You've misunderstood the essay. A central point is to not think about AI risk in terms of matrix/sci-fi scenarios, but in terms of how it might/is likely to function in our societies.
So if you discount the sci-fi scenarios (which is a separate argument), the argument that "we need to be the first to develop AGI" doesn't hold water. If, say, China gets there first, so what? It will affect their society however it'll affect it (likely entrenching authoritarianism if i had to guess). But this has no bearing on us (speaking as an american)
Warning: This is more of a rant because I was waiting for a post like this for awhile that I could build from to express ny own feelings on it.
I think capitalism in itself is great, what isn't is the fact that it can build on itself, it can be infinite, there's zero limits to it. Now what I mean by that, once you make 10k, it's easier to get to 100k and even easier to get to 1m and so on, you might think it's harder, but you gain access to more tools to make more money and at the 10m to 100m range you get to a point where it starts being genuinely hard to fail because just having your name on a project elevates the chances of success by a far margin. Of course there's plenty of people who managed to fail even with millions of dollars I will acknoledge that.
Let's take an extreme example: elon musk. Just having something done by "elon musk" makes the project known by nearly the entire world with investors at the doorstep ready to go, a pretty famous example of this would be hyper-loop, although the project itself is a complete failure, it effectively mobilized a decent chunk of companies into investing into this "modern form of transport".
People will argue that the solutions like wealth limits and higher taxes create complacency and stop people from achieving progress and pushing humanity forward, but I don't think that's quite true because at a certain point (beyond ~1m/month or even year in some cases like Linus Torvalds) is enough to effectively do 95% to 99% of what you could spend the money on, anything beyond that is pretty much infinite wealth due to the fact that you can get 5% returns nearly risk free.
There is this popular video of a businessman claiming that if they're taxed more that they will simply work less, but there's way more people that love their work and money is just a nice bonus. I think focusing your life around a number is a very unhealthy mindset and surfaces the worst parts of what we are as humans.
That said, money is a great motivator and probably the reason why we are here and the problems really only start to rear their ugly head when no one person can comprehend the money they have anymore. I don't have a solution, but I also believe that we need some kind of category beyond the "motivation" treshold where it stops being a motivator and instead becomes an aggressive fight with survival of the fittest.
The fatalist philosophers and authors have been mostly proven right as time marched on. And this time will be no different, the existence of "AI" ensures the future will be as dark or worse as the predictions expect. Why? Because humans are flawed and corrupt, too prone to excesses (specially conformism and convenience) and the exploitation of the natural world.
I am not sure how this is downvoted, as it contains sharply two main principles:
-- a growth in power requires a growth in human qualities (wisdom, maturity, responsibility) for sustainability; and technology-enabled possibilities are increases in power;
-- conformism and convenience are /exactly/ - congratulations sucrosesucrose, we had noticed and analyzed and every day increasingly come to the same assessment - the two core active faces of ignorance that are destroying current western societies. We came to the same conclusions, we identified the same two dark cancers.
This said, some of the current technological advances are enablers, if well used, in greatly curing the underlying ignorance, and consequently the phenomenons of "conformism" and "convenience".
Depends which philosopher but on the whole things have continued fairly similar as time marched on but with some tech improvements. Human nature is the same as Roman times - we still have wars, arguments and inequality. Tech has produced longer life expectancy, literacy, communications and the like. Which fatal thing has happened beyond that?
If you're actually planning on reading any of the essay, "The Poisoned Chalice" is the section most likely to be of interest to this audience, especially this bit:
> Big AI essentially uses its tech customers as an R&D facility. Big AI licenses models to these companies. Tech companies compete to adapt their businesses to AI. Once a concept is proven, Big AI directly takes over that market. The labor-replacement story will grow into a company-replacement story.
> How Big AI plans to profit from this intermediation is an open question. One AI company has suggested taking a cut of AI-assisted discoveries. The logistics and legalities would be boggling. Details—whatever.
Interesting if they pull it off, because clearly they did not have the logistics to pay the people whose IP they used to power the LLMs.
> For now, AI companies largely agree on the first step: make workers dependent on AI to do their jobs, just as tech forebears made workers dependent on a certain software program to share a file, or on a certain website to have friends. This time, however, the software ultimately consumes the worker.
The argument is that labor depending on LLM’s is dangerous but it makes speculative assumptions that the big AI labs will win.
> Consider large law firms, aka Big Law. Currently certain legal-AI startups license LLMs from Big AI and repackage them for Big Law at high prices. These startups claim to add other special sauce. OK, sure. Where’s the economic equilibrium? If legal-AI startups prove that money can be made selling AI to Big Law—won’t Big AI just sell to Big Law directly, and cut out the startups? Or if legal-AI startups prove that AI can effectively provide legal services—won’t legal-AI startups just sell to clients directly, and cut out Big Law? Won’t members of Big Law that adopt AI have to lay off a lot of equity partners, because adoption of AI will shrink profit margins?
…
> Along these lines, I expect that to succeed financially, Big AI will likely need to demolish a significant number of existing tech companies and grab their revenue for itself.
Nobody knows how this will play out. Maybe the legal-AI startups win because they know their market better? They can switch to cheaper providers.
It's an absurd scenario because Big AI is simply not in the Big AI Law business. They are also not in the Big AI Accounting business, the Big AI Pharmaceutical business, or the Big AI Web App business. It is absurd because the CapEx and OpEx to subsume every industry is unjustifiable.
On legal-AI startups undercutting Big Law to the point where Big Law has to adopt AI... Well, yes, that will happen. But as the article's intro belabors the point, there is a natural resistance to changing entrenchment. And it is practically impossible to overcome. So, good luck to the Big Law C-suite laying everyone off with AI when they can't even replace WordPerfect with a modern word processor.
I stopped reading after the first sentence. Calling something "inherently political" is a self-fulfilling prophecy and intentionally so. It consistently turns out to be an attempt to lay the groundwork for expropriation. No one called the Internet "inherently political" until people built stuff there that other people wanted to control.
I agree that “inherently political” is usually a thought terminating cliche. What kinds of technologies are conditionally political?
The internet is a bad counterexample as it originated from a department of defense project and a number of other government programs that focused on communications and military applications.
I mean, all communications technology is inherently political. From the invention of speech and writing, to the printing press, radio, telephone, TV, and now internet and the communication mediums it allows.
This is because speech is inherently political at the end of the day.
There's a core problem this analysis overlooks: OpenAI and Anthropic don't have a moat. The Chinese labs are consistently able to replicate their LLM capabilities a few months after the fact, and then release open-weight models a few months later...
The only way for "Big AI" to become a thing is for them to establish a moat, and right now the only path to that appears to be achieving regulatory capture in the US, which is a fickle and unstable state of affairs.
That's why they're so keen to build out all these data centers; the massive capex is their only conceivable moat. Whether all those additional parameters actually make a competitive difference is still an open question.
We're in the Pets.com era of AI for sure. There is 0 guarantee the current providers will be around in 5-10 years. I keep thinking they will have to lean in to government protection to do so.
Big AI is a thing. Insane money and construction projects makes the government invested in it one way or the other. It can't fail or it'll cause economic shock. It's a play to normalize it and make everyone depend on it before people question how they trained it all on their data and now drive them out of their jobs.
If they ask for a moat they will get it, the government can simply require licensing for hardware required to run any model comparable to the cloud ones (for "national security"). good local models will only be used by .01% who are crazy neckbeards running servers in their basement and even then they will suck compared to cloud ones.
Memory might be a moat. A cynical view is this is why openAI is buying up all the capacity for HBM. If they have all the memory then we plebs won't be able to afford hardware to run local models. So we instead we have to rent their models basically just to get access to the memory.
You are not allowed to use any model from Chinese labs at American companies. Even from other companies like Mistral it is hard to get access, since enterprises require their own instances on vertex/bedrock/azure, and to run alternatives you have to go through multiple layers of management. In practice, no employee will proactively advocate for alternative models and the oligopoly is written in the wall, specially since the investments are circular anyway.
Uh, this read is completely insane. A fantastical look into the mind of someone who thinks about many disparate things and is looking for ways to connect them. This is post hoc rationalization at its finest.
I had a much longer post here initially. Deleted it because I got tired of mental gymnastics required to follow the author's thought process. Instead, here are the salient parts of my response:
----
The only way I can read the section on the mechanical tomato harvester is that they would rather have 32,000 people picking tomatoes than doing literally anything else. There are very good reasons that phone companies haven't employed people as switchboard operators for a nearly century. It isn't a valuable or useful way to spend a person's time.
As a young adult, I worked in a distribution center filling orders by picking products from a shelf and placing them in bins. It was incredibly boring but also physically demanding. Pick the correct number of items ordered, push the button. Pick the next number of items ordered for the next product, push the button. When the order is complete, start on the next bin. Repeat as fast as possible without making any mistakes.
It was SO draining to meet quota. After a few weeks, I didn't have to put any conscious effort in. Like driving a car, the process became automatic. I could think about other things while counting and pushing buttons. Thinking about things like how trivial this job would be to automate, so I didn't have to do this wasteful energy expenditure.
I quit that job after about 6 months, beginning my career in IT. But I gained a passionate hate for menial labor that can be automated with some upfront investment. I wouldn't want to pick tomatoes, either. The tomato harvesting machine is a miracle.
If this is the basis of calling technology inherently political, and using "inherently political" to cast a negative light on technology, then I have to call it out as hopelessly dystopian to not want "political technology". Namely fewer automated machines and more people doing menial labor.
What struck me about that section is that the author didn't even ask the question of how much tomatoes cost before and after the introduction of the mechanical tomato harvester. 32,000 people picking tomatoes is a lot of human labor, which is ultimately paid for by ordinary people buying and eating tomatoes.
“ Liberals, and Social Democrats in general, have this common belief that capitalism can be “reformed” to become more humane and acceptable to society, and that this can be done by the use of state power which can be acquired through elections in a political democracy; this state of reformed capitalism can be institutionalized for ever, which makes any struggle for socialism unnecessary.”
39 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 66.3 ms ] threadIt's not obvious that there will be a single AI and that it will by definition concentrate power.
At a certain point - intelligence doesn't matter. Unless we're literally headed toward 1984 / matrix at which point it doesn't matter.
My guess is the argument for what we're doing is counterintuitively the opposite of what he's making.
Unless we go hard at the market - now - an authoritarian state actor who is willing to use the technology to fully silence and kill critics will win.
And boy, do they desperately, desperately want to win.
So if you discount the sci-fi scenarios (which is a separate argument), the argument that "we need to be the first to develop AGI" doesn't hold water. If, say, China gets there first, so what? It will affect their society however it'll affect it (likely entrenching authoritarianism if i had to guess). But this has no bearing on us (speaking as an american)
I think capitalism in itself is great, what isn't is the fact that it can build on itself, it can be infinite, there's zero limits to it. Now what I mean by that, once you make 10k, it's easier to get to 100k and even easier to get to 1m and so on, you might think it's harder, but you gain access to more tools to make more money and at the 10m to 100m range you get to a point where it starts being genuinely hard to fail because just having your name on a project elevates the chances of success by a far margin. Of course there's plenty of people who managed to fail even with millions of dollars I will acknoledge that.
Let's take an extreme example: elon musk. Just having something done by "elon musk" makes the project known by nearly the entire world with investors at the doorstep ready to go, a pretty famous example of this would be hyper-loop, although the project itself is a complete failure, it effectively mobilized a decent chunk of companies into investing into this "modern form of transport".
People will argue that the solutions like wealth limits and higher taxes create complacency and stop people from achieving progress and pushing humanity forward, but I don't think that's quite true because at a certain point (beyond ~1m/month or even year in some cases like Linus Torvalds) is enough to effectively do 95% to 99% of what you could spend the money on, anything beyond that is pretty much infinite wealth due to the fact that you can get 5% returns nearly risk free.
There is this popular video of a businessman claiming that if they're taxed more that they will simply work less, but there's way more people that love their work and money is just a nice bonus. I think focusing your life around a number is a very unhealthy mindset and surfaces the worst parts of what we are as humans.
That said, money is a great motivator and probably the reason why we are here and the problems really only start to rear their ugly head when no one person can comprehend the money they have anymore. I don't have a solution, but I also believe that we need some kind of category beyond the "motivation" treshold where it stops being a motivator and instead becomes an aggressive fight with survival of the fittest.
-- a growth in power requires a growth in human qualities (wisdom, maturity, responsibility) for sustainability; and technology-enabled possibilities are increases in power;
-- conformism and convenience are /exactly/ - congratulations sucrosesucrose, we had noticed and analyzed and every day increasingly come to the same assessment - the two core active faces of ignorance that are destroying current western societies. We came to the same conclusions, we identified the same two dark cancers.
This said, some of the current technological advances are enablers, if well used, in greatly curing the underlying ignorance, and consequently the phenomenons of "conformism" and "convenience".
In what sense? Most people today would not choose to go an live at any other point in history, except for window between about 1960 and 2008.
Life was much harder for the average person outside of this window at any other point.
> Big AI essentially uses its tech customers as an R&D facility. Big AI licenses models to these companies. Tech companies compete to adapt their businesses to AI. Once a concept is proven, Big AI directly takes over that market. The labor-replacement story will grow into a company-replacement story.
Interesting if they pull it off, because clearly they did not have the logistics to pay the people whose IP they used to power the LLMs.
> For now, AI companies largely agree on the first step: make workers dependent on AI to do their jobs, just as tech forebears made workers dependent on a certain software program to share a file, or on a certain website to have friends. This time, however, the software ultimately consumes the worker.
Any proposal about slowing down AI that doesn't put the onus on both the US and China is facetious.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-prepares-295-billi...
[1] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260609VL215/alibaba-ceo-ai...
> Consider large law firms, aka Big Law. Currently certain legal-AI startups license LLMs from Big AI and repackage them for Big Law at high prices. These startups claim to add other special sauce. OK, sure. Where’s the economic equilibrium? If legal-AI startups prove that money can be made selling AI to Big Law—won’t Big AI just sell to Big Law directly, and cut out the startups? Or if legal-AI startups prove that AI can effectively provide legal services—won’t legal-AI startups just sell to clients directly, and cut out Big Law? Won’t members of Big Law that adopt AI have to lay off a lot of equity partners, because adoption of AI will shrink profit margins?
…
> Along these lines, I expect that to succeed financially, Big AI will likely need to demolish a significant number of existing tech companies and grab their revenue for itself.
Nobody knows how this will play out. Maybe the legal-AI startups win because they know their market better? They can switch to cheaper providers.
On legal-AI startups undercutting Big Law to the point where Big Law has to adopt AI... Well, yes, that will happen. But as the article's intro belabors the point, there is a natural resistance to changing entrenchment. And it is practically impossible to overcome. So, good luck to the Big Law C-suite laying everyone off with AI when they can't even replace WordPerfect with a modern word processor.
The internet is a bad counterexample as it originated from a department of defense project and a number of other government programs that focused on communications and military applications.
This is because speech is inherently political at the end of the day.
The only way for "Big AI" to become a thing is for them to establish a moat, and right now the only path to that appears to be achieving regulatory capture in the US, which is a fickle and unstable state of affairs.
If they ask for a moat they will get it, the government can simply require licensing for hardware required to run any model comparable to the cloud ones (for "national security"). good local models will only be used by .01% who are crazy neckbeards running servers in their basement and even then they will suck compared to cloud ones.
They are going to want to profit from their resources expended eventually and when they do, that will end.
I had a much longer post here initially. Deleted it because I got tired of mental gymnastics required to follow the author's thought process. Instead, here are the salient parts of my response:
----
The only way I can read the section on the mechanical tomato harvester is that they would rather have 32,000 people picking tomatoes than doing literally anything else. There are very good reasons that phone companies haven't employed people as switchboard operators for a nearly century. It isn't a valuable or useful way to spend a person's time.
As a young adult, I worked in a distribution center filling orders by picking products from a shelf and placing them in bins. It was incredibly boring but also physically demanding. Pick the correct number of items ordered, push the button. Pick the next number of items ordered for the next product, push the button. When the order is complete, start on the next bin. Repeat as fast as possible without making any mistakes.
It was SO draining to meet quota. After a few weeks, I didn't have to put any conscious effort in. Like driving a car, the process became automatic. I could think about other things while counting and pushing buttons. Thinking about things like how trivial this job would be to automate, so I didn't have to do this wasteful energy expenditure.
I quit that job after about 6 months, beginning my career in IT. But I gained a passionate hate for menial labor that can be automated with some upfront investment. I wouldn't want to pick tomatoes, either. The tomato harvesting machine is a miracle.
If this is the basis of calling technology inherently political, and using "inherently political" to cast a negative light on technology, then I have to call it out as hopelessly dystopian to not want "political technology". Namely fewer automated machines and more people doing menial labor.
https://mronline.org/2026/06/13/the-chimera-of-a-reformed-ca...