Sippican Abides

The world is moving at warp speed lately. The picture pretty much encapsulates how I’ve been dealing with it for my whole life.

I’m not that old. I don’t fart dust or have God’s unlisted phone number or anything. But a lot of earthshaking shifts have taken place in my lifetime. Chatbots/LLMs/Ai/whateveryouwanttocallthem are just the latest shake of the technological snowglobe we live in.  Off the top of my head:

• Phones went from a single black thing on the kitchen wall that rang like a four-alarm fire, to Dick Tracy communicators, with multiple steps between
• Photography went from B&W to Polaroids to 35mm Kodachrome, to potato cams to megapixel cameras in everything. Been to a Fotomat recently?
• Television went from 3 channels to cable to streaming to coming out of gas pump screens
• Movies went from giant screen, destination viewing to VHS tapes to DVDs to digital files people watch on their phones in the subway
• Attention spans went from 8 hours to 8 swipes on TikTok
• Social media went from bulletin boards (actual cork ones) to chat rooms to MySpace to Facebook to Instagram to Twitter to Discord to heaven knows what now
• Cars went from 2 tons of sheet metal, a bench seat, and an AM radio, to rollerskate/spaceship/iPhone cradles
• Finding out stuff on the internet went from (blog)lists to directories (Yahoo) to Google to Chad
• Making images, including moving images, went from pen and ink or cameras the size of a refrigerator, to pixels via an LLM, with mucho layoffs in between

When I say Chad, I mean Chat GPT. Or Claude. Perplexity. Gemini. Any of a number of large language models that elicit scorn or paranoia to taste. Both scorn and paranoia are understandable, but I fear the scornful have forgotten the saying, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” And while armies of terminators aren’t currently roaming the countryside, relying on their chatbot overlords to send them to hunt the next Sarah Conner on the list, there are bound to be lots of casualties from the integration of leviathan computational machines into everyday life. It might not be you directly, but there’s bound to be a lot of collateral damage.

If you’re like me, you’re mostly like The Dude in the picture above. You’re hurtling at warp speed to god knows where, but you’re just along for the ride. I have mostly avoided relying on, or even participating in every step in the technological chain I listed above. But that didn’t mean I scoffed, exactly. I just stood athwart the world and yelled whatever. I didn’t bother yelling stop, because I knew you wouldn’t. I didn’t willingly cooperate in any degringolade, but I didn’t stick my fingers in my ears and chant la la la, either. The world beamed me down to some pretty unpleasant digital planets along the way, though, and I’ve had to change my job description more often than my wardrobe.

So there’s hysteria and there’s scorn about Chad’s effect on damn near everything, depending on who you’re listening to. But someone is at least starting to ask the right questions about the LLM phenomenon. Who’s going to be Crewman Expendable when beaming down to the planet’s surface wearing a red pullover instead of a bathrobe?

Payrolls to Prompts: Firm-Level Evidence on the Substitution of Labor for AI (study found via Marginal Revolution)

It’s an economic treatise, so they’re using weird economist backwards nomenclature. They mean that AI is being substituted for human labor. The study tries to track whether firms are replacing human labor with generative AI in their spending patterns, and what it might cost them to do so. They measured the amount of money being spent on freelance marketplaces like Fiverr and Upwork, or whatever they’re calling themselves this week, and then comparing it to the amount of money the same people spent on AI to do the work instead. Here’s a taste of what they came up with:

We see differential patterns of spending shifts by exposure quartile. In the highest exposure quartile, we find that for every $1 decrease in labor marketplace spend, there is a $0.03 increase in AI model provider spend in Q3 2025 relative to Q1–Q2 2022 baselines. In the middle exposure quartile, we find that for every $1 decrease in labor marketplace spend, there is a $0.30 increase in AI model provider spend in Q3 2025 relative to Q1–Q2 2022 baselines. The true magnitude most likely lies somewhere between these two quartiles. The middle exposure quartile is only significant in the last time period, whereas the highest exposure quartile is significant in all time periods. We note that we cannot observe all potential additional spending that comes from bringing AI in-house, such as infrastructure costs for serving models, as well as increases in engineering headcount to build and maintain AI capabilities. Even if this estimate is conservative, it is still a significant cost savings. For example, if a firm is spending $100,000 on labor marketplaces and $10,000 on AI model providers, the firm is saving $90,000 by substituting labor for AI. Understanding how these cost savings are distributed both across and within firms is important to understand the potential impact of AI on labor markets and the economy more generally.

Got that? It’s possible to save somewhere between 70 and 97 cents on the dollar by firing someone and hiring Chad to do your intellectual scut work.

I can assure you that the replacement of freelance webworkers with Ai chadworkers is happening, bigtime. Entire ecosystems of people gulled into thinking they could write SEO articles or product descriptions or fake reviews or whatever other phony dreck the internet mostly consists of are becoming dead as Scrooge’s doornails, almost overnight. Over the last fifteen years or so, these people have seen one after another internet toehold shift under their feet and leave them without a crummy internet income. They’ve adapted somewhat as webwork changed, but Chads are currently putting a fork in a lot of them permanently. So what are they going to do with themselves?

I have a theory. They’re not going to get real jobs. If they thought they could handle real jobs, they wouldn’t be trying to make their Etsy store pay for their rent, student loans, and medical marijuana in the first place. Even if they’re capable, they’re not willing. They think the world has dealt them some pretty shitty cards, and whatever they can get back from that crooked dealer, they deserve. This is what they’re going to do, in general, if not in particular:

Of course I’m the worst kind of prognosticator. I often predict things that have already happened, and this is no exception. The United States is already awash in criminality. It’s almost ubiquitous at this point, but boy howdy, it can get worse. Shoplifting, aggressive panhandling, porch pirates, vexatious litigants, learing center operators, disability fakirs, drug dealers, gift card scammers, phishers, hackers, and just plain old scofflaws riding around smoking a J with an expired registration and a suspended license.

Chad will be the dread god of such dinky criminality. It’s the rough beast that slouches toward a datacenter in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. What to do? I’m not full of advice on the topic. I’ll simply abide, I guess, as best I can, while everyone around me loses their mind over Chad, until the next thing to lose your mind over appears.

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory (Shelley)