> Smartphones are expected to get pricier for potentially years to come.
"Smart" phones have ceased to be smart years ago. They are now instruments of mass surveillance, and the tech industry has convinced people that 1) you need one not to be a social outcast, 2) you need to upgrade it every year, 3) not having root access is for your own good.
I'll stick to my Pixel 9a running Graphene for the forseeable future.
The real question is whether the boom is, economically, a mistake.
If AI is here to stay, as a thing that permanently increases productivity, then AI buying up all the electricians and network engineers is a (correct) signal. People will take courses in those things and try to get a piece of the winnings. Same with those memory chips that they are gobbling up, it just tells everyone where to make a living.
If it's a flash in a pan, and it turns out to be empty promises, then all those people are wasting their time.
What we really want to ask ourselves is whether our economy is set up to mostly get things right, or it is wastefully searching.
"If X is here to stay, as a thing that permanently increases productivity" - matches a lot of different X. Maintaining persons health increases productivity. Good education increases productivity. What is playing out now is completely different - it is both irresistible lust for omniscient power provided by this technology ("mirror mirror on the wall, who has recently thought bad things about me?"), and the dread of someone else wielding it.
Plus, it makes natural moat against masses of normal (i.e. poor) people, because requires a spaceship to run. Finally intelligence can also be controlled by capital the way it was meant to, joining information, creativity, means of production, communication and such things
> Finally intelligence can also be controlled by capital
The relationship between capital and AI is a fascinating topic. The contemporary philosopher who has thought most intensely about this is probably Nick Land (who is heavily inspired by Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk and Friedrich Hayek). For Land, intelligence has always been immanent in capitalism and capitalism is actively producing it. As we get closer to the realization of capitalism's telos/attractor (technological singularity), this becomes more and more obvious (intelligible).
> Plus, it makes natural moat against masses of normal (i.e. poor) people, because requires a spaceship to run. Finally intelligence can also be controlled by capital the way it was meant to, joining information, creativity, means of production, communication and such things
I'd put intelligence in quotes there, but it doesn't detract from the point.
It is astounding to me how willfully ignorant people are being about the massive aggregation of power that's going on here. In retrospect, I don't think they're ignorant, they just haven't had to think about it much in the past. But this is a real problem with very real consequences. Sovereignty must be occasionally be asserted, or someone will infringe upon it.
>I've given up tbh. It's like the apathetic masses want the billionaires to become trillionaires as long as they get their tiktok fix.
Especially at cost of diverting power and water for farmers and humans who need them. And the benefit of the AI seems quite limited from recent Signal post here on HN.
> It's like the apathetic masses want the billionaires to become trillionaires as long as they get their tiktok fix.
it's much worse. a great demographic of hacker news love gen. AI.. these are usually highly educated people showing their true faces on the plethora of problems this technology violates and generates
The difference is that we've more or less hit a stable Pareto front in education and healthcare. Gains are small and incremental; if you pour more money into one place and less into another, you generally don't end up much better off, although you can make small but meaningful improvements in select areas. You can push the front forward slightly with new research and innovation, but not very fast or far.
The current generation of AI is an opportunity for quick gains that go beyond just a few months longer lifespan or a 2% higher average grade. It is an unrealised and maybe unrealistic opportunity, but it's not just greed and lust for power that pushes people to invest, it's hope that this time the next big thing will make a real difference. It's not the same as investing more in schools because it's far less certain but also has a far higher alleged upside.
> if you pour more money into one place and less into another, you generally don't end up much better off, although you can make small but meaningful improvements in select areas
> The difference is that we've more or less hit a stable Pareto front in education and healthcare. Gains are small and incremental;
You probably mean gains between someone receiving healtcare and education now, as compared to 10 years ago, or maybe you mean year to year average across every man alive.
You certainly do not mean that person receiving appropriate healthcare is only 2% better off than one not receiving it, or educated person is noly 2% better of than an uneducated one?
Because I find such notion highly unlikely. So, here you have vast amounts of people you can mine for productivity increase, simply by providing things that exist already and are available in unlimited supply to anyone who can produce money at will. Instead, let's build warehouses and fill them with obsolete tech, power it all up using tiny Sun and .. what exactly?
This seems like a thinly disguised act of an obsessed person that will stop at nothing to satisfy their fantasies.
There's one additional question we could have here, which is "is AI here to stay and is it net-positive, or does it have significant negative externalities"
> What we really want to ask ourselves is whether our economy is set up to mostly get things right, or it is wastefully searching.
We've so far found two ways in recent memory that our economy massively fails when it comes to externalities.
Global Warming continues to get worse, and we cannot globally coordinate to stop it when the markets keep saying "no, produce more oil, make more CO2, it makes _our_ stock go up until the planet eventually dies, but our current stock value is more important than the nebulous entire planet's CO2".
Ads and addiction to gambling games, tiktok, etc also are a negative externality where the company doing the advertising or making the gambling game gains profit, but at the expense of effectively robbing money from those with worse impulse control and gambling problems.
Even if the market votes that AI will successfully extract enough money to be "here to stay", I think that doesn't necessarily mean the market is getting things right nor that it necessarily increases productivity.
Gambling doesn't increase productivity, but the market around kalshi and sports betting sure indicates it's on the rise lately.
Investing 1 or 2% of global GDP to increase wealth gap 50% more and make top 1% unbelievable rich while everyone else looking for jobs or getting 50 year mortgage, seem very bad idea to me.
I think you inadvertently stepped in the point — Yes, what the fuck do I need 10,000 iPhones for?
Also part of the problem is which resources end up in abundance. What am I going to do with more compute when housing and land are a limited resource.
Gary’s Economics talks about this but in many cases inequality _is_ the problem. More billionaires means more people investing in limited resources(housing) driving up prices.
Maybe plebes get more money too, but not enough to spend on the things that matter.
It’s just a proxy for wealth using concrete things.
If you were given 10,000 dollars but your friends were also 100,000 dollars as well, would you take the deal?
Land and housing can get costlier while other things get cheaper, making you overall more prosperous. This is what happened in the USA and most of the world. Would you take this deal?
You’re missing the point. It’s not about jealousy it’s basic economics - supply and demand. No I would not take the deal if it raised the demand in something central to my happiness (housing) driving the price up for something previously affordable and make it unaffordable.
I would not trade my house for a better iPhone with higher quality YouTube videos, and slightly more fashionable athleisure.
I don’t care how many yacht’s Elon Musk has, I care how many governments.
What if you could buy the same house as before, buy the same iPhone as before and still have more money remaining? But your house cost way way more proportionally.
Yes the very fact that billionaires exist mean our species has failed.
I do not believe that there is a legitimate billionaire on the planet, in that they haven't engaged in stock manipulation, lobbying, insider trading, corrupt deals, monopolistic practices, dark patterns, corporate tax dodging, personal tax dodging.
You could for example say that the latter are technically legal and therefore okay, but it's my belief that they're "technically legal/loopholes" because we have reached a point where the rich are so powerful that they bend the laws to their own ends.
Our species is a bit of a disappointment. People would rather focus on trivial tribal issues than on anything that impacts the majority of the members of our species. We are well and truly animals.
They still gotta figure out how their consumers will get the cash to consume. Toss all the developers and a largish cohort of well-paid people head towards the dole.
Yeah I don't think this get's enough attention. It still requires a technical person to use these things effectively. Building coherent systems that solve a business problem is an iterative process. I have a hard time seeing how an LLM could climb that mountain on it's own.
I don't think there's a way to solve the issue of: one-shotted apps will increasingly look more convincing, in the same way that the image generation looks more convincing. But when you peel back the curtain, that output isn't quite correct enough to deploy to production. You could try brute-force vibe iterating until it's exactly what you wanted, but that rarely works for anything that isn't a CRUD app.
Ask any of the image generators to build you a sprite sheet for a 2d character with multiple animation frames. I have never gotten one to do this successfully in one prompt. Sometimes the background will be the checkerboard png transparency layer. Except, the checkers aren't all one color (#000000, #ffffff), instead it's a million variations of off-white and off-black. The legs in walking frames are almost never correct, etc.
And even if they get close - as soon as you try to iterate on the first output, you enter a game of whack-a-mole. Okay we fixed the background but now the legs don't look right, let's fix those. Okay great legs are fixed but now the faces are different in every frame let's fix those. Oh no fixing the faces broke the legs again, Etc.
We are in a weird place where companies are shedding the engineers that know how to use these things. And some of those engineers will become solo-devs. As a solo-dev, funds won't be infinite. So it doesn't seem likely that they can jack up the prices on the consumer plans. But if companies keep firing developers, then who will actually steer the agents on the enterprise plans?
> It still requires a technical person to use these things effectively.
I feel like few people critically think about how technical skill gets acquired in the age of LLMs. Statements like this kind of ignore that those who are the most productive already have experience & technical expertise. It's almost like there is a belief that technical people just grow on trees or that every LLM response somehow imparts knowledge when you use these things.
I can vibe code things that would take me a large time investment to learn and build. But I don't know how or why anything works. If I get asked to review it to ensure it's accurate, it would take me a considerable amount of time where it would otherwise just be easier for me to actually learn the thing. Feels like those most adamant about being more productive in the age of AI/LLMs don't consider any of the side effects of its use.
It's a fun thought, but you know what we call those people? Poor. The people who light their own money on fire today are ceding power. The two are the same.
1. Some people can afford to light a lot of their money on fire and still remain rich.
2. The trick is to burn other people’s money. Which is a lot more akin to what is going on here. Then, at least in the US, if you’re too big to fail, the fed will just give you more cash effectively diminishing everyone else’s buying power.
> People will take courses in those things and try to get a piece of the winnings.
The problem is boom-bust cycles. Electricians will always be in demand but it takes about 3 years to properly train even a "normal" residential electrician - add easily 2-3 years on top to work on the really nasty stuff aka 50 kV and above.
No matter what, the growth of AI is too rapid and cannot be sustained. Even if the supposed benefits of AI all come true - the level of growth cannot be upheld because everything else suffers.
> US$700 billion could build a lot of infrastructure, housing, or manufacturing capacity.
I am now 100% convinced, that the US has power to build those things, but it will not, because it means lives of ordinary people will be elevated even more, this is not what brutal capitalism wants.
If it can make top 1% richer in 10 year span vs good for everyone in 20 years, it will go with former
SF is not the only place where housing is expensive. There are plenty of cities where they could build more housing and they don't because it isn't profitable or because they don't have the workers to build more, not because the government is telling them they can't.
What $700 billion can't do is cure cancers, Parkinsons, etc. We know because we've tried and that's barely a sliver of what it's cost so far, for middling results.
Whereas $700 billion in AI might actually do that.
Your name is well earned! "can't cure cancers" is impressively counterfactual [0] as 5 year survival of cancer diagnosis is up over almost all categories. Despite every cancer being a unique species trying to kill you, we're getting better and better at dealing with them.
Yes, we're getting better at treating cancers, but still if a person gets cancer, chances are good the thing they'll die of is cancer. Middling results.
Because we're not good at curing cancers, we're just good at making people survive better for longer until the cancer gets them. 5 year survival is a lousy metric but it's the best we can manage and measure.
I'm perfectly happy investing roughly 98% of my savings into the thing that has a solid shot at curing cancers, autoimmune and neurodegenerative diseases. I don't understand why all billionaires aren't doing this.
If we knew that we probably wouldn’t need AI to tell us.
But realistically: perhaps by noticing patterns we’ve failed to notice and by generating likely molecules or pathways to treatment that we hadn’t explored.
We don’t really know what causes most diseases anyway. Why does the Shingles vaccine seem to defend against dementia? Why does picking your nose a lot seem to increase risk of Alzheimer’s?
That’s the point of building something smarter than us: it can get to places we can’t get on our own, at least much faster than we could without it.
I don’t think that lack of intelligence is the bottleneck. It might be in some places, but categorically, across the board, our bottlenecks are much more pragmatic and mundane.
Consider another devastating disease: tuberculosis. It’s largely eradicated in the 1st world but is still a major cause of death basically everywhere else. We know how to treat it, lack of knowledge isn’t the bottleneck. I’d say effectively we do not have a cure for TB because we have not made that cure accessible to enough humans.
It gives me pause that most people drive cars or are willing to sit in one for more than 20 minutes a week.
But people accept the status quo and are afraid to take a moment’s look into the face of their own impending injury, senescence and death: that’s how our brains are wired to survive and it used to make sense evolutionarily until about 5 minutes ago.
Ah, yes: "well, we can't cure cancer or autoimmune and neurodegenerative diseases, but I'm willing to invest basically all my money into a thing that's...trained on the things we know how to do already, and isn't actually very good at doing any of them."
...Meanwhile, we are developing techniques to yes, cure some kinds of cancer, as in every time they check back it's completely gone, without harming healthy tissue.
We are developing "anti-vaccines" for autoimmune diseases, that can teach our bodies to stop attacking themselves.
We are learning where some of the origins of the neurodegenerative diseases are, in ways that makes treating them much more feasible.
So you're 100% wrong about the things we can't do, and your confidence in what "AI" can do is ludicrously unfounded.
Every doctor and researcher in the world is trained on things we already know how to do already.
I’m not claiming we haven’t made a dent. I’m claiming I’m in roughly as much danger from these things right now as any human ever has been: middling results.
If we can speed up the cures by even 1%, that’s cumulatively billions of hours of human life saved by the time we’re done.
But what they can do, that AI can't, is try new things in measured, effective, and ethical ways.
And that hypothetical "billions of hours of human life saved" has to be measured against the actual damage being done right now.
Real damage to economy, environment, politics, social cohesion, and people's lives now
vs
Maybe, someday, we improve the speed of finding cures for diseases? In an unknown way, at an unknown time, for an unknown cost, and by an unknown amount.
Who knows, maybe they'll give everyone a pony while they're at it! It seems just as likely as what you're proposing.
I suspect a lot of this is due to large amounts of liquidity sloshing around looking for returns. We are still dealing with the consequences of the ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy) and QE (Quantitative Easing) where money to support the economy through the Great Financial Crisis and Covid was largely funneled in to the top, causing the 'everything bubble'. The rich got (a lot) richer, and now have to find something to do with that wealth. The immeasurable returns promised by LLMs (in return for biblical amounts of investment) fits that bill very well.
> If AI is here to stay, as a thing that permanently increases productivity,
Thing is, I am still waiting to see where it increases productivity aside from some extremely small niches like speech to text and summarizing some small text very fast.
Serious question, but have you not used it to implement anything at your job? Admittedly I was very skeptical but last sprint in 2 days I got 12 pull requests up for review by running 8 agents on my computer in parallel and about 10 more on cloud VMs. The PRs are all double reviewed and QA'd and merged. The ones that don't have PRs are larger refactors, one 40K loc and the other 30k loc and I just need actual time to go through every line myself and self-test appropriately, otherwise it would have been more stuff finished. These are all items tied to money in our backlog. It would have taken me about 5 times as long to close those items out without this tooling. I also would have not had as much time to produce and verify as many unit tests as I did. Is this not increased productivity?
> What we really want to ask ourselves is whether our economy is set up to mostly get things right, or it is wastefully searching.
I can’t speak to the economy as a whole, but the tech economy has a long history of bubbles and scams. Some huge successes, too—but gets it wrong more often than it gets it right.
I have been having this conversation more and more with friends. As a research topic, modern AI is a miracle, and I absolutely love learning about it. As an economic endeavor, it just feels insane. How many hospitals, roads, houses, machine shops, biomanufacturing facilities, parks, forests, laboratories, etc. could we build with the money we’re spending on pretraining models that we throw away next quarter?
It’s definitely not causing shortages of people, with tens of thousands and more getting laid off every month!
The AI boom is just like a conference- where new and shiny seems to do wonders, but when you come back to workplace, none of that seem to work or fit in!
The article was specific about where the jobs shortages are. Electricians, construction, mathematicians (?)(wasn't aware the was a lot of dedicated math work in a data center design and build). Lay offs have been in software, design, and elsewhere.
This is the trade-off to connectivity and removing frictional barriers (i.e., globalism). This is the economic equivalent of what Nick Land and Spandrell called the "IQ shredder". Spandrell said of Singapore:
Singapore is an IQ shredder. It is an economically productive metropolis that
sucks in bright and productive minds with opportunities and amusements at the
cost of having a demographically unsustainable family unit.
Basically, if you're a productive person, you want to maximize your return. So, you go where the action is. So does every other smart person. Often that place is a tech hub, which is now overflowing with smart guys. Those smart guys build adware (or whatever) and fail to reproduce (combined, these forces "shred" the IQ). Meanwhile every small town is brain-drained. You hometown's mayor is 105 IQ because he's the smartest guy in town. Things don't work that great, and there's a general stagnation to the place.
Right now, AI is a "capital shredder". In the past, there were barriers everywhere, and we've worked hard to tear those down. It used to be that the further the distance (physically, but also in other senses too, like currencies, language, culture, etc.), the greater the friction to capital flows. The local rich guy would start a business in his town. Now he sends it to one of the latest global capital attractors, which have optimized for capital inflow. This mechanism works whether the attractor can efficiently use that capital or not. That resource inflow might be so lucrative, that managing inflow is the main thing it does. Right now that's AI, but as long as present structure continues, this is how the machine of the global economy will work.
This is hogwash. It's incel and eugenic reasoning wrapped up all together.
Not every smart person (or even most) are engineers, and of the ones that are they don't all move to tech hubs, and the ones that do not all of them can't get laid.
And I'll give you a great reason why it's hogwash, the "brilliant" engineers that can't get laid in Singapore are the same "brilliant" engineers that can't get laid in their home town
I agree with you that STEM don't hold a monopoly on intelligence.
> engineers that can't get laid in Singapore are the same "brilliant" engineers that can't get laid in their home town
Maybe so, but not for the same reasons. Back in their home town, they cannot vibe with anyone because the few who might be compatible have long since left. In a STEM hotspot, they go to an event and meet compatible people, but it's 11 guys for every 3 girls, so unless they are top dog in that room, they aren't going to score.
IDK the dating scene in Singapore. I frankly didn't even know that Singapore was considered a tech hub. I was using it as a synonym for a tech hub because that is what I assumed the author was doing.
We can blame the individual for the cost we've outsourced into him. When he collapses under that load, we can attribute it to personal shortcomings. Some people survive, even thrive, in the current environment, after all. We've coalesced a plurality of games into a single one, and in a sense, it works great. We have our smartphones, AI, online shopping, and targeted advertising.
Notepad now has Copilot built right into it, after all. That wasn't going to happen by now if we took the human psyche as a given and built around that.
Apologies but either I don’t understand your post or it is nonsensical.
What relevance does AI have to being an IQ shredder if the talent has gone into (productively) developing capable AI?
If anything, AI completely disproves your notion of IQ shredder because this is an instance of lack of barriers actually hastening progress. Look at all the AI talent. Very few are American or ethnic Americans.
What amazes me about this theory is that being the 115 IQ guy in a town where the next guy is 105 isn’t better than being the 115 IQ guy in and office averaging 120.
Or put more plainly, being a big fish in a small pond is not better than being a small fish.
Why not just not compare to others because it’s easy to game anything?
Just look for patterns and then act out of self interest. Nobody is coming to save you.
I’m no high IQ person but if I can figure out how to get a STEM job without STEM degree, make money by getting lucky at a unicorn, invest and sell for profit and invest again (only losers HODL so others can take profits), then there’s really no excuse why someone else can’t.
And I’m originally from a country that has like 70 IQ nationally or so it is said. So I’m not a genius, maybe the only quality I have that makes me different is I don’t know how to quit until I meet my goal.
More people should stop crying and be a man. Our ancestors literally survived against nature and each other so we could post here on HN. I don’t mean being able to lift 500lbs like a caveman either.
Exercise your brain, it gets stronger too because I have a hard time understanding concepts sometimes, but taking steps to break it down and digest it in pieces helps me. Takes a bit longer but hopefully you have tomorrow.
What’s the alternative. Keep the smart physically separated, can never collaborate to make anything paradigm shifting and we just prod along with small town paper mills and marginally better local government?
Within the Landian system, I suspect he'd say the answer is economic "territorialization", the economic equivalent to the mechanism originally defined by Deleuze+Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus based on the territoriality of earlier work.
It's the process where social, political, or cultural meaning is rooted in some context. It's a state of stability and boundaries. For just the economic, the geographic would likely be the centroid of that, but the other vectors are not irrelevant.
One could argue that we suffer to the degree we are deterritorialized, because the effects thereof are alienating. So, we need structure that aligns both our economic and psychological needs. What we have is subordination to the machine, which will do what it's designed to: optimize for its own desire, which is machinic production.
Note that none of this is inherently good/bad. Like anything, a choice has trade-offs. We definitely get more production within the current structure. The cost is born by the individual, aggregating into the social ills that are now endemic.
We’ve had 50 years of genetic engineering and it’s about time we started using it. I wish someone with more central authority like China starts doing experiments of genetically altering humans to start making super humans. We have the technology, it’s only ethics holding us back. So what if a few thousand people (preferably volunteers) die in experiments, we should just make sure they’re condemned (like death row or terminally ill) and carry on.
Land himself has suggested a very anti-human solution to the problem of "IQ shredders":
"The most hard-core capitalist response to this [IQ shredders] is to double-down on the antihumanist accelerationism. This genetic burn-rate is obviously unsustainable, so we need to convert the human species into auto-intelligenic robotized capital [a]s fast as possible, before the whole process goes down in flames." [0]
[0] Nick Land (2014). IQ Shredders in Xenosystems Blog. Retrieved from github.com/cyborg-nomade/reignition
I think the only solution is territorialization if you want to preserve the human. If you don't care about that (or think that it's not possible anyway), then yes, accelerate.
California had a great mechanism for this in their land grant colleges, which back before the protests of the Vietnam War were required to offer the valedictorian of nearby high schools (or the person with the highest GPA who accepted) full tuition and room and board --- then Governor Ronald Reagan shut down this program when the students had the temerity to protest the Vietnam War --- it was also grade inflation to keep students above the threshold necessary for a draft deferment which began the downward spiral of American education.
A cohesive culture that has strong bonds that transcend class. Rich people choosing to allocate capital in a manner that benefits them at the expense of others isn’t a new phenomenon by any means. We need rulers who value noblesse oblige. The current ones see us as cattle (the term popping up the Epstein emails so frequently is kinda funny).
“Blood and soil” is such a taboo in today’s society because it’s the solution to the problems we have. I don’t say this to be edgy. Scaling trust is the most important thing in human societies, and race, cultural history, shared religion etc are the absolute best ways to do this. Think about it this way:
Every morning men like Sam Altman wake up and decide to keep pursuing billions of dollars with no thought of how to ensure the rest of his people (because they aren’t you and me) are going to get by. He could very easily make this a core tenet of OpenAI (in a way inline with its original incarnation) and be _loved_ by the people. We don’t have a single elite that behaves this way: Musk, Trump, Altman, etc are all parasites that do not care if we live or die.
Land and co. are more or less transhumanist Thiel cronies so you’re not gonna get great analysis from them.
It's time that societies act against this cancer. When everything else suffers because the cancer is stealing all sorts of resources, a human would go to a doctor and have the cancer killed chemically or excised.
This is another facet of the fierce opposition to AI by a swath of the population: it’s quite literally destroying the last bit of enjoyment we could wring from existence in the form of hobbies funded through normal employment.
Think of the PC gamers, who first dealt with COVID supply shocks, followed by crypto making GPUs scarce and untenable, then GPU makers raising prices and narrowing inventory to only the highest-end SKUs, only to outright abandon them entirely for AI - which then also consumed their RAM and SSDs. A hobby that used to be enjoyed by folks on even a modest budget is now a theft risk given the insane resale priced of parts on the second-hand market due to scarcity.
And that extends to others as well. The swaths of folks who made freelance or commission artistry work through Patreons and conventions and the like are suddenly struggling as customers and companies spew out AI slop using their work and without compensation. Tech workers, previously the wealthy patron of artisans and communities, are now being laid off en masse for AI CapEx buildouts and share pumps as investors get cold feet about what these systems are actually doing to the economy at large (definite bad, questionable good, uncertain futures).
Late stage capitalism’s sole respite was consumerism, and we can’t even do that anymore thanks to AI gobbling up all the resources and capital. It’s no wonder people are pissed at AI boosters trying to say this is a miracle technology that’ll lift everyone up: it’s already kicking people down, and nobody actually wants to admit or address that lest their investments be disrupted to protect humans.
I think this started a lot earlier actually. A few generations back, many people played an instrument, or at least could sing. It didn't matter that none of them was a Mozart, because they didn't had to be. For making music or singing together in a family or a friend group, it was wholly sufficient to be just good, not necessarily great.
But when everyone has access to recordings of the world's best musicians at all times, why listen to uncle Harry's shoddy guitar play? Why sing Christmas songs together when you can put on the Sinatra Christmas jazz playlist on Spotify?
That’s definitely part of it as well, this sort of general distillation into a smaller and smaller pool of content or objects or goods that cost ever more money.
Like how most of the royalties Spotify pays out are for older catalogue stuff from “classic” artists, rather than new bands. Or how historical libraries of movies and films are constantly either up for grabs (for prestige) or being pushed off platforms due to their older/more costly royalty agreements.
With AI though, it’s the actual, tangible consumption of physical goods being threatened, which many companies involved in AI may argue is exactly the point: that everyone should be renters rather than consumers, and by making ownership expensive through cost and scarcity alike, you naturally drive more folks towards subscriptions for what used to be commodities (music, movies, games, compute, vehicles, creativity tools, TCGs, you name it).
THIS!
Instrument-playing capability of a social environment:
By today, I know only of one person playing a piano regularly in his club, he is the only one I know.
When I was young, you had some basic instrument introduction in music classes at school - I do not know if these still exist today.
Regarding singing - I do not know a single perso who can "somehow" sing at least a little bit.
"Comparison is the thief of joy" as they say. Some dude has the world's highest score in Pac-Man in the Guinness Book Of World Records. It doesn't mean that I can't play Pac-Man to beat my own personal high score and enjoy the process because the game is fun in it's own right.
That's sure true in theory, but given the prevalence of status symbols, many people thrive on comparing themselves to others. I'd argue society was better off when the only people you could reasonably compare yourself to were the three neighbours down the street (out of which only one would be into Pac-Man), not the world's ten thousand best players showing off only their best streaks on your Instagram feed all day.
Apologies for being glib but I never thought I’d see a sincere “think of the gamers” comment.
Your whole post is a bit vague and naive. If people enjoyed real art more than AI art, then the market will decide it. If they don’t then we should not be making people enjoy what they don’t.
Think bigger, think of the entire system outside of just the single LLM: the interplay of capital, human engineering, and continual improvement of LLMs. First gen LLM used 100% human coding. Previous gen were ~50% human coding. Current gen are ~10% human coding (practically all OpenAI/Anthropic engineers admit they're entirely using Claude Code / Codex for code). What happens when we're at 1% human coding, then 0%? The recursive self-improvement is happening, it's just indirectly for now.
How would you have done it differently? It’s clear that even if this builds up more billionaire wealth, it still benefits everyone. Just like any other technology?
So would you rather stop billionaires from doing it?
Is there really for the ML boom, or is it just a way to make computers more and more expensive to push people towards mobile? Because looking around, that's the effect I'm seeing, regardless of the causes.
I see a future where most people will buy tablets to save money and the desktop will be for only a few, a very few, just when self-hosting is becoming trendy and people are saying "it's time for GNU/Linux to take Windows' place"...
https://archive.ph/J8pg5
> Smartphones are expected to get pricier for potentially years to come.
"Smart" phones have ceased to be smart years ago. They are now instruments of mass surveillance, and the tech industry has convinced people that 1) you need one not to be a social outcast, 2) you need to upgrade it every year, 3) not having root access is for your own good.
I'll stick to my Pixel 9a running Graphene for the forseeable future.
The real question is whether the boom is, economically, a mistake.
If AI is here to stay, as a thing that permanently increases productivity, then AI buying up all the electricians and network engineers is a (correct) signal. People will take courses in those things and try to get a piece of the winnings. Same with those memory chips that they are gobbling up, it just tells everyone where to make a living.
If it's a flash in a pan, and it turns out to be empty promises, then all those people are wasting their time.
What we really want to ask ourselves is whether our economy is set up to mostly get things right, or it is wastefully searching.
"If X is here to stay, as a thing that permanently increases productivity" - matches a lot of different X. Maintaining persons health increases productivity. Good education increases productivity. What is playing out now is completely different - it is both irresistible lust for omniscient power provided by this technology ("mirror mirror on the wall, who has recently thought bad things about me?"), and the dread of someone else wielding it.
Plus, it makes natural moat against masses of normal (i.e. poor) people, because requires a spaceship to run. Finally intelligence can also be controlled by capital the way it was meant to, joining information, creativity, means of production, communication and such things
> Finally intelligence can also be controlled by capital
The relationship between capital and AI is a fascinating topic. The contemporary philosopher who has thought most intensely about this is probably Nick Land (who is heavily inspired by Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk and Friedrich Hayek). For Land, intelligence has always been immanent in capitalism and capitalism is actively producing it. As we get closer to the realization of capitalism's telos/attractor (technological singularity), this becomes more and more obvious (intelligible).
> Plus, it makes natural moat against masses of normal (i.e. poor) people, because requires a spaceship to run. Finally intelligence can also be controlled by capital the way it was meant to, joining information, creativity, means of production, communication and such things
I'd put intelligence in quotes there, but it doesn't detract from the point.
It is astounding to me how willfully ignorant people are being about the massive aggregation of power that's going on here. In retrospect, I don't think they're ignorant, they just haven't had to think about it much in the past. But this is a real problem with very real consequences. Sovereignty must be occasionally be asserted, or someone will infringe upon it.
That's exactly what's happening here.
>massive aggregation of power that's going on here
Which has been happening since what at least the bad old IBM days and nobody's done a thing about it?
I've given up tbh. It's like the apathetic masses want the billionaires to become trillionaires as long as they get their tiktok fix.
>I've given up tbh. It's like the apathetic masses want the billionaires to become trillionaires as long as they get their tiktok fix.
Especially at cost of diverting power and water for farmers and humans who need them. And the benefit of the AI seems quite limited from recent Signal post here on HN.
> It's like the apathetic masses want the billionaires to become trillionaires as long as they get their tiktok fix.
it's much worse. a great demographic of hacker news love gen. AI.. these are usually highly educated people showing their true faces on the plethora of problems this technology violates and generates
The difference is that we've more or less hit a stable Pareto front in education and healthcare. Gains are small and incremental; if you pour more money into one place and less into another, you generally don't end up much better off, although you can make small but meaningful improvements in select areas. You can push the front forward slightly with new research and innovation, but not very fast or far.
The current generation of AI is an opportunity for quick gains that go beyond just a few months longer lifespan or a 2% higher average grade. It is an unrealised and maybe unrealistic opportunity, but it's not just greed and lust for power that pushes people to invest, it's hope that this time the next big thing will make a real difference. It's not the same as investing more in schools because it's far less certain but also has a far higher alleged upside.
> if you pour more money into one place and less into another, you generally don't end up much better off, although you can make small but meaningful improvements in select areas
"Marginal cost barrier" hit, then?
> The difference is that we've more or less hit a stable Pareto front in education and healthcare. Gains are small and incremental;
You probably mean gains between someone receiving healtcare and education now, as compared to 10 years ago, or maybe you mean year to year average across every man alive.
You certainly do not mean that person receiving appropriate healthcare is only 2% better off than one not receiving it, or educated person is noly 2% better of than an uneducated one?
Because I find such notion highly unlikely. So, here you have vast amounts of people you can mine for productivity increase, simply by providing things that exist already and are available in unlimited supply to anyone who can produce money at will. Instead, let's build warehouses and fill them with obsolete tech, power it all up using tiny Sun and .. what exactly?
This seems like a thinly disguised act of an obsessed person that will stop at nothing to satisfy their fantasies.
There's one additional question we could have here, which is "is AI here to stay and is it net-positive, or does it have significant negative externalities"
> What we really want to ask ourselves is whether our economy is set up to mostly get things right, or it is wastefully searching.
We've so far found two ways in recent memory that our economy massively fails when it comes to externalities.
Global Warming continues to get worse, and we cannot globally coordinate to stop it when the markets keep saying "no, produce more oil, make more CO2, it makes _our_ stock go up until the planet eventually dies, but our current stock value is more important than the nebulous entire planet's CO2".
Ads and addiction to gambling games, tiktok, etc also are a negative externality where the company doing the advertising or making the gambling game gains profit, but at the expense of effectively robbing money from those with worse impulse control and gambling problems.
Even if the market votes that AI will successfully extract enough money to be "here to stay", I think that doesn't necessarily mean the market is getting things right nor that it necessarily increases productivity.
Gambling doesn't increase productivity, but the market around kalshi and sports betting sure indicates it's on the rise lately.
In 2024, global GDP was $111 trillion.[1] Investing 1 or 2 % of that to improve global productivity via AI does not seem exaggerated to me.
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD
I will put it differently,
Investing 1 or 2% of global GDP to increase wealth gap 50% more and make top 1% unbelievable rich while everyone else looking for jobs or getting 50 year mortgage, seem very bad idea to me.
It can be both? Both that inequality increases but also prosperity for the lower class? I don’t mind that trade off.
If some one were to say to you - you can have 10,000 more iPhones to play with but your friends would get 100,000 iPhones, would you reject the deal?
I think you inadvertently stepped in the point — Yes, what the fuck do I need 10,000 iPhones for? Also part of the problem is which resources end up in abundance. What am I going to do with more compute when housing and land are a limited resource.
Gary’s Economics talks about this but in many cases inequality _is_ the problem. More billionaires means more people investing in limited resources(housing) driving up prices.
Maybe plebes get more money too, but not enough to spend on the things that matter.
It’s just a proxy for wealth using concrete things.
If you were given 10,000 dollars but your friends were also 100,000 dollars as well, would you take the deal?
Land and housing can get costlier while other things get cheaper, making you overall more prosperous. This is what happened in the USA and most of the world. Would you take this deal?
You’re missing the point. It’s not about jealousy it’s basic economics - supply and demand. No I would not take the deal if it raised the demand in something central to my happiness (housing) driving the price up for something previously affordable and make it unaffordable.
I would not trade my house for a better iPhone with higher quality YouTube videos, and slightly more fashionable athleisure.
I don’t care how many yacht’s Elon Musk has, I care how many governments.
What if you could buy the same house as before, buy the same iPhone as before and still have more money remaining? But your house cost way way more proportionally.
>Investing 1 or 2% of global GDP to increase wealth gap 50% more
What’s your definition of wealth gap?
Is it how you feel when you see the name of a billionaire?
Yes the very fact that billionaires exist mean our species has failed.
I do not believe that there is a legitimate billionaire on the planet, in that they haven't engaged in stock manipulation, lobbying, insider trading, corrupt deals, monopolistic practices, dark patterns, corporate tax dodging, personal tax dodging.
You could for example say that the latter are technically legal and therefore okay, but it's my belief that they're "technically legal/loopholes" because we have reached a point where the rich are so powerful that they bend the laws to their own ends.
Our species is a bit of a disappointment. People would rather focus on trivial tribal issues than on anything that impacts the majority of the members of our species. We are well and truly animals.
[delayed]
"The real question is whether the boom is, economically, a mistake."
The answer to this is two part:
1. Have we seen an increase in capability over the last couple of years? The answer here is clearly yes.
2. Do we think that this increase will continue? This is unknown. It seems so, but we don't know and these firms are clearly betting that it will.
1a. Do we think that with existing capability that there is tremendous latent demand? If so the buildout is still rational if progress stops.
They still gotta figure out how their consumers will get the cash to consume. Toss all the developers and a largish cohort of well-paid people head towards the dole.
Yeah I don't think this get's enough attention. It still requires a technical person to use these things effectively. Building coherent systems that solve a business problem is an iterative process. I have a hard time seeing how an LLM could climb that mountain on it's own.
I don't think there's a way to solve the issue of: one-shotted apps will increasingly look more convincing, in the same way that the image generation looks more convincing. But when you peel back the curtain, that output isn't quite correct enough to deploy to production. You could try brute-force vibe iterating until it's exactly what you wanted, but that rarely works for anything that isn't a CRUD app.
Ask any of the image generators to build you a sprite sheet for a 2d character with multiple animation frames. I have never gotten one to do this successfully in one prompt. Sometimes the background will be the checkerboard png transparency layer. Except, the checkers aren't all one color (#000000, #ffffff), instead it's a million variations of off-white and off-black. The legs in walking frames are almost never correct, etc.
And even if they get close - as soon as you try to iterate on the first output, you enter a game of whack-a-mole. Okay we fixed the background but now the legs don't look right, let's fix those. Okay great legs are fixed but now the faces are different in every frame let's fix those. Oh no fixing the faces broke the legs again, Etc.
We are in a weird place where companies are shedding the engineers that know how to use these things. And some of those engineers will become solo-devs. As a solo-dev, funds won't be infinite. So it doesn't seem likely that they can jack up the prices on the consumer plans. But if companies keep firing developers, then who will actually steer the agents on the enterprise plans?
> It still requires a technical person to use these things effectively.
I feel like few people critically think about how technical skill gets acquired in the age of LLMs. Statements like this kind of ignore that those who are the most productive already have experience & technical expertise. It's almost like there is a belief that technical people just grow on trees or that every LLM response somehow imparts knowledge when you use these things.
I can vibe code things that would take me a large time investment to learn and build. But I don't know how or why anything works. If I get asked to review it to ensure it's accurate, it would take me a considerable amount of time where it would otherwise just be easier for me to actually learn the thing. Feels like those most adamant about being more productive in the age of AI/LLMs don't consider any of the side effects of its use.
> But when you peel back the curtain, that output isn't quite correct enough to deploy to production
What if, we change current production environments to fit that blackbox and make it run somehow with 99% availability and good security?
esp when it comes down to integration with the rest of the business processes & people aroud this "single apps" :-)
At some point rich people stop caring about money and only care about power.
It's a fun thought, but you know what we call those people? Poor. The people who light their own money on fire today are ceding power. The two are the same.
1. Some people can afford to light a lot of their money on fire and still remain rich.
2. The trick is to burn other people’s money. Which is a lot more akin to what is going on here. Then, at least in the US, if you’re too big to fail, the fed will just give you more cash effectively diminishing everyone else’s buying power.
> People will take courses in those things and try to get a piece of the winnings.
The problem is boom-bust cycles. Electricians will always be in demand but it takes about 3 years to properly train even a "normal" residential electrician - add easily 2-3 years on top to work on the really nasty stuff aka 50 kV and above.
No matter what, the growth of AI is too rapid and cannot be sustained. Even if the supposed benefits of AI all come true - the level of growth cannot be upheld because everything else suffers.
I know that all investments have risk, but this is one risky gamble.
US$700 billion could build a lot of infrastructure, housing, or manufacturing capacity.
> US$700 billion could build a lot of infrastructure, housing, or manufacturing capacity.
I am now 100% convinced, that the US has power to build those things, but it will not, because it means lives of ordinary people will be elevated even more, this is not what brutal capitalism wants.
If it can make top 1% richer in 10 year span vs good for everyone in 20 years, it will go with former
There is no shortage of money to build housing. There is an abundance of regulatory burdens in places that are desirable to live in.
Its not due to a lack of money that housing in SF is extremely expensive.
SF is not the only place where housing is expensive. There are plenty of cities where they could build more housing and they don't because it isn't profitable or because they don't have the workers to build more, not because the government is telling them they can't.
Which cities, for example?
What $700 billion can't do is cure cancers, Parkinsons, etc. We know because we've tried and that's barely a sliver of what it's cost so far, for middling results.
Whereas $700 billion in AI might actually do that.
Your name is well earned! "can't cure cancers" is impressively counterfactual [0] as 5 year survival of cancer diagnosis is up over almost all categories. Despite every cancer being a unique species trying to kill you, we're getting better and better at dealing with them.
[0]https://www.cancer.org/research/acs-research-news/people-are...
Treating cancer is not the same as curing it. Currently, no doctor would ever tell you you are "cured", just that you are in remission.
Yes, we're getting better at treating cancers, but still if a person gets cancer, chances are good the thing they'll die of is cancer. Middling results.
Because we're not good at curing cancers, we're just good at making people survive better for longer until the cancer gets them. 5 year survival is a lousy metric but it's the best we can manage and measure.
I'm perfectly happy investing roughly 98% of my savings into the thing that has a solid shot at curing cancers, autoimmune and neurodegenerative diseases. I don't understand why all billionaires aren't doing this.
How AI will cure neurodegenerative diseases and cancer?
If we knew that we probably wouldn’t need AI to tell us.
But realistically: perhaps by noticing patterns we’ve failed to notice and by generating likely molecules or pathways to treatment that we hadn’t explored.
We don’t really know what causes most diseases anyway. Why does the Shingles vaccine seem to defend against dementia? Why does picking your nose a lot seem to increase risk of Alzheimer’s?
That’s the point of building something smarter than us: it can get to places we can’t get on our own, at least much faster than we could without it.
I don’t think that lack of intelligence is the bottleneck. It might be in some places, but categorically, across the board, our bottlenecks are much more pragmatic and mundane.
Consider another devastating disease: tuberculosis. It’s largely eradicated in the 1st world but is still a major cause of death basically everywhere else. We know how to treat it, lack of knowledge isn’t the bottleneck. I’d say effectively we do not have a cure for TB because we have not made that cure accessible to enough humans.
> I don't understand why all billionaires aren't doing this.
I know, shocking isn’t it?
Maybe it should give you pause then, that not everyone else is investing 98% of their savings?
It gives me pause that most people drive cars or are willing to sit in one for more than 20 minutes a week.
But people accept the status quo and are afraid to take a moment’s look into the face of their own impending injury, senescence and death: that’s how our brains are wired to survive and it used to make sense evolutionarily until about 5 minutes ago.
Ah, yes: "well, we can't cure cancer or autoimmune and neurodegenerative diseases, but I'm willing to invest basically all my money into a thing that's...trained on the things we know how to do already, and isn't actually very good at doing any of them."
...Meanwhile, we are developing techniques to yes, cure some kinds of cancer, as in every time they check back it's completely gone, without harming healthy tissue.
We are developing "anti-vaccines" for autoimmune diseases, that can teach our bodies to stop attacking themselves.
We are learning where some of the origins of the neurodegenerative diseases are, in ways that makes treating them much more feasible.
So you're 100% wrong about the things we can't do, and your confidence in what "AI" can do is ludicrously unfounded.
Every doctor and researcher in the world is trained on things we already know how to do already.
I’m not claiming we haven’t made a dent. I’m claiming I’m in roughly as much danger from these things right now as any human ever has been: middling results.
If we can speed up the cures by even 1%, that’s cumulatively billions of hours of human life saved by the time we’re done.
But what they can do, that AI can't, is try new things in measured, effective, and ethical ways.
And that hypothetical "billions of hours of human life saved" has to be measured against the actual damage being done right now.
Real damage to economy, environment, politics, social cohesion, and people's lives now
vs
Maybe, someday, we improve the speed of finding cures for diseases? In an unknown way, at an unknown time, for an unknown cost, and by an unknown amount.
Who knows, maybe they'll give everyone a pony while they're at it! It seems just as likely as what you're proposing.
I suspect a lot of this is due to large amounts of liquidity sloshing around looking for returns. We are still dealing with the consequences of the ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy) and QE (Quantitative Easing) where money to support the economy through the Great Financial Crisis and Covid was largely funneled in to the top, causing the 'everything bubble'. The rich got (a lot) richer, and now have to find something to do with that wealth. The immeasurable returns promised by LLMs (in return for biblical amounts of investment) fits that bill very well.
Your comment doesn't say anything
> If AI is here to stay, as a thing that permanently increases productivity,
Thing is, I am still waiting to see where it increases productivity aside from some extremely small niches like speech to text and summarizing some small text very fast.
Serious question, but have you not used it to implement anything at your job? Admittedly I was very skeptical but last sprint in 2 days I got 12 pull requests up for review by running 8 agents on my computer in parallel and about 10 more on cloud VMs. The PRs are all double reviewed and QA'd and merged. The ones that don't have PRs are larger refactors, one 40K loc and the other 30k loc and I just need actual time to go through every line myself and self-test appropriately, otherwise it would have been more stuff finished. These are all items tied to money in our backlog. It would have taken me about 5 times as long to close those items out without this tooling. I also would have not had as much time to produce and verify as many unit tests as I did. Is this not increased productivity?
Are you doctor or a farmer?
If you are a software engineer you are missing out a lot, literally a lot!
> What we really want to ask ourselves is whether our economy is set up to mostly get things right, or it is wastefully searching.
I can’t speak to the economy as a whole, but the tech economy has a long history of bubbles and scams. Some huge successes, too—but gets it wrong more often than it gets it right.
It's hard to comprehend the scale of these investments. Comparing them to notable industrial projects, it's almost unbelievable.
Every week in 2026 Google will pay for the cost of a Burj Khalifa. Amazon for a Wembley Stadium.
Facebook will spend a France-England tunnel every month.
I have been having this conversation more and more with friends. As a research topic, modern AI is a miracle, and I absolutely love learning about it. As an economic endeavor, it just feels insane. How many hospitals, roads, houses, machine shops, biomanufacturing facilities, parks, forests, laboratories, etc. could we build with the money we’re spending on pretraining models that we throw away next quarter?
Haters will say Sora wasn't worth it.
Inflation adjusted?
It’s definitely not causing shortages of people, with tens of thousands and more getting laid off every month!
The AI boom is just like a conference- where new and shiny seems to do wonders, but when you come back to workplace, none of that seem to work or fit in!
The article was specific about where the jobs shortages are. Electricians, construction, mathematicians (?)(wasn't aware the was a lot of dedicated math work in a data center design and build). Lay offs have been in software, design, and elsewhere.
This is the trade-off to connectivity and removing frictional barriers (i.e., globalism). This is the economic equivalent of what Nick Land and Spandrell called the "IQ shredder". Spandrell said of Singapore:
Basically, if you're a productive person, you want to maximize your return. So, you go where the action is. So does every other smart person. Often that place is a tech hub, which is now overflowing with smart guys. Those smart guys build adware (or whatever) and fail to reproduce (combined, these forces "shred" the IQ). Meanwhile every small town is brain-drained. You hometown's mayor is 105 IQ because he's the smartest guy in town. Things don't work that great, and there's a general stagnation to the place.Right now, AI is a "capital shredder". In the past, there were barriers everywhere, and we've worked hard to tear those down. It used to be that the further the distance (physically, but also in other senses too, like currencies, language, culture, etc.), the greater the friction to capital flows. The local rich guy would start a business in his town. Now he sends it to one of the latest global capital attractors, which have optimized for capital inflow. This mechanism works whether the attractor can efficiently use that capital or not. That resource inflow might be so lucrative, that managing inflow is the main thing it does. Right now that's AI, but as long as present structure continues, this is how the machine of the global economy will work.
This is hogwash. It's incel and eugenic reasoning wrapped up all together.
Not every smart person (or even most) are engineers, and of the ones that are they don't all move to tech hubs, and the ones that do not all of them can't get laid.
And I'll give you a great reason why it's hogwash, the "brilliant" engineers that can't get laid in Singapore are the same "brilliant" engineers that can't get laid in their home town
I agree with you that STEM don't hold a monopoly on intelligence.
> engineers that can't get laid in Singapore are the same "brilliant" engineers that can't get laid in their home town
Maybe so, but not for the same reasons. Back in their home town, they cannot vibe with anyone because the few who might be compatible have long since left. In a STEM hotspot, they go to an event and meet compatible people, but it's 11 guys for every 3 girls, so unless they are top dog in that room, they aren't going to score.
And yet, the population of Singapore isn't 79% male.
IDK the dating scene in Singapore. I frankly didn't even know that Singapore was considered a tech hub. I was using it as a synonym for a tech hub because that is what I assumed the author was doing.
We can blame the individual for the cost we've outsourced into him. When he collapses under that load, we can attribute it to personal shortcomings. Some people survive, even thrive, in the current environment, after all. We've coalesced a plurality of games into a single one, and in a sense, it works great. We have our smartphones, AI, online shopping, and targeted advertising.
Notepad now has Copilot built right into it, after all. That wasn't going to happen by now if we took the human psyche as a given and built around that.
…not to mention they are completely ignoring the existence of smart girls as well
>>It's incel and eugenic reasoning wrapped up all together.
More like French post-structuralism.
It’s the same nonsense as people going “Idiocracy is a documentary.“ Of course none of them think they’re the idiots.
Apologies but either I don’t understand your post or it is nonsensical.
What relevance does AI have to being an IQ shredder if the talent has gone into (productively) developing capable AI?
If anything, AI completely disproves your notion of IQ shredder because this is an instance of lack of barriers actually hastening progress. Look at all the AI talent. Very few are American or ethnic Americans.
this is genius
What amazes me about this theory is that being the 115 IQ guy in a town where the next guy is 105 isn’t better than being the 115 IQ guy in and office averaging 120.
Or put more plainly, being a big fish in a small pond is not better than being a small fish.
Why not just not compare to others because it’s easy to game anything?
Just look for patterns and then act out of self interest. Nobody is coming to save you.
I’m no high IQ person but if I can figure out how to get a STEM job without STEM degree, make money by getting lucky at a unicorn, invest and sell for profit and invest again (only losers HODL so others can take profits), then there’s really no excuse why someone else can’t.
And I’m originally from a country that has like 70 IQ nationally or so it is said. So I’m not a genius, maybe the only quality I have that makes me different is I don’t know how to quit until I meet my goal.
More people should stop crying and be a man. Our ancestors literally survived against nature and each other so we could post here on HN. I don’t mean being able to lift 500lbs like a caveman either.
Exercise your brain, it gets stronger too because I have a hard time understanding concepts sometimes, but taking steps to break it down and digest it in pieces helps me. Takes a bit longer but hopefully you have tomorrow.
What’s the alternative. Keep the smart physically separated, can never collaborate to make anything paradigm shifting and we just prod along with small town paper mills and marginally better local government?
Within the Landian system, I suspect he'd say the answer is economic "territorialization", the economic equivalent to the mechanism originally defined by Deleuze+Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus based on the territoriality of earlier work.
It's the process where social, political, or cultural meaning is rooted in some context. It's a state of stability and boundaries. For just the economic, the geographic would likely be the centroid of that, but the other vectors are not irrelevant.
One could argue that we suffer to the degree we are deterritorialized, because the effects thereof are alienating. So, we need structure that aligns both our economic and psychological needs. What we have is subordination to the machine, which will do what it's designed to: optimize for its own desire, which is machinic production.
Note that none of this is inherently good/bad. Like anything, a choice has trade-offs. We definitely get more production within the current structure. The cost is born by the individual, aggregating into the social ills that are now endemic.
We’ve had 50 years of genetic engineering and it’s about time we started using it. I wish someone with more central authority like China starts doing experiments of genetically altering humans to start making super humans. We have the technology, it’s only ethics holding us back. So what if a few thousand people (preferably volunteers) die in experiments, we should just make sure they’re condemned (like death row or terminally ill) and carry on.
Land himself has suggested a very anti-human solution to the problem of "IQ shredders":
"The most hard-core capitalist response to this [IQ shredders] is to double-down on the antihumanist accelerationism. This genetic burn-rate is obviously unsustainable, so we need to convert the human species into auto-intelligenic robotized capital [a]s fast as possible, before the whole process goes down in flames." [0]
[0] Nick Land (2014). IQ Shredders in Xenosystems Blog. Retrieved from github.com/cyborg-nomade/reignition
Thanks, been awhile since I read it.
I think the only solution is territorialization if you want to preserve the human. If you don't care about that (or think that it's not possible anyway), then yes, accelerate.
Glad there’s other fellow travelers here
California had a great mechanism for this in their land grant colleges, which back before the protests of the Vietnam War were required to offer the valedictorian of nearby high schools (or the person with the highest GPA who accepted) full tuition and room and board --- then Governor Ronald Reagan shut down this program when the students had the temerity to protest the Vietnam War --- it was also grade inflation to keep students above the threshold necessary for a draft deferment which began the downward spiral of American education.
A little less min-maxing, perhaps.
A cohesive culture that has strong bonds that transcend class. Rich people choosing to allocate capital in a manner that benefits them at the expense of others isn’t a new phenomenon by any means. We need rulers who value noblesse oblige. The current ones see us as cattle (the term popping up the Epstein emails so frequently is kinda funny).
“Blood and soil” is such a taboo in today’s society because it’s the solution to the problems we have. I don’t say this to be edgy. Scaling trust is the most important thing in human societies, and race, cultural history, shared religion etc are the absolute best ways to do this. Think about it this way:
Every morning men like Sam Altman wake up and decide to keep pursuing billions of dollars with no thought of how to ensure the rest of his people (because they aren’t you and me) are going to get by. He could very easily make this a core tenet of OpenAI (in a way inline with its original incarnation) and be _loved_ by the people. We don’t have a single elite that behaves this way: Musk, Trump, Altman, etc are all parasites that do not care if we live or die.
Land and co. are more or less transhumanist Thiel cronies so you’re not gonna get great analysis from them.
Sign me up to be an electrician. The line for that is pretty long and gatekept.
It's time that societies act against this cancer. When everything else suffers because the cancer is stealing all sorts of resources, a human would go to a doctor and have the cancer killed chemically or excised.
This is another facet of the fierce opposition to AI by a swath of the population: it’s quite literally destroying the last bit of enjoyment we could wring from existence in the form of hobbies funded through normal employment.
Think of the PC gamers, who first dealt with COVID supply shocks, followed by crypto making GPUs scarce and untenable, then GPU makers raising prices and narrowing inventory to only the highest-end SKUs, only to outright abandon them entirely for AI - which then also consumed their RAM and SSDs. A hobby that used to be enjoyed by folks on even a modest budget is now a theft risk given the insane resale priced of parts on the second-hand market due to scarcity.
And that extends to others as well. The swaths of folks who made freelance or commission artistry work through Patreons and conventions and the like are suddenly struggling as customers and companies spew out AI slop using their work and without compensation. Tech workers, previously the wealthy patron of artisans and communities, are now being laid off en masse for AI CapEx buildouts and share pumps as investors get cold feet about what these systems are actually doing to the economy at large (definite bad, questionable good, uncertain futures).
Late stage capitalism’s sole respite was consumerism, and we can’t even do that anymore thanks to AI gobbling up all the resources and capital. It’s no wonder people are pissed at AI boosters trying to say this is a miracle technology that’ll lift everyone up: it’s already kicking people down, and nobody actually wants to admit or address that lest their investments be disrupted to protect humans.
I think this started a lot earlier actually. A few generations back, many people played an instrument, or at least could sing. It didn't matter that none of them was a Mozart, because they didn't had to be. For making music or singing together in a family or a friend group, it was wholly sufficient to be just good, not necessarily great.
But when everyone has access to recordings of the world's best musicians at all times, why listen to uncle Harry's shoddy guitar play? Why sing Christmas songs together when you can put on the Sinatra Christmas jazz playlist on Spotify?
> why listen to uncle Harry's shoddy guitar play?
Uncle Harry is not playing guitar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXzz8o1m5bM
That’s definitely part of it as well, this sort of general distillation into a smaller and smaller pool of content or objects or goods that cost ever more money.
Like how most of the royalties Spotify pays out are for older catalogue stuff from “classic” artists, rather than new bands. Or how historical libraries of movies and films are constantly either up for grabs (for prestige) or being pushed off platforms due to their older/more costly royalty agreements.
With AI though, it’s the actual, tangible consumption of physical goods being threatened, which many companies involved in AI may argue is exactly the point: that everyone should be renters rather than consumers, and by making ownership expensive through cost and scarcity alike, you naturally drive more folks towards subscriptions for what used to be commodities (music, movies, games, compute, vehicles, creativity tools, TCGs, you name it).
It’s damn depressing.
THIS! Instrument-playing capability of a social environment: By today, I know only of one person playing a piano regularly in his club, he is the only one I know. When I was young, you had some basic instrument introduction in music classes at school - I do not know if these still exist today.
Regarding singing - I do not know a single perso who can "somehow" sing at least a little bit.
The society is loosing these capacities.
"Comparison is the thief of joy" as they say. Some dude has the world's highest score in Pac-Man in the Guinness Book Of World Records. It doesn't mean that I can't play Pac-Man to beat my own personal high score and enjoy the process because the game is fun in it's own right.
That's sure true in theory, but given the prevalence of status symbols, many people thrive on comparing themselves to others. I'd argue society was better off when the only people you could reasonably compare yourself to were the three neighbours down the street (out of which only one would be into Pac-Man), not the world's ten thousand best players showing off only their best streaks on your Instagram feed all day.
Apologies for being glib but I never thought I’d see a sincere “think of the gamers” comment.
Your whole post is a bit vague and naive. If people enjoyed real art more than AI art, then the market will decide it. If they don’t then we should not be making people enjoy what they don’t.
Think of the PC gamers
The battlecry of the new revolution?
The current LLMs are not constantly learning. They're static models that require megatons of coal to retrain.
Now if the LLMs could modify their own nets, and improve themselves, then that would be immensely valuable for the world.
But as of now, its a billionaires wet dream to threaten all workers as a way to replace labor.
> if the LLMs could modify their own nets ... then that would be immensely valuable for the world.
Not sure :)
I expect different things, don't think Wall Street allows good things to happen to ordinary people
Think bigger, think of the entire system outside of just the single LLM: the interplay of capital, human engineering, and continual improvement of LLMs. First gen LLM used 100% human coding. Previous gen were ~50% human coding. Current gen are ~10% human coding (practically all OpenAI/Anthropic engineers admit they're entirely using Claude Code / Codex for code). What happens when we're at 1% human coding, then 0%? The recursive self-improvement is happening, it's just indirectly for now.
How would you have done it differently? It’s clear that even if this builds up more billionaire wealth, it still benefits everyone. Just like any other technology?
So would you rather stop billionaires from doing it?
Is there really for the ML boom, or is it just a way to make computers more and more expensive to push people towards mobile? Because looking around, that's the effect I'm seeing, regardless of the causes.
I see a future where most people will buy tablets to save money and the desktop will be for only a few, a very few, just when self-hosting is becoming trendy and people are saying "it's time for GNU/Linux to take Windows' place"...
RIP Washington Post.
I don't think these companies buying realize how much animosity they're creating with literally everyone until it explodes on their face.