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Extinction-Level Capitalism

matthewbutterick.com

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Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#41

Post by ReptileMan »

deaux wrote: post #23
epsteingpt wrote: post #5

Interesting argument, but wrong. 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 authorita…

So the US will win? Do you realize that the US has a "Secretary of War" who is a literal, unashamed Nazi? Not in the sense of "let's call all racists nazis", but a tattooed, true believer? How could we possibly live in a world where that is not obviously "a government willing to use the technology to fully silence and kill critics"? God, Idiocracy (2006) is nothing compared to World (2026).

Hugh... when has graham platner became secretary of war?

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#42

Post by mindslight »

dirtikiti wrote: post #32
deaux wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the US will win? Do you realize that the US has a "Secretary of War" who is a literal, unashamed Nazi? Not in the sense of "let's call all racists nazis", but a tattooed, true believer? How could we possibly live in a world where that is not obviously "a government willing to use the technology to fully silence and kill critics"? God, Idiocracy (2006) is nothing compared to World (2026).

A tattooed, true believer nazi has a Jerusalem Cross tattoo? Weird, thats like the exact opposite of a nazi.

Yes, the regime is quite adept at abusing symbols to distract and deflect. The Cross in particular has been a mainstay of performative hypocrisy for as long as I've been alive. (apologies to the believers and clergy actually living out Christian values, who already have to suffer being railed against as "woke" by the societal maggots)

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#43

Post by thriftwy »

ozgrakkurt wrote: post #33
thriftwy wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I glimpsed last years of Soviet Union and it was pretty meh. 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, p…

Pretty sure Russia is Russia because Russians are Russians and Russian culture is Russian culture. Not because Russia was communist.

I will address some of your concerns.

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.

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#44

Post by zelphirkalt »

krona wrote: post #30
deaux wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the US will win? Do you realize that the US has a "Secretary of War" who is a literal, unashamed Nazi? Not in the sense of "let's call all racists nazis", but a tattooed, true believer? How could we possibly live in a world where that is not obviously "a government willing to use the technology to fully silence and kill critics"? God, Idiocracy (2006) is nothing compared to World (2026).

> literal, unashamed Nazi 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.

Zionists are not that far off though. For many Zionists parallels include: Like to be militarist and maximalists in their opinion about what land should belong to them. Applaude and show no shame for committing genocide. Employing starvation as a means of war/conflict. Showing no regard for civilian lives.

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.

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#45

Post by swiftcoder »

There's a core problem this analysis overlooks: OpenAI and Anthropic don't have a moat. The Chinese labs are consistently able to replicate their LLM capabilities a few months after the fact, and then release open-weight models a few months later...

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.

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#46

Post by krona »

actionfromafar wrote: post #39
krona wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> literal, unashamed Nazi 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.

One of them wants an eschatological, world cleansing war. The other wants to usher in an eschatological, world cleansing war.

Nazism is as eschatological as Marxism (class vs racial struggle) and many other secular/religious ideologies with utopian endpoints.

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.

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#47

Post by somenameforme »

himata4113 wrote: post #36
derektank wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The great equalizer here is death. Nobody can cleanly pass all of their wealth and influence off to their children and while those that inherit large fortunes can maintain and improve upon them (see the Waltons) they’re rarely able to maintain the act for generation after generation. None of the great fortunes of today were built by descendants of the Vanderbilts or the Rockefellers.

We will see, the big concern here is that lifespans start increasing faster than aging, ex: you're a ~40 year old and estimated lifespan is 80, but by the time you're 60 it's 90, by the time you're 80 it's 100 and at some point it might start increasing faster than the speed you age at. Of course we might be a few generations away from where this is the case, but it's a scary thought. Another would be the power your…

Bit of a tangent, but that was a view popularized by Kurzweil and is very poorly supported. The reason is that life expectancy increases over the past are overwhelmingly driven by decreases in childhood mortality. Look at more or less any sample of humanity in the past that was free from the direct effects of war/famine, and you find life expectancy for those who reach adulthood to be extremely comparable to modern times. For instance the Founding Fathers are a simple people often find surprising - with some even living on into their 90s. People didn't just drop dead at 40, but rather when one person dies in childhood and the other in his 80s, you end up with a life expectancy of around 40.

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.

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#48

Post by datadrivenangel »

himata4113 wrote: post #36
derektank wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The great equalizer here is death. Nobody can cleanly pass all of their wealth and influence off to their children and while those that inherit large fortunes can maintain and improve upon them (see the Waltons) they’re rarely able to maintain the act for generation after generation. None of the great fortunes of today were built by descendants of the Vanderbilts or the Rockefellers.

We will see, the big concern here is that lifespans start increasing faster than aging, ex: you're a ~40 year old and estimated lifespan is 80, but by the time you're 60 it's 90, by the time you're 80 it's 100 and at some point it might start increasing faster than the speed you age at. Of course we might be a few generations away from where this is the case, but it's a scary thought. Another would be the power your…

All the new tech gods will eventually die of cancer due to prop 65 (thanks California.)

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#49

Post by himata4113 »

somenameforme wrote: post #47
himata4113 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We will see, the big concern here is that lifespans start increasing faster than aging, ex: you're a ~40 year old and estimated lifespan is 80, but by the time you're 60 it's 90, by the time you're 80 it's 100 and at some point it might start increasing faster than the speed you age at. Of course we might be a few generations away from where this is the case, but it's a scary thought. Another would be the power your…

Bit of a tangent, but that was a view popularized by Kurzweil and is very poorly supported. The reason is that life expectancy increases over the past are overwhelmingly driven by decreases in childhood mortality. Look at more or less any sample of humanity in the past that was free from the direct effects of war/famine, and you find life expectancy for those who reach adulthood to be extremely comparable to modern t…

Isn't life expentancy 95th percentile where infant/sids deaths are excluded? Either way I am pretty sure the topmost of life expentancy has also been increasing faster.

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.

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#50

Post by originalvichy »

thatoneengineer wrote: post #38

I stopped reading after the first sentence. Calling something "inherently political" is a self-fulfilling prophecy and intentionally so. It consistently turns out to be an attempt to lay the groundwork for expropriation. No one called the Internet "inherently political" until people built stuff there that other people wanted to control.

It’s a pretty non-controversial claim and argument about the interaction between technology and human society. If you read the post further you’d probably understand what is meant by that phrase. It’s not centered solely around electronics or the internet at all.
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