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Extinction-Level Capitalism

matthewbutterick.com

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Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#81

Post by bilegeek »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #68
trashface wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Memory might be a moat. A cynical view is this is why openAI is buying up all the capacity for HBM. If they have all the memory then we plebs won't be able to afford hardware to run local models. So we instead we have to rent their models basically just to get access to the memory.

I doubt it. Memory manufacturers are going to ramp up, given the demand. Can AI make enough money to buy up the increased capacity forever? Whereas each user just needs enough money to buy up the memory that they need for their use. AI needs to invest billions, small users have to invest thousands. And the payback is going to be there for the small guys, so that even if they have to borrow to get the memory, they wil…

> Memory manufacturers are going to ramp up

Given the prior boom-bust cycles, they are essentially slow-walking expansion to whatever plans they had prior to the AI boom. Don't expect things to let up for awhile, even if AI crashes tomorrow they'll keep supply controlled as long as they can.

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#82

Post by warumdarum »

dmurvihill wrote: post #56
swiftcoder wrote: post #45

There's a core problem this analysis overlooks: OpenAI and Anthropic don't have a moat. The Chinese labs are consistently able to replicate their LLM capabilities a few months after the fact, and then release open-weight models a few months later... The only way for "Big AI" to become a thing is for them to establish a moat, and right now the only path to that appears to be achieving regulatory capture in the US, whi…

That's why they're so keen to build out all these data centers; the massive capex is their only conceivable moat. Whether all those additional parameters actually make a competitive difference is still an open question.

Moat by having the investors in a bubble in to deep. Thanks, i never looked at it that way. It can not fail, because IT CAN NOT FAIL or we are done for

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#83

Post by tanseydavid »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #48
himata4113 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We will see, the big concern here is that lifespans start increasing faster than aging, ex: you're a ~40 year old and estimated lifespan is 80, but by the time you're 60 it's 90, by the time you're 80 it's 100 and at some point it might start increasing faster than the speed you age at. Of course we might be a few generations away from where this is the case, but it's a scary thought. Another would be the power your…

All the new tech gods will eventually die of cancer due to prop 65 (thanks California.)

[dead]

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#84

Post by jason_oster »

Uh, this read is completely insane. A fantastical look into the mind of someone who thinks about many disparate things and is looking for ways to connect them. This is post hoc rationalization at its finest.

I had a much longer post here initially. Deleted it because I got tired of mental gymnastics required to follow the author's thought process. Instead, here are the salient parts of my response:

----

The only way I can read the section on the mechanical tomato harvester is that they would rather have 32,000 people picking tomatoes than doing literally anything else. There are very good reasons that phone companies haven't employed people as switchboard operators for a nearly century. It isn't a valuable or useful way to spend a person's time.

As a young adult, I worked in a distribution center filling orders by picking products from a shelf and placing them in bins. It was incredibly boring but also physically demanding. Pick the correct number of items ordered, push the button. Pick the next number of items ordered for the next product, push the button. When the order is complete, start on the next bin. Repeat as fast as possible without making any mistakes.

It was SO draining to meet quota. After a few weeks, I didn't have to put any conscious effort in. Like driving a car, the process became automatic. I could think about other things while counting and pushing buttons. Thinking about things like how trivial this job would be to automate, so I didn't have to do this wasteful energy expenditure.

I quit that job after about 6 months, beginning my career in IT. But I gained a passionate hate for menial labor that can be automated with some upfront investment. I wouldn't want to pick tomatoes, either. The tomato harvesting machine is a miracle.

If this is the basis of calling technology inherently political, and using "inherently political" to cast a negative light on technology, then I have to call it out as hopelessly dystopian to not want "political technology". Namely fewer automated machines and more people doing menial labor.

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#85

Post by epsteingpt »

mavleop wrote: post #76
epsteingpt wrote: post #5

Interesting argument, but wrong. It's not obvious that there will be a single AI and that it will by definition concentrate power. At a certain point - intelligence doesn't matter. Unless we're literally headed toward 1984 / matrix at which point it doesn't matter. My guess is the argument for what we're doing is counterintuitively the opposite of what he's making. Unless we go hard at the market - now - an authorita…

You've misunderstood the essay. A central point is to not think about AI risk in terms of matrix/sci-fi scenarios, but in terms of how it might/is likely to function in our societies. So if you discount the sci-fi scenarios (which is a separate argument), the argument that "we need to be the first to develop AGI" doesn't hold water. If, say, China gets there first, so what? It will affect their society however it'll…

Perhaps - can't jump into the mind of the author. But a lot of it relies on theoretical and philosophical scenario planning (eg Marx)

If that's your premise, and you suggest that an authoritarian country winning on AI recursive self-improvement does not have the possibility to completely reshape the world into an authoritarian regime... I'll suggest you're falling prey to the exact 1st sentence of the article and making a political point, not a logical one :-)

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#86

Post by jason_oster »

skybrian wrote: post #37

The argument is that labor depending on LLM’s is dangerous but it makes speculative assumptions that the big AI labs will win. > Consider large law firms, aka Big Law. Currently certain legal-AI star­tups license LLMs from Big AI and repackage them for Big Law at high prices. These star­tups claim to add other special sauce. OK, sure. Where’s the economic equi­lib­rium? If legal-AI star­tups prove that money can be m…

It's an absurd scenario because Big AI is simply not in the Big AI Law business. They are also not in the Big AI Accounting business, the Big AI Pharmaceutical business, or the Big AI Web App business. It is absurd because the CapEx and OpEx to subsume every industry is unjustifiable.

On legal-AI startups undercutting Big Law to the point where Big Law has to adopt AI... Well, yes, that will happen. But as the article's intro belabors the point, there is a natural resistance to changing entrenchment. And it is practically impossible to overcome. So, good luck to the Big Law C-suite laying everyone off with AI when they can't even replace WordPerfect with a modern word processor.

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#87

Post by ozgrakkurt »

thriftwy wrote: post #43
ozgrakkurt wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure Russia is Russia because Russians are Russians and Russian culture is Russian culture. Not because Russia was communist.

I will address some of your concerns. Karl Marx was European. His publisher was European. His early adopters were Europeans. The evidence that Europe cannot be communist is not there. Soviet Union is a pinnacle of socialist achievement. It is possible that your communism will have mass starvation and hoe strikes breaking skulls phase which is not followed by space exploration and nuclear power phase. You are miserabl…

Sorry for late editing, it felt too much writing to essentially mean the same thing.

I don’t mean it in a negative way. I just mean ideologies or religion doesn’t dictate what whole civilizations do. It is just a small part of it.

It is arbitrary to assign positive/negative outcomes to religion or ideology.

For example, the science advancement in Russia began before communism with Petro as far as I know. So the positive science success of Russia can't be attributed to communism only

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#88

Post by swiftcoder »

ShinyLeftPad wrote: post #63
swiftcoder wrote: post #45

There's a core problem this analysis overlooks: OpenAI and Anthropic don't have a moat. The Chinese labs are consistently able to replicate their LLM capabilities a few months after the fact, and then release open-weight models a few months later... The only way for "Big AI" to become a thing is for them to establish a moat, and right now the only path to that appears to be achieving regulatory capture in the US, whi…

Big AI is a thing. Insane money and construction projects makes the government invested in it one way or the other. It can't fail or it'll cause economic shock. It's a play to normalize it and make everyone depend on it before people question how they trained it all on their data and now drive them out of their jobs. If they ask for a moat they will get it, the government can simply require licensing for hardware req…

> If they ask for a moat they will get it, the government can simply require licensing for hardware required to run any model comparable to the cloud ones (for "national security")

This is the "moat by US regulatory capture" I mentioned above, but it only extends to the US, and pretty much cedes the rest of the world to the Chinese labs. It only makes sense if the US is going to become an isolationist power

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#89

Post by tim333 »

sucrosesucrose wrote: post #17

The fatalist philosophers and authors have been mostly proven right as time marched on. And this time will be no different, the existence of "AI" ensures the future will be as dark or worse as the predictions expect. Why? Because humans are flawed and corrupt, too prone to excesses (specially conformism and convenience) and the exploitation of the natural world.

Depends which philosopher but on the whole things have continued fairly similar as time marched on but with some tech improvements. Human nature is the same as Roman times - we still have wars, arguments and inequality. Tech has produced longer life expectancy, literacy, communications and the like. Which fatal thing has happened beyond that?

Re: Extinction-Level Capitalism

#90

Post by charlescearl »

“ Liberals, and Social Democrats in general, have this common belief that capitalism can be “reformed” to become more humane and acceptable to society, and that this can be done by the use of state power which can be acquired through elections in a political democracy; this state of reformed capitalism can be institutionalized for ever, which makes any struggle for socialism unnecessary.”

https://mronline.org/2026/06/13/the-chimera-of-a-reformed-ca...

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