AI won't make things cheaper unless it is decentralized entirely.
A response to Sundar Pichai on the Big Technology Podcast.
One big lie peddled by these AI hawkers, including Sundar Pichai, is that things are expensive to buy because they are expensive to build—not because extractive legal frameworks intentionally determine the standard of living of any society.
I remember at my first job, I disagreed with the idea that someone with the same position in Uganda deserves to be paid less than someone with that exact position in the US. The reason that the employer insisted on was the so-called "cost of living"—which is really just code for enforcing a lower standard of living. It is actually a stupid argument, because standardized, manufactured goods and tools that Ugandans have to import from the US (like laptops, iPhones, cars, or software subscriptions) are actually cheaper in the US than they are in Uganda. It is only the things that Uganda doesn't import that are cheaper in Uganda than they are everywhere else. So clearly, instead of paying Americans more just to hand it over to banks and predatory financing that artificially inflate basic human needs like shelter, someone should make things made in America as cheap in America as things made in Uganda are in Uganda. Man, I feel like this economics talk is a tired psyop that keeps getting to me anyway.
The problem is that now, the economics doublespeak psyop is moving into AI. At the end of this interview, Pichai claims that AI will make things fundamentally cheaper, to the point that we shall have more than we need. This is obviously nonsense—and he even contradicts himself within the exact same conversation. A clear example is software: AI has taken over a significant amount of software development—who can point me to a software that is cheaper than it was 3 years ago? Earlier in the very same interview, Pichai literally brags about how developers are happily paying high prices for coding models and celebrates a 30% jump in sales from their new Argon model. Even the AI chatbots themselves are getting more expensive every day. But for some reason, we should expect the robots to be cheaper than all the Ugandan maids in Arabia.
I swear it is impossible to tell when people are just stupid or when they're just embarrassed to learn.
Other than that, the rest of this conversation isn't trash. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3ItSTZNtT0