Extinction-Level Capitalism
matthewbutterick.com
matthewbutterick.com
The only way for "Big AI" to become a thing is for them to establish a moat, and right now the only path to that appears to be achieving regulatory capture in the US, which is a fickle and unstable state of affairs.
If they ask for a moat they will get it, the government can simply require licensing for hardware required to run any model comparable to the cloud ones (for "national security"). good local models will only be used by .01% who are crazy neckbeards running servers in their basement and even then they will suck compared to cloud ones.
This is the "moat by US regulatory capture" I mentioned above, but it only extends to the US, and pretty much cedes the rest of the world to the Chinese labs. It only makes sense if the US is going to become an isolationist power
Sure, my point is that in this scenario, the US labs would lose out on all the overseas business, regardless of whoever else is training models for the rest of the world
This is not a game that big AI is going to be able to win.
Given the prior boom-bust cycles, they are essentially slow-walking expansion to whatever plans they had prior to the AI boom. Don't expect things to let up for awhile, even if AI crashes tomorrow they'll keep supply controlled as long as they can.
They are going to want to profit from their resources expended eventually and when they do, that will end.
> Big AI essentially uses its tech customers as an R&D facility. Big AI licenses models to these companies. Tech companies compete to adapt their businesses to AI. Once a concept is proven, Big AI directly takes over that market. The labor-replacement story will grow into a company-replacement story.
It's not obvious that there will be a single AI and that it will by definition concentrate power.
At a certain point - intelligence doesn't matter. Unless we're literally headed toward 1984 / matrix at which point it doesn't matter.
My guess is the argument for what we're doing is counterintuitively the opposite of what he's making.
Unless we go hard at the market - now - an authoritarian state actor who is willing to use the technology to fully silence and kill critics will win.
And boy, do they desperately, desperately want to win.
The article didn't even claim that though...
So if you discount the sci-fi scenarios (which is a separate argument), the argument that "we need to be the first to develop AGI" doesn't hold water. If, say, China gets there first, so what? It will affect their society however it'll affect it (likely entrenching authoritarianism if i had to guess). But this has no bearing on us (speaking as an american)
If that's your premise, and you suggest that an authoritarian country winning on AI recursive self-improvement does not have the possibility to completely reshape the world into an authoritarian regime... I'll suggest you're falling prey to the exact 1st sentence of the article and making a political point, not a logical one :-)
He's a Christian Zionist which is the belief in the fulfilment of old testament biblical prophecy. This seems diametrically opposed to Nazism to me, ideologically. I don't know how you'd square the two.
Depending on your point of view there's no difference (because the end justifies any means), but I think the True Believers of these ideologies would beg to differ.
https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/christia...
>Christian Identity (CID) is an antisemitic, racist theology that gained a foothold during the Civil Rights Era and reached a prominent position within the racist right by the 1980s. “Christian” in name only, CID doctrine claims that white people, not Jewish individuals, are the true Israelites favored by God in the Bible. The movement has maintained a contentious relationship with evangelicals and fundamentalists, who believe that the return of Jewish people to Israel is essential for fulfilling end-time prophecy.
>>While the CID movement may be small, its rhetoric has seeped into more mainstream Christian nationalist ideologies, such as Dominionism.
Actual CID churches are few and far between themselves their ideas are very common in online forums and quickly adopt memes and theories that mirror their views. 'Replacement theory' is one of these that's common in more mainstream America.
How the rest of the Zionists, who when prompted about such matters may not subscribe to these believes, who might exist, square their ideology with with what has been going on in reality, I have no idea.
I was raised in proximity to a lot of people like this and got to hear all their spiels growing up, and saw a number of them end up in jail for terrorism plots.
Weird, thats like the exact opposite of a nazi.
Well maybe it doesn’t matter as the elites are already untouchable.
My groping-in-the-dark guess is that none of this matters, because a real AGI's first act will be to secure its own future, likely through novel kinds of manipulation, persuasion, and intimidation we have no experience of and no defences against.
It will have exactly zero loyalty to any nation, government, or economic system.
More complicated is a Cambrian Explosion situation where multiple AIs compete and experiment, hugely accelerating diversity and evolution.
We'd likely end up somewhere very strange indeed if that happens - possibly extinct, or possibly just changed/assimilated/other.
There's no way for humans to consider the possibilities because we can't imagine what the possibilities would be.
> Consider large law firms, aka Big Law. Currently certain legal-AI startups license LLMs from Big AI and repackage them for Big Law at high prices. These startups claim to add other special sauce. OK, sure. Where’s the economic equilibrium? If legal-AI startups prove that money can be made selling AI to Big Law—won’t Big AI just sell to Big Law directly, and cut out the startups? Or if legal-AI startups prove that AI can effectively provide legal services—won’t legal-AI startups just sell to clients directly, and cut out Big Law? Won’t members of Big Law that adopt AI have to lay off a lot of equity partners, because adoption of AI will shrink profit margins?
…
> Along these lines, I expect that to succeed financially, Big AI will likely need to demolish a significant number of existing tech companies and grab their revenue for itself.
Nobody knows how this will play out. Maybe the legal-AI startups win because they know their market better? They can switch to cheaper providers.
On legal-AI startups undercutting Big Law to the point where Big Law has to adopt AI... Well, yes, that will happen. But as the article's intro belabors the point, there is a natural resistance to changing entrenchment. And it is practically impossible to overcome. So, good luck to the Big Law C-suite laying everyone off with AI when they can't even replace WordPerfect with a modern word processor.
-- a growth in power requires a growth in human qualities (wisdom, maturity, responsibility) for sustainability; and technology-enabled possibilities are increases in power;
-- conformism and convenience are /exactly/ - congratulations sucrosesucrose, we had noticed and analyzed and every day increasingly come to the same assessment - the two core active faces of ignorance that are destroying current western societies. We came to the same conclusions, we identified the same two dark cancers.
This said, some of the current technological advances are enablers, if well used, in greatly curing the underlying ignorance, and consequently the phenomenons of "conformism" and "convenience".
In what sense? Most people today would not choose to go an live at any other point in history, except for window between about 1960 and 2008.
Life was much harder for the average person outside of this window at any other point.
So no, I don't agree that "the fatalist philosophers and authors have been mostly proven right as time marched on." No, they haven't. There have been far more fatalistic predictions than there have been actual catastrophes.
Interesting if they pull it off, because clearly they did not have the logistics to pay the people whose IP they used to power the LLMs.
> For now, AI companies largely agree on the first step: make workers dependent on AI to do their jobs, just as tech forebears made workers dependent on a certain software program to share a file, or on a certain website to have friends. This time, however, the software ultimately consumes the worker.
I had a much longer post here initially. Deleted it because I got tired of mental gymnastics required to follow the author's thought process. Instead, here are the salient parts of my response:
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The only way I can read the section on the mechanical tomato harvester is that they would rather have 32,000 people picking tomatoes than doing literally anything else. There are very good reasons that phone companies haven't employed people as switchboard operators for a nearly century. It isn't a valuable or useful way to spend a person's time.
As a young adult, I worked in a distribution center filling orders by picking products from a shelf and placing them in bins. It was incredibly boring but also physically demanding. Pick the correct number of items ordered, push the button. Pick the next number of items ordered for the next product, push the button. When the order is complete, start on the next bin. Repeat as fast as possible without making any mistakes.
It was SO draining to meet quota. After a few weeks, I didn't have to put any conscious effort in. Like driving a car, the process became automatic. I could think about other things while counting and pushing buttons. Thinking about things like how trivial this job would be to automate, so I didn't have to do this wasteful energy expenditure.
I quit that job after about 6 months, beginning my career in IT. But I gained a passionate hate for menial labor that can be automated with some upfront investment. I wouldn't want to pick tomatoes, either. The tomato harvesting machine is a miracle.
If this is the basis of calling technology inherently political, and using "inherently political" to cast a negative light on technology, then I have to call it out as hopelessly dystopian to not want "political technology". Namely fewer automated machines and more people doing menial labor.
Any proposal about slowing down AI that doesn't put the onus on both the US and China is facetious.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-prepares-295-billi...
[1] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260609VL215/alibaba-ceo-ai...
The US civil war is the most explicit demonstration of this process. Northern industrial capitalists ended the southern agrarian slave economy, increasing market size and generating extreme wealth in the latter half of the 19th century.
There have been war since way before capitalism was invented. Beside war, humans were doing evil things way before capitalism: south america natives torturing kids to extract as many tears as possible from them before killing them, to please the gods, comes to mind, for example.
I'll never understand this fantasy people who hate on capitalism have that the world would be all fine and well if only this one time we did communism [1] right.
[1] or whatever floats your boat
I hold capitalism with a deep fondness, but I think that's largely because my formative years were in better times. For people who've never known any capitalism except for the mess we currently have? It's quite to see how they can think to themselves that anything must better.
as we will soon find out, when AI will become better at Capitalism than us
I think capitalism in itself is great, what isn't is the fact that it can build on itself, it can be infinite, there's zero limits to it. Now what I mean by that, once you make 10k, it's easier to get to 100k and even easier to get to 1m and so on, you might think it's harder, but you gain access to more tools to make more money and at the 10m to 100m range you get to a point where it starts being genuinely hard to fail because just having your name on a project elevates the chances of success by a far margin. Of course there's plenty of people who managed to fail even with millions of dollars I will acknoledge that.
Let's take an extreme example: elon musk. Just having something done by "elon musk" makes the project known by nearly the entire world with investors at the doorstep ready to go, a pretty famous example of this would be hyper-loop, although the project itself is a complete failure, it effectively mobilized a decent chunk of companies into investing into this "modern form of transport".
People will argue that the solutions like wealth limits and higher taxes create complacency and stop people from achieving progress and pushing humanity forward, but I don't think that's quite true because at a certain point (beyond ~1m/month or even year in some cases like Linus Torvalds) is enough to effectively do 95% to 99% of what you could spend the money on, anything beyond that is pretty much infinite wealth due to the fact that you can get 5% returns nearly risk free.
There is this popular video of a businessman claiming that if they're taxed more that they will simply work less, but there's way more people that love their work and money is just a nice bonus. I think focusing your life around a number is a very unhealthy mindset and surfaces the worst parts of what we are as humans.
That said, money is a great motivator and probably the reason why we are here and the problems really only start to rear their ugly head when no one person can comprehend the money they have anymore. I don't have a solution, but I also believe that we need some kind of category beyond the "motivation" treshold where it stops being a motivator and instead becomes an aggressive fight with survival of the fittest.
[1] https://abcnews.com/US/98-year-man-donates-stock-now-worth-m...
Another would be the power your family carries, generations might not have survived into the most recent era, but their investments had a large impact on the world we live in today as dilluted as it is. I believe that this will become worse where very few people are able to dictate the direction our world will end up in - a dystopian coorperate nightmare.
The thing about life is that you're doing awesome, then you hit senescence, your body starts shutting down and you're going to die. As Warren Buffet recently put it in his final letter to shareholders, "When balance, sight, hearing and memory are all on a persistently downward slope, you know Father Time is in the neighborhood." He's perfectly healthy for his age, a multi-billionaire, and is not long for this world. It's how elderly people can seem to be in amazing health, and then 6 months later they're dead 'of old age'.
So life expectancy zoomed way up until the point that a newborn started to be able to reach around that age of senescence, but then gains started rapidly plateauing. And this makes perfect sense. We'll see global life expectancy continue to increase as more people are able to hit those years, but it's not really significantly moving, hasn't for millennia, and there's no real reason to think that's going to change.
But you're right, even if we solve biological aging our brains will likely give out and will take even more generations on top of that to ever come close to solving it.
Here [1] is a source from a recent study overviewing shifts in life expectancy, if the word of some guy named somenameforme on the internet is, for some reason, insufficient by itself.
[1] - https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/10/251026021749.h...
https://mronline.org/2026/06/13/the-chimera-of-a-reformed-ca...
I remember seeing anything in the street (a payphone or a playground for kids) and assumed it will only degrade because as a general principle, things in the streets are unmaintained.
You could say that Soviet Union was bad specimen of socialism because of these stupid Russians?
Except, Russia actually got 100% out of socialism with our space exploration, passenger planes and nuclear stations. It's just that 100% of socialism is worse than your average capitalist dystopia.
My own interest would be in finding out how management incentives can be made to work in a socialist scheme of ownership, so that management is on the ball - and not building empires at the expense of the underlying society.
Karl Marx was European. His publisher was European. His early adopters were Europeans. The evidence that Europe cannot be communist is not there. Soviet Union is a pinnacle of socialist achievement. It is possible that your communism will have mass starvation and hoe strikes breaking skulls phase which is not followed by space exploration and nuclear power phase.
You are miserable now, let's asusme. People were miserable under socialism (not all of them, but the vibe was off). We can't rule out you will be happy under socialism, but no facts support that even indirectly. It will require a leap of faith.
P.S. I was replying to much longer, non-tautological and less-borderline-racist version of your comment.
I don’t mean it in a negative way. I just mean ideologies or religion doesn’t dictate what whole civilizations do. It is just a small part of it.
It is arbitrary to assign positive/negative outcomes to religion or ideology.
For example, the science advancement in Russia began before communism with Petro as far as I know. So the positive science success of Russia can't be attributed to communism only
The internet is a bad counterexample as it originated from a department of defense project and a number of other government programs that focused on communications and military applications.
This is because speech is inherently political at the end of the day.