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You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass
- Traubenfuchs 9mo agoI am betting on being on the right side of the scissors for a while longer.
- d1sxeyes 9mo agoHard to take seriously from a guy who has Facebook, Google, and Twitter on his CV.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- flanked-evergl 9mo agoAll inequality is inequity and other hot takes from people of privilege.
- fnoef 9mo agoI noticed an interesting pattern. People who “made it” usually by working high paying jobs for the neofeudal lords, suddenly gain moral compass and tell the rest of us to not work for said neofeudal lords, because “money is not important”, and apparently you can buy a place to live or food to feed your family simply by having principles.
- dizlexic 9mo agoIt’s remarkably easy to tell others not to do what you did.
- breppp 9mo agoit's simply the principle of fuck you money that's why they are also more egocentric, racist, etc. When people do not feel the threat of society it is easier to have opinions that verge out of the norm or could restrict further employment (and also opinions that are wrongfully or rightfully policed in society)
- GardenLetter27 9mo agoMoney is less important once you've already paid off your mansion.
- oefrha 9mo agoI also chuckled when an ex-Facebook employee whose blog is popular on HN lectured us on "web page annoyances that I don't inflict on you here".
- weinzierl 9mo agoI agree with your point, and superficially OP is a prime example. Not to excuse the guy, but I think that, looking deeper, the situation with geohot is more involved. He grew up in a lower-middle-class household and was lucky to be a smart kid in a time when being a nerd could be a ticket out. I guess not unlike many of us here on HN. Unlike many of us, his explorations in the corporate world were all short stints. If I’ve kept tabs correctly, he never stayed longer than a year. Sometimes only for weeks. Apart from that, I often take the pattern you noticed more as confession, penance, and a "tell your children not to walk my way" kind of message. Maybe I read this stuff too generously.
- fnoef 9mo agoSure, self awareness is important. When you tell your kids not to walk your way, you take accountability. You say that what you did was bad, and you are accountable for it. You also acknowledge that what you did brought you to where you are, but given the chance you would take a different way. It’s not bad to have moral principles after you’ve done what you fight against, as long as you do it with accountability and self awareness. OPs post had neither.
- d1sxeyes 9mo agoThen he should know better the line he’s selling. “Opt out of capitalism” doesn’t work when you’re trying to feed your family. He offers no alternative, speaks from a place of safety with no acknowledgment that the people he’s addressing don’t have the same safety net as he does.[0] He’s not wrong. We are all fucked. But if it were as simple as “not participating” (whatever that means), then we wouldn’t be. [0]: to be fair he does address others at tech companies, maybe he assumes that everyone working in big tech has a safety net, which is perhaps not as unreasonable as I first thought.
- mlrtime 9mo agoProbably not a popular opinion but this is why capitalism works. We all work to compete for what is best for US and our Family, not what someone tells us to work on because they think they know whats better, they don't.
- esotericwarfare 9mo agoRead this one: http://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2021/06/23/pieces-of-shit.html http://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2021/06/23/pieces... >Capitalism is so rigged it isn’t fun anymore.
- kaliqt 9mo agoI fail to see your point. He's very well traveled is all.
- MattGaiser 9mo agoIn case he is wrong about money, he has already hedged himself.
- shomp 9mo agotraveling more would inspire one to think positively of capitalism, rather than the reverse. to quote andrew carnegie roughly, the status quo has always been misery for everyone, and just recently have we begun to extricate ourselves from it. not to mention that it is sheer derangement of luxury to have plenty of funding for one's own family, and yet vocally dissuade others from taking the same steps, for some "end game theoretical" that certainly won't arrive in single digit generations
- heeen2 9mo agoI'm guessing his soapbox has a nice cushion from his previous jobs.
- petesergeant 9mo agoSo?
- d1sxeyes 9mo agoMy point is after you’ve worked at Facebook, Google, and Twitter, telling us you had a nightmare that you worked at Amazon is hard to swallow. Ranting about how everyone else should opt-out after he’s filled his cup at the bosom of these behemoths is hard to swallow. In his defence, he does say that he’s targeting folks who already work in big tech.
- myst 9mo agoThat is exactly why I’d take it seriously.
- ares623 9mo agoWill you take it seriously from someone who _hasn't_ worked at those companies? It's a realistic take. I personally wouldn't absolve him of his contribution though.
- raphman 9mo agoa) On such a topic I would trust someone who has worked there even more than someone who only experienced how these companies work from the outside. b) I'd argue that decentralization of power and knowledge has always been a main driver for George Hotz¹²³ and possibly a reason why he is no longer at Facebook, Google, Twitter. ¹) https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2025/10/06/always-been-at-war.html https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2025/10/06/alway... ²) https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2023/11/04/disrupt-the-government.html https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2023/11/04/disru... ³) https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2021/06/10/a-circulation-of-the-elites.html https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2021/06/10/a-cir...
- ben_w 9mo agoHe worked for Facebook for less than a year back when Zuck had just been Time Person of the Year, Google before it dropped the "Don't be evil" motto and code of conduct, that really only leaves his time as Twitter as a "what were you thinking?" because it was after Musk bought it… compensated for somewhat by him leaving it quickly. Even with the poor judgement to join Musk's twitter at all, he left a few weeks after joining, soon after ChatGPT was released. Before ChatGPT, the idea that the singularity was anywhere near was utterly fringe: tech version of all the new-age stuff, I think Charlie Stross described it as "Rapture for atheists" or something like that. It's now… well, a lot of people with a lot of power are trying to *make it* be the singularity. I still don't think this is "it", despite how useful I find what we do have, but of the top 10 valued companies by market cap in Q4 last year, 9 are chasing it, the money is definitely interested, in a way it just wasn't when he worked at those places.
- forthwall 9mo agoWhen there is nothing to lose but your chains … as the saying goes
- why_is_it_good 9mo agoThat works both ways. Human chains are all that justifies your existence, having abandoned being a hunter gatherer.
- mlrtime 9mo agoMost of our chains are in our heads, we just don't see them.
- vaughands 9mo agoThis post seems to be haphazardly proposing that big tech will inevitably make everyone's lives miserable. And by working for them, you are enabling this. It offers no constructive alternative and the author (yes, I know who he is) seems to have no issue with Google hosting their email. It's hard to take this too seriously (even if there is some legitimate worry here)
- obsoleetorr 9mo ago[flagged]
- b65e8bee43c2ed0 9mo agobeing snarky about it doesn't change the fact that you, despite having a number of options, opted to give one of the most inhuman corporations in the world a lot of money for a luxury brand device assembled by quasi-slave laborers. so yes, it is rather absurd to demand radical changes from the society when you are unwilling to endure even minor inconveniences yourself.
- kaliqt 9mo agoIt posits that the tools at their disposal will be far more powerful and wide reaching than just Gmail or even modern social networks. The good ol' AGI and then ASI singularity everyone likes to talk about. To be fair, it is possible.
- jofzar 9mo agoI don't believe "true" agi/asi will happen, but I totally believe if a company theoretically invented they would immediately shut all API's and then go for software market dominance in every category.
- ben_w 9mo agoWhile I've said in another comment on this thread that comparative advantage is flawed, I still think the opening moves, the very initial phase, would be as per comparative advantage, not everything all at once. Until supply grows to saturate demand in whatever market, comparative advantage points to the fastest way to make more money, that money then gets used to construct more servers and data centres, which gets used to saturate supply for the next most profitable market, etc. until there's none left. I wouldn't say "never" for AI that can economically substitute all human labour. I think that meaning of AGI/ASI is slightly easier than the "AI which learns from as few examples as humans do" meaning, which I also think is possible eventually but don't know how far away it is.
- pu_pe 9mo agoThis is a real threat that is not discussed enough. If labor could be completely automated, then the value and political power of workers tends to zero.
- obsoleetorr 9mo agoor as a former Google executive likes to call them, "the eaters"
- andersmurphy 9mo agoWonder if that inspired: The tomb of the eaters - in caves of qud.
- uh_uh 9mo agoIf you own AGI, human workers are worse than zero. They become an active threat that can kill you.
- XorNot 9mo agoI feel like the people who post this sentiment have never done any plumbing, electrical wiring or really just any sort of actual creative manual labor. Show me the robot that can plumb a new sink in, or brick up an old doorway... Because I'd really like to buy it, those things are hard and time consuming!
- uh_uh 9mo agoCouple years ago you could have made the same argument about talking computers and here we are.
- petesergeant 9mo agoRight, like programming
- mlrtime 9mo ago100% Smaller tools might be better, humanoid robots can HELP with this but it will still be a tool that we command. I just fixed a leaking sprinkler, would love to have had a humanoid help me dig the hole, help me turn on/off the shutoff, cut the pipe, glue it back, etc...
- MattGaiser 9mo ago> Have you considered not participating? If you participate, we all lose. We will either all be in the underclass together or not. This has been suggested a bunch of times in the comments of HN as well as on other social media, but what exactly would that look like? As this seems like the ultimate prisoner dilemma and the winning solution there is always be first to make a deal, even if we accept the premise of AI turning us all into an underclass (a prediction often made with revolutionary technology I might add).
- obsoleetorr 9mo agoit's ok, the billionaires will be in the underclass too, maybe a month later capitalism is artificial intelligence. we dont control capitalism, capitalism controls us and through us builds its next vessel
- mmaunder 9mo agoThe premise is economically incoherent because labor is not a single task category that technology can delete. It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises. This is the lump of labor fallacy- the belief that there’s a fixed amount of economically valuable work that technology and capital can eliminate through automation or capital accumulation instead of transforming it. Middle class status anxiety manifesting as a rhetoric about neofeudalism.
- roenxi 9mo agoAnd it isn't like people can't do still everything they could do yesterday. There are just more and better options. Economically AI is no particular threat to the median human and even knowledge workers are still going to have fine lives. Maybe not as knowledge workers. The real risk here is the military implications of pairing AI and robots. If the army doesn't need lots of people then there is a real problem. But robotics will take a long time to get there even in an optimistic case. Labour will still have value for a long time to come.
- mitthrowaway2 9mo agoRight, you can still do everything you could yesterday. You can still hand-weave cloth and sell it if you want to, just like your ancestors could do three hundred years ago; you'll simply have to do it three thousand times faster than your ancestors did to exchange that labor for a loaf of bread, because even though bread is cheaper than it used to be, your customer's next best alternative is an automatic loom, and those move very quickly these days.
- roenxi 9mo agoI'm pretty sure you're literally just wrong on that one - no special knowledge of the weaving market but it seems people do still make a living from hand-weaving fabric. Eg, I found https://loomandstars.com/collections/handwoven-fabrics https://loomandstars.com/collections/handwoven-fabrics - they claim to have a shop in New York. They can probably afford bread - bread is quite cheap. The issue is if bread becomes insanely cheap and cloth becomes insanely cheap, then a very inefficient weaver can still afford food. It runs in to comparative advantage theory eventually - just because someone else is much more efficient than you at literally everything doesn't mean you can't still do something inefficiently and set up a win-win situation. Although there might still be something better to put your time towards. I recommend managing your own capital - maybe even building it and maintaining it yourself - but people seem dead set against the idea for some reason. I dunno why geohotz thinks in this article that shares in a granary are a bad idea, someone has to profit from storing food. May as well be me. I'll do it if he won't. I like granaries.
- 0xbadcafebee 9mo agoAnd this is why blog posts shouldn't ever get on HN's front page... they're usually embarrassing.
- GardenLetter27 9mo agoHard disagree, technical blog posts are some of the best content here. But this isn't technical.
- phyzix5761 9mo agoHonest question, if large portions of labor are automated or marginalized who ultimately buys the goods and services that companies produce? Markets depend on consumers having purchasing power. It seems economically rational to keep the average worker making just enough to afford goods and services over the long term. We can see this logic reflected at times in business history. Ford paid workers double the daily wage so they could afford the cars they built and Costco pays employees 50% more than Walmart. They're not doing these things out of the goodness of their heart but out of greed to increase long term profits.
- bananaflag 9mo ago> who ultimately buys the goods and services that companies produce? The only goods that will be produced will be the one that machines will need for their survival or for whatever unfathomable goals they will have. Human goods will only be produced as long as human labour still has some value.
- petesergeant 9mo ago> who ultimately buys the goods and services that companies produce? You don’t need anyone to buy them if you already have all the capital. You sell good and services to make more capital, but if you’ve got enough capital to provide all your needs, you don’t need anyone buyers.
- bloak 9mo agoBut why does Costco pay more than Walmart rather than the other way around? (I don't know much about either company.)
- energy123 9mo ago> Markets depend on consumers having purchasing power. Markets and consumers would still exist, unless the AI is smart enough to solve the local knowledge problem via centralized computation. A consumer doesn't have to be a person. It's an abstraction, and behind it sits any entity with capital. That includes non-human entities. An example would be bidirectional trade between an AI company who mines resources, and an AI company who makes robots to mine resources. Or if it's one big monopoly, they can have an internal market to facilitate competition and cooperation, like how Samsung operates.
- imiric 9mo agoI partly agree, but where this analogy breaks down, and what the neofeudal rulers are too shortsighted to realize, is that if lower classes don't have income to spend, there will be nobody to buy their products, and the entire economy collapses. Proposals to address this like UBI are a pipe dream.
- sothatsit 9mo agoThe idea is that neofeudal lords would own fully automated systems to produce everything they need. They wouldn't need to make stuff to sell to us at all, they could just pursue their own goals. We would be irrelevant to them, other than a nuisance if we tried to get some of their resources for ourselves. Imagine if you owned a million humanoid robots and a data center with your own super-intelligence. Would you produce doodads to sell to people? Or would you build your own rockets to mine asteroids, fortresses and weapons systems to protect yourself, and palaces for you to live in? I don't agree that this is where we are headed, but that is the idea. Thinking about this in relation to our current economy is missing the point.
- imiric 9mo agoAha, so late-game Factorio. It's a nice fantasy, but I don't think that the rest of humanity will stand by and allow the entire system to function autonomously. It's more likely that heads will roll far before such system is in place.
- GardenLetter27 9mo agoI couldn't disagree more. Throughout history, higher productivity leads to a higher quality of life for everyone. Yes, the transition can be painful and some people will lose out and face hard career changes. But overall, the multiplicative power of investment only increases, helping to make everything cheaper, and everyone richer. People focus too much on their own small part of experience - like Claude Code replacing CRUD developers. Without appreciating that the LLM revolution (and broader AI like AlphaFold) also includes PhD students that don't need to lose time programming tooling, interns that might have spent their time on tooling that can now use LLMs to learn faster and actually contribute to their fields, disadvantaged students that can learn more directly and in a personal way, without it being dependent on their physical location. All of this means you get more experimentation, more ideas, and more successes.
- pharrington 9mo agoYou're wrong. Sharing the fruits of labor and greater social cohesion are what lead to greater quality of life. Greater productivity leads to increased wealth among the owning class, but historically that wealth only reached the masses after hard, usually physically violent, conflict between the haves and havenots.
- bloak 9mo ago> Throughout history, higher productivity leads to a higher quality of life for everyone. I have several times seen the claim that the change from hunter-gatherer to agriculture lead to a lower quality of life. But do we really know how to measure "quality of life"?
- paprikanotfound 9mo agoi think is possible to have those things without big tech
- raverbashing 9mo agoSometimes people just need to touch (literal) grass No gpt18Pro won't cost $1Bi dollars. The buck (or the bubble) will stop somewhere. I'd be more worried for the people making trades run 1ms faster, they literally create no value to the world that is not something their own peers believe it There are billions of people not knowing and not caring about what is chatgpt and while it might hit them hard, humans are more flexible and less impressionable than most people think (I mean, some people think it's the other way as well and they might be right in some situations)
- petesergeant 9mo ago> The buck (or the bubble) will stop somewhere. Why?
- raverbashing 9mo agoEvery bubble in history has popped But if you disagree I have an NFT to sell you
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- pizlonator 9mo agoLet's say that somehow we end up in a world where capital is the only thing separating one set of humans from the other, and that separation is large, and the overwhelming majority of humans are in the underclass. Such situations usually correct themselves violently.
- rglullis 9mo agoBrazil would like to have a word with you.
- pizlonator 9mo agoI find it surprising if Brazil meets this criteria: > capital is the only thing separating one set of humans from the other, and that separation is large, and the overwhelming majority of humans are in the underclass. Obviously, it's a matter of degree. You could reasonably argue that any capitalist society meets the criteria depending on your definition of "large", and depending on how you interpret the "capital is the only [sic] thing" part
- rglullis 9mo agoYou could also argue in the other direction: capital is never going to be the only thing separating one set of individuals from another, because we sure like to keep finding ways to label ourselves different: ethinicity, religion, political ideology, sex preferences, eye color... Then again, maybe this is why Brazil finds itself in this steady state of economic inequality and endemic violence but without critical mass for a civil war: the same diversity that makes Brazilians apt at navigating conflicts is what makes us incapable at finding a common enemy and building an united front?
- RyanHamilton 9mo agoYes, the ability to command a kingdom was relative to the number of people with force you could convince AND pay to be on your side vs the others. With automation, drones and AI, you no longer need any convincing just capital.
- 9mo ago
- teiferer 9mo agoHow can > capital is the only force, be squared with > A pile of money will buy you nothing in the neofeudal world. and > didn’t operate on capitalist principles ? Capital being the driving force is the very definition of capitalism. It's even in its name!
- DiscourseFan 9mo agoAll this talk of neofeudalism and yet not a single bushel of corn has been taken by my lord! Capital leads to class difference, often immense class difference, which is not a claim against our society as primarily capitalistic but in favor of it. If you took away all the food grown in America and the clothes woven in Bangladesh and the laptops manufactured in China, there would be no Amazon, no Google, no Microsoft, no "technofeudalism." The economic base is still defined by the exchange of commodities, its just that the US does not produce many industrial goods anymore, so the US economy is mostly a service based economy. Chinese citizens do not experience their lifeworld in terms of service based industries, they are surrounded by mass markets and complex factories and very material evidence of mechanization which we often do not see directly in the West, only the end product. So to many Americans it feels like they live in a magical society where they click some keys on their laptop and food and clothes and whatever they need shows up on their doorstep--but there are real workers out there tooling all the machines and developing all the architecture to make those things appear, to reduce the basic struggles of life to give time for greater and more advanced forms of social organization beyond the need to survive. This is not what peasants had; for them, despite having a relatively complex existence, a bad season could and often would kill their entire family. Or a raiding band would take all their food, or they'd die of the plague...life was far more tenuous, and the basic made of production was not commodity production, it was growing food and animal husbandry. International trade, artisanal crafts, and capital improvements on industrial production were nowhere near the level they were in even the early modern period. Nothing about our contemporary society resembles this way of living. Addendum: The claim that somehow everyone in tech could just "stop," like consciously decide to stop creating things, is absurd. Amazon is very good at what it does, but it does not have exclusive control over the trade of all goods in the whole world. Rakuten is a major competitor in Japan, there are many other companies that have strong holds in their local markets. You take a Bolt in Germany, not an Uber. Chinese users can query DeepSeek, which is surely more proficient in Mandarin than ChatGPT. Even if a state uses its sovereign power to artificially control industry, it only slows the development of capital, since other states may allow their own companies and technologies to flourish, like China is doing now with its electric vehicles. If Amazon does not meet its projections, it fails, its employees all lose their jobs, Jeff Bezos might even go bankrupt. There is a constant pressure of competition. As a worker, your goal should not be to arbitrarily stop working--you may not enrich others but you certainly won't be enriching yourself either. The goal should be to capture far more wealth that is the result of your labor. This is only possible through labor organizing, which does not permanently cease the means of production, it only takes control of them. But business continues and people still produce things and do services and enjoy the wealth of those things and services. One should basically desire to live in a wealthy, prosperous society. This article does nothing but ask workers to go into voluntary poverty; it is reactionary and backwards.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- throawayonthe 9mo agoam i missing something? is the call to action "don't participate in capitalism?" please just read lenin or something istg
- energy123 9mo agoAn economics counter argument: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/plentiful-high-paying-jobs-in-the https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/plentiful-high-paying-jobs-in-... Also, my p(doom) is 1.0-epsilon under the status quo without AGI/ASI, due to old age and disease. Under some assumptions, self-interest says that I may as well roll the dice.
- redox99 9mo agoMaybe p(doom) without AGI is 1.0 in the long term, but I'll be dead by then. But AGI definitely increases the p(doom) within my lifetime.
- energy123 9mo agoI redefined p(doom) to mean your death rather than the demise of the species, which I probably should have clarified.
- Epa095 9mo agoThanks for posting the article, it's really well written and worth reading! I think he raises some important points in the `“Possible” doesn’t mean “guaranteed”` section. His argument is based on comparative advantage, and he says "The key difference here is that everyone — every single person, every single AI, everyone — always has a comparative advantage at something!". This is why everyone in the world has a job and a decent salary today, just as humanity will in the future(!!). In reality it is not like this, and he talks about some of the reasons for this in the above mentioned paragraph. I also disagree massively with his discounting of the scenario where energy gets relocated to AI instead of food production. He paints that as unlikely, while I think it is almost inevitable. I don't necessarily think it will happen in one fell swoop with force, but it can definitely happen over a generation through pure market forces. The owners of AI just have more money, and will use this to buy energy. Cost of food will rise compared to the value of labour, aka cost of living will rise, and it will be harder and harder to sustain a family. Since we somehow think that taxing wealth is absurd, we will keep taxing labour. It seems to me that he tries to wave away the fact that if AI becomes much more productive than humans in everything, then economy predicts that it will be allocated the energy, not humans. And he waves this away with 'politics will save us', which I find unlikely.
- camillomiller 9mo agoGeorge Hotz’s post-capitalist decoherence wasn’t in my 2026 bingo card. I wonder if he came up with this view before or after working for big tech in different capacities and using Gmail. He’s not wrong though, but he’s in a weird position to say that. Also, this post isn’t constructive in any possible way.
- barrenko 9mo agoPairs nicely with this article about the transition from the age of the gun to the age of the drone https://qz.com/185945/drones-are-about-to-upheave-society-in-a-way-we-havent-seen-in-700-years https://qz.com/185945/drones-are-about-to-upheave-society-in...
- exceptione 9mo agoMarkets needs regulation to keep them open. Monopolists understand that and thus they buy policy and sponsor narratives in order to abolish market regulation, or reach a "rules for thee, but not for me", or prevent incumbents from entering the market by means of Regulatory Capture. But capitalism needs competition. So they slowly kill their own lands, and thus they need to cross borders to keep eating. If one feels morally compelled to pay with their own income to stop these parasites, hats of to them. It is nasty that people are being put in this position. They need support from a society. Society needs information and debate about real issues, which requires them to be free from the barrage of falsehoods and yellow journalism. And possible it would help to have a Roosevelt, but culture is the biggest hindrance to change.
- rmunn 9mo agoI don't have enough time to explain the many reasons why that post is wrong, but some of them are: - "In the future, when labor is fully marginalized..." Hasn't happened in the history of the world, not going to happen in the future either. Some forms of labor were replaced by machines, which then gave rise to new types of jobs, such as building and maintaining the machines. The human cost cannot be neglected, because many people do find it difficult to retrain to other jobs. But on the whole, there are more jobs and higher-paying jobs now than there were a hundred years ago. Higher-paying not just in absolute financial terms, but also in terms of what can be purchased with that money. The richest man of the 19th century couldn't buy an air-conditioned house, not with all his millions. - "GPT$$$ is surely smart enough to separate you from whatever you have..." Assumes an unbounded growth curve in the "smarts" of AI, and worse than that, assumes that that AI will take the form of an LLM. This is laughable. LLMs will not ever achieve AGI; they are simply not capable of it. If AGI is achievable at all (which I doubt), it will come from one of the currently-neglected avenues of research whose funding is currently being neglected because LLMs are sucking all the metaphorical oxygen out of the room. - "the neofeudal world": assumes that all companies are like that. Yes, there are many companies that suck to work for because they treat their workers as mere cogs in a machine, instead of as human beings. But not all companies operate that way. If you are being treated as a cog in a machine, start looking for opportunities to jump ship to a better working environment. I've worked in both types of places, and I would be willing to take a big pay cut to work for company that didn't treat me as a cog. They're out there, but it might take some looking. Tip: ask employees what it's like working for the comapny, don't just take the interviewers' word at face value.
- procaryote 9mo agoThe article makes it sound like this is inevitable, and the only choice you have is A: participate and have a chance to not be part of a perpetual underclass B: for moral reasons, don't participate, be part of the underclass I kinda would have hoped for C: <something> to stop this from happening Otherwise it's the worst sales-pitch ever
- inatreecrown2 9mo agoVote with your money and support open source software and hardware.
- CrzyLngPwd 9mo agoI think it's pretty clear that if automation gets to the point where machines can do the difficult tasks, like repairing a sewer or managing a farm, then the entire human workforce is no longer needed. It's difficult to see where it might head that doesn't lead to population collapse and some form of dystopia.
- awakeasleep 9mo agoIt will only be a dystopia to people like us. It will be a near post scarcity utopia to our betters!
- curtisblaine 9mo agoThis is incredibly naive. Not participating is not the solution, unless everybody stops participating at the same time. If only you stop participating, you will be marginalized now instead of later. It's a prisoner's dilemma, only against billions of people. There are many things that can happen before we're all enslaved by AGI. It might well not happen. We might enter a war, or a cycle of civil wars that change society in a way we can't predict. Or, most probably, some jobs will disappear, some others will become available and AI will be a commodity. Just as machines did after the Industrial Revolution. It's extremely hard predicting the future. Telling people to "stop participating" (how? By quitting their job? By fighting the class war?) is a bit irresponsible.
- willtemperley 9mo agoI would recommend moving to a country that is less susceptible to this threat. I left the UK for this reason and live very comfortably on around £15k. I rent a city centre flat with 600 megabit fibre and really good amenities. I have time and space to build what I want. "Give me the place to stand, and I shall move the earth." - Archimedes. Unfortunately in the UK it's really hard to survive, let alone actually have time to do anything meaningful. I don't know if it's engineered by big tech/property/finance or some other demon. Maybe the monster in qntm's "There is no Anitmemetics Division" is allegorical.
- GardenLetter27 9mo agoWhere did you move to? That said, the real point is paying off your mortgage (or getting fixed low interest). With no mortgage I could almost live on that little in Sweden.
- willtemperley 9mo agoMalaysia. It's not going to be cheap for long here though, they're really positioning themselves as a tech hub and I think they'll do well. Utilities are particularly cheap here, I pay around £10 per month for water and electricity. Many working people live on around RM3000 or about £550 a month here.
- iNerdier 9mo agoIt is, on hacker news, easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism it seems. This is echoing a term made by Varoufakis about an increasing amount of money being held by a smaller and smaller group, not a return to literal peasant existence. It’s not feudalism, it’s ‘neo-feudalism’. The argument that labour can move is true, except where it can’t. Look at the entire towns of miners made irrelevant with no replacement to their jobs. Sure you might say they can move half way across the country to clean toilets but they have skills, a family and houses somewhere else. Where the argument of a feudal analogy really rings true is the increasing attempt to do back to extraction of rent for everything. Subscriptions for everything, including homes are becoming more and more normal. Are we really okay with a world in this form?
- StopDisinfo910 9mo agoI think the article is mixing together multiple things while at the same time having an underlying bedrock of truth. The system as it stands is not viable and people need to rebel at least in how they vote but I don't think AI is the real issue here. The system is flawed for different reasons. Tolerance for high vertical integration and oligopolies have seriously damaged the efficiency of the market and limited people's ability to disrupt. Capital concentration has created a new form of aristocracy. They have successfully lobbied to significantly weaken the mechanisms supposed to spread this money, notably inheritance tax. The Supreme Court has significantly altered how democracy functions by lifting limits on fundings and given far too much power to the richest. The last forty years have basically torn down all the foundations Tocqueville saw as fundamental to the success of the young USA. People should fight to get things back on track. AI is mostly incidental in that. It doesn't matter if AI temporary concentrates some wealth if the mechanisms for it to then be spread again are in place.
- rmunn 9mo agoHad a comment listing specific reasons why that post is wrong, but I just realized a generic reason. I see two broad spectra of opinion on AI. One is "LLMs are the greatest thing ever!!!11!1!eleventy! They will usher in the post-scarcity economy!" The other is "LLMs will eat the world! We're doomed! Doooooooooooooomed!!!" In my opinion, both are wrong, because both assume unbounded potential for LLMs that just isn't justified by the facts. Look at how much trouble you have getting good code out of an LLM, for example. The fact that you simply cannot rely on LLM output but have to carefully scrutinize it for mistakes isn't going to go away, because of the fundamental reality of what an LLM is. So why would you assume that LLMs would be reliable in other areas? This is a new-and-improved version of Gell-Mann Amnesia, replacing newspapers with LLMs: people know LLMs aren't reliable in the field they personally specialize in (I've seen, on a lawyer's blog, examples of other lawyers who submitted LLM-written court papers with hallucinated citations; Courts take a, shall we say, dim view of such things). But then those same people go and assume that the LLMs are going to take over the world in other fields. It's not always the case that given an opinion, both extremes are wrong. But in this specific case, it certainly is. Neither the "LLMs will usher in the post-scarcity economy" view nor the "LLMs will doom everyone to unemployment" view (which are remarkably closer to each other than it would appear at first glance) are correct. LLMs are a useful tool with inherent, fundamental limitations that mean that they will never be able to do everything. AGI is currently a pipe dream, and LLMs are not going to be the technology that achieves it.
- keyle 9mo agoWhy is this already gone from the home page?
- benashford 9mo agoI think I get the gist of the moral of this story. But I'm not sure I'm fully agreeing with the specifics. The nub is something I've thought about before. My contingency plan for AI turning the industry I work in upside down is to make hay while the sun shines before that point. Have enough saved or invested for a (lean) retirement (depending on how far away that point is). But what if AI turns every industry upside down. Will there be enough overall economic activity to actually invest in at all. Then we're all poor regardless of how much we've individually saved, or what kind of social safety net exists, simply because there's not enough economic activity to fund it. That is, at the moment, and I hope forever, a very remote possibility. For a whole host of reasons, technological and economic ones. But if that did happen in the next 20-30 years...
- neuralkoi 9mo ago"The people who are leading the AI revolution, 'the tech titans', many of them are thinking in a way which is really alien to most of the people on the planet. People sometimes think 'Oh, these tech titans, they want money. They want power.' They want something far more ambitious than money or power. They want to change the course of the evolution of life and even of the evolution of the cosmos. In the minds of some of them, sometime in the future, millions, billions of years in the future, when they write the history of the universe, it will be like: 'Okay, the Big Bang - 14 billions years ago, 10 billion years later - the emergence of life on earth, the only life we know about so far in the universe, 4 billion years later - Elon Musk and the beginning of AI'. This is the timeline they have.” - Yuval Noah Harari, Ideas for the Future
- Chance-Device 9mo agoI get the feeling behind the anti-AI sentiment, I just disagree with the conclusions. There’s a lot of fear around what will happen with AI, not so much of extinction but rather of two things: fear of losing income, and arguably more importantly, fear of losing identity. People often are invested in what they do to the point that it’s who they are. That being replaced or eliminated might be a bigger psychological threat than lack of income, at least to those of us fortunate enough to be well off right now. However, these threats are outweighed by the benefits that AI can eventually bring. Medical advances, power generation, manufacturing capability. Our systems for running society have a lot of problems, economically, politically, epistemologically. These can also be improved with AI assistance. The real problem is the transition, it’s such a huge shift, and it will happen all at once to everyone, uprooting our idea of the world and our place in it. What we need is to embrace AI and find a way to make sure that the transition and benefits of AI are distributed instead of concentrated. For me this looks like the following: companies must commit to retaining some minimum number of employees in every currently existing function, to be determined proportional to their profit taking. This sets a floor on the job losses that can come later when AI really comes on stream. The justification for this is three fold: firstly, it’s a safety mechanism, it ensures that regardless of the capabilities of an AI system, there are multiple humans working with it to verify its results. If they aren’t verifying diligently, then they’re not doing their jobs. Secondly, jobs aren’t just a way of making income, they’re wrapped up in identity and meaning for at least some people, and this helps to maintain that existing identity structure across a meaningful cross section of society. Third, it keeps the economy running, money circulating. You can’t have a market economy without consumers. UBI is one component of this too, but this is both more direct, more useful and more meaningful.
- Llamamoe 9mo ago> However, these threats are outweighed by the benefits that AI can eventually bring. Medical advances, power generation, manufacturing capability. Our systems for running society have a lot of problems, economically, politically, epistemologically. These can also be improved with AI assistance. Benefits come to those who have the means to access it, and wealth is a measure of the ability to direct and influence human effort and society. How exactly do you propose that AI will serve the wellbeing of the worker/middle classes after they've been made obsolete by it? Goodwill of the corporations working on them? Of their shareholders, well-known to always put welfare first and profit second? Government action increasingly directed by their lobbying? > What we need is to embrace AI and find a way to make sure that the transition and benefits of AI are distributed instead of concentrated. Sure. How? We've not done it with any other technological advances so far, and I don't see how shifting the power balance further away from the worker/middle class will help matters. There's a reason why the era of techno-optimism has already faded as quickly as it's begun.
- camgunz 9mo agoTech needs to learn about collective action problems. Are any of geohot's shops unionized? Has he done any political work or advocacy? What I want to read is "geohot donates $5m to CWA", not some insipid, entirely useless blog post effectively calling me a coward, while its author does nothing.
- Llamamoe 9mo agoIf you raise the bar for being allowed to speak about a very real concern that high, nobody will be left to spread and debate the idea in the first place.
- camgunz 9mo agogeohot's not a regular joe, he's founded multiple companies and is a leader in our community. This is like a general being like "why are you letting the enemy win?" while he sits comfortably in his study managing his cigar collection.
- Llamamoe 9mo agoI still don't think it precludes him from having this opinion. Could he be doing more? Sure, but having found success in this system doesn't make his criticisms of it invalid.
- mold_aid 9mo agoI agree with OP, who to my mind hasn't said the so-called critique is invalid or that he's not allowed to have an opinion. Isn't the comment along the lines of "well, what have you actually tried to do? You have resources, standing, kairos, etc." Seems one of the more perceptive critiques on here.
- mlrtime 9mo agoI personally wish he would spend more time jailbreaking the PS5 than writing blogs posts about how SWEs at big tech should quit their jobs.
- Llamamoe 9mo agoI'd just like to add three things to the conversation: 1) Instead of LLMs, imagine large models trained end-to-end on ALL online content and the impact it has on public opinion and discourse. What about when everything is an algorithmic feed controlled by such a model under the control of the elite? You might be resistant(but probably aren't), but in aggregate this will be effective mind control over society. 2) Money directs human effort. Every quantum of bargaining power the worker/middle class lose due to being less needed is the reduction in our ability to have a say in who society should serve and how. 3) Don't forget regulatory capture is a thing. Not just a thing but happening as we speak. Are you still optimistic? 4) Tech is already addicting and ads are already everywhere even without technology that has a theory of mind. 5) Do not forget that humans are social creatures, power over others is not just an accidental byproduct of wealth. Once you're unnecessary for labor, what's left? Fulfilling sexual/emotional/social whims of the wealthy elite? Hunger games? Being a pet in a billionaire's human zoo city so he can brag about his contributions to humanity?
- MonkeyClub 9mo ago> GPT$$$ is surely smart enough to separate you from whatever you have, [...] or lobbying your government to take it from you. I find it quite interesting, and somewhat disturbing, that we've so quickly come to the point of seeing the AI power drivers as openly adversarial to people and deeply entangled with equally adversarial government forces. But are we actually (and realistically) talking about technofeudalism in the next couple of decades?
- mold_aid 9mo agoWhat happened in the last three weeks to radicalize Mr. "Trump's an ok president, all you haters are just political performers. Apropos of nothing, here is a political performance"
- alecco 9mo agoI have a much better solution: make a mission to tell everybody around you to stop consuming and stop frying their brains. But be mindful they are addicts so they will say you are mean, ugly, stupid, boring, etc. Keep at it and don't negotiate down. Remind them you gain nothing from this and you care for their wellbeing. Eventually most of them come around. The window to fix this is closing.
- jswelker 9mo agoMaybe the real maker economy will be the future underclass building makeshift infrastructure to support a subsistence lifestyle in small post capital communities off the grid once big capital no longer feels the need to maintain a consumer economy at any scale. I don't know what the future holds, but owning a few acres in rural nowhere and knowing how to build stuff gives me a sense of security. Someone needs to find a way to turn dirt into a 3d printing material.
- kranke155 9mo agowhy would capital allow you to do that
- johnnyanmac 9mo ago>But why do you think having more money will fix that insecurity? Because it'd be nice for rent to not cost 80% of my part time income and spending hours just looking for full time work. >Have you considered not participating? Sure, but tech is too full of hyoerindividualist egos to collectively bargain. We'll burn the world down before we come to that point.
- krackers 9mo ago>GPT$$$ (it’s $1B per month) This doesn't follow, open models are not that far behind frontier. And it doesn't take into account geopolitics.
- mateozarate 9mo agoWhy is targeted advertising miserable?