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Roughly 3 years ago, specifically in December 2023, I've reiterated my longstanding prediction that «the culture war's most important front will be about AI», and specifically AI accelerationism vs anti-AI/AI safety movement:
And the following political compass:
Seems like this was too much complexity for big tent politics in the US, at least so far; and the Trumpian State sees no use for the EA network, and instead (pretty rationally) perceives it as an uncontrollable alternative center of power. Instead we have, essentially, anti-AI left + pro-AI right (with some notable exceptions – eg. Steve Bannon, apparently, has been anti-China specifically because of his concern about Chinese AI progress, and now joins hands with Bernie Sanders). I've also failed to predict the salience and extent of Chinese open source dominance, as well as the bizarre datacenter water use backlash (charitably, can be shoehorned as Luddism?). Nevertheless, we've «succeeded» at the core task of making this a culture war front. The degree of (unnecessary) politicization of the issue is incredible. Trump is doing the yeoman's work, lumping it in with random Blue-coded ideas he disapproves of “Global “Warming,” where everyone was going to be dead by now, RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA, UKRAINE, UKRAINE, UKRAINE, or Impeachment Hoax #1, or Impeachment Hoax #2.”. Jensen Huang enjoys his role as the kingmaker who has the King's ear. Sam Altman is opportunistic as usual but, after recent incidents, is genuinely spooked about AI risks (I have it on good authority that OpenAI really intends to slow down some internal projects specifically to bolster their oversight). The quasi-Masonic part is shaping up nicely, too – Dario Amodei, who's become the poster boy of Woke Left AI, promotes Embedded Evaluators with the central example being METR, very deeply connected to Anthropic and the broader EA scene. The EA itself is more explicitly Left-aligned now, despite efforts of some to paint them as TESCREAL eugenicists (the woke cancellation of Bostrom in Jan 2023 was the canary in the coal mine, Yudkowsky laments the missed opportunity of bipartisanship). There are clearly politically coded reports on prominent doomers.
This is all a bit meandering. What I want to know: how do you see this going further? We aren't anywhere close to the wall of capabilities; there are no walls in sight. Anthropic and OpenAI are holding back already, but their products will keep getting better, and fast. Google will make a comeback at some point (maybe in a couple weeks), xAI and Meta may catch up too. In my book, we (well, they) have practical superintelligence that's sufficient for both unprecedented productivity acceleration and really devastating, nation-crippling cyberattacks, which I guess will be discussed with Xi soon. At this rate, in a few months the level of capability Fable 5.1 or GPT 6 Astra will be mostly commodified and uploaded to HuggingFace (owned by Nvidia now). And those are relatively weak systems compared to internal models, which can build models that are vastly stronger still, without even any R&D breakthroughs, just by virtue of synthesizing stronger data trajectories and designing better RL environments. Superintelligence, in other words, is baked in. By Q1 2027 we'll see a jump from Astra that's at least as big as Sol => Astra. I fail to understand how that won't steamroll companies trying to build their moats on products downstream of frontier AI, labs need every bit of revenue to cover their costs, which will only increase due to growing self-imposed safety requirements; employers outside the AI sphere will also be increasingly feeling the heat. There's a whole ugly dimension of circular financing, too.
Americans as a whole are pretty pessimistic about AI even at these mediocre levels of diffusion (I am skeptical of this data that purports to demonstrate much lower adoption than in China, Americans are probably lying more due to widespread negativity on AI, but in any case AI isn't currently doing most of their jobs). Astra+ level models with very low error rate and 300 tok/s output totally can replace most knowledge workers. On the other hand, it seems that so far AI has not caused anything like mass unemployment, and perhaps economists have a point about comparative advantage, so that'll reduce the intensity of class dynamics.
Democrats are likely to sweep both chambers of Congress, which I guess is what Dario is hoping for and why he feels emboldened to antagonize Trump&Hegseth. Nevertheless, the needs of national security and GDP-maxxing (as well as the Executive's will) should prevent any nontrivial exogenous industry slowdown. So by default we'll see further crystallization of Red Accelerationism vs Blue Decelism, and as AI becomes more undeniably scary, that may begin to eat into the Red political base. It'll be interesting to watch, but I'm really uncertain as to how it'll go.
The mood is already turning against AI even while the labor market is strong, it’s hard to believe that won’t get much worse as large scale layoffs start to bite. As we know, corporations exist primarily to serve their employees rather than shareholders or customers, so (as @RandomRanger says below) this is more likely to be in the ‘the guy next door opens a factory with a tenth of the workers and half the prices’ form of creative destruction. That will force widespread changes in the labor market absent extreme political intervention1 , which necessitates politics, and could happen in a matter of months (or not). I also think it’s clear by now that a Chernobyl or at least Three Mile Island (although I expect the former) level casualty event is imminent, at least from my dilettante’s understanding of the HF attack, which will only make the backlash stronger.
The Chinese, of course, have much less of a social safety net than any Western country, a hypercompetitive entrepreneurial culture used to driving down margins, and a competition between provinces for subsidies that essentially encourages lossmaking businesses. All this means that even if CCP directives ban layoffs (and they will), that would not contain a labor crisis in most sectors. Inertia can only take you so far.
I don't think "large scale layoffs" is necessarily the only future here. I'll certainly admit it's possible, but historically automation hasn't always gone that way. A century ago, we had lots of accountants, and most of their time was spent manually balancing arithmetic, maybe with a mechanical adding machine. Along came the personal computer (earlier for large businesses with mainframes), and most of that work can be automated pretty trivially. Yet there are more accountants today than there were a century ago. What changed is that they're not doing arithmetic, and the complexity of what they do has grown substantially. For all the complaints about the growth of the tax code (and frequent related stunts by politicians), we are able to handle that complexity because we can offload the line-by-line balancing to software. Some of that complexity is probably wasteful, but some of it is also better auditing and accountability, or targeted governmental incentives — some, again, is probably wasteful, but some seems reasonable.
I don't have quite as coherent an argument (still a work in progress), but it's also the case that "recession caused by mass AI-driven unemployment" is actually a self-own by corporate AI overlords in limiting their upside. If you replaced half of human workers tomorrow at a cost savings, any not-truly-essential business is going to lose customers who can't afford their wares: tech companies fit pretty high on Maslow's pyramid, and most of the base ones are long-commodified — at one point, most of us were farmers, then along came the tractor. Nobody in the West is starving because they can't get a farmhand job. The cratering of farm employment is, in fact, why I get to work an office job, rather than out in the fields somewhere, and I'm not sure I'm worse-off for it.
But that latter part is, again, a half-formed argument.
The problem is that essentially there’s little chance that there’s a limit to the complexity that AI can handle. It’s not just a calculator, it can do all kinds of data analytics and so on. That’s the issue of saying that “maybe the people will just do something else” is that we’re talking about a general intelligence that can learn to do the next jobs created — probably before you can set up a training program to teach a human to do that job. It takes 4 years of school to make an accountant. It’s probably a lot less time to give the LLM training data and have it learn to do those tasks. And that’s true for a lot of tasks. Actuarial skills are basically “find patterns in data”. X-ray and diagnostic imaging is the same thing, but with images. So we’re going to have a problem simply because any newer, more complex job enabled by people using AI can be done by AI probably before you can teach a human to do them. Then that enables more work, except that AI can do that work too, and probably the next set to infinity.
Eh, Assuming we don't EMP ourselves into the stone age (HV transformers have replacement times measured in months) we would simply use government FIAT to mandate some % of human employment or simply forbid AI use in certain sectors.
Two problems:
1). Unless you can do this enforced at a global level, it doesn’t matter (the same is true of the safety stuff btw) because if it’s illegal to use AI to do say translation work in the USA, then the cheap solution is to simply use AI to translate things in Canada. The humans are still going to lose those jobs, you just get the added bonus of not only losing the human paychecks, but the taxes paid by the company as well. Or if we’re talking safety, we slow down and limit our technology for safety. China is under no such obligation and will happily lap the safety conscious American companies and dominate AI.
Second problem being that effectively, there is no way to enforce such a treaty even if we make it. The UN is a glorified debate society. To the degree it allows wars or issues arrest warrants, it’s basically dependent on member countries to go along. It doesn’t have a military or police force, it doesn’t have a police force. It doesn’t have the legal right to put boots on the ground to arrest war criminals and instead must depend on the countries to volunteer to abide by the treaty or resolution. If Trump were accused of war crimes and was supposed to stand trial in The Hague, so what? The USA is not going to agree to let a sitting president be tried in an international criminal court, no military is going to volunteer for the suicide mission of trying to defeat the USA military to arrest him. And other treaties are on the same honor system. We have the Paris Treaty on Climate Change, right. But countries face no actual penalties for not keeping to their carbon limits. That’s the same international body that’s supposed to police the AI treaties when countries have trillions on the line if they win the race. The first to create a human level AGI has enormous power and influence and can basically print money. It’s worth trillions, conservatively in GDP. It means military superiority. No one is going to even pretend to follow the treaty if it even exists. The only use of that treaty is to try to trick other countries into slowing down so you can catch up or pull ahead.
I'll give you that, but this assumes some Theoretical Super inteligence type AGI deal, we could for a long while hover over mundane human tier AGI, still something more than we currently have with the LLMs, but nothing that's not already in play (billions of general intelligences, running about, eating burgers, giving titjobs etc)
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Of the job categories listed in the 1960 US Census, supposedly only one has disappeared completely: elevator operator.
Nevertheless, I think the complexity argument might fail for accountants. Complexity actually favors AI. They are good at it.
When you talk to rich people, everyone is looking for an accountant. They all think that their accountant is bad and want a better one. I've only had bad ones personally. Now I just do things myself because I don't want to deal with errors. AI has been a godsend. I think it's likely that AI will do my taxes in April 2028.
But there is a silver lining for accountants: knowing which rules to bend or break. If it treats taxes like it treats code, AI will happily fill out a 500 page form so you can pay $0.04 to the state of Arkansas for some K1 you got from an oil services company. The accountant knows to throw it in the trash. They can tell you to ignore that letter from IRS because it doesn't get serious until the nth notice. They know how to ignore the rules that contradict the other rules. They know that certain tax dodges are okay because all their clients do them and never get audited.
I think it's somewhat similar to driving. The system only works because people know when to break the rules. Will AI break the rules? If so, will they be liable for that? Humans might stay in the loop just so they can break/bend the rules.
"Computer" is also no longer a job category thanks primarily to the machine named after said profession.
That one was gone before 1960.
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Hilariously I've been in elevators with an operator.
I'm pretty sure another silver lining for accountants is that "my freakin' AI did it wrong" is probably not an excuse that the IRS will accept. They will accept "my accountant did it wrong."
Was this in a heavily Jewish area, perchance?
New York City, so yes.
I think elevator operators are standard in tall buildings which are themselves tourist attractions like the Empire State Building, the Shard, the Eiffel Tower etc.
Of course their real job is mostly guest herding, but they do operate the elevator.
I think its more about the religious prohibition on doing work during the Shabbat and the interpretation that pushing a button on a machine is work, so they have people to push the button for you. Hilarious and archaic at the same time.
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Definitely. It’s the same problem that self driving has where every Tesla that crashes with FSD is nationwide news even though it’s 10x (or more?) safer than average drivers.
Those things only apply on average random samples. As soon as they hit a consistent failure mode, you end up with Problems.
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I think it's worse. In the case I am familiar with, (sample size of two) as far as I can tell, when a guy did something on his own, he did okay. When he tried to use AI to do about the same thing, SNAP!
So either the AI screwed up big time 50% of the time, or 100% of the time. Either way, not great, and seems worse "per task" than self-driving cars.
Weird. This is so far from my experience that I wonder what you guys are even doing? Like, you only tried AI twice?
If you’re a senior dev, and AI is not banned by your org, and you’re not personally using AI, that seems very inefficient.
Oh no, I've tried AI lots more than twice. Definitely witnessed more than one hallucination.
I'm not in software. The mistake I'm talking about wasn't made by me, so I don't have any insight into how it was made or how often the user was using it, or what model.
To give you the sort of idea of what happened without doxxing myself, imagine someone turned in their PhD dissertation and it (or parts of it) turned out to be AI written, and the AI had made stuff up.
Was he using a "cutting edge" model? No idea. I've had Opus goof stuff up for me before, so I don't necessarily trust even the higher-end models not to make mistakes from time to time.
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AI fails for accounting not because of complexity but because of care. Accountants have to get the numbers right, and occasionally hallucinating shit isn't going to cut it. Maybe it would work for mob accounting, but I suspect the mob wants their made-up shit to be less random.
I doubt it - the IRS don't start with your fingernails when you make an error.
Correct, the IRS traditionally starts by hanging you upside down and shaking you until the money comes out of your pockets. Then they start on your toenails.
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If you have three independent AIs do the numbers and they match, they’re likely right.
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The hallucination argument is losing power. Harnesses will fix hallucination much like they have for coding.
I'm not going to straight up ask Astra to do my taxes, but I'm fully confident that Astra+harness is capable. So now we just wait for the harness. No doubt lots of smart people are working on it.
Accountants don't get the numbers right anyway which is why I do my own taxes now. It's a boring, frustrating job and attracts people who like money more than having interesting work with predictable effects.
Harnesses fixing hallucinations is news to me. I just spent an hour today putting a Junior's head on straight after codex sent them down the garden path for a day and a half.
It's not really about "harnesses" as some dedicated tooling, it's about meta-instructions and models generally becoming good at following instructions over long horizons. Like, I just wrote in my AGENTS.md some stuff to the effect of "periodically spawn subagents for independent blind audits, create teams with different scopes and domain-customized personas, check with web access, sometimes step back, iterate until you get clean results", and even the latest DeepSeek will diligently execute all that and massively improve its reliability. Astra Ultra won't even need such handholding. They'll still make mistakes, rabbithole into irrelevant minutiae, perform suboptimally on cost, but for labs this is all easy to improve with More RL, and humans are flawed too. I am sure that a junior's level can be automated today.
And yet.
ChatGPT Sol absolutely.
insists on
writing.
Like this.
In a shitty.
broken up.
style.
If I ask it to demonstrate a writing concept or somesuch and there are people in the scene. It will happily tell what the problem is and how to supposedly prompt it away but will then keep on writing like that. So much for "good at following instructions".
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No, it most definitely is not.
Do you use these tools on a regular basis? My experience with hallucinations is that they are extremely reduced.
Same. I can't recall seeing one with Codex and 5.6-Sol.
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It is still a problem with whatever models people are using. Just had to deal with a pretty bad incident at work a couple of weeks ago (thankfully not one due to any failures on our part).
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I agree, but it doesn't seem like there's been an emergence of an Official Progressive Position on AI. Not like there is on Israel; or on Elon Musk; or on gay marriage. With respect to AI, I haven't noticed an army of NPCs uniformly and uncritically repeating the same talking points and buzzwords. I haven't seen much in the way of virtue-signalling competitions. So it doesn't (yet) feel like a culture war issue to me.
It's interesting to note that in China, there are large numbers of State-Owned Enterprises which really do (at least in practice) exist to provide jobs and effectuate state policy. From what I understand, a common scenario will be that a State-Owned Enterprise will have a publicly traded subsidiary and the shares of that subsidiary trade for significantly less than the scrap value of that company. Because the parent company won't allow the subsidiary to just be sold. In other words, it's known and accepted that these companies really don't serve their shareholders.
So I would expect that if there is a worldwide AI boom, the CCP will make use of these State-Owned Enterprises to stabilize their economies and employment figures. After all, they are doing that already.
I've been seeing Hinge profiles with demands that anyone who wants to fuck them not use AI, at slightly less frequency than the usual ACAB/Palestine. And I've heard the data-centers-use-wAtEr rant from my local frothing leftist co-worker once or thrice.
Are they referring to general AI use or use of AI in their dating profile, messages, pictures, etc?
There's a really strong movement against even knowingly consuming products made using it, although it's not quite as straightforward as right/left or red-tribe/blue-tribe. The furry version isn't much of a surprise, but it's definitely something with a faction in normal (or at least as anyone on modern social media can be normal) space, treating its use as a mental contaminant.
The furry version is understandable, that's a gooner culture where larping as a ware-dolphin-lizardkin with neon hair is part of the dream. And a significant portion of the culture ritual is consuming and exchanging 2d/3d and text fiction depicting such creatures/characters. In essence, "there is no soul in these coochie pics"
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That movement seems to be a fairly straightforward job protection campaign among creative professionals (who are disproportionately leftist).
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Basically I'll accept that it's a culture war issue when AI researchers giving talks on progressive college campuses get disrupted just like conservative speakers get disrupted.
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I assume general AI use. Hinge is so cringe, conformist, and buzzword-y already, I don't see how AI could even be noticed there.
Assuming that's true, I agree it's evidence that AI is becoming a culture war issue. That being said, I haven't yet heard stories of AI researchers having their talks disrupted as would happen with conservative speakers on college campuses.
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It seems to me like there is. Generative AI is evil because 1) it's used by capitalists to save money by replacing workers and 2) it specifically replaces creative people. Of course, #2 is partly an artifact of the fact that it's creative people who have access to left-wing media in the first place.
There's no progressive position about AI taking over the world, but there doesn't need to be.
Well here's a thought experiment:
Suppose you are on a progressive college campus. Which is more likely to provoke a negative reaction from your progressive classmates:
(1) You are known to work for an organization the primary purpose of which is to oppose gay marriage;
(2) You are known to work for an organization the primary purpose of which is to oppose affirmative action and other forms of discrimination against white people; or
(3) You are known to work for an organization which is primarily developing improved LLMs.
It seems pretty clear to me that the first 2 are going to provoke a much more negative reaction.
Or to put it another way, in progressive circles, people are afraid to even suggest the possibility that the police are not in fact biased against blacks; or that trans rights are being abused by fetishists; etc. But if you argue that generative AI will lead to a wonderful future? Not so much.
I don't have close enough knowledge of a progressive college campus that I could tell you if saying that you work for an organization developing LLMs will get you attacked. But it doesn't seem implausible.
Well, I have heard lots and lots of stories of speakers who were conservative, pro-Israel, etc. coming to college campuses and having their events disrupted. I've never heard of this happening with AI researchers. So I'm just not (yet) seeing this as a culture war issue.
They get booed and jeered
I could see this leading somewhere, but I don't think we are there yet. I was talking about a situation where, for example, Ben Shapiro is hosted on a campus. Not as a graduation speaker but just at some club event. In that case, if it's a progressive-dominated campus, hostile people (who wouldn't otherwise attend) can be expected to seek out and disrupt the event.
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