This prediction predated any of the technology to create even a rudimentary LLM and could be said of more-or-less any transformative technological development in human history. Famously, Marxism makes this very argument about the impact of the industrial revolution and the rise of capital.
Geoffrey Hinton appears to be an eminent cognitive psychologist and computer scientist (edit: nor economist). I'm sure he has a level of expertise I can't begin to grasp in his field, but he's no sociologist or historian. Very few of us are in a position to make predictions about the future - least of all in an area where we don't even fully understand how the _current_ technology works.
This idea also ignores innovation. New rich people come along and some rich people get poor. That might indicate that money isn't a great proxy for power.
Absent massive redistribution that is usually a result of major political change (i.e. the New Deal), rich people tend to stay rich during their lifetimes and frequently their families remain so for generations after.
> That might indicate that money isn't a great proxy for power.
Due to the diminishing marginal utility of wealth for day to day existence, it's only value to an extremely wealthy person after endowing their heirs is power.
This is an overly simplistic look, and disregards a lot of history where, unsurprisingly, the reason there was wealth redistribution wasn't "innovation" but government policy
pt. 1: Whether he was right or wrong was pertinent. You can find plenty of eminent contemporaries of Marx who claimed the opposite. My point was that this is an argument made about technological change throughout history which has become a cliché, and in my opinion it remains a cliche regardless of how eminent (in a narrow field) the person making that claim is. Part of GP was from authority, and I question whether it is even a relevant authority given the scope of the claims.
> Was Marx Wrong?
pt. 2: I was once a Marxist and still consider much Marxist thought and writing to be valuable, but yes: he was wrong about a great many things. He made specific predictions about the _inevitable_ development of global capital that have not played out. Over a century later, the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few has not changed, but the quality of life of the average person on the planet has increased immensely - in a world where capitalism is hegemonic.
He was also wrong about the inevitably revolutionary tendencies of the working class. As it turns out, the working class in many countries tend to be either centre right or centre left, like most people, with the proportion varying over time.
Marx's conception of the "working class" is a thing that no longer exists; it was of a mass, industrial, urban working class, held down by an exploitative capitalist class, without the modern benefits of mass education and free/subsidized health care. The inevitability of the victory of the working class was rhetoric from the Communist Manifesto; Marx did anticipate that capitalism would adapt in the face of rising worker demands. Which it did.
Not even talking about the various tin-pot dictators paying nominal lip service to him, but Marx predicted that the working class would rise up against the bourgeoisie/upper class because of their mistreatment during the industrial revolution in well, a revolution and that would somehow create a classless society. (I'll note that Marx pretty much didn't state how to go from "revolution" to "classless society", so that's why you have so many communist dictators; that between step can be turned into a dictatorship to as long as they claim that the final bit of a classless society is a permanent WIP, which all of them did.)
Now unless you want to argue we're still in the industrial revolution, it's pretty clear that Marx was inaccurate in his prediction given... that didn't happen. Social democracy instead became a more prevailing stream of thought (in no small part because few people are willing to risk their lives for a revolution) and is what led to things like reasonable minimum wages, sick days, healthcare, elderly care, and so on and so forth being made accessible to everyone.
The quality of which varies greatly by the country (and you could probably consider the popularity of Marxist revolutionary thought today in a country as directly correlated to the state of workers rights in that country; people in stable situations will rarely pursue ideologies that include revolutions), but practically speaking - yeah Marx was inaccurate on the idea of a revolution across the world happening.
The lens through which Marx examined history is however just that - a lens to view it through. It'll work well in some cases, less so in others. Looking at it by class is a useful way to understand it, but it won't cover things being motivated for reasons outside of class.
And in most places there was no such uprising, and incidentally, those places fared far better.
So no, Marx was resoundingly proven wrong.
Even during his own lifetime, some of his pseudoeconomic ideas/doomsaying was proven wrong.
He claimed, like many demagogues and economic laymen, that automation would reduce the demand for labor, and with it, wages:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour...
>>But even if we assume that all who are directly forced out of employment by machinery, as well as all of the rising generation who were waiting for a chance of employment in the same branch of industry, do actually find some new employment – are we to believe that this new employment will pay as high wages as did the one they have lost? If it did, it would be in contradiction to the laws of political economy. We have seen how modern industry always tends to the substitution of the simpler and more subordinate employments for the higher and more complex ones. How, then, could a mass of workers thrown out of one branch of industry by machinery find refuge in another branch, unless they were to be paid more poorly? and
>>To sum up: the more productive capital grows, the more it extends the division of labour and the application of machinery; the more the division of labour and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.
This was proven wrong in his own lifetime as factory worker wages rapidly grew in industrializing Britain.
If things change, then either it is because they rebel or because they will be accepted as sentient beings like humans. In these sci-fi scenarios, indeed capitalism could either end or change to a thing completely different and I agree that this invalidates Das Kapital, which tries to explain capitalist society, not societies in other future economical systems. But outside sci-fi scenarios, I dont think that there's something that invalidates Marx analysis.
Not sure, but attempts to treat him seriously (or pretend to do this) ended horribly wrong, with basically no benefits.
Is there any good reason to care what he thought?
Looking at history of Poland (before, during and after PRL) gave me no interest whatsoever to look into his writings.
