Great article, super fun. > In 2025, 1.1 million layoffs were announced. Only the sixth time that threshold has been breached since 1993. Over 55,000 explicitly cited AI. But HBR found that companies are cutting based on AI's potential, not its performance. The displacement is anticipatory. You have to wonder if this was coming regardless of what technological or economic event triggered it. It is baffling to me that…
heh devops was suppose to end the careers of DBAs and SysAdmins, instead it created a whole new industry. "a shitload of people have meaningless busy work corporate jobs." for real.
Iirc in the Matrix Morpheus says something like "... no one knows when exactly the singularity occurred, we think some time in the 2020s". I always loved that little line. I think that when the singularity occurs all of the problems in physics will solve, like in a vacuum, and physics will advance centuries if not millennia in a few pico-seconds, and of course time will stop. Also: > As t→ts−t→ts− , the denominator g…
> I think that when the singularity occurs all of the problems in physics will solve, like in a vacuum, and physics will advance centuries if not millennia in a few pico-seconds It doesn't matter how smart you are, you still need to run experiments to do physics. Experiments take nontrivial amounts of time to both run and set up (you can't tunnel a new CERN in picoseconds, again no matter how smart you are). Similarl…
Kind of, I mean you have to verify things experimentally but thought can go a very long way, no? And we're not talking about humans thinking about things, we're talking about an agent with internet access existing in a digital space, so what experiments it would do within that space are hard for us to imagine. Of course my post isn't meant to be taken seriously, it's more of a fun sci-fi idea. Also I'm implying not necessarily reaching the limits of the things you mentioned, but rather, just taking a massive step in a very short time window. Like, the time window from the discovery of fire to the discoveries of Quantum Mechanics but in a flash.
It is so easy to critique the response in hindsight. Or at the time. But critiques like that ignore uncertainty, risk, and unavoidably getting it "wrong" (on any and all dimensions), no matter what anyone did. With a new virus successfully circumnavigating the globe in a very short period of time, with billions of potential brand new hosts to infect and adapt within, and no way to know ahead of time how virulent and…
It's usually the same people that would have been the loudest to shout if it had not worked as well as it did...
It's the same people who don't even notice that we don't talk about acid rain anymore, because we solved it with government regulation for pretty cheap.
They even indignantly mention the Ozone layer, insisting that "Look, liberals told you to care but its not a problem anymore", ignorant entirely of the immense global effort to fix that.
Your ideal. Definitely not mine. Get rid of everyone else so your life is easier and more sustainable... I guess I need to make my goal to get rid of you? Do you understand how this works yet?
No, you should make your goal to teach AndrewKemendo to appreciate his existence as the inscrutable gift it is, and to spend his brief time in this universe helping others appreciate the great gift they've been given and using it to the fullest.
> * enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly* Here comes my favorite notion of "epistemic takeover". A crude form: make everybody believe that you have already won. A refined form: make everybody believe that everybody else believes that you have already won. That is, even if one has doubts about your having won, they believe that everyone else submit to you as a winner, and must act accordingly.
This world where everybody’s very concerned with that “refined form” is annoying and exhausting. It causes discussions to become about speculative guesses about everybody else’s beliefs, not actual facts. In the end it breeds cynicism as “well yes, the belief is wrong, but everybody is stupid and believes it anyway,” becomes a stop-gap argument. I don’t know how to get away from it because ultimately coordination dep…
On the other hand talking about those believes can also lead to real changes. Slavery used to be seen widely a necessary evil, just like for instance war.
With the odd story that we paid the price for it in the long term. This book https://www.amazon.com/Zero-Sum-Society-Distribution-Possibi... tells the compelling story that the Mellon family teamed up with the steelworker's union to use protectionism to protect the American steel industry's investments in obsolete open hearth steel furnaces that couldn't compete on a fair market with the basic oxygen furnace process…
Ha, we gutted our manufacturing base, so if we bring it back it will now be state of the art! Not sure if that will work out for us, but hey their is some precedence.
The dollar became the world's reserve currency because the idea of Bancor lost to it. Thus subjecting the US to the Triffin dilemma which made the US capital markets benefit at the expense of a hugely underappreciated incentive to offshore manufacturing.
You can't onshore manufacturing and have a dollar reserve currency. The only question then is, Are you willing to de-dollarize to bring back manufacturing jobs?
This isn't a rhetorical question if the answer is yes, great, let's get moving. But if the answer is no, sorry, dollarization and its effects will continue to persist.
The simple model of an "intelligence explosion" is the obscure equation dx 2 -- = x dt which has the solution 1 x = ----- C-t and is interesting in relation to the classic exponential growth equation dx -- = x dt because the rate of growth is proportional to x and represents the idea of an "intelligence explosion" AND a model of why small western towns became ghost towns, it is hard to start a new social network, etc…
How dare you bring logic and pragmatic thinking to a discussion about the singularity. This is the singularity we are talking about. No reality allowed.
I had to ask duck.ai to summarize the article in plain English.
It said that the article claims that is not necessarily that AI is getting smarter but that people
might be getting too stupid to understand what are they getting into.
Are people in San Francisco that stupid that they're having open-clawd meetups and talking about the Singularity non stop? Has San Francisco become just a cliche larp?
There's all sorts of conversations like this that are genuinely exciting and fairly profound when you first consider them. Maybe you're older and have had enough conversations about the concept of a singularity that the topic is already boring to you. Let them have their fun. Related, some adults are watching The Matrix, a 26 year old movie , for the first time today. For some proof that it's not some common idea, I…
I'd be more inclined to let them have thier fun if it they weren't torching trillions of dollars trying to lead humanity into a singularity.
"I'm aware this is unhinged. We're doing it anyway" is probably one of the greatest quotes I've heard in 2026. I feel like I need to start more sprint stand-ups with this quote...
"I'm aware this is unhinged. We're doing it anyway" i love this! I ordered a tshirt they other day that says "Claude's Favorite" I may be placing an order for a new design soon :)