I think this might be plausible in the future, but it needs a lot more tooling. For starters you need to be able to run the prompt through the exact same model so you can reproduce a "build".
Even the exact same model isn't enough. There are several sources of nondeterminism in LLMs. These would all need to be squashed or seeded - which as far as I know isn't a feature that openai / anthropic / etc provide.
A lot of this stuff is in the realm of "lol" or even "lmao". There's a consistent failure to consider human nature and economic incentives woven through this essay. Probably the most objectionable stuff is in section 2 "Neuroscience and Mind" because the definition of "mental illness" itself is prone to all kind of historical and societal biases. Who gets to decide what a "normal" brain is? Is it the AI? Does the owner of the brain have any say here? Would a psychopath actually volunteer to be "treated"? Ultimately the danger is that "normal" will just mean "what's best for economic productivity". This is not a good or moral definition and is not founded in any kind of ethical reasoning.
Just remember you "lol" at Nobel laureates and Turing award winners that all agree unanimously that we are going there. You just lol. Not much to say to convince you.
> Take a million dollars, give 1,000 poor people $1,000 and every dollar will be spent on goods and services.
If we're being realistic a bunch of this will go to paying off existing debt. Still good, but not the economic stimulus you're imagining. There are also "services" like gambling apps that act as a sponge to soak up money from those foolish enough to use them and transfer that money back to the wealthy shareholders. I'm sure there is research on what percentage of that $1000 can be expected to stimulate the economy, but it's not 100%.
I think that's a distinction without difference. If one person can do the job of 10 thanks to automation, what happens to the other 9 who were doing that job before?
You can also produce 10x the goods with the same amount of workers or let the other 9 work in other jobs.
The difference is that previously there still had been plenty of (low skill) jobs where automation didn't work. Pizza delivery, taxi driver, lots of office jobs with repetitive tasks etc.
Soon there will be nothing for the average joe as the machine will be better in all tasks he could perform.
I see a lot of people attacking the messenger but very few addressing the basic logic that you need 800B+ in profit just to pay the interest on some of these investments.
Pointing out IBM's mixed history would be valid if they were making some complex, intricate, hard to verify case for why AI won't be profitable. But the case being made seems like really simple math. A lot of the counterarguments to these economic problems have the form "this time it's different" - something you hear every bubble from .com to 2008.
While I agree that the US has a historical obsession with communism, "anything right is abhorrent totalitarian fascism in the making" has been a far more commonly stated position for the last decade. At this point, it's necessary to regard both "communism" and "fascism" as simple pejoratives and focus on the specific policies being discussed.
This is unfortunate but perhaps inevitable. There are not that many left that remember the horrors of either ideology clearly.
"Thiel owns Vance" is obviously shorthand, but is there evidence that Vance is actually under Thiel's control or do they just agree on stuff? I think proving corruption would probably require that Thiel personally/materially benefit from actions that Vance takes in office, not just that he funded Vance's campaign because he agrees with Vance's politics.
Edit: I think there's a much stronger case for some kind of corruption charge against Trump, since he's been using the office to enrich himself.[1]
> not just that he funded Vance's campaign because he agrees with Vance's politics.
That should be sufficient. We need to start the process of a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and we need to do as much as we can to enforce existing laws against dark money and enact as much as we can while Citizens United is in effect.
If anything they seem to be friends, with Curtis Yarvin as well, and believes that democracy has run its course. It doesn't really matter if he's just bought by money or if he has bought into the same ideas. Thiel maneuvered Vance into this position using his money and power, and their plans extend far beyond Trump's lifetime.
I used to think this was deep, but it equally applies to progressivism as well as well as a range of human institutions. It's a restatement the basic observation that humans are prone to in-group bias. What's really dangerous is that some refuse to see the same flaw within themselves and instead always ascribe it to "the other".
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