This is where we're headed: https://sibylline.dev/articles/2025-10-12-ai-is-too-big-to-f...
Well we could still vote out the corrupt and actually invest in US infrastructure but I guess that's crazier than hanging all our hopes on AI serfdom.
After the AI boom: what might we be left with?
221–230 of 489 posts
Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?
#222This is where we're headed: https://sibylline.dev/articles/2025-10-12-ai-is-too-big-to-f...
> brutal serfdom
You can't seriously believe that spending all your income each month while living in the country with the highest standard of living in history is "serfdom."
Hyperbolic nonsense like this makes the rest of the article hard to take seriously, not that I agree with most of it anyway.
Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
Comparing to China is tricky because Chinese investment is almost by default bubbley in the sense of misallocating capital. That's what heavily state-directed economies tend to do and China's still a communist country. Especially they tend to over-invest in industrial capacity. China's massively overbuilt electricity grid and HSR network would be easily identified as a bubble if it were in the west, but when it's sta…
All fair points, and it's hard to know exactly how robust the Chinese system will turn out to be, however I would argue that their bets are paying off overall, so even if there is some capital misallocation, overall their hit rate in important areas has been good, while we've been dumping capital in "Uber for X, AirBnB for X, ..."
Well, their bets haven't been paying off, Chinese government is in huge amounts of debt due to a massive real estate bubble, and lots of subsidies that don't pay back. It's a systematic problem, for instance their HSR lines are losing a ton of money too.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amtrak/comments/1hnvl3d/chinese_hsr...
https://merics.org/en/report/beyond-overcapacity-chinese-sty...
It's easy to think of Uber/AirBnB style apps as trivialities, but this is the mistake communist countries always make. They struggle to properly invest in consumer goods because only heavy industry is legible to the planners. China has had too low domestic spending for a long time. USSR had the same issue, way too many steel mills and nowhere near enough quality of life stuff for ordinary people. It killed them in the end; Yeltsin's loyalty to communist ideology famously collapsed when he mounted a surprise visit to an American supermarket on a diplomatic mission to NASA. The wealth and variety of goods on sale crushed him and he was in tears on the flight home. A few years later he would end up president of Russia leading it out of communist times.
Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not proposing and end of history, but things can remain in stable equilibrium for longer than you'd expect (just look at sharks!). If we slide into stable dystopia now, my guess is that there will be a black swan at some point that shakes us out of it and continues evolution, but we could still be in for 50 years of suffering.
> but we could still be in for 50 years of suffering. I mean if you are talking about USA itself falling into dystopic metastability in such a situation, maybe, but even so I think it misses some nuance. I don't see every other country following USA into oblivion, and also I don't see the USA bending the knee to techno-kings and in the process giving up real influence for some bet on total influence. The only mechani…
That's basically my maximum likelihood scenario.
Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?
#225Cell phones have been through how many generations between the 80s and now? All the past generations are obsolete, but the investment in improving the technology (which is really a continuation of WWII era RF engineering) means we have readily available low cost miniature comms equipment. It doesn’t matter that the capex on individual phones was wasted. Same for GPUs/LLMs? At some point things will mature and we’ll b…
> At some point things will mature and we’ll be left with plentiful, cheap, high end LLM access, on the back of the investment that has been made.
Okay, and? What if the demand for LLMs plummets because people get disillusioned due to the failure to solve issues like hallucinations? If nobody is willing to buy, who cares how cheap it gets?
Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?
#226This is where we're headed: https://sibylline.dev/articles/2025-10-12-ai-is-too-big-to-f...
> brutal serfdom You can't seriously believe that spending all your income each month while living in the country with the highest standard of living in history is "serfdom." Hyperbolic nonsense like this makes the rest of the article hard to take seriously, not that I agree with most of it anyway.
Take a look at the way people in a large part of the US are living. Paycheck to paycheck not because they're idiots that likes to consume, but because shit is expensive and wages haven't kept up with productivity for like 50 years.
People are suffering, agree with the rest of what I say or not, but I can't let you slide on that.
Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?
#227Cell phones have been through how many generations between the 80s and now? All the past generations are obsolete, but the investment in improving the technology (which is really a continuation of WWII era RF engineering) means we have readily available low cost miniature comms equipment. It doesn’t matter that the capex on individual phones was wasted. Same for GPUs/LLMs? At some point things will mature and we’ll b…
> At some point things will mature and we’ll be left with plentiful, cheap, high end LLM access, on the back of the investment that has been made. Okay, and? What if the demand for LLMs plummets because people get disillusioned due to the failure to solve issues like hallucinations? If nobody is willing to buy, who cares how cheap it gets?
LLMs are less of a miraculous new world than the hype machine says they are, but they are not nothing. They have some actual uses. It will fulfill those uses. There will be some people who still buy.
Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?
#228Cell phones have been through how many generations between the 80s and now? All the past generations are obsolete, but the investment in improving the technology (which is really a continuation of WWII era RF engineering) means we have readily available low cost miniature comms equipment. It doesn’t matter that the capex on individual phones was wasted. Same for GPUs/LLMs? At some point things will mature and we’ll b…
AI as normal technology take.
Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?
#229This is where we're headed: https://sibylline.dev/articles/2025-10-12-ai-is-too-big-to-f...
Quite an interesting read Basically saying we're in war time economy with a race to super intelligence. Whichever super power does it first has won the game. Seeing the last tariffs and what China done about the rare earth minerals (and also the deal the US made with Ukraine for said minerals), the article might have a point that the super power will cripple each other to be the first with the super intelligence. And…
It says the people running the US right now think that is the game we are playing - it doesn't say it is the one we actually are playing. America is utterly fucked if they are wrong, and only a bit less so if they are right.