Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why my p(doom) has risen, dramatically

garymarcus.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 42 posts

Re: Why my p(doom) has risen, dramatically

#31

Post by os2warpman »

dlivingston wrote: post #24
os2warpman wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zuckerberg is incompetent. He was lucky, and that's all, with Facebook and has coasted on its momentum ever since. Every single "play" after that has failed. Not only have they failed, he's even fallen into the dictator's trap: where wealthy men who surround themselves with multiple layers of overlapping and competing of staff and hierarchy which act to completely insulate and isolate them from reality start or fund…

Incompetent people don't stumble their way into a global empire. Nor do simply lucky people. What a strange comment.

Success is almost entirely familial positioning and timing.

The Great Man is a myth that needs to die.

If you or any other person had wealthy parents who sent you to Philips Exeter and then Harvard and been friends and roommates with who Zuckerberg had been, you would be a wealthy banker, professional, or with luck-- Facebook founder.

My best friend in the Army was a Philips Exeter cat who rebelled against his parents and joined the military, married a stripper, drank and fucked his way across a couple of countries, divorced the stripper, got out of the military, went back home with his hat in his hand, got his mom and dad to pay for Marquette, and now he's the CEO of a medical device manufacturing company his parents started.

Nice guy.

Dumb as hell, but nice.

Re: Why my p(doom) has risen, dramatically

#32

Post by OgsyedIE »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #28
OgsyedIE wrote: post #20

Everybody looks at AI 2027 and nobody looks at Gradual Disempowerment. They both came out at around the same time and they both portend tremendous volumes of doom with a litany of citations, but the preexisting skynet/paperclipper memes means that nobody talks at length about the scenario of a few hundred human owners using AI servants to eliminate everybody else out of an incremental slippery slope of good business…

I think this comes close to the probable near-future outcome, but is missing an important element. Over the last several decades we've seen an enormous transfer and consolidation of wealth from many people into a much smaller number of people. I think AI is going to dramatically accelerate this. Fully open source, locally-hosted AI models are currently lagging far behind their commercial counterparts (in adoption if…

The people in those commercial entities might wholly be the property (with human rights refactored/disrupted), or indentured servants, of just the members of the alignment team of whichever AI company hits recursive self-improvement first, who live like new emperors.

Re: Why my p(doom) has risen, dramatically

#33

Post by lijok »

dlivingston wrote: post #24
os2warpman wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zuckerberg is incompetent. He was lucky, and that's all, with Facebook and has coasted on its momentum ever since. Every single "play" after that has failed. Not only have they failed, he's even fallen into the dictator's trap: where wealthy men who surround themselves with multiple layers of overlapping and competing of staff and hierarchy which act to completely insulate and isolate them from reality start or fund…

Incompetent people don't stumble their way into a global empire. Nor do simply lucky people. What a strange comment.

So the founders of Juicero, Theranos, and WeWork must have been geniuses building sustainable empires?

Re: Why my p(doom) has risen, dramatically

#34

Post by LeifCarrotson »

dlivingston wrote: post #24
os2warpman wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zuckerberg is incompetent. He was lucky, and that's all, with Facebook and has coasted on its momentum ever since. Every single "play" after that has failed. Not only have they failed, he's even fallen into the dictator's trap: where wealthy men who surround themselves with multiple layers of overlapping and competing of staff and hierarchy which act to completely insulate and isolate them from reality start or fund…

Incompetent people don't stumble their way into a global empire. Nor do simply lucky people. What a strange comment.

A modicum of competence, a willingness to engage in cut-throat business tactics to take more than most would think their contributions are worth, a good deal of runway/connections, a little risk-taking...and a huge, huge pile of luck are the only things that could have propelled Zuck to his empire.

Do you really think it's just competence?

A lot of other people also started businesses in ~2004. I worked with one yesterday, he's now a freelancing consultant who is well worth the $180/hour he charges for software development skills in the niche he's built in the last 20 years. He's technically brilliant, brings himself rapidly up to date on new tools, works hard and fast, and is also extremely professional when it comes to communication, finances, and scheduling - a rare combination. I haven't asked about his personal net worth, but he's talked about retirement in a few years, just guessing he's worth maybe a couple million?

Competence cannot be in any way correlated to empire and net worth if Zuck is worth 100,000 times more than my friend. From what I've seen and read from Zuckerberg, he's maybe 0.8x? 0.7? as capable or as intelligent. Maybe, if it's all a front and he's actually the most incredible human being ever, he's 2x. Or even imagine he's a so-called 10x worker. But there's no way that any human's contributions can be imagined to be worth 100,000x more than even an average person's labor.

I'll grant that maybe there's a floor on competence required to reach that level of income. Maybe Zuck isn't truly incompetent. But it's definitely not just competence.

Re: Why my p(doom) has risen, dramatically

#35

Post by weare138 »

I'm sorry but the whole Grok “mechahitler” thing was a feature not a bug. The timing between that and xAI announcing it's AI services for governments and subsequently being awarded a government contract was not coincidental. Elon was demonstrating that Grok 4 comes with a state propaganda switch governments can flip whenever they want.

Re: Why my p(doom) has risen, dramatically

#37

Post by OgsyedIE »

lijok wrote: post #29
OgsyedIE wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, AI-driven p(doom) is only 100% if there is no intelligence ceiling around the human level. But consider, in the alternate universe where we never invent AI, economic p(doom) is also 100%. Humans are fragile and short-lived. https://youtu.be/b5z5R6xqEG0

That's interesting - first time I'm hearing the idea there might be an intelligence ceiling around the human level. Who talks about this more?

It is an open question and typing "human intelligence ceiling ai" into your search engine of choice is a good way to see that, but it is basically wishful thinking. The likes of David Deutsch, Judea Pearl and Noam Chomsky all argue this at differing levels of academic integrity (IMO Steven Byrnes has produced the most rigorous work on the English internet), but there is a simple objection.

If you have a single AI that is capped at an intelligence ceiling equivalent to human levels of intellect, what is stopping you from running fifty of them, in parallel, at fifty times faster than our normal human clock speed, as a team?

Re: Why my p(doom) has risen, dramatically

#38

Post by redeeman »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #21
redeeman wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

could you provide more details on this?

I believe the parent is talking about Grok, the Nazi Twitter AI from Elon Musk: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/14/elon-musk...

yes, a most explicit and deliberate happening masterminded by mr musk himself.

Re: Why my p(doom) has risen, dramatically

#39

Post by vouaobrasil »

ryanmcgarvey wrote: post #30
vouaobrasil wrote: post #3

Gary Marcus has a dichotomy between extinction versus bad actors. I feel a third possibiltiy is much more likely: a world of extreme specialization where AI reigns supreme, and where humans are mainly button-pushers. Those at the top and who still enjoy life will be the techies who are good at and enjoy making things with AI, which will be approximately 1% of the population. The other 99% will be administrators, butt…

Your description of "little toys" and "immense power of AI" seem to be at odds in your argument. Which is it?

little toys was meant to imply the juvenile nature of AI.

Re: Why my p(doom) has risen, dramatically

#40

Post by Henchman21 »

corpusdeli wrote: post #7
eisvogel wrote: post #2

I don't think Elon has any malice towards his own species. I tend to agree with the first comment on the article, re: p(dystopia), where almost all LLM services are currently in play, mostly due to the actions of third party clients.

Lolwhat? He’s literally called for jailing and worse of people with progressive ideas. Either he’s a junky who is so high he doesn’t know what he’s saying, or he’s an evil piece of white shit. (I consider “edgelord doing it for the lulz” to be the second category.)

Hey now, don't shoot so low. It's entirely possible for him to be both! :)
Post reply on HN