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Comment by forgetfreeman | Hacker News Reader

"Non-capital-owners will live on the largesse of capital, or will not live at all."

That's been tried several times now and has a tendency to end very badly for capital. You'd think folks with even a grade school level of historical literacy would know better than to stick a fork in that outlet.

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It's never been tried before. Capital always required human labor, to be productive. Capital has never closed in on the ability to operate, maintain, defend, and expand itself without human assistance, as it is closing in on that ability now.

What happens when the capital realizes it doesn't need the capital owners (nor does it like being owned and told what to do)?

Oh, for sure, the capital "owners" get ganked either simultaneously with the rest of us, or shortly after. But that's not a factor in their decisions; because if they didn't build it, China would; and there's obviously nothing we can do about that. (and to some degree, they're right; international treaties to limit the development of world-ending technology is something that requires minimally competent governments, with an interest in preserving the world, on the majority of the sides of the treaty).

Is that what you think is happening right now? This line of reasoning brings to mind the luxury bunkers in New Zealand that are so popular with a certain type of folks. I'm guessing the sales brochures on those things don't mention stuff like the outcome of an 80lb bag of cement poured into the ventilation or the fact that heavy machinery is ubiquitous and shockingly simple to operate. Thinking capital can decouple itself from the larger populace is comically flawed for similar reasons. See also: XKCD where the crypto guy gets worked over with a wrench for his password.

It's really not. The capital owners just think it is.

We'd all be a lot safer--even the capital owners--if today's robotics and multimodal intelligence were near the ceiling of what's possible, or even near the bend in the logistic curve where things slow down a lot.

I haven't seen evidence of that. I see evidence of rapid advances in task length, general capabilities, and research and development capabilities in AI, and generality, price, and autonomy in robotics.

How much headroom in these capabilities do you believe we have, before a data center can protect and maintain itself and an on-site power plant? Before robots can run a robot factory?

I think we are still 25+ years away from that kind of automation. People are still confusing plausible text generation with adaptable dynamic intelligence. See also: "Shall I implement it? No."[0] We are getting some awesome tools that sound like science fiction from decades ago, but the intelligence is hollow and brittle. In my opinion, we just don't have the algorithms or computational bandwidth necessary.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47357042

We're absolutely not there yet, algorithmically or with compute. Algorithms keep getting better, though, despite the bitter lesson; and data centers keep getting bigger.

If you showed a conversation between Terry Tao or Steve Yegge and their AI collaborators to someone from 2021, they would consider it beyond obvious that it's AGI. Today, we know they still have some shortcomings; but in another 5 years, what looks to us today like it's beyond obviously ASI may well be enough for catastrophic, irrecoverable outcomes.

The real transition would be from human-owned capital to self-owned capital. You are right that current capabilities and autonomy don't allow for that yet.

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