Global Intelligence Crisis

Are you going to choose to buy your protein bar online from mysteryBargainBar[.]com for a $1 savings, or just pick it up as part of your local grocery trip?

> I still remember when people were scared to buy things on the internet

People still /are/ scared to buy things from Amazon for things that go on or in their body.

Trust is what we've always had for dealing with this. It is an incredible force multiplier for intellectual capacity.

We've just forgotten it. This doesn't require a technical solution, it just requires operating in a trustworthy manner and only extending your web of trust in your platforms to trustworthy entities.

Price matching across vendors does not matter if you trust one vendor. You can just go with "order from Costco" and avoid a complicated technical problem.

So much of what we are doing now is rediscovering trust, integrity, and ethics. Think about Meta and the challenges they would have to being a foundational model provider in light of that analysis, for example.

If I understand this correctly, the whole chain depends on Phase 1 being right, that agentic coding makes SaaS replicable in weeks. We got a live test of that in February when Claude Cowork plugins wiped ~$2T off enterprise software. As I see it the market made a category error though, pricing Salesforce and ServiceNow the same when systems of record and systems of engagement have very different exposure: https://philippdubach.com/posts/the-saaspocalypse-paradox/

The displacement numbers are the other thing (support hires down 65% in eight quarters) but historical evidence keeps showing tech creates more jobs than it kills.

The situation is clear. There is a great risk to the livelihoods and bargaining power of workers everywhere. This risk is driven by a race dynamic that is accelerating. In tech we can see this earlier than others because we are close to the technology at the heart of this.

This is quickly becoming one of the largests threats to the public in history and the concentration of power of this trajectory threatens democracy. Irreversable shifts in the structure of power are on the table.

I think the clear point of this piece is that we have the space and opportunity now to ask ourselves as a group: what are we doing? Who actually stands to benefit from the massive devaluation of services in an economy that is buoyed by service-based roles?

There has been so little thought to the multi-order effects of the future we're pushing toward, and even if AI fails to deliver on its lofty promises, it will likely cause an economic crisis in its collapse.

The people saying that AI will rapidly drive costs down are frankly delusional. The things that people actually need to live like food, shelter, and clothes all have inputs that are physical and real. Even if AI somehow can drive the input costs of those things down, it will be delayed, and people will suffer in the interim.

The AI future that I worry about isn't the terminators coming to get us, it is the top 0.1% using this technology to accumulate more wealth. Unlike feudalism, however, the feudal lords will not be dependent on or responsible for the serfs, they can rely on a small minority of humans for production of critical goods for themselves.

These wealthy people don't really hide how they feel either[1], they are clearly stating their contempt for the unwashed masses below them. As Lasch predicted in his "Revolt of the Elites," they are separating themselves entirely from culture in favor of their own insulated fiefdoms. This is already happening: companies more than ever are orienting toward ultra-luxury: from travel, to housing, and everything in-between.

[1]: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/peter-thiel-billio...