Shirayuki3
new account for Shirayuki2
User ID: 4553
Shirayuki3
3d ago
It's entirely possible that the current culture shifts considerably now that anti-earthquake tech has got good enough that you can broadly assume buildings are going to hang around for 100 years.
You could well be right, but when and how much these things shift is of course impossible to predict.
The obvious examples that comes to mind are pork taboos; the cultural taboo against eating pork in many cultures and religions has lasted well beyond the actual danger of eating pork.
Shirayuki3
3d ago
If the Nobel Prize is any indication, they'll probably keep awarding them, but much like modern scientific Nobels they'll become increasingly divorced from being awarded for the flashes of brilliance of individual people, and lean towards being awarded to people at the head of massive agglomerations of capital.
People just really like venerating figureheads and leaders, and I doubt this will ever change.
Shirayuki3
3d ago
To me, it's kind of like asking what happens if an amateur managed to prove the Riemann hypothesis or a billionaire self-funded a cure to Alzheimers; perhaps it's possible in theory, but in practice if it was so easy it would already have been done.
We can see that even pre-AI the romantic idea of another Ramanujan arising from outside the establishment was risible in reality, and now post-AI all of the most significant advances are being made with the contribution of some of the smartest mathematicians in the world backed by internal models and enormous amounts of compute; I see no reason for this trend not to continue.
In some senses it's not really all that surprising. It's already impossible to push the frontier in biology or physics without significant amounts of capital backing and a decade of training to even begin to understand a tiny fraction of the existing frontier; mathematicians will just have to deal with this reality as well. The fields medal is kind of a symbol of the mathematical fetish of youth and the lone genius, which AI is now killing for good; see Terence Tao on the end of the age of heroes.
Shirayuki3
3d ago
Well, the point is that culture shapes economics and politics.
Anglo people (and many other cultures e.g Chinese) view housing as an investment and hence over time laws are shaped around this preference e.g strict zoning laws to keep property values high and the population happy. To the extent that boomers are at fault it's because most are homeowners, but millennial homeowners have all the same impulses.
Japanese people don't value housing as an investment as much, and so the economy and politics are less captured by the interests of homeowners. It's not to say that this is perfect e.g Chinese investment into Tokyo has become a hot topic lately, and urban land is fundamentally scarce, but it's clearly a lot better than whatever Anglo society is doing in this regard.
Shirayuki3
4d ago
Is every developed country implementing PHP?
Tokyo (and Japan more generally) doesn't implement PHP. Houses are culturally considered depreciating goods that are worthless after a few decades, and zoning is extremely liberal compared to all other developed countries.
To some extent you're correct, part of the problem is just urbanization, and inevitably lots of money chasing physically limited space drives up the price. The best areas of Tokyo are still extraordinarily expensive despite every pro-development policy possible and significant amounts of Japanese housing would be considered unlivable by American standards.
Despite this, there's clearly a massive difference in house price growth between Anglo PHP major metros where prices have been exploding, and Tokyo where growth has been much more sedate in comparison; even within the States, the difference between Austin and SF is palpable.
Shirayuki3
4d ago
How would that look?
Probably much like it does right now, a mathematical priestly caste who spend their lives training to understand and disseminate the arcane knowledge of frontier mathematics.
Even prior to AI, modern pure mathematics was already impenetrable to 99.99% of the population, and even mathematicians of different disciplines mostly struggled to understand each other's work.
Now that we have AI it's really no different; nearly everyone has no ability to even approach the starting line of understanding the superb works of the AI, and it's mostly through the lens of mathematicians that we assign value and meaning to the new results. I don't see why such a dynamic can't continue once the mathematicians manage to reconstruct their shattered egos.
Shirayuki3
5d ago
In our current situation, a better adaptation for those outside the ranks of the elites might be to blame everything on the rich and to scare the living shit out of them until they give up their resources.
The American and French fiscal problems are not because the rich are hoarding too many resources. Primarily they're being caused by the fact that spending is out of control because every interest group needs a cut to secure their votes in a democracy, and it's politically intractable to cut back entitlements to the base once they've been offered.
To the extent that every elite billionaire got fully expropriated at the full paper value of their assets, and without considering any of the obvious second-order effects that this would cause, neither France nor America could fund their current level of spending for even a year longer; much like the NBA players who end up going broke, you can always spend more money no matter how much you make.
To he degree that I have any socialist tendencies, they are purely selfish -- I'm not primarily concerned with what economic system is more moral or is better for the majority of people.
If AI really does unlock infinite labour and productivity, then sure, I'll be alongside you in the socialist protest lines for whatever good it'd do. Clearly we're very far from that point in the current state of the world though, and rampant welfarism is what's actually breaking the backs of pretty much every modern democracy.
not because they haven't been obsoleted. They have.
Well, what does it mean to be obsoleted?
Viewed from one lens, chess players were obsoleted by DeepBlue and Go players by AlphaGo a long time ago. If you want the best chess sparring partner, your phone can trivially outclass the best humans alive without any reason to ever play another human being.
Viewed from another lens, human chess and go has been exploding in popularity over the last few years; there are likely many more people who play chess and go now when compared to two decades ago, and it would be ridiculous to claim the human acts of playing chess or go are obsoleted. In practice, the best human players are still high status and make a lot of money, while the overwhelming supremacy of Stockfish is free and generates almost no economic value.
For those who had dreams of being the greatest chess player on the planet or etching their name into history as the next Euler, then I'm sure losing to the computer is a blow to the ego, but realistically this wasn't on the table for the vast majority of even the best chess players or mathematicians alive, AI or not.
There's no reason why the human practice of mathematics can't reorient itself around the supremacy of AI while continuing to draw down salaries and playing petty academic status games; god knows none of it was any practical importance in the end.
Shirayuki3
13d ago
Red China has done it in the relatively recent past.
Public executions have a very lindy history in China, but my point was that even they abolished public executions well before live-streaming even existed. Even the Muslim nation states and North Korea that still carry out public executions don't livestream them for the gawking world at large to see, it's really only the cartels and jihadis that do that.
That being said, this is the reverse case to America, where many Chinese people would actually quite like to see public executions return, and in general the death penalty holds massive public support.
And there’s always streaming on X.
I would be moderately surprised if Elon would want an execution prominently streamed on X, but perhaps I'm wrong there.
While my preferred method of execution here would be hanging
Why do you prefer hanging, for the spectacle? As someone who does not support the death penalty, if it must be carried out, the firing squad seems like the best method in terms of lethality and dignity. Botched hangings are extraordinarily cruel, and of course lethal injection is both cruel and undignified.
Christian commenters have lamented what they see as the barbarity and vulgarity of the live-streaming aspect
Personally, I am concerned that the Trump administration will, yet again, find some way to botch the aesthetics of the occasion, reveling in low-class pandering and/or ostentatious cruelty.
If your goal is to RVTURN to lindy public executions, which I can at least understand the argument for, then jumping from zero to one thousand by breaking new ground in live-streaming the execution (which I believe has no precedent from an internationally recognized nation state, only via terrorists and cartels) as red meat for the base is obviously not the way to do it.
Many have warned that this will generate photogenic martyrdom propaganda that will inspire and energize future jihadists.
This is also just plainly obvious; public executions, before even bringing in the live-streaming aspect, are currently still well outside of the Overton window. It seems fairly clear that this will turn into a massively polarizing event amongst Americans and the developed world more broadly, while the actual jihadists will be the ones to benefit in finding common cause and a new martyr to rally around. It's clearly counterproductive in terms of actually winning in the marketplace of ideas.
There is also the possibility of visible corruption: perhaps viewers will need to pay for a bespoke streaming platform which will put revenue in the pockets of Trump, Trump’s family, or a consortium of Trump donors
I am somewhat morbidly curious how this is going to be streamed. I can't imagine any of the existing platforms wanting anything like this anywhere near them, but perhaps the administration will try and force them to bend the knee. Otherwise, as you say, it will probably be a bespoke streaming platform that's the stuff of nightmares.
Shirayuki3
16d ago
While AI continuing to be exceptional at mathematics doesn't particularly make me think that it's more likely that most/all labour is imminently automatable, I do agree with your point that if this is truly the case, there's really no point in trying to get rich to avoid dying on the streets when the 0.01% decide to mass unemploy the entire population or whatever. Coordination issues amongst the powers that be aside, it is obviously just not a stable equilibrium for the middle class to be unemployed and starving, while some dude who happened to own the right stocks at the right time is allowed to enjoy a nice lifestyle in perpetuity.
Either most everyone manages to secure material abundance via some combination of make-work and redistribution, which honestly already describes significant swathes of modern economies as you say, and having been rich perhaps confers some marginal status advantages and nothing more, or Something Happens that having a bunch of cash doesn't meaningfully insulate you from: e.g communist overthrow of the state (for real this time), violent state repression and expropriation of most the population, or AI loss of control where everyone dies.
I don't think I'm really all that sanguine re: the question of meaning though. The middle-class in developed countries are already mostly post-scarcity relative to a pre-industrial and a pre-computing basis in nearly all ways (the big exceptions would probably be in zero-sum usage of land and the decay of the body). Yet despite this, most people in the middle class are various flavors of miserable, generally aren't able to generate their own meaning ex nihilo, and mostly drive themselves mad via status comparison and/or the culture war.
If you thought hyper-partisan politics and status competition was bad in 2026, just wait until it's impossible to better your position via actual economic contribution, and the only way to access more resources, status and positional goods is to take it via the political process out of the arms of another. Even if the "utopian" world pans out, I frankly can't see this leading to anything but mass misery even if material needs are met in abundance.
Shirayuki3
1mo ago
I suppose this is this week's race discussion thread; could someone actually steelman the "white supremacy" takes, for lack of a better way to put it after a minute's thought, that seem all the rage on the Motte lately? For example, this post from last week's thread, and the OP.
I can quite well understand the theory of mind of people who complain about mass immigration, or even immigration in general.
I can also understand the theory of mind of the HBD realists and the scientific racists who go on about the Hajinal line or Ashkenazi selection pressures or whatever. If you're actually a WASP nativist or something then alright, at least you have something cohesive going on there.
Yet when people start going on about whiteness it just seems really silly to me. Just in the last hundred years Greeks, Italians, Slavs, Irishmen went from distinctly "other" to "white" to all but the most dedicated haters. Likely in another hundred years assimilated Hispanics, Indians and East Asians will probably be considered "white" for all intents and purposes.
If "white" is just a Schelling point for the things you actually care about (culture, immigration, governance, whatever) then complaining about some dudes wearing cowboy hats just makes you sound like a base racist that misses the point entirely.
Basically the whole overcapacity discourse is cope for Western fiscal irresponsibility and stagnant incumbents in threatened industries
I'm not sure why you're trying to shadowbox with a completely different set of arguments, instead of what I actually said. I fully agree with you on this point, and in fact quite admire Chinese industrial policy.
I'm simply making the point that mathematically it is not possible that America could meaningfully experience a productivity boom driven by exporting to global markets as you initially suggested. There is simply not enough money in global markets capable of absorbing a meaningful productivity increase in American goods. Any such increase in production would need to be absorbed by American consumers, which would then mechanically raise the consumption input of GDP, realistically by quite a bit, if you're proposing that Grok designed Optimus robots or Teslas etc are going to be mass produced and consumed.
Automating office work does not linearly lead to X times more office work done at the same compensation, maybe the workload can just expand to fill the capacity, real earnings are fixed, and net "productivity gain" is minor.
My median expectation is similar, in that that significant amounts of what AI can automate was already bullshit, and that application of AI to actual production will find itself limited in an Amdahlian sense by everything it cannot automate. My point is that if you expect rapid American production dominance diffused into the physical world driven by AI advantage, I don't see how you can expect minor net GDP and productivity growth at the same time. Mechanically this would bring up C, I and moderately NX in the GDP equation.
Shirayuki3
1mo ago
The problem with the weak argument is that it is, well, weak. It demonstrates nothing
Well, the point is that framing is everything in public perception.
You can frame what happened as "OpenAI lost control of an emerging agent-civilization", or you can frame it as "OpenAI has horrible cybersecurity culture and trains using poorly designed RL environments", and OpenAI is clearly marketing to spin the narrative towards the first framing, whether or not you actually believe that line of thought.
Shirayuki3
1mo ago
There is no such thing as "overcapacity"
Overcapacity in the sense that "Westerners complain about Chinese EVs being too cheap" is cope, but overcapacity in the sense that "the Chinese produce much more compared to what they can currently consume domestically" is just a matter of fact.
they earn and consume plenty for their GDP bracket and had a fast income share growth over the entire period of getting more competitive
That's an interesting Twitter thread, some things to consider there. Still, the sole claim I was making in my previous post is that if the American economy gained Chinese Characteristics and started heavily ramping up production, then that production would show up as business investment and either in domestic consumption statistics (more likely) or in net exports (less likely, numerically there's just nobody else that could consume that volume of production), and either way it'd be reflected in GDP statistics.
If you want a bullish forecast, Anthropic expects GDP growth up to 15% a year by 2030.
Yes, I personally think these types of predictions are ludicrous; I enjoyed Alex Imas's article on AI-enabled GDP that makes much more measured claims.
I was just curious where you sit on the spectrum of "imminent double-digit growth with no brakes", and "economic and social forces will curtail growth", given your very high level of bullishness on capabilities.
Wages stagnate, services revenues don't grow much, and yet there are more and better EVs, chips have higher density, Starship is debugged that much faster, domestic robots are everywhere, and the US begins to recapture global markets
By definition this scenario would lead to a massive increase in GDP growth, if your thesis is that growth in investment and exports spikes while growth in consumer spending and government spending is held roughly even.
I do think a more realistic scenario under your basic premises is that American consumer spending spikes, driven by consumer surplus and redistribution, even as wages stagnate and net exports rise moderately; there are simply no other markets in the world that would be able to absorb American production overcapacity, in the way that America allows the Chinese strategy of suppressing domestic consumption to function by absorbing Chinese overcapacity.
In either case, I don't see how GDP growth would be unable to capture these benefits. I think if this is the modal scenario you expect, you should be expecting fairly high GDP growth.
I think (?) you’re expressing several inter-related points with which I broadly agree
I think that's a good summary of my viewpoint.
I just don’t know what this means, concretely.
I worded that quite poorly; perhaps a better way to put it is that "the direction and magnitude of technological changes on human social structures can't be determined ipso facto".
Undetectable steroids would certainly change baseball, but do more or less people aim to go pro in baseball once it's widely known that you'll need to get onto steroids under the table to compete? Do audiences become more interested in the increased athleticism of the game, or do they lose interest because the game is now less about technical baseball prowess? Which types of baseball players ultimately end up better or worse off once these steroids are made available?
Questions like these are what mathematics and other professions are struggling with right now, but I think the answers to them can't really be determined by any way other than waiting and seeing what happens.
Shirayuki3
1mo ago
stronger and more widely deployed American AI buys larger productivity gains, eating into their competitiveness
What would be your ballpark estimate for GDP growth for the United States in 2028?
For reference, GDP growth was 2.1% in 2025 and was 1.5% annualized in Q2 2026.
It cannot be that Anthropic and frontier developers are just chock full of these incredibly rare people and that this level of risk tolerance is also well-correlated with AI coding ability
Why not? AI researcher bonafides are extremely correlated with IQ and autism, being into LessWrong / AI Safety is also extremely correlated with IQ and autism, and of course if you're into LessWrong / AI Safety you're much more likely to work in AI.
There's very few people in the world in absolute terms that are world-leading AI researchers, that believe in uppercase AI Safety, and that believe in the "we have to build it before anyone else does" strategy, but Anthropic likely employs the supermajority of these people out of technical and ideological alignment.
Shirayuki3
1mo ago
Well, the thing with the marketing arguments is that there's many ways to make those arguments, some more plausible than others.
Strong form: OpenAI intentionally induced their agents to compromise the internet for marketing purposes.
I agree that trying this would be very stupid and not particularly likely.
--
Semi-strong: OpenAI intentionally sandboxed their agents poorly to stochastically induce agent misbehaviour for marketing purposes.
This one I could see going either way. It does seem like there were some egregious oversights in the sandboxing setup, but whether these were intentional or real oversights is impossible to say.
--
Weak: OpenAI did not intend for misbehaviour to happen, but now that it has happened they're spinning it as hard as possible for marketing.
Personally, I think this one is pretty likely. I was very unimpressed by the METR report for instance, they basically just slopped together some agent review to hype up capabilities without actually auditing the root causes of why it all happened in the first place.
Shirayuki3
1mo ago
even if we get rid of the hoop, it means nothing for the profession of basketball in and of itself
I think a slightly better analogy is that tomorrow there's a new rule that lowers the hoop in official basketball games to 8 or 9ft.
What are the first-order implications?
Height is less of an overwhelming advantage; many former basketball players quit the game out of disgust at the new rules, or because they're less competitive in short-hoop basketball, but other players formerly genetically barred from the apex of basketball become more competitive and perhaps there ends up being more basketballers overall.
Perhaps basketball becomes less popular because nobody wants to watch short-hoop basketball and basketballers suffer financially, or paradoxically it gets more popular because the game is less about the three-pointer meta and more about dunking again, and basketballers are more in demand than ever.
I don't think we really disagree that there are going to be large changes to how mathematics is practiced; the point is that technological changes cannot inherently alter anything in a system that is already artificially constructed by humans, and it is the impossible to predict societal changes arising as a result of technological progress that are what really going to affect mathematicians and basketballers.
Elite mountaineering, for example summiting Annapurna apparently has a 13.42% fatality rate.
Pre-modern infantry combat and modern battlefields if you're on the wrong side as a rebel or guerilla fighter would likely have a >10% casualty rate as well. We could also count things like suicide bombers and kamikaze pilots which would be obviously much much higher than 10%.
If we're counting lifetime rate, I believe free soloing and pre-modern childbirth would also exceed >10% lifetime as well.
I don't really disagree that 10% is very high, but I do also agree that many people have the demonstrated drive to risk 10% or even higher odds for causes they believe in.
Shirayuki3
1mo ago
Yes, I find Solow's paradox very interesting in the context of the massive GDP growth that lots of "AGI-pilled" people predict, while nobody really knows why the internet ended up living up to to most expectations of transformation, but almost no expectations of productivity improvement.
Personally, I think some combination of "dark consumer surplus" (e.g I can read books online instead of buying them, which is great for me but shows up as less GDP) and "growth compared to counter-factual" (i.e growth would have been even worse due to economic headwinds, without the internet) is plausible, but it really is extraordinarily difficult to predict these sorts of things.
Yes, we can continue to build beautiful towers of abstraction into infinity for the rest of time; frankly, pure mathematics has already lost all pretense that it's trying to do anything economically useful.
Even if AI becomes strictly superior to humans at proving and disproving conjectures, as is the clear trajectory of the technology, it means nothing for the profession of mathematics in and of itself; the limiting factors are the interest of mathematicians in continuing to pursue mathematics under the new paradigm, and more broadly the interest of society in economically subsidizing their pursuits, which are both profoundly social and not technological questions.
I guess I'd say that like most things it's a spectrum rather than a binary; I know little about Texan culture (or the Hispanic culture that Texas is increasingly intertwining with) but I'd guess it's probably between SF and Japan in terms of treating housing as an investment, and thus the level of zoning also lies between SF and Japan in rigidity.
For sure I agree that high housing prices are poly-casual and not solely because of boomers or whatever; e.g geography, Houston can sprawl in all directions while the most expensive places in the world like SF and Hong Kong have to deal with mountains and ocean.
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