I think this is far too nuanced. I am terrified by what the civilization we have known will become. People living in less advanced economies will do OK, but the rest of us not so much. We stand on the brink of a world where some wealthy people will get more wealthy, but very many will struggle without work or prospects.
A society where a large percent have no income is unsustainable in the short term, and ultimately liable to turn to violence. I can see it ending badly. Trouble who in power is willing to stop it?
> Trouble who in power is willing to stop it?
Absolutely no one.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/719111/survival-of-t...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwJQEAI_KE0
I definitely recommend to watch this video with Reinhold Niebuhr.
Sure some things deteriorate, but many things improve. Talking about a net decline (or net gain) is very difficult.
Every age has its own set of problems that need to be solved.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93EJJVAinRc
Part of it is also that when we look back we think of people's suffering as sacrifices that needed to be made. Now that it's us being sacrificed it really shifts a lot of people's perspective. I think we need a better solution than letting a bunch of people get fucked so that some other set of people in the right place can have shinier toys in the future. Society needs to handle these transitions better, especially as technology raises the stakes with mass servailance and nuclear weapons.
It only took 70 years (1880s to 1950s) and two world wars for the world to digest the industrial revolution and reach the 'capitalism lifts everyone' modern Capitalist(ish) era. Just think of the new kinds of jobs AI will enable our grandchildren to have after we inbetween sacrifice. Space yacht polisher. Space yacht teak refinisher. Space yacht eye candy.
There is one thing different though: Technology allows surveillance on a level and scale that did not ever exist before. I would expect that that in turn allows far greater levels of oppression than ever before. And with all payments going more and more digital, if the powers decide to cut you off you can't even buy anything any more. Or get a job. Or go anywhere without being seen and identified by various cameras.
Or, try organizing any kind of movement that those with power don't like. It does not even have to be violent! Here in Germany, as soon as the previous government with the Green Party was in power, a huge never-ending campaign started. Easy - after all, the vast majority of the important media is owned by very few, just like in the US. Funny enough, after inevitably that government failed, turned out the CDU failed many if not most of the promises made, and in other areas does exactly what they heavily criticized.
The point is, surveillance, "soft" punishments, and media control and reach are on a whole new level. Trump wanted TikTok for a reason, and Musk wanted X not for the money that company could make.
The more tech we have, and it's conveniently concentrated too, the worse it can get if you don't want to play that game.
On top pf that, debt and a system of law heavily skewed for those with money, just because of its complexity and to gain access, and no more competition for minds from a block of socialist countries, so no clear alternative apart from obviously stupid ideas most people won't want to vote for, and this "democratic" system can go very far towards being very controlling and restricting for many.
We can see for example in Iran, or few decades ago in China, or since it was founded in North Korea what happens when people protest - and how nothing changes. Now we have billionaires who would love to have similar powers, who don't want to be "held back" by laws and regulations.
It's no coincidence that populism is rising. That's the non-violent way out - electing leaders that are willing to change the dynamics a lot.
Populism can be a non-violent way out, not is the non-violent way out.
As we saw 100 years ago, violent authoritarians will gladly use technology to make themselves look like the populists choice all the while planning to neglect the very thing they promised when they were getting elected.
> violent authoritarians will gladly use technology to make themselves look like the populists choice all the while planning to neglect the very thing they promised when they were getting elected.
And you don't even have to go back 100 years for an example. About a year will do it.
Populism is how you get elected, not what you do once elected. Disregarding current politics, Adolf Hitler was a populist and that didn't go very well, did it? As I see it now, populism means focusing on truthiness instead of truth, charisma instead of competency, and running the country into the ground because those things you don't have are actually important.
Yes, that’s why they are on the race to building the very advanced robots. To prevent the violence towards them.
>To prevent the violence towards them.
"This morning at 8:00 am Pacific, there were 5 simultaneously assassination attempts on tech executives across the Bay Area. The victims, who are all tech executives known to us have suffered serious injuries . It is reported that Securibot 5000s were involved. Securibot inc declined to comment. This is a developing story"
There is no master plan, there's a hype cycle, environment and the market.
Humanoid robots became possible and so people are racing to be first to market assuming that might be a giant market (it's cheap labor potentially so of course it might be huge - the microcomputer was).
That is exactly the motivation. The problem with being a billionaire is you still have to associate with poor people. But imagine a world where your wealth completely insulates you from the resentful poor.
That notion is based on the misconception that for there to be very rich people, other people would need to be poor — that would resent you.
Economic science has pretty much proven that when the average income in a society is higher and fewer are poor, the economy moves more money and the rich benefit more as well.
Misconception is not really the right word here along with the word 'need'.
It comes down to if the people in power think they are playing a zero sum game and are driven by greed. We see plenty of dictatorships that are very resource wealthy and yet their society suffers in abject poverty. Said leaders have zero care about making their peoples life better and will gladly kill them wholesale if they become problematic.
> other people would need to be poor
Just like billions are not about "being rich", this is about CONTROL. Control of the economy, and how people live, and control over one's own life.
Abstraction is a beast, putting everything regardless of what it actually is as some $$ number is terrible for understanding. The billionaires don't have Scrooge McDuck money at home where they swim in coins, they control huge parts of the economy.
And as long as they need workers, they will want them to live not too well - that would raise the price of labor, if people wanted to do work in places like Amazon warehouses to begin with, if they had better alternatives not working for the billionaires.
Being "poor" in this context means having a lot less control over how you live, not that you live on the streets. Although, as soon as you lose your value, e.g. by getting too sick, that is always on the table too.
Relative wealth disparity is what drives lower-class resentment, not absolute poverty.
Income inequality is very bad in its own right.
Watch, or read "altered carbon" for a taste of that future.
Or the Epstein files, for that matter
How does a billionaire have to associate with poor people? They can live in a complete bubble: house in the hills, driven by a chauffeur, private jets, private islands for holidays etc...?
The people who cook for them, the people who clean for them, the ones who take care of their kids, the one who sell them stuff or serve them in restaurants...
They have separate kitchens for the prep, the cleaners work while they’re out on the yacht, they have people to do the buying, and the restaurants they visit have very well trained staff who stay out of the way.
All that is irrelevant to the point: they still need to have those poor people around them, trust them, and even trust their security to them.
And this is all very easy to control.
First is you get a particular group of people to work for you. You tell them they are better than all the other poor people out there, that is get them to be nationalistic/racist, etc. You also give them a little bit more than the abjectly poor so they have something they fear to lose. You also let them know if they upset the situation they are in retribution will be swift and brutal and affect anyone they know and love.
And this is how every societal hierarchy is structured.
So easy to control that most rich people throughout history were murdered by their guards and close helper circle.
"Most rich people that were murdered" is a different statement from "most rich people"
Epstein had a staff of 70 on that island kept mum
Also, they're not building the house or the jet, they're not growing the food, ... people close enough can be chosen for willingness to be sycophants and happiness to be servants. Unless you're feeding yourself from your own farm, or manufacturing your own electronics, there are limits to even a billionaires ability to control personnel.
nah, if slave owners like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington could reorient their entire lives around not seeing the "ick" of chattel slavery I think modern billionaires can do the same thing even easier now if they wanted.
The poor maids and servants, the poor chauffeur, the poor chef, etc.
Unless they’re living entirely by themselves, they will always be dependent on poor people.
The fact that people see that basically the singularity is happening but can't imagine that humanoid robots get good rapidly is why most people here are bad futurists.
That fact that people see "the singularity happening" based on LLM results, is why most people are the kind of ignorant cheerleaders of tech that predicted robot servants, flying cars, and space colonies by 2000 in 1950.
This feels different. In the 1950s rapid technological progress had been driven by the pressures of the second world war and produced amazing things that held a lot of promise, but few appreciated the depth of complexity of what lay before them. A lot of that complexity had to be solved with software which expanded the problem set rather than solving it. If we have a general solution to the problem of software, we don't know that there are other barriers that would slow progress so much.
Tomy made the Dustbot robot vacuum in 1985, Electrolux made the Trilobite robot vacuum in 1996, and then washing machines, dishwashers, tumble-dryers, microwaves, microwave meals, disposable diapers, fast fashion, and plug-in vacuums, floor steamers, carpet washers, home automation for lights and curtains, central heating instead of coal/wood fires and ash buckets, fridge-freezers and supermarkets (removing the need for canning, pickling, jamming, preserving), takeaways and food delivery, people having 1-2 children instead of 6-12 children. The amount of human labour in housework has plummetted since 1900.
Plenty of flying cars existed through the 1900s, including commercial ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_car
The International Space Station was launched in 1998.
> the singularity is happening
[Citation needed]
No LLM is yet being used effectively to improve LLM output in exponential ways. Personally, I'm skeptical that such a thing is possible.
LLMs aren't AGI, and aren't a path to AGI.
The Singularity is the Rapture for techbros.
LLMs aren't AGI and maybe aren't a path to AGI, but step back and look at the way the world is changing. Hard disks were invented by IBM in 1953 and now less than a hundred years later there's an estimated million terabytes a year of hard disks made and sold, and a total sold of Mega, Giga, Tera, Peta, Exa, Zetta ... 1.36 Zettabytes.
In 2000, webcams were barely a thing, audio was often recorded to dictaphone tapes, and now you can find a recorded photo or video of roughly anyone and anything on Earth. Maybe a tenth of all humans, almost any place, animal, insect, or natural event, almost any machine, mechanism, invention, painting, and a large sampling of "indoors" both public and private, almost any festival or event or tradition, and a very large sampling of "people doing things" and people teaching things for all kinds of skills. And tons of measurements of locations, temperatures, movements, weather, experiment results, and so on.
The ability of computers to process information jumped with punched card readers, with electronic computers in the 1950s, again with transistors in the 1970s, semiconductors in the 1980s, commodity computer clusters (Google) in the 1990s, maybe again with multi-core desktops for everyone in the 2000s, with general purpose GPUs in the 2010s, and with faster commodity networking from 10Mbit to 100Gbit and more, and with SATA, then SAS, then RAID, then SSDs.
It's now completely normal to check Google Maps to look at road traffic and how busy stores are (picked up in near realtime from the movement of smartphones around the planet), to do face and object recognition and search in photos, to do realtime face editing/enhancement while recording on a smartphone, to track increasing amounts of exercise and health data from increasing numbers of people, to call and speak to people across the planet and have your voice transcribed automatically to text, to realtime face-swap or face-enhance on a mobile chip, to download gigabytes of compressed Wikipedia onto a laptop and play with it in a weekend in Python just for fun.
"AI" stuff (LLMs, neural networks and other techniques, PyTorch, TensorFlow, cloud GPUs and TPUs), the increase in research money, in companies competing to hire the best researchers, the increase in tutorials and numbers of people around the world wanting to play with it and being able to do that ... do you predict that by 2030, 2035, 2040, 2045, 2050 ... 2100, we'll have manufactured more compute power and storage than has ever been made, several times over, and made it more and more accessible to more people, and nothing will change, nothing interesting or new will have been found deliberately or stumbled upon accidentally, nothing new will have been understood about human brains, biology, or cognition, no new insights or products or modelling or AI techniques developed or become normal, no once-in-a-lifetime geniuses having any flashes of insight?
I mean, what you're describing is technological advancement. It's great! I'm fully in favor of it, and I fully believe in it.
It's not the singularity.
The singularity is a specific belief that we will achieve AGI, and the AGI will then self-improve at an exponential rate allowing it to become infinitely more advanced and powerful (much moreso than we could ever have made it), and it will then also invent loads of new technologies and usher in a golden age. (Either for itself or us. That part's a bit under contention, from my understanding.)
> "The singularity is a specific belief that we will achieve AGI
That is one version of it, but not the only one. "John von Neumann is the first person known to have discussed a "singularity" in technological progress.[14][15] Stanislaw Ulam reported in 1958 that an earlier discussion with von Neumann "centered on the accelerating progress of technology and changes in human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue""[1]. A time when people before it, would be unable to predict what came after it because it was so different. (And which I argue in another comment[2] is not a specific cutoff time, but a trend over history of the future being increasingly hard to predict over shorter and shorter timeframes).
Apart from AGI, or Von Neuman accelerationism, I also understand it as augmenting human intelligence: "once we become cyborgs and enhance our abilities, nobody can predict what comes next"; or artificial 'life' - "if we make self-replicating nano-machines (that can have Darwinian natural selection?), all bets about the future are off"; or "once we can simulate human brains in a machine, even if we can't understand how they work, we can run tons of them at high speeds".
> and usher in a golden age. (Either for itself or us. That part's a bit under contention, from my understanding.)
Arguably, we have built weakly-superhuman entities, in the form of companies. Collectively they can solve problems that individual humans can't, live longer than humans, deploy and exploit more resources over larger areas and longer timelines than humans, and have shown a tendency to burn through workers and ruin the environment that keeps us alive even while supposedly guided by human intelligence. I don't have very much hope that a non-human AGI would be more aligned with our interests than companies made up of us are.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46935546
If you look at the rapid acceleration of progress and conclude this way, well, de nile ain't just a river in egypt.
Also yes LLMs are indeed AGI: https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-...
This was Peter Norvig's take. AGI is a low bar because most humans are really stupid.
> If you look at the rapid acceleration of progress
I don’t understand this perspective. There are numerous examples of technical progress that then stalls out. Just look at batteries for example. Or ones where advancements are too expensive for widespread use (e.g. why no one flies Concorde any more)
Why is previous progress a guaranteed indicator of future progress?
Just think of this as risk management.
If AGI doesn't happen, then good. You get to keep working and playing and generally screwing off in the way that humans have for generations.
On the other hand if AGI happens, especially any time soon, you are exceptionally fucked along with me. The world changes very rapidly and there is no getting off Mr Bones wild ride.
>Why is previous progress a guaranteed indicator of future progress?
In this case, because nature already did it. We're not just inventing and testing something whole cloth. And we know there are still massive efficiencies to be gained.
For me the Concorde is an example of how people look at stuff incorrectly. In the past we had to send people places very quickly to do things. This was very expensive and inefficient. I don't need to get on a plane to have an effect just about anywhere else in the world now. The internet and digital mediums give me a presence at other locations that is very close to being there. We didn't need planes that fly at the speed of sound, we needed strings that communicate at the speed of light.
If you think AGI is at hand why are you trying to sway a bunch of internet randos who don’t get it? :) Use those god-like powers to make the life you want while it’s still under the radar.
how do you take over the world if you have access to 1000 normal people? if AGI is by the original definition (long forgotten by now) of surpassing MEDIAN human at almost all tasks. How the rebranding of ASI into AGI happened without anyone noticing is kind of insane
>If you look at the rapid acceleration of progress and conclude this way
There's no "rapid acceleration of progress". If anything there's a decline, and even an economic decline.
Take away the financial bubbles based on deregulation and huge explosion of debt, and the last 40 years of "economic progress" are just a mirage filling a huge bubble with air in actual advancement terms - unlike the previous millenia.
That’s completely wrong. There was barely any progress in previous millennia. There was even economic Nobel prize for showing why!
The GDP per capita of the world has been slowly increasing for several millenia. Same for the advancements in core technology.
The industrial revolution increased the pace, but it was already there, not flat or randomly flunctuating (think ancient hominids versus early agriculture vs bronge age, vs ancient Babylon and Assyrian empires, vs later Greece, and Persia, later Rome, later Renaissance and so on).
Post 1970s most of the further increase has been based on mirages due to financialization, and doesn't reflect actual improvement.
> Post 1970s most of the further increase has been based on mirages due to financialization, and doesn't reflect actual improvement.
Of course it does. It would be good if you would try to actually support such controversial claims with data.
Lol, wut?
The world can produce more things cheaper and faster than ever and this is an economic decline? I think you may have missed the other 6 billion people on the planet getting massive improvements in their quality of life.
>I think you may have missed the other 6 billion people on the planet getting massive improvements in their quality of life.
I think you have missed that it's easy to get "massive improvements in your quality of life" if you start from merely-post-revolution-era China or 1950s Africa or colonial India.
Much less so if you plateaud as US and Europe, and live off of increased debt ever since the 1970s.
And yet in the US I can currently survive and illness by the means of technology where I would have died in the 70s. It can be really hard to see the forest from the trees when everything around us is rapidly changing technology.
Increased debt is mostly on the good that technology cannot at least yet reproduce. For example they aren't making new land. Taste, NIMBYism and currently laws stop us from increased housing density in a lot of places too. Healthcare is still quite limited by laws in the US and made expensive because of it.
> rapid acceleration
Who was it who stated that every exponential was just a sigmoid in disguise?
> most humans are really stupid.
Statistically, don't we all sort of fit somewhere along a bell curve?
The bell curve of IQ and being stupid probably don't have much to do with each other.
Think of stupidity as the consequences of interacting with ones environment with negative outcomes. If you have a simple environment with few negative outcomes, then even someone with a 80 IQ may not be considered stupid. But if your environment rapidly grows more complex and the amount of thinking you have to do for positive outcomes increases then even someone with a 110 IQ may find themselves quickly in trouble.
Yes, and that's why surpassing it doesn't lead to a singularity except over an infinite timeframe. This whole thing was stupid in the first place.
What rapid acceleration?
I look at the trajectory of LLMs, and the shape I see is one of diminishing returns.
The improvements in the first few generations came fast, and they were impressive. Then subsequent generations took longer, improved less over the previous generation, and required more and more (and more and more) resources to achieve.
I'm not interested in one guy's take that LLMs are AGI, regardless of his computer science bonafides. I can look at what they do myself, and see that they aren't, by most very reasonable definitions of AGI.
If you really believe that the singularity is happening now...well, then, shouldn't it take a very short time for the effects of that to be painfully obvious? Like, massive improvements in all kinds of technology coming in a matter of months? Come back in a few months and tell me what amazing new technologies this supposed AGI has created...or maybe the one in denial isn't me.
> I look at the trajectory of LLMs, and the shape I see is one of diminishing returns
It seems even more true if you look at OpenAI funding thru 2022 initial public release to how spending has exponentially increased to deliver improvements since. We’re now talking upwards of $600B/yr of spending on LLM based AI infrastructure across the industry in 2026.
In my opinion, LLMs provide one piece of AGI. The only intelligence I’ve directly experienced is my own. I don’t consciously plan what I’m saying (or writing right now).
Instead, a subconscious process assembles the words to support my stream of consciousness. I think that LLMs are very similar, if not identical.
Stream of thought is accomplishing something superficially similar to consciousness, but without the ability to be innovative.
At any rate, until there’s an artificial human level stream of consciousness in the mix for each AI, I doubt we’ll see a group of AIs collaborating to produce a significantly improved new generation of AI hardware and software minus human involvement.
Once that does happen, the Singularity is at hand.
You’re delusional if you think singularity is happening.
If your every other animal on the planet other than humans, the singularity already happened.
Your species would have watched humans go from hairless mammals that basically did the same set of actions and need that your species had to an alien that might as well have landed from another planet (other than you don't even know other planets even exist). Now forests disappear in an instant. Lakes appear and disappear. Weird objects cover the ground and fill the sky. The paradigms that worked for eons are suddenly broken.
But you, you're a human, you're smart. The same thing couldn't possibly happen to you, right?
That's like saying "you're delusional if you think we're affected by The Sun's gravity when it's a hundred million miles away".
A hundred million years ago, every day on Earth was much like every other day and you could count on that. As you sweep forwards in time you cross things like language, cooperation, villages, control of fire, and the before/after effects are distinctly different. The nearer you get to the present, the more of those changes happen and the closer they happen, like ripples on a pond getting closer to the splash point, or like the whispers of gravity turning into a pull and then a crunch. "Singularity" as an area closer to the splash point where models from outside can't make good predictions keeps happening - a million years ago, who would have predicted nations and empires and currency stamped with a human face? Fifty thousand years ago, who could have predicted skyscrapers with human-made train tunnels underground beneath them, or even washing bleached white bedsheets made from cotton grown overseas? Ten thousand years ago, who could have predicted container shipping through the human-made Panama canal? A thousand years ago who could have predicted Bitcoin? Five hundred years ago, who could have predicted electric motors? Three hundred years ago who could have predicted satellite weather mapping of the entire planet or trans-Atlantic undersea dark fibre bundles? Two hundred years ago, who could have predicted genetic engineering? A hundred and fifty years ago, who could have predicted MRI scanners? A hundred years ago, who could have predicted a DoorDash rider following GPS from a satellite using a map downloaded over a cellular data link to a wirelessly charging smartphone the size of a large matchbox bringing a pizza to your house coordinated by an internet-wide app?
In 2000 with Blackberry and Palm Treo and HP Journada and PalmPilot and Windows Phone and TomTom navigation, who was expecting YouTube, Google Maps with satellite photos, Google StreetView, Twitch, Discord, Vine, TikTok, Electron, Amazon Kindle with worldwide free internet book delivery, or the dominance of Python or the ubiquity of bluetooth headphones?
Fifty years ago is 1975, batteries were heavy and weak, cameras were film based, bulbs were incandescent, betamax and VHS and semiconductors were barely a thing - who was predicting micro-electromechanical timing devices, computer controlled LED Christmas lights playing tunes in greetings cards, DJI camera drones affordable to the population, Network Time Protocol synchronising the planet, the normality of video calling from every laptop or smartphone, or online shopping with encrypted credit card transactions hollowing out the highstreets and town centers?
The strange attractor at the end of history might be a long way away, but it's pulling us towards it nonetheless and its ripples go back millions of years in time. It's not like there's (all of history) and then at one point (the singularity where things get weird). Things have been getting weird for thousands and thousands of years in ways that the people before that wouldn't or couldn't have predicted.
You still have to find the kids to rape.
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Gaza is kept as a testing ground for domestic spying and domestic military technology intended to be used on other groups. Otherwise they'd have destroyed it by now. Stuff like Palantir is always tested in Gaza first.
The bombs dropped on Gaza are equivalent to six Hiroshimas - I think we can safely say that Gaza has been destroyed.
https://www.bradford.ac.uk/news/archive/2025/gaza-bombing-eq...
There are still living people in it
> Otherwise they'd have destroyed it by now.
About that…
Isn’t Gaza a mess in ruins already? I’d count that as destroyed aleeady
Not completely. I mean there would be zero living people left. They've been downscaling it.
Sort of. The thing building and being protected is capital, not humans. As Nick Land wrote:
"Robotic security. [...] The armed mass as a model for the revolutionary citizenry declines into senselessness, replaced by drones. Asabiyyah ceases entirely to matter, however much it remains a focus for romantic attachment. Industrialization closes the loop, and protects itself." [0]
The important part here is that "[i]ndustrialization [...] protects itself". This is not about protecting humans ultimately. Humans are not autonomous, but ultimately functions of (autonomous) capital. Mark Fisher put it like this (summarizing Land's philosophy):
"Capital will not be ultimately unmasked as exploited labour power; rather, humans are the meat puppet of Capital, their identities and self-understandings are simulations that can and will be ultimately be sloughed off." [1]
Land's philosophy is quite useful for providing a non-anthropocentric perspective on various processes.
[0] Nick Land (2016). The NRx Moment in Xenosystems Blog. Retrieved from github.com/cyborg-nomade/reignition
[1] Mark Fisher (2012). Terminator vs Avatar in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, Urbanomic, p. 342.
This reads like absolute gibberish to me. The capitalistic system does not function without the motivations of the people running it. Ultimately every decision and action is in service of some human, and his or his group's interest.
They're saying capital is power. Not analogous — the same thing. Until now power always had to be wielded by a human, but it's really the power who is wielding the human as an instrument to channel itself, like Majora's Mask. Once we have power that doesn't need a human, it won't need that and we'll all be subservient.
I agree with it. Consider financial markets, for example. There are individual humans whose account balances are changing, but the system as a whole is not an instrument of any human, not the buyers, not the sellers, and not the exchange operators, and yet it dictates the large scale structure of society in ways unimaginable a century ago.
Companies are already like this. Boss fires his friend and puts him out of work with a family to feed. Why? It was ‘good for the company.’ So many inhuman decisions hide behind that fig leaf. It is a way to mentally remove responsibilities from these decisions. After all, it was for the good of the company. Stock buybacks while mailroom is on food stamps? For the good of the company. Dumping the waste into the river instead of safely disposing it? For the good of the company. Making money off vice and the mentally vulnerable? For the good of the company. Overfishing the ocean such that there won’t even be a commercial fishing industry in our lifetimes? For the good of the company. Polluting the earth and ushering in a new age of extinction? For the good of the company.
We are already enslaved to capitalism. Working against our own interest. In service towards the company and the company alone. This meta organism we value above all else on earth.
Capitalism is the ultimate 'Norman lord in his castle on conquered land', removed from the consequences of his choices/rent extraction on the serfs he shares no culture, no understanding with just what value can he extract from them.
He is forced to do that, or he'll be replaced by someone who will. All hail Moloch[2+√7i]!
[2+√7i] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
From the Landian perspective, initially, sure, the system needs humans. But once you have autonomous and sovereign capital, things could look very different.
In Land's own words:
"Since capitalism did not arise from abstract intelligence, but instead from a concrete human social organization, it necessarily disguises itself as better monkey business, until it can take off elsewhere. It has to be the case, therefore, that cynical evo-psych reduction of business activity remains highly plausible, so long as the escape threshold of capitalism has not been reached. No one gets a hormone rush from business-for-business while political history continues. To fixate upon this, however, is to miss everything important (and perhaps to enable the important thing to remain hidden). Our inherited purposes do not provide the decryption key." [0]
[0] Nick Land (2013). Monkey Business in Xenosystems Blog. Retrieved from github.com/cyborg-nomade/reignition
If you're open to explore Land's perspective more deeply, you can read the introduction here: https://retrochronic.com/
The motivations of the people running the capitalistic system is making more money. Remember the entire mantra of greed is good? Group interest can be a super-human entity that you can get caught in a loop of serving even though serving said entity is not in your best interest. Humans have only been 'mostly' in control of this because there was no other entities capable of said control themselves.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
People in power won't act out of foresight or ethics. They'll act when the cost of not acting exceeds the cost of doing something messy and imperfect
They'll act when it profits them.
What's stopping them from good actions is not the fear of "doing something messy and imperfect". It's the lack of financial and power-grabbing motivation.
Even that’s giving them too much credit. They’ll burn it all down preserve their fragile egos.
I wonder, will the rich start hiring elaborate casts of servants including butlers, footmen, lady's maids, and so on, since they'll be the only ones with the income?
As far as I can tell, the rich have never stopped employing elaborate casts of servants; these servants just go by different titles now: private chef, personal assistant, nanny, fashion consultant, etc.
The fact that it's a voluntary arrangement instead of forced makes a significant difference.
They already do. In fact, we are all working in service of their power trips.
They already do and always have. They never stopped hiring butlers (who are pretty well paid BTW), chefs, chauffeurs, maids, gardeners, nannies.....
The terminology may have changed a bit, but they still employ people to do stuff for them
One big difference is while professional class affluent people will hire cleaners or gardeners or nannies for a certain number or hours they cannot (at least in rich countries) hire them as full time live in employees.
There are some things that are increasing. For example employing full time tutors to teach their kids - as rich people used to often do (say a 100 years ago). So they get one to one attention while other people kids are in classes with many kids, and the poor have their kids in classes with a large number of kids. Interesting the government here in the UK is increasingly hostile to ordinary people educating their kids outside school which is the nearest we can get to what the rich do (again, hiring tutors by the hour, and self-supply within the household).
They also hire people to manage their wealth. I do not know enough about the history to be sure, but this seems to be also to be a return to historical norms after an egalitarian anomaly. A lot of wealth is looked after by full time employees of "family offices" - and the impression I get from people in investment management and high end property is that this has increased a lot in the last few decades. Incidentally, one of the questions around Epstein is why so many rich people let him take over some of the work that you would expect their family offices to handle.
>increasingly hostile to ordinary people educating their kids outside school
There is a whole lot more nuance here than you're giving the topic.
There is one side that wants to give their kids a good education, they have the resources and the motivation to ensure they come out ahead.
They are not the problem, the problem is the other side of this coin.
Where I grew up there were a lot of homeschooled kids that belonged to religious organizations. These groups had very little motivation to ensure they were intelligent, but instead nice dumb little worker bees that would stay with said organization and have little ability to work with the outside world at large. They were also at a much higher risk of being sexually abused/sexually trafficked as they were given little to no education about sex or risky adults.
I still remember being a kid myself and having to educate these other kids my age because they were missing large chunks of important information about the world.
> Where I grew up there were a lot of homeschooled kids that belonged to religious organization. These groups had very little motivation to ensure they were intelligent, but instead nice dumb little worker bees that would stay with said organization
Not true in the UK. Studies in many countries (the UK, US, Australia) and others have shown that home educated kids have better outcomes than school going kids after correcting for parental education, wealth etc.
Yes, there are exceptions, but there are also bad schools and some terrible schools.
UK law also requires children to receive a "suitable and efficient" full time education and there are legal mechanisms for sending children to school if they do not.
> They were also at a much higher risk of being sexually abused/sexually trafficked as they were given little to no education about sex or risky adults.
Stats in the UK show home ed kids are MUCH less likely to be abused, to self harm, or commit suicide.
Of course there are bad home educating communities, but there are also some horrific schools and the latter are a lot more common. Does that mean we should shut down schools?
A lot of it is probably more part-time but, yes, people who are some definition of rich spend more money on people to do more work for them (cleaning, landscaping, accounting, etc.) Doesn't mean they don't do any of those things--and outsourcing some can be more effort than it's worth--but they don't necessarily cut their own lawn or do car repairs.
If you are rich "outsourcing" is easy because you have people to handle that for you. You have senior servants like butlers and housekeepers who manage the rest of the staff, for example, so you are not directly hiring cleaners.
This is the difference between the affluent and the truly rich.
It's fair that's probably the difference. You don't have a full-time personal assistant/butler/whatever you want to call it. But you personally outsource a lot of individual tasks that you don't really want to do.
I pay to have my car serviced... but I don't employ a full-time mechanic.
In this day and age, how often do you actually need to have your car serviced? And there is no shortage of places that will do it for you in a few hours.
Similarly, if money were no real object within reason, I'm not sure what I would really need done on a day-to-basis that I couldn't just order or contract for pretty easily.
You clearly don't have enough cars. Once you get enough cars, especially if any of them are classic cars you actually want to drive occasionally and want to be in a driveable condition, you might want to have a full time mechanic.
Who do you think is building the machines for the rich? All of these tech companies are nothing without the employees that build the tech.
This is what the service economy in the imperial core already is.
"People living in less advanced economies will do OK, but the rest of us not so much" how is this possible? are the less advanced economies protected from outside influences? are they also protected from immigration?
Not OP, but assuming I am following the argument correctly, I think parent is referring to something else. Advanced economies have participants, who function well in that environment and are shaped by it to a large degree. As a result, if one was to ask them to get food in an environment, where it is not as easily accessible as it is today, they might stumble. On the other hand, in the old country, a lot of people I knew had a tendency to have a little garden, hunt every so often, forage for mushrooms and so on. In other words, more individuals may be able to survive in less developed economies precisely, because they are less developed and less reliant on convenience today brings.
ah makes a lot of sense! thanks!
>We stand on the brink of a world where some wealthy people will get more wealthy, but very many will struggle without work or prospects.
Brink? This has been the reality for decades now.
>A society where a large percent have no income is unsustainable in the short term, and ultimately liable to turn to violence. I can see it ending badly. Trouble who in power is willing to stop it?
Nobody. They will try to channel it.
I think all signals are pretty inevitably pointing to three potential outcomes (in order of likelihood): WW3, soviet style collapse of the west or a soviet style collapse of the sino-russian bloc.
If the promise of AI is real I think it makes WW3 a much more likely outcome - a "freed up" disaffected workforce pining for meaning and a revolutionized AI-drone first battlefield both tip the scales in favor of world war.
> We stand on the brink of a world where some wealthy people will get more wealthy
Not to the degree you might originally think. Most of the wealth being captured today is hypothetical wealth (i.e. promises) to be delivered in a hypothetical future. Except we know that future will never come as the masses, as you point out, have almost nothing, and increasing nothing, to offer to make good on those promises. In other words, it is just a piece of paper with IOU written on it, not real wealth.
What that hypothetical wealth does provide and what makes it so appealing, however, is social standing. People are willing to listen to the people who have the most hypothetical wealth. You soon hear of what they have to say. When the hobo on the street corner says something... Wait, there is a hobo on the street corner?
A small group of people having the ear of the people is human nature. In ancient times, communication challenges left that small group of people to be limited to a small community (e.g. a tribe, with the people listening to the tribe leader). Now that we can communicate across the world with ease, a few people rising up to capture the attention of the world is the natural outcome. That was, after all, the whole point — to move us away from "small tribes" towards a "global tribe".
Hypothetical wealth is the attention-grabbing attribute du jour, but if you remove it, it will just become something else like who is most physically attractive, who tells the funniest jokes, whatever. The handling of "Dunbar's number" doesn't go away.
> Trouble who in power is willing to stop it?
China has tried with its Great Wall (meaning the internet one, although perhaps you can find relevance in the physical one too), but is it successful? Maybe to some degree, but I expect many people in China still listen to what Elon Musk has to say, all while completely ignoring the millions of Chinese people immediately outside of their door. It isn't really something a power can do (ignoring that there even being a power contradicts the whole thing). The people themselves could in theory, but they would have to overcome their natural urges to do so.
Welcome to capitalism!
Besides being a bit of a shallow comment, what exactly do you imply here? That capitalism logically implies that the rich become richer? I don't think this is necessarily the case, it just needs a stronger government than what the US currently has in place. (e.g. progressive taxation and strong antitrust policy seem to work fairly well in Europe).
But with how compounding works, isn't this outcome inevitable in capitalism? If the strong government prevents it then the first step for the rich is to weaken or co-opt the government, and exactly this has been happening.
>That capitalism logically implies that the rich become richer? I don't think this is necessarily the case,
It doesn't need to imply anything. It's an ideology, those promoting it will say whatever BS attracts people to it. In practice, what is happening in capitalist countries since 1970s (when they abandoned all pretense) is that the rich get way richer and everybody else is fucked.
Versus what exactly? Communism? Where the rich got richer faster and people got fucked faster?
At the end of the day Capitalism and Communism have nothing to do with authoritarianism and liberalism/democracy. An authoritarian capitalist country is a perfectly valid type of government as there has never existed a 'pure' capitalistic governed country.
They taught you the only two altenatives are 1917 style communism or 2026 style capitalism?
Talk about a crap educational system.
We have a lot of people, capitalism values them as approaching zero, anything that alters that valuation (without reducing population) is contrary to capitalism. Capitalism means the rich must get richer, they own the resources and means of production, they take the reward.
It comes to a point where they need an underclass to insulate them from the masses; look how cheaply Trump bought his paramilitary though, he only had to spend the money taken from those he's suppressing, didn't even have to reduce his own wealth one bit; the military and his new brown shirts will ensure the rich stay rich and that eventually there is massive starvation (possibly water/fuel poverty first).
Or USA recovers the constitution, recognises climate change and start to do something about it.
It seems like the whole of humanities future hinges on a handful of billionaires megalomania and that riding on the coattails of Trump's need to not face justice for his crimes.
Capitalism just means private citizens can own the means of production (e.g. start a business, buy stock) and earn a return on investment. It doesn’t mean only the rich must get richer. It means anyone who saves and invests their money instead of spending it gets richer.
However capitalism is perfectly compatible with a progressives taxation system such that the rich get richer at a lesser rate than the poor get richer.
>anyone who saves and invests their money instead of spending it gets richer.
You realise that a large swathe of society earn less than their costs?
Everyone will get richer perpetually, there will never be any impact on climate, we'll never suffer water shortages, we'll all ride unicorns and eat rainbows...
The important thing to note here is people have been propagandized into thinking that capitalist = democratic. In fact the US would gladly punish you with 'un-American activities' investigation if you said anything to the contrary.
The thing is a capitalistic country will gladly turn itself into an authoritarian one if both wealth becomes concentrated and wealth buys votes. With the massive rise in authoritarian activities all over the world, especially in the US our democratic system is at very high risk of collapsing.
Isn't that what Americans call socialism?
> very many will struggle without work or prospects.
People always say this with zero evidence. What are some real examples of real people losing their job today because of LLMs. Apart from copywriters (i.e. the original human slop creators) having to rebrand as copyeditors because the first draft of their work now comes from a language model.
Translators, graphic designers, soundtrack composers, call center/support workers, journalists, all have reported devastating losses coinciding with LLM use. And there's no shortage of companies press releases about cutting down thousands of jobs and saying it's because they leverage AI.
Call center workers are bound to a fixed script, they're basically humans who play robot as their job. Replacing this with AI is a welcome development. As for jobs like translator, graphic designer and journalist, it's only the extremely low-end work that can possibly be replaced with LLMs. Not an issue if they move upmarket.
> And there's no shortage of companies press releases about cutting down thousands of jobs and saying it's because they leverage AI.
These press releases are largely fake. "We're leveraging AI now" sounds a lot better than "whoops, looks like we overhired, we have to scale back and layoff workers because there's no demand for what we're doing".
>Replacing this with AI is a welcome development.
Not if you fed your kid doing it, and now you can't.
> As for jobs like translator, graphic designer and journalist, it's only the extremely low-end work that can possibly be replaced with LLMs. Not an issue if they move upmarket.
Yes, fuck the 90% of those working in that space, and let's hope the 10% gets an "upmarket" gig there.
All this grand-visioning sounds devoid of empathy and real understanding of millions of real people's situations and needs.
> Not if you fed your kid doing it, and now you can't.
Which happens all the time anyway. There just aren't that many people for whom being a call center worker is their long-term career, they'll just switch to some other job.
What other jobs? I hate how people just throw that out as a viable path. In a world with ever increasing wealth inequality there is lower velocity of money (lower available cash flow) to enable the creation of jobs. And just pointing to the industrial revolution is not the panacea that you think it is. Past economic/tech revolutions creating new jobs, I have yet to see anyone point to a vast creation of jobs (or at least the starting trend of job creation)... Instead all the news, all the discussions, everything has been about (directly or indirectly) the decreased need for as many workers or the increased production of workers with the tools (which indirectly implies a decrease in workforce)
> What other jobs? I hate how people just throw that out as a viable path.
People on HN are extremely privileged and massively out of touch with the average normal person, what's new?
There are millions upon millions of people where there is no "long-term career" period, just regular shitty and more shitty gig jobs and low end work like this, from factories and workcenters to burger flipping, to deliveries, loading, to cleaning, and everything in between. And they are getting increasingly squeezed and out of options.
This works until we run out of sensible jobs, which may have already happened.
book keepers, graphic artists
I wouldn't let an LLM touch my business's books with a 10 foot pole.
If your corp is large enough to use a full-sized ERP system it will no longer be your choice to make. The whole software industry is desperately trying to fit AI functions into every pore of their software, ERP vendors being no exception.
me neither, but that's because I used to be a bookkeeper. There's accountants though who have data entry people under them who they market as "bookkeepers," and they are now being replaced by AI. Most small business owners in particular dont care.
It's regression to the mean in action. Everethyng eventually collapses into olygarhy and wevwill simply joing the unpriviliged rest in their misery. Likely with few wars civil or not here and there
It's not oligarchy, it's feudalism.
I wholeheartedly recommend you buying a new keyboard, by the way.