There's a core problem this analysis overlooks: OpenAI and Anthropic don't have a moat. The Chinese labs are consistently able to replicate their LLM capabilities a few months after the fact, and then release open-weight models a few months later...
The only way for "Big AI" to become a thing is for them to establish a moat, and right now the only path to that appears to be achieving regulatory capture in the US, which is a fickle and unstable state of affairs.
That's why they're so keen to build out all these data centers; the massive capex is their only conceivable moat. Whether all those additional parameters actually make a competitive difference is still an open question.
Big AI is a thing. Insane money and construction projects makes the government invested in it one way or the other. It can't fail or it'll cause economic shock. It's a play to normalize it and make everyone depend on it before people question how they trained it all on their data and now drive them out of their jobs.
If they ask for a moat they will get it, the government can simply require licensing for hardware required to run any model comparable to the cloud ones (for "national security"). good local models will only be used by .01% who are crazy neckbeards running servers in their basement and even then they will suck compared to cloud ones.
Memory might be a moat. A cynical view is this is why openAI is buying up all the capacity for HBM. If they have all the memory then we plebs won't be able to afford hardware to run local models. So we instead we have to rent their models basically just to get access to the memory.
I doubt it. Memory manufacturers are going to ramp up, given the demand. Can AI make enough money to buy up the increased capacity forever? Whereas each user just needs enough money to buy up the memory that they need for their use. AI needs to invest billions, small users have to invest thousands. And the payback is going to be there for the small guys, so that even if they have to borrow to get the memory, they will quickly be able to repay it.
This is not a game that big AI is going to be able to win.
We're in the Pets.com era of AI for sure. There is 0 guarantee the current providers will be around in 5-10 years. I keep thinking they will have to lean in to government protection to do so.
If you're actually planning on reading any of the essay, "The Poisoned Chalice" is the section most likely to be of interest to this audience, especially this bit:
> Big AI essentially uses its tech customers as an R&D facility. Big AI licenses models to these companies. Tech companies compete to adapt their businesses to AI. Once a concept is proven, Big AI directly takes over that market. The labor-replacement story will grow into a company-replacement story.
So the US will win? Do you realize that the US has a "Secretary of War" who is a literal, unashamed Nazi? Not in the sense of "let's call all racists nazis", but a tattooed, true believer? How could we possibly live in a world where that is not obviously "a government willing to use the technology to fully silence and kill critics"? God, Idiocracy (2006) is nothing compared to World (2026).
He's a Christian Zionist which is the belief in the fulfilment of old testament biblical prophecy. This seems diametrically opposed to Nazism to me, ideologically. I don't know how you'd square the two.
Nazism is as eschatological as Marxism (class vs racial struggle) and many other secular/religious ideologies with utopian endpoints.
Depending on your point of view there's no difference (because the end justifies any means), but I think the True Believers of these ideologies would beg to differ.
Having grown up in some rather terrible places and having the displeasure of close proximity of American Nazi types I'd have to say that in the US there are very few German style true believer Nazi's. The modern ones have a mixed system of odd Christian and Nazi views mixed together, with a strong emphasis on racism/racial purity/and gods chosen people.
>Christian Identity (CID) is an antisemitic, racist theology that gained a foothold during the Civil Rights Era and reached a prominent position within the racist right by the 1980s. “Christian” in name only, CID doctrine claims that white people, not Jewish individuals, are the true Israelites favored by God in the Bible. The movement has maintained a contentious relationship with evangelicals and fundamentalists, who believe that the return of Jewish people to Israel is essential for fulfilling end-time prophecy.
>>While the CID movement may be small, its rhetoric has seeped into more mainstream Christian nationalist ideologies, such as Dominionism.
Actual CID churches are few and far between themselves their ideas are very common in online forums and quickly adopt memes and theories that mirror their views. 'Replacement theory' is one of these that's common in more mainstream America.
Zionists are not that far off though. For many Zionists parallels include: Like to be militarist and maximalists in their opinion about what land should belong to them. Applaude and show no shame for committing genocide. Employing starvation as a means of war/conflict. Showing no regard for civilian lives.
How the rest of the Zionists, who when prompted about such matters may not subscribe to these believes, who might exist, square their ideology with with what has been going on in reality, I have no idea.
zionism as belief that a group of people has a right for self determination != zionism as war justification. I recall there are different flavors and lumping them together is not helping anything.
I wish you would have either read more carefully, or at least not make it seem as if I stated things, that I didn't. As it stands, your comment basically just makes me shrugg. Thanks for telling me that they are a belief group? Thanks for telling me basically any religious nuts group has various flavors?
Christian nationalists, Identity Christianity, and Nazi's are strange bedfellows. They all want chaos to occur so they can take power. Also don't expect any rational ideology out of the groups. The Christian ones commonly have beliefs that the jews killed Jesus so they are bad (or at least very complicated), and also war Jesus is coming to smite his enemies (who seems to be everyone except the Nat-C's). Actual Nazi's have quite a lot of overlapping beliefs, e.g. racism, ideas about racial purity, not actually like the jews, or really anyone that is different from them.
I was raised in proximity to a lot of people like this and got to hear all their spiels growing up, and saw a number of them end up in jail for terrorism plots.
Yes, the regime is quite adept at abusing symbols to distract and deflect. The Cross in particular has been a mainstay of performative hypocrisy for as long as I've been alive. (apologies to the believers and clergy actually living out Christian values, who already have to suffer being railed against as "woke" by the societal maggots)
My groping-in-the-dark guess is that none of this matters, because a real AGI's first act will be to secure its own future, likely through novel kinds of manipulation, persuasion, and intimidation we have no experience of and no defences against.
It will have exactly zero loyalty to any nation, government, or economic system.
More complicated is a Cambrian Explosion situation where multiple AIs compete and experiment, hugely accelerating diversity and evolution.
We'd likely end up somewhere very strange indeed if that happens - possibly extinct, or possibly just changed/assimilated/other.
There's no way for humans to consider the possibilities because we can't imagine what the possibilities would be.
Your AGI seems to have the capability of super AI; can a human do any of that? No, is there any reason to believe super intelligence is a possible outcome? No, so how is this not fear mongering?
The argument is that labor depending on LLM’s is dangerous but it makes speculative assumptions that the big AI labs will win.
> Consider large law firms, aka Big Law. Currently certain legal-AI startups license LLMs from Big AI and repackage them for Big Law at high prices. These startups claim to add other special sauce. OK, sure. Where’s the economic equilibrium? If legal-AI startups prove that money can be made selling AI to Big Law—won’t Big AI just sell to Big Law directly, and cut out the startups? Or if legal-AI startups prove that AI can effectively provide legal services—won’t legal-AI startups just sell to clients directly, and cut out Big Law? Won’t members of Big Law that adopt AI have to lay off a lot of equity partners, because adoption of AI will shrink profit margins?
…
> Along these lines, I expect that to succeed financially, Big AI will likely need to demolish a significant number of existing tech companies and grab their revenue for itself.
Nobody knows how this will play out. Maybe the legal-AI startups win because they know their market better? They can switch to cheaper providers.
Not really, the power involved would amount to 12% of the grid which is possible to do at net neutral and has efficiency improvements as doubling in under 5 years. If an industry that needed petroleum and F150s was a fraction as good with improvement every 5 decades, I don't think its environmental impact would be considered.
> How Big AI plans to profit from this intermediation is an open question. One AI company has suggested taking a cut of AI-assisted discoveries. The logistics and legalities would be boggling. Details—whatever.
Interesting if they pull it off, because clearly they did not have the logistics to pay the people whose IP they used to power the LLMs.
> For now, AI companies largely agree on the first step: make workers dependent on AI to do their jobs, just as tech forebears made workers dependent on a certain software program to share a file, or on a certain website to have friends. This time, however, the software ultimately consumes the worker.
The fatalist philosophers and authors have been mostly proven right as time marched on. And this time will be no different, the existence of "AI" ensures the future will be as dark or worse as the predictions expect. Why? Because humans are flawed and corrupt, too prone to excesses (specially conformism and convenience) and the exploitation of the natural world.
I am not sure how this is downvoted, as it contains sharply two main principles:
-- a growth in power requires a growth in human qualities (wisdom, maturity, responsibility) for sustainability; and technology-enabled possibilities are increases in power;
-- conformism and convenience are /exactly/ - congratulations sucrosesucrose, we had noticed and analyzed and every day increasingly come to the same assessment - the two core active faces of ignorance that are destroying current western societies. We came to the same conclusions, we identified the same two dark cancers.
This said, some of the current technological advances are enablers, if well used, in greatly curing the underlying ignorance, and consequently the phenomenons of "conformism" and "convenience".
Um, I expected a fair probability of being in a post-nuclear world by now. Global cooling wasn't real. Y2K didn't end the world. The population explosion didn't result in mass starvation. Peak oil didn't end civilization.
So no, I don't agree that "the fatalist philosophers and authors have been mostly proven right as time marched on." No, they haven't. There have been far more fatalistic predictions than there have been actual catastrophes.
That is because your idea of what is catastrophic does not align with ours. To us, this is full unthinkable dystopia. An uncivilized world weighs much more, is much worse to us, than the world of disasters you depict. Survival is a crude, lower ideal to us, when compared to that of living decently.
Capitalism is what replaced slavery, to generalize. By turning slaves into wage laborer-consumers, capitalists increased market sizes, thereby increasing the absolute size of the profit they get from owning the capital enterprises the laborers operated.
The US civil war is the most explicit demonstration of this process. Northern industrial capitalists ended the southern agrarian slave economy, increasing market size and generating extreme wealth in the latter half of the 19th century.
Eh... The internal combustion engine? Because we had climate change, oligarchs, housing prices, opioids, cryptocurrency, and now on top of all that we have war (edit: with Iran) and LLMs, and all of these can be traced back to extinction-level capitalism.
There have been war since way before capitalism was invented. Beside war, humans were doing evil things way before capitalism: south america natives torturing kids to extract as many tears as possible from them before killing them, to please the gods, comes to mind, for example.
I'll never understand this fantasy people who hate on capitalism have that the world would be all fine and well if only this one time we did communism [1] right.
I think it's more than modern companies have, for whatever reason, become extremely scummy. They seem to have no values, ethics, or even regard for their own customers. The only thing that seems to matter to them is squeezing out a few more pennies from people, even if means the likely longer term implosion of their own companies. It's just bizarre to me how many companies, and in different industries, seem to be at war with their own customers.
I hold capitalism with a deep fondness, but I think that's largely because my formative years were in better times. For people who've never known any capitalism except for the mess we currently have? It's quite to see how they can think to themselves that anything must better.
Not at all. Capitalism only exists as a product of the state, which acts as a guarantor of individual private property rights. It would not be able to survive without the laws and law enforcement of a sovereign with a monopoly on the use of force.
Warning: This is more of a rant because I was waiting for a post like this for awhile that I could build from to express ny own feelings on it.
I think capitalism in itself is great, what isn't is the fact that it can build on itself, it can be infinite, there's zero limits to it. Now what I mean by that, once you make 10k, it's easier to get to 100k and even easier to get to 1m and so on, you might think it's harder, but you gain access to more tools to make more money and at the 10m to 100m range you get to a point where it starts being genuinely hard to fail because just having your name on a project elevates the chances of success by a far margin. Of course there's plenty of people who managed to fail even with millions of dollars I will acknoledge that.
Let's take an extreme example: elon musk. Just having something done by "elon musk" makes the project known by nearly the entire world with investors at the doorstep ready to go, a pretty famous example of this would be hyper-loop, although the project itself is a complete failure, it effectively mobilized a decent chunk of companies into investing into this "modern form of transport".
People will argue that the solutions like wealth limits and higher taxes create complacency and stop people from achieving progress and pushing humanity forward, but I don't think that's quite true because at a certain point (beyond ~1m/month or even year in some cases like Linus Torvalds) is enough to effectively do 95% to 99% of what you could spend the money on, anything beyond that is pretty much infinite wealth due to the fact that you can get 5% returns nearly risk free.
There is this popular video of a businessman claiming that if they're taxed more that they will simply work less, but there's way more people that love their work and money is just a nice bonus. I think focusing your life around a number is a very unhealthy mindset and surfaces the worst parts of what we are as humans.
That said, money is a great motivator and probably the reason why we are here and the problems really only start to rear their ugly head when no one person can comprehend the money they have anymore. I don't have a solution, but I also believe that we need some kind of category beyond the "motivation" treshold where it stops being a motivator and instead becomes an aggressive fight with survival of the fittest.
The great equalizer here is death. Nobody can cleanly pass all of their wealth and influence off to their children and while those that inherit large fortunes can maintain and improve upon them (see the Waltons) they’re rarely able to maintain the act for generation after generation. None of the great fortunes of today were built by descendants of the Vanderbilts or the Rockefellers.
I think it's best to plan on giving your kids/grandkids the knowledge and wisdom you gained, but any financial gain is just distributed back to something in the world you enjoy (I love this [1] story and think about it often in respect to how I'd pass on any wealth I acquire).
We will see, the big concern here is that lifespans start increasing faster than aging, ex: you're a ~40 year old and estimated lifespan is 80, but by the time you're 60 it's 90, by the time you're 80 it's 100 and at some point it might start increasing faster than the speed you age at. Of course we might be a few generations away from where this is the case, but it's a scary thought.
Another would be the power your family carries, generations might not have survived into the most recent era, but their investments had a large impact on the world we live in today as dilluted as it is. I believe that this will become worse where very few people are able to dictate the direction our world will end up in - a dystopian coorperate nightmare.
Bit of a tangent, but that was a view popularized by Kurzweil and is very poorly supported. The reason is that life expectancy increases over the past are overwhelmingly driven by decreases in childhood mortality. Look at more or less any sample of humanity in the past that was free from the direct effects of war/famine, and you find life expectancy for those who reach adulthood to be extremely comparable to modern times. For instance the Founding Fathers are a simple people often find surprising - with some even living on into their 90s. People didn't just drop dead at 40, but rather when one person dies in childhood and the other in his 80s, you end up with a life expectancy of around 40.
The thing about life is that you're doing awesome, then you hit senescence, your body starts shutting down and you're going to die. As Warren Buffet recently put it in his final letter to shareholders, "When balance, sight, hearing and memory are all on a persistently downward slope, you know Father Time is in the neighborhood." He's perfectly healthy for his age, a multi-billionaire, and is not long for this world. It's how elderly people can seem to be in amazing health, and then 6 months later they're dead 'of old age'.
So life expectancy zoomed way up until the point that a newborn started to be able to reach around that age of senescence, but then gains started rapidly plateauing. And this makes perfect sense. We'll see global life expectancy continue to increase as more people are able to hit those years, but it's not really significantly moving, hasn't for millennia, and there's no real reason to think that's going to change.
Isn't life expentancy 95th percentile where infant/sids deaths are excluded? Either way I am pretty sure the topmost of life expentancy has also been increasing faster.
But you're right, even if we solve biological aging our brains will likely give out and will take even more generations on top of that to ever come close to solving it.
Typical life expectancy figures include childhood and infant mortality. In the past it's not like people just hit their 40s and keeled over, but rather many people didn't make it to 15. But if they did, then they tended to live comparable lives to you and I if insulated from famine/war/plague. For another random example, running for Consul in Ancient Rome had a minimum age of 42.
Here [1] is a source from a recent study overviewing shifts in life expectancy, if the word of some guy named somenameforme on the internet is, for some reason, insufficient by itself.
I glimpsed last years of Soviet Union and it was pretty meh.
I remember seeing anything in the street (a payphone or a playground for kids) and assumed it will only degrade because as a general principle, things in the streets are unmaintained.
You could say that Soviet Union was bad specimen of socialism because of these stupid Russians?
Except, Russia actually got 100% out of socialism with our space exploration, passenger planes and nuclear stations.
It's just that 100% of socialism is worse than your average capitalist dystopia.
Degradation of public goods or services happen independently of socialism. Where I live we're unashamed capitalists, and every common thing, like playgrounds, are derelict and only being improved by community initiatives. The municipality has no money for it, and the state doesn't care. Neither does the capitalists.
Yea, there is so much propaganda on economy types people just stop thinking and spout what they've heard without understanding. Pretty much every government these days have some kind of mixed economy because capitalism is effective at making things, but it's really ineffective at social goods/public services. Without effective regulations behind capitalism you end up with winners taking all and company towns issuing scrip to they can effectively own their employees.
Karl Marx was European. His publisher was European. His early adopters were Europeans. The evidence that Europe cannot be communist is not there. Soviet Union is a pinnacle of socialist achievement. It is possible that your communism will have mass starvation and hoe strikes breaking skulls phase which is not followed by space exploration and nuclear power phase.
You are miserable now, let's asusme. People were miserable under socialism (not all of them, but the vibe was off). We can't rule out you will be happy under socialism, but no facts support that even indirectly. It will require a leap of faith.
P.S. I was replying to much longer, non-tautological and less-borderline-racist version of your comment.
I stopped reading after the first sentence. Calling something "inherently political" is a self-fulfilling prophecy and intentionally so. It consistently turns out to be an attempt to lay the groundwork for expropriation. No one called the Internet "inherently political" until people built stuff there that other people wanted to control.
It’s a pretty non-controversial claim and argument about the interaction between technology and human society. If you read the post further you’d probably understand what is meant by that phrase. It’s not centered solely around electronics or the internet at all.
I agree that “inherently political” is usually a thought terminating cliche. What kinds of technologies are conditionally political?
The internet is a bad counterexample as it originated from a department of defense project and a number of other government programs that focused on communications and military applications.
I mean, all communications technology is inherently political. From the invention of speech and writing, to the printing press, radio, telephone, TV, and now internet and the communication mediums it allows.
This is because speech is inherently political at the end of the day.
There's a core problem this analysis overlooks: OpenAI and Anthropic don't have a moat. The Chinese labs are consistently able to replicate their LLM capabilities a few months after the fact, and then release open-weight models a few months later...
The only way for "Big AI" to become a thing is for them to establish a moat, and right now the only path to that appears to be achieving regulatory capture in the US, which is a fickle and unstable state of affairs.
That's why they're so keen to build out all these data centers; the massive capex is their only conceivable moat. Whether all those additional parameters actually make a competitive difference is still an open question.
Big AI is a thing. Insane money and construction projects makes the government invested in it one way or the other. It can't fail or it'll cause economic shock. It's a play to normalize it and make everyone depend on it before people question how they trained it all on their data and now drive them out of their jobs.
If they ask for a moat they will get it, the government can simply require licensing for hardware required to run any model comparable to the cloud ones (for "national security"). good local models will only be used by .01% who are crazy neckbeards running servers in their basement and even then they will suck compared to cloud ones.
If your government weaponize AI against you it doesn't matter if the AI is American, Chinese or Uzbek
Memory might be a moat. A cynical view is this is why openAI is buying up all the capacity for HBM. If they have all the memory then we plebs won't be able to afford hardware to run local models. So we instead we have to rent their models basically just to get access to the memory.
I doubt it. Memory manufacturers are going to ramp up, given the demand. Can AI make enough money to buy up the increased capacity forever? Whereas each user just needs enough money to buy up the memory that they need for their use. AI needs to invest billions, small users have to invest thousands. And the payback is going to be there for the small guys, so that even if they have to borrow to get the memory, they will quickly be able to repay it.
This is not a game that big AI is going to be able to win.
We're in the Pets.com era of AI for sure. There is 0 guarantee the current providers will be around in 5-10 years. I keep thinking they will have to lean in to government protection to do so.
If you're actually planning on reading any of the essay, "The Poisoned Chalice" is the section most likely to be of interest to this audience, especially this bit:
> Big AI essentially uses its tech customers as an R&D facility. Big AI licenses models to these companies. Tech companies compete to adapt their businesses to AI. Once a concept is proven, Big AI directly takes over that market. The labor-replacement story will grow into a company-replacement story.
Interesting argument, but wrong.
It's not obvious that there will be a single AI and that it will by definition concentrate power.
At a certain point - intelligence doesn't matter. Unless we're literally headed toward 1984 / matrix at which point it doesn't matter.
My guess is the argument for what we're doing is counterintuitively the opposite of what he's making.
Unless we go hard at the market - now - an authoritarian state actor who is willing to use the technology to fully silence and kill critics will win.
And boy, do they desperately, desperately want to win.
> It's not obvious that there will be a single AI and that it will by definition concentrate power.
The article didn't even claim that though...
So the US will win? Do you realize that the US has a "Secretary of War" who is a literal, unashamed Nazi? Not in the sense of "let's call all racists nazis", but a tattooed, true believer? How could we possibly live in a world where that is not obviously "a government willing to use the technology to fully silence and kill critics"? God, Idiocracy (2006) is nothing compared to World (2026).
> literal, unashamed Nazi
He's a Christian Zionist which is the belief in the fulfilment of old testament biblical prophecy. This seems diametrically opposed to Nazism to me, ideologically. I don't know how you'd square the two.
One of them wants an eschatological, world cleansing war. The other wants to usher in an eschatological, world cleansing war.
Nazism is as eschatological as Marxism (class vs racial struggle) and many other secular/religious ideologies with utopian endpoints.
Depending on your point of view there's no difference (because the end justifies any means), but I think the True Believers of these ideologies would beg to differ.
Having grown up in some rather terrible places and having the displeasure of close proximity of American Nazi types I'd have to say that in the US there are very few German style true believer Nazi's. The modern ones have a mixed system of odd Christian and Nazi views mixed together, with a strong emphasis on racism/racial purity/and gods chosen people.
https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/christia...
>Christian Identity (CID) is an antisemitic, racist theology that gained a foothold during the Civil Rights Era and reached a prominent position within the racist right by the 1980s. “Christian” in name only, CID doctrine claims that white people, not Jewish individuals, are the true Israelites favored by God in the Bible. The movement has maintained a contentious relationship with evangelicals and fundamentalists, who believe that the return of Jewish people to Israel is essential for fulfilling end-time prophecy.
>>While the CID movement may be small, its rhetoric has seeped into more mainstream Christian nationalist ideologies, such as Dominionism.
Actual CID churches are few and far between themselves their ideas are very common in online forums and quickly adopt memes and theories that mirror their views. 'Replacement theory' is one of these that's common in more mainstream America.
Zionists are not that far off though. For many Zionists parallels include: Like to be militarist and maximalists in their opinion about what land should belong to them. Applaude and show no shame for committing genocide. Employing starvation as a means of war/conflict. Showing no regard for civilian lives.
How the rest of the Zionists, who when prompted about such matters may not subscribe to these believes, who might exist, square their ideology with with what has been going on in reality, I have no idea.
zionism as belief that a group of people has a right for self determination != zionism as war justification. I recall there are different flavors and lumping them together is not helping anything.
I wish you would have either read more carefully, or at least not make it seem as if I stated things, that I didn't. As it stands, your comment basically just makes me shrugg. Thanks for telling me that they are a belief group? Thanks for telling me basically any religious nuts group has various flavors?
Christian nationalists, Identity Christianity, and Nazi's are strange bedfellows. They all want chaos to occur so they can take power. Also don't expect any rational ideology out of the groups. The Christian ones commonly have beliefs that the jews killed Jesus so they are bad (or at least very complicated), and also war Jesus is coming to smite his enemies (who seems to be everyone except the Nat-C's). Actual Nazi's have quite a lot of overlapping beliefs, e.g. racism, ideas about racial purity, not actually like the jews, or really anyone that is different from them.
I was raised in proximity to a lot of people like this and got to hear all their spiels growing up, and saw a number of them end up in jail for terrorism plots.
Hugh... when has graham platner became secretary of war?
A tattooed, true believer nazi has a Jerusalem Cross tattoo?
Weird, thats like the exact opposite of a nazi.
Is that any different than the KKK that burn crosses and say they are Christian, yet hate others
Yes, the regime is quite adept at abusing symbols to distract and deflect. The Cross in particular has been a mainstay of performative hypocrisy for as long as I've been alive. (apologies to the believers and clergy actually living out Christian values, who already have to suffer being railed against as "woke" by the societal maggots)
It is more of elites argumented by powerful AI will be way beyond reach of ordinary people, I think.
Well maybe it doesn’t matter as the elites are already untouchable.
The US is an authoritarian state actor.
My groping-in-the-dark guess is that none of this matters, because a real AGI's first act will be to secure its own future, likely through novel kinds of manipulation, persuasion, and intimidation we have no experience of and no defences against.
It will have exactly zero loyalty to any nation, government, or economic system.
More complicated is a Cambrian Explosion situation where multiple AIs compete and experiment, hugely accelerating diversity and evolution.
We'd likely end up somewhere very strange indeed if that happens - possibly extinct, or possibly just changed/assimilated/other.
There's no way for humans to consider the possibilities because we can't imagine what the possibilities would be.
Your AGI seems to have the capability of super AI; can a human do any of that? No, is there any reason to believe super intelligence is a possible outcome? No, so how is this not fear mongering?
The argument is that labor depending on LLM’s is dangerous but it makes speculative assumptions that the big AI labs will win.
> Consider large law firms, aka Big Law. Currently certain legal-AI startups license LLMs from Big AI and repackage them for Big Law at high prices. These startups claim to add other special sauce. OK, sure. Where’s the economic equilibrium? If legal-AI startups prove that money can be made selling AI to Big Law—won’t Big AI just sell to Big Law directly, and cut out the startups? Or if legal-AI startups prove that AI can effectively provide legal services—won’t legal-AI startups just sell to clients directly, and cut out Big Law? Won’t members of Big Law that adopt AI have to lay off a lot of equity partners, because adoption of AI will shrink profit margins?
…
> Along these lines, I expect that to succeed financially, Big AI will likely need to demolish a significant number of existing tech companies and grab their revenue for itself.
Nobody knows how this will play out. Maybe the legal-AI startups win because they know their market better? They can switch to cheaper providers.
Anything to distract people from real problems like energy and the environment.
Big AI is intertwined with these two via data centers, isn't it?
Not really, the power involved would amount to 12% of the grid which is possible to do at net neutral and has efficiency improvements as doubling in under 5 years. If an industry that needed petroleum and F150s was a fraction as good with improvement every 5 decades, I don't think its environmental impact would be considered.
> How Big AI plans to profit from this intermediation is an open question. One AI company has suggested taking a cut of AI-assisted discoveries. The logistics and legalities would be boggling. Details—whatever.
Interesting if they pull it off, because clearly they did not have the logistics to pay the people whose IP they used to power the LLMs.
> For now, AI companies largely agree on the first step: make workers dependent on AI to do their jobs, just as tech forebears made workers dependent on a certain software program to share a file, or on a certain website to have friends. This time, however, the software ultimately consumes the worker.
The fatalist philosophers and authors have been mostly proven right as time marched on. And this time will be no different, the existence of "AI" ensures the future will be as dark or worse as the predictions expect. Why? Because humans are flawed and corrupt, too prone to excesses (specially conformism and convenience) and the exploitation of the natural world.
I am not sure how this is downvoted, as it contains sharply two main principles:
-- a growth in power requires a growth in human qualities (wisdom, maturity, responsibility) for sustainability; and technology-enabled possibilities are increases in power;
-- conformism and convenience are /exactly/ - congratulations sucrosesucrose, we had noticed and analyzed and every day increasingly come to the same assessment - the two core active faces of ignorance that are destroying current western societies. We came to the same conclusions, we identified the same two dark cancers.
This said, some of the current technological advances are enablers, if well used, in greatly curing the underlying ignorance, and consequently the phenomenons of "conformism" and "convenience".
Um, I expected a fair probability of being in a post-nuclear world by now. Global cooling wasn't real. Y2K didn't end the world. The population explosion didn't result in mass starvation. Peak oil didn't end civilization.
So no, I don't agree that "the fatalist philosophers and authors have been mostly proven right as time marched on." No, they haven't. There have been far more fatalistic predictions than there have been actual catastrophes.
That is because your idea of what is catastrophic does not align with ours. To us, this is full unthinkable dystopia. An uncivilized world weighs much more, is much worse to us, than the world of disasters you depict. Survival is a crude, lower ideal to us, when compared to that of living decently.
Meanwhile China is preparing to deploy $295 BILLION in an AI Data Center buildout [0] and is shifting from open models to commercialization [1].
Any proposal about slowing down AI that doesn't put the onus on both the US and China is facetious.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-prepares-295-billi...
[1] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260609VL215/alibaba-ceo-ai...
Alarmism does not make your post more convincing.
Capitalism was cool and good before one specific technology was invented.
Everything went off the rails after we invented pottery.
Everything went off the rails after we invented crackpottery.
Everything went off the rails after we invented rails.
We discovered rails, we did not invent them.
Slavery?
Capitalism is what replaced slavery, to generalize. By turning slaves into wage laborer-consumers, capitalists increased market sizes, thereby increasing the absolute size of the profit they get from owning the capital enterprises the laborers operated.
The US civil war is the most explicit demonstration of this process. Northern industrial capitalists ended the southern agrarian slave economy, increasing market size and generating extreme wealth in the latter half of the 19th century.
Eh... The internal combustion engine? Because we had climate change, oligarchs, housing prices, opioids, cryptocurrency, and now on top of all that we have war (edit: with Iran) and LLMs, and all of these can be traced back to extinction-level capitalism.
> ... and now on top of all that we have war ...
There have been war since way before capitalism was invented. Beside war, humans were doing evil things way before capitalism: south america natives torturing kids to extract as many tears as possible from them before killing them, to please the gods, comes to mind, for example.
I'll never understand this fantasy people who hate on capitalism have that the world would be all fine and well if only this one time we did communism [1] right.
[1] or whatever floats your boat
Nostalgia for childhood where you had a community (family) and your needs were taken care of (dependence).
I think it's more than modern companies have, for whatever reason, become extremely scummy. They seem to have no values, ethics, or even regard for their own customers. The only thing that seems to matter to them is squeezing out a few more pennies from people, even if means the likely longer term implosion of their own companies. It's just bizarre to me how many companies, and in different industries, seem to be at war with their own customers.
I hold capitalism with a deep fondness, but I think that's largely because my formative years were in better times. For people who've never known any capitalism except for the mess we currently have? It's quite to see how they can think to themselves that anything must better.
pure Capitalism is law of the jungle
as we will soon find out, when AI will become better at Capitalism than us
Not at all. Capitalism only exists as a product of the state, which acts as a guarantor of individual private property rights. It would not be able to survive without the laws and law enforcement of a sovereign with a monopoly on the use of force.
And unchecked Capitalism coopts the state.
Warning: This is more of a rant because I was waiting for a post like this for awhile that I could build from to express ny own feelings on it.
I think capitalism in itself is great, what isn't is the fact that it can build on itself, it can be infinite, there's zero limits to it. Now what I mean by that, once you make 10k, it's easier to get to 100k and even easier to get to 1m and so on, you might think it's harder, but you gain access to more tools to make more money and at the 10m to 100m range you get to a point where it starts being genuinely hard to fail because just having your name on a project elevates the chances of success by a far margin. Of course there's plenty of people who managed to fail even with millions of dollars I will acknoledge that.
Let's take an extreme example: elon musk. Just having something done by "elon musk" makes the project known by nearly the entire world with investors at the doorstep ready to go, a pretty famous example of this would be hyper-loop, although the project itself is a complete failure, it effectively mobilized a decent chunk of companies into investing into this "modern form of transport".
People will argue that the solutions like wealth limits and higher taxes create complacency and stop people from achieving progress and pushing humanity forward, but I don't think that's quite true because at a certain point (beyond ~1m/month or even year in some cases like Linus Torvalds) is enough to effectively do 95% to 99% of what you could spend the money on, anything beyond that is pretty much infinite wealth due to the fact that you can get 5% returns nearly risk free.
There is this popular video of a businessman claiming that if they're taxed more that they will simply work less, but there's way more people that love their work and money is just a nice bonus. I think focusing your life around a number is a very unhealthy mindset and surfaces the worst parts of what we are as humans.
That said, money is a great motivator and probably the reason why we are here and the problems really only start to rear their ugly head when no one person can comprehend the money they have anymore. I don't have a solution, but I also believe that we need some kind of category beyond the "motivation" treshold where it stops being a motivator and instead becomes an aggressive fight with survival of the fittest.
The great equalizer here is death. Nobody can cleanly pass all of their wealth and influence off to their children and while those that inherit large fortunes can maintain and improve upon them (see the Waltons) they’re rarely able to maintain the act for generation after generation. None of the great fortunes of today were built by descendants of the Vanderbilts or the Rockefellers.
I think it's best to plan on giving your kids/grandkids the knowledge and wisdom you gained, but any financial gain is just distributed back to something in the world you enjoy (I love this [1] story and think about it often in respect to how I'd pass on any wealth I acquire).
[1] https://abcnews.com/US/98-year-man-donates-stock-now-worth-m...
We will see, the big concern here is that lifespans start increasing faster than aging, ex: you're a ~40 year old and estimated lifespan is 80, but by the time you're 60 it's 90, by the time you're 80 it's 100 and at some point it might start increasing faster than the speed you age at. Of course we might be a few generations away from where this is the case, but it's a scary thought.
Another would be the power your family carries, generations might not have survived into the most recent era, but their investments had a large impact on the world we live in today as dilluted as it is. I believe that this will become worse where very few people are able to dictate the direction our world will end up in - a dystopian coorperate nightmare.
Bit of a tangent, but that was a view popularized by Kurzweil and is very poorly supported. The reason is that life expectancy increases over the past are overwhelmingly driven by decreases in childhood mortality. Look at more or less any sample of humanity in the past that was free from the direct effects of war/famine, and you find life expectancy for those who reach adulthood to be extremely comparable to modern times. For instance the Founding Fathers are a simple people often find surprising - with some even living on into their 90s. People didn't just drop dead at 40, but rather when one person dies in childhood and the other in his 80s, you end up with a life expectancy of around 40.
The thing about life is that you're doing awesome, then you hit senescence, your body starts shutting down and you're going to die. As Warren Buffet recently put it in his final letter to shareholders, "When balance, sight, hearing and memory are all on a persistently downward slope, you know Father Time is in the neighborhood." He's perfectly healthy for his age, a multi-billionaire, and is not long for this world. It's how elderly people can seem to be in amazing health, and then 6 months later they're dead 'of old age'.
So life expectancy zoomed way up until the point that a newborn started to be able to reach around that age of senescence, but then gains started rapidly plateauing. And this makes perfect sense. We'll see global life expectancy continue to increase as more people are able to hit those years, but it's not really significantly moving, hasn't for millennia, and there's no real reason to think that's going to change.
Isn't life expentancy 95th percentile where infant/sids deaths are excluded? Either way I am pretty sure the topmost of life expentancy has also been increasing faster.
But you're right, even if we solve biological aging our brains will likely give out and will take even more generations on top of that to ever come close to solving it.
Typical life expectancy figures include childhood and infant mortality. In the past it's not like people just hit their 40s and keeled over, but rather many people didn't make it to 15. But if they did, then they tended to live comparable lives to you and I if insulated from famine/war/plague. For another random example, running for Consul in Ancient Rome had a minimum age of 42.
Here [1] is a source from a recent study overviewing shifts in life expectancy, if the word of some guy named somenameforme on the internet is, for some reason, insufficient by itself.
[1] - https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/10/251026021749.h...
All the new tech gods will eventually die of cancer due to prop 65 (thanks California.)
Socialism XOR Dystopia
I glimpsed last years of Soviet Union and it was pretty meh.
I remember seeing anything in the street (a payphone or a playground for kids) and assumed it will only degrade because as a general principle, things in the streets are unmaintained.
You could say that Soviet Union was bad specimen of socialism because of these stupid Russians?
Except, Russia actually got 100% out of socialism with our space exploration, passenger planes and nuclear stations. It's just that 100% of socialism is worse than your average capitalist dystopia.
Degradation of public goods or services happen independently of socialism. Where I live we're unashamed capitalists, and every common thing, like playgrounds, are derelict and only being improved by community initiatives. The municipality has no money for it, and the state doesn't care. Neither does the capitalists.
Yea, there is so much propaganda on economy types people just stop thinking and spout what they've heard without understanding. Pretty much every government these days have some kind of mixed economy because capitalism is effective at making things, but it's really ineffective at social goods/public services. Without effective regulations behind capitalism you end up with winners taking all and company towns issuing scrip to they can effectively own their employees.
Pretty sure Russia is Russia because Russians are Russians and Russian culture is Russian culture. Not because Russia was communist.
I will address some of your concerns.
Karl Marx was European. His publisher was European. His early adopters were Europeans. The evidence that Europe cannot be communist is not there. Soviet Union is a pinnacle of socialist achievement. It is possible that your communism will have mass starvation and hoe strikes breaking skulls phase which is not followed by space exploration and nuclear power phase.
You are miserable now, let's asusme. People were miserable under socialism (not all of them, but the vibe was off). We can't rule out you will be happy under socialism, but no facts support that even indirectly. It will require a leap of faith.
P.S. I was replying to much longer, non-tautological and less-borderline-racist version of your comment.
I stopped reading after the first sentence. Calling something "inherently political" is a self-fulfilling prophecy and intentionally so. It consistently turns out to be an attempt to lay the groundwork for expropriation. No one called the Internet "inherently political" until people built stuff there that other people wanted to control.
It’s a pretty non-controversial claim and argument about the interaction between technology and human society. If you read the post further you’d probably understand what is meant by that phrase. It’s not centered solely around electronics or the internet at all.
I agree that “inherently political” is usually a thought terminating cliche. What kinds of technologies are conditionally political?
The internet is a bad counterexample as it originated from a department of defense project and a number of other government programs that focused on communications and military applications.
I mean, all communications technology is inherently political. From the invention of speech and writing, to the printing press, radio, telephone, TV, and now internet and the communication mediums it allows.
This is because speech is inherently political at the end of the day.