Every discussion I see here is working under “when they are another order or two of magnitude better than today.”

No one is saying masters are getting replaced today. But “you pay the x to look at the problem and know the y and know z” is literally just intelligence over complicated tasks. It gets replaced if these things get smarter. And there is not really a good reason to think they won’t besides “I don’t want them to” or “my identity is tied to them not getting smarter”.

What people I see are usually referring to is that the far right and far left end up being fundamentally anti-liberal, and in their anti-liberal beliefs they more closely resemble each other (meet back up on the horse shoe) than they do the mainstream liberal left/right.

Did you assume I’d think otherwise?

Someone left-aligned (and acting alone, not an official terrorist group) assassinated Charlie Kirk in the US.

A group of left aligned people got in over their heads on a protest action and one shot a police officer.

My too-online left friends worship Luigi IRL, one even recently got a tattoo meant to reference him.

Right wing attacks used to be more common than left aligned ones in the US, but that trend has recently flipped: https://www.csis.org/analysis/left-wing-terrorism-and-politi...

I’m not convinced there are any real terrorist groups operating the way e.g the Weathermen were back in the 70s. But there is some kind of violent left tendency rising, and we could easily be headed that way.

Also what if it’s not 2 vs 98, but something more like 10 vs 90, or 30 vs 70? Or 50 vs 50? And this kind of thing doesn’t happen overnight. It happens over a generation, or at least a few decades.

Anyway, the point isn’t this will happen, the point is that really bad outcomes that are almost impossible to walk back from are completely within the realm of possibility. And we have no real way to predict where we’re headed. So people are rightly very afraid.

Your strongest point is “will people stand for a world with no jobs, where only a percentage of the population owns most things?” And the answer is who knows, people stand for a massive amount of inequality right now, and technology for suppressing the masses is getting much better every year. It’s a big unknown imo, and probably contingent on too many things to predict at all.

There are many millions of people in the USA who don’t work but own things. Some don’t work and own a lot of things

The dread is: where does this stop? Right now, with ai I can fly. But when does ai no longer need me? Just as an extreme example: a this pace, how far are we from “AI agent, here’s our assets, make money”? If every year 50% of the job disappears, how long until there is no human-ai team, just ai.

Idk, this conversation is endlessly frustrating, because people seem to have so much certainty one way or another about the future. Fear comes from not knowing more than anything.

What a load of bullshit victim blaming.

I say this as someone who agrees, cameras don’t work much. But my point is that people had better support some alternative then, instead of blocking every other attempt to improve the situation.

My wife is at the point where she would probably like a flock camera on our street. I’m at the point where I wouldn’t mind a patrol car circling the area, like a damn police state. What else would you suggest people support when they are harassed by crime this much?

(Edit to expand): instead of just complaining I’ll meta-point. People will vote for things like flock cameras when society is unsafe, or they feel unsafe. Right now, in the USA, lots of places are visibly unsafe and people deal with actual threats from bad actors much more often than they deal with police overreach. If you want people to vote against mass surveillance then you need to support policy that makes mass surveillance unnecessary, and you need to do it now instead of “in a future communist utopia there will be no crime” kind of policy (I use this because it’s what I see a lot of in Seattle). Weak on crime is anti-urban, weak on crime is pro police state.

Any tips for how you planned your landscape to work this way? I’m slowly trying to convert mine but have already gotten burned by not matching plants to the right soil or sun exposure level and it’s taking longer to get right than I expected.

I asked Claude to do the math, and it claimed reducing alfalfa use (not all use, just alfalfa) by the Colorado river by 1% per 1 million people who move from a place not already supplied by it.

I think when it comes to water a really important mental model everyone needs to have is that a human without a lawn or pool uses really tiny amounts of water at scale directly.

How are you going to pay for the models or the electricity or the hardware? How are you going to compete against a swarm of ai agents that were spun up 6 months before you with 100x the capital whatever small amount of capital you scraped together doing one of the last few human jobs? Not with your human intelligence, which is now useless compared to machine intelligence. Maybe with luck, but at that point we’re all just at the casino.

The wife of another friend of mine confided in me that AI replacing his work in such a short time has made him depressed to the point she's getting scared he'll hurt himself.

I think we need a support group or something. But I'm too busy burning the candle at both ends trying to "catch the lifeboat" before its too late. So are most other engineers I know.

I'm sorry you're going through this but know not only are you not alone, but you're in the majority of software developers at this point (I think, anecdotally).