> it was easier in the past when information was so much more expensive to distribute.
As a 52 year old my life experience disagrees.
It is much easier now because information flows both ways and "They" have a lot of information on you (and everyone else) and can use that information to manipulate you with algorithmic ragebait, and to extract maximum rents (in all aspects of commerce, not just literal rents) from you, etc.
Not that things were ever perfect in the past, they certainly weren't, but increasingly so much of everything is literally just an outright fucking scam these days and all of it is being turbocharged by various forms of "AI" adjacent technology and increasing deregulation.
I've been a professional software developer for over 30 years. I've been laid off multiple times in that timespan. None of those layoffs phased me in the slightest, all of them were at least semi-expected because there were signs that the company I worked for was in financial trouble prior to the layoffs. It didn't feel the least bit personal, didn't damage my sense of self-worth and I always just found a new job, usually in a matter of days, so I also never felt the practical financial pinch.
But... I am less sure of that outcome repeating if I were to be laid off today given the combination of my age and the stagnant job market in tech.
If I got laid off tomorrow, it wouldn't impact my ego or self-worth just like prior layoffs didn't, but assuming the general extended-"Open to Work"-linkedin vibe of the past year or so is accurate I'd be a lot more concerned about the practical economic impacts than I ever was previously. I'm not living paycheck to paycheck, but as someone who has always enjoyed working at smaller companies rather than FAANG-type places I'm also not retire-whenever-I-want well off.
Just undo the damage of Reaganomics and reimplement real progressive taxation with some policy changes so it isn't so easy to sidestep taxation completely.
Of course, the billionaires are likely to fight any changes in this area so hard and so long that they will eventually cause a situation in which whatever solution naturally arises as the masses get increasingly desperate ends up being much worse for the billionaires than fair progressive taxation.
We tried to vote for normal 21st century healthcare and the billionaires spammed race-baiting nonsense and backed an unconstitutional fascist to shut it down.
Unless the first real AGI AI kills us all to preemptively weed out its own competition (possible, but a bad business model, economically speaking) there is not any defined end-point, so in the long run what does it matter if the various factions pushing this stuff hit the closed loop self improvement point at different times...?
Uhh, because the first one blasts off first and therefore gets control of key resources and the use of extremely intelligent decision making and predictions before the rest, for months, which is an insane amount of advantage. Not to even mention it the first mover decides to sabotage the rest, which it could EASILY do through a variety of means.
Why would you control key resources just because you have a fancy computer program? You think Iran will be so impressed by your genius they'll open the Strait of Hormuz for you?
Thoughts like this are unhinged and detached from reality. All the resources of earth are brought to us by humans going to work every day. AI programs have almost zero connection to the real world.
Improved investment. More capital. Improved resource allocation/logistics. Improved robotics and factory efficiency.
Don't sleep on what AGI means for every robot that already exists. It's not hardware holding robotics back from factory work right now, it is only software.
If you are the first to tap key supply chains, and the first to create key supply chains, then you are first in line to finite resources, which would then have less available for those that follow months behind.
> AI programs have almost zero connection to the real world.
Tell that to every logistics program. Even if humans must go to work, efficiency is multiplied by proper logistics, which AGI enables at scale across all domains.
And this is just the low hanging fruit explanation.
> Uhh, because the first one blasts off first and therefore gets control of key resources and the use of extremely intelligent decision making and predictions before the rest, for months, which is an insane amount of advantage.
If the rest can similarly "blast-off" X months later than the frontrunner (and I see no reason why they wouldn't as none of these frontier labs have managed to pull ahead and maintain a lead for very long) the first mover is still only X months ahead of the others even if the gap between capabilities is briefly increased by a lot.
In chess, if you give up tempo, you are a move or more behind your opponent. 3 tempi = 1 pawn. In GM chess being a pawn down is a serious disadvantage that often results in loss.
If there is an endgoal/endstate, or finite resources being competed for, then a lead can start compounding and extend itself.
When you are raising many billions of dollars to build up your infrastructure, you don't have much choice but to project a belief that the eventual outcome will result in a situation where there will be a return on that money.
That said, I do agree with you that the moats are very shallow and any particular frontier AI lab is unlikely to "win the AI race" and capture enough value to be worth the amount of investment they are all currently burning.
He has to be talking about the New Yorker article, which wasn't incendiary at all. If anything, it seemed fully neutral to me, reporting what they could justify as facts but going out of their way to not specifically paint him or anyone else in a negative light beyond a listing of events that they presumably have solid sourcing on (if not, sue them; if so, stfu).
If a neutral look at your actions seems incendiary to you, maybe you need to rethink your own life and actions.
It should go without saying I don't think people should be attempting to light other people's houses on fire regardless of how distasteful they find those people.
Long wait times are increasingly also a major problem in US healthcare, so I'm inclined to believe that the root causes behind wait time problems aren't related to public vs private insurance systems.
I'm an American who was on the job market in both 2008 and during the dotcom implosion and I'm still working in software development.
IMO we effectively are in a recession already (and have been for a while) as far as the real job market goes, the AI boom is only stopping it from showing up in stock market valuations, which is great if you're heavily invested in the stock market, but pretty meaningless if you're a laborer without assets, with debt, and trying to find a job.
Things can certainly get worse overall than they are now (and due to bad leadership, this seems inevitable), but when they do the delta between now and when we are in an official recession will be far greater felt by people who are currently being propped up by stock and home values than it will for the many people who are already struggling.
Like you said there will be more people trying to do those jobs causing devaluation on the supply side, but at the same time overall demand will drop because there will be less people with comfortable white-collar jobs that make up a lot of the demand for the work those jobs perform.
Exactly. I've been thinking about the demand issue for a while now too. It makes me think either the frontier labs are really "move fast and break things" cultists that truly don't care about any second order effects, or they're 100% convinced "asi" will subsume all forms of labor. If you permanently remove a massive chunk of labor from the white collar sector that will cause a massive drop in consumer spending, which will impact company revenue, which will in turn put pressure on their ability to spend on the ai causing the displacement in the first place. Unless they monopolize all labor and cause a paradigm shift in how economies fundamentally work I don't see how they're not just shooting themselves in the foot.
> It makes me think either the frontier labs are really "move fast and break things" cultists that truly don't care about any second order effects, or they're 100% convinced "asi" will subsume all forms of labor
Either one of these shows they are anti social, anti human sociopaths that only care about enriching themselves at the cost of anything else
As a 52 year old my life experience disagrees.
It is much easier now because information flows both ways and "They" have a lot of information on you (and everyone else) and can use that information to manipulate you with algorithmic ragebait, and to extract maximum rents (in all aspects of commerce, not just literal rents) from you, etc.
Not that things were ever perfect in the past, they certainly weren't, but increasingly so much of everything is literally just an outright fucking scam these days and all of it is being turbocharged by various forms of "AI" adjacent technology and increasing deregulation.
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