No. It's partisanship and polarization, which has little to do with intelligence.

But there's one thing that I know is stupid: assuming the reason opposite pole doesn't do what you think they should is because they're full of stupids.

I hear AI is especially awesome in domains you personally don't understand.

> I also think people are mad at the world. Times are tough for many. Hearing about a job-killing machine doesn't exactly inspire joy. So I kind of understand the pushback on datacenters and AI and that sort of thing. I don't find it particularly logical; datacenters have existed forever and most money poured into computer programs are basically designed to mess up your life (deny you credit, deny you healthcare, rebook your flight to a terrible time, the list goes on) and so I don't think AI is anything new in that respect. But, if you're mad at the world, you might as well find something to take out your rage on and raging against AI will make you a lot of friends.

Then you need to quit confusing simplistic pattern matching for logic. Details matter, as do degree and scale.

Yes, data centers "existed forever," but compared to a hyper-scalar AI datacenter; they were small, used far less electricity, and their generators were used for backup, not primary power.

Yes, there were computer programs that could "mess up your life," but they were narrow in function so not such an existential threat. I'm sure you understand the difference between a phone tree and Claude Mythos.

And maybe develop a little empathy? You said "people are mad at the world. Times are tough for many." Why is that? Do you think part of that might be that people have gotten the chair kicked out from under them. And along comes AI, which has been promised to be a bigger chair-kicker than anyone's ever seen?

> I work in the AI infra industry and ya know, a lot of our customers have really good ideas that are going to save people a lot of time and effort, so I am OK with the general direction of the field as a whole.

Oh, but why would people be so "illogical" to be mad at such a thing as AI? It's so hard to understand, right? [Insert Upton Sinclair quote here]

That wasn't a new idea at the time. In 1994 Apple distributed a "software store" CD-ROM called Software Dispatch that implemented the same idea: https://68kmla.org/bb/threads/apple-software-dispatch-from-1.... The thing was full of demos, and if you wanted to buy the full version, you just had to call some number to get an unlock code.

I think I had at least one other CD-ROM that implemented the same concept. I'm sure there were tons of others.

It's sarcasm, and the main tell is I'm not even bothering with pretense; just serving up the dystopia straight and acting like that's good.

But one of the "fun" things about HN is SV is so fucked up you can't even be sure someone doesn't actually sincerely believe that shit. And most of them are probably dumbasses with nothing to gain.

They should each buy out a RAM manufacture, and make this the new normal.

It really is the best thing for AI adoption and the shareholders.

Not necessarily. It's not going to be evenly distributed. It's not like today, but everyone works 4 hours a week. Some dudes will work 80, others won't work at all. That situation is what's most adventitious to shareholders.

> and universal basic income will likely be rolled out.

If UBI even happens, it's going to enable a poverty-level existence.

Thing of all the things you enjoy doing, that you wouldn't be able to afford if you were in poverty. That's UBI life.

None of those technological shifts affected so many of the jobs at once, nor did they simultaneously threaten many of the alternative jobs for those affected.

> Even with AGI robots smarter than us I think there's a good chance it would go like the Antebellum South with robots replacing the slaves and humans planning their debutantes balls.

Ok. So you have a small number of planters with big estates, what happens to all the other people (e.g. the "slaves" and other worksers, after the planters no longer need them)?

Wealth is not distributed evenly enough for such a fantasy. Dario Amodei and Sam Altman will be able to go play planter. Me? Not so much.

The paying/selling part will be transitory. Right now the people paying for it are investors, and they're selling a cost-cutting dream to executive managers.

If someone builds a machine that automated all the jobs, they've have amassed an unprecedented amount of power, even if the economy is in ruins for everyone else. They won't need to sell anything to anyone.

> What stops the rest of humanity from turning data centers into a pile of ash?

AI slaughterbots. Think the Ukraine front line, but completely automated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU

If my time on HN is any indication many, many people hold that view. Any call for any kind of new regulation is attempted to be shot down with references to "regulatory capture." It seems like it's one of the standard libertarian arguments.

> Stigler challenged the traditional view that government regulation arises from a benevolent state protecting the public from market failures.

Government regulation arises also from a desire to just limit or prohibit certain unwanted situations the market would otherwise support. For instance: gun regulations limiting high-capacity magazines have nothing to do with "protecting the public from market failures," and are almost certainly hated by the gun industry.

We're probably on the right track if the regulation of the AI industry is something both Amodei and Sacks hate.

> Has David Sacks actually called for stronger antitrust enforcement? Not that he has total control of this administration but it’s gone pretty hard in the other direction in my observation.

Not commentating on this particular case (because I don't know the details), but it's amazing how many public statements from tech people are just absolute shameless lies. The public/PR statement is just whatever it is they think you want to hear, but behind the scenes they just do whatever they want. There's no connection between the two, except by coincidence.

I'm not an accountant (so I could be wrong), but I'm vaguely under the impression it's sometimes financially beneficial to "write off" inventory, and to do that you have to destroy the items (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_video_game_burial, https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/05/30/apples-lisa-entom...).

So I kinda wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of these GPUs go in the dump, given that it sounds like they'd be extremely power-hungry and difficult to use outside a hyperscale data center setting.

Ask yourself: is that really the world you want to live in? It's a world where people, all people, are sidelined.

I think the happy ending of that path is something like Idiocracy. And the more likely ending is something like "automated capitalist economy without the people, because the people couldn't compete."

SV has poor alignment, so probably needs to be destroyed and rebuilt with better alignment.

> They managed to fine-tune models to be good at math and coding, despite the vast majority of humanity being awful at those…

Think about the kind of people who are leading the companies making these models, and their underlings who will be leading the fine tuning.

Math and coding are fairly objective. Fine tuning for morality and ethics is going to reflect the biases of those people.

I thought they were talking about AI replacing people's jobs, because that's music to investors' ears.

Think about how much wealth concentration would happen if they could hit their goals eat that much of the economy.

IIRC, Elon Musk has literally compared the effect of AI on people to the effect of highway construction on an anthill (that's in the way), and kinda shrugged his shoulders.

If you've got engineer's disease, those "other fields" include things like psychology and politics. It's a combination of arrogance and myopia.

If your expertise is legitimately relevant and you know where your expertise ends, that's not a problem.

There's got to be a special name for that kind of treachery. I suppose "collaboration," but that doesn't have a nasty enough ring to it.

Like a fascist occupation, that dystopia isn't "happening anyway" without collaborators.