End state of capitalism is Egyptian pharaohs, a few pyramid architects, and a lot of slaves and whips.
The only thing to counter this would be some sort of geopolitical Darwinism, where societies that invest more in their populations would have healthier and stronger societies and militaries.
But nuclear Armageddon prevents that from being any sort of slim hope.
The current American political climate of extreme service to the ultra rich, vast degradation of the democratic institutions, and infrastructure for a complete surveillance state is bleak.
The only hope I have for some sort of human structure in this technological wasteland that might win out is the fact that AI and the tech algorithms in general have taken the demographic collapse associated with urbanization and vastly magnified it.
We're already seeing this in places like China. If you have too much centralized control and too much limitation of freedom, The population will simply refuse to procreate, and your country dies a slow death over 50 years.
Ive done a couple exploratory learning with AIs and wow could it help with learning.
Imo we may be messing up the economy with AIs. They should be engineering better workers, not being employed to make one person do the work of three poorly.
The power of AIs to smooth learning and raise expertise, rather than replace it, should be the adaptation goal. Obviously AIs as work assistants are powerful, but all the AI bullshitting CEOs overselling AIs is really damaging on the whole economic level
Particularly because the current marketing leads to the next generation abandoning roles that AI bullshitters claim are perfectly replaced.
It's like the urbanization demographic bomb on steroids.
I find myself worrying the AI bubble will pop and we'll lose this aspect of AI's without it ever being properly explored. Instead of doomscrolling now I find myself firing up claude and saying 'explain ... to me' and it proceeds to tell me all about it. I can ask it questions and it seems fairly right - at least right enough for me to proceed, it's way better at this than building code, in my experience anyway.
When people say the "bubble will pop" it's meant in analogy to the dotcom era - businesses and investers lost money, but the internet (and its opportunities) didn't vanish.
Even open-weight local models are becoming good enough for teaching yourself quite a range of stuff, especially the beginner aspects. LLMs are not going to simply disappear because of a financial reallignment. The worst thing might be not being able to access a super-duper frontier model for free?
No, there is one award each year, and this year it is shared equally between two people: Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard. This happens more often, and it has even been shared between three people (in 2002, 2007 and 2018).
It increasingly looks like legacy auto should have pursued (and still can, there is a LOT of runway for it) PHEV architectures for a 10 year cycle. Well to be honest government should have put a hard deadline of 10 years for PHEVs over 20 years ago (10 years after the Prius/Insight was released) for all consumer platforms or pay a $5000 new car tax.
PHEVs with 50 miles of range would effectively make almost all day-to-day driving electrified, at least in "consumer" transportation, wouldn't require special recharging equipment beyond a 110V outlet, removes range anxiety, would alleviate urban air pollution.
Of course nothing will be done in this administration. But to the point of the article, oil and transportation dependence, even with extensive shale oil production, remains a national security risk that PHEVs and alt energy can mitigate.
Lol, #2 on the front page, but "Microslop" violates HN posting/commenting policy, as I was chastised for.
I suppose it's refreshing people laugh at Nadella trying to, uh, "lead" by saying don't call AI slop, but Microsoft has had monopoly power over the thoughts and feelings of PC for decades before the smartphone.
There used to be hundreds of humans doing math by hand. They were computers. The people that managed those armies of humans were management class.
Then came actual silicon computers. The ones that managed those, despite the fact the value, quality, efficiency, productivity of the systems they now managed dwarfed the old human armies, those people were no longer management. They were labor.
AI will bring a similar effect. These front line "managers" who were already greyarea management, will be labelled "labor".
Needs: network performance and costs, desperately.
I wouldn't mind SAN/non-local storage performance and costs too.
VM cost isn't where AWS gets you. It's ALLLLLLLL the other nickel and diming that they kill you on, especially since outbound data transfer costs a log of money to get off of the platform.
reply