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And the LLMs exist to further those problems. People can't afford houses? Well, now they won't be able to own computers either. That's a feature, not a side effect. Once the K-shaped economy progresses enough, you won't even be allowed to use the LLMs. They'll exist only to be a tool for the new feudal class who owns you.

Unless you destroy their wealth now.

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Once capabilities catch up with the demand (~which is in few years - it just takes time to build!) average person will have much better access to higher quality and cheaper hardware. It's literally how it has always worked, I don't understand why would it be different this time. There's zero substance in your comment, just repeating tired tropes from twitter.
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A market requires scarcity, because scarcity is what neccesitates trade.

You can't invoke market mechanisms to defend a post-scarcity scenario.

Why would the ai owners make things cheaper or even available at all once their abundance machines give them everything they want?

What would they get out of if it? What could ordinary people trade for it that their abundance machine can't give them already and that would be worth giving up their monopoly on productive force?

You can't argue "this will change everything" and "this is how it's always worked" simultaneously, and yet AI accelerationists bring out both to defend their ideology.

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> That's a feature, not a side effect.

You’re implying that the deep lizard state planned the LLM craze?

Sama might be a lizard..

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r>g is an old hustle, LLMs just accelerate it. Lizards aren't wizards.
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when there was so little capital it had to be true... the idea that it will persist forever is obviously silly.
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The problem isn't that it fails to unwind, the problem is what the unwind looks like. Last time it meant global upheaval and world wide capital incineration -- mostly metaphorical in the case of the US but very literal in the case of Europe and Asia. The poor suffer more in real terms but capital suffers more in nominal terms and that unwinds inequality and the burden of furnishing runaway capital with the runaway returns it demands in excess of economic growth.

I'm sure the same "strategy" will work again, but this time around everyone has nukes and drone swarms and AI-equipped bio labs so shit's gonna be lit.

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You don't need a back room filled with cigar smoke where supervillains coordinate their plans while twirling their mustaches when good ol' class interest does the same job.
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s/deep lizard state/billionaires/
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> The reason problems like housing or famines or war aren't being solved is because structurally there's no incentives to solve them not because there's not enough geniuses out there.

Rather: these problems are not solved because there are not enough geniuses who are capable of convincing the masses to send the responsible politicians to hell.

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A great deal of the supposed smartest people have fully sided with fascism, it's not about smarts
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I'm confused by this comment, can you explain?
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This is broadly the same people who bemoaned the idea that the "smartest people in a generation" were all just working on adtech without any reflection about maybe that's not actually an exclusive set of the smartest people... or that a lot of the people in that set were the same one who might, twenty years ago, otherwise be chasing money as middlemen in finance vs doing productivity-expanding things anyway...

You can be smart and chase the money, but it's crazy hubris to assume that only your peer set of money-chasers are smart.

It's a small leap from there to "since we're the only smart people, we should get to have the most influence."

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I’ve heard people say variations of, “Clever people can easily convince themselves of just about anything, if they’re inclined to. And then it’s nearly impossible to talk them out of it.”

Kinda seems true. And the worst people in history often don’t seem super dumb, despite their various other defects.

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"Supposed" is doing a lot of work there. Compare, say, Yudkowsky et al. to the people who actually changed the world with mRNA vaccines.
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Yudkowsky is hardly an example of someone who has sided with the fascists.
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In America anyways, we send the “responsible politicians” to hell every 2-6 years. People vote for this.
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and yet... it feels like we are actually a one party state most of the time.
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The party of corporate interest?
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Maybe underneath it all we really do want the same thing…
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More like the people with power all serve the mechanism of power: Capital.
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Duverger's law. Any elected body with FPP voting will converge to a one-party body.
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That is not what Duverger's law says. (But it's a interesting hypothesis so thanks for mentioning it.)
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For that you might need the kind of geniuses who write stirring books about principles and values. Or whatever the modern equivalent of those books is. Maybe nobody would pay attention to that kind of advocacy in the present day, not sure why. But it's not tech geniuses, anyway. Much though tech has power as a catalyst.

I suppose there was Project 2025, and there was that book about the inevitability of Russian hegemony (or empire or something) that Putin liked. Those got attention with influential people. Not sure what to conclude from that.

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> Rather: these problems are not solved because there are not enough geniuses who are capable of convincing the masses to send the responsible politicians to hell.

People support policies that make housing much less affordable (e.g. rent controls) and oppose policies that would make housing more affordable (e.g. zoning reforms). Saying that it's evil politicians that cause this crisis is dishonest - it's what people want.

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People by and large don’t understand the second and third order effects of their policy preferences. It’s not that they don’t want those things, it’s that the world is more complicated than their mental model insists it is. Politicians could try harder to fix the fundamental problems but they don’t because the long-term solutions don’t manifest until after the next N (very expensive) election cycles.
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The politicians are those who created the respecting laws.

"Convincing the masses to send these politicians to hell" is thus nearly isomorphic to making the masses hate politicians who create such laws, which at least very likely implies that by convincing the masses to send these politicians to hell, a different mindset emerges in the masses.

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There is no evidence that reducing rent makes the rent go up - only fearmongering. It's a stopgap measure, though, since there still won't be enough housing to meet demand unless you also fix that at the same time.
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Which you can also do as a city by just... building! You don't need some developer to come in, you can just do that as a local government!

The City of Vienna is the largest landlord in Europe. It is also the only capital in Europe without a stifling rent or housing crisis.

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> because there are not enough geniuses who are capable of convincing the masses to send the responsible politicians to hell

I could talk about this for hours, and was last night actually.

What do vanguardist communism, feudalism, liberal democracy, and fascism have in common? A shared belief that the general population is composed of a bunch of dumb dumbs that need super smart (read: politically educated) people to "lead" them.

Seems subjective. When is the smartness, big smart enough to allow someone to enter the hallowed ranks of "actually a real human allowed to speak for the masses?"

There does seem to be a clear delineation between the people you hear about (the vanguard in our example), and the people you don't hear about (the masses): willingness to create confrontation. Most people want to just go with the flow, live in peace. In a dichotomy I've been calling "choose peace or violence," they choose peace. They choose to see bad things in the world or their life and focus on managing their happiness around it.

I think that this is the default human mode of existence, and that this mode lacks defenses against people willing to violate the default peace. Imagine a bagel line, and someone cutting that line, and when tapped on the shoulder, the cutter breaking into a huge tantrum, and people in line backing down with a "Jesus! It's not worth it, fine." Thus some people learn that they can be much more selfish in life if they're willing to create confrontation and disturb the peace.

When I talk to people about agitation, civil disobedience, or even just unionizing, the most common thing I hear is anxiety. What if the situation gets worse, what if there's reprisals, what if I lose this little bit of comfort that I've managed to be happy with? That slice could get smaller and smaller but people aren't willing to take the step to say "enough is enough" because I think it fundamentally goes against human nature, we have to sacrifice our own happiness on some level to put our foot down and demand or make change. At minimum we have to acknowledge the discomfort or injustice, which is a diversion from our constructed internal peace.

Personally I think people should be allowed to live in peace. Maybe the liberal democrats and vanguardist communists are right, maybe most people shouldn't need to trouble themselves with the greater direction of their society. However I think the stability this promises is false; in fact I think all stability is false. I think this constructed peace that people are afraid to disrupt clearly can be torn apart at any moment, not just by people willing to create conflict, but by a literal earthquake, or fire, or plague. Therefore I think there's a couple societies in history that got it right: ones who distributed the responsibility of society across all individuals in the society; namely the brief period of syndicalized Spain, and the several hundred thousand years of certain tribes of native Americans on the eastern portion of the continent. There may be other societies in history, these are just the cases I've been able to read about so far.

It seems to me that it's possible and necessary for all people to be ready to wake out of their constructed peace long enough to make adjustments together to maintain it. I don't think this is the same thing as them being "led out of it," I think this is each individual being on some level alert to the need to spontaneously say "no, here we wait in line for our bagels. No, screaming about it won't help you, get to the back of the line. Look around: everyone is laughing at how silly you look."

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Yes, many of the problems are 'features not bugs'. There's no reason to think the AIs won't dream up more of these'features' too.
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> The reason problems like housing or famines or war aren't being solved is because structurally there's no incentives to solve them not because there's not enough geniuses out there.

When I asked why Musk doesn't put his money towards non-profits my Musk supporting friends say it's because he "doesn't believe anything but for-profit entities can solve the world's problems".

So why isn't he solving homelessness, famines, war, etc. with capitalism?

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To add insult to injury, we're being told: "Just trust us bro, however we make things worse now will totes be redeemed as the prophesied god-mind magically fixes it later."

Strangely, they never discuss the possibility that Multivac might seize all their wealth and cast them down into average-ness. What if it actually comes about, but then it tells us to do the things we already refuse to do?

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