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Yeah, we should get on those bilateral international treaties that Yudd wants. Until then the alternative is unilateral ceasing where we lose all the upside and delay the problem by optimistically 6 months to two years. I don't really see that as a reasonable choice, especially because approximately zero of the people you're talking about are taking x-risk seriously anyways. This subject is more about me hedging my excitement and has nothing to do with what the opponents actually care about.
They are being built, just have not yet finished being built. and no one besides investors are being asked to give them anything. If people don't want to be personally invested in these projects then I have no real beef with those people. I haven't decided exactly what my own financial position will be in relationship to the IPOs.
You're conflating a number of different people and positions. none of the labs are pushing the "permanent underclass" line. That's an expressed anxiety of some people on social media who feel something big is coming and they don't know how to prepare for it. It's like when people get indignant at "tech bros" for the learn to code meme. It wasn't tech bros that proposed miners should learn to code, it was random journalists. Anthropic is currently in the process of getting blackballed by the department of war for taking a stand against their models being used for domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons. The labs and their staff have been unusually honest and forthright with their concerns about how we need to work out as a society what we're going to do if a singularity event happens. For the most part people like op have accused them of fear mongering to hype their product. No doubt if they downplayed the risks they'd be accused of lying about the potential downsides.
I don't know what to do here. Really. I have no idea what I'm supposed to do about people who make terrible and ignorant arguments as soldiers against fantom interlocutors. That's one of the most frustrating elements of this whole topic. There are civilizationally important conversations to be had. But all I'm presented with are people who somehow simultaneously believe that the whole industry is a scam that doesn't even work while also being an imminent threat to all jobs which it will somehow be able to remove without actually providing any value. And this incoherent position is expressed in the form of on their face ridiculous empirical claims. It's exhausting.
More than anything what I feel about these people is that they just want to be mad, half of them have been whining for years about American decline and incapacity. This is a field where we are excelling, if America is going to right itself and bring about a new age of American prosperity this is it, this is the chance. Should we squander it? Certainly one should be cautious and prudent but that isn't what these people are. They have already written us off and want things to get worse to validate their black pilled priors. They'd rather this all fall apart so they can smugly say "I told you so" in the ruins. I fear some might even, if they could, sabotage us to this end. I want to wake them up.
Money is fungible. To a first approximation, if a trillion dollars is going into trying to build data centers (and failing, in many respects) that's a enormous chunk of resources that isn't going into fusion research, hiring, fixing bridges, what have you - things that could directly and meaningfully improve people's lives.
FWIW I'm optimistic about AI as a normal productivity-improving technology for improving people's lives, but this is explicitly not what the frontier American labs are aiming for, and it seems extremely difficult to justify the trillion dollar investments in a AI-as-normal-technology world where tokens are inevitably commoditized and primarily inferenced locally.
I guess I'm just feeling a disconnect from your posts. If you want to be a hard-nosed historical realist, OK: in the same way that the Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression made WW2 inevitable and Hitler was merely in the right place at the right time, I agree that race dynamics ensure in no realistic world does a bilateral pause happen, and that as soon as Attention Is All You Need was published realistically no force on the planet could have stopped the AI race from accelerating - Altman and Amodei were merely in the right places at the right times to ride the wave.
But then you go on about "how can you not be excited" and "[bringing] about a new age of American prosperity" and I'm just confused about how you can think we're being forced into a world where if anyone builds it everyone (probably) dies and think this is a good thing. At best, if by some miracle alignment is inherent, you're under the heel of God-Emperor AI Frontier Lab Leader or God-Emperor Democratic/Republican President (adjust for your outgroup party) for all time and at worst all America's done is won the "created the Torment Nexus first" award.
At the end of the day "American" and "Chinese" are merely constructs of society as we know it and not immutable laws of reality - I fail to see how "superhuman general intelligence" and "liberal democratic All-American values as we know them" or "superhuman general intelligence" and "socialist values with Chinese characteristics as we know them" could meaningfully co-exist, so what benefit does the median person really get from ultimate, unaccountable power being instantiated 2000 vs 6000 miles away from them?
Their money is not fungible with our money or the state's money. much of it is debt that can only be created because of the promise of a return. If you want to be more sophisticated you could say the labor being used to build these things was bid up and would otherwise be able to be allocated more cheaply to other projects but even then what you're arguing for is that trades people get paid less which seems kind of counter to the rest of your position. Trillions are spent on much less worthy consumption than building durable data infrastructure.
Yes, the question of whether the tokens get commoditized is a major factor on whether these investments will pay off for the labs. But why is that your problem? So in one potential future a bunch of investors who aren't you get soaked and you get to enjoy the fruits of incredibly discounted inference capex. This is a gift directly from frontier lab investors to you, you should cheer on their generosity.
Unless many breakthroughs happen this will not be the case any time soon. Batched queries are several orders of magnitude more efficient than single thread inference.
There's some difficulty of keeping multiple potential futures in your head at once. It goes something like:
Essentially across all of these worlds and acutely in some these data centers are pure upside epsilon the handful of upset caused by any construction project that should be easily sorted out locally.
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No, production is not zero-sum and in any case money is not the limit of these things. God could come down from Heaven and declare a halt to data center development, and we would not get one step closer to fusion (might actually slow things down), and not one more bridge would be fixed (possibly fewer, in that the data center people might need a bridge fixed).
Money is an abstraction over resource allocation in this context - I agree that production is not zero-sum, but many of the inputs to production are obviously rivalrous; land, power, raw resources, construction workers and chip fab allocation are all finite and rivalrous to name a few.
If you're just trying to be edgy about lack of state capacity being why shit doesn't get built then I agree, in many cases resource allocation is not the limiting factor as to why no progress is made, but it's farcial to claim that resource allocation isn't the limiting factor for anything that might directly improve people's lives.
Not a matter of edginess at all. Land is rivalrous, but it's not a limiting factor for any of your examples. Even if (theoretically) we needed to restart the Superconducting Supercollider project for fusion, land wouldn't be an issue; heck, you could build data centers on top inside the ring. Power is rivalrous but not fixed; both Alphabet and Microsoft have literally had nuclear plants started or restarted for data center power.
Your claim implicitly depends on a fixed set of resources that are already 100% utilized, and neither condition is true.
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I mean this in all sincerity and good faith, and not as a rhetorical question: are you hearing yourself talk right now? You do understand why many reasonable people would find this rhetoric offputting, right?
"Yeah there's something big coming. You'll lose your job. Everyone will lose their job, there will be no more jobs. Deal with it, crybaby. Adapt. Not my problem if you can't prepare. Move fast and break things."
Losing your job is generally a traumatic and unpleasant experience for people. It means they stop making money, and they need money to buy things. Everyone losing their job at the same time because there are no more jobs sounds even worse.
Now, if you want to simply take a hardline Darwinian stance and say that the fittest will win out and life has always been permanent flux and that's simply that, then I wouldn't really have any problems with that. You would at least be internally consistent. But you're both a) saying things that have extremely offputting implications, and b) you're confused about why anyone would oppose your position, so you deduce that they must all be brainwashed cattle. Do you see the issue here?
But how do we determine how that value gets distributed, and to whom? How do people accumulate resources if they're unable to sell their labor? These are reasonable questions to ask, no?
I'm at a disadvantage because I have to defend a complicated process that must exist in the real world from people in the peanut gallery and I'm not willing to lie about my own worries. There are problems and things we are going to have to address in the near future around this rapidly changing technology. I've got my eyes wide open and probably take existential risk more seriously than any of the detractors here. I advocate for getting UBI set up as basic civic infrastructure for if this job loss things starts coming at us fast. The critics here are making no such concessions to reality. They aren't expected to actually have an answer to the "what about the fact that china is going to build this anyways just a few year later?" question. All they do is throw peanuts and moan about problems that those of us who see the potential in this industry have been talking about for years and have produced volumes of discourse on that they refuse to read or engage with.
Literally who the fuck is saying this? Every lab that thinks job displacement is coming has produced documents and spoken at length about how we must prepare for this and create a future where everyone can benefit from the abundance. There is a great deal of pressure to lie about this. What is your solution exactly? Can you please come down from the peanut gallery and actually talk about what we're going to do productively instead of engaging in this exhaustive discourse about the feelings of people who are acting like toddlers. I'll be honest, I've completely lost my patience with this discourse.
Yes, these are indeed good questions to ask. I don't object to people asking these questions. In fact I think they're very important things we should politically work out, the labs seem to broadly agree that this is the kind of discussion we should be having. I object to people lying about projects. Lying about projects and talking about what we're going to do if things go well and no one has to work anymore are very different types of behaviors.
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We have spent trillions of dollars on AI tech, not turned a profit, and not been able to build even a modest moat around the technology.
What if we had spent those trillions of dollars on literally anything else? We could have the best automated manufacturing in the world, or advanced medical technology, or any of a dozen other things that would bring actual prosperity to the nation as a whole.
You seem to be conflating 'we spent a ton of money on this' with 'we are excelling'. The whole point is that AI is a bad investment!
It takes more than a couple years to see the fruits of spending trillions of dollars. Building data centers takes actual years itself, and those data centers are used to do research which itself takes time. I would definitely argue that we're already seeing returns for previous investments and that the perspective that they haven't paid off is hopelessly short sighted. If we want to be great we have to be willing to make investments that take more than a quarter to pay off. I'm reminded of people who doubted amazon or uber because they invested aggressively rather than trying to immediately turn a profit.
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China, whose one ruling party can have a plan spanning many decades, has the advantage in long term developments. Like when they decided 40 years ago to corner the rare earths market.
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Aren't there, like, more practical ways for America to right itself? Like, I dunno, kicking out criminal illegal immigrants and purging the commies?
Would those actually result in America "righting itself", even ignoring the expected self-harm from the backlash due to the large number of Americans against those two things? Criminal illegal immigrants don't really seem like a problem that is big enough except psychologically, unless the illegal immigration itself is considered a sufficient crime, in which case kicking them out would probably kick the bottom out of agriculture and other menial labour heavy areas; purging the commies might entail destroying much of the tech industry and university research, because a lot of the most productive people there are about the most proudly self-identifying commies around.
"Sure, destroying the things I hate will cause a lot of disruption at first, but what will grow back afterwards will be so much better because it will not be encumbered by the things I hate" is a line of argumentation that has a bad enough track record (including, in particular, from assorted commies!) that one should not just accept it on faith.
Are you not expecting self-harm from the backlash due to the AI revolution?
If the AI revolution actually happens, the answer to this may depend on the definition of "self". Perhaps America-the-geopolitical-entity reaches new heights of power, but America-the-300something-million-people are paperclipped or left to live out the rest of their natural lifespans miserably under the watchful eye of Skynet.
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