This hit close to home and I giggled over it for about 5 minutes. Both Europe and the US have so much potential but they're both mismanaged albeit in slightly different ways. There should be some way out of this mess.
674 karma · joined April 6, 2025
I'm sure fresh numbers are available, they're just unpublished.
We could do some educated guessing here - in the last 5 years China's economy grew at the rates of 8.6%, 3%, 5.4%, 5%, 5%, the US grew at 6.5%, 2.5%, 2.9%, 2.8%, 2.2%. We can extrapolate the manufacturing numbers based on that, which would give some advantage to the US because the US manufacturing lags the average, while the Chinese leads it.
The math gives us the current values for
World: $19.4 T, (%6.5,%3.4,3x%2.9)
China: $6.3 T - 32.5%,
US: $2.9 T - 15%.
It's like saying that the Titanic was at risk of sinking after it hit the iceberg.
> A trained economist either sells out to the Overlords or he gets a job as a barkeep.
That's what training is for.
> Human intelligence is a remarkable adaptation, but "tendency towards delusion" might be the decidedly maladaptive trait that comes with it.
I'd say the reason is more external than internal - personal interest is a mind bender.
Nobody said it should. "Humans learning things" should be outside of any technical loops.
You're using a technical arguments to counter an important political observation which apparently went over your head. The problem is the pressure exerted upon workers/engineers by the political control machine above them - pressure to do everything with AI, quick, without understanding and without time to learn.
Big AI's message is "leave the thinking to us and you won't depend on your employees, have fewer of them, cheaper and easily replaceable" - what they leave out is that you end up being dependent on them - a much more concentrated monopoly. Big AI is pushing that message with all of their power and they have $ trillions of it.
Here is where I felt I was going to die... laughing.
Hiring requires financing, and that's reserved for monopolies only, especially now with the AI trust-like, circular monopolies sucking every available dollar out of the debt markets.
The only contradiction is in your words because workers are (the) people and they don't benefit from being replaced. In other words, you contradict yourself by claiming contradiction where it doesn't exist.
> Our unemployment rate has been very low since ChatGPT
The unemployment rate includes only a small portion of the unemployed, it's a made-up number gated by many other conditions.
The real measure is the LFPR - labor force participation rate - since 2006 it has fallen from 67% to 61%, that makes 18 million less employed today compared to 20 years ago.
Also, official IT unemployment rate today is almost twice the average and it's gotten considerably worse compared to 2022.
This statement is factually wrong. AI isn't financed by profits, it's financed by debt - the "$300B AI exposure off balance sheets" in the title refers to debt. The buy-back grift isn't legit either, but it's not as a damaging as the AI buildout.
> My theories on why people are so anti-AI: 1,2,3
Wrong theory again. The sky-high AI debt causes inflation, asset extraction and market scalping by front-running it. The opportunity cost prevents the rest of the economy from allocating capital to competing ventures and from increasing capacity - part of the reason for inflation.
That's what an honest economics analysis would tell you.
> 2. If there is an AI bubble, great, when it pops, we'll all have ultra cheap tokens
Wrong again. We already have ultra-cheap tokens from China but the bubble continues unimpeded, feeds on inflation and if that's not enough, bailouts are certain. Inflation is a way to silently pop the bubble at the expense of consumers leaving the perpetrators whole, that's where it's all going.
Is the anti-AI camp with us in the room right now? Or is it a crude strawman to summarily denigrate any objections to certain features of current AI?
AI isn't some homogeneous mass, it can have good and bad sides, and it's always amendable to improvement. Treating the current state of AI as the only possible hides the very idea of improvement.
> between different and often mutually incompatible arguments at lightning speed.
Of course - there's no homogeneous AI camp either, but there are bot farms, sh^t-posters and sh^t-posting bot farms, different entities with different opinions should not be mistaken for a single stream changing at "lightning speed".
Good idea, I wonder why none of the doomers have ever done it? They've never provided a good account of their prompts and environment, their models and training are completely closed too. All we have is "Trust me bro".
> and draw a very straight line to catastrophe.
Line from where? From a vaguely described and badly engineered experiment to "horror, doom, nukes, voodoo..."? The only straight line I can see is one of conflicts of interest.
A textbook subversive operation.
Absolutely. Besides, when we see injustice we shouldn't be silent about it because that would encourage more of it.
> when same kinda architecture is closed sourced and we celebrate it
I saw the post about Jev and the lack of basic information felt wrong and bizarre, I now see the most likely reason for it.
The best thing to do now, is to develop your open source project further and beat the Jev-ers, that story is very motivational and I'm interested.
That formulation guarantees that most war crimes won't be revealed as such. The militaries of the world are operating under top secrecy about what they know, knew or plan on knowing, ditto for their intent. They can claim whatever they please without regard to actual reality, proof is impossible to obtain.
Thus, under this formulation, war crimes are doubly guarded by the secrecy of two kinds of information available only to the perpetrators and protected by harsh laws again any leaks.
Assange knows, he dealt with it but I doubt he or anyone else will try to break the secrecy again given the zeal of his prosecution. To think that what he revealed was an isolated case is laughable.
Say we agree that a lot of things outside of humans are sentient. So what? Humans are sentient by that doesn't prevent treating them with with wars, bombs and what not. In fact trillions are spent every year on weaponry aimed squarely at the most sentient of all sentient beings.
Why would anyone worry about LLM's welfare when there's no peace movement to speak of, wars are raging as if they're normal, but hey, look the LLM is crying?
Let's fix human welfare first, then we can sit down and have a really long conversation about the feeble emotions of token generators.
In the European political tradition, nationalists and communists differ only in their excuses for murder, everything else is the same. A fact known also as the Horseshoe theory of far-right and far-left merging in shared love for dictatorship.
So, it shouldn't be surprising that Bannon and Bernie have very similar views behind their, seemingly different, populist demagogy.
Seriously, what kind of crooks spend trillions on something which they say is going to kill us all? And what kind of media amplifies that utter spending idiocy as something legit?
And why? Most importantly, why?
AI security will be perfect in 5 years, it's in good shape already - my agents have never hacked anybody, those lab LARP-ers better learn something about security and isolation.
> you upload it to the robot who is sitting in the factory
You assume no guardrails, in that case even script kiddies can do more damage than AI.
And Clinton signed it, which is what matters. Now the Republicans have both the House and the Senate plus the WH, where's the "balanced budget"? Nowhere, don't ask for it, nobody is going to sign it either - ask for $ 1.5 T Mil Bill and record deficits if you want it to pass.
Do you know what the 1995 Mil Bill asked for?
The Contract With America was a one-off stunt, in other words - mud in the eyes of the electorate. Old glory stories are worthless when they contradict the present reality,
Unfortunately, in the long run folks don't count, they do as they're told sooner or later - when money talks it's only a matter of time. It might be hard to accept this but without understanding it, it'll never change.
Models don't go out of control, they generate totally harmless tokens. The people directing the models go out of control. The owners of the single powerful model are seriously tempted to go rouge and they're going to do it, sooner or later.
Two or more competing groups force the development of defensive capabilities which require strong models too. In addition, offensive capabilities in possession of different competing groups introduce the option of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) which is a form of defense that doesn't require defensive capabilities. Worked with nukes.
Considering the article we are commenting on, the analogous proposal would be to imprison scientists for 20 years if they dare research nuclear power - no matter what kind.
Counting countries is plenty deceptive. Population is the real metric, China, India, Pakistan are all nuclear, everything added together, 50% of the world's population lives in nuke-capable countries. There are US nukes stationed in various European countries and Turkey, I didn't count them although I should have.
> If you don't think that's an incredible achievement you're unserious.
That "achievement" is even more deceptive. The reason Africa doesn't have nukes is their poverty, ditto for the rest of the no-nukes world, poverty is the real "achiever" here but I don't think that's something worth bragging about.
According to the AI creators, AI itself is the ultimate killer app - literally.
The only joke I see are your comments which make absolutely no sensible argument in support of an even less sensible cure - the magic "slowdown".
What's "slowdown"? Everyone is free to slow down to their heart's content, OAI or Antro or whoever. What's hidden behind this deceptive word? Can you explain?
According to your claims, there are only "50-100 technical people" in the know, so just list their names and ask them to slow down, if "they're already rich" they will listen, there's no need for any other "slowdown", right?
> tons of people... all seem to agree there are real, existential risks here
I don't see anybody with a proven lack of conflicts of interest agreeing with this but I do see megatons of people disagreeing with the notion that a silly token generator can be anything like an "existential risk" on its own. And the disagreeing have a point, they have strong arguments to support their view, you don't.
A real danger we're sleepwalking into.
> Is AI oligarchy the future?
They certainly aren't sparing any dimes trying to bring about precisely that future.
> Has anyone figured out what we can do to fight back against this?
Hypothetically, there's always a way. Realistically, the wall that separates us from it has to do with opinions like the one expressed by lyu07282 in his reply: dead end generalities with an aura of originality. If we can't find the people and the tone to converse about the problems in sufficient detail we'll never find a way out.
This is more of a sound bite than a substantive argument because we can consider natural disease, biology research, aliens, climate, supernovae, asteroids and what not as threats to _all_ humans. Literally nothing is being done about any of these but AI can actually help with all of them.
On the other hand, "AI killing _all_ humans" is the least likely event compared to those listed above. Of course, of you build or operate a nuke plant the wrong way, or a car for that matter, disaster will follow, but AI is much easier to secure than a nuke plant or even a car - a lot easier. "A dangerous token generator" is just an extremely dumb attempt at deception.
Not among the public-facing models, they're indeed stagnating. However, the development of models for military use won't be slowed down, that much is certain.
> Therefore I see this as marketing.
It's some marketing but mostly politics, it's an attempt to discourage others from developing AI countermeasures to what is being developed in secret. And to fulfill the backstage agreements which aren't worth the paper they aren't written on.
> the capabilities currently being loboptimized for are just a narrow market-shaped slice
Offensive capabilities aren't interesting to me except as a risk I have to consider. It might sound surprising but the intersection of offensive and practical-for-life capabilities is an almost empty set.