Sometimes you can be in a situation where every actor taking locally-rational actions leads to globally catastrophic outcomes. It would be easy to argue I think that the July Crisis was like this: if you look at the incentives of each player, they had many reasons to do what they did, and nobody can perfectly what all other players will do, or what the future holds.
Doesn't this prove my point? In feudal Japanese society, wealthy merchants were lower status than poor samurai, i.e., they rich could not buy political power. "The wealthy" and "the ruling class" are not always the same group of people.
I guess I was thinking of the samurai as being part of the permanant overclass. You mentioned that of old aristocracy provided officers for the military, so I thought that was analogious to the samurai. Perhaps I misread what you're trying to say.
My reading was that the Samurai were part of the overclass but were pretty useless, albiet still potentially dangerous, and just sat around devouring resources for hundreds of years, so perhaps the overclass of the future could do the same. The samuri weren't all rich, but they didn't dishonor themselves with labor, which is a similar thing and they certainly held power over the state. The end of the samuri was, perhaps, an example of the state getting what it wants despite the desires of the permanant overclass, supporting what you said, but it took a long time to get there.
I suppose you are thinking of the Samuri as an arm of the state and not "the rich".
You're making a mistake by confusing "wealth" and "ownership of the means of production". Under feudalism, the means of production are land rights. Merchants don't have those; warrior-nobles do. The ruling class is the class that controls the means of production.
I will say that a feudal society where you have merchants/factors/etc becoming richer than the feudal nobles is a society in transition. The Japanese example is no different from Renaissance and early modern Europe when capitalism was in its earliest stages.
For every person using AI as a personal tutor there's a hundred people using it to produce AI slop articles, slop scientific papers, slop short stories, to checck out of living and let the AI do all their thinking and writing and creation. Voluntary disempowerment is already here!
For many, this is how they learn. They are experience learners, which is the vast majority. This overwhelming condemning of people learning, not being excellent first try, always comparing against the famous top tiers of everything is Lord Of The Flies. Fuck it: make slop, swim in slop, and emerge smarter. Condemn those experiencing and trying and learning is the stupid slop.
A corporation that is fully staffed by AIs and only retains humans for legal reasons (as directors, for liability etc.) still needs money to coordinate. You need to pay for inputs, you need to pay to run the AIs, which consumes resources. Why would costs go to zero? The market is still a valuable tool for allocating resources even if no market actors are human.
> A corporation that is fully staffed by AIs and only retains humans for legal reasons (as directors, for liability etc.) still needs money to coordinate.
i see developer starting to develop apps from scratch using ai. they aren't really doing "ai-assisted coding", the LLMs are doing pretty much most of the work.
and the company is shedding people off (as in: voluntarily not not keeping up with the natural people turnover).
as a sysadmin/cloud/devops engineer this is weird because i see people that after a week of development have a decently complex app working... but they have no idea how it works. they're largely unable to troubleshoot it.
Why am I writing this?
Because i have a very strong feeling that people in other positions (directors, managers etc) are doing a very similar job, meaning they essentially have no idea what's going on at all.
How long can this go on? I don't know really, i think this is uncharted territory for humanity.
To my mind the article is excellently written, but it comes with many bigger "if"s than the one it states.
That said, taking for granted some of its premisses, indeed saying that cost goes to zero in term of money is no big deal.
That is, money is purely human conventions. So if humans are put out of the loop, not only monetary cost goes to zero, the whole notion can skipped.
Of course, there is still some energy and material needed to run data centers, which do have costs in whatever unit one might measure them with.
A market is a place where human encounter to trade. Without humans, there is no market.
We do with mere local scalar currency because using vectorial computation taking into account everything that can be probed and measured into account integrated into a single whole is out of reach for human representation, even for the most intellectually gifted human person.
Money is a stupid unit, that tries to conflate everything in a single scalar and proves every single time that it's not able to deem what something is worth in all its intricated relationships. But somehow humans seem unable to leverage at scale on any tool that would be more sophisticated in all their socioeconomical exchanges. Once again, if one eliminate humans from the equation, or isolate as a ridiculously marginal factor, money and market become irrelevant.
All that said, once again, that stand on a very large set of "if"s.
> All that said, once again, that stand on a very large set of "if"s.
Yeah, probably I should have listed some more premises, i.e. that corporations maximize profits, the state maximizes power and security (I don't entirely buy the Realist framework, but if you want to predict how things work out "in the limit", rather than tomorrow, it seems alright?).
And naturally every "therefore" becomes weaker the further out into the future you try to predict.
Agree with sibling that this is a straw man. The state exists to protect and serve the capitalist class, not particular capitalists. Actual state policy generally arises out of conflicts between factions within the capitalist class, striving either for direct benefit or for different guesses of what benefits the class as a whole. But the capitalists don't have to provide any benefit to the state to earn its protection, as in your model. It is literally what the state is for.
This straw man doesn't merit falsification. Nobody claims wealth alone gives political power. Wealth applies leverage to all endeavors, but political ends still require strategy and operationalization. It's just a lot easier with a couple trillion dollars, vs. a single individual vote once every couple of years.
> you start or fund a think tank that writes policy proposals, or a media organization that advocates your views
Or you run "money primaries", financially filtering the menu of candidates before democratic voting. Or you pay/lobby for (non-democratic) judicial appointments, which is a strategy that's been openly pursued since 1971: https://biotech.law.lsu.edu/blog/powell-memo.pdf
Seems kinda silly to name such a huge project after a meme that will be stale in a few years, but then, this was likely all generated by AI, so it doesn't matter.
EDIT: Expanding on this a bit, because I want this comment to be more productive and less old-man-yells-at-cloud.
When I saw the link I got curious. It reminds me of the old skdb[0] project and of Open Source Ecology[1]. The idea is cool: a DAG of civilization from David Gingery[2] basic tools to jet planes and turbofans and rocket engines! Imagine that!
If it was real, it would be world-changing. The creator would be a personal hero of mine. But it's not real. It's a vague suggestion of the real thing.
Who is the creator? No-one knows. These vibeslop websites never have an About page, or contact info. No-one is putting their reputation on the line, regarding the quality or accuracy of the content.
> never have an About page, or contact info. No-one is putting their reputation on the line, regarding the quality or accuracy of the content.
It's a useful litmus test current to quickly evaluate new websites/services/projects, if there is no names/profiles attached to it that you can find some history about, it's well likely to be hastily put together with not much concern for quality. People who care about quality usually end up proud of the thing they make public.
Tangentially, this is why (despite being an extremist for privacy) I've somewhat soured on Internet anonymity. Very few people are using their anon status to further discourse, i.e. like Publius. Mostly it's just people who want to sever the reputational thread between their output and their person.
I think it's fine to be pseudonymous, like Gwern, because while your government identity is protected, the pseudonym is a persistent store of reputation across time.
If the About page said who made it, i.e. if someone was putting their reputation on the line, I might be more receptive. But the website has enough LLM design tics to make me suspicious.
It's sad. I come to Hacker News to see cool stuff and when I click on a link and see something obviously put together by an LLM I feel like I've been tricked :(
Fair hit and I should have done that from the start. There is a person behind this and the About page is now updated (https://storiedcolors.com/about).
Short version: I'm a technical architect who painted as a kid, stopped for years, and started this to get back into it. I do use AI to draft the entries and I'm not going to pretend otherwise but I check every one against named, non-Wikipedia sources and cut what I cant source. You shouldn't take that on faith so the methodology and the citations are there to check and there's a corrections address when I get something wrong. I totally get the "put together by an LLM" reaction on how it felt. I'd rather try and earn the trust back than argue about it.
Right?! It's a bummer when a nice-looking website is now a red flag. It's become part of my workflow now browsing the web to check the About/Contact page on a website immediately; if there's no real person behind the site, how can it be trusted?
Apologies. Was taken with the names and stories. . . didn't read the about page. Guess my critical thinking was on the fritz. Seriously, learn a lot here and will try to do better.
I actually think “explore Claude’s understanding of colors” is an interesting concept. A lot of fascinating cultural information gets compressed into LLMs.
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