"Baumol's cost disease hurts the lower classes by restricting their access to services like health care and education, and LLMs/agents make it possible to increase productivity in these areas in ways which were once unimaginable."

You've expressed very clearly what LLMs would have to do in order to be economically transformative.

"If you can get high quality medical advice for effectively nothing, if you can get high quality individualized tutoring for free, that's a pretty big game changer for a lot of people. Prices on these services have been rising to the stratosphere over the past few decades because it's so difficult to increase the productivity of individual medical practitioners and educators. We're entering an era that could finally break this logjam."

It's not that process innovations are lacking, it's that product innovations are perceived as an indignity by most people. Why should one child get an LLM teacher or doctor while others get individualized attention by a skilled human being?

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mullingitover 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Why should one child get an LLM teacher or doctor while others get individualized attention by a skilled human being?

Is the value in the outcome of receiving medical advice and care, and becoming educated, or is the value just in the co-opting of another human being's attention?

If the value is in the outcome, the means to achieving that aren't of much consequence.

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alwa 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

More subtly, what is an education? What is care? As you point out, the LLMs are (or probably will become) perfectly good at the measurable parts of those services; but I think the residual edge of “good” education/care is more than just the other human’s co-opted attention.

How many of us have a reminiscence that starts “looking back, the most life-changing part of my primary or secondary education was ________,” where the blank is a person, not a curriculum module? How many doctors operate, at least in part, on hunches—on totalities of perception-filtered-through-experience that they can’t fully put into words?

I’m reminded of the recent account of homebound elderly Japanese people relying on the Yakult delivery lady partly for tiny yoghurt drinks, but mainly for a glimmer of human contact [0]. Although I guess that cuts to your point: the value in that example really is just co-opting another human’s attention.

In most of these caring professions, some of the value is in the measurable outcome (bacterial infection? Antibiotic!), but different means really do create different collections of value that don’t fully overlap (fine, I’ll actually lay off the wine because the doctor put the fear of the lord in me).

I guess the optimistic case is, with the rote mechanical aspects automated away, maybe humans have more time to give each other the residual human element…

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47287344

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bwestergard an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The premise of your argument is that "the outcome" can be separated from the process. This is true enough for manufacturing bricks: I don't much care what processes was used to create a brick if it has certain a compressive strength, mass, etc.

But Baumol's argument, which you introduced to the conversation, is that outcome and process cannot actually be distinguished, even if a distinction in thought is possible among economic theorists.

	▲	TeMPOraL 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It's very true for healthcare (especially mental healthcare) and education today as well, because for most people, the choice isn't LLM vs. human attention - it's LLM vs. no access at all.

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jimbokun an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Even if you have perfect medical information and advice through an LLM, can you perform surgery on yourself? Can you prescribe yourself whatever medication you think you need?

For education, if you know as much as the average Harvard grad, can you give yourself a Harvard degree that will be as readily accepted in a job application or raising funds for a new business?

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Devasta 9 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

> the value just in the co-opting of another human being's attention?

Thats a weird way of describing it.

A machine telling me to exercise and eat right will be ignored, even if the advice is correct. A person I trust taking me aside, looking me in the eye and asking me the same would be taken far more seriously.

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somekyle2 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It also seems like the value of quality tutoring that doesn't primarily function as social/class signaling goes down as tools capable of automating high quality intellectual work are more widely available.

	▲	mullingitover 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It depends on outcome again: is the value of tutoring the social class elevation, or is it in the outcome of becoming more skilled and knowledgable? There's also the deeper philosophical question of what is the meaning of life, and if there's inherent value in learning outside of what remunerative advantages you reap from it.