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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 8, 2026

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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.

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?

while also being an imminent threat to all jobs which it will somehow be able to remove without actually providing any value.

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 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?

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.

You'll lose your job. Everyone will lose their job, there will be no more jobs. Deal with it, crybaby.

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.

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?

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.