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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.
I think that even AI good enough to replace workers has minimal actual impact because most white collar companies do not try very hard to make money. Companies are run mainly as a lifestyle and socialization environment. Making money is a secondary goal. Making more money might mean higher bonuses. But the company as an institution does not have the planning or will to appreciate that and deliberately work to raise productivity.
They would much rather remain ignorant of the simplest AI applications than learn anything new or do anything new. If they do anything new, they'll do it wrong. They'll get GPT5.4 from Harvey or through Copilot or whatever as their AI solution. They have no time for doing anything new. Software engineering is an exception, people there are closer to the AI world and have more of a clue. Outside software it's a madhouse (exceptions exist but I'm talking about the general population).
The average white collar workplace doesn't particularly want to run more efficiently. Some of the biggest companies are run even worse. Google is run in an extremely inefficient way. Interacting with Google the company, or even just trying to use some of their products like Google Vertex is extremely difficult for no reason. Google acts in this needy, schizophrenic, loathe-to-make-decisions way, they stress out people dealing with them.
Even if Gemini 5 is smarter than the average Google worker, better in all respects, Google won't change significantly unless Gemini is working on projects at AI-speeds autonomously. Put in more intelligence into the dysfunction machine, I don't think that helps too much.
Only when the AIs can do the work of entire companies, end to end, do things really start to change. Because then companies go under. Creative destruction is going to be the primary source of innovation, not adoption. AI is too alien to the white collar world, outside software. Only then do Gary Marcus and Ed Zitron have their faces melt (intellectually). So next year probably, as you say.
I have only ever managed to work for companies that were run with making money as the primary goal, and lifestyle and socialization as secondary goals. And it's not like I was deliberately seeking out companies that were primarily run to make money. Those are just the companies I happened to get jobs at.
Anecdotal evidence, but it makes me kind of wonder about the accuracy of your statement.
Likewise, I've somehow managed to never get one of those so-called "bullshit jobs" that are supposedly everywhere.
We all walk in different circles (even different countries), so my anecdotes are no more valuable than your anecdotes, true.
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