We are maybe a few months away from a startup claiming their AI will turn lead into gold, raise the dead, and conquer the heavens to usurp God. They just need a modest 20 billion dollars in funding to make it happen.
Something tells me that if this succeeds, I'm not going to be living in a Culture-esque utopia.
It's amazing how AI has caused people to completely lose their minds. I think it's something to do with the fascination humans have with things that embody human-like characteristics (parrots / crows being a good example) coupled by it lighting up the parts of our brain normally reserved for religion.
Is AI useful? 100% - I use it as an aid all the time. Is it going to continue to grow exponentially? Well, it's already slowed down quite a bit compared with gpt2 to gpt3 to 3.5 to 4. Is it going to replace every worker? This is crazy talk.
> The market potential here is absurdly large: workers in the US are paid around $18 trillion per year in aggregate. For the entire world, the number is over three times greater, around $60 trillion per year.
This is an appeal to greed - let's stop paying wages and make a ton of money in the process. But, if you automatize all work, how will you distribute all this abundance ? How will people without wages afford to buy your goods ? How will you prevent the formation of a society split into masters and slaves ?
Some people have a God complex, they imagine that they know better and everyone should follow their ideas.
Yeah capitalism would become irrelevant and/or they are tempting the largest genocide the world has ever known. Yet this goofball is using phrases like market potential as if saying "all labor is a big market" is some kind of insightful thing to say.
The point is to promise something trendy, not absolutely impossible (but astronomically expensive), a McGuffin, that you can use as an excuse to raise infinite capital.
Unfortunately, this is just a sign of the bigger problem which is what happens when people as a society choose to protect evil instead of killing it.
Anyone who understands economics understands what AI means to organization systems based in a distribution of labor when time value of labor is forced to 0. It stalls and fails.
Evil acts are any act that doesn't result in long-term beneficial growth of self and others (i.e. destructive acts).
Evil people are people who have willfully blinded themselves to the consequences of their evil acts repeating them without thought unless they are stopped.
As society collapses, they will find that the protection they relied upon wanes. They don't realize they are evil people, but that is only because they were induced to blind themselves to it and were weak people. This changes nothing in that they are fully accountable for their actions and choices.
Negligence and Destruction(loss) are sufficient for intent, forming malice.
Socio-economic collapse may very well happen since no market can survive the environment that is being created. Natural law will reassert following known principles discussed in Social Contract Theory going back hundreds of years. It will be violent.
Some people are just evil, and when you have a society whose environment induces all within it, to varying degrees, to participate in evil acts, of course the people at the top will be quite a bit more evil than those at the bottom who may have to commit evil acts, but are not blind and try to correct it when possible.
Every single person alive does evil actions at some point to survive, its what people do after to prevent those circumstances repeating in the future that determines whether they are evil people or not.
Evil people are blind people. They may become blind in a number of ways, but generally they had to make a choice to blind themselves, a willful choice they may have been induced to through education/torture but a choice nonetheless.
That choice involved repeated acts of self-violation, which doesn't hurt at all. False justification and flawed reasoning is one example of such an act. It doesn't hurt, but you become less each time, resistance shrinking, until there is no resistance at which point you no longer perceive an issue and do so any time until someone forcefully stops you. Lack of resistance to evil acts is acceptance of evil into your heart.
Your definition lacks a property of metaphysical objectivity.
Just because your feelings are hurt doesn't make someone evil. If you punish someone for murdering someone else also doesn't make you evil. In either case your definition would consider those people evil, but they wouldn't be, and that would expand endlessly to absurdity.
Your description is far too ambiguous. You may value greatly from reading some of Ilyin's works on the subject matter, and how it refutes many aspects of Tolstoy's War and Peace.
Time to build a startup that replaces all human workers in AI startups everywhere and just uses AI to spin up more startups, automatic grant applications, etc.
I kind of get it. Just rip the band aid off already. If we are all gonna be unemployed and the economy is going to be AI and robots then let’s just do it. Capitalism as we know it will fundamentally change or fail, there will be a revolution or laws will be enacted to finally build safety nets everywhere and we can get over this will-they-won’t-they bullshit of employers threatening everyone’s livelihoods because “vibe coding”.
Many people are under the naive, misguided, and mistaken belief that the reason we have so many issues today is because we live under capitalism. This belief is false and is propaganda.
True understanding starts with a definition.
Capitalism is an economic system where the means of production are privately owned and operated for profit with prices determined by the forces of supply and demand in a free market. It's characterized by voluntary exchange, competition, and the pursuit of profit.
Profit must be in purchasing power. This requires a stable store of value, a monetary property of the currency which no longer holds true.
Socialism is a system where the means of production are transferred from private ownership to collective or state ownership (in secret or public), resulting in a centralized planning authority controlling all production and distribution.
The key here is in the concept of ownership. Ownership is the right to dispose of the assets at a loss as an individual.
Free-markets require independent adversarial decision-making without cooperation, but money-printing via gifts, or more commonly non-reserve debt issuance/loans like AT&T or other companies with loans > assets, forces cooperation resulting in artificial distortions (such as artificial supply constraints to raise price levels) that grow until no profit (in purchasing power) can be made. This is shown in a long-term trend towards few companies holding the majority of marketshare.
Since money-printing is a function of the state, this meets the rigorous definition of the system we live under right now being socialism, specifically market socialism, since there are still some independent businesses out there; but when you have one entity constrained by loss function and the other is not, that other will always win. When most private business fails, it fails to non-market socialism (but it hasn't happened quite yet, current projections by people who know say it may be 2027-2030).
That wouldn't be so bad if the system was sustainable but we've known since the 1930s that non-market socialism fails to 6 intractable problems. One of which, is a hysteresis problem that can only be solved by having perfect future sight (an impossibility). The absence of a working system leads to socio-economic collapse.
Malthus and Catton have described what happens under these scenarios. TL;DR food production without modern supply chains only supports 4bn people globally, we have ~8.2bn, and during a malthusian reversion the flows are destroyed during pre-crisis extraction stage, so the sustainable population is a fraction of what it may have been in the past. If you have 8.2bn people, and you can only suddenly feed 2bn people. Who decides who lives and who starves/dies, the older people or the younger people? Maybe the children get to go first. Unthinkable sure, but that's how these things often happen.
Profit in purchasing power must still be made under state-run apparatus which is why the chaotic distortions occur. Corners are cut, regulatory kicks in when people die, shortages ensue, and it can't self-correct because the costs to enter the business are exceeded because the price floor money-printers have set up.
For the last 30 years, the vast majority of everyone's life has become poorer. The options they've had available have dissappeared, their agency has been taken, and the services they pay for have enshittified. These are signs Mises warned about in the 1930s, but few today have the education or cognitive ability (having been tortured their entire lives), to rationally follow the material.
Under socialism, there is only one inevitable outcome, and the environment is fundamentally chaotic preventing us from taking any effective action to self-correct under it. Although these failures are indirect, allowing people to deceitfully claim its something else than what it is to justify ever more control, it doesn't change the facts.
The money printing experiment the Fed in conjunction with the leaders chosen by the boomer generation, forces a society that has no hope or future.
It steals money from future generations to make the current generation comfortable, leaving nothing left. That is their legacy, and there will be very few who will survive it (if any).
Totalism makes the population hopelessly dependent on the state which will fail as a matter of course because at the same time it prevents any kind of adaptation to the issues.
An abstract failure of darwin's fitness test, existentially for humanity.
Similar things have happened in the far past, but because of chaos and the distance in time, few if any records remains. The most similar type of collapse to what seems to be happening is the bronze age collapse.
A sea-faring people of cruel intelligence, who look just like us, and who came and disappeared and destroyed all civilizations at that time not through war but by chaos, subterfuge, and deceit.
The only thing we have left are the legends passed by word of mouth, that are more aptly stories that seem more fiction than real, of terrible cruelly intelligent gods that were mistaken for people, who were capricious and enjoyed tormenting mortals in their odyssey's and beyond.
They are aiming to replace all white collor work, but not anything manual that would require robotics, which sounds like all they need then is enforcement to maintain the impossible to breach gap, between owning companys, and working for them,also known as slavery.
We are maybe a few months away from a startup claiming their AI will turn lead into gold, raise the dead, and conquer the heavens to usurp God. They just need a modest 20 billion dollars in funding to make it happen.
The Demo Day pitch: "This is a $60 trillion dollar market---all we need is one ten-thousandth of 1% of the market!"
And they may get it... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
Something tells me that if this succeeds, I'm not going to be living in a Culture-esque utopia.
It's amazing how AI has caused people to completely lose their minds. I think it's something to do with the fascination humans have with things that embody human-like characteristics (parrots / crows being a good example) coupled by it lighting up the parts of our brain normally reserved for religion.
Is AI useful? 100% - I use it as an aid all the time. Is it going to continue to grow exponentially? Well, it's already slowed down quite a bit compared with gpt2 to gpt3 to 3.5 to 4. Is it going to replace every worker? This is crazy talk.
I’d love that too, but a lot of the people don’t seem that convinced. They are emotionally attached to working for a living and dying of old age.
> The market potential here is absurdly large: workers in the US are paid around $18 trillion per year in aggregate. For the entire world, the number is over three times greater, around $60 trillion per year.
This is an appeal to greed - let's stop paying wages and make a ton of money in the process. But, if you automatize all work, how will you distribute all this abundance ? How will people without wages afford to buy your goods ? How will you prevent the formation of a society split into masters and slaves ?
Some people have a God complex, they imagine that they know better and everyone should follow their ideas.
Yeah capitalism would become irrelevant and/or they are tempting the largest genocide the world has ever known. Yet this goofball is using phrases like market potential as if saying "all labor is a big market" is some kind of insightful thing to say.
The point is to promise something trendy, not absolutely impossible (but astronomically expensive), a McGuffin, that you can use as an excuse to raise infinite capital.
This is an inducement to destruction, not greed.
Unfortunately, this is just a sign of the bigger problem which is what happens when people as a society choose to protect evil instead of killing it.
Anyone who understands economics understands what AI means to organization systems based in a distribution of labor when time value of labor is forced to 0. It stalls and fails.
Evil acts are any act that doesn't result in long-term beneficial growth of self and others (i.e. destructive acts).
Evil people are people who have willfully blinded themselves to the consequences of their evil acts repeating them without thought unless they are stopped.
As society collapses, they will find that the protection they relied upon wanes. They don't realize they are evil people, but that is only because they were induced to blind themselves to it and were weak people. This changes nothing in that they are fully accountable for their actions and choices.
Negligence and Destruction(loss) are sufficient for intent, forming malice.
Socio-economic collapse may very well happen since no market can survive the environment that is being created. Natural law will reassert following known principles discussed in Social Contract Theory going back hundreds of years. It will be violent.
Some people are just evil, and when you have a society whose environment induces all within it, to varying degrees, to participate in evil acts, of course the people at the top will be quite a bit more evil than those at the bottom who may have to commit evil acts, but are not blind and try to correct it when possible.
People with ADHD does not constantly do "evil" actions just because their actions does not "result in long-term beneficial growth of self and others".
I would argue that a better description of evil is: being entitled, being a coward and/or having a "cold heart".
Every single person alive does evil actions at some point to survive, its what people do after to prevent those circumstances repeating in the future that determines whether they are evil people or not.
Evil people are blind people. They may become blind in a number of ways, but generally they had to make a choice to blind themselves, a willful choice they may have been induced to through education/torture but a choice nonetheless.
That choice involved repeated acts of self-violation, which doesn't hurt at all. False justification and flawed reasoning is one example of such an act. It doesn't hurt, but you become less each time, resistance shrinking, until there is no resistance at which point you no longer perceive an issue and do so any time until someone forcefully stops you. Lack of resistance to evil acts is acceptance of evil into your heart.
Your definition lacks a property of metaphysical objectivity.
Just because your feelings are hurt doesn't make someone evil. If you punish someone for murdering someone else also doesn't make you evil. In either case your definition would consider those people evil, but they wouldn't be, and that would expand endlessly to absurdity.
Your description is far too ambiguous. You may value greatly from reading some of Ilyin's works on the subject matter, and how it refutes many aspects of Tolstoy's War and Peace.
Time to build a startup that replaces all human workers in AI startups everywhere and just uses AI to spin up more startups, automatic grant applications, etc.
I kind of get it. Just rip the band aid off already. If we are all gonna be unemployed and the economy is going to be AI and robots then let’s just do it. Capitalism as we know it will fundamentally change or fail, there will be a revolution or laws will be enacted to finally build safety nets everywhere and we can get over this will-they-won’t-they bullshit of employers threatening everyone’s livelihoods because “vibe coding”.
Many people are under the naive, misguided, and mistaken belief that the reason we have so many issues today is because we live under capitalism. This belief is false and is propaganda.
True understanding starts with a definition.
Capitalism is an economic system where the means of production are privately owned and operated for profit with prices determined by the forces of supply and demand in a free market. It's characterized by voluntary exchange, competition, and the pursuit of profit.
Profit must be in purchasing power. This requires a stable store of value, a monetary property of the currency which no longer holds true.
Socialism is a system where the means of production are transferred from private ownership to collective or state ownership (in secret or public), resulting in a centralized planning authority controlling all production and distribution.
The key here is in the concept of ownership. Ownership is the right to dispose of the assets at a loss as an individual.
Free-markets require independent adversarial decision-making without cooperation, but money-printing via gifts, or more commonly non-reserve debt issuance/loans like AT&T or other companies with loans > assets, forces cooperation resulting in artificial distortions (such as artificial supply constraints to raise price levels) that grow until no profit (in purchasing power) can be made. This is shown in a long-term trend towards few companies holding the majority of marketshare.
Since money-printing is a function of the state, this meets the rigorous definition of the system we live under right now being socialism, specifically market socialism, since there are still some independent businesses out there; but when you have one entity constrained by loss function and the other is not, that other will always win. When most private business fails, it fails to non-market socialism (but it hasn't happened quite yet, current projections by people who know say it may be 2027-2030).
That wouldn't be so bad if the system was sustainable but we've known since the 1930s that non-market socialism fails to 6 intractable problems. One of which, is a hysteresis problem that can only be solved by having perfect future sight (an impossibility). The absence of a working system leads to socio-economic collapse.
Malthus and Catton have described what happens under these scenarios. TL;DR food production without modern supply chains only supports 4bn people globally, we have ~8.2bn, and during a malthusian reversion the flows are destroyed during pre-crisis extraction stage, so the sustainable population is a fraction of what it may have been in the past. If you have 8.2bn people, and you can only suddenly feed 2bn people. Who decides who lives and who starves/dies, the older people or the younger people? Maybe the children get to go first. Unthinkable sure, but that's how these things often happen.
Profit in purchasing power must still be made under state-run apparatus which is why the chaotic distortions occur. Corners are cut, regulatory kicks in when people die, shortages ensue, and it can't self-correct because the costs to enter the business are exceeded because the price floor money-printers have set up.
For the last 30 years, the vast majority of everyone's life has become poorer. The options they've had available have dissappeared, their agency has been taken, and the services they pay for have enshittified. These are signs Mises warned about in the 1930s, but few today have the education or cognitive ability (having been tortured their entire lives), to rationally follow the material.
Under socialism, there is only one inevitable outcome, and the environment is fundamentally chaotic preventing us from taking any effective action to self-correct under it. Although these failures are indirect, allowing people to deceitfully claim its something else than what it is to justify ever more control, it doesn't change the facts.
The money printing experiment the Fed in conjunction with the leaders chosen by the boomer generation, forces a society that has no hope or future.
It steals money from future generations to make the current generation comfortable, leaving nothing left. That is their legacy, and there will be very few who will survive it (if any).
Totalism makes the population hopelessly dependent on the state which will fail as a matter of course because at the same time it prevents any kind of adaptation to the issues. An abstract failure of darwin's fitness test, existentially for humanity.
Similar things have happened in the far past, but because of chaos and the distance in time, few if any records remains. The most similar type of collapse to what seems to be happening is the bronze age collapse.
A sea-faring people of cruel intelligence, who look just like us, and who came and disappeared and destroyed all civilizations at that time not through war but by chaos, subterfuge, and deceit.
The only thing we have left are the legends passed by word of mouth, that are more aptly stories that seem more fiction than real, of terrible cruelly intelligent gods that were mistaken for people, who were capricious and enjoyed tormenting mortals in their odyssey's and beyond.
They are aiming to replace all white collor work, but not anything manual that would require robotics, which sounds like all they need then is enforcement to maintain the impossible to breach gap, between owning companys, and working for them,also known as slavery.
Someone else just needs to have an AI startup to automate this company’s work and so on ad infinitum.