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Worth sharing Starcloud’s paper in this post:

https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf


It will benefit all people but it will disproportionally benefit more rich people.


> It will benefit all people but it will disproportionally benefit more rich people.

Yes: you'll be homeless and living under a bridge, but you'll have an LLM therapist on your phone to console you. That's a benefit!


No they don't want that, because it could lead to an uprising against them. They want us provided with the essentials in exchange for being dutiful workers, so we have something to lose.

Everyone should live in pods stacked together, eat insects, not drive our own automobiles around or fly places, we should be able to get our entertainment and everything to keep ourselves happy from their subscription entertainment services. Basically we are to consume as little as possible to barely keep ourselves alive and sane while they sail themselves around to pat one another on the backs at their climate and economic conferences on their billion dollar luxury yachts.

Actually no that would be stupid they don't have the time or patience to sail their yachts around. They have crew for that. They will fly in one of their handful of private jets and have the yacht meet them there.


I'd actually love to eat insects but to my dismay I found out they're actually really expensive...


Just go outside for a while with a survival book if you are into it.


Soylent green will be affordable when the baby boomers start passing.


None of this was ever intended to be cheap for you.


don't forget the dismantling of the local community and family identity to make people reliant on the government preventing resistance by division.


People do this to themselves and willingly, no spooky evil capitalists behind the curtains are necessary.

People love money and what they can bring on the table, people often hate each other ie within families stiffed by peer pressure and expectations of mentalities formed in another very different era, people love discovering new countries and cultures. And so on and on.

Ie me - I love my parents, my childhood was normal, only later to find and compare with others to see how such childhood was... abnormally uncommon. But I very much prefer seeing them few times a year only, even though we love when they help with kids. Some of their opinions are very outdated, their ramblings are often out of touch with reality, they tend sometimes to spoil kids (even after setting boundaries), and overall generational gap is absolutely massive. It is a form of freedom. Make that 10x more in much more strict societies where pressure and expectations from parents on kids are massive and then they wonder why kids stay the heck away from them once adults.

And fuck local communities, for every good-hearted neighbor who just wants to socialize and help out and otherwise stays away from one's life, there is easily 5 or 10 who are the epitome of nimbyism, voyeurism or similar hobbies of people with empty lives, clueless on how world and people actually work but always with very strong opinions on everything and will to push those on everybody else.


But kids in those strict societies stay with parents more, help them and treat them better.

Meanwhile, you dont care about them except for them being potential resource of free work.

And I mean, you idea of local comunity is all about other people doing free work for you and then tolerating your peculiarities with no reciprocation.

So, I dont think that is much of an argument here.


> And I mean, you idea of local comunity is all about other people doing free work for you and then tolerating your peculiarities with no reciprocation.

When it seems to you like everyone around you is the problem, you may actually be the problem.


Maybe I phrased wrongly (not a native speaker) but what you say is incorrect. I am not free coasting on parents, in contrary my first years all my earning went into providing them a good home for rest of their lives, while living in tiny rental rooms. You have no idea from sort of poor background I come from, most western kids have no clue. It was a massive improvement of QoL for them that they would never be able to afford themselves and they still appreciate it massively. Since we live 1500km from them they help with kids literally few hours per year, not a burden for anybody involved.

But freedom to chose with whom we spend our time is a thing, no matter how much people like you try to force their righteous values that are the only proper true way (TM) on everybody else. I am old enough and over time met plenty of folks like that, be it religious or other forms, they are at the end the same as your comment.


the last bit is only true under individualised consumerism. its when everybody is like a spoiled child is where solidarity goes to die.


I suspect that's beyond what the Hackernews crowd can cope with contemplating. Billionaires bad except on that subject in which case billionaires good and working class bad.


At that stage, owners will very likely have enough drones and robots at their command to not need to worry about petty things like flesh and blood uprisings.


How will they steal added value and get richer if masses consume as little as possible?


All the value will be diverted. I don’t know if you noticed, but in the last few years, you’d have come ahead if you gambled on the stock, crypto or commodities market than if you busted your ass.



> Everyone should live in pods stacked together, eat insects, not drive our own automobiles around or fly places, we should be able to get our entertainment and everything to keep ourselves happy from their subscription entertainment services.

Yes of course capitalists love when economy is bad. Sorry, these dystopic visions do not pass even simplest smell test.


It’s less complicated than that. Externalities are when an individual profits but others pay the price. Think of climate change. And when a small number are so rich they control the government, so there’s nothing to stop them. It’s narrow incentives driving the whole thing.


They love it when the richest people do well. They dont care about how anyone else lives. The poorer other people are better they feel about winning.

Those you call "capitalists" love monopolies as long as they are theirs. They love captured market. They dont care about competition unless it is someone not them competing to provide for them on lower price.

As of now, billionaires dont want or need strong economy as a "middle class and lower class doing good". They want the "our wealth goes up, we are getting tax breaks, if lower class pays for it cool" kind of economy.


The poorer people are that are still able to work, the cheaper labor is. It's really that simple.


The economy won't be bad. The numbers will look good for them. Also they aren't capitalists. Try to keep up.


[flagged]


I found the comment to be quite sober and realistic. Other than usage of "they want" as a monolith group it's pretty accurate.


It is not realistic - we are consuming way more than any of the previous generations. Poverty is at an all time low and steeply dropped since the last century. We are curing diseases, people are living long. What's the pessimism about?


I just thought you could make your point without calling other people cringe for disagreeing. I agree the average now is better than any century before, while also agreeing there's many interests of the type the comment you replied to illustrates, trying to either reduce personal freedoms or perpetuating a certain order of things. Both things can be true and they are both realistic view points, specially because there's multitudes of people all with their own priorities fighting for their own ideal futures and a few of those have a crazy amount of power.


Fair points and I agree with you.


> It is not realistic - we are consuming way more than any of the previous generations

That's not true. At least not true on all metrics. Energy consumption is down on 30 years ago, for example.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC?locat...

Mat and protein consumption peaked around 20 years ago too.

> Poverty is at an all time low and steeply dropped since the last century. We are curing diseases, people are living long. What's the pessimism about?

It's not pessimism, it's reality. The ruling class are demanding we reduce consumption while increasing and flaunting theirs. That's just what is. If you're denying that or think it's pessimism I really don't know what to tell you.


> That's not true. At least not true on all metrics. Energy consumption is down on 30 years ago, for example.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC?locat...

That's because of efficiency gains. Easily explained by the fact that consumption over all other products increased.

>Mat and protein consumption peaked around 20 years ago too.

Meat consumption is not a realiable indicator of anything in developed countries. It is the same in Netherlands as well. But increased dramatically in India and develping countries.

>It's not pessimism, it's reality. The ruling class are demanding we reduce consumption while increasing and flaunting theirs. That's just what is. If you're denying that or think it's pessimism I really don't know what to tell you.

What's the proof that we reduced consumption? Without cherrypicking?


How is compsumption a measure of good times? We are citizens, not consumers


I used consumption becasue the post used it. But take any other metric? Life expectancy?


The climate will get worse and worse.


What's it even talking about?

> live in pods stacked together,

... the housing crisis? Cause disputed, seems limited to cities, may hinge on zoning. Who are the "they"?

> eat insects,

... so here "they" are vegans, climate warriors?

> not drive our own automobiles around

... self driving cars, not mandatory and not very successful. Musk's vision, so this one would fit, if it was happening.

> or fly places

... climate regulations?


Back in my day…


Go repeat that to the nearest homeless guy. Wealth inequality is rising rapidly, and around a billion people on this planet still can't eat as well as they should.


Poverty is at an all time low. We are consuming way more than ancestors. Life expectancy is at an all time high.

How do you explain this?


I definitely woundn't explain it with speculative market bubbles though.

Every single time the market slips up, it jeopardizes all those achievements you mentioned.


> Poverty is at an all time low.

In USA, it's not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Number_in_Poverty_and_Pov...

Poverty rate flatlined since the 70s.

> We are consuming way more than ancestors.

Not true of at least several major indicators of consumption vs previous generations according to data I posted in other thread.

> Life expectancy is at an all time high.

> How do you explain this?

The more important question is, how do you believe these things you wrote disprove the comment that the rich and ruling class wants us to reduce our consumption, even if they were true?

Because they do. Up until some time maybe around the end of the cold war, progress and development of countries were measured by (among other things) metrics like energy consumption, meat and protein consumption. The consumption based metrics have basically disappeared and the mantra these days is that we are consuming too much. We should minimize meat, energy consumption. There are many proposals to tax such things directly or indirectly, or even just outright limit the amount of animals that are farmed and so on.


I agree that poverty rate flatlined in USA but world poverty (counting India and China) reduced dramatically in the past 20 years. How do you explain this?

>Not true of at least several major indicators of consumption vs previous generations according to data I posted in other thread.

You posted energy consumption per capita which was due to efficiencies.

>Because they do. Up until some time maybe around the end of the cold war, progress and development of countries were measured by (among other things) metrics like energy consumption, meat and protein consumption. The consumption based metrics have basically disappeared and the mantra these days is that we are consuming too much. We should minimize meat, energy consumption. There are many proposals to tax such things directly or indirectly, or even just outright limit the amount of animals that are farmed and so on.

Because consumption did not reduce holistically no matter how hard you try to cherry pick a few cases. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCEC96


Chinese Communism is what dramatically decreased world poverty.


What did china precisely do to achieve this? What specific policies?


Statistics.


I don't know why you insist on licking rich people's boots for these. None of these good thing came from them.

I'm telling you: around a billion people are still hungry, and that number has been stable for 50 years. In the face of massive, global wealth inequality, this is unacceptable to me.


I have agency and I'm very happy with my lot. I'm not "blaming" anybody for anything. But unlike you I am not in a naive infantile delusion about what the ruling class are and want and work toward.


> I'm not "blaming" anybody for anything.

This has to be a joke given your post. Ctr + F "they"


You appear to be incapable of developing a coherent point that addresses what I wrote.

"They" is not blame, it is observation. The bird is flying. I am not "blaming" the bird for flying, it just is.


The difference between an observation and blame is, blame implies moral judgement and the implication that "it ought to be different". It is clear from this post and other posts that this is your agenda.

If you don't claim that it ought to be different, what are you arguing about?


You're the one arguing!! What TF are you arguing about??

Why don't you start by explaining how "not everything is getting worse / some things are getting better" addresses in the slightest what I wrote, or somehow proves that what I wrote is wrong. That would be a good start.


Doubtful. More likely that there will be robocops to stop you from loitering in the scenic places.


For sure, but most bridges aren't in scenic places and robocops will still be limited in numbers, so no worries, just ask your LLM assistance in case of doubt under which bridge you won't get evicted from. Altough, that would probably be illegal advice, but they can try to help you with therapy should you end up in such a situation. Not the top model of course, but hey, it is a benefit.


>robocops will still be limited in numbers

The population of developed countries is already at least 75% robocops


Erm, what qualifies as a robocop to you?


Being robotic and policing.



Every strata of society has been getting richer and richer along with technological progress. What makes you think that would change now?


For just $19.99/mo no doubt.


And covered by universal basic income.


Not necessarily. The benefits may barely trickle down, and the conditions for the majority could degrade overall.


Based on what evidence? The last few times this happened the whole world benefitted.


Based on extensive academic research on trickle-down economics, in particular looking into the evolution of real wages of different sectors of population, since 1980s.

See the work of recent Nobel prize laureates in economics. Many argue for redistribution and investment back to the society.


But the past few revolutions benefitted everyone and we are better off. Look at industrial revolution, digital revolution. Why do you think it is different this time? If trickle down economics don't work, why is world poverty at all time low and consumption at all time high?


> Look at industrial revolution

I really don't see how one can separate the industrial revolution from colonialism, considering we have chiefs of government in colonial countries on the record saying that colonies are a necessary outlet for industrial goods [1].

Once you've established that link, it's hard to explain that "everyone" benefitted from the industrial revolution.

Even disregarding that, the working conditions created by industrialization allowed for situations that can hardly be described as "beneficial" [2][3][4].

> digital revolution.

[5] provided without comment.

---

[1]: for instance, Jules Ferry: https://www2.assemblee-nationale.fr/decouvrir-l-assemblee/hi...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisbee_Deportation

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_Wars

[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM


What percent of the population in places which experienced the industrial revolution would be better off if they time-travelled back 200 years? 1%? 0.2%?


> in places which experienced the industrial revolution

People experienced the industrial revolution everywhere.

I suspect, when you think "places which experienced the industrial revolution", you think about a small subset of areas where some development happened as a result of that, likely the areas where industrialists lived.

But you would also have to consider other places' experience of industrialization. For instance, Congo under EIC colonial rule did experience industrialization - it was the place where industrial amounts of rubber were harvested to allow for plants elsewhere to produce joints, pipes, motor belts, etc. It's not really hard to believe that, had Congo not experienced that, its citizen would almost certainly have been better off now.


Does Congo lack electricity, modern medicine, and air conditioning?

If the industrial revolution has made their lives worse, it's a double-whammy because they are forced to suffer almost twice as long, as their life expectancy at birth has approximately doubled since 1870.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1071021/life-expectancy-...


Places that luckily avoided colonialism haven’t improved a zilch.


> Places that luckily avoided colonialism haven’t improved a zilch

Thailand and China would like a word.


So would Liberia and Ethiopia.


So we agree that it is more complex than:

colonized => successful

not_colonized => unsuccessful


As noted, this refers to Reagan policies and onward.


Even after Reagan's policies how do your points hold?


Because we are counting people's wealth in significant fractions of a trillion dollars and young people around the world cannot afford homes no more?


Prices of houses increased but others decreased. Life expectancy increased, consumption increased.


“Phones not homes.”


Consumption of overpriced crap, a.k.a. the lipstick effect [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipstick_effect


When have we ever had a push to full automation?


Yeah it’s a complicated picture and of course nobody knows, but it would be helpful to split “benefits” into things like;

- net benefits to the average person (considering drawbacks)

- overall relative benefits compared to income groups

- benefits in certain areas of society and topics

I think there’ll be some “benefits for all” in terms of things like medical advances and health technology. There will also be broader benefits to all in general areas but as a parent poster said it’ll benefit equity holders most and there might be some bad tradeoffs (like we’ll have access to much better information and entertainment but it may also affect the overall employment rate). It’s a very nuanced picture and it’s probably disingenuous of some tech leaders to say “we’ll all benefit) but some do believe that will be the future.


What you mean is those with some form of ownership of the technology. If development eventually results in full automation, with the expense of production reduced to zero, money will be irrelevant.


Energy, raw materials, and logistics still remain. I don't think we'll ever get to a place where there isn't some input to a production process that is not infinite and free.


You don't see full automation with robotics as a possible outcome?


Theoretically possible? Maybe (but still an extremely slim chance).

Practically possible? No. People (and countries) own land. Raw materials for robots comes from land. Energy for robots consumes land. Farming food requires massive inputs beyond just the land and energy (but also needs those).

I don’t imagine we’ll get to a world where my great-great-great^20-grandkids can hold out their hand and have a plate of steak and potatoes (or the then-equivalent) placed into it for free, anytime they want.

The expense of production and on-demand delivery of just a simple plate of steak and baked potato will not ever get to zero. If we can’t even get that simple of thing for free, I don’t believe in a world without the notion of money.

Expand that to even better dining, vacation, and leisure/recreational activities and I think the argument becomes even more solid that some form of rationing/limiting will be in effect and there will be a unit/notation of ration and trade that will be indistinguishable from money.


'Not ever' is a broad statement. Would you rule out off-planet mining and manufacturing? Or the scaling of artificial meat production?


I don't. If you do, maybe you could hypothesize a practically possible path from now to then and enlighten us Luddites?

The overwhelmingly most likely "end of money for humans" comes from the extinction of humans.


Believe me, ruling them out is the last thing I'd do. I fully expect them in the next decade or two.

A practically possible path to both: Starship is perfected and mining companies begin operations in space. Vast data centers training spatial ai using virtual simulations perfect it well enough for general robotics to become practicable. Automation is then as follows: robotics manufacturing and maintenance is handled by robots. Mining is performed by robots. General manufacturing performed by robots. Potential manufacturing scales increase by orders of magnitudes. Where are the costs in this scenario that would prevent prices falling to zero? And if prices for all goods and virtually all services* fall to zero, what possible role can money have at that point, other than sitting on a shelf as a memento of a vanished system?

*excluding sex workers.


The cost is in transportation (aside from the cost of developing and producing all those automated systems). Where do you expect extra-terrestrial mining to occur and why do you think what's mined there would be used on Earth? The nearest place to mine would be the moon, and it's on the order of 1 million dollars per kg to bring things back. We could potentially drop that, but that's a hell of a base cost just for material transport. What makes you think that's going to be happening soon?


In the next couple of decades? Starship is real, space mining companies are real, NVIDIA Cosmos is real, robotics development is nascent, but real and thrilling. Ordinary market forces will ensure the uptake of robotics.

You're calculating the expense of returning mined resources using past metrics that are superseded altogether in this scenario. For instance miniaturization suddenly won't be necessary for mining companies wishing to send gear to asteroids.


>metrics that are superseded altogether in this scenario. For instance miniaturization suddenly won't be necessary for mining companies wishing to send gear to asteroids

Nothing in the near future is superceding the tyranny of the rocket equation. It'll still be extremely expensive to send equipment to and retrieve material from space even if the spacecraft and mining equipment were literally free.


You are simply incorrect.[1] Starship will change it all if it succeeds. The space sector is abuzz with the possibility of orbital refueling and the opportunities it will open up, eg [2]

[1] https://orbitalindex.com/archive/2023-03-15-Issue-210/

[2] https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=50157.0


Why would off-planet mining and manufacturing make things easier?


It was a reply to the assertion that land restrictions mean the resources for full automation will always be unavailable. I don't agree with his contention, but offered a likely workaround anyway.


> It will benefit all people but it will disproportionally benefit more rich people

The rich already have a diminishing returns situation with money. Everyone else has much more upswing.


Rich people will enjoy additional monetary benefits, but everyone will still enjoy the same standard benefits.


The wealth gap widening is quite independent from AI being involved. A natural progression which was always happening and continues to be happening. Entil some sort of catastrophe reshuffles the cards. Usually a war or revolution. The poor simply rising up or a lazy and corrupt ruling class depriving their country of enough resources and will to defend itself that some outside power can take it.


If be benefitting you mean displacing all reason to live, then yes, it will solve that problem I face. Now I will be certain.


It will not benefit the rich as disproportionately as the covid pandemic did.


I can’t speak for others countries but here in the UK special “VIP lanes” were used to steal billions using fraudulent PPE contracts.

I’m not just talking about Baroness Mone either. PPE Medpro was the tip of the iceberg.


And we're not talking a 51-49 disproportion, we're talking about a 99.9999 percent of the benefit will go to the richest people


Cite?


The entirety of human history.


There are many places on earth where people live no different from what we lived like 10,000s of years ago. You can just go there, you know, you can just do things. You are an adult.


How so?


Thought experiment - Startrek replicators are real.

This basically means almost everything can be built without human involvement. The guy who owns the replicators is the richest.

The wealth gap is so massive you get revolts (because we're educated, not serfs, right?) So then government needs to step in. Either tax->ubi?, socialize it, or make it a state asset?

Regardless, that's the goal of AGI/robotics/etc.


If you can make many replicators, money stops making much sense. You probably end up with energy (if these devices take a lot of energy to operate) as the new currency.

My gut says that _somehow_ the middle class will get screwed as always, but I struggle to articulate the way that abundant cheap goods lead to that outcome.

Maybe because the very few that control the replicators will be able to cut people they don’t like out of partaking from them? That’d make some sense.

If replicators were replicatable, that control evaporates quickly. Remember how nervous we all were about LLM censorship, then suddenly a $2000 MacBook Pro could run pretty great open source models that seem a few months behind SOTA?


IMO - Money will NEVER stops making sense.

Money is a cheap way to translate unlike objects. Cows to art, labor to goods. Green to triangle.

Money (or something) will always exist, because it is a needed lubricant for transactions.


In a word: it's fungible[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility


> Money (or something) will always exist, because it is a needed lubricant for transactions.

So it's only useful for as long as you have the need for transactions.


> So it's only useful for as long as you have the need for transactions

Which you will always have some need for, because resources aren't infinite, real estate isn't infinite, services aren't infinite, etc


> If you can make many replicators, money stops making much sense.

There are many, many, many, many positional goods. Beachfront properties, original art, historical artifacts, elite clubs, limited edition luxury goods, top restaurants, etc.

The notion that we'd all live happily and contentedly without money if only we had some more iPhones and other goods produced by replicators strikes me as false.

Remember that Keynes predicted about a century ago that 100 years thence (in other words, now) everyone would just work 10 hours a week at most, and the biggest challenge would be to avoid boredom? He predicted productivity growth accurate enough, but assumed that people would have enough with 4x, 5x as much as they had back then while simultaneously working 4x, 5x less. Instead, people opted to work just as much and consume 16x as much.


What does it mean in practice to have energy instead of money as currency?

People would still want to be able to trade with lower friction than lugging batteries around, so don't you just re-invent money on top of it? orrrrrr just keep having the current money around the whole time?

--

The general limiting factor with the "one person controls the replicators, only they have income" idea is that they would rapidly lose that income because nobody else would have anything to trade them anymore. (If you toss in the AI/robotic dream scenario, they don't even need humans to manage the raw material.) But then does that turn into famine and mass-die-off, or Star Trek utopia?


> What does it mean in practice to have energy instead of money as currency?

Something like Bitcoin. When the progress in miners efficiency stalls any kWh of energy not used for something else will be used to make some amount of bitcoins. If you have energy you can make btc. If you have btc you can give your btc to someone in exchange for their energy so that they give you their energy, instead of using it to mine bitcoins themselves.


That just seems very wasteful when proof-of-stake works.


It's not really wasteful if you use excess energy for mining that you couldn't store because storage is very limited.

The goal is not efficiency. The goal to provide incentive to overbuild the renewables.


Or even good old centralised distributed systems that do it another 4 to 6 orders of magnitude more efficiently than PoS.


It sounds terrible when you approach it from the point of money. Of course you can do money more efficiently. But if you approach this form the side of energy it's a way to organically tie a value to any energy produced. Even the energy produced at times when production vastly exceeds the demand. And that's going to be most of the energy produced since we need to develop renewables capacity and can't really wait for the storage technologies that lag horribly so we can match the supply the demand.

This is a way to make all energy valuable and providing incentive to build renewables even when 90% of the energy they produce will find no traditional buyer.


Using crypto to consume stranded wind and solar is an elegant idea.


> But then does that turn into famine and mass-die-off

Probably extremely bloody revolt and collapse


Only if you assume people's major motivation is wanting what they don't have, as opposed to wanting a little more to survive. History shows the opposite.


> History shows the opposite.

I strongly disagree, everything I know about history points the other way

Human history is littered with "people's major motivation is wanting what they don't have"

Look at the conflicts happening right now in Ukraine, or Israel

Come on, be serious


> If you can make many replicators, money stops making much sense. You probably end up with energy (if these devices take a lot of energy to operate) as the new currency.

If you can make many replicators, you certainly won't be providing them to anyone else. You'd be using them to ensure that money starts funneling into your revenue stream, and use that as a cash cow to pursue other projects.


That’s only a temporary possibility, once the tech gets out everyone will have replicators.


What are they replicating? Patented things, copyrighted things? Or groceries? Do they want to replicate things? In Star Trek, they travel light, wear uniforms, and have few personal possessions, because they're on a ship, in the navy. That's why everything has to be digital and everybody stuffs their life inside a phonecorder and drinks synthale. When he's back on earth, Picard has a horse. I could be wrong but I don't think he replicated it.


Just like everyone owns factories today


  You probably end up with energy (if these devices take a lot of energy to operate) as the new currency.
So what's stopping you from replicating a power source and battery?

Seems analogous to LLM's: replicators replicate but do not create. Information would then seem to the proper choice for a new currency..


But energy is essentially free also, at least on the margin, and if we're talking about sunlight.


Sure. And AI will only run at peak solar times.


Did you know, that there is always a place on earth enjoying peak solar time right now?


> Remember how nervous we all were about LLM censorship

You're taking the wrong lesson from that observation. Models that people actually use are just as censored now as they ever were. What changed was the the hysterical anti-censorship babies realized that it's not that big of a problem, at least acutely.


> I struggle to articulate the way that abundant cheap goods lead to that outcome.

It has nothing to do with how cheap the goods are

The problem is that at some point people won't be able to afford literally anything because all, and I mean literally all, of the wealth will be hyper concentrated in a super small percentage of the population


Do you have anything to support this hypothesis?



Link's broken.



Simple hypothesis. Top 5percent of US wealth now belongs to top 50 richest American. Even if you ignore corruption, lobbying and any ill intent you can definitely conclude that this top 50 individuals have better way of getting return from money than rest of the population. Even if if their delta of return is 5% we can assume that withing next 50 years there is a high probability that these guys will own 30-50% of wealth. I have a strong belive AI will acclerate that further.


But all your numbers (except maybe top 5% one) are completely made up. Strong beliefs don't prevent one from being completely wrong. Neville Chamberlain has a strong belief that he had ensured peace; Einstein had a strong belief that quantum theory's "spooky action at a distance" was incorrect. Both were wrong. Fifty years is a long time, and anything could happen. The last fifty years had the fall of Communism, the EU, China going from an impoverished countryside to a superpower, video phones in our pocket, social media upending communication and mental health, renewable energy displacing coal, Trump, etc.


Not to mention that 50% of US wealth is only 15% of the world's total wealth - a far cry from "literally all wealth"


But these aren’t replicators owned by a monopolist. There are a number of highly funded, highly competitive vendors at every level of the stack.


Sure, but you're not one of them.


Sure, but who do they sell stuff to if no one has a job? We’re on the brink of some _very_ unexplored branches of human behavior.


That's the key. The poor are useful to business so long as they are a source of money and power. What happens if the time comes that the poor have nothing the rich want?


The rich will need play things. Think Westworld, but with real people.


Historically in this case eventually the poor kill the rich

Probably not this time though


If they killed the poor, then how can they enjoy their power over people?


They'll just make some more poor to kill.


I guess that’s why Larry, Zuck and Thiel, et al want constant recording of the plebs, so that ‘citizens will be on their best behaviour’.

This time there will be no revolution but it will be televised. :P


It's strange that socialists seem more concerned with their material possessions than anyone else.


The poor will always have the only thing the rich want. Labor. Without labor Trump cannot slather the white house in gold. Without labor Zuck cannot smoke meats. Without labor Musk cannot troll people on X.

The rich do not want anything you have, they want you. Body and soul.


Robots can take most of the jobs, but the feeling of power over other humans they likely cannot replace.


> Robots can take most of the jobs

Not in our lifetimes and certainly not in our form of society. Robots will only drive down the price of labor. People will always be able to supply labor at costs below the price of materials for robots.


" People will always be able to supply labor at costs below the price of materials for robots."

Why? What critical materials do robots need that will always be more expansive than raising a human?

Also, from the point of "the rich" - the benefit of a robot is, that it will (stupidly) do as command, unlike a human. They don't have a family they want to take care first.


I mean, eventually like 1 person is going to have more wealth than 60% of the nation combined. At that point, why even bother trying to earn customers or appeal to the lower half when you can instead curry favor with that 1 person.


Oh, the rich will be very happy wielding sadistic power over the poor


They will always want entertainment.

Whether it's gladiators or bum fights, the poor will ultimately be given a job. Robot wars was fun, but UFC has stayed.


This is why revolts happen.

If you scratch under the hood of UBI, it's a mechanism to keep revolutions at bay. The balance of tax the ultra wealthy vs giving people enough to "live comfortably" is always the job of governance.


> If you scratch under the hood of UBI, it's a mechanism to keep revolutions at bay.

It's also putting money in the hands of the consumers so the rich can compete between themselves at how much each can scoop back up.

Something like feeding animals in the forest to compete with your friends at who can hunt better.

When poor have nothing then you have to shift to taking money of the other rich, but they are clever, so it's easier to take a little bit from the hands of all rich equally, give that money to the poor and reduce the new problem to the old one, how to extract as much as you can from the poor.


The first sentence is definitely. But, UBI is a nerd/socialist fantasy. It would nevet work and will never happen. Everyone with these sci-fi fever dreams of what will happen if AI collapses white collar jobs are coming from people that don’t know how the world or people actually work outside of their daydreams. People aren’t going to just be like “ok, well I guess it’s time for bread and water and Soviet style tenement housing, all this progress in livings was great while it lasted.” And other people are talking about using batteries for money or something. People need to touch grass.


This is very explored - it was the state of humanity for most of its existence. The few had resources, the many were poor.


For most of humanity's existence nobody was poor because there was no such thing as money.


We're nearly-there. The humans then become the capital/resource to be acquired, not money.

That's why every country is somehow chasing that elusive "population growth". It creates more "things" to own, whether that be money by virtue of more people creating more money through economic activity or simply more people to claim as "yours" (for the elites/leaders).


Bots. Agentic consumers.


Imagine a few billionaires pay big bucks to keep AGI to themselves and let the rest of us die on the vine.


Okay, but why would we die on the vine? Wouldn’t we just… make a parallel economy without the AGI? The world works today without AGI.


Or use any of the wonders of military technology invented in the last 200 years to take back society. These fuckers have lived in prosperity for so long that they don't even think it is possible. But so many people throughout history thought they were untouchable until the masses decided they had enough of their shit. Kings with professional armies, full plate knights, men with cannons, mens with guns, machine guns, bombs, planes, tanks, helicopters, and yet at the end of the day when enough random people are pissed off enough the mass of people with nothing to lose are the ones who "win" in the end with the powerful dead or hiding.


When unrest happens the military sides with the ones that give better hopes of keeping the stream of money that funds the army flowing.

It sides with the poor only if the powerful (gov) are hopelessly inept at gathering money. If there's a chance that current civilian power can reform and keep collecting the money from the people and funding the army then the army sides with them and help quell the rebellion.

Those who hold kinetic power will never side with poor against the rich.


Im not talking about the military siding with the people, im talking about the military's side not being enough to prevent the people from rising up and taking down whoever is in power. Militaries require logistics, random people do not. Military needs a government or people to follow for direction, masses of angry people do not.

Every time a government or military force has decided they were unstoppable or untouchable, history has proven them wrong. Hell we spent 2 decades in Iraq and Afganistan with the most powerful military and military tech the world has ever known backed by the strongest economy in the world against guys with 60+ year old bolt actions and guns filed out by hand in caves living in mostly desert landscapes, and we still ended up abandoning it because it was too costly. How would the military fair any better against the best armed population in the world with direct access to their supplying economy and logistics networks?

Yeah sure masses of people aren't making aircraft carriers, but you don't need aircarft carriers to win a war at home. We have modern engineering and chemistry text books in every library across the US that will tell you how military technology works and its flaws, what technology you can utilize find or make yourself, and a supply of nearly any material someone could possibly want or need sitting in scrapyards across the nation.


> im talking about the military's side not being enough to prevent the people from rising up and taking down whoever is in power.

That's sheer fantasy.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C9AdZVQuITM/?utm_source=ig_we...


Not always .. see the peasants revolt of 1381, French Revolution in 1789-1793, Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, etc.


Parallel economies are banned. Try making a new currency in the US.


Economies can work without currencies. It's a little inconvenient, but bartering/trading goods for services was common in the depression when nobody had any cash.



Printing money is lucrative for the printer so any time it might get even a little bit useful and feasible for other parties somebody will start printing.


Did we just ignore the last fifteen years of crypto?


No I had the speculative ponzi front of mind when making that comment.

Governments love crypto because it lets you seize lots of money from criminals across borders. And it is legal gambling where you can tax the winnings without reimbursing the losers (unless they can offset it but most probably can not)


> Okay, but why would we die on the vine? Wouldn’t we just… make a parallel economy without the AGI? The world works today without AGI.

Because you need things they want. Like why would they spare the electricity to heat your home, when it could go to "better" use powering a few dozen GPUs serving a billionaire? Why would they spare the land for you to grow food, when they could use it to build ziggurats dedicated to their power (or whatever else is their whim)?

The market sends the scarce resources to those with the most money.


What is the fantasy AGI supposed to be that's so great for billionaires to have? A human baby is an <s>A</s>GI, it won't tell you the Ultimate Answer, or even a penultimate one, because it has no way to know.

No, seriously, what? You think an AGI is going to be a willing slave and endowed with special knowledge? Where does either part of that come from?


The world of Star Trek was fully post scarcity. Rich/poor were not things that existed.

They had to get through this before things got better: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bell_Riots


> The wealth gap is so massive you get revolts

This never happens. It's not the relative wealth gap that creates revolts it's the poverty/bad conditions in absolute terms.

If the lower class conditions improve, even just a little bit, there is no revolt.


Ultimately labour goes and works on something else instead. And the availability of free labour makes that possible. New industries and markets develop as a result. But a huge number of people will be left behind. But people will focus on things that were a lower priority before.


I have bad news for you, we've run out of sectors to pretend labor could be funneled towards. Manufacturing and agriculture are highly automated, service industry is full tf up, and nobody can afford more construction.


What about medical, elder care, fitness, leisure. Even service industries that focus on a more human connection. Or jobs focused on nature, the environment etc.

And i don't think this would nbe an easy process or something that could or would be managed. But it is probably already happening.


Thought experiments in science work because there are falsifiable scientific theories that make definite predictions about the world than can be tested.

What you wrote is not that.


Yeah, but which tech has not had a homegrown variant that ultimately democratized it? Makes me think of the "feed" vs the "seed" in "The Diamond Age".


Continuing current trends presumably.


No you can’t, the system is setup to make you work that hard. Their compensation policy is based on rewarding disproportionally the top performers…

So if you can work 10% more than your peers, you get not 10% bonus but rather 30%-100% more. So it makes business sense to put the extra 10%, until everyone is working at 110% and then again, adding an extra 10% pays off, rinse release, death spiral.

The compensation model is pure evil.


> So it makes business sense to put the extra 10%

Does it actually? I'd buy that it makes silly arbitrary emotion sense to bask in the nonsensical feelings about an even bigger number. The actual business case is much less clear. There is obviously an opportunity cost associated with that extra 10% and 30-100% is not necessarily the best opportunity. I suspect it is often not.


Microsoft engineer throwaway chiming in.

I think the parent emphasizes the wrong side of it, although I agree with them strongly that it is a damaging way to do things. Yes, you get slightly more upside on the top end, but it's more like 30% vs. 10% for an average performer, there's no 100% bonuses here unless you're in the "ruling class" (roughly VP and above).

The actual risk is that if you're on the downside of what they call "differentiation", if you're not the one who pushed above your peers, what used to be called meets expectation is now considered below expectations, and is a path towards pip and layoff. Lack of growth for non-terminal roles is also now identified as a path towards pip and layoff.

Microsoft is intentionally turning up the heat to thin the herd.


Or, you can just be happy getting the lower end of the bonus. It’s not like the pay and RSU is peanuts. Or work just enough to be in the middle of the bell curve. I put in the work to be in the top part earlier but it is absolutely not worth it, they will lay you off anyway.


I remember being so stressed on an immigration visa, if you don’t perform well and get fired, you also get deported.


That would be nice, but if you want to immigrate, that’s the current deal.



From the frypan into the fire. I think the reality, proven by history and even just this short five years, is no company will hold onto their ethics in this space. This should surprise no one since the first step of the enterprise is hoovering up the worlds data without permission.


Worse by every measure.


What metrics are you looking at? Grok 4 outperforms Claude 4 Opus in the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index.

https://artificialanalysis.ai/leaderboards/models


What sane person would downgrade to Grok


Any chance we can get a high-level breakdown of the AWS services they are paying for?


No. The figure is from their S-1 filing and further detail is not provided.



Like the concept! After signing up and defining my criteria clicking “Start Search” returns no results


Hey, thanks so much for checking it out, and really appreciate you scheduling a call!

That "no results" issue typically happens when the targeting criteria are too narrow or a specific region/industry has lower coverage in the lead dataset. I’ll walk you through how to get results fast on the call, and we’ll make sure it works smoothly for your use case.

Looking forward to chatting and getting you set up!


Same and thanks!


You're welcome


Scheduled time in your website to troubleshoot and try it out


What is the max number of dimensions supported for a vector?


There is currently no cap. We will probably impose a similar cap to Qdrant or Pinecone some time soon ~64k. There's obviously a performance trade off as you go up, but we hope to massively offset this by doing binary quantisation within the next couple of months.


there is also the fact that the more dimensions you have for embedded data the more diluted the embedding becomes so it is unusual to go anywhere near the limits of vector length!


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