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Does anyone else feel like we're heading for a good old-fashioned, 2008-tier, financial crash? I recall people bringing up the possibility ever since Covid bucks started rolling out, but even though we were due for one, and even though the money printer was going brrrrr, the crash has so far failed to materialize.
At the time, I was of two minds about this. On one hand, all the libertarian theory I used to subscribe to said money-printing => boom, boom => bust. On the other hand, the problem for me was it never felt like a boom, and I think this is changing now. A key feature of the pre-crash boom is "malinvestment"; capital going into often downright deranged projects, that are later abandoned half-finished. Well, I feel like the datacenter craze qualifies, and with the wave of AI IPOs that are coming just as major indices are changing their rules, to allow for these companies' near-instantaneous inclusion (an investment so good, you can't pass up on it. Literally, if you're American), it seems like we're solidly in the "irrational exuberance" phase.
Add this to the list of things I hope I'm wrong about, because if we get a proper crash, the political fallout is going to be massive. The script writes itself: Trump / tech bros / capitalism bad, even more gay race communism now.
To whitepillers: is there an argument for why I'm wrong that doesn't boil down to "you don't get it, chud, it's the New Economy! The Singularity is just around the corner! All the rules are obsolete!"? This argument is verboten, because this is pretty much what people say with every bubble.
To fellow blackpillers: any ideas on how to brace for impact? Any IT guys here old enough to make it through the dotcom bubble? How did you do it? Any advice you would have given your past self?
At this point I would prefer to be ruled by the pink haired feminist communists than the AI techbros.
I can imagine a AI post scarcity possibility. The communists will just never work if they ever get meaningful power.
AI bros also have lower downside, though. Communists winning would likely only result in deaths in the order of 10s-100s of millions, maybe a billion or two, but likely not more. AI bros winning could mean literally every last human dead, or perhaps even worse, their consciousness stuck in eternity in a hell simulator.
I think AI bros still win out in terms of expected value, though.
aren't we scrathcing St. Petersburg paradox territory here?
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Is that a realistic outcome? I could say that Communists winning could mean nuclear bombs in space and sun death and the blow-up of the entire galaxy. Maybe Communists winning means all our consciousnesses stuck in eternity in a hell simulator, plus one.
Communism is a hell simulator, but at least you get to die (sometimes pretty quickly).
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I'm pretty bad at making predictions, especially about the future, but a lot of people in AI seem to think that the odds of AI development leading to human extinction is at least in single digit percentage odds, which is high enough to be concerning. Communists could likely build rockets and simulators, but I'm skeptical that such tech progress is likely in a Communist-run world before we're brought back to some post-apocalypse situation or just boring stasis in some barely tolerable dystopia. Certainly I'd bet that inventing immortal consciousness that can suffer for eternity seems far more likely in an AI bro world than a communist one. In the latter, the suffering would only last about a lifetime, and in the real world.
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