muldvarp

You're arguing against a point I never made. I agree that AI will be an important technology. I also think that it'll affect people that have to work for a living negatively (both in the short-term and assuming there is no foundational change in the structure of society, also in the long-term).

By that definition gasoline would not classify as a consequential technology as it's almost exclusively used in a single application (transportation).

It also already assumes that the technology is more often benefical than harmful.

Fear is not usually a voluntary response. Telling people that they should not fear something (especially without an argument why there is no danger) is wasted effort.

The printing press, automobile and calculator didn't threaten the employability of a large part of the population, so no, that sentence was probably not uttered by anyone at that time.

The problem with AI isn't that it's threating software development. It's that it's _also_ threating pretty much any other job that I could reasonably be retrained for.

Also, I'm pretty conflicted about the overall impact of automobiles.

Leaded gasoline to me is a very consequential technology given how much toxic lead it put into our environment.

Do you have an argument why "normal" technology can be good or bad, but "consequential" technology is always good?

Unions only work because their members have leverage because the wealthy still need their labour. Unions will do absolutely nothing against full replacement by AI.

> How will it destroy your life?

By taking away my ability to earn a living.

> There are so many great and useful things it can and will do to improve humanity.

What great things and why would I get access to those things?

> The ability to create software accelerates technological progress, which has direct and indirect benefits for everyone.

It has benefits for people with enough leverage (money and formerly labour) to obtain those benefits.

> It is true that competition could have short-term negative effect on people who sustain themselves by creating software, though.

I'm guessing that even if the unlikeliest of all unlikely things does happen and we all live off of some UBI some day, the short-term negative effects won't be "short-term" in the context of a human life.

The fact a technology is still in use does not imply that it is not negative for humanity.

I don't consider myself as part of a "laptop class", I don't live in the US and I'm anti-immigration.

I suspect your reasoning is circular if you only consider "great" technologies.

There are many technologies that have not been a net positive for humanity. Leaded gasoline comes to mind immediately. For many other technologies it is also hard to determine because counterfactuals are hard to reason about.

Even then past performance is not an indicator of future results. Just because you think internal combustion engines were a great invention, doesn't mean AI cannot be bad for humanity.

Because the ability to create software has little inherent value to me and is only valuable to me because it allows me to earn enough to make this life somewhat bearable.

LLMs that can build a computer vision pipeline are a direct threat to my ability to sustain myself. At the same time, being able to prompt an LLM to build a computer vision pipeline doesn't really positively affect my life at all, because personally I don't care that much about computer vision pipelines (or frankly, any software).

Why should I be amazed at something that promises to destroy my life?

I genuinely don't understand why people who have to work for their living are amazed at this. It will have a vast negative impact on your life unless you already live off of your wealth.

Okay? We have information that Anthropic sucked up all of the internet for the development of Fable.

> "Our AI makes your workers X times more productive"

This is still replacement, it's just not _total_ replacement.

You're not the target audience of his attempts at advertising. Your employer is. So, to answer your question: Dario does not care.

What else would they advertise with? "Our model constantly makes mistakes so you still have to hire expensive humans to proof-read everything"? The entire point of the AI industry is to automate human jobs. There is nothing else to advertise with.

The existing biological evidence took billions of years of evolution to get to the state it's at. So it may not just take research and discovery but also enormous computing power.

> Why do you think tech bro billions aren't also subject to replacement by AI?

Because they're billionaires. They don't actually work for a living. They own stuff for a living.

> And fully superhuman AI eliminates the main objection to socialism, that you need markets with smart people to make an economy function. Full automated luxury communism (like Ian Banks) is a possible outcome.

Luxury communism is also a possible outcome in countries with large oil reserves (Venezuela for example), it's just not a likely outcome because common people have no leverage and billionaires didn't become billionaires by giving stuff away.

Even if "fully automated luxury communism" were a likely outcome, the transition there would be very rough and would take years. If software engineering is automated away in 2028 it could still take years or decades before the first general purpose robot can take over plumbing. (Former) software engineers will have a rough transition.

He isn't saying that anyone not born in Sweden is forced to leave. You should try to actually read and understand the quote.

Sadly your comment does not contain any actual argument as to _why_ you think the quote is ethnonationalist.

> The math community was not a global underclass.

I never claimed they were. The term "permanent underclass" refers to the preferred world order of AI techbro billionaires[1] where human labour is worthless and in consequence normal people no longer have any leverage. Societies where most of the value is dug out of the ground and where human labour is comparatively worthless already exist and living there is not necessarily fun[2].

> World wealth is increasing, the actual global underclass is seeing rapidly improving lives.

The global underclass has been seeing improving lives well before LLMs were a thing. The question is whether they will _continue_ to see their lives improve if their labour is no longer required.

> You may be seeing a loss of privilege due at least in part to the inevitable reversion to the mean of US economic dominance.

I'm not from the US, I don't live in the US, and in fact I've never been to the US.

> AI will lead to a much larger pie.

Which will only benefit people if their piece of the pie doesn't shrink because they don't have any leverage. There is also more than one pie. The real estate pie for example won't grow, instead every piece of the pie will become even more expensive. Most people only own pieces of the pie that will decrease in value (human labour) not pieces of pies that will increase in value.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/30/opinion/ai-labor-work-for...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

Do you think the CEO of your company hired you and pays a lot of money for you because they like you?

> so it's kind of annoying I'm not really going to see any upsides to an AI world either

I don't think the "permanent underclass" will see many upsides either. They certainly won't have the money to pay for it. I'm excluding myself in that statement because luckily I have access to large amounts of barbiturates.

I think the training data contains more than enough information for an LLM to learn what kind of proof is considered beautiful or elegant by humans.

Of course it also contains more than enough information to learn what kind of question is interesting to humans.

Doesn't that mean you bet against the bitter lesson?

Do you assume that five years from now you'll get paid for coding with LLMs?

I think anyone willing to pay $500k is well aware that LLMs can be used to find vulnerabilities.

> Of course AI can also farm conjectures, but they have to develop taste, which might be harder than just proving theorems.

Do you have any argument why you might think this would be true?