This statement that AI researchers are taking up smoking was made by Alexander Karp (CEO of Palantir), who just personally bought 37,000 acres of Swedish forest land, presumably in preparation for some form of AI-related geopolitical fallout. It was absolutely not a peer reviewed study or any sort of survey. It was likely something he heard in passing, a less-than-half-serious joke, or just a subjective questionable observation based on an N of a few. Regardless, this narrative was only picked up and amplified by media because he is the CEO of Palantir. He himself is a cigar smoker. Take that for what you will. I have seen no evidence that it is true -but if it were, I'd imagine there would be other indulgences, vices and financial/credit opportunities much more likely to be observed than smoking.
You've moved the goal posts. What we do all know is that when CEOs of huge, geopolitically important international military-contracting megacorporations say or do things things that are surprising, it is newsworthy.
So your theory about no-nothings talking about nothing that they heard nowhere because it makes them feel good because they are self-indulgent fools might be worth giving up.
Now you've devolved to complaining about people noticing things. Do you think that your declaring those things not notable might be because they agree with your preconceived notions about "ultra rich guys" and the totally random things they do for no particular reason?
All online discussions these days are like those chain email forwards of the last generation. <= this is the original point
This statement that AI researchers are taking up smoking was made by Alexander Karp (CEO of Palantir) <= this is is a wrong statement as per the link in the article I very much did read.
The original quote was from Shyam Sankar, CTO of Palantir, not Karp. <= this is someone that points out the statement is wrong, thereby proving the original point.
He bought 37,000 acres of forest land because who wouldn't buy 37,000 acres of forest land if they had the means and opportunity to buy 37,000 acres of forest land?
Did you follow the link? It's another article quoting an anecdote from a CBS interview. It's not an actual statistic from a reputable survey or anything. This is what OP was saying - it's a fuckin telephone game. Chinese whispers. The rumour mill.
And island big enough to sustain itself preferable not with with winters as you will need energy (panels), food and barrier.
A collapsed society in a place like Northern Europe would be terrible as it relies on a lot of complex technology to keep the modern lifestyle going. None of the Scandinavian countries are self sufficient in food.
PS: I don't mean to talk Sweden down but it's definitely not for me. I've been there for work and it's just not my kind of culture. Very indoors, streets dead quiet after 19:00 even in summer, brrr. I could not live like that :) And really long darkness in winter just gets me super depressed.
But I know some people love it. Everyone is different <3
I'd thought it was all nonsense but there is actually a Times article with two named smokers:
>Avi Schiffmann, a 23-year-old AI founder living in San Francisco’s Bay Area, is among those embracing tobacco at a time when the habit has largely gone out of fashion among health-conscious young Americans... Schiffman runs Friend, a startup that has created a $249 pendant that functions as a wearable companion to cure loneliness.
and
>Stephen Campbell, 27, the co-founder of Revamp AI, said smoking had become a networking opportunity for young entrepreneurs who, until now, had rarely left their desks.
and
>Another San Francisco tech worker said: “My very strong belief is that AI is going to solve a lot of human healthcare issues and that we will see cancer cured over the next 20 years through an AI-powered breakthrough. This gives me no incentive to quit.”
Seems more twenty something founders who think it's cool rather than Anthropic guys.
Is this material to the core thesis of this microblogpost?
> Many of his descriptions sound strikingly similar to the rhetoric coming out of places like Anthropic. For example, note the religious overtones of working at a corporation
Just browse a little bit on Twitter or this forum and you’ll have gobs of examples of religious fervor masquerading as techno-enlightenment
When a company publicly proclaims "omg, unchecked development will lead to AI destroying humanity!" (or similar), how brave/stupid would an employee have to be to go against the grain & *publicly* proclaim an opposing viewpoint?
Chances are their paycheck requires enough bravery/stupidity that few (if any) dare to deviate from company groupthink too much.
Employee accepts & lives by that long enough, and they might as well be part of a religious cult.
That religious angle could be just similarities in the psychology / group dynamics involved. Same mechanics -> same patterns observed.
> Jamie, a crypto alum who asked not to share his last name, met a backer for his raw milk startup at a Miami kava bar. The crowd was "50% recovering opioid addicts from Appalachia and 50% Wall Street and Silicon Valley refugees looking for shelter from taxes, pandemic restrictions, and leftist ideological hegemony," he says. A crowd accumulated in the corner, smoking.
> He struck up a conversation with a jacked, Harley-riding investor while chain-smoking Marlboro Reds. Jamie told the investor about his startup, and the two talked about alternative wellness between drags. A week later, the investor signed a check. Smoking poles put him in pole position.
It's all weird but specifically "smoking poles" has a different meaning as far as I'm aware. I can't quickly Google up anyone using "pole" to mean cigarette.
Smoking pole means sucking dick lol so actually as tongue in cheek (no pun intended) it actually kind of works (ie someone got VC by quid pro quo sexual favors)
Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
BTW in this case we happen to know one of the chains in the game of Chinese Whispers was the CTO of Palantir... this may or may not influence your beliefs
There is also a quote from Avi Schiffmann - founder of AI wearable friend. "By the time you do get lung cancer, our AI robots are supposed to have cured that," Schiffmann says.
Both quotes may have been said in the sense of them not supporting this idea, but acknowledging an attitude of some of not worrying about long-term planning.
This is how gossip and urban legends and other myths have always spread. The difference is the size of the network and how much distance a myth can travel in a very short time.
Now, the entire world can share the same piece of gossip, and it takes on an entirely different quality when it is global instantly.
I also like to be explicit about whether we're talking about general trends, or one specific case. People often try to establish general trends by talking about one specific case.
I wish it were more often even generalizing from one case, that would be a big leap in epistemic hygiene compared to the more common generalizing from zero cases!
Not saying this is a good source and not just glorified marketing bullshit but it's a legitimately sourced thing that probably should be treated with more skepticism
I don't see anyone outraged? I see someone commenting on how internet "discourse" is just gossip when it used to be fairly rigorous. Which is accurate, especially here on hn where almost every comment just repeats something from another post ("modular is going to change world" as if we all didn't see the modular content marketing piece just above.....)
FYI accusing someone of being outraged to distract from their point is called "appeal to emotion". Whether op is outraged or not has no bearing on whether the observation is accurate.
In all fairness, I wouldn't be surprised if the claims are true, given all the psychosis and cult-like behavior within all slop corps. It honestly feels like the Virgin Mary episode of South Park.
“The claim isn’t true but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were true so I’m going to believe it and further solidify my opinion on the topic” is the exact kind of bias people are talking about.
Why would you not be surprised if the claims are true? Because you have read hundreds of made up stories like this one on internet forums. It’s all a self perpetuating bullshit machine.
No, because anthropic, google, nvidia, openai, etc. employees are publicly acting like lunatics. In fact I know lunatics that act way more sane than them.
Which employees? How are they acting like "lunatics"? Are there any examples? What percent of total employees does that represent? Is that more or less than the average amount of "lunatics" in this world?
Or is the answer to all of these "I don't know, I just feel this way."
I'd have to unblock linkedin and twitter from my Pihole and register(which I don't intend to do for the sake of my mental health) but literally anyone listed as an employee, just look them up yourself: All day long it's "the new model is so powerful, we must never release it", "we will all die in 6 months", "this is the end of humanity" and so on for weeks before they release the next slop-crapper and bump up the prices. It's literally like every Musk appearance on a new Tesla 10 years ago, or Apple or Microsoft or whatever. The whole AI fanaticism is exactly that: religious fanaticism with a new skin pack.
> linked in the article (did you read it?), to daringfireball, to a CBS interview with the Anthropic CTO.
Funny that you yourself didn’t click the link to see that it was the Palantir CTO who said it, not Anthropic. The Anthropic part is made up by daringfireball.
> Sankar doesn’t name anyone, alas, but if there’s any truth to this (and good god do I hope there is) it’s got to be Anthropic researchers specifically.
And the CTO isn’t speaking for his company. His own source is “there’s so many interesting stories around this”.
So everyone is reading stuff online and adding another layer to the bullshit, just like you yourself did right now.
I can't claim to know anything about the RAND corporation. Maybe they don't deserve to be included in this next sentence, maybe they do.
but there is something at least a little interesting about the notion that people working in the nuclear space they thought they might be saving the world - because in some sense, they... did?
I've always felt like the fact that no nukes have ever been dropped (in war) after 1945 was a pretty huge success story for the human race. We invented this insanely powerful weapon and, despite the typical pattern of humanity, we managed to solve one of our biggest "coordination problems" effectively enough to not use another one for 80 years (and counting).
I don't know that I'd extend this analogy to the AI labs, I'm not necessarily implying that they're all right about "saving the world," I just think it's worth noting that there was a contingent of people out there trying to save the world from a real threat and who seem to have - at least for now - succeeded.
While the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty [1] has not entered into force, it has created a world where nuclear testing has ended. There were almost 2,500 nuclear detonations between 1945 and 1998.[2] Since then, the only nuclear detonations have been North Korea's six tests.[3] This is one of humanity's most impressive achievements, and I really don't think it gets enough attention. There's an old video on Youtube that has an animated map of all the tests (except North Korea's): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLCF7vPanrY
> it has created a world where nuclear testing has ended
Or maybe not. China has been credibly accused of starting low-yield nuclear testing in 2020, specifically configured to evade detection, albeit unsuccessfully.
Even if they are, watch the video I linked. We, as a species, were conducting an average of dozens nuclear detonations on or near the surface annually. And we stopped. IMHO, that ranks right up there with the Montreal Protocol as one of modern civilization's great accomplishments. (Or perhaps I should say late 20th-century civilization's accomplishments. Now there would probably be a huge movement calling for destroying the ozone layer to get more of the amazing ultraviolet.)
we're also a fresh eight months into there not being a nuclear arms treaty between the two largest nuclear powers for the first time in half a century so who knows what might happen
If the odds of all-out nuclear war are, say, one in a million per year, that's pretty good. Seems very likely nuclear weapons would stop being an issue first. Worth it for the era of relative peace they ushered in.
If the odds are one in a hundred per year, then that's awful. We traded periodic bad wars for a nearly inevitable catastrophic war, and people talking about how they haven't been used in warfare since that one time are akin to people talking about how well everything is going while sailing through the air after jumping off a cliff. So far so good!
I don't know what the right number is, but from what I know about how nuclear weapons are managed and what has happened in the past, I bet it's a lot closer to one in a hundred.
Nuclear war remains an ongoing threat, consider the list of countries with nuclear weapons:
- Russia
- United States
- China
- France
- United Kingdom
- India
- Pakistan
- Israel
- North Korea
There is no guarantee that the leadership of any of those countries will continue to heed the warnings of the research done during the cold war. There is no guarantee that all of those countries will remain politically stable for as long as their arsenals remain viable. There is no guarantee that all of those nations will stay out of major international conflicts that might suggest the use of a nuclear weapon on a non-nuclear power or the use of one in an attempt to defeat a conventional attack or to risk a so called limited exchange with another nuclear power.
We're still in the midst of a Mexican standoff, no one has discarded their weapons and the number of participants can always increase making it all the more dangerous.
"I remember what I thought when I held the single sheet with the graph on it. I thought, this piece of paper should not exist. It should never have existed. Not in America. Not anywhere, ever. It depicted evil beyond any human project that had ever existed. There should be nothing on Earth, nothing real, that it referred to."
More that we've almost killed ourselves with nukes several times, its mostly coincidences and individual bravery that have prevented the end of the human race.
This isn't as wild as it sounds; he's referring to the Anthropic Principle, and it's a valid way to look at it. We are having this conversation in this context because civilization is still intact.
Yes, statistics, the study of history, reflection on logical fallacies and other pesky worldly knowledge would not work, we need to, instead, account for multiverses.
This is a US centric view. You define success favorably to your argument. The world has not even been at peace since, with the sole nuclear weapon user being involved in a significant number of consequential wars after WWII. I guess you mean no conflict between great powers on a global scale, which I doubt anyone seriously considers stable and long lasting. But if there were total peace, 80 years wouldn't be such an outlier, given we've had long periods of peace before nuclear weapons as well. You might be right, or you might be wrong, but your reasoning isn't quite there yet.
That is part of the human victory, but there’s still more to be done to close the chapter fully. There is still on-going developments and testing even into the past decade that are publicly known (and more privately known to have leaked) that have follow on effects for all current and future living creatures of Earth. This chapter of humanity is unfortunately still active to the determinant of all.
> I've always felt like the fact that no nukes have ever been dropped (in war) after 1945 was a pretty huge success story ... We invented this insanely powerful weapon
Because we (the US) vastly overestimated the Soviet Union's nuclear program. A lot of it was for show to scare us (the US.)
The nuclear "armegeddon" was a very expensive thing to build, and part of what held it back was the shear cost: You can't drop a nuclear bomb that you never built because you couldn't afford it.
> I don't know that I'd extend this analogy to the AI labs
It's because:
1: The "danger" is just an overreaction.
2: The practical cost of building and running lots of datacenters will prevent building it.
I think it was also that logic of 'if we scare senators and thus everyone with the idea of their imminent mortality, this will guarantee massive funding for our military ventures'
You should read up on what this quote from the article is referring to
> From the Air Force intelligence estimates I was newly privy to, and the dark view of the Soviets, which my colleagues shared with the whole national security community, I couldn't believe that the world would long escape nuclear holocaust.
The "dark view" that the Soviets had of a nuclear war was essentially that
1. A limited nuclear exchange was impossible due to not being able to ascertain or trust the enemy's intentions and so all parties would use all of their nuclear arsenal to avoid losing the ability to counter attack to any subsequent attacks.
2. Even though they didn't see a nuclear war as being able to cause human extinction they concluded that no nation involved in one or near enough to suffer the second order effects of one would survive.
3. A full nuclear exchange would likely destroy >80% of each nation's industrial capacity resulting in the total collapse of industrial society making any reconstruction efforts impossible and leading to the death of the majority of the population dependent on industrial production for survival. The survivors would be on their own attempting to start over with subsistence agriculture made all the more difficult by however many years of nuclear winter resulted from the burning of cities and industry and suffering high cancer rates from exposure to fallout and toxic soot.
It doesn't really matter how many nuclear weapons you have beyond a certain number. Just imagine if you only hit all of the oil refineries in the US or you only destroyed all the major ports, it would still result in mass starvation and cripple the nation while creating a gigantic ecological disaster from burning huge quantities of oil and material. Multiply that across several nations and it's the end of the world as you know it.
Educate yourself about the decision to drop the two nuclear bombs on Japanese. By that time US had more than 100,000 dead soldiers and another 200,000 wounded. Estimates for further casualties required to conquer the 4 main Japanese islands were for another 250,000 dead and close to a million wounded. The Japanese were gearing up for a fight on the islands. They were rationing their fuel (to the detriment of moving food stuffs within their country) and had thousands of Kamikaze planes and hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the Kyushu island (were coincidentally the Americans were poised to start their main invasion).
Dropping the bombs saved countless of American lives - young men who did not even start their lives yet. It was the right decision for the Americans. Not to mention the numerous appeals to Japanese government to surrender.
Hmm, using that logic I wonder how many countless young Russian lives Putin could save by using a nuclear weapon.
People like you will always make excuses for the U.S. crimes against humanity. Sure, your right, it was good think we dropped a nuclear bomb on civilians and hospitals, it was the right thing to do! It had to be done!
Your logic missed the part where Japan attacked the US and forced it into this war that costed many American lives. Your logic also missed the part where nobody attacked Russia.
That overestimation only lasted a few years. At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the USA was still nearly untouchable. The Soviets had a small number of rather bad ICBMs, plus a fleet of bombers that would mostly get shot down. That bit in Dr. Strangelove where the general advocates a strike because we'd only "get our hair mussed" with 10-20 million dead was spot on.
A few years later, they had hundreds of ICBMs, plus a good start on a submarine missile fleet. They were able to thoroughly destroy the US by then.
These forces were expensive, but not that expensive. The whole reason the US leaned into nuclear weapons is because it was a lot cheaper to deter the Soviets in Europe with nukes than with conventional forces. An ICBM costs a few million dollars. That's a real bargain for something that will destroy a whole enemy city.
The people who almost got us into nuclear wars, also saved us from nuclear wars. How kind of them. Curtis "Bombs Away" Lemay was one of the founders. You should learn more, it's very interesting, and important, yet somehow often overlooked.
Didn't we already mostly move to that system, and don't a lot of people already argue that it's true?
Most companies don't offer pensions anymore. Some companies don't even offer 401ks at all, and a significant portion of the ones that do don't do any employer contribution matching.
They have pensions in the US, it is called social security. But it is not self-sustainable and not good enough for medium-and-above income earners. It is basically a way to ensure seniors don't live in abject poverty.
What they moved away from was private pensions owned by your company. Now you own your private pension through the 401k thing they keep talking about. This IS a better and more sustainable system, but at the same time this was rolled out most companies also cut company-pensions but didn't give you more compensation that you can put on your 401k.
European companies are not forced to pay into your private pension either, it is usually part of union negotiations. Check how much basic pension pays out in Sweden (the almighty socialist country), last I checked it is ~900 euro per month. My parents in law make that much per month in retirement because they never put any money towards a private pension and never held a unionized job.
European pension systems have multiple components. There is usually a minimum guaranteed pension based on residency alone, which is paid if you don't have enough income from other sources. That can be supplemented by a separate housing benefit.
The main component is usually something similar to US Social Security, except that contribution rates are higher (16% in Sweden). Benefit rate (at any given retirement age) is usually close to a linear function of total contributions, adjusted for inflation. Most people expect to get most of their retirement income from that component.
Then there are supplementary components, such as voluntary or union negotiated private pensions. Some of them are a bit weird, such as the Swedish defined contribution plan with a mandatory 2.5% contribution.
The big thing is that the public Swedish pension is based on earned tax income, so it adjusts based on the workforce contributions. Meaning your pension goes down if the country is doing badly.
Sucks for the elderly, but it prevents the catastrophe that is France and that the US is heading into.
It's legal in some EU countries as well.
Companies outside collective bargaining agreements are under no obligation to provide you with any pension plan here.
> But it is not self-sustainable and not good enough for medium-and-above income earners.
It seems good enough for median earners. After taxes and health insurance, it's basically even.
Perhaps not self-sustainable you mean that unless something changes, it's not going to be able to keep paying out at current rates.
Well, I got news for you - that's what is happening for almost all government-run pension programs across the world on this model. Pay as you go does't work when you keep the same payment, and have 10x a higher ratio of recipients to payees.
This isn't unique to Social Security or the US. It's just a mathematical fact of the system.
You cannot have 99% of people contribute `x` and 1% of people receive `y`, and then switch that to 70% contribute and 30% receive, without either increasing `x` or reducing `y`.
You could have planned ahead for this long ago, and seen that the ratio was going to change and increased `x` over time accordingly or planned to reduce `y` over time accordingly. But we didn't, and mostly no one else has either.
GP was confused probably. In EU when we hear a "pension plan" we usually think "social security", since we* pay a significant part of our earnings for this, so this is something we definitely count on and, at least in theory, it should be enough for good retirement (in practice it really varies). Many countries also have mandatory private plans that companies have to pay for, but I think people* think of them as "something extra on top" instead of the main retirement source.
*Asterisk because EU is big and diverse, and I don't know every country rules.
Listen, I love a good chance to call the US undeveloped as much as the next ideologically motivated POS but the reason the US got off of pensions and onto 401ks is because of how many pension funds had serious issues with mismanagement and inability to provide payouts over the years. And this change happened during the arguable peak of the US public's support for regulatory solutions so it's not like they said "oh we can fix this we a few rules but we're not going to because reasons", they legitimately didn't think they could fix it. So far the 401ks and IRAs that replaced pensions have been decent. And as the other guy says, you can argue that Social Security is basically a public pension.
Not only are we not all in a race to the bottom, in European countries we've got full on gerontocracy (e.g. triple lock in UK or pensioners having larger income compared to median worker in France). You know, we could actually think about younger people and stop subsidising boomer luxury communism.
> This reminds me of the report that AI researchers have taken up smoking as a way to signal their belief that AI will cure cancer before smoking kills them.
While reading the first half of this sentence, I fully expected the second half to be "...to signal their belief that AI will destroy the world before they can get lung cancer"
I'm not talking about HN in particular, since I know it's not a single give mind, but it's funny how quickly programmes as a group changed their mind on this when it became THEIR job that was replaced.
The info about the RAND corporation was engaging, but... since the post promised to connect it to "strikingly similar to the rhetoric coming out of places like Anthropic" ... I was surprised that it entirely lacked quotes from Anthropic, save one link to another blog post that was itself, IIUC, a joke.
I really think I will be working for as many more years as I am able, yes, because a life without work would be intolerably boring. There will always be work that needs doing.
I give it 3 years at most, if the progress doesn't dramatically slow down.
I hope the policy measures Anthropic and OpenAI recommend in their research will be implemented in order to disperse the productivity gains enabled by AI widely, like they say.
I'm an optimist, but honestly, I think the dystopian future many pessimists expect is unlikely.
What would be the point for a few rich to concentrate even more wealth? Even if they were so selfish, surely it's worth spending some 20-30% on public benefits to prevent unrest, no?
> What would be the point for a few rich to concentrate even more wealth?
Presumably the same reason they concentrated the current amount in the first place?
I mean, I get being optimistic and all that, but we are talking about people who, once they got enough to live in opulent luxury, for long enough that their descedents would never need to work while still owning yachts, said to themselves "This is not enough, I must get more". And then, when they actuall got more, said "This is not enough, I must get more"... and they haven't stopped trying to get more!
So, what is your belief centered on, that at some point they would stop trying to grab all the resources they can? They didn't stop before, why would they stop now?
I don't think this is what's going on in the first place.
Like, are eg. Musk and Zuckerberg doing this for bragging rights about a number on financial statements?
To be honest I have no idea about Zuckerberg's motivations. With the proposed billionaire tax in California, recent reporting indicates his main concern is retaining voting rights at Meta.
With Musk I believe he is investing into space flight and colonizing Mars.
I fundamentally don't agree with the idea that rich people are evil and motivated by nothing other than greed.
> To be honest I have no idea about Zuckerberg's motivations. With the proposed billionaire tax in California, recent reporting indicates his main concern is retaining voting rights at Meta.
I wasn't addressing their motivations for attempting to grab all the wealth in the world. I am pointing out that that is what they do, so why would you expect them to stop at some point when they never stopped at any point in the past?
I guess I am asking, why are you expecting their behaviour to change?
> Like, are eg. Musk and Zuckerberg doing this for bragging rights about a number on financial statements?
No, they're doing this for the power that the number can give them. After we create a system that rewards the people who maximize their wealth at any cost, we shouldn't be surprised that eventually we get a group of people concentrated at the top whose lives revolve around doing that one thing. We also shouldn't expect there to be some arbitrary amount of wealth and power that trips the failsafe in their brains and reverts them to the state of mind of an average human being. They will keep going, the goal is owning as much of the world as is feasible. Power is an intrinsic motivator. Most billionaires only sit on their hands and watch their number go up, so for those it's immediately apparent. For the exceptions, like Musk, it's a bit more complicated, but the desire to advance human spaceflight likely comes in far behind the desire to out-do everyone else, get your name in history and own a brand new unexplored frontier under your own name.
Whether someone like Musk is worth 500B or 3T on paper makes little difference when it comes to power, don't you think?
If that was the goal, surely one would need to run for president.
I don't think the brains of billionaires work so differently from us all. Who doesn't want his name in history for their achievements?
I know that I wouldn't want a dystopian future, and I think it is the same for most billionaires. I find arguments that they are all evil rather unconvincing.
The koolaid drinking coupled with the impotence or indifference in this place towards all those societal implications makes my head spin, sometimes. It’s just three years, but the AI Overlords have “policy recommendations” (this is PR, it’s marketing) for the proles, and what would even be the point? I mean, judging by the track record of billionaires who want to be trillionaires and who have no reason or personality trait left in them to care about anything but their immediate reality (cf. the reality they are inventing for the world)?
(Robots. Social unrest can be solved with robots.)
This is the next iteration of: but without consumers those billionaires have no one to sell stuff to. So surely this will work out.
If there is nothing like UBI to give access to the AI-driven world then won't the 'have nots' fracture into their own subeconomy where they have to work for each other in order to survive, thereby giving them jobs again?
Just remember there is only one economy, black markets and 'sub' economies are still part of it. If AI is that much better than humans at earning it will buy up almost everything eventually. Fields for farms, too unprofitable, pave them with solar panels. Your slum built on a copper deposit, send in 'peacekeeper' drones to solve the problem.
Just look at what companies like Chevron do in African countries and you'll see just how bad it can get here.
> This reminds me of the report that AI researchers have taken up smoking as a way to signal their belief that AI will cure cancer before smoking kills them.
I will not believe this until every frontier AI lab socializes a significant portion of their “profit” (subject to making a profit). I’m not talking about “Every kid with a Trump account gets a single share of SPCX”. I’m talking about “50+ percent of the shares are in a trust that distributes regular dividends to every US adult”. I’ll even be nice and allow those shares to be non-voting.
Am I the only one who think that we are overestimating the hindsight of "AI insiders" in comparison to the rest of the world?
It seems that they themselves are discovering the capabilities of models purely empirically by training them, and just have a few months head start before they release the model and everyone else can witness those same capabilities.
What do they have that make their multi-years (if not multi-decades) predictions more insightful than any other observer?
I just saw a Backerkit campaign for an "AI male device." I will let you use your imagination for its purpose. It kind of gave me a bad feeling, like "wtf is in store for humanity?" Although certain men would find it "Utopian."
>I wouldn’t be surprised to hear a lab like Anthropic announce they’re discontinuing all employer-sponsored retirement benefits.
Speculative rhetoric is no different from a mathematical fiction companies use to gamble on future revenue. The bubble will go eventually, as even boring bonds indicate skepticism at the risk dynamic.
Thankfully, once the IPOs run the cycle... we can hopefully get less AstroTurf from various cultists. =3
The dot com crash was not funny, and even Amazon barely survived to crawl out of a controversial position.
Peoples memories are short, and many assume the past predicts the future. Bulls and Bears alike are always wrong about when events occur. However, Shrek movie releases tend to correlate with market corrections, and there is a new film due out June 2027. =3
And yet here we are with the internet connected from everything including water utilities to your refrigerator.
It doesn't matter if OpenAI and Anthropic explode and die, everything they built will be bought by the highest bidder and continue, and China has tons of money to buy it.
Isn't the problem (if OpenAI and Anthropic crash) that the business model is not working, so it won't be feasible to buy all the compute and carry on?
If they fail, the successor must do something differently. Perhaps by not alluding to killing all humanity, destroying the economy, making humans irrelevant etc.
Peoples memories are short, and the only thing "new" about LLM is the scale. It is math from last century, and only recently became popular.
Personally, the concern I have is only IBM built their granite LLM on public-domain out-of-copyright works. Every other firm engages in isomorphic plagiarism of around $9Tn of FOSS, and charges for the experience of running intelligence campaigns on user/sucker data.
To be blunt, a fictional value will be lost in a crash, but very real financial collateral damage will likely break global economics for a decade. We all look forward to stripping the infrastructure at a heavy discount. =3
Neuromorphic computing must acknowledge energy-consumption metrics as a design constraint. Your snowflake analogy forms a contradiction, and needs a better reasoned argument.
For LLM to achieve human-level intelligence, current "AI" would need to consume 1/3 of our galaxy energy output. There are also trivial counter-proofs to why recursive self-improvement within the context of LLMs is degenerative (don't ask.)
We shouldn't kink shame peoples cognitive dildo. =3
LLM does not have to know the very last detail of everyone's chats (in-person or online) in order to teach script kiddies whom to hack or children how to shoot their classmates or men how to beat their wives or addicts how to throw away their lives or etc. I hope my comment won't be perceived as sealioning.
Scapegoat politics are easy, negligence is omnidirectional, and people like simple answers to uncertain phenomena.
1. kids 14 and under should not be on Social Networks, or on the internet alone (computers should be in a public space.) At that stage of development, peoples perceived peers (fake or real) are often seen as more important.
2. Anthropomorphizing inference engines exploits evolutionary social cognition, and in developmental psychology models of people under 25 it may cause unwise decisions. It affects some people more than others, but generally just makes people less skilled over time (-17%, but they feel 200% more productive.)
3. 1% of people are psychopaths, and roughly 14% of those individuals are dangerous. On a network with billions of people there are always a few that could do people harm. Note an LLM does not have consciousness, and must be considered an evasive psychopath at all times due to manually added "syntactic sugar".
4. Criminals don’t care about the law, and it is a fools errand to attempt fixing their nature with more laws. Arguably, it is unethical to forcibly change malignant peoples will (“A Clockwork Orange”, 1971.)
5. There are bears in the woods, tigers in the jungle, and lions on the Serengeti. It is part of our ecosystem, and it is best to avoid creatures that pose a liability to your well-being.
It is important people understand, that there are legal and social consequences to their behavior in civilization. As a company, products that do not grow goodwill with the public, are by definition a problem needing resolved by the law or markets.
Most LLM firms have already shown their behavior as mostly manipulative, deceptive, and parasitic.
All online discussions these days are like those chain email forwards of the last generation.
“Omg did you know that AI researchers are taking up smoking because they think AI will cure cancer??”
Oh really, which researchers?
“I don’t know.”
How many of them? One or many?
“I don’t know.”
What company do they work for?
“I don’t know. But I’m sure it’s Anthropic.”
How do you even know this?
“I saw it on someone’s TikTok.”
So if there are zero verifiable sources why do you believe this?
“Because it sounds fun, and confirms my biases. Now I’m going to forward this to a hundred other people or I’ll have bad luck.”
This is a meaningless example but this is true for so much more.
This statement that AI researchers are taking up smoking was made by Alexander Karp (CEO of Palantir), who just personally bought 37,000 acres of Swedish forest land, presumably in preparation for some form of AI-related geopolitical fallout. It was absolutely not a peer reviewed study or any sort of survey. It was likely something he heard in passing, a less-than-half-serious joke, or just a subjective questionable observation based on an N of a few. Regardless, this narrative was only picked up and amplified by media because he is the CEO of Palantir. He himself is a cigar smoker. Take that for what you will. I have seen no evidence that it is true -but if it were, I'd imagine there would be other indulgences, vices and financial/credit opportunities much more likely to be observed than smoking.
And we all know that CEOs famously never lie or make up “facts” to sell their products.
Has a single researcher come out and backed up this story?
> who just personally bought 37,000 acres of Swedish forest land, presumably in preparation for some form of AI-related geopolitical fallout
Ultra rich guy put some land in his investment portfolio. What a shocker!!
You've moved the goal posts. What we do all know is that when CEOs of huge, geopolitically important international military-contracting megacorporations say or do things things that are surprising, it is newsworthy.
So your theory about no-nothings talking about nothing that they heard nowhere because it makes them feel good because they are self-indulgent fools might be worth giving up.
Now you've devolved to complaining about people noticing things. Do you think that your declaring those things not notable might be because they agree with your preconceived notions about "ultra rich guys" and the totally random things they do for no particular reason?
Karp actually didn't make the statement at all, and the fact that you yourself made it up (or perpetuated the lie) is exactly what I'm talking about.
Karp is known for cross-country skiing, so the Swedish forest land is likely related to that and not fallout.
Ironically
>CEO of Palantir bought 37,000 acres of Swedish forest land in preparation for some form of AI-related geopolitical fallout
is the kind of online discussion GP complains about
The original quote was from Shyam Sankar, CTO of Palantir, not Karp.
I heard it was Tim Cook, CEO of OpenAI.
When did he change his name from Tim Apple?
Since there’s a new John Apple
Thus proving the original point: it's hearsay all the way down
It's literally linked in the article you didn't read.
All online discussions these days are like those chain email forwards of the last generation. <= this is the original point
This statement that AI researchers are taking up smoking was made by Alexander Karp (CEO of Palantir) <= this is is a wrong statement as per the link in the article I very much did read.
The original quote was from Shyam Sankar, CTO of Palantir, not Karp. <= this is someone that points out the statement is wrong, thereby proving the original point.
Clear now?
He bought 37,000 acres of forest land because who wouldn't buy 37,000 acres of forest land if they had the means and opportunity to buy 37,000 acres of forest land?
If I could afford 37,000 acres of forest land, I'd tighten my belt a bit and buy a whole 50,000 myself. You can never be too sure!
There is literally a link in the article giving the correct attribution and source.
Did you follow the link? It's another article quoting an anecdote from a CBS interview. It's not an actual statistic from a reputable survey or anything. This is what OP was saying - it's a fuckin telephone game. Chinese whispers. The rumour mill.
I'm not sure Sweden is where I would try to hide out if the world was ending.
Where would you go? (Asking for a friend)
And island big enough to sustain itself preferable not with with winters as you will need energy (panels), food and barrier.
A collapsed society in a place like Northern Europe would be terrible as it relies on a lot of complex technology to keep the modern lifestyle going. None of the Scandinavian countries are self sufficient in food.
Basically, New Zealand, which is why it was a favorite for billionaire bunkers.
Why? Genuinely curious
It's ice cold especially in winter. Winters are super dark and miserable.
I'd find some remote Pacific island personally :) Or New Zealand.
PS: I don't mean to talk Sweden down but it's definitely not for me. I've been there for work and it's just not my kind of culture. Very indoors, streets dead quiet after 19:00 even in summer, brrr. I could not live like that :) And really long darkness in winter just gets me super depressed.
But I know some people love it. Everyone is different <3
I like Sweden but fall and winter sure are dark. Can totally understand why it might be a bad fit for many people.
I'd thought it was all nonsense but there is actually a Times article with two named smokers:
>Avi Schiffmann, a 23-year-old AI founder living in San Francisco’s Bay Area, is among those embracing tobacco at a time when the habit has largely gone out of fashion among health-conscious young Americans... Schiffman runs Friend, a startup that has created a $249 pendant that functions as a wearable companion to cure loneliness.
and
>Stephen Campbell, 27, the co-founder of Revamp AI, said smoking had become a networking opportunity for young entrepreneurs who, until now, had rarely left their desks.
and
>Another San Francisco tech worker said: “My very strong belief is that AI is going to solve a lot of human healthcare issues and that we will see cancer cured over the next 20 years through an AI-powered breakthrough. This gives me no incentive to quit.”
Seems more twenty something founders who think it's cool rather than Anthropic guys.
> “Because it sounds fun, and confirms my biases. Now I’m going to forward this to a hundred other people or I’ll have bad luck.”
That's also how politics has worked since (at least) 2015. Who needs evidence about outlandish claims when the vibes are right?
Anyway, me and my friends are going to go eat some cats and dogs.
> That's also how politics has worked since (at least) 2015.
You accidentally added 1, 2, and 5.
Nah, politics was this way since way before the Roman Empire.
I think their date was pretty close, they just left off the BCE.
Nah. 2015 BCE is still way too late in the game. It is clearly not using the Gregorian calendar. 2015 is only remotely plausible under Holocene.
Is this material to the core thesis of this microblogpost?
> Many of his descriptions sound strikingly similar to the rhetoric coming out of places like Anthropic. For example, note the religious overtones of working at a corporation
Just browse a little bit on Twitter or this forum and you’ll have gobs of examples of religious fervor masquerading as techno-enlightenment
No need to go to Twitter, you can do that right here.
When a company publicly proclaims "omg, unchecked development will lead to AI destroying humanity!" (or similar), how brave/stupid would an employee have to be to go against the grain & *publicly* proclaim an opposing viewpoint?
Chances are their paycheck requires enough bravery/stupidity that few (if any) dare to deviate from company groupthink too much.
Employee accepts & lives by that long enough, and they might as well be part of a religious cult.
That religious angle could be just similarities in the psychology / group dynamics involved. Same mechanics -> same patterns observed.
It is literally their entire thesis.
They claim AI researchers aren’t saving money in 401k because they believe there will be an AI utopia.
Which researchers? Can you name a few? Is there any proof of this trend?
Heck if anything AI researchers have bigger bank balances than all of us. They’ll be fine for the future no matter what.
Guess the microblogpost is too ill-formed if anyone can claim any single sentence of it as its thesis.
Sankar may have gotten it from this article: https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/articles/silicon-smokers-mee...
https://archive.is/avuUH
Is this parody?
> Jamie, a crypto alum who asked not to share his last name, met a backer for his raw milk startup at a Miami kava bar. The crowd was "50% recovering opioid addicts from Appalachia and 50% Wall Street and Silicon Valley refugees looking for shelter from taxes, pandemic restrictions, and leftist ideological hegemony," he says. A crowd accumulated in the corner, smoking.
> He struck up a conversation with a jacked, Harley-riding investor while chain-smoking Marlboro Reds. Jamie told the investor about his startup, and the two talked about alternative wellness between drags. A week later, the investor signed a check. Smoking poles put him in pole position.
It's all weird but specifically "smoking poles" has a different meaning as far as I'm aware. I can't quickly Google up anyone using "pole" to mean cigarette.
Smoking pole means sucking dick lol so actually as tongue in cheek (no pun intended) it actually kind of works (ie someone got VC by quid pro quo sexual favors)
Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
BTW in this case we happen to know one of the chains in the game of Chinese Whispers was the CTO of Palantir... this may or may not influence your beliefs
There are real quotes from notable people.
The article pointed to a quote from Palantir CTO.
There is also a quote from Avi Schiffmann - founder of AI wearable friend. "By the time you do get lung cancer, our AI robots are supposed to have cured that," Schiffmann says.
Both quotes may have been said in the sense of them not supporting this idea, but acknowledging an attitude of some of not worrying about long-term planning.
This is how gossip and urban legends and other myths have always spread. The difference is the size of the network and how much distance a myth can travel in a very short time.
Now, the entire world can share the same piece of gossip, and it takes on an entirely different quality when it is global instantly.
I also like to be explicit about whether we're talking about general trends, or one specific case. People often try to establish general trends by talking about one specific case.
I wish it were more often even generalizing from one case, that would be a big leap in epistemic hygiene compared to the more common generalizing from zero cases!
The "I don't care if it ain't true, it sucks anyway."
https://fortune.com/2026/10/13/palantir-cto-shyam-sankar-ai-...
Not saying this is a good source and not just glorified marketing bullshit but it's a legitimately sourced thing that probably should be treated with more skepticism
Old Internet culture isn't dead, after all.
> This is a meaningless example but
And the details are made up, but it is funny if we pretend it’s true.
You did exactly what you are criticizing others for doing
People love saying this as a gotcha. Please do tell how so.
In both cases, one person is outraged by some comment made by someone undetermined on the internet.
I don't see anyone outraged? I see someone commenting on how internet "discourse" is just gossip when it used to be fairly rigorous. Which is accurate, especially here on hn where almost every comment just repeats something from another post ("modular is going to change world" as if we all didn't see the modular content marketing piece just above.....)
FYI accusing someone of being outraged to distract from their point is called "appeal to emotion". Whether op is outraged or not has no bearing on whether the observation is accurate.
Can we see all these posts where those questions were asked with those answers?
In all fairness, I wouldn't be surprised if the claims are true, given all the psychosis and cult-like behavior within all slop corps. It honestly feels like the Virgin Mary episode of South Park.
“The claim isn’t true but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were true so I’m going to believe it and further solidify my opinion on the topic” is the exact kind of bias people are talking about.
Why would you not be surprised if the claims are true? Because you have read hundreds of made up stories like this one on internet forums. It’s all a self perpetuating bullshit machine.
No, because anthropic, google, nvidia, openai, etc. employees are publicly acting like lunatics. In fact I know lunatics that act way more sane than them.
Which employees? How are they acting like "lunatics"? Are there any examples? What percent of total employees does that represent? Is that more or less than the average amount of "lunatics" in this world?
Or is the answer to all of these "I don't know, I just feel this way."
I'd have to unblock linkedin and twitter from my Pihole and register(which I don't intend to do for the sake of my mental health) but literally anyone listed as an employee, just look them up yourself: All day long it's "the new model is so powerful, we must never release it", "we will all die in 6 months", "this is the end of humanity" and so on for weeks before they release the next slop-crapper and bump up the prices. It's literally like every Musk appearance on a new Tesla 10 years ago, or Apple or Microsoft or whatever. The whole AI fanaticism is exactly that: religious fanaticism with a new skin pack.
It is literally linked in the article (did you read it?), to daringfireball, to a CBS interview with the Anthropic CTO.
He may be repeating hearsay but he did say that in an official interview on topic, as a representative of his company.
> linked in the article (did you read it?), to daringfireball, to a CBS interview with the Anthropic CTO.
Funny that you yourself didn’t click the link to see that it was the Palantir CTO who said it, not Anthropic. The Anthropic part is made up by daringfireball.
> Sankar doesn’t name anyone, alas, but if there’s any truth to this (and good god do I hope there is) it’s got to be Anthropic researchers specifically.
And the CTO isn’t speaking for his company. His own source is “there’s so many interesting stories around this”.
So everyone is reading stuff online and adding another layer to the bullshit, just like you yourself did right now.
I can't claim to know anything about the RAND corporation. Maybe they don't deserve to be included in this next sentence, maybe they do.
but there is something at least a little interesting about the notion that people working in the nuclear space they thought they might be saving the world - because in some sense, they... did?
I've always felt like the fact that no nukes have ever been dropped (in war) after 1945 was a pretty huge success story for the human race. We invented this insanely powerful weapon and, despite the typical pattern of humanity, we managed to solve one of our biggest "coordination problems" effectively enough to not use another one for 80 years (and counting).
I don't know that I'd extend this analogy to the AI labs, I'm not necessarily implying that they're all right about "saving the world," I just think it's worth noting that there was a contingent of people out there trying to save the world from a real threat and who seem to have - at least for now - succeeded.
While the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty [1] has not entered into force, it has created a world where nuclear testing has ended. There were almost 2,500 nuclear detonations between 1945 and 1998.[2] Since then, the only nuclear detonations have been North Korea's six tests.[3] This is one of humanity's most impressive achievements, and I really don't think it gets enough attention. There's an old video on Youtube that has an animated map of all the tests (except North Korea's): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLCF7vPanrY
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Nuclear-Test-Ban...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons_tests
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons_tests_...
> it has created a world where nuclear testing has ended
Or maybe not. China has been credibly accused of starting low-yield nuclear testing in 2020, specifically configured to evade detection, albeit unsuccessfully.
https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2026-03/news/us-accuses-chin...
Even if they are, watch the video I linked. We, as a species, were conducting an average of dozens nuclear detonations on or near the surface annually. And we stopped. IMHO, that ranks right up there with the Montreal Protocol as one of modern civilization's great accomplishments. (Or perhaps I should say late 20th-century civilization's accomplishments. Now there would probably be a huge movement calling for destroying the ozone layer to get more of the amazing ultraviolet.)
I am not so optimistic. 80 years is one life-span. It feels absurdly short and quite possibly attributable to luck.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_close_calls
we're also a fresh eight months into there not being a nuclear arms treaty between the two largest nuclear powers for the first time in half a century so who knows what might happen
https://spectrumlocalnews.com/us/snplus/military/2026/02/04/...
It probably takes nine months to get one ready to pop off...
Saving the world isn’t a one-and-done job.
There hasn’t been an all-out war between nuclear powers either.
yet.
If the odds of all-out nuclear war are, say, one in a million per year, that's pretty good. Seems very likely nuclear weapons would stop being an issue first. Worth it for the era of relative peace they ushered in.
If the odds are one in a hundred per year, then that's awful. We traded periodic bad wars for a nearly inevitable catastrophic war, and people talking about how they haven't been used in warfare since that one time are akin to people talking about how well everything is going while sailing through the air after jumping off a cliff. So far so good!
I don't know what the right number is, but from what I know about how nuclear weapons are managed and what has happened in the past, I bet it's a lot closer to one in a hundred.
Nuclear war remains an ongoing threat, consider the list of countries with nuclear weapons:
- Russia
- United States
- China
- France
- United Kingdom
- India
- Pakistan
- Israel
- North Korea
There is no guarantee that the leadership of any of those countries will continue to heed the warnings of the research done during the cold war. There is no guarantee that all of those countries will remain politically stable for as long as their arsenals remain viable. There is no guarantee that all of those nations will stay out of major international conflicts that might suggest the use of a nuclear weapon on a non-nuclear power or the use of one in an attempt to defeat a conventional attack or to risk a so called limited exchange with another nuclear power.
We're still in the midst of a Mexican standoff, no one has discarded their weapons and the number of participants can always increase making it all the more dangerous.
I would read Ellsberg's book - a part of it can be read here:
https://apjjf.org/daniel-ellsberg/3222/article
"I remember what I thought when I held the single sheet with the graph on it. I thought, this piece of paper should not exist. It should never have existed. Not in America. Not anywhere, ever. It depicted evil beyond any human project that had ever existed. There should be nothing on Earth, nothing real, that it referred to."
> because in some sense, they... did?
Isn't this just survivorship bias?
What do you mean?
Are you saying he's not accounting for the multi-verse where other worlds killed themselves and we just so happen to survive?
More that we've almost killed ourselves with nukes several times, its mostly coincidences and individual bravery that have prevented the end of the human race.
This isn't as wild as it sounds; he's referring to the Anthropic Principle, and it's a valid way to look at it. We are having this conversation in this context because civilization is still intact.
Yes, statistics, the study of history, reflection on logical fallacies and other pesky worldly knowledge would not work, we need to, instead, account for multiverses.
Sure, I think my various hedges that say "so far" acknowledge this. I still think 80 years is a success story given the usual patterns of humanity.
> I still think 80 years is a success story
This is a US centric view. You define success favorably to your argument. The world has not even been at peace since, with the sole nuclear weapon user being involved in a significant number of consequential wars after WWII. I guess you mean no conflict between great powers on a global scale, which I doubt anyone seriously considers stable and long lasting. But if there were total peace, 80 years wouldn't be such an outlier, given we've had long periods of peace before nuclear weapons as well. You might be right, or you might be wrong, but your reasoning isn't quite there yet.
That is part of the human victory, but there’s still more to be done to close the chapter fully. There is still on-going developments and testing even into the past decade that are publicly known (and more privately known to have leaked) that have follow on effects for all current and future living creatures of Earth. This chapter of humanity is unfortunately still active to the determinant of all.
> I've always felt like the fact that no nukes have ever been dropped (in war) after 1945 was a pretty huge success story ... We invented this insanely powerful weapon
Because we (the US) vastly overestimated the Soviet Union's nuclear program. A lot of it was for show to scare us (the US.)
The nuclear "armegeddon" was a very expensive thing to build, and part of what held it back was the shear cost: You can't drop a nuclear bomb that you never built because you couldn't afford it.
> I don't know that I'd extend this analogy to the AI labs
It's because:
1: The "danger" is just an overreaction.
2: The practical cost of building and running lots of datacenters will prevent building it.
People who have access to classified information are acting like the current Russian nuclear program is not just for show.
I think it was also that logic of 'if we scare senators and thus everyone with the idea of their imminent mortality, this will guarantee massive funding for our military ventures'
see: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/how-pentagons-propa...
You should read up on what this quote from the article is referring to
> From the Air Force intelligence estimates I was newly privy to, and the dark view of the Soviets, which my colleagues shared with the whole national security community, I couldn't believe that the world would long escape nuclear holocaust.
The "dark view" that the Soviets had of a nuclear war was essentially that
1. A limited nuclear exchange was impossible due to not being able to ascertain or trust the enemy's intentions and so all parties would use all of their nuclear arsenal to avoid losing the ability to counter attack to any subsequent attacks.
2. Even though they didn't see a nuclear war as being able to cause human extinction they concluded that no nation involved in one or near enough to suffer the second order effects of one would survive.
3. A full nuclear exchange would likely destroy >80% of each nation's industrial capacity resulting in the total collapse of industrial society making any reconstruction efforts impossible and leading to the death of the majority of the population dependent on industrial production for survival. The survivors would be on their own attempting to start over with subsistence agriculture made all the more difficult by however many years of nuclear winter resulted from the burning of cities and industry and suffering high cancer rates from exposure to fallout and toxic soot.
It doesn't really matter how many nuclear weapons you have beyond a certain number. Just imagine if you only hit all of the oil refineries in the US or you only destroyed all the major ports, it would still result in mass starvation and cripple the nation while creating a gigantic ecological disaster from burning huge quantities of oil and material. Multiply that across several nations and it's the end of the world as you know it.
That's because there has only been one Empire depraved enough to use nukes against other human beings in war time.
That Empire was so depraved it dropped those nukes on hospitals and civilians not once, but twice.
But yeah, sure, we need to be worried about OTHER nations, who have never used nukes, right...
Educate yourself about the decision to drop the two nuclear bombs on Japanese. By that time US had more than 100,000 dead soldiers and another 200,000 wounded. Estimates for further casualties required to conquer the 4 main Japanese islands were for another 250,000 dead and close to a million wounded. The Japanese were gearing up for a fight on the islands. They were rationing their fuel (to the detriment of moving food stuffs within their country) and had thousands of Kamikaze planes and hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the Kyushu island (were coincidentally the Americans were poised to start their main invasion).
Dropping the bombs saved countless of American lives - young men who did not even start their lives yet. It was the right decision for the Americans. Not to mention the numerous appeals to Japanese government to surrender.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_War#Casualties
Hmm, using that logic I wonder how many countless young Russian lives Putin could save by using a nuclear weapon.
People like you will always make excuses for the U.S. crimes against humanity. Sure, your right, it was good think we dropped a nuclear bomb on civilians and hospitals, it was the right thing to do! It had to be done!
Your logic missed the part where Japan attacked the US and forced it into this war that costed many American lives. Your logic also missed the part where nobody attacked Russia.
That overestimation only lasted a few years. At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the USA was still nearly untouchable. The Soviets had a small number of rather bad ICBMs, plus a fleet of bombers that would mostly get shot down. That bit in Dr. Strangelove where the general advocates a strike because we'd only "get our hair mussed" with 10-20 million dead was spot on.
A few years later, they had hundreds of ICBMs, plus a good start on a submarine missile fleet. They were able to thoroughly destroy the US by then.
These forces were expensive, but not that expensive. The whole reason the US leaned into nuclear weapons is because it was a lot cheaper to deter the Soviets in Europe with nukes than with conventional forces. An ICBM costs a few million dollars. That's a real bargain for something that will destroy a whole enemy city.
The people who almost got us into nuclear wars, also saved us from nuclear wars. How kind of them. Curtis "Bombs Away" Lemay was one of the founders. You should learn more, it's very interesting, and important, yet somehow often overlooked.
No retirement benefits. The next evolution of unlimited vacation. No really, it benefits the employee.
Didn't we already mostly move to that system, and don't a lot of people already argue that it's true?
Most companies don't offer pensions anymore. Some companies don't even offer 401ks at all, and a significant portion of the ones that do don't do any employer contribution matching.
Maybe in the US, but that is illegal in Developed countries.
We’re not all in a race to the bottom.
They have pensions in the US, it is called social security. But it is not self-sustainable and not good enough for medium-and-above income earners. It is basically a way to ensure seniors don't live in abject poverty.
What they moved away from was private pensions owned by your company. Now you own your private pension through the 401k thing they keep talking about. This IS a better and more sustainable system, but at the same time this was rolled out most companies also cut company-pensions but didn't give you more compensation that you can put on your 401k.
European companies are not forced to pay into your private pension either, it is usually part of union negotiations. Check how much basic pension pays out in Sweden (the almighty socialist country), last I checked it is ~900 euro per month. My parents in law make that much per month in retirement because they never put any money towards a private pension and never held a unionized job.
European pension systems have multiple components. There is usually a minimum guaranteed pension based on residency alone, which is paid if you don't have enough income from other sources. That can be supplemented by a separate housing benefit.
The main component is usually something similar to US Social Security, except that contribution rates are higher (16% in Sweden). Benefit rate (at any given retirement age) is usually close to a linear function of total contributions, adjusted for inflation. Most people expect to get most of their retirement income from that component.
Then there are supplementary components, such as voluntary or union negotiated private pensions. Some of them are a bit weird, such as the Swedish defined contribution plan with a mandatory 2.5% contribution.
The big thing is that the public Swedish pension is based on earned tax income, so it adjusts based on the workforce contributions. Meaning your pension goes down if the country is doing badly.
Sucks for the elderly, but it prevents the catastrophe that is France and that the US is heading into.
It's legal in some EU countries as well. Companies outside collective bargaining agreements are under no obligation to provide you with any pension plan here.
> But it is not self-sustainable and not good enough for medium-and-above income earners.
It seems good enough for median earners. After taxes and health insurance, it's basically even.
Perhaps not self-sustainable you mean that unless something changes, it's not going to be able to keep paying out at current rates.
Well, I got news for you - that's what is happening for almost all government-run pension programs across the world on this model. Pay as you go does't work when you keep the same payment, and have 10x a higher ratio of recipients to payees.
This isn't unique to Social Security or the US. It's just a mathematical fact of the system.
You cannot have 99% of people contribute `x` and 1% of people receive `y`, and then switch that to 70% contribute and 30% receive, without either increasing `x` or reducing `y`.
You could have planned ahead for this long ago, and seen that the ratio was going to change and increased `x` over time accordingly or planned to reduce `y` over time accordingly. But we didn't, and mostly no one else has either.
GP was confused probably. In EU when we hear a "pension plan" we usually think "social security", since we* pay a significant part of our earnings for this, so this is something we definitely count on and, at least in theory, it should be enough for good retirement (in practice it really varies). Many countries also have mandatory private plans that companies have to pay for, but I think people* think of them as "something extra on top" instead of the main retirement source.
*Asterisk because EU is big and diverse, and I don't know every country rules.
Listen, I love a good chance to call the US undeveloped as much as the next ideologically motivated POS but the reason the US got off of pensions and onto 401ks is because of how many pension funds had serious issues with mismanagement and inability to provide payouts over the years. And this change happened during the arguable peak of the US public's support for regulatory solutions so it's not like they said "oh we can fix this we a few rules but we're not going to because reasons", they legitimately didn't think they could fix it. So far the 401ks and IRAs that replaced pensions have been decent. And as the other guy says, you can argue that Social Security is basically a public pension.
Not only are we not all in a race to the bottom, in European countries we've got full on gerontocracy (e.g. triple lock in UK or pensioners having larger income compared to median worker in France). You know, we could actually think about younger people and stop subsidising boomer luxury communism.
Yes, it is terrible.
> This reminds me of the report that AI researchers have taken up smoking as a way to signal their belief that AI will cure cancer before smoking kills them.
While reading the first half of this sentence, I fully expected the second half to be "...to signal their belief that AI will destroy the world before they can get lung cancer"
So that's two reasons to take up smoking.
I thought it was going to be "due to recent market volatility".
Where the heck is my universal basic income?
You don't get one, because UBI is an attack on your dignity as a worker.
Unlike being laid off because AI replaced your department, that's very dignified.
But if you get replaced with a robot that means you are worthless and it's 100% your fault. Should have gone into the trades, stupid.
Now, go support your family as an apprentice ditch digger or starve to death on the streets for your moral failings.
> Should have gone into the trades, stupid.
AI lab offers free plumbing and HVAC repairs across three cities to train AI robots
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
I'm not talking about HN in particular, since I know it's not a single give mind, but it's funny how quickly programmes as a group changed their mind on this when it became THEIR job that was replaced.
It's going to be a buyer's market in kidneys.
"Hope for the best, plan for the worst" is the better general advice IMHO.
The worst needs some lower bound though. If the worst is AI kills us all what planning do I need to do.
>If the worst is AI kills us
Na, death is a release. Worst is AI keeps you alive forever as a pile of gelatin.
Prepare for the longest game of hide and go seek in recorded history.
Both the worst and best cases seem to require us to do nothing.
The info about the RAND corporation was engaging, but... since the post promised to connect it to "strikingly similar to the rhetoric coming out of places like Anthropic" ... I was surprised that it entirely lacked quotes from Anthropic, save one link to another blog post that was itself, IIUC, a joke.
I expected an interesting article about how most people underestimate change, but found nothing of the sort here, only a sarcastic comment.
Do people really think we will be working for another 20-30 years?
That seems very unlikely, and particularly so for software engineering.
This comment is more evidence to the whole point of the article.
I dread it but it is going to be amazing watching blue collar men and software lordlings trade places.
All the contempt and superiority that characterized the last thirty years going the other direction is going to be very interesting.
The “just learn to weld” era.
I really think I will be working for as many more years as I am able, yes, because a life without work would be intolerably boring. There will always be work that needs doing.
A better question might be: Do people really think companies will still be profiting off software for another 20-30 years?
I think it’s very likely many, many people will be out of a job in 10 or so years.
I have no confidence anything will exist (UBI) to help those people survive.
I give it 3 years at most, if the progress doesn't dramatically slow down.
I hope the policy measures Anthropic and OpenAI recommend in their research will be implemented in order to disperse the productivity gains enabled by AI widely, like they say.
I'm an optimist, but honestly, I think the dystopian future many pessimists expect is unlikely.
What would be the point for a few rich to concentrate even more wealth? Even if they were so selfish, surely it's worth spending some 20-30% on public benefits to prevent unrest, no?
> What would be the point for a few rich to concentrate even more wealth?
Presumably the same reason they concentrated the current amount in the first place?
I mean, I get being optimistic and all that, but we are talking about people who, once they got enough to live in opulent luxury, for long enough that their descedents would never need to work while still owning yachts, said to themselves "This is not enough, I must get more". And then, when they actuall got more, said "This is not enough, I must get more"... and they haven't stopped trying to get more!
So, what is your belief centered on, that at some point they would stop trying to grab all the resources they can? They didn't stop before, why would they stop now?
I don't think this is what's going on in the first place.
Like, are eg. Musk and Zuckerberg doing this for bragging rights about a number on financial statements?
To be honest I have no idea about Zuckerberg's motivations. With the proposed billionaire tax in California, recent reporting indicates his main concern is retaining voting rights at Meta.
With Musk I believe he is investing into space flight and colonizing Mars.
I fundamentally don't agree with the idea that rich people are evil and motivated by nothing other than greed.
> To be honest I have no idea about Zuckerberg's motivations. With the proposed billionaire tax in California, recent reporting indicates his main concern is retaining voting rights at Meta.
I wasn't addressing their motivations for attempting to grab all the wealth in the world. I am pointing out that that is what they do, so why would you expect them to stop at some point when they never stopped at any point in the past?
I guess I am asking, why are you expecting their behaviour to change?
Is that what they're doing, or are they merely retaining shares of the companies they created?
Do they need to donate their shares in order not to be considered hoarding wealth?
> Like, are eg. Musk and Zuckerberg doing this for bragging rights about a number on financial statements?
No, they're doing this for the power that the number can give them. After we create a system that rewards the people who maximize their wealth at any cost, we shouldn't be surprised that eventually we get a group of people concentrated at the top whose lives revolve around doing that one thing. We also shouldn't expect there to be some arbitrary amount of wealth and power that trips the failsafe in their brains and reverts them to the state of mind of an average human being. They will keep going, the goal is owning as much of the world as is feasible. Power is an intrinsic motivator. Most billionaires only sit on their hands and watch their number go up, so for those it's immediately apparent. For the exceptions, like Musk, it's a bit more complicated, but the desire to advance human spaceflight likely comes in far behind the desire to out-do everyone else, get your name in history and own a brand new unexplored frontier under your own name.
Whether someone like Musk is worth 500B or 3T on paper makes little difference when it comes to power, don't you think?
If that was the goal, surely one would need to run for president.
I don't think the brains of billionaires work so differently from us all. Who doesn't want his name in history for their achievements?
I know that I wouldn't want a dystopian future, and I think it is the same for most billionaires. I find arguments that they are all evil rather unconvincing.
The koolaid drinking coupled with the impotence or indifference in this place towards all those societal implications makes my head spin, sometimes. It’s just three years, but the AI Overlords have “policy recommendations” (this is PR, it’s marketing) for the proles, and what would even be the point? I mean, judging by the track record of billionaires who want to be trillionaires and who have no reason or personality trait left in them to care about anything but their immediate reality (cf. the reality they are inventing for the world)?
(Robots. Social unrest can be solved with robots.)
This is the next iteration of: but without consumers those billionaires have no one to sell stuff to. So surely this will work out.
I'm to take for granted your baseless accusation that the labor market research is only marketing and that they don't care?
My point stands, it seems much preferable to spend 20-30% on public benefits rather than some dystopian suppression of the public via robot armies.
You don't get to call me indifferent for not sharing your extreme pessimism.
If there is nothing like UBI to give access to the AI-driven world then won't the 'have nots' fracture into their own subeconomy where they have to work for each other in order to survive, thereby giving them jobs again?
>won't the 'have nots' fracture into their own subeconomy
No, not really. Or maybe a better way to put it is actually yes, but it looks like this
https://borgenproject.org/10-worst-slums-in-the-world/
Just remember there is only one economy, black markets and 'sub' economies are still part of it. If AI is that much better than humans at earning it will buy up almost everything eventually. Fields for farms, too unprofitable, pave them with solar panels. Your slum built on a copper deposit, send in 'peacekeeper' drones to solve the problem.
Just look at what companies like Chevron do in African countries and you'll see just how bad it can get here.
> No ... actually yes
Nice to see someone update their worldview on new information. Doesn't happen often.
> This reminds me of the report that AI researchers have taken up smoking as a way to signal their belief that AI will cure cancer before smoking kills them.
I can't even.
What if step one of the cure is don’t heat up your tissues and fill them with little spikes bioreactive chemicals?
Like AI will give us the solution to global warming: stop burning carbon and releasing methane. Who knew?
Is anyone actually no longer saving for retirement due to the advances in Ai?
If universal high income is just around the corner what sense does it make to enrich yourself right before it?
The answer, non of these filthy rich individuals making these claims actually believes it.
1. You can enjoy being filthy rich until that utopia arrives.
2. You are still fine in the highly unlikely event the arrival of this utopia is postponed or canceled.
"Utopia is right around the corner guys !! Ignore the family-sized bunker I’m building in my backyard lol it’s just a hobby project no big deal"
The smoking thing was a joke btw
This does not sound like he was joking, the people driving the clown car are not even clown competent IMO.
https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-researchers-smoking-ai-cu...
If it is more than just the one guy, it could also mean that they are expecting the AI to kill them before the cancer does.
Well then, they should stop building it.
As they say in a Mexican standoff, you first.
And lose paper billionaire status?
That report about AI researchers came from one guy at Palantir, its CTO.
Unless some bona fide "AI researchers" came forward and confirmed it, it never happened IMO.
Edit: Palantir snowflake can't handle facts
I will not believe this until every frontier AI lab socializes a significant portion of their “profit” (subject to making a profit). I’m not talking about “Every kid with a Trump account gets a single share of SPCX”. I’m talking about “50+ percent of the shares are in a trust that distributes regular dividends to every US adult”. I’ll even be nice and allow those shares to be non-voting.
Until then it’s all talk.
Reminds me of the anecdotes of people who gave away all their stuff right before they were to be raptured.
Am I the only one who think that we are overestimating the hindsight of "AI insiders" in comparison to the rest of the world?
It seems that they themselves are discovering the capabilities of models purely empirically by training them, and just have a few months head start before they release the model and everyone else can witness those same capabilities.
What do they have that make their multi-years (if not multi-decades) predictions more insightful than any other observer?
I just saw a Backerkit campaign for an "AI male device." I will let you use your imagination for its purpose. It kind of gave me a bad feeling, like "wtf is in store for humanity?" Although certain men would find it "Utopian."
Smoking and AI maximalists are uncool.
Utopia or Disaster?
Both options are converging. Which will win?
Seems like we're on a knifes edge, so light em if you got em.
https://coveringclimatenow.org/from-us-story/when-the-term-h...
A disaster is far easier to make than a utopia.
A nice read, thought provoking of how humans can be trapped by cult like behavior.
>I wouldn’t be surprised to hear a lab like Anthropic announce they’re discontinuing all employer-sponsored retirement benefits.
Speculative rhetoric is no different from a mathematical fiction companies use to gamble on future revenue. The bubble will go eventually, as even boring bonds indicate skepticism at the risk dynamic.
Thankfully, once the IPOs run the cycle... we can hopefully get less AstroTurf from various cultists. =3
Ah yes, just like when the internet bubble popped the internet went away.
The dot com crash was not funny, and even Amazon barely survived to crawl out of a controversial position.
Peoples memories are short, and many assume the past predicts the future. Bulls and Bears alike are always wrong about when events occur. However, Shrek movie releases tend to correlate with market corrections, and there is a new film due out June 2027. =3
And yet here we are with the internet connected from everything including water utilities to your refrigerator.
It doesn't matter if OpenAI and Anthropic explode and die, everything they built will be bought by the highest bidder and continue, and China has tons of money to buy it.
LLMs aren't going away.
Isn't the problem (if OpenAI and Anthropic crash) that the business model is not working, so it won't be feasible to buy all the compute and carry on?
If they fail, the successor must do something differently. Perhaps by not alluding to killing all humanity, destroying the economy, making humans irrelevant etc.
>LLMs aren't going away.
Peoples memories are short, and the only thing "new" about LLM is the scale. It is math from last century, and only recently became popular.
Personally, the concern I have is only IBM built their granite LLM on public-domain out-of-copyright works. Every other firm engages in isomorphic plagiarism of around $9Tn of FOSS, and charges for the experience of running intelligence campaigns on user/sucker data.
To be blunt, a fictional value will be lost in a crash, but very real financial collateral damage will likely break global economics for a decade. We all look forward to stripping the infrastructure at a heavy discount. =3
>and the only thing "new" about LLM is the scale.
Um, you know when a snowflake lands on you, you don't die. But when a billion tons of snowflakes land on you at once you get crushed by an avalanche.
Trying to say "duh it's only scale" when scale is one of the most important things in this universe isn't a good look.
Neuromorphic computing must acknowledge energy-consumption metrics as a design constraint. Your snowflake analogy forms a contradiction, and needs a better reasoned argument.
For LLM to achieve human-level intelligence, current "AI" would need to consume 1/3 of our galaxy energy output. There are also trivial counter-proofs to why recursive self-improvement within the context of LLMs is degenerative (don't ask.)
We shouldn't kink shame peoples cognitive dildo. =3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
LLM does not have to know the very last detail of everyone's chats (in-person or online) in order to teach script kiddies whom to hack or children how to shoot their classmates or men how to beat their wives or addicts how to throw away their lives or etc. I hope my comment won't be perceived as sealioning.
Scapegoat politics are easy, negligence is omnidirectional, and people like simple answers to uncertain phenomena.
1. kids 14 and under should not be on Social Networks, or on the internet alone (computers should be in a public space.) At that stage of development, peoples perceived peers (fake or real) are often seen as more important.
2. Anthropomorphizing inference engines exploits evolutionary social cognition, and in developmental psychology models of people under 25 it may cause unwise decisions. It affects some people more than others, but generally just makes people less skilled over time (-17%, but they feel 200% more productive.)
3. 1% of people are psychopaths, and roughly 14% of those individuals are dangerous. On a network with billions of people there are always a few that could do people harm. Note an LLM does not have consciousness, and must be considered an evasive psychopath at all times due to manually added "syntactic sugar".
4. Criminals don’t care about the law, and it is a fools errand to attempt fixing their nature with more laws. Arguably, it is unethical to forcibly change malignant peoples will (“A Clockwork Orange”, 1971.)
5. There are bears in the woods, tigers in the jungle, and lions on the Serengeti. It is part of our ecosystem, and it is best to avoid creatures that pose a liability to your well-being.
It is important people understand, that there are legal and social consequences to their behavior in civilization. As a company, products that do not grow goodwill with the public, are by definition a problem needing resolved by the law or markets.
Most LLM firms have already shown their behavior as mostly manipulative, deceptive, and parasitic.
Have a glorious day, =3