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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   22690 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 8, 2026

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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.

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.

it seems extremely difficult to justify the trillion dollar investments in a AI-as-normal-technology world where tokens are inevitably commoditized

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.

where tokens are inevitably commoditized and primarily inference locally.

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.

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.

There's some difficulty of keeping multiple potential futures in your head at once. It goes something like:
Outcome Probability Thoughts
World where someone builds it and everyone dies but they wouldn't have if we told more blatant and ridiculous lies about the American data center build out <0.0001% whooops
Somebody builds it and everyone dies 15% This is indeed too high and we should seek bilateral global treaties to try and sort out alignment while we can. Unilaterally hamstringing our labs doesn't change this possibility, even us and china both hamstringing our labs only pushes the date back some number of years.
Scaling plateaus and inference is a commodity soon 25% The lab investments don't pan out, all go bankrupt, the models and datacenters get acquired and are served incredibly cheaply. This is bad for some investors but good for most consumers of tokens, which is practically everyone else. A gift from them to us. We should be broadly happy that these datacenters are on our soil and subject to our laws
Scaling plateaus and inference is a commodity in a few months or years when the models are so good that they can do most but not all jobs 30% The lab investments may or may not pan out as their commodity is still meaningfully scarce it just turns out more of that scarcity is in the data centers than the models, some go bankrupt. We see a lot of job displacement but also a tremendous amount of value creation. Robots advances in leaps and bounds. After a shake up this is potentially a very good future. It is critical that these data centers are on our soil and subject to our laws, that are incredibly important geopolitically.
Singularity event where we don't all die 25% basically by definition these are difficult to predict but I'm confident we'd rather have it kicked off on our soil than chinese soil. The marginal progress we make in alignment work between now and the kick off will be critical and china doesn't broadly seem to even understand alignment to be a meaningful concept. If I had more time I'd break this into several worlds but I think in nearly all of them there'll be pivotal moments that I prefer be performed by americans.
I'm a retarded hype monkey with deep ai psychosis. AI can't even do what I can plainly see it doing now. 5% Hey, at least I'll get some credit for acknowledging it's possible

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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