Addiction Economy

The use of LLMs for constructive activities (writing, coding, etc.) rapidly produces a profound dependence.

Try turning it off for a day or two, you're hobbled, incapacitated. Anecdotally, ThePrimeagen describes forgetting how to write a for/range loop in Go after using CoPilot for a while (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQNyYx2fZXw). Funny stuff.

Competition in the workplace forces us down this road to being utterly dependent. Human intellect atrophies through disuse.

In the arts, we see something different. People don't seem to like AI-generated content. For example, I monitor a random sample of recent pornography (4-second slideshow from all over the Internet, see https://rnsaffn.com/zg3/) and AI-generated porn is still very niche, comparable in frequency to small fetishes like elder or latex or rope porn. I expected it to be more popular, but generally humans prefer something else.

As Tim Cook recently said, (paraphrased) once you start using Apple Intelligence to think and work, it's hard to stop.

Those skills that you no longer use will be lost. This is the profitable new addiction, and programmers like us are the first group of people to become hooked.

Well, how else are you going to prop up economies as birthrates fall? Get people to compulsively spend and never be satisfied with what they have. Sports, gambling, video games, substances, etc are all just distractions from our shitty empty lives.

The article touches on GLP-1's but doesn't state explicitly: GLP-1's treat addiction. Scientific backing for this is still preliminary, but when/if confirmed, it'll be a game changer for humanity. Whether it's a digital, chemical, or biological addiction, (but sure which category gambling falls under) it'll be huge to be able to treat that underlying gnawing feeling that addicts of all stripes face.

> These acquisitions are akin to Pablo Escobar buying the Betty Ford Center.

This line cracked me up 8-)

Of course, many acquisitions conform to this analogy.

> The world’s most valuable resource isn’t data, compute, oil, or rare earth metals; it’s dopa, i.e., the fuel of the addiction economy, which runs the most valuable companies in history.

What is the antidote?

Wow, didn't know the boomers had a no nut november equivalent.

I feel we are very close to a tipping point, we will get to 90% awake screentime, then 99% then 99.9%. At some point we'll start increasing our efforts to revert that on a massive scale until something works

Lost me in the last section.

Debating Elon's salute and Trump's Fascism is the biggest dopa there is. Millions are addicted to it.

I wish there was more discussion about creating alternatives vs reinforcement of the loop.

I have a peculiar relationship with Galloway as a figure, which manifests in that when I watch/listen to/read things he makes, I rapidly oscillate between "he got it all figured out" and "this man has no idea what he's talking about" and the rest of this comment is about the man himself and the system he represents, not the article in question, so if you want that focused discussion go ahead and scroll, it's not going to be here.

I have consumed no other creator's work who gets so shockingly, agonizing close to understanding what's wrong than Galloway who also manages to, regularly, immediately shift back into pro-America, pro-capitalism, pro status quo without his brain physically splitting in half, and it's genuinely a feat of mental gymnastics. He's previously advocated for removing section 230 protection for algorithmically elevated content (great idea!) but also thinks TikTok is a deliberate plot by the Chinese to make Western country's populaces think our country sucks, as though tons of us don't have... an entire lived experience under Western capitalism already telling us that? Scott, I didn't need the Chinese government to tell me that needing to spend $1,500 on an ambulance to get to the hospital that will bankrupt me because my appendix exploded sucks ass. I put that one together myself.

And I say all of this to say he is such an incredible distillation of what is, in my opinion, actually wrong with Western nations and Westerners: the just... shocking levels of incuriousity. This man has clearly been thoroughly educated, but his mind is utterly trapped within the notion of how great America is, presumably because he grew up in a time where it was and it was, in fact, so great, and more importantly, that it was still permitting some of that dividend to fall to people who weren't already loaded. And the reaction to this educated, clearly intelligent man who is identifying all these problems with our society is not to suggest a better society, no, it's to utterly mentally backflip onto "communists are propagandizing our children." He identifies that the government is staffed to the gills with people even older than he is, even more indoctrinated than he is, but can't cross the Rubicon of actually criticizing the system that put them there. He is fully aware of how the Boomer generation has utterly decimated the ability of it's own and all subsequent children to make a decent living via catastrophic wealth transfers and tax policies, while letting the nation their parents gifted them utterly ROT, but his solution is to fuck over people with student loans even harder than they've already been fucked because goodness knows, he isn't ready to pay back any of the money transferred to him, no matter how much he's ready to complain about it.

I'll commend him for his ability to actually see and bear witness to the problems plaguing the young, that makes him better than 90% of his contemporaries right out of the gate. However his solutions are more free markets, more chest beating, more of what already brought us to the precipice of a ruined world and just, nah man. Hardest conceivable pass please.

Child lottery. Children will be bred and sent to families who have to take care of them.