if you click through to the linked Vannevar Bush article and scroll down there are a bunch of vintage ads around the prose that are kind of interesting. And some of the predictions have been well overtaken by events!
> If we consider life to be a sort of open-ended MMO, the game server has just received a major update. All players take note: consider playing differently.
Some of the ugliest prose I've read in a while. Thanks for that.
I think that Gemini regularly generates inane metaphors like the above. As an example, here's a message that it sent me when I was attempting to get it to generate a somewhat natural conversation:
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Look, if you aren't putting salt on your watermelon, you’re basically eating flavored water. It’s the only way to actually wake up the sweetness. People who think it’s "weird" are the same ones who still buy 2-in-1 shampoo.
Anyway, I saw a guy at the park today trying to teach a cat to walk on a leash. The cat looked like it was being interrogated by the FBI, just dead-weighting it across the grass while he whispered "encouragement."
Physical books are vastly superior to Kindles solely for the ability to judge a stranger's taste from across a coffee shop. You can’t get that hit of elitism from a matte gray plastic slab.
----
This was with a prompt telling it to skip Reddit-style analogies.
The article goes from philosophical (what AI will do to society) to jargony blowhard and then even deeper look (I think. I flicked my thumb past several screens of text), and back out again.
Come on author, learn to write properly. Or tell your LLM to not mix a philosophical article with a technical one.
Unrelated, but it seems his previous company, 1x, was initially named Halodi and was located in Norway. And eventually, it was moved with all employees in Silicon Valley. How the hell does that work? That sounds like a logistical nightmare.Do you upend all those people's lives? Do you fire those who refuse? How many norwegians even want to go to the US? Sounds crazy to me.
Not sure how you could read this essay and come to that conclusion. It definitely aligns with my own understanding, and his conclusions seem pretty reasonable (though the AI 2027/Situational Awareness part might be arguable)
> We are entering a golden age in which all computer science problems seem to be tractable, insomuch as we can get very useful approximations of any computable function.
Alternatively, we are entering a dark age where the billionaires who control most of the world's capital will no longer need to suffer the indignity of paying wages to humans in order to generate more revenue from information products and all of the data they've hoarded over the past couple of decades.
> the real kicker is that we now have general-purpose thinking machines that can use computers and tackle just about any short digital problem.
We already have those thinking machines. They're called people. Why haven't people solved many of the world's problems already? Largely because the people who can afford to pay them to do so have chosen not to.
I don't see any evidence that the selfishness, avarice, and short-term thinking of the elites will be improved by them being able to replace their employees with a bot army.
I don't think you've read those quotes very closely? He's writing about all computer science problems. And "just about any short digital problem" is not the same as solving the world's problems.
AI ghosts can do a lot of things, but they're limited by being non-physical.
I don't understand why you're being downvoted. This is a topic worth discussing.
Like every previous invention that improves productivity (cf. copiers, steam power, the wheel), this wave of AI is making certain forms of labor redundant, creating or further enriching a class of industrialists, and enabling individuals to become even more productive.
This could create a golden age, or a dark age -- most likely, it will create both. The industrial revolution created Dickensian London, the Luddite rebellion & ensuing massacres, and Blake's "dark satanic mills," but it also gave me my wardrobe of cool $30 band T-shirts and my beloved Amtrak train service.
Now is the time to talk about how we predict incentive structures will cause this technology to be used, and what levers we have at our disposal to tilt it toward "golden age."
Considering the usage of LLMs by many people as a sort of friend or psychologist we also get to look forward to a new form a control over people. These things earn peoples "trust" and there is no reason why it couldn't be used to sway peoples opinions. Not to mention the devious and subtle ways it can advertise to people.
Also, these productivity gains arent used to reduce working time for the same number of people, but instead to reduce the number of people needed to do the same amount of work. Working people get to see the productivity benefits via worsening material conditions.
AIUI, in most lines of work AI is being used to replace/augment pointless paper-pushing jobs. It doesn't seem to be all that useful for real, productive work.
Coding may be a limited exception, but even then the AI's job is to be basically a dumb (if sometimes knowledgeable) code monkey. You still need to do all the architecture and detailed design work if you want something maintainable at the end of the day.
> It doesn't seem to be all that useful for real, productive work.
Even the most pointless bullshit job accomplishes a societal function by transferring wages from a likely wealthy large corporation to a individual worker who has bills to pay.
Eliminating bullshit jobs might be good from an economic efficiency perspective, but people still gotta eat.
The logic of American economic policy relies on a large velocity of money driven by consumer habits. It is tautological, and it is obsolete in the face of the elite trying to minimize wage expenses.
real productive work like what? What do you think all this hubub with robotics is about?
I mean, I know what you are getting at. I agree with you on the current state of the art. But advancements beyond this point threaten everyone's job. I don't see a moat for 95% of human labor.
There's no reason why you couldn't figure out an AI to assemble "the architecture and detailed design work". I mean I hope it's the case that the state of the art stays like this forever, I'm just not counting on it.
Robotics is nothing new, we had robots in factories in the 1980s. The jobs of modern factory workers are mostly about attending to robots and other automated systems.
> There's no reason why you couldn't figure out an AI to assemble "the architecture and detailed design work".
I'd like to see that because it would mean that AI's have managed to stay at least somewhat coherent over longer work contexts.
The closest you get to this (AIUI) is with AI's trying to prove complex math theorems, where the proof checking system itself enforces the presence of effective
large-scale structure. But that's an outside system keeping the AI on a very tight leash with immediate feedback, and not letting it go off-track.
Capitalists have openly gloated in public about wanting to replace at least one profession. That was months or years ago. What are people doing in response? Discussing incentive structures?
SC coders paid hundreds of thousands a year are just letting this happen to them. “Nothing to be done about another 15K round of layoffs, onlookers say”
> Capitalists have openly gloated in public about wanting to replace at least one profession. That was months or years ago. What are people doing in response?
Great, let them try. They'll find out that AI makes the human SC coder more productive not less. Everyone knows that AI has little to nothing to do with the layoffs, it's just a silly excuse to give their investors better optics. Nobody wants to admit that maybe they've overhired a bit after the whole COVID mess.
A labouring proletariat with bread and circuses is a distracted proletariat. Billionaires are still flesh and blood, much like Louis XVI and Charles I.
I think we'd need a lot more suffering before we have enough people to start that kind of action. If we see 35% unemployment over the next 5 years with insufficient time to adjust, then maybe the pitchforks come out.
Well, time is one aspect but we'd also need motivation and proper execution for a reasonable chance at successful adaptation. My guess is we'll coast along the boundary. I don't imagine things will move so fast as to cause the sort of general upheaval that I think you're talking about. But I do think things will move fast enough to cause significant harm on a larger scale than we've seen recently in the West.
What you fail to understand Bob is that as long as we let the billionaires do what they want then we all automatically win. That's just how the system is designed to work, we can't lose as long as Musk & his buddies are at the helm.
It's the only thing us plebeians can hope for. When all is said & done the people at the top are the only ones that can truly create wealth w/ their innovative genius. The rest of us should just shut up & follow their orders for our own good.
I thought they meant the plural of ASRock as in "ASRocks May think" and thought this was about ASRock motherboards getting a BIOS/UEFI with an integrated LLM or something.
Yes, yes, we are all going to be living in an automated & luxurious communist utopia. Here are some material facts to ground the exuberance: 1) Lifecycel of typical GPU in a data center is 1-3 years, 2) Buildout is already limited by production capacity & will hit production walls by 2027-2028 when turnover matches & exceeds production capacity, 3) TSMCs projected capacity is ~130k wafers/month & it is not keeping up w/ demand which is more than doubling, 4) Power consumption for these "geniuses" & "thinking rocks" in data centers requires lots of power & the capacity was saturated in 2025, 5) So along w/ production capacity limitations power production is now another gating factor.
Anyway, like data centers in space there are lots of material limitations that all of these exuberant "ZOMG rocks can think now" essays all sweep under the rug to drive a very biased narrative about what is actually happening & the fact that all those binary bits are produced by real materials that have lifecycles & production limits not visible in the digital artifacts.
GPU lifecycle is 1-3 years because GPUs are becoming obsolete for cutting-edge work (especially re: power use) in that timeframe. This is good news if you'd like to see expanded use of AI. Production walls at fabs will matter little since future silicon dies will be capable of far more per unit area than current ones, so there will be plenty of incentive to upgrade.
I'm just stating facts. I don't care whether it's a good or bad thing. You can theorycraft about future utopias w/ computronium as much as you want but the facts as they stand today are what I stated.
If you think the facts are "good" or "bad" then take it up w/ the people who can do something about it to make them "better". Typical discussions about stuff like this becomes nonsensical & incoherent b/c whether you think the facts are "good" or "bad" makes no difference to the material reality & again, those are as I have stated them.
Some of the ugliest prose I've read in a while. Thanks for that.
----
Look, if you aren't putting salt on your watermelon, you’re basically eating flavored water. It’s the only way to actually wake up the sweetness. People who think it’s "weird" are the same ones who still buy 2-in-1 shampoo.
Anyway, I saw a guy at the park today trying to teach a cat to walk on a leash. The cat looked like it was being interrogated by the FBI, just dead-weighting it across the grass while he whispered "encouragement."
Physical books are vastly superior to Kindles solely for the ability to judge a stranger's taste from across a coffee shop. You can’t get that hit of elitism from a matte gray plastic slab.
----
This was with a prompt telling it to skip Reddit-style analogies.
Come on author, learn to write properly. Or tell your LLM to not mix a philosophical article with a technical one.
They can’t and never will.
Alternatively, we are entering a dark age where the billionaires who control most of the world's capital will no longer need to suffer the indignity of paying wages to humans in order to generate more revenue from information products and all of the data they've hoarded over the past couple of decades.
> the real kicker is that we now have general-purpose thinking machines that can use computers and tackle just about any short digital problem.
We already have those thinking machines. They're called people. Why haven't people solved many of the world's problems already? Largely because the people who can afford to pay them to do so have chosen not to.
I don't see any evidence that the selfishness, avarice, and short-term thinking of the elites will be improved by them being able to replace their employees with a bot army.
AI ghosts can do a lot of things, but they're limited by being non-physical.
Like every previous invention that improves productivity (cf. copiers, steam power, the wheel), this wave of AI is making certain forms of labor redundant, creating or further enriching a class of industrialists, and enabling individuals to become even more productive.
This could create a golden age, or a dark age -- most likely, it will create both. The industrial revolution created Dickensian London, the Luddite rebellion & ensuing massacres, and Blake's "dark satanic mills," but it also gave me my wardrobe of cool $30 band T-shirts and my beloved Amtrak train service.
Now is the time to talk about how we predict incentive structures will cause this technology to be used, and what levers we have at our disposal to tilt it toward "golden age."
Also, these productivity gains arent used to reduce working time for the same number of people, but instead to reduce the number of people needed to do the same amount of work. Working people get to see the productivity benefits via worsening material conditions.
Coding may be a limited exception, but even then the AI's job is to be basically a dumb (if sometimes knowledgeable) code monkey. You still need to do all the architecture and detailed design work if you want something maintainable at the end of the day.
Even the most pointless bullshit job accomplishes a societal function by transferring wages from a likely wealthy large corporation to a individual worker who has bills to pay.
Eliminating bullshit jobs might be good from an economic efficiency perspective, but people still gotta eat.
I mean, I know what you are getting at. I agree with you on the current state of the art. But advancements beyond this point threaten everyone's job. I don't see a moat for 95% of human labor.
There's no reason why you couldn't figure out an AI to assemble "the architecture and detailed design work". I mean I hope it's the case that the state of the art stays like this forever, I'm just not counting on it.
> There's no reason why you couldn't figure out an AI to assemble "the architecture and detailed design work".
I'd like to see that because it would mean that AI's have managed to stay at least somewhat coherent over longer work contexts.
The closest you get to this (AIUI) is with AI's trying to prove complex math theorems, where the proof checking system itself enforces the presence of effective large-scale structure. But that's an outside system keeping the AI on a very tight leash with immediate feedback, and not letting it go off-track.
Capitalists have openly gloated in public about wanting to replace at least one profession. That was months or years ago. What are people doing in response? Discussing incentive structures?
SC coders paid hundreds of thousands a year are just letting this happen to them. “Nothing to be done about another 15K round of layoffs, onlookers say”
Great, let them try. They'll find out that AI makes the human SC coder more productive not less. Everyone knows that AI has little to nothing to do with the layoffs, it's just a silly excuse to give their investors better optics. Nobody wants to admit that maybe they've overhired a bit after the whole COVID mess.
I see literally zero people doing the equivalent of “breaking the factories” like the luddites attempted
Do you not see the overwhelmingly negative response to AI produced goods and services from the average westerner?
At a certain point it’s too late.
What if it’s over 10 years?
I thought they meant the plural of ASRock as in "ASRocks May think" and thought this was about ASRock motherboards getting a BIOS/UEFI with an integrated LLM or something.
Anyway, like data centers in space there are lots of material limitations that all of these exuberant "ZOMG rocks can think now" essays all sweep under the rug to drive a very biased narrative about what is actually happening & the fact that all those binary bits are produced by real materials that have lifecycles & production limits not visible in the digital artifacts.