I don't think many people disagree with this. The main problem is that labour has been what allows regular people to have negociating power with those who own most of the capital.
People are worried that if they lose this leverage, nothing is stopping the few who have most of the capital to just disregard the needs of the masses.
Democracy is what allows regular people to have negotiating power vs the rich, and the majority of these battles are actually won through legislation, not union negotiation.
I understand that regular people have lost faith in democracy, and that they think rich people control the world and make every major decision, but that just doesn't ring true to me. Democracy is more or less giving us what we vote for, we just vote for dumb things. Ultimately, I have faith that if political and economic circumstances change enough, we might actually vote for the right things.
> Democracy is more or less giving us what we vote for, we just vote for dumb things.
Sorry, when did I vote in favor of the Citizens United, McCutcheon, or Buckley outcomes, all of which are tied to our current predicament of money in politics? And how is my voice, through my vote, able to change and possibly overrule those decisions? Until that happens, even the ballot box won't give me negotiating power versus the wealthy.
The five Supreme Court Justices who voted in favor of Citizens United and McCutcheon were all appointed by Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Had either of those two not won the presidency, Citizens United and McCutcheon would have lost their cases against the FEC.
People can still vote for representatives who want to pass legislation to undo those cases through congress. There's nothing that's stopping people from voting in representatives who are in favor of this (yet).
When the mine closes, democracy does not save the town. It still becomes a ghost town. Democracy cannot work upstream against fundamental market forces.
Every industry is being pitched as becoming a ghost town. Democracy will not save us. We will all die in the future and not be replaced. This is the end of our line in this century. I hope you are proud of how far we’ve come because this is the end for us. There will be no economic justification for humanity quite soon and we will likely be slaughtered to eliminate latent variability.
That's not a very good analogy. When the mine closes, democracy doesn't save the town, because the town only has control over the economic activity inside of it.
AI or no AI, the US will still have control over the economic activity inside of it. America is not pitched to be a ghost town, but instead a vastly productive and wealthy economy driven by AI. A ghost town cannot redistribute wealth it does not have, but America will still have all of the wealth.
Democracy is also doomed by sufficiently capable AI. When the "meta" military unit was a knight in shining armor, most societies were under feudalism, ie rule by knights. When guns became cheap enough that whoever had the most guys would win a civil war, we got democracy: rule by whoever has the most guys. When whoever has the most robots will win a civil war, what kind of government do you expect?
It's impossible to predict when they happen, or their outcomes. The world may be worse at least for a while after them. Or they fail in general.
But they happen and then all the people who were crowing about the inevitability of some existing order and now it embodies natural law and what not look really f*ckin stupid in retrospect.
People believed in the divine right of kings with the same full earnestness of people on this forum who have think AI is just the outcropping of some transcendent mathematical telos.
I might disagree with it, unexpectedly, even though I'm very lazy and anti-work and would have agreed with it ten years ago. This isn't some they took our jobs stance, either.
Thing is, you have this mythical beast, the "dark factory". This exists mainly as way to humiliate the west by suggesting that China is way more developed. One reason that it's unlikely to be substantially real is because of the failure of robotics to really replicate adaptable, self-repairing, sensitive, sensible humans in an industrial context. But two of those adjectives are technical, while the other two, adaptable and sensible, are to do with knowledge and creativity.
I mean that it's an ugly fact that human creativity (thinking on your feet), and morality even (knowing what to do), is useful and necessary in the context of the most boring shitwork. Even on an assembly line, if you're expected to do some QA and accept ad-hoc instructions for different products. I don't want us to be diminished by having to do the shitwork, but I don't think AI can make it go away.
Oh come on, why a downvote? I put some thought into this and all I get is a binary nah.
You're directionally right, anyway. There's no reason significantly advanced AI (likely to not be developed from LLMs but from some other path) can't completely replace a wide variety of human labor. But replacing human labor with machinery (i.e., capital) is not new, it's been going on for a couple centuries plus some. The thing that happens when you replace wage labor with capital is that the rate of profit (i.e., the ratio of profit to the amount of invested capital) tends to fall, which is a systemic threat to investment. The recurring tech and asset bubbles since the 1990s have each been inflated in an attempt to maintain rising levels of investment in the face of rising productivity and therefore falling profit. An economy of dark factories isn't useful under capitalism, because it produces goods which end up having no sale-value.
The Musk-esque theory is that robots can do all the drudgery for free, while the economy centers on humans being creative, which in this trope looks like an Elysium with singing and dancing and poetry and painting, and maybe togas.
The core argument is that people don't want to be machines, and shouldn't do mechanical work, and that it's a shame if anybody feels compelled to work like a machine to survive. But then we have the job loss part, in which, because of automation, that person doesn't even have the option of working like a machine, and complains about it.
However, I'm coming round to thinking that the vision of a continual symposium-party is wrong anyway. I think automation can't do all that much, and creativity is needed in even the most mundane and dreary contexts. This means automation is less disruptive that it's purported to be - but is still somewhat disruptive - and the change in the nature of jobs is less of a shift to creativity - but is still a small shift to creativity. The jobs aren't delightful, people are still needed in factories, and there are no togas involved. This is my dreary insight.
I often hear people talk online about burning data centers to avoid some capitalist dystopia.
It just seems incredibly pessimistic to me. Who wants civil unrest? The rich elite does not want this either.
We will pay people.
Capitalism is not set in stone when human labor is no longer essential for productivity and AI can handle planning that markets currently coordinate through capitalism.
Exactly! The rich don't want to see mass starvation any more than the rest of us. We only permit homelessness and food insecurity now because of scarcity and a "just deserts" mentality where we blame people for their lot in life. When AI is doing the majority of labor, there will be no "just deserts" mentality, and there will be massive abundance.
This is plainly delusional. There already is abundance, global crop lands produce enough calories to feed twice the world’s population[0]. Greed is the reason for inequality and “AI” is not solving that. It is pure wishful utopian thinking to believe that there will be some massive AI-initiated abundance.
Speaking specifically about food insecurity and homelessness in the US, it's not simply greed, it's "just deserts" ideology. It's a belief in the lack of merit of the poor to receive help.
Speaking globally, there are many more barriers to feeding everybody than just abundance, like the other guy said.
Not much info on the actual robot... For instance, I wonder how it has enough battery to follow a whale for 'months'? Which seems really unrealistic, as sperm whales can dive more than a kilometre, can't imagine an autonomous robot can support this kind of pressure, let alone for months at a time?
There exist many underwater vehicles that can withstand ocean pressures. The REMUS 6000 for example can reach depths of 6000m.
As the article describes, these are gliders:
> A glider is a small robot that slowly changes its buoyancy, becoming slightly heavier to sink and lighter to rise.
It doesn’t need battery power to endlessly spin a prop. With little energy expenditure it can inflate or deflate a bladder; changing volume changes buoyancy and therefore vertical motion in the water column. The vehicle’s design allows it to “soar” as it does so. The tradeoff is control.
The bot doesn't have to dive deep, it can track, follow and listen to the whales from above using the same sonar gear. Also, I kind of doubt the whales would talk much when in the deep.
Why couldn't the calendar app expose in an API the read_calendar and update_calendar functionalities, and have a skill 'use_calendar' that describes how to use the above?
Then, the minimal skill descriptions are always in the model's context, and whenever you ask it to add something to the calendar, it will know to fetch that skill. It feels very similar to the MCP solution to me, but with potentially less bloat and no obligation to deal with MCP? I might be missing something, though.
> The MCP exposes the API with those tools, it explains what the calendar app is
So does an API and a text file (or hell, a self describing api).
Which is more complex and harder to maintain, update and use?
This is a solved problem.
The world doesnt need MCP to reinvent a solution to it.
If we’re gonna play the ELI5 game, why does MCP define a UI as part of its spec? Why does it define a bunch of different resource types of which only tools are used by most servers? Why did not have an auth spec at launch? Why are there so many MCP security concerns?
These are not idle questions.
They are indicative of the “more featurrrrrres” and “lack of competence” that went into designing MCP.
Agents, running a sandbox, with normal standard rbac based access control or, for complex operations standard stateful cli tooling like the azure cli are fundamentally better.
> So does an API and a text file (or hell, a self describing api).
That sounds great. How about we standardize this idea? We can have an endpoint to tell the agents where to find this text file and API. Perhaps we should be a bit formal and call it a protocol!
How would the AI know about the calendar app unless you make the text file and attach it to the session?
Self-describing APIs require probing through calls, they don't tell you what you need to know before you interact with them.
MCP servers are very simple to implement, and the developers of the app/service maintain the server so you don't have to create or update skills with incomplete understanding of the system.
Your skill file is going to drift from the actual API as the app updates. You're going to have to manage it, instead of the developers of the app. I don't understand what you're even talking about.
Sure thing! That probably won't take more than a couple years at 10-20 hours a week of tutelage, and although my usual rate for consulting of any stripe is $150 an hour, for you I'm willing to knock that all the way down to just $150 an hour.
Just give us a taste of what we'd be paying for? I'm sure you're an expert but before I commit to 2+ years of consultation I'd like to see your approach.
I've already pointed this out as the silly, purposeless argument it's become. (Or more become.) Even I at this point can't figure out who is advocating what or why, other than for the obvious ego reasons. You're bikeshedding at each other and wasting all the time and effort it requires, because no one else is enjoying it any more than you two are: if anything you have left your audience more confused than we began, but I see I repeat myself.
Show me you can stop doing that, and I'll happily mediate a technical version of this conversation that proceeds respectfully from the two of you each making a clear and concise statement of your design thesis, and what you see as its primary pros and cons.
For that I'll take a flat $150 for up to 4 hours. I usually bill by the 15-minute increment, but obviously we would dispense with that here, and ordinarily I would not, of course, offer such a remarkable discount. But it doesn't really take $150 worth of effort to remind someone that he should take better care to distinguish his engineering judgment and his outraged insecurity.
I don't get it, you joined this thread to call me an idiot with a meme, and now you're talking about being a neutral arbiter for a technical discussion that I supposedly ruined.
More than anything I'm getting frustrated with HN discussions because people just insinuate that I'm stupid instead of making substantive arguments reasoning how what I'm saying is wrong.
Are we performing for an audience or having a discussion?
I can't make heads nor tails of anyone's position in this mess, precisely because of its devolution into everyone yelling at one another. Yours happened to be the tail comment on this branch at the time I posted. Don't take it more personally than it was meant.
I understand why this website doesn't have DMs except among YC founders. But if it were otherwise, I'd have DMed you instead of posting that first comment publicly. The criticism I remain convinced has merit, but such things are better done in private. If I chose to make an example out of you over the other guy, it was because you looked like offering a better chance than he of redirecting this into the kind of discussion from which someone could conceivably learn something.
Are you certain? My understanding was that this is automatically injected in the context, and in my experience that's how it worked. I never see 'ReadFile(claude.md)', and yet claude is aware of some conventions I put in there.
Afaik the experts are not usually very interpretable, and generally would be surprised if at least one does not change every token. I don't know what happens in practice, but I know at least during training, nothing is done to minimize the number of expert switches between tokens.
I'd have thought at least a tiny explicit penalty term for switching, to discourage messing around with the composition without any expected gains from it.
If one is to use these on hardware that can't keep everything loaded I guess someone should examine how it works out in practice. Interpretability may be be a too much to ask, but I can't spontaneously see any reason why the experts can't at least be pushed to incorporate what's needed to remain the good choice for a longer segment.
The switching is done by layer, not just per token. Every layer is loading completely different parameters, you don't really benefit from continuity. You're generally better off shifting this work to the CPU, since CPU RAM is more abundant than the GPU's VRAM hence it matters less that so much of it is "wasted" on inactive expert layers. Disk storage is even more relatively abundant, so offloading experts to disk if you can't keep them in RAM (as OP does) is the next step.
People are worried that if they lose this leverage, nothing is stopping the few who have most of the capital to just disregard the needs of the masses.
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