Exactly. Not only have the prices gone up, they've gone up for no real reason other than some CEOs are attempting to take over society. The average person isn't even seeing much of the upside of modern technology anymore, just the downsides. Gadgets no longer get cheaper over time, experiences no longer improve over time, and every new startup or innovation seems to be used to make their lives worse, whether directly or indirectly.
The average person does not really benefit from recent AI tech - and the minuscule benefits they may possibly sometimes get are easily outweighed by the negative effects. Say what you will about the morality of bread and circuses, but making them increasingly out of reach seems like a very bad idea to me.
And can 'most people' even afford most of these services? Having seen some people's spend, even a $200/month plan has me questioning why I'd spend $200/month on Anthropic products when $200/month would be a substantial chunk of my housing as a blue-collar class IT worker just to survive.
You don't need a $200/mo plan, that's for people chewing through Opus tokens with multiple instances of Claude Code going in parallel. My impression is that most people just use the free ChatGPT tier, or $20/mo at most.
I think I'm already real? The main reasons for inflation, outside of computer components, are related to the fact that we're near the end of a long-term debt cycle. Look at demographics and monetary/fiscal policy. This is just the scapegoat du jour for long-term structural issues.
Stability in the job market seems to mean stagnation in the long term. That's fine in the short run, but eventually, you're Germany/France and major pillars of your economy are cornered and in trouble. Personally, I think the move is total at-will employment paired with UBI rather than the heavy-handed employer regs that those countries have for stability, and I think that's where we're going to have to go if job losses really start materializing.
Low paid humans have been pumping out low quality SEO slop full of misinformation for at least the last 15-20 years, it’s not much different. If anything, the quality is probably somewhat higher.
You don’t pay for the insight, you pay for the certificate. If the AI doesn’t give you a degree, it doesn’t really help you. Even before AI, you could have learned stuff from a degree for free.
I don't think the software that lies to you and makes things up on a regular basis is a very good teacher. Even if it was, that's not worth the cost to society vs just improving education.
I don't see it as anti-intellectual as in person learning is going to run into physical constraints of bringing together experts of individual subjects to a student. With the power of AI and the internet it is possible to bring such specialized knowledge directly to students where they are at.
Thinking that teachers (or AIs) are always right is the anti-intellectual way to go through life. Between a teacher or an AI just going off of its training data is a close call; between a teacher and an AI doing a web search it's no contest, it's the AI.
College was never about learning it was about signaling. I get two resumes on my desk, one went to Harvard, one learned about stuff on ChatGPT. Which has a higher likelihood of being a success?
The average person does not really benefit from recent AI tech - and the minuscule benefits they may possibly sometimes get are easily outweighed by the negative effects. Say what you will about the morality of bread and circuses, but making them increasingly out of reach seems like a very bad idea to me.