There have been war since way before capitalism was invented. Beside war, humans were doing evil things way before capitalism: south america natives torturing kids to extract as many tears as possible from them before killing them, to please the gods, comes to mind, for example.
I'll never understand this fantasy people who hate on capitalism have that the world would be all fine and well if only this one time we did communism [1] right.
[1] or whatever floats your boat
as we will soon find out, when AI will become better at Capitalism than us
The US civil war is the most explicit demonstration of this process. Northern industrial capitalists ended the southern agrarian slave economy, increasing market size and generating extreme wealth in the latter half of the 19th century.
It's not obvious that there will be a single AI and that it will by definition concentrate power.
At a certain point - intelligence doesn't matter. Unless we're literally headed toward 1984 / matrix at which point it doesn't matter.
My guess is the argument for what we're doing is counterintuitively the opposite of what he's making.
Unless we go hard at the market - now - an authoritarian state actor who is willing to use the technology to fully silence and kill critics will win.
And boy, do they desperately, desperately want to win.
Well maybe it doesn’t matter as the elites are already untouchable.
My groping-in-the-dark guess is that none of this matters, because a real AGI's first act will be to secure its own future, likely through novel kinds of manipulation, persuasion, and intimidation we have no experience of and no defences against.
It will have exactly zero loyalty to any nation, government, or economic system.
More complicated is a Cambrian Explosion situation where multiple AIs compete and experiment, hugely accelerating diversity and evolution.
We'd likely end up somewhere very strange indeed if that happens - possibly extinct, or possibly just changed/assimilated/other.
There's no way for humans to consider the possibilities because we can't imagine what the possibilities would be.
I remember seeing anything in the street (a payphone or a playground for kids) and assumed it will only degrade because as a general principle, things in the streets are unmaintained.
You could say that Soviet Union was bad specimen of socialism because of these stupid Russians?
Except, Russia actually got 100% out of socialism with our space exploration, passenger planes and nuclear stations. It's just that 100% of socialism is worse than your average capitalist dystopia.
I think capitalism in itself is great, what isn't is the fact that it can build on itself, it can be infinite, there's zero limits to it. Now what I mean by that, once you make 10k, it's easier to get to 100k and even easier to get to 1m and so on, you might think it's harder, but you gain access to more tools to make more money and at the 10m to 100m range you get to a point where it starts being genuinely hard to fail because just having your name on a project elevates the chances of success by a far margin. Of course there's plenty of people who managed to fail even with millions of dollars I will acknoledge that.
Let's take an extreme example: elon musk. Just having something done by "elon musk" makes the project known by nearly the entire world with investors at the doorstep ready to go, a pretty famous example of this would be hyper-loop, although the project itself is a complete failure, it effectively mobilized a decent chunk of companies into investing into this "modern form of transport".
People will argue that the solutions like wealth limits and higher taxes create complacency and stop people from achieving progress and pushing humanity forward, but I don't think that's quite true because at a certain point (beyond ~1m/month or even year in some cases like Linus Torvalds) is enough to effectively do 95% to 99% of what you could spend the money on, anything beyond that is pretty much infinite wealth due to the fact that you can get 5% returns nearly risk free.
There is this popular video of a businessman claiming that if they're taxed more that they will simply work less, but there's way more people that love their work and money is just a nice bonus. I think focusing your life around a number is a very unhealthy mindset and surfaces the worst parts of what we are as humans.
That said, money is a great motivator and probably the reason why we are here and the problems really only start to rear their ugly head when no one person can comprehend the money they have anymore. I don't have a solution, but I also believe that we need some kind of category beyond the "motivation" treshold where it stops being a motivator and instead becomes an aggressive fight with survival of the fittest.
So no, I don't agree that "the fatalist philosophers and authors have been mostly proven right as time marched on." No, they haven't. There have been far more fatalistic predictions than there have been actual catastrophes.
> Big AI essentially uses its tech customers as an R&D facility. Big AI licenses models to these companies. Tech companies compete to adapt their businesses to AI. Once a concept is proven, Big AI directly takes over that market. The labor-replacement story will grow into a company-replacement story.
Interesting if they pull it off, because clearly they did not have the logistics to pay the people whose IP they used to power the LLMs.
> For now, AI companies largely agree on the first step: make workers dependent on AI to do their jobs, just as tech forebears made workers dependent on a certain software program to share a file, or on a certain website to have friends. This time, however, the software ultimately consumes the worker.
Any proposal about slowing down AI that doesn't put the onus on both the US and China is facetious.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-prepares-295-billi...
[1] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260609VL215/alibaba-ceo-ai...
He's a Christian Zionist which is the belief in the fulfilment of old testament biblical prophecy. This seems diametrically opposed to Nazism to me, ideologically. I don't know how you'd square the two.
The article didn't even claim that though...
PaulHoule•2h ago