Sounds like influencer nonsense to me. Touch grass. If the people are fed and housed, there's no collapse. And if the billionaire class lets them starve, they will finally go through some things just like the aristocracy in France once did. And I think even Peter Thiel is smarter than that. You can feed yourself for <$1000 a year on beans and rice. Not saying you'd enjoy it, but you won't starve. So for ~$40B annually, the billionaires buy themselves revolution insurance. Fantastic value.
OTOH if what you're really talking about is the long-term collapse in our ludicrous carbon footprint when we finally run out of fossil fuels and we didn't invest in renewables or nuclear to replace them, well, I'm with you there.
>Sounds like influencer nonsense to me. Touch grass.
I don't even know what this means.
The worst unemployment during the Weimar Republic was 25-30%. Unemployment in the Great Depression peaked at 25%.
So yeah if we get to 45% unemployment and those are the highest paying jobs on average then yeah it's gonna be bad. Then you add in second order effects where none of those people have the money to pay the other 55% who are still employed.
We might get to a UBI relatively quickly and peacefully. But I'm not betting on it.
>finally go through some things just like the aristocracy in France once did.
Yeah that's probably the most likely scenario, but that quickly devolved into a death and imprisonment for far more than the aristocrats and eventually ended with Napoleon trying to take over Europe and millions of deaths overall.
The world didn't literally end, but it was 40 years of war, famine, disease, and death, and not a lot of time to think about starting businesses with your laptop.
And the dark ages lasted a millennium. Sounds like quite an improvement on that. And if America didn't want a society hellbent on living the worst possible timeline, why did it re-elect President Voldemaga and give him the football? And then, even when he breaks nearly every political promise, his support remains better than his predecessor? Anyway, I think the richest ~1135 Americans won't let you starve, but they'll be happy to watch you die young of things that had stopped killing people for quite some time whilst they skim all the cream. And that seems to be what the plurality wants or they'd vote differently.
The good news is that America is ~5% of the world. And the more we keep punching ourselves in the face, the better the chance someone else pulls ahead. But still, we have nukes, so we're still the town bully for the immediate future.
What are you even arguing about? I have absolutely no idea where you are going with this.
Yeah I figured that. You think society is going to collapse because of AI. I don't. But I do think that stupid narrative is prevalent in the media right now and the C-suite happily proclaiming they're going to lay people off and replace them with AI got the ball rolling in the first place. Now it has momentum of its own with lunatics like Eliezer Yudkowsky once again getting taken seriously.
Fortunately, the other 95% of humanity is far less doomer about their prospects. So if America wants to be the new neanderthals, they'll be happy to be the new cro magnons.
I don't think society is going to collapse because of AI because I don't think the current architectures have any chance of becoming AGI. I think that if AGI is even something we're capable of it's very far off.
I think that if CEOs can replace us soon, it's because AGI got here much sooner than I predicted. And if that happens we have 2 options Mad Max and Star Trek and Mad Max is the more likely of the 2.
What's with all the catastrophic thinking then? Mad Max? Collapse of Society because 45% unemployment? I really hate people on principle but I have more faith in them looking out for their own self interest than you do apparently. Mad Max specifically requires a ridiculous amount of intact infrastructure for all the gasoline (you know gasoline goes bad in 3-6 months? Yeah didn't think so), manufacturing for all the parts for all those crazy custom build road warrior wagons, and ranches of livestock for all the leather for all the cool outfits (and with all that cow, no one needs to starve but oh the infrastructure needed to keep the cows fed).
If doom porn is your thing, try watching Threads or The Day After, especially Threads. That said, I don't think Star Trek is possible, maybe The Expanse but more likely we run out of cheap energy before we get off world.
As for the AGI, it all depends on your definition. We're already at Amazon IC1/IC2 coding performance with these agents (I speak from experience previously managing them). If we get to IC3, one person will be able to build a $1B company and run it or sell it. If you're a purist like me and insist we stick to douchebag racist Nick Bostrom's superintelligence definition of AGI, then we agree. But I expect 24/7 IC3 level engineering as a service for $200/month to be more than enough and I think that's a year or two away. And you can either prepare for that or scream how the sky is falling, your choice.
>Mad Max specifically requires a ridiculous amount of intact infrastructure for all the gasoline (you know gasoline goes bad in 3-6 months? Yeah didn't think so)
Is this a joke or do you have a learning disability?
>But I expect 24/7 IC3 level engineering as a service for $200/month to be more than enough and I think that's a year or two away. And you can either prepare for that or scream how the sky is falling, your choice.
Or I could do neither and write you off as a gasbag who doesn't know what he's talking about like all the other ex-amazon management I've had the pleasure to work with over the years.
I guess you have a really short context buffer with all this frequently forgetting things you've said yourself.
But that aside, how's all that self-righteousness working out for you?
I bet you have ex-Amazon prominently in your LinkedIn profile.
Don't have a LinkedIn profile, don't need one. But I'm guessing you're listed under LinkedIn Lunatics.
I read back through a few of your posts and you’re either schizophrenic, or a very elaborate troll.
I know a few older people who started posting like this when they hit their 50s. I’ve only got a few years left. Hopefully I can avoid it, but maybe it’s inevitable.
Ageism: now that's a warrior's flex, amIRight?
People like myself in their 50s to 60s who had the experience of banging the metal on imperfect buggy hardware late into the night to mine gems before Python made the entire software engineering community pivot to a core competency of syntax pedanting plus stringing library calls together are having a real party with AI agents effectively doing the same thing they did 30 years ago. I personally never stopped coding even through my one awful experience as an engineering manager.
But you do you, and hear me now, dismiss me later. There won't be 45% unemployment because the minute AI starts replacing current engineering skills for real is the minute the people it targets wake up and start learning how to work with AI coding agents that will be dramatically better than today. People resist change until there are no other options, just look at fossil fuels. The free market will work that one out too eventually.
And no amount of some nontechnical guy vibe scienceing his way to a working mRNA vaccine for his cancer-ridden dog or an engineer unlocking mods to Disney Infinity just from the binary and Claude Code or an entire web browser ported to rust will ever convince you these things are not the enemy. And that's going to put you through some things down the road. So of course, since this will never happen I'm an elaborate troll or a nutcase just like the people who pulled all those things off, never mind all the evidence mounting that these things can be amazing in the right hands. That's CRAZYTALK! Stochastic Parrot! Glorified Autocomplete! Mad Max! Mad Max! DLSS 5!
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
>You can feed yourself for <$1000 a year on beans and rice. Not saying you'd enjoy it, but you won't starve. So for ~$40B annually, the billionaires buy themselves revolution insurance. Fantastic value.
You are the epitome of the tech bro.
Sure, sure. Understanding how these sociopaths think clearly makes me a tech bro rather than someone who incorporates worst-case scenarios into my planning. Suggesting they would maintain minimum viable society to save their own asses means I'm in favor of it, right? This is why I work remotely.
Peter Thiel might be smarter than that but I’m not sure about the other ones.
Look how Musk treated the Twitter devs or Bezos any of his workers or Trump anybody.
They're all quite intelligent. And they're world class experts in saving their own bacon. Doesn't mean they have any ethics though nor any emotional intelligence after decades of being surrounded by toadies and bootlickers.
Smart is not equal to intelligent.
You can be very intelligent but have a blind eye on some trivial things.
I’m certain that some of them think they are untouchable (or even just are well prepared). We will only see if that’s really true if shit hits the fan.
We all know they have bunkers and we roughly know where they are. I got suspended on reddit for threatening harm to others for saying that a couple weeks back. But I don't think we need to raid the bunkers in your TEOTWAWKI scenario, their bodyguards will do all the heavy-lifting once they realize the power balance has shifted. But I also don't expect a SHTF scenario, just a slow creeping enshitification of living standards instead of actually implementing a UBI.
And then the survivors who band together to rebuild community instead of chasing some idiotic Mad Max scenario will ultimately prevail. And yes, they are blind to that other option because they wouldn't end up on top.