AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

The printing press and communications technology. Prior to that everything was run by the king who was chosen by God himself.

The author's conspiracy theory is this:

    > I think that what is really behind the AI bubble is the same thing behind 
    > most money, power, and influence: land and resources. The AI future that is 
    > promised, whether to you and me or to the billionaires, requires the same 
    > thing: lots of energy, lots of land, and lots of water. Datacenters that 
    > outburn cities to keep the data churning are big, expensive, and have to be 
    > built somewhere. [...] When the list of people who own this property is as 
    > short as it is, you have a very peculiar imbalance of power that almost 
    > creates an independent nation within a nation. Globalism eroded borders by 
    > crossing them, this new thing — this Privatism — erodes them from within. 

In my opinion, this is an irrationally optimistic take. Yes, of course, building private cities is a threat to democratic conceptions of a shared political sphere, and power imbalances harm the institutions that we require to protect our common interests.

But it should be noted that this "privatism" is nothing new - people have always complained about the ultra-wealthy having an undue influence on politics, and when looking at the USA in particular, the current situation - where the number of the ultra-wealthy is very small, and their influence is very large - has existed before, during the Gilded Age. Robber barons are not a novel innovation of the 21st century. That problem has been studied before, and if it was truly just about them robber barons, the old solutions - grassroots organization, economic reform and, if necessary, guillotines - would still be applicable.

The reason that these solutions work is that even though Mark Zuckerberg may, on paper, own and control a large amount of land and industrial resources, in practice, he relies on societal consent to keep that control. To subdue an angry mob in front of the Meta headquarters, you need actual people (such as police) to do it for you - and those people will only do that for you for as long as they still believe either in your doing something good for society, or at least believe in the (democratic) societal contract itself. Power, in the traditional sense, always requires legitimization; without the belief that the ultra-powerful deserve to be where they are, institutions will crumble and finally fail, and then there's nobody there to prevent a bunch of smelly new-age Silicon Valley hippies from moving into that AI datacenter, because of its great vibrations and dude, have you seen those pretty racks, I'm going to put an Amiga in there, and so on.

However, again, I believe this to be irrationally optimistic. Because this new consolidation of power is not merely over land and resources by means of legitimized violence, it's also about control over emerging new technologies which could fundamentally change how violence itself is excercised. Palantir is only the first example to come to mind of companies that develop mass surveillance tools potentially enabling totalitarian control in an unprecedented scale. Fundamentally, all the "adtech" companies are in the business of constructing surveillance machines that could not only be used to predict whether you're in the market for a new iPhone or not, but also to assess your truth to party principles and overall danger to dear leader. Once predictive policing has identified a threat, of course, "self-driving", embodied autonomous systems could be automatically dispatched to detain, question or neutralize it.

So why hasn't that happened yet? After all, Google has had similar capabilities for decades now, why do we still not go to our knees before weaponized DJI drones and swear allegiance to Larry Page? The problem, again, is one of "alignment" - for the same reason that police officers will not shoot protesters when the state itself has become illegitimate, "Googlers" will refuse to build software that influences election results, judges moral character or threatens bodily harm. What's worse, even if tech billionaires would find a small group of motivated fascist engineers to build those systems for them, they could never go for it, as the risk of being found out is way too severe: remember, their power (over land and resources) relies on legitimacy; that legitimacy would instantly be shaken if there was a plausible leak of plans to turn America into a dystopian surveillance state.

What you would really need to build that dystopian surveillance state, then, is agents that can build software according to your precise specifications, whose aligment you can control, that will follow your every order in the most sycophantic manner, and that are not capable of leaking what you are doing to third parties even when they do see that what they're doing is morally questionable.

I work as an SRE, I have tried LLMs, they barely work. You're not missing out.

Or, more correctly, they don't work well for my problems or usage. They can at best answer basic questions, stuff you could lookup using a search engine, if you knew what to look for. They can also generate code for inspiration, but you'll end up rewriting all of it before you're done. What they can't do it solve your problem start to end. They really do need a RTFM mode, where they will just insult you if you're approach or design is plain wrong or at least just let you know that it will now stop helping as you're clearly of the rails.

We need to bubble to pop, it'll be a year or two, the finance bros aren't done extracting value from the stonks. Once it does, we can focus on what's working and what isn't and refine the good stuff.

Right now the LLMs are the product, and they can't be, it makes no sense. They need to be embedded within product, either as a built in feature, e.g. CoPilot in Visual Studio, or as plugins, like LSPs.

Clearly others are having more luck with LLMs than I do, and do amazing projects, but that sort of illustrates the point, their aren't ready and we don't have a solution for them to be universally useful (and here I'm even restricting myself to thinking about coding).

> Consciousness is a physical phenomenon

This can mean one of 50 different physicalist frameworks. And only 55% of philosophers of mind accept or lean towards physicalism

https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/4874?aos=16

> rainbows, their ends, and pots of gold at them are not

It's an analogy. Someone sees a rainbow and assumes there might be a pot of gold at the end of it, so they think if there were more rainbows, there would be more likelihood of pot of gold (or more pots of gold).

Someone sees computing, assuming consciousness is at the end of it, so they think fi there were more computing, there would be more likelihood of consciousness.

But just like the pot of gold, that might be a false assumption. After all, even under physicalism, there is a variety of ideas, some of which would say more computing will not yield consciousness.

Personally, I think even if computing as we know can't yield consciousness, that would just result in changing "computing as we know" and end up with attempts to make computers with wetware, literal neurons (which I think is already an attempt)