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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.
Tangential but I've been wondering recently - what becomes of the internet writ large, if/when we do actually get open-sourced Astra+ level models which any skiddie can plausibly prompt with the Navy Seal copypasta and point at any website or domain of choice? I'm usually firmly on the "nothing ever happens" team which so far is largely bearing out (I'm still employed as a mid-tier IT monkey, even), and continue to think that any significant and un-ignore-able effects of AI on day-to-day real life, or
android catgirlsany "physical" manifestations of said AI, are still years away in the most optimistic case. So far I don't see sufficient reason to consider myself doomed in the short term, and live in a sufficiently old-fashioned shithole that can plausibly endure shutting down all those fancy interwebs of yours throughout without much issue (in fact total cybergulag infra destruction would actually be a positive).Still, recent developments like the HF incident have been pretty instructive, and coupled with my experience working with gov't infra software, significantly tanked my already meager faith in the ability of pre-AI domains and software to withstand future centaur attackers (I'm not even sure if rampant vibe-coding is meaningfully less safe than "manual" spaghetti of yore in some cases). And I wonder, how does the post-open-source-AGI internet even look like in such a world? Wild West Web 2.0, where you never know which link might give your computer incurable AIDS today? Glorious RETVRN to fido/usenet/etc? Literal fucking Blackwalls cleaving apart pre-AI and post-AI interwebs, for the countries that have the capability and (more importantly) foresight to build one? Global internet splintering into insular country-wide intranets, with govt-sanctioned throttled glowing gateways to the infested formerly-global domains? Status quo unchanged because with AGI perfect defense is actually possible, give or take the cloying aftertaste of globohomo creeping into every domain (you need cutting-edge stuff after all, better make sure Claude 9 Talmud consents to your use case)?
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Predicting what will happen is tough but I could see a couple things happening.
Cloudflare maximalism. One thing that's changed post ChatGPT is that nearly every website is now behind CloudFlare. This reduces automated traffic a lot (at the expense of a single point of failure). We might take the next step and give Cloudflare or a company like it control of the server architecture too so that my server is running on a known secure architecture that is regularly patched. No more just standing up a LAMP stack on Amazon.
A new internet protocol using some cryptographically secure identify verification with payment. So if I want to visit themotte.org, my account will be charged like $0.0001 per request, possibly handled at the DNS layer. Of course people have been proposing this for email for ages and it never happened.
We're probably going to stay on our current course until some big financial institution gets hacked.
The usual arguments for the platform-ization of the Internet focus on social network effects and corporate centralization. Your argument has me wondering if there's another element of security that's been ignored. The big platforms can afford security professionals; my basic personal site is more likely to be running an unpatched (who has time for prompt patching) WordPress with an expired SSL cert. Let's Encrypt is finally a free option, but is going to start issuing 45-day certs by 2028.
Beyond that, the desire for a public web presence seems to have wanted over time. I don't want to be internet-famous. IMO the "I don't post anymore" problem is evidence that whatever effort the platforms put into "trust and safety" doesn't seem to have delivered either. But I do miss those naive times some days.
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