In whose interest is it to make the pro AI position in the United States so indefensible?
Maybe the foreign agents are coming from inside the house...
487 karma · joined May 28, 2026
Maybe the foreign agents are coming from inside the house...
How are these math problems being solved? AI just needs to recursively self prompt. Why does it need a human will? As long as the power keeps flowing and the recursion is resilient, what computational problem discoverable by a human is out of reach?
I keep hoping for better answers to this. Your longer answer is frankly just as disappointing.
"AI doesn't take showers" was particularly unconvincing. An army of AIs can ruminate on a codebase indefinitely. They can explore a possibility space at scale in a number of dimensions beyond most humans. How do you think these math problems are being solved? Code is largely verifiable and testable, most of the things that are hard to test is with human interaction. But humans will increasingly be out of the loop.
Most apps are not very useful. Most startups fail. Most companies are copying each other. There's a reason AI is so good.
Trust will be solved with mitigations. There will be inventions in this regard like breakthroughs in formal verification and adversarial LLMs to hold the automations accountable. At a certain point AIs will be trusted more than humans. AI has no free will. Humans go rogue all the time. You can't wipe their brains or reset them or turn them off. How many AIs have shot up their workplace? I just am kind of baffled by people who say AI can't be trusted or controlled as if humans can be?
The question is about outcomes. Costs and benefits. It seems obvious to me within 10 years unless you are within the top 1% of software engineers an AI will make more economic sense than you on a basic cost/benefit breakdown. Maybe a few of the top 10% hang around to certify certain critical paths so if the AI makes a big enough goof you are around to have the rope be hung around your neck.
The end state of capital is automation of everything. The humans actually doing interesting things aren't making "prototype apps" or being "project managers" they are building these AIs or coming up with ways to engineer UBI and a future where knowledge workers cease to exist without the entire economy collapsing.
I'm sorry but it's just not a very good answer. Thanks for trying though.
To act as if the United States is sticking its nose in Australia as if it's Venezuela or something shows a rather pedestrian understanding of Australian history and geopolitics.
If the United States retreats from the world the Australian people will be among those who suffer the most. The interest in each other is mutual.
Edit: I'm not endorsing any particular intervention I'm merely pointing out the parent comment's framing (basically Australia should just ignore the United States or vice-versa) is silly given the reality of the relationship between the two countries, especially right now given how Australia views the present risks associated with the growing threat of Chinese hegemony in the Pacific.
If the answer is it's reassuring because it's not happening yet (with your proviso for if ever) then fine.
Doesn't sound very compelling to me but if that's the answer then fair enough.
Why don't you calm down and read my question again and you will see the only one "completely missing the point" is you.
You're arguing with someone else. I didn't make a claim that LLMs were human. If you're going to respond to me then engage with what I'm exactly saying. Go back and read it again, if you can manage it.
I'm asking why is it reassuring about his job? Surely your big human brain can understand to be automated away doesn't mean the machine is "smart as a human" whatever that means. There is probably not a lot of utility in comparing synthetic and organic intelligence from such a reductive perspective.
Factory workers got automated by machines. Is a robotic arm smarter than a human? Is a tractor smarter than a bovine?
My question is simply what is he doing that is so "smart" or novel that it cannot be automated or mechanized. This should not be so hard to understand.
Anyway I hope I get an answer to my actual questions. Engaging with your "it's just a calculator" denialism is an obvious dead-end. Have a good day buddy.
Why won't smarter and cheaper models in the future be able to automate this part for your manager as well? How novel is the feature set? Is it he has a knowledge gap or the model is incapable of something? What expertise are you bringing to bear that is beyond the scope of a future harness/model? Why wouldn't such a model simply fill in the blanks for your management, perhaps observing a diff of whatever you did? How do you verify the correctness of your thinking? Why could a future model not replicate this process?
I am just very puzzled by these sort of takes as we approach the end of 2026.
For what purpose? Seems strange you start here and then need me to connect the dot to blood feuds.
We are saying the same thing. If adjoining families take it upon themselves to engage in blood feuds this is in direct conflict with the state's "monopoly on legitimate violence".
The point of the phrase is to convey that the only legitimate violence in the conception of the state is the state's own violence, or in some select cases (self-defense being one) violence the state explicitly grants or endorses. The monopoly on violence is thus sort of required when deriving the moral theory. The states violence is by definition legitimate in its own eyes. The monopoly is the operative part - there can be no competing violence. This is perfectly coherent, whereas a competing "legitimate" violence would not compute given the internal logic of the state itself. It would be existential.
This is the basic germ of politics. Prevent small conflicts within a group from escalating and prevent external domination. I mentioned both. Again, not sure where you see disagreement between our views. Preventing conquest by a roving band is compatible with my view. If the conquering entity is a state then my contention would be the process of stopping blood feuds would have already occured (among the conquering people) as that is what law and order is, which is sort of a prerequisite to effective armies. You don't get to just kill the person who killed your brother absent state intervention, because such acts have a way of spinning out of control. Justice is the province of the state alone. Of course, blood feuds still happen. Occasionally they are even legitimized (as is necessarily the case with this sort of intervention) by the state. But as state power increases, the space for this sort of violence shrinks. Once again, tacking on "legitimate" to "monopoly of violence" often confuses the point. The point is the state requires that all violence it does not sanction is necessarily illegitimate. There is a nice circular logic here, evocative of the phrase "the house always wins".
Put another way - when the state does it, it's not illegal. Those who control the state control the law.
Perhaps it is because you are aware that the two go hand in hand?
As to the rest of it, it sort of fails the historical test on its face. States have been around since well before Christ. Your disappointment with contemporary geopolitics ("all the violence"), economics ("industrial supply chains ") or whatever other ills you discover in your "modern life" are irrelevant to the question of state formation. Your contention of states creating more violence has also been debunked. Obviously there is more violence with more people. People are violent. On a per capita basis, states reduce violence. There is a rather well known book on this that was somewhat recently published that I strongly suspect you are aware of.
I sympathize with your disappointment. Do try to cheer up. The easiest way is to realize that despite everything, there are few eras where you would actually prefer to live instead. Certainly if you had no control over your social class, precise geographical location, or had up to give or take 100 years of variance baked into your somewhat errant time machine.
If you ran the same algorithm on the present age you would have a better shot at a pleasurable life than most humans could have ever dreamed for most of human history. If you require a citation for this we should probably just agree to disagree. Have a nice day.
It's perfectly coherent to anyone who understands a) what a state is and b) not all states are equally bad. States are by their nature, necessarily violent. Their primary purpose is to prevent lethal intergroup violence and blood feuds. One doesn't do this merely by asking nicely. This is where the violence comes in. At some level this tradeoff is baked into every human, as with most pack animals. It's why so much of violence is posturing - ie creating off-ramps to bad trades.
The bait/honeypot part should be the least controversial element to someone with your apparent sentiments. This is a rather common tactic, likely around as old as states themselves.
None of this is to excuse or endorse any action. Just because states are observed to be certain way does not create some normative statement. I'm simply pointing out the coherence of the comment you alleged had none.
Companies will increasingly not ship frontends anymore, maybe just themed components that most users will ignore. "Pages" naturally become synthetic amalgamations of the various things you are interested in from various sources. Your preferred UI/UX comes for free courtesy of your LLM intermediary.
Everything is an API. Regulation will probably be needed to enforce this on the data access side given the incentives for companies to resist despite the benefit to the consumer. A relatively easy solution is to make it part of the requirements to take payments online, which is already highly regulated. The goal would be that essentially to operate anything approaching e-commerce online you must allow consumer AI intermediaries sufficient access that they could independently construct whatever your current frontend is from the publicly available API/MCP endpoints.
The tricky part of engineering around privacy/personas, account creation, etc. will be relatively easy following such state intervention. Take payments - virtual credit cards are already a useful way to protect data and mitigate risks when dealing with multiple vendors. This sort of API is a natural fit for a world in which companies are not allowed to box you into their horrible UIs, most of which are simply lazy attempts at copying the most profitable anti patterns of their competitors. Let your personal agent generate a unique card for each vendor behind the scenes. Why should you have to care?
How much better the internet would be if every UI/UX was in a meaningful sense, your own.
It is easy to ignore the misallocation of output and the private greed when generally people are still doing fairly well.
As the denials give way, the politics will change. You may be right such moments will be hijacked and hope extinguished. That's why we should all aim to think about these problems in the most robust way, so we can all contribute to the coming efforts.
Cynicism about the future is easy, but should be resisted. Perhaps ironically, I find hope in your acknowledgement of your own imminent devaluation.
The state runs the system. Or really at a certain point, the state runs itself. In 100 years or so, the CEO becomes a barbaric relic of the past age, like our ancestors who beat each other over the head with clubs. Nevertheless, such a future will necessarily owe a debt to both.
Wealth and states are often connected. In this case if the state is properly aligned (this is what the coming battles are to be about - as they always have been) to be egalitarian, then redistribution can occur unblocked by human enclaves of greed.
Imagine if the astronaut taking Earthrise had looked down upon his planet with such scorn. Human aspirations frequently exceed our capacity for timely predictions. It doesn't make the aspiration any less worthwhile.
On a cosmic scale human life is a "complete joke". It is a feature of humanity (which we should cherish) that we nevertheless pursue our lives with interest anyway.
You work less than your counterparts centuries ago... on what understanding of history do you imagine your life would be better in the past? Is your life with a washing machine worse? Is the perfect the enemy of the good? What part of "glimpse" is escaping you?
Humans with zero economic value can still vote. They can still mass. They will still have needs. Really the script here writes itself. The historical precedents bound the problem rather well. As always, radical social change will not occur until a wide swath of the population is aligned. In this case, due to their broad economic devaluation.
It would be easier if today's knowledge workers stopped deluding themselves into thinking that their standards of living will maintain. Your acknowledgement of the necessary predicate to change is, in that respect, progress in itself. There is little reason why we cannot accelerate the timing of broad consensus if more people so readily came to that conclusion - and resisted the temptation to then find the answer instead in nostalgia about the past.
It is however, achievable. Certainly more so than engaging in the fantasy that we can criminalize LLMs out of existence. And it is likely more desirable than such an effort anyway.
At least with LLMs we can glimpse an escape route to that which generations of humans have strived for - a world in which the labor required of each human to lead a flourishing life approaches zero.
Instead of fixating on a remedy that seeks to criminalize AI, maybe focus on the relatively rather achievable goal of redistributing LLM gains. Would that not be the most desirable justice? What is your alternative, and would you foreclose the future in the name of a past that never really existed in the first place?
Is this the best you can do?
> you pay to access social media optimized to be interesting...
So is it commercial or non commercial?
Nothing is stopping you from creating a social network that is pay gated. Go build it. If you can't get anyone to sign up perhaps you'll realize it's not so easy as scapegoating addictive social media.
There is a whole cottage industry of people who legitimately make their living criticizing Facebook. It's a consumer software product. Yet few of these people seem to have their conviction extend to building an alternative that ever catches an audience. Why is that? Because addiction? Any other excuses?
I believe the Jewish billionaire's wife's secret was to "longevity".
I think the target is the elderly. My understanding is they have always been a frequent target of these sort of internet scams.
A politician who doesn't agitate voters to take direct action in between elections is ultimately one who hopes you really don't pay that much attention to what they are doing. It's always about electioneering or diverting attention elsewhere. It's fine to say voting is merely the bare minimum check on elected officials, as long as you don't encourage anyone to then skip this necessary (albeit preliminary) step.
Why do you think AI will not be a major political issue in 2028? Perhaps to level set do you think it is a political issue now? Do you expect it to be less politicized in two years? Why?
Sometimes voting changes things, sometimes it doesn't. Naturally it's in the nature of most governments to not wildly change every election. This is usually thought of as an advantage. It's rare a wide majority of the electorate ever actually agrees on anything anyway, and tyranny of the majority or government that is too reactive to popular will is also not desirable.
But sometimes things are different, due to external or macro factors as you indicated. Some elections are more consequential than others. That doesn't necessarily mean any one election simply doesn't matter. It's simply good civic hygiene to vote. Think of all the people in red states who vote blue or vice versa in elections they will never win, never mind have their chosen candidate "change things". Does this mean they are fools? I salute them for such a faithful exercise of their civic privileges, that which generations of humans have died for. Your vote doesn't simply lose all value because you didn't get the outcome you wanted. It also doesn't preclude other avenues, like direct action or whatever your supposed alternative is.
It's good to vote simply out of civic obligation. Many people who say otherwise seem to merely be complaining that voting doesn't give anyone 100% of what they want. We've seen more and more "insurgent" candidates take over primaries. Increasingly people who complain about politics strike me as engineers who talk instead of build. Complaining about the effectiveness of your vote is like listening to an engineer who is always talking but never ships.
Like go run a campaign or solve the problem. What does saying voting doesn't matter solve? It feels like middle school age cynicism masquerading as insight. Politics has actually rarely felt so unsettled in America. Voting is likely more important than ever.
In 2028 a maximalist case could then be made to nationalize them.
The government actually running them isn't great, but no one ever gets 100% of they want in politics. It's about trafeoffs. If the labs use the current government to pull up the ladder, then the voters should vote for a government to swing hard to punish them.
In theory the threat of this should also act as a deterrent.
There's nothing weird about this at all. Politics is all about push and pull, carrot and stick. No one has permanent influence over affairs, and no one ever gets 100% of what they want. Yet it is entirely coherent to advocate for something like nationalization or take your pick of threat to private capital if they essentially cheat by pulling up the ladder because they've suddenly decided they don't want to compete.
Or they could abide by the precedents they set and learn to compete. They shouldn't be allowed to have it both ways.
"Retroactive grant of immunity" is a nice reminder that the law is ultimately about power.
Amass enough power and the law is yours.