on R&D.

It would be hilarious if it wasn’t the GDPs of nations being spent on this.

> to be fair, everyone on my team has decade+ professional experience (many more non-prodessional), and we understand limitations of AI fairly well.

I see this appear quite often in discussions on productivity, to the point that a conclusion may be made regarding its centrality for productivity gains.

At the end of the day, if I am spending X$s for automation, I want to be able to sleep at night knowing my factory will not build a WMD or delete itself.

If its simply a tool that is a multiplier for experts, then do I really need it? How much does it actually make my processes more efficient, faster, or more capable of earning revenue?

There is a LOT that is forgiven when tech is new - but at some point the shiny newness falls off and it is compared to alternatives.

Review and oversight does address reliability directly, and hence why we make use of those in processes to improve the reliability of mechanical processes as well, and why they are core elements of AI harnesses.

> If its simply a tool that is a multiplier for experts, then do I really need it? How much does it actually make my processes more efficient, faster, or more capable of earning revenue?

You can ask the same thing about all the supporting staff around the experts in your team.

> There is a LOT that is forgiven when tech is new - but at some point the shiny newness falls off and it is compared to alternatives.

Only teams without mature processes are not doing that for AI today.

Most of the deployments of AI I work on are the outcome of comparing it to alternatives, and often are part of initiatives to increase reliability of human teams jut as much as increasing raw productivity, because they are often one and the same.

Yes and no. see next point.

> You can ask the same thing about all the supporting staff around the experts in your team.

I have a good idea of the shape of errors for a human based process, costing and the type of QA/QC team that has to be formed for it.

We have decades, if not centuries of experience working with humans, which LLMs are promising to be the equivalents/superiors of.

I think you and me, would both agree with the statement "use the right tool for the job".

However, the current hype cycle has created expectations of reliability from LLMs that drive 'Automated Intelligence' styled workflows.

On the other hand:

> part of initiatives to increase reliability of human teams

is a significantly more defensible uses of LLMs.

For me, most deployments die on the altar of error rates. The only people who are using them to any effect are people who have an answer to "what happens when it blows up" and "what is the cost if something goes wrong".

(there is no singular thread behind my comment. I think we probably have more in agreement than not, and its more a question of finding the precise words to declare the shapes we perceive.)

I moved this up top, because I agree, despite the length of the below:

> However, the current hype cycle has created expectations of reliability from LLMs that drive 'Automated Intelligence' styled workflows.

Because for a lot of things it works. Today. I have a setup doing mostly autonomous software development. I set direction. I don't even write specs. It's not foolproof yet by any means - that is on the edge of what is doable today. Dial it back just a little bit, and I have projects in production that are mostly AI written, that have passed through rigorous reviews from human developers.

The key thing is that you can't "vibecode" that. I'm sure we agree there.

There needs to be a rigorous process behind it, and I think we'll agree on that too.

Those processes are largely the same as the processes required for human developers. Only for human developers we leave a lot of that process "squishy" and under-specified.

We trust our human developers to mostly do the right thing, even though many don't, and to not need written checklists and controls, even though many do.

What is coming out of this is a start of systems that codify processes that are very much feels based with human teams. Partly because we still need to codify them for AI, but also because we can - most people wouldn't want to work in the kind of regimented environment we can enforce on AI.

Sure, there is a lot of hype from people who just want to throw random prompts at an LLM and get finished software out. That is idiocy. Even a super-intelligent future AI can't read minds.

But there are a lot of people building harnesses to wrap these LLMs in process and rigor to squeeze as much reliability as possible from them, and it turns out you can leverage human organisational knowledge to get surprisingly far in that respect.

> There needs to be a rigorous process behind it, and I think we'll agree on that too.

I would simplify it to: “I have a setup” is the part that is doing the actual heavy lifting.

From my very unscientific survey / extensive pestering of network, the only people getting lift out of AI are people with both domain expertise/experience and familiarity with the tooling.

The types of automation I see people wanting though are fully automated customer support systems, fully automated document review - essentially white collar dark factories. (Hey thats a good term). The need is for a process that is stable, and behaves the same way every time.

It seems actual AI use cases are more like sketching - if you have enough skill you can make out the rough sketch is unbalanced and won’t resolve into a good final piece. Non experts spend far more time exploring dead ends because they don’t have the experience.

In my opinion, it’s a force multiplier for experts or stable processes, and it’s presented as Intelligence.

I feel your examples fit within these boundaries as well as the ones you have described.

for MVPs, mock ups, prototypes or in the hands of an expert coder. You can't let them go unsupervised. The promise of automated intelligence falls far short of the reality.

The market is the thing we create, and its effective functioning is what competition and regulation is meant to enable. It is through the functioning of the market that effective resource allocation occurs.

> A market economy is meant to generate the best allocation of resources and the biggest benefits for consumers. For these promises to be fulfilled, consumers must be able to see and choose alternatives deliberately; compare them on undistorted dimensions; form preferences that reflect actual interests; and switch freely. Cognitive exploitation undermines all four of these. Infinite scroll captures attention. Dark patterns distort comparison. Dopaminergic loops manufacture compulsion. Addiction engineering blocks effective switching.

> Securities regulation offers an instructive analogy. When a trader manipulates stock or derivatives prices, the law treats the crime as a structural harm to the broader market; the corrupted price no longer tells the truth. Cognitive exploitation should be seen in the same light, at a much larger scale. When platforms systematically manufacture the preferences of billions of users, consumer signals no longer point anywhere useful. That is a structural failure.

Internal testing showed these features were addictive. They had resources allocated to creating addictive experiences for tweens.

The underlying behavioral science is well studied, down to the causal level.

Dark patterns are designed to make it hard to exit and unsubscribe. The language is purposefully obtuse, the options buried behind menu choices. We have enough A/B testing data to know how effective friction is at dissuading people from following a path.

How are we proving a negative here?

> The question is whether the company can show, before rolling a product out to billions of people, that it is not predatory by design.

"Not predatory" is a negative