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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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the moment AGI is cracked nothing else matters

Are they wrong? You could argue they're wrong about the timeline, which is largely trying to predict unknown unknowns, but it does seem to me that once/if AGI is cracked it is pretty much true that nothing else matters.

Now, I'm kind of a doomer about AGI in the LW/rationalist sense, but even if you're not, every extant political system rests on the assumption that humans are a necessary input for production, and every economy relies on the spending of consumers to stay afloat.

What does debt load or shareholders matter in a world where humans no longer have any say via their ability to produce or their demand for consumption?

They could be right, but that doesn't change the facts: if you're examining this from an investor's perspective, the insiders don't really think in the same frame of mind we do.

The investor is like a sports gambler trying to bet on a fight, and the companies are like a fighter who thinks he's figured out a brand new unbeatable Steven Seagal kick that will win them the fight. The gambler is betting based on conditioning, style vs style, form in fights going into the match, etc. The fighter thinks that conditioning and form are pointless to worry about it because the only question is will the kick work or won't the kick work.