My father happened to go back there about 15 years later, randomly on a road trip through Cornwall and thought he'd stop in for a pint for old times' sake. On walking through the door, the barman said "hello Simon, good to see you again, pint of the usual?".

I wonder how many people call in to have a pint at the pub purely because of that barman. I wonder if that pub has survived the cull of British pubs purely because of that barman.

In Iain Banks' The Culture novels, the machines provide the How, humans provide the Why.

No. Earned income is salary, and taxed as such. Unearned income is capital gains, exercised options, etc, not taxed as income. It's pretty easy.

If we just use this tax office definition, it's effectively impossible to earn a billion dollars because you'd need to pay yourself ~$1.6 billion dollars in salary (depending on where you live), and very, very, few people can afford to do that

Right up until enshittification kicks in and suddenly everyone cares and there are shouts of destroying the evil techbros who are poisoning the minds of our youth to buy a new yacht.

Can you imagine the situation if Jobs hadn't killed Flash? Most of the commercial websites required a Flash blob to deliver full functionality even back then in the early 2000's. Adobe never even vaguely pretended to be the good guys, they would have enshittified as soon as they possibly could, as hard as they possibly could (as they have done with the rest of their software). The entire web would be held to ransom at this point.

The thing is, that blatant market manipulation is playing with fire here, as so much of the US economy is invested in the AI bubble.

The US government believes that Fable/Mythos is a weapon that needs to be export-controlled, and limited to only US customers. Presumably OpenAI/xAI/Google would face the same constraints, for the same reasons.

OS/foreign models are unaffected - OS because they cannot control who runs them, and foreign because they are not controlled by the US government. We could assume that China will implement the same policy controls, but they see the world differently so might not.

So US AI companies are then limited to the US market, effectively, after about six months (the lag between the current frontier models and the OS models). They have much less incentive to push the envelope to create better models, because the US govt might also ban those completely.

The investor froth around the race to AGI dies, so valuations shrink (the current IPOs may be affected), and presumably the bubble bursts. None of the AI companies can afford to continue building data centres, so that all dies immediately. US GDP drops by ~5% because of that alone.

In a year's time, the US is in a major recession because it gambled so hard on AI. Europe less so, only because it was such a distant follower in that race. China is more-or-less unaffected. The best models are now OS/foreign, and AI is moving forward more slowly, but still moving forward.

Any other scenarios?

But the project management team were extremely careful about only changing parts of the system that needed to be changed. Partly so that the scope was contained and second-order effects limited, and partly because the people making the changes were being paid vast sums to do this, and any reduction in work was saving real money. So when they say that it would all have stopped if the work wasn't done, I believe them ;)

I earned my first house deposit helping the team fixing the water and gas company in Wales, UK. Their entire system was running off a set of COBOL programs on a mainframe, none of which had been properly documented over the years, and the whole thing used 2-digit dates. It would have caused actual deaths if not fixed; everything would have shut down, and no water and no heating in a British winter is potentially lethal. And then it would have sent everyone in Wales a bill for 100 years of water and gas.

They were bribing retired software devs to come out of retirement with huge stacks of money, because that was cheaper than training new COBOL devs and getting them familiar with the spaghetti system.

It worked, no-one died, life went on. So obviously it was all fake rolls eyes

The agent was under control, as far as we can tell, and obeying its instructions.

This is important for two reasons:

1. There are all the tropes of AI becoming uncontrolled and destroying humanity. Writing bad headlines around AI "running amok" feeds this. We should not be talking about this because it's not actually a problem.

2. It ignores, or overwrites, the much more serious and dangerous problem of LLM agents enabling and automating Xz attacks on OSS projects. We should be talking about this because it is a big problem.

[0] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/amok [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/amok

No journalist joins a newsroom to become rich. Famous, maybe, but not rich.

The business model used to be advertising, but the internet destroyed that model. And we don't have a replacement, while democracy doesn't work without someone holding the politicians to account.