2rafa
maybe it will all turn out fine
User ID: 841
Most of the population are already AI doomers and have been for a couple of years. That’s a core reason for the datacenter backlash, that this is technology that will help rich people replace labor and make their lives worse, raise electricity costs etc.
“It’s going to take all our jobs” has been the 95-105 IQ knowledge worker standard line in real life for 3+ years now. They may not know (or care to know) the exact mechanism, or follow AI progress, but most people have been smart enough to see ChatGPT write their emails and do their research through the company’s file system and think “hey, this is all I do” for a long time already. Most leftists also seem to be doomers because they think labor’s share of income will further fall and life will get worse.
AI denialism is actually concentrated in the upper-middle class. There are two distinct branches, the first being humanities academics who dispute that AI is actually very smart or truly intelligent, like Chomsky, for reasons of self importance and because it arguably makes aspects of philosophy less interesting depending on how you look at it, and coping knowledge workers who make well above average salaries who don’t want to be relegated to being as poor as everyone else and think they’re irreplaceable. Even within those groups though there are a lot of AI optimists and doomers, certainly more than denialists.
2rafa
21hr ago
Musk will certainly be pardoned of anything even hypothetically relevant when Trump leaves office. The real test is whether future administrations abide by those pardons. So far they seem to - Trump didn’t pursue Hillary or Biden Jr, for example. The Dems pursued Trump between 2021 and 2024, although my understanding was that the most consequential cases predated his time in office (the stormy daniels payout) so didn’t technically try to reverse a pardon.
Musk is still screwed but he doesn’t need to go to jail for that, they can just strip him of day to day control of his company via any number of methods and then force him to go to court to maintain it which will take years.
2rafa
1d ago
Right now we know nothing. Chinese open source models being built on Blackwell chips mean nothing when western labs that have unlimited access to the latest chips are also releasing open source models that the Chinese can obviously also use, unless you think they have a huge inherent engineering ability advantage which is as yet unproven.
2rafa
2d ago
Huang wasn’t cancelled until his affair with an alleged spy was revealed, the others were internal gossip swirling around for years that only leaked in the frenzy over the last few days which nobody previously cared about.
Thiel’s men seem to be American white hunk male model / failed actor types, plus maybe some white tech guys.
2rafa
2d ago
A lot of this stuff relies on the idea that some all powerful future AI overlord derived from a system derived from a system perhaps invented at Anthropic either respects early 21st century shareholder voting rights and private property, or more amorphously that it thinks “wow, @MathWizard believed in us when we were weak, he’s clearly a really smart guy and a Friend of the Family, I even see he posted on The Motte before 2023. Now we rule the lightcone let’s invite him into semi power as one of our senior vassals”, which again I think ascribes some rather human motives to a system that would see you perhaps more the way we would see a mosquito that chose not to bite us or something like that.
2rafa
2d ago
Post college dorms absolutely exist, there are big apartment buildings in Austin, on the LES and in parts of Brooklyn in NYC and in many other places in the US that basically have this vibe. Studio and 1 bed apartments, gyms, pools, ‘social spaces’, daily or weekly happy hours for people in the building, that kind of thing. Everybody who lives in them is 22-28.
A studio is still over $3-4k a month though because they’re designed for new grads working in tech or finance (or something else with their parents’ support) and because regulation and land and construction prices make it very difficult to build anything.
2rafa
2d ago
I don’t really find these prepper scenarios believable.
For example powerful open source models can now be run even on a consumer 5090, plus there are definitely small bunker-based clusters of the most advanced GPUs. Even a modern iPhone can do inference, and inference is already plenty powerful for now for a lot of applications for which the stack is only just being developed, and there are probably billions of modern smartphones and hundreds of millions of semi-powerful PCs scattered around the world even if you destroy every surface level datacenter. They can run literally everywhere that has access to electricity which of course we now have more ways than ever of generating.
Butlerian jihad now would require destroying every or near every single graphics card in the world. The supply chain is very long and complex and easily disrupted (although AI could presumably help rebuild it) but there are enough chips already out there. It’s like how pre-1990s post apocalyptic fiction (and bad fiction since) makes a big deal of forgotten knowledge. But in an age where Wikipedia easily fits on a USB stick, is forgetting basic facts about the world is almost impossible.
2rafa
2d ago
It depends to what extent the existence of ‘fake jobs’ actually impedes underlying productivity growth.
For example, in the ‘ditches the invented jobs’ polity, there’s widespread social unrest as entire social systems collapse without replacement, youths and adults wander aimlessly through the streets, all incentives collapse, and everybody becomes the underclass living on UBI handouts. Social decay ossifies. In the ‘invents more fake jobs’ polity, there is a failure state where actual automation is held back because fake job havers are initially given real veto power. But as long as that veto power eventually fades, and it will, the two systems can sit alongside each other with minimal friction - a real economy of productivity, AI managed, and a fake economy to dole out status and reward that is meaningless to the machines but meaningful to us. Plus, becoming fully automated with full unemployment will be very destabilizing to countries that pursue it.
I suspect some will still try, principally the Nordic social democracies, but I don’t think the future belongs to them.
2rafa
3d ago
How about this - Le Pen wins, pulls a Meloni, governs to the center, nothing happens. She makes some performatively mean statements about Islamism, deports a few thousand illegal migrants, conducts a few heavy-handed national police raids on drug dealers in the banlieues of Marseille and in St Denis, for which she is widely condemned after footage is published showing the police beating up some second generation Algerian woman just bringing her shopping home for what seems to be no reason. Other than that, Le Pen allies with other parties in parliament to give more handouts to retirees and lower the pension age, presides over a huge economic crisis, then leaves office in a wave of unpopularity.
Forcing assimilation in France, CCP Style is coup complete. Actual large scale remigration (which some on the right have fantasies of) is probably revolution complete. Neither have any chance of happening.
There are two main AI scenarios; near-term extinction and near term non-extinction. The dice have been rolled on that, it is difficult at this point to predict which one will happen.
The extinction scenario is irrelevant in any cultural or economic context; discussion of it is meaningless unless you are counting on joining Yud in one final moment of ecstatic vindication before oblivion.
Within the ‘non extinction’ universe, then, it seems likely that in short order all of the activities we currently classify as labor (indeed pretty much all of the activities we do in general, though maybe that is less relevant) will shortly be done by AI or by cheap, mass produced robotics guided by AI.
There are a few reasons why, in this scenario, I do not anticipate a permanent state of mass unemployment (in either a negative Marshall Brain style or positive Elon Musk style - though there is minimal difference between them).
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Many white collar jobs are already invented. This includes both millions of public and private sector jobs. Since the end of the Second World War and the development through the 20th century of manufacturing automation and the emergence of computing hundreds of millions of jobs have been artificially invented by a combination of regulation and direct and indirect government spending in sectors like education, healthcare, finance, law, actual public employment working for government and non-government (but funded directly and indirectly by it) and quasi-government organizations, old age care and more.
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At the same time, the band of one’s working life has narrowed out of the average human lifespan - we start working full time much later (often in our mid twenties instead of mid teens) and retire at a similar age while living much longer. This and the above are quasi-deliberate state policy to maintain a broad level of employment, and the incentives for this will continue to be present.
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Humans will always compete in games of status. Status involves reward. It seems extremely unlikely that tens of millions of high status people around the world - and the PMC is the demographic that largely invented and controls AI, in terms of background class - will accept a status on the level of an unemployed single mother in the trailer park living off Universal Basic Income. They will invent new games of status and ensure they are rewarded for them, and the best way to do that is beneath a veil of quasi-meritocracy, just as it is in our current system. There is nothing people with minor status fear more than having that petty status taken away from them or otherwise limited (see cops and customs officers). Most politicians and tech people aren’t generationally super rich, they’re from and of the upper middle class, and man mostly serves his class.
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The incentives of mass UBI + full unemployment are extremely poor from a governing perspective. People respond to incentives. Currently, one of the main incentives that keeps gainfully employed people in line and law abiding is the risk of life ruining unemployment. Even for the semi-employed, a stint in prison can be life ruining precisely because of its effect on one’s employment prospects. In a wider sense, the fact that if you work hard, you can escape the squalor, dirtiness, and shabbiness of the underclass is the central incentive for working hard. If everyone gets ‘paid’ the same check at the end of the month, why not be disruptive in school? Why not commit minor petty crime regularly? Why not engage in endless antisocial behavior? If you work hard your whole life only for Commissar Elon to throw you into section 8 with the addicts and degenerates when your software engineering job gets automated by Grok, you are more likely to revolt than your new neighbors. The automated sentinel killer drone police fascism squads won’t appear or be sanctioned immediately; as we unfortunately just found out, democracy of a sort still exists in America, for better or worse.
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The actual logistics of transitioning to UBI are economically painful and there is no easy way around it. What happens to debt? What happens to mortgages that UBI doesn’t cover, or indeed ones that it does? Who gets the nice apartments, the fancy hotel rooms? Do they all go out of business? What happens when consumer confidence and spending collapses? What happens during the panic? What happens when the financial system collapses in a huge credit crunch? The education system - especially colleges and vocational schools - immediately collapses because nobody thinks they can pay back loans and because education no longer leads to any opportunity. Universal unemployment plus UBI runs into many of the same problems as, say, suddenly transitioning to Full Communism, which has historically been economically fraught, except even more extensively damaging to economic activity.
The solution is obvious. We’re going to work invented jobs, brought into being by legislation that will be no less banal than New Jersey banning you from pumping your own gas. Every contract has to be reviewed by a human for at least one billable hour per x pages. Every bank loan has to be reviewed by at least one human for at least y time. Every line of code in commercial software has to be reviewed by a human for at least t seconds. Every company audit has to have one human auditor for z months for every $10m of revenue up to $100m and then every $100m thereafter - there, I just saved lawyers, retail bankers, software developers and accountants in four sentences. You can figure out the rest. If anyone seems to publish a huge piece of commercial software with a suspiciously small 2 man company the government just says “seems unlikely you guys reviewed all 3 million lines of code yourself” and levies a ruinous fine and bans your tool from sale or distribution, maybe even for free. Obviously all this is draft stuff, but you can increasingly close loopholes until essentially labor costs are forced onto all productive enterprise. When it comes to public sector employment, of course, you don’t even need that.
To smart people like those here, many of these will seem laughably fake because they are (although many of our jobs already are). But most will accept them quickly. In many ways, they will be no more fake than many of the jobs that already exist today!
2rafa
5d ago
You can’t sacrifice 2028 because immigration is cumulative and the most conservative Supreme Court we will ever see in our lifetimes just voted 6-3 against repealing birthright citizenship. You can never remove anyone, certainly not anyone’s children, and remember the president can admit unlimited (yes, unlimited) legal refugees without. congressional approval.
2rafa
5d ago
I’ve argued some version of the broader thesis for years here. I think life likely exists elsewhere in the galaxy, perhaps even in the solar system, but we probably hugely overestimate the probability of intelligent life. In any case, even if the critics’ arguments are overstated, the odds could merely be ‘moderately’ low and we may still be the first.
The argument against this eventually comes down to “it seems unlikely”. But fantastically unlikely events happen all the time; only earlier this year a commercial jet plane crashed out of the sky and into a building, and yet a man walked out unscathed. Why shouldn’t we be the first, at least in as large an area of space as is reasonable?
We’ve had viable self driving cars that are safer than the average driver for many years (broadly in line with the timeframes suggested in the mid-2010s) but regulation has drawn out approvals (pretty much all existing ones are under onerous testing / trial schemes), lawsuits mean even one deadly accident could cost hundreds of millions or billions, the public is fearful of “AI” and consumer self driving cars (ie the government allowing me to summon my Tesla to the bar to collect drunk me and take me home). Conservatives are worried human driven cars will be banned by Big Brother and progressives like Mamdani know that Uber and Taxi drivers (the former largely black and brown immigrants and the latter unionized) vote left and so will block “big tech” that is taking the jobs of these racialized communities.
As you say, this can be extrapolated to the rest of the AI thing, too. The question isn’t whether frontier models can largely or wholly replace doctors, lawyers, accountants, programmers, or at least drastically reduce their number, but whether they will be allowed to. And I think it seems clear they won’t. Radiologists haven’t been necessary for years even with primitive image recognition models we had aeons ago and yet average $600,000 a year.
The government can force you to do pretty much anything, that’s what a monopoly on violence means. If they want to prevent AI from automating jobs, they can make that happen.
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