You've fished a comment from completely different discussion, where a point was that if AI were to displace workers, it would be different than previous waves of automation (and there meeting these capabilities was assumed, not put forward by me). But in this thread it's more down to earth discussion about manufacturing capabilities if there is no ASI. But sure, I'll bite - yes, capitalism won't work in post-scarcity society. But we are not leaving in post-scarcity society and in our current situation capitalism is amazing system. If capitalism would get us to post-scarcity society then well, you'd have to admin that capitalism is amazingly effective. Your assumption about AI-rulers (I presume altman and amodei, not governments) having abundance machines and not sharing the abundance with anyone else is really without any merit. For this scenario to work we would need to meet few conditions that are so unlikely that it's not really worth entertaining them seriousl: 1) powerless government 2) actual ASI that's abundance machine 3) ASI that's perfectly aligned towards serving altman and amodei and none else 4) altman and amodei deciding that everyone should be poor. And also as someone who I guess you'd call AI booster (so a person that's not deluded about AI capabilities and sees how powerful they are and how current concerns with AI such as water use are overblown) I can tell you how I address this - you can't stop progress. It never worked and never will. I think world would be better if we would've stopped developing AI. But it's impossible so you might just embrace it.

Reducing him to child prodigy is, I don't know, condescending? You do realise he's one of the greatest living mathematicians, right? Child prodigy sounds as if his greatest life achievements was being smart kid or something, not his substantial contributions to mathematics as an adult. He was one of the most important voices in maths long before transformers were discovered.

And as I've noted above that's jus assumption (to show that AI is different than previous displacements), I'm not making actual claim that LLMs will be better at knowledge work than humans.

Everything looks to be a lot different. Once AI is better than humans at knowledge work, why would you even keep human in the loop? (That's assuming AI reaches the level of being better than humans - I'm not arguing for that assumption, but about it's consequences and that in this scenario we won't get much new jobs).

Luckily I did not, you are arguing against points I did not make at all.

Yes and general population LOVES these laws, even though they are harmful to them. But anyway - you've got your causality reversed - it's voting masses that incentivize rent controls and other shitty politics. Remember that to implement your policies you've got to actually win elections. And since people generally don't understand n-order effects for n>=2, it's really easy to win elections with populist policies.

> The only ones who lose are commercial landlords, and they will stay profitable by design so it's easy to shut down any complaints.

No, also people who would like to move into city would lose, because that would become literally impossible. You'd have like 15 years waiting lists for housing.

> And you get better quality apartments as a side effect because the only way to get more money out of existing properties is to spend more on fixing them.

Why would anyone fix apartment that's under rent control? If you mean system like in Berlin, then I've got bad news - people there are actually frequently not allowed to renovate even THEIR OWN apartments.

> Suddenly, with this AI math thing in the past year or two, he is starting to get more non-academic focused attention.

He's just gaining popularity in your bubble, which is probably not much larger than the audience he previously had. It's not like he's suddenly become orders of magnitude more famous.

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.

> These things are ok-ish to halfway decent at coding tasks with a ton of babysitting and still make tons of extremely simple errors almost constantly, why should math be any different?

1) AI is winning programming competitions, 2025 was probably the last year we've had human participant winning* 2) Math is different because there's formal verification.

* Of course competitive programming is different than enterprise programming, but competitive programming is closer to math.

Yes, it was good for society (nowadays it would be oppressive and would be very bad). Is it good for these children to be born? Maybe, depends if you think living is better than never being born. Do I support policy of forcing people into having children? Absolutely not, I think it's terrible idea! But that's completely tangential - my point is that we've got large body of evidence that 1) surveys asking people why they don't have children are pretty much worthless; 2) economic factors do not matter that much.

> Sounds like you just want a serf class and fuck everyone else.

No, it doesn't sound like that, you are projecting something onto me.