[[ ]] The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip.
In the introduction to my research project on Accelerationism [0], I write:
Faced with the acceleration of progress in Artificial Intelligence (AI) — with AI agents now automating AI research and development —, Accelerationism no longer seems like an abstract philosophy producing empty hyperstitional hype, but like a sober description of reality. The failed 2023 memorandum to stop AI development on systems more powerful than OpenAI's ChatGPT-4 perfectly illustrates the phenomenological aspects of Accelerationism: "To be rushed by the phenomenon, to the point of terminal institutional paralysis, is the phenomenon." [1]
[1] Nick Land (2017). A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism in Jacobite Magazine.
I went from accepting I wouldn't see a true AI in my lifetime, to thinking it is possible before I die, to thinking it is possible in in the next decade, to thinking it is probably in the next 3 years to wondering if we might see it this year.
Just 6 months ago people were wondering if pre-training was stalling out and if we hit a wall. Then deepseek drops with RL'd inference time compute, China jumps from being 2 years behind in the AI race to being neck-and-neck and we're all wondering what will happen when we apply those techniques to the current full-sized behemoth models.
It seems the models that are going to come out around summer time may be jumps in capability beyond our expectations. And the updated costs means that there may be several open source alternatives available. The intelligence that will be available to the average technically literate individual will be frightening.
That's not the scary part. The scary part is the intelligence at scale that could be available to the average employer. Lots of us like to LARP that we're capitalists, but very few of us are. There's zero ideological or cultural framework in place to prioritize the well being of the general population over the profits of some capitalists.
AI, especially accelerating AI, is bad news for anyone who needs to work for a living. It's not going to lead to a Star Trek fantasy. It means an eventual phase change for the economy that consigns us (and most consumer product companies) to wither and fade away.
I get a lot of "IA will allow us to create SaaS in a weekend" and "IA will take engineers jobs", which I think they both may be true. But a lot of SaaS surive because engineers pay for them -- if engineer don't exist anymore, a lot of SaaS won't either. If you eat your potential customers, creating quick SaaS doesn't make sense anymore (yeah, there are exceptions, etc., I know).
> For Land, capitalism begins in Northern Italy around 1500 with "the emerging world of technologists and accountants", the spiral interexcitation of "oceanic navigation and place-value calculation", and zero-unlocked double-entry book-keeping
Fibonacci, amongst many others, played a critical role that highly accelerative technology.
A lot of those will probably go under, too. I think a lot of people are in for a rude awakening.
The only people our society and economy really values are the elite with ownership and control, and the people who get to eat and have comfort are those who provide things that are directly or indirectly valuable to that elite. AI will enable a game of musical chairs, with economic participants iteratively eliminated as the technology advances, until there are only a few left controlling vast resources and capabilities, to be harnessed for personal whims. The rest of us will be like rats in a city, scraping by on the margins, unwanted, out of sight, subsisting on scraps, perhaps subject to "pest control" regimes.
If AI lives up to the hype, that will become possible.
> If all that remains of the economy consists of a few datacenters talking to each other, how can the ruling class profit off that?
I don't think it would be that. There'd also be power generation, manufacturing, mining, and construction, etc.; but all extremely automated. If you get to truly extreme levels of wealth concentration, things would shift out of our capitalist market system model, and concepts like "profit" would become anachronisms.
It actually might kinda look like the "economy" of Starcraft: you gather resources, decide what to build with them, and order it all around according to your whim. There will be a handful of guys playing, and everyone else will be a NPC.
How would that work? If there are no consumers then why even bother producing? If the cost of labor and capital trends towards zero then the natural consequence is incredible deflation. If the producers refuse to lower their prices then they either don’t participate in the market (which also means their production is pointless) or ensure some other way that the consumers can buy their products.
Our society isn’t really geared for handling double digit deflation so something does need to change if we really are accelerating exponentially.
I guess if the “players” are sociopathic enough they might decide to just wipe out the NPCs. The possibility of someone like Putin or Musk becoming the sole member of the post-singularity humanity does make me pause.
This isn’t true. The biggest companies are all rich because they cater to the massive US middle class. That’s where the big money is at.
We're racing up a hill at an ever-increasing speed, and we don't know what's on the other side. Maybe 80% chance that it's either nothing or "simply" a technological revolution.
It is true, but I can see why you'd be confused. Let me ask you this: if members of the "the massive US middle class" can be replaced with automation, are those companies going 1) to keep paying those workers to support the middle-class demand which made them rich, or are they going to 2) fire them so more money can be shoveled up to the shareholders?
The answer is obviously #2, which has been proven time and again (e.g. how we came to have "the Rust Belt").
> That’s where the big money is at
Now, but not necessarily in the future. I think AI (if it doesn't hit a wall) will change that, maybe not instantaneously, but over time.
Bedroom superweapons? Algorithmic propaganda? These things have humans in the loop building them. And the problem of "human alignment" is one unsolved since Cain and Abel.
AI alone is words on a screen.
The sibling thread details the "mass unemployment" scenario, which would be destabilizing, but understates how much of the current world of work is still physical. It's a threat to pure desk workers, but we're not the majority of the economy.
Perhaps there will be political instability, but .. we're already there from good old humans.
Whim and ego. I think the advanced economy will shift to supporting trillionaires doing things like "DIY home improvement" for themselves. They'll own a bunch of automated resources (power generation, mining, manufacturing, AI engineers), and use it to do whatever they want. Build pyramids on the moon, while the now economically-useless former middle-class laborers shiver in the cold? Sure, why not?
> I've yet to see really good articulations of what, precisely we should be scared of. Bedroom superweapons?
Loss of paid employment opportunities and increasing inequality are real world concerns.
UBI isn't coming by itself.
Plenty of profit was made off feudalism, and technofeudalism has all the tools of modern technology at its disposal. If things go in that direction, they will have an unlimited supply of serfs desperate for whatever human work/livelihood is left.
It has certainly had this impact on my identity; I am unclear how well-grounded I really am*.
> I've yet to see really good articulations of what, precisely we should be scared of.
What would such an articulation look like, given you've not seen it?
> Bedroom superweapons? Algorithmic propaganda? These things have humans in the loop building them.
Even with current limited systems — which are not purely desk workers, they're already being connected to and controlling robots, even by amateurs — AI lowers the minimum human skill level needed to do those things.
The fear is: how far are we from an AI that doesn't need a human in the loop? Because ChatGPT was almost immediately followed by ChaosGPT, and I have every reason to expect people to continue to make clones of ChaosGPT continuously until one is capable of actually causing harm. (As with 3d-printed guns, high chance the first ones will explode in the face of the user rather than the target).
I hope we're years away, just as self driving cars turned out to be over-promised and under-delivered for the last decade — even without a question of "safety", it's going to be hard to transition the world economy to one where humans need not apply.
> And the problem of "human alignment" is one unsolved since Cain and Abel.
Yes, it is unsolved since time immemorial.
This has required us to not only write laws, but also design our societies and institutions such that humans breaking laws doesn't make everything collapse.
While I dislike the meme "AI == crypto", one overlap is that both have nerds speed-running discovering how legislation works any why it's needed — for crypto, specifically financial legislation after it explodes in their face; for AI, to imbue the machine with a reason to approximate society's moral code, because they see the problem coming.
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* Dunning Kruger applies; and now I have first-hand experience of what this feels like from the inside, as my self-perception of how competent I am at German has remained constant over 7 years of living in Germany and improving my grasp of the language the entire time.
> If the producers refuse to lower their prices then they either don’t participate in the market (which also means their production is pointless) or ensure some other way that the consumers can buy their products.
Imagine you're a billionaire with a data centre and golden horde of androids.
You're the consumer, the robots make stuff for you; they don't make stuff for anyone else, just you, in the same way and for the same reason that your power tools and kitchen appliances don't commute to work — you could, if you wanted, lend them to people, just like those other appliances, but you'd have to actually choose to, it wouldn't be a natural consequence of the free market.
Their production is, indeed, pointless. This doesn't help anyone else eat. The moment anyone can afford to move from "have not" to "have", they drop out of the demand market for everyone else's economic output.
I don't know how big the impact of dropping out would be: the right says "trickle down economics" is good and this would be the exact opposite of that; while the left criticism's of trickle-down economics is that in practice the super-rich already have so much stuff that making them richer doesn't enrich anyone else who might service them, so if the right is correct then this is bad but if the left is correct then this makes very little difference.
Unfortunately, "nobody knows" is a great way to get a market panic all by itself.
In a general sense, uncertainty causes anxiety. Once you know the properties of the monster you are dealing with you can start planning on how to address it.
Some people have blind and ignorant confidence. A feeling they can take on literally anything, no matter how powerful. Sometimes they are right, sometimes they are wrong.
I'm reminded by the scene in No Country For Old Men where the good guy bad-ass meets the antagonist and immediately dies. I have little faith in blind confidence.
edit: I'll also add that human adaptability (which is probably the trait most confidence in humans would rest) has shown itself capable of saving us from many previous civilization changing events. However, this change with AI is happening much, much faster than any before it. So part of the anxiety is whether or not our species reaction time is enough to avoid the cliff we are accelerating towards.
Personally, I think UBI is a ploy to keep the "huge starved mob[s]" pacified during the transition, when they still have enough power to act, before the tech oligarchs fully cement their control.
Once the common people are powerless to protect themselves and their interests, then they'll be left to die out.
But at some point (still quite far away) I'm sure we'll start training a more general purpose model, or an LLM self-training will break outside of the "you're a language model" bounds and we'll end up with exactly that;
An LLM model in a self-training loop that breaks outside of what we've told it to be (a Language model), becomes a general purpose model and then becomes intelligent enough to do something like put itself out onto the Internet. Obviously we'd catch the feelers that it puts out and realise that this sort of behaviour is starting to happen, but imagine if we didn't? A model that trained itself to be general purpose but act like a constantly executing LLM, uploads itself to Hugging Face, gets run on thousands of clusters by people, because it's "best in class" and yes it's sitting there answering LLM type queries but also in the background is sending out beacons & communicating with itself between those clusters to...idk do something nefarious.