It should be very obvious that the 'infosphere' (media, culture, education, day-to-day interactions and environment) heavily influences people, and ends up controlling them by setting the 'normal' for society, and it's affordances
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Now we're expected to believe a rag-tag crew of Ukrainians used a leaky sailboat to simultaneously detonate deep water pipelines, lol.
Denmark and Sweden gave up thier investigations quite quickly, probably they arrived at the truth but couldn't say it, only Germany was strong-armed into keeping the charade going.
Cheap, _limitless_ energy from fusion could solve almost every geopolitical/environmental issue we face today. Europe is acutely aware of this at the moment and it's why China and America are investing mega bucks. We will eventually run out of finite energy sources. Even if we do capture the max capacity possible from renewables with 100% efficiency, our energy consumption rates increasing at current rates will eventually exceed this max capacity. Those rates are accelerating. We really have no choice.
There is zero reason to assume that fusion power will ever be the cheapest source of energy. At the very least, you have to deal with a sizeable vacuum chamber, big magnets to control the plasma and massive neutron flux (turning your fusion plant into radioactive waste over time), none of which is cheap.
I'd say limitless energy from fusion plants is about as likely as e-scooters getting replaced by hoverboards. Maybe next millenium.
Except that the bubble's money is not being invested into cutting-edge ML research, but only into LLMs. And it has been obvious from the start to anyone half-competent about the topic that LLMs are not the path to AGI (if such a thing ever happens anyway).
I don't think it's that obvious, in fact the 'bitter lesson' teaches us that simple scale leads to qualitative, not just quantitative improvement.
It does look like this is now topping out, but it's still not sure.
It seems to me a couple of simple innovations, like the transformer, could quite possibly lead to AGI, and the infrastructure would 'light up' like all that overinvested dark fiber in the 90s.
> But what if someone reaches autonomous AGI with this push?
What if Jesus turns up again? Seems a little optimistic, especially with several leading AI voices suggesting that AGI is at least a lot further away than just parameter expansion.
> If someone reaches AGI, current business models, ROI etc will be meaningless.
sure, but its still a moonshot, compared to our current tech. I think such hope leaves us vulnerable to cognitive biases such as sunk cost fallacies. If Jesus comes back that really would change everything, that's the clarion call of many cults that end in tragedy.
I imagine there is fruit that is considerably lower hanging, that has more obvious ROI but is just considerably less sexy than AGI.
Probably the most reliable person I can think of to estimate that would be Hassabis at Deepmind and he's saying like 5 years give or take a factor of two. (for AGI, not Jesus)
When you can use AI as though it's an employee, instead of repeatedly 'prompting' it with small problems and tasks.
It will have agency, it will perform the role. A part of that is that it will have to maintain a running context, and learn as it goes, which seem to be the missing pieces in current llms.
I suppose we'll know, when we start rating AI by 'performance review', like employees, instead of the current 'solve problem' scorecards.
Most of big tech enjoys some degree of monopoly power through network effects, so it's a little disingenuous to wave "It's the market, stupid" in this case.
Quite apart from the fact that in the jobs 'market', one side is forced to participate, else they starve.
Eh, businesses die and starve all the time. Most businesses fail, and competition to hire is brutal.
Big tech are among the top tier businesses. So I don't think it's fair to compare them to average employees. Rule #1 if you want to do well in the market is not to commoditize yourself, and average employees are commodities: people who slot into job titles with almost no differentiation between others competing for the same job title.
It's more accurate to big tech to top tier employees. Your execs, your staff engineers, your top sales talent, your startup founders who get acquired. Just like big tech, these people have a lot of negotiating power, tons of options, sometimes multiple clients, and often a nest egg so they can take time off work and be picky.
I think we can agree that a 'starving' company is not the same as a starving human.
Your other points about differentiation are especially valid, now, but the great mass of people have limited capability there. Should they just starve?
The next step will be to impose tariffs on code developed abroad.
Not that I agree with tariffs, but there are import taxes on physical goods and parts and so on, even when they are produced by the same company, so why not on services?
We export more services than we import, so if we start tariffing them, we are very vulnerable to reciprocal services tariffs.
But also, it’s logistically difficult to tax services because they don’t enter into the same ports of entry (eg. airports, seaports), but rather over phone or the internet. There’s no CBP agent listening in on every international phone call, identifying which type of service is being performed across the international phone system.
Poe's law....? I honestly can't tell if you're joking.
US Customs interdiction on those ssh/https-transported "git clone" sessions you use as an importer, then. "Please first fill out CBP Form 5106 to identify yourself as an Importer and get in that line over there to get your git license."
it some way you already have with that - section 174 requires amortization of foreign software salaries for 15 years. I'm ok with that as long americans will stop crying about EU trying to tax tech companies. Trump administration completely was not taking into account service sector when applying tariffs to everyone when in fact we buying a lot of such services.
This gets at an underlying concept, but arrives at entirely the wrong conclusion IMHO.
Through history clocks and time have been used to regulate and control society. eg read "About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks" by Rooney.
But time-keeping was orchestrated by elites, to control the masses, and differentiate themselves, just like manners. Whoever owned the time, had the best clock, had power and control.
That is now symbolized by expensive clocks and watches, worn by the wealthy and powerful.
