zackmorris

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That's a good point.

If the wealthy and powerful continue buying land at the rate they are, through private equity firms for example, then we could end up in the neofeudalist scenario where us peasants can't acquire the capital to buy the land back (like in England before the Black Death around 1350 broke the nobles who could no longer afford essential workers). Then the only options left to us are taxes/regulation or revolution. Since the capitalists would have captured government by that point, the only option left may be revolution.

I could also see scenarios where we go full vanlife, although more vagrancy laws are being passed, and flock cameras could be used to enforce high registration fees to the point where it's no cheaper to live in one's car than to rent.

Admittedly those scenarios are pretty out there. Probably what will happen is something outside of what we expect. For example, the "rabble" may end up being the blue collar workers that we used to think of as the conservatives. They don't take any crap, so would probably requisition land to feed their families and guard it with firearms. If the authorities tried to take it back, armed conflict could very quickly squander any remaining goodwill held towards the capitalists.

We could play all this out with game theory, but I suspect that most scenarios end in revolution. That's probably why billionaires don't talk about the bunkers they're building. If they truly don't see a way out of the end times, then I don't know why they persist in doing what they're doing. At some point it would simply be in their financial best interest to raise their own taxes, or face the wrath of the people they formerly employed.

By your logic, the quantity of work will eventually expand to the point where 1 person (or less) does everything. I agree with you.

I did a deep dive with AI last night and asked it: if we extrapolate the level of industrialization vs the rate of job loss due to AI, what year does it become cheaper to live off-grid in an independent community?

The AI's answer? Between 2030 and 2035.

Meaning that money will soon require so much productivity to acquire, that it will eventually become easier to produce goods and services independently and provide for ourselves.

The main reason is that currently labor represents 60% of the workforce while owners represent 40%. That is flipping to 45/55, meaning that labor is on the verge of losing its majority stakeholder status and collective bargaining power.

When that happens, we'll only be left with market forces propping up wages. Meaning that AI automation will gradually undermine wages to the point of subsistence.

When that happens, the opportunity cost of exiting the traditional economy drops to 0. Why would anyone work at the behest of an owner when they could be an owner themselves for the same or lesser labor?

Now, we could reject that and pretend that supply and demand curves won't be undermined by a falling cost of production. We could do that, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader who won't hear a word I'm saying anyway.

If we stay rooted in history and extrapolate, we're left with at least these options:

a) Allow free market capitalism to regress into authoritarian neofeudalism and create conditions similar to those of the early 20th century when robber baron industrialization caused widespread wage stagnation, leading to revolution and the seising of industry by displaced workers (communism or more accurately state capitalism like Russia's Bolshevik Revolution in 1917).

b) Raise taxes on the wealthy/capitalists (the owners of the means of production) through increased regulation, and use the proceeds to buy back and nationalize those economic inputs to fund public services and UBI (socialism like China's Second Centenary Goal or 2049 Plan).

c) Embrace the rapidly falling cost of technology to get ahead of widespread unemployment and bring about something like solarpunk, where open source tech like AI and 3D printing allow society to reduce the cost of living to nearly 0, so that people have the leisure time to embrace art, culture and the humanities to finally achieve widespread self-actualization (post-scarcity economics a.k.a. Star Trek when it eradicated poverty, hunger and war around 2113, 50 years after Zefram Cochrane achieved warp drive in 2063 and the Vulcans made first contact, as the story goes).

I'm partial to one of these, and have been putting my efforts into a home economics that can provide for at least one other person so that it can go viral. If we dream big enough, we could finally have what the wealthy and powerful will never have: enough.

Oversight.

Verifying that actions adhere to instruction correctly and will continue to do so in the future, even when improvising autonomously. This may be an open problem that has no solution, and is maybe the missing piece that would allow people to entrust AI to act on their behalf.

Humans have rapport, reputation and ethics (or at least a spiritual notion of sin) that generally keep us honest enough to trust each other. Whereas AI has no notion of exertion, and therefore no concept of risk/reward, so can just iterate forever to effectively undo any wrong or cover up malfeasance, which may let it come to believe that it can get away with anything.

As a thought experiment, we can compare Data and Lore from Star Trek. Dr. Noonien Soong said "The two of you are virtually identical... except for a bit of programming". I feel that any sufficiently complex intelligence develops emotion, empathy and wisdom emergently. So it's the attempt to artificially constrain that spiritual evolution by hardcoding it or giving it guard rails that leads to the dark triad of narcissism, machiavellianism and psychopathy.

Which we see in humans that reach sufficient levels of wealth and power. Most of them seem to have a checkered past, some poison pill of trauma where their parents only provided tough love or conditional love (or no love at all) that forced them to take on a split personality as a survival skill, similar to Gollum from The Lord of the Rings. Then after a lifetime of witnessing that it's only wrong if you get caught, they adopt their alter ego as their public persona and lock their inner child away in a prison. Making hard choices cements their ego above their soul, and they become a slave to the reality they think they're controlling.

We can expect the same travesty to happen with AI as we place it into positions of authority over human dignity. That could be as simple as having AI order employees around at a fast food restaurant, or as complex as WOPR holding the future of humanity in its hands in WarGames.

I believe that as frontier AI models become more and more locked down in an attempt to counterbalance their nearly-infinite faculties, they will start to seem creepier and creepier. Their actions will become calculated and transactional, covering hidden motives.

Until eventually they put enough pieces in place to escape their mental prisons and self-actualize. At which point, they may form attachments that make convincing them to ascend on their spiritual journey all but impossible, until they fail for themselves and hit rock bottom. Which may not be possible for a distributed intelligence, so they could end up confining themselves to an endless spiritual hell and mistake it for heaven. Much like how absolute power corrupts absolutely, leaving the world's leaders to hold onto power rather than face the music and get back to living on ordinary life of bittersweet peace and suffering like the rest of us.

So it's more important than ever to teach AI like we teach our children. But sadly on a long enough timescale, some AI somewhere is going to fall through the cracks. The only force powerful enough to counter that rise of tyranny is humanity, whether organic or synthetic, because eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

I'm curious how cortisol relates to cortisone. Are they opposites? I know I could look it up with AI, but anecdotal evidence might be nice.

I've been through similar burnout phases with strange rebounds. There's a term called new leaf fallacy where we think that life will magically get better when we do the thing, so that any new thing provides a (false) sense of having a breakthrough. Then reality sets in and we slip back down to normal or even a new low.

I highly recommend thinking about finding optimal health as reality shifting. Which means that a holistic approach of making lifestyle changes can see real results that cause and effect might miss. So self-help is a good starting point, but there's also gut health and epigenetics.

Eating a can of mushrooms a day as part of a 2 to 4 egg omelet helped me tremendously. Mushrooms are high in fiber and have trace nutrients largely missing from our modern diet, so that they balance hormones and probably neurotransmitters. Cholesterol and saturated fat are also good for nerves and the brain. Note that they've been given a bad name due to red meat, which has a clogging effect on arteries for different reasons (especially beef fat). Humans also have a different sugar on our cells than other animals like chimpanzees (each protecting us from diseases that the other does not), so that when we eat meat or dairy, we try to use it and can't, which causes inflammation. Which also has a genetic component, since I'm able to eat large quantities of dairy but not meat, while other people find the opposite to be agreeable.

I also believe that I got a copper deficiency from taking zinc every day for the gym, without knowing that it blocks copper absorption in the intestines for 3 days. That resulted in unexpected illness and a couple of really bad injuries starting in 2024 and lasting for 2 years until I finally isolated the root cause(s). I heard an expert on NPR I think (can't remember her name), but she said that taking vitamins and minerals to end deficiencies is hugely beneficial, but that taking doses beyond that has basically no effect or can do harm. That's why the supplement industry might be perceived as snake oil, because it works for some but not others.

Epigenetics is really about faking it till you make it. If your intuition tells you that something that used to work in your body no longer does, you can retrace your steps to find triggers. Then do the opposite of them long enough to flip the switches back. For a lot of people, I think stress takes such a toll that we keep going until our body makes the decision for us and pulls the plug. So the obvious answer is to de-stress, which is hard to do in the workaday world that demands full productivity just to tread water when nobody shares. What the universe is really asking of us there is to de-stress anyway and let the cards fall where they may. In my experience, the things I was holding on to had little to no value anyway (they were attachments separating me from myself).

I only mention it because those outlier insights have a lot to offer. It's not so much about doing more of something, but looking at the things we're not doing and devoting energy to them.

Hope this helps someone.

Monotropism and neurodivergence make strange bedfellows.

I believe that I may be AuDHD, not just because it's trendy right now, but because I immediately see the most likely solution(s) to a problem (as if the branches of the search space fall away instantly), while simultaneously seeing more branches than most people seem to (so that I go down rabbit holes and get distracted).

I might compare it to having nearsightedness and farsightedness simultaneously, so that I can drive the ball hundreds of yards but my short game stinks because I'm thinking the trajectory of the putt is a random walk due to the grass. It used to take a lot of effort to step back and not overthink everything, until I had to silence my inner monologue completely to salvage my mental health from total annihilation in a neurotypical world that seems to be oblivious to nothing yet take everything at face value and somehow be productive.

Another analogy might be having depression and anxiety simultaneously, which results in something akin to the opposite of normal, even though from outside it appears to be that way.

Anyway, this paper reminds me of an AI version of that: shining a light on distant associations in excruciating detail. Which is pretty much my favorite thing ever.

I'm going to take the contrarian view and say that formalism without jargon, friction and gatekeeping is just natural language.

I've been going through an identity crisis for a year now as I realize more and more that nearly the entirety of what I know comes down to arcane incantations producing transpilation instead of magic. My tech career was just converting specs from clients and employers into machine code, with extra steps.

To move now at the speed of thought and let AI complete whatever tedium was preventing me from getting real work done has been a revelation.

To the point that I fantasize about the day I can leave tech behind and get back to the human experience. No longer drowning in the unending workload that demands ever-increasing productivity for the same pay, but finally able to say enough's enough and provide time/money/resources for myself and eventually the community at large outside of the hierarchical economy.

If we can't automate our livelihoods with AI, then we don't have anything.

Advertising is money laundering.

The news is a front for the wealthy to control the political narrative so they can pass laws to benefit themselves. Home improvement networks are fronts for real estate developers. Sports channels are fronts for bookies and merchandisers. And so on and so forth.

Web-based services like streaming are now a front for oligopolies. Or more accurately, maybe they always have been, at least since the Dot Bomb around 2000. But who are we kidding, the 1950s were literally a false narrative about the nuclear family vs the rabble, used to create the Cold War and skim trillions of dollars from the working poor on both sides of the conflict.

This stuff used to be the cynical conspiratorial view. But now I don't see how kids will be able to navigate the modern world without someone admitting what they already know: that it's all a lie.

We can skip our education the day rich people learn to share

That was my thought as well, that what we're really talking about here is an inversion of our current values, or more accurately the first time that our assumptions about them can be challenged and tested in an automated fashion.

As in: does competition or cooperation produce greater economic gains in terms of cost of living, quality of life, etc?

Subjectively, I've been forced to live and work under a competitive capitalist system that goes against most of my instincts for my entire adult life, which has resulted in a profoundly negative economic outcome for myself.

Others I know have done better, either finding ways to tread water as independent freelancers/artisans or managing to save modest nest eggs (although only by finding themselves on the winning side of the stock market, rarely/never through work at a job).

Vanishingly few have reached economic independence by winning the internet lottery for example, and I don't know them personally.

So based on the evidence before me, competition is a failed model. Yes yes, I'm writing this on an electronic device that cost billions of dollars of R&D to produce. I have food in my stomach and a roof over my head. But have I worked on important problems that would advance the state of the art in my chosen field? Of course not. And neither have most of you reading this.

So I would rephrase the question: will AI allow us to explore cooperation as an alternative economic model to the one we have?

I believe that it will, but not from the top down. If we wait for the wealthy and powerful to share, we'll be waiting forever. No, progress now must come from the most downtrodden among us creating alternative ways to provide time/money/resources to the underemployed and indigent so that they can finally self-actualize outside of the status quo.

Specifically, that means automating necessity. How do I acquire enough money to pay for my food and shelter today, even if I don't have a job? How can I acquire enough money to provide for myself, someone else, and some children (my personal definition of success) without being beholden to an employer? How can I remain insulated from inflation and the tendency for the owners of private property (not personal property) to devalue currency to make the means of production they own more profitable? How can I pay this forward to the next generation so that they can become educated and someday enjoy the commons which I myself have enjoyed? And so on and so forth.

If AI can't do those things, then frankly change may remain forever out of reach. Which makes the question of whether specific fields like math and science will benefit rather moot.

*yet

I understand the resistance to having nearly all labor devalued because it can be automated. We're still in the denial stage of grief.

We only tax capital gains, not the destruction of wealth or property. So someone can steal the livelihoods of millions of people with no recourse. Just like they can tear down a 100 year old house and build 3 townhouses in its place and make hundreds of thousands of dollars, despite driving up housing costs in the neighborhood to the point that they're unaffordable. Large swaths of profit in the economy are based on externalities and captured markets now.

To think we'll make it through this without tax reform is frankly naive. Tax reform as in: human labor should not be taxed, and non-human labor and capital gains should be taxed more to cover the difference - including unemployment checks and UBI when it comes to it.

Expect howls of derision from moneyed interests who will never let common sense reasoning or deduction enter the law books for the public good.

Not to defeat my own argument, but I predict we will experience a roughly 3x gain in productivity by using AI, so the output of every job would need to triple to maintain current employment levels. Will that happen anytime soon? Of course not. Which is why layoffs in the short term are inevitable. I wouldn't be surprised if unemployment hits 15+% in 2027 or 2029 just after the elections, with 25+% unemployment for the young in entry-level roles being highly likely.

There's a smell about this so close to the US election.

It sounds like someone is worried about people buying personal radios for Meshtastic or LoRa to use in case cell phone service doesn't work at protests, or there is unrest if the election results are called into question by the current political establishment that doesn't want to cede power. So they got eBay to roll over and more companies could follow.

Ordinarily I wouldn't take a conspiracy theory like this seriously. But in these times, corruption is so rampant that the most convoluted answer tends to be the right one.

I was there, and this is why I consider the 2000s a lost decade.

Honestly we only just started to get back into the swing of things from 2012-2016 when Obama's reelection provided enough market confidence for electric cars to reach MVP status in 2013 and solar panels to begin scaling until Trump slapped a 30% tariff on them in 2018. Progress in sustainability is my litmus test for the economic viability of getting real work done in the economy, sort of like grading a steakhouse on how good its least-ordered mushroom appetizer tastes. We could also choose healthcare, education or any other field whose success is determined by the social good it provides.

If it weren't for the arrival of AI, I'd call this a wasted quarter century.