On this point - check out Matthew Pines on his view that over the next year the US will force allies to convert treasuries and gold to US century bonds, with the stick being a threat of being left outside the US security and technology alliance system. The conversion being a way to deal with the big overhang of US short-dated debt.
This week a major US AI development flew under the radar - a US congressional commission, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) presented their annual report to congress.
Their number one recommendation was that Congress establish a "Manhattan Project-like program dedicated to racing to and acquiring an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) capability".
There's a lot to say about this, which I cover in the piece.
It's an awfully big logical stretch from "a report used the phrase Manhattan Project" to "AGI may be born secret." This is coming from someone who knew the relevant history/concept beforehand.
The word "may" is doing a great deal of work in your headline.
The possibility of "humans to spend their free time in true leisure" is actually cited and specifically not rejected in the piece. It's addressing a very specific, and very dangerous, failure mode of a post-AI society.
Read the piece and be enlightened.
Also, jeez, I pine for the day when silly randomly-applied ad-hominems like "tech bros" just get dogpiled. For your own sake, elevate your discourse, man (or woman).
btw I also agree that pure PageRank on the endorsement links might benefit from tweaking, although some of the common failure cases for PR on the web don't apply here - you can't generate piles of extra humans to endorse-link to yourself.
So, to respond to the snark seriously, the problem it is trying to solve assumes that we have encountered a particular economic failure case - that AI has outcompeted humans in cost and quality of work, such that most humans have zero economic value.
So without some scheme, there will be no wealth distribution whatsoever, and potentially grim actions by national leadership.
It's a "utility-based" wealth distribution scheme.
I prefer to find a distribution scheme that is not isomorphic to communism.
The social graph described in the article is what you see in a high school or small community or anywhere material productivity is not important. Relationships and attention are the source of value.
Ironically, those places are the most communist. Everybody enters on a relatively even footing, and there are strong norms against directly profiting off your peers.
Have you ever been to a high school? Nobody is on equal footing, socially speaking. The authoritarian nature of high school is about the only communist thing about it.
Kids are not materially the same. Some kids are on foot, some have cars, some have nice cars. Same for clothes, vacations, basically everything. I think uniforms may be common these days but even with uniforms you can tell who has money, drugs, popularity. Their bodies are radically different from each other.
I get what you're driving at I guess (and I initially misunderstood and thought you were pro-communist). All that happens if you take money and talent out of the equation is, the most attractive and connected people get ahead. Being unattractive is what makes a lot of people develop other positive qualities within themselves such as talent. If we are entering a talent-free world then there will be a lot of people with no prospects to have a satisfying life because there is nothing else they could do systematically to increase their value to society.
> I prefer to find a distribution scheme that is not isomorphic to communism.
Communism as it was practiced, or communism as Marx envisioned it?
Because what Marx was envisioning was communal ownership of the means of production, which in the case of AI would mean communal ownership over the very businesses that necessarily have to replace humans with AI for cold hard business reasons.
I don't think Marx's idea of utopia is stable, game theoretically, but then very little utopian ever is.
What you've got certainly has enough merit to be interesting! But, as Communism demonstrated, the difference between theory and practice can have a genocide or three between them.
Unfortunately communism "...then was replaced by a <insert ruling class> after masses were sufficiently bamboozled by a strong leader" seems to be the kinetic outcome for every attempt at nation-scale communism.
This is an example of the "No true Scotsman" fallacy. These arguments for communism have been refuted thousands of times before, no need to waste electrons doing it here again.
Communism is always and everywhere a violent ideology, because the core tenets of communism are an exercise in theft, repression (economic and otherwise), and envy. People naturally don't want to be repressed - the communist answer is that those people, then, need to be murdered.
I resent the fact that communists created a history where terms like Lesser Megamurderer and Deka-Megamurderer[1] (sic) are simply factual descriptions, rather than works of dark fiction.
I'm ever hopeful though that good people like yourself, that have been unintentionally absorbed lies about what communism is, can be given an opportunity to read broadly, learn about history, meet victims of these regimes, and look back with discomfort at what you advocated in the past.
To the extent that one may argue that Communism has to be anarchic, I think that it is doomed to follow exactly that path — but this is a flaw with anarchy, not with Communism, and would also affect e.g. anarcho-Capitalism.
I would also argue that the flavour of Communism seen in China, from Mao Zedong to wherever you'd like to say it's become "state Capitalism", was overall a success despite the Great Chinese Famine that was unnecessarily severe due to people wanting to win favour and avoid getting purged.
You may be surprised by my position on such a severely bad thing, which I am openly calling out as severely bad. This is not to minimise it, but because I see similar failures in very non-Communist systems — the UK had, for different reasons, a similar failure of governance with the Irish Potato Famine that made that unnecessarily severe. Given the timings, I suspect the Irish Potato Famine formed part of Marx' reasoning when writing the Communist Manifesto in the first place.
I do not think we need to repeat the mistakes of the past, but for me that means looking into the causes of bad governance everywhere rather than picking between the biggest teams of the mid 19th to late 20th century.
There's a place for something new — just as Marx' Communist Manifesto was written in a world where Capitalism seemed to be enriching a minority in a "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" kind of a way; and just as Smith's Wealth of Nations was written in a world where local market information could not possibly be collected let alone computed by a central government; so now do we find ourselves in a world where we have some ideas about how a Nash equilibrium can show us what outcomes are incentivised by the legal and technical things we consider building.
It's OK to ask if we can figure out how to do the (next) Industrial Revolution without Sabotage[0] from Luddites afraid of losing their jobs to automation, it's also OK to ask if we can figure out how to get public ownership of the means of production without dictatorships, and it's OK to ask how we might get government of any kind without groupthink[1].
> It could be “being a good producer” and “being a good judge” are different things
Yes I agree with this in principle. Although in this case what "good" is, is ill-defined - or rather different to everyone. The scoring each person performs is actually most directly a statement of utility to the scorer. That should probably go into the piece as an edit :-)
It’s interesting to observe how detached the discussion here is from the issues created for Europe due to the DMA. A majority of the comments here make the implicit assumption that the DMA is good because it will penalize big tech companies and force them to change business models in the EU. This is not what is happening or will happen.
What’s really being destroyed by the DMA is Europe’s access to new technologies and services. It’s almost like a self-embargo on the AI building blocks of their future economy.
When Nvidia GPUs are supply constrained do you really think it matters to Nvidia if they need to redirect the small chunk of their supply constrained volume that they were previously selling into France? Who is harmed in this picture? The only EU AI player of note, Mistral, and other EU businesses.
Does it really harm Apple if the DMA forces them to withhold new AI features in Europe? They still earn their device and services revenues. Who is harmed in this picture? EU consumers and businesses.
We’ve now seen within just a couple months, Apple withhold AI features and Meta withhold multimodal AI models from the EU. Expect this cutting off of the EU from new features to become a recurring event over the next year.
DMA-supporting voices are under a serious misapprehension of what the effect of the DMA is and will be over the next few years. It’s cutting off European access (consumer, business & government) to critical technologies which are all being developed outside the bloc.
The DMA violates a number of longstanding principles of good legislation - it is vague, it’s written to enable arbitrary enforcement, it’s penalties are not designed to be proportionate to damages, or even require actual damages in order to be applied, the regulator’s actions stray into actual takings of property (European Commission opinion that Facebook cannot charge a subscription fee for its ad-free offering… so it must operate as a charity? This is a taking of property. European Commission opinion that Apple cannot charge a platform fee for use of its IP? This is a taking of property).
I think the topic is hard to talk about because the EU is technically trying to do the right thing but reality often rewards the conquerors and the US, China etc. (aka the competitors) still believe in the right of tech conquest. They don't stop their companies from taking whatever they want whether it's properly licensed or not. So we are in a situation where the EU is dotting their i's and shaking hands in their moral superiority while not understanding that we have to compete with people who don't care if they steal something or rob you by force. It's similar in all these other areas like the DMA and GDPR... we are competing with markets who simply don't care that they are violating people's privacy and it's more profitable to rob people and sell their stuff. The EU in my opinion has to create regulations that understand this reality and create an even stronger wall for european companies. So please go create these regulations, fine.. but understand that you should make unfair exceptions for european companies.
Let european companies that are situated here violate these regulations and make this explicit: As long as the US and China do not have equivalent regulations, EU companies are explicitly allowed to steal US and chinese content. Yes really, make that very explicit. Make laws with the full understanding of what reality we are living in. We are dealing with competitors who will take our last shirt by force, not friends and "partners" as they so lovingly put it in their press releases.
