Ofc "full labor automation" has a certain spread of meaning. A sliver of population will always find ways to hold to a job or run one or many businesses. But there will be "enough" labor automation for it to be a social ticking bomb. That, in fact, does not depend on better models nor better AI than we have today. By 2045 there will be a couple of generations that has been outsourcing their thinking to AI for most of their adult lives. Some of them may still work as legal flesh of sorts, but many won't get to be middle man and will find no job.

Also, if you could replace your senator today by an untainted version of a frontier model (of today), would you do it? Would it be a better ruler? What are the odds of you not wanting to push that button in the next twenty years, after a few more batches of incompetent and self-serving politicians?

I have this theory that researchers and science journalists' internal bias is a gradation between the huge shadow projected by millennia of religious culture and the huge shadow projected by the things we have learned recently. The quote above, particularly the term "leap", evokes intelligent design.

> Instead, evolution roughly tripled the number of neurons that connect the brain's mouth-movement control center with just two target regions.

This, on the other hand, outright sounds like scaling the size of the model, which is on the opposite direction of the bias axis. FWIW, my own bias also tends in this direction.

A week ago I decided to explore a new part of town. I mean, I've only lived in this town for a few years, but I'm not into big cities, and I live in a country where even the capital can feel inordinately leafy and forested if you come from a town in India. I don't come from India, and my dad saw to it that I got acquainted with the ticks and the brambles from a young age, so short of true jungle or a dense mangrove swamp, I consider most places fair game for a leisurely stroll or a rowing. So I was talking with my mom on the phone, relating to her the greens of a small prairie and the reeds demarcating the swampy shore, and counting the many rabbits that were scattering at my passing, when, at a turn of the dirt trail, I found a stark reminder that I was still in town territory: a perfectly normal bench.

I don’t believe that the current state of things represents peak-AI problems. AI is for now weak both in its capability and its impact, and also just new. Speculatively, if things go really bad, in a couple of decades there will be a huge swath of population without jobs nor high-flying education. They, perhaps rightly, will blame AI for the situation, but they’ll also, perhaps rightly, blame capital and the “snobbish elite” that is today and in the near future propping AI. That “snobbish elite” is well-paid engineers and researchers. That’s because people tend to like to have somebody to blame for their problems. But even without making it about bad guys, the heart of the thing that is pouring billions into AI is a relentless ethos of profit deriving from progress and disruption. You can’t stop AI without stabbing that heart.

But I saw this one coming three or four years ago.

Actually, I've been listening to AI-generated brainrot music. I prefer it to some human-generated brainrot music (there's "I Hate Boys" from Christina Aguilera. Sorry if you are a fan).

Brainrot serves a specific social purpose: relieving stress, incoherently winning elections. It's a kind of drug that dulls the dangerous part of the brain while leaving the he-is-a-good-tool and she-is-blonde brain hemispheres in working order.

In fact, I do believe that if there were to be an uprising in a couple of decades against AI, and the human side were to rise victorious, the aftermath's social order would be studiously anti-AI and anti-science, but they would make a carve-out for AI brainrot (yes, I published a short fiction story with that premise, because I'm brainrot-vers).

[^1] https://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-organized-crim...

#1 leads to theism and offers an immediate balm. Unfortunately, it mostly excludes #2, and that leaves us in the merciless hands of God.

[^1]: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/teleology

Alzheimer's (like a gazillion other diseases) is a product of senescence, and senescence is a subject that faces strong ideological headwinds. That leaves the medical system in a situation where they want to treat the symptoms (the diseases) instead of the root cause, and treating the set of symptoms that we call Alzheimer's is going to be tough.