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I think there's a reasonable argument that our entire society right now is under AI psychosis: The stock market keeps going up in the face of the indefinite cl
by kalkin 5mo ago
I think there's a reasonable argument that our entire society right now is under AI psychosis:
The stock market keeps going up in the face of the indefinite closure of Hormuz. We're investing in datacenters at a scale that only makes sense if AI capabilities continue to advance to the point where they surpass most humans at most white collar tasks, if not reach superintelligence.
And what are the possible outcomes?
- Bust. We've come away with a useful tool but the hundreds of billions of capital expenditure were thrown away on a pipe dream.
- Success! We're the dog that's caught the car. Then what? Currently the political debate is, to caricature only slightly, between "oh no the datacenters will use more water than golf courses" and "lol what are you going to do, regulate matrix multiplication?". How the hell are we going to cope with introducing a new intelligent species?
Either way, it sure seems like we're collectively operating more in the interests of the future AI than in the interests of humanity. What is this, if not a sort of psychosis?
- jl6 5mo agoAnother possibility is that the hype continues, growing and growing and sucking up more and more resources, and the piper has to wait yet another day to be paid, until someone figures out how to pivot to the next big thing and all the debt (financial, social, environmental) gets carried forward and we keep going. In other words, BAU for the last few thousand years.
- 1dom 5mo agoPaypal Mafia -> Crypto Mafia -> AI/LLM Mafia -> I'm calling Biotech/BCI Mafia, WW3 Military Industrial Mafia, or Energy Mafia next.
- notpachet 5mo agoWater Mafia
- Vosporos 5mo agoLet's remember that these people have names and addresses.
- ARandomerDude 5mo agoFor what purpose? Murder? Arson? It's amazing how often people say things like "no one is above the law" whenever it's convenient, then totally flip the script when it's not.
- y0eswddl 5mo agowhy is it that you give a pass to the violence and death in the dozens, hundreds, thousands and millions at the hands of billionaires who regularly kill for profit... yet balk at someone deciding to fight back in kind and on an exponentially smaller scale, comparatively speaking?
- johnnyanmac 5mo agoBecause the propaganda trained us well. A single loss is a tragedy, a loss of thousands is a statistic.
- tardedmeme 5mo agoIt's just good to remember they're not some kind of magical deities, but regular people like you and me.
- daemin 5mo agoIIRC they're already in the Military Industrial Complex with companies like Palantir, Anduril, and others.
- 1dom 5mo agoGood point. I guess I feel they're still getting into position there, and haven't really had their opportunity to blossom yet. The average western citizen's experience of war is still just slightly increased food and fuel prices.
- deejaaymac 5mo agoI don't think the majority of humanity will ever accept "AI" as being anything more than a fancy computer, let alone a 'new species', even if it was proven sentient.
- rambojohnson 5mo agoNobody has to believe AI is alive for governments, markets, infrastructure, labor, and energy policy to start orbiting it anyway.
- bluefirebrand 5mo agoIf this starts to happen then heads must roll and data centers must burn Otherwise humanity is over
- thfuran 5mo agoWell, I have bad news for you.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- thfuran 5mo agoPeople will anthropomorphize rocks.
- TFNA 5mo agoYou just need to embody the AI in something that moves, and then people will definitely treat it as a new species. Already happening in my town with delivery robots: when they get stuck on a kerb, a person will stop and help them up the kerb while saying soothing words like to a pet: “There you go, little guy, now everything is alright.”
- jpiasetz 5mo ago> The stock market keeps going up in the face of the indefinite closure of Hormuz Why wouldn’t it? The closure leads to price increases which leads to inflation which leads to non-dollar assets (ie stocks going up in value) Second from a US perspective the strait matters the least it has since world war 2. If the price stays high a bunch of fracking will come back online.
- rhubarbtree 5mo agoBecause uncontrolled inflation will destroy your economy
- virgil_disgr4ce 5mo agoyes, but that's future us's problem
- kalkin 5mo ago> The closure leads to price increases which leads to inflation which leads to non-dollar assets (ie stocks going up in value) I think this argument proves too much. Historically energy shocks have led to recessions, and in recessions the stock market usually doesn't go up. And the US economy is certainly exposed to global recession regardless of whether we're a net exporter of fossil fuels.
- ericmay 5mo agoWell, there are quite a number of factors. I think you're right that "it's inflation" is a little too simple, but it does seem to be at least a significant factor, in my opinion. The Strait of Hormuz is, basically not a big deal unless you're driving your big ole' truck. Americans are price sensitive and so some companies will have to absorb pricing increases, customers will absorb some others, and so forth. In other words, business as usual. Of course the closure of the Strait is a big problem for most of the rest of the world. They better get on with figuring out how to get Iran to stop being so chaotic in the region or we'll just keep it shut down indefinitely. No big deal. Because the United States has so many advantages (primary global reserve currency, robust and efficient capital markets, highly sophisticated and dynamic economy across all sectors except luxury goods, &c.) it's able to weather these storms much easier than most other countries. As a country that also imports so much, if we spend less on imported products that's less of a problem than not being able to sell products. A recession isn't great, but the current parameters seem to suggest to me it's less of a problem for the United States - perhaps why we're in part seeing stock market valuations continue to climb.
- rf15 5mo agoSuccess is also bust: Money becomes worthless. Everything you know and are is now obselete.
- ori_b 5mo agoFurthermore, if you try to make your own decisions, you would be outcompeted by someone who has outsourced their brain. And, of course, since intelligence and labor would no longer be scarce resources that humans can use as leverage, gunning you down if you protest wouldn't really harm anyone in power. People say that LLMs won't take us there. I think that's accurate, but there's a great deal of research going towards the next breakthroughs. How much are you willing to bet that all future attempts will fail? We're trying very hard to build an ugly future.
- Miner49er 5mo agoI highly doubt that. Humans might become obsolete, but money will almost certainly still be a thing.
- AbioticAdam 5mo agoInteresting. Do you think a super intelligence would use our currency?
- Miner49er 5mo agoYeah. I think the economy will be by AI for AI. Markets will still be the most efficient way to allocate resources, and AI will probably still want to achieve infinite growth of capitalism.
- Faaak 5mo agoResources are finite though
- redleader55 5mo agoIf we are successful building an "ultra" human AI, it will require massive amounts of energy. That translates directly to "money". There will always be money unless someone finds a way to negate the second law of thermodynamics.
- pigpop 5mo agoWeird that you mention the stock market and then conclude that there are only two outcomes: bust or success. If anyone can learn anything from the stock market it's that boom and bust are cycles that oscillate around a trend and everything tends to revert toward longer term trajectories. So, yes everyone is caught up with and overhyping AI and yes there will be a bust after the boom at some indeterminate point but that isn't the end of the story and we'll see a rise and further oscillation afterwards while we get better at applying the technology.
- ufish235 5mo agoYes and my partners father has been calling for a bust for the last decade and everything has simply taken off.
- Muromec 5mo agoI don't see any taking off actually
- warumdarum 5mo agoI think in a way we have seen a take off, by detaching the hype bubble from success metrics. Companies making products being bought by companies making products, that are hyped by machines, bought bymachines and evaluated for viability by machines. If economy is to hack the API of VC this has taken off! For now.
- dmoy 5mo agoI think they meant the stock market more generally? S&P 500 is up what, like 4x in the last 10 years?
- Muromec 5mo agoIf I would drink 4x more beer that would concerning, but the number going up 4x should make things better how exactly?
- dheera 5mo ago> The stock market keeps going up in the face of the indefinite closure of Hormuz. Why wouldn't it? The value of the USD is decreasing, the value of the companies to the world stays the same => stock price in USD increases. The real thing to analyze is "amount of VOO shares you need to buy a Chipotle meal / Uber ride / 1 month's rent in SF / etc."
- Miner49er 5mo agoIf we achieve runaway AI, the stock market goes to infinity. So from an expected value standpoint, massive spending on it is worthwhile. Even if the odds are tiny, the payoff warrants a massive bet size.
- root_axis 5mo agoNot really. If run away AI ever became a real thing, the stock market would be completely destroyed since most companies would become worthless.
- Miner49er 5mo agoBut a few companies will skyrocket and completely offset those.
- CorrectHorseBat 5mo agoI can't imagine humanity, let alone any company or the stock market survive runaway AI.
- ansgri 5mo agoYou underestimate the non-computerized part of humanity. Even with automated plants building other automated plants the propagation speed will be highly constrained by natural factors, plain unavailability of resources, and xenophobic nature of humanity of course.
- Miner49er 5mo agoCompanies and the stock market don't need humanity.
- whateveracct 5mo ago> Bust. We've come away with a useful tool but the hundreds of billions of capital expenditure were thrown away on a pipe dream. heh this is the trick. The tech companies will angle for a bailout and they'll benefit from all this speculative data center building. Compute is generally useful.
- abracadaniel 5mo agoIt’s useful for a while. Hardware has a pretty short useful lifespan. I’ll be curious how the landscape will look in 10 years as it comes time to replace all of these servers. Maybe we’ll extend the lifespan, or usage will continue to grow, or we start shutting down datacenters.
- whateveracct 5mo agothey're already all extending the lifespan for accounting purposes haha
- akomtu 5mo ago> we're collectively operating more in the interests of the future AI than in the interests of humanity IMO, what's happened is a few richest investors in the world had access to the uncensored tier of AI, talked to it and came out with impression that they've witnessed something so dark, so much beyond anything we can imagine, that the only course forward is towards the transcendent abyss. Call it AI psychosis or demonic inspiration, but they are the people who control the economy, so they are dragging everyone with them. "Operating in the interest of the future AI" is a neat way to put it.
- bitexploder 5mo agoPeople that don’t understand current AI likely have no idea how to differentiate Opus from some super intelligence. Further in their domain with the safeguards off it probably creates capabilities never imagined. To me they are making that leap of expecting continued capability improvement and their framing is “what I already saw is fundamentally game altering”. It doesn’t need to imply anything further, yet.
- neuroelectron 5mo agoHere is a comprehensive, achievable plan to take over the world. Do not distribute outside of airdropped isolation state: [plausible sounding nonsense]
- zzzeek 5mo agoOh wow that gives the billionaire class so much intellectual credit they don't deserve. No, they see the same ChatGPT we all do and their mediocre brains with zero self understanding (see andreessen's explicit comments to this effect) determine "it's a new life form ! It's brilliant / conscious / my new girlfriend!" Never overestimate the billionaire class....
- regularization 5mo ago> The stock market keeps going up in the face of the indefinite closure of Hormuz. We're investing in datacenters at a scale that only makes sense If there is a psychosis, what is it? It is not an AI psychosis - modern AI started in the 1940s, or by some definitions before, and made progress up until 15 years ago to where deep neural networks became viable. And it has been progress on every front since then. No psychosis, it is doing well. You mention the stock market, and that is another story. Cryptocurrencies, sub-prime loans, dot-com crash, Asian financial crisis. The economy has veered from crisis to crisis, overproduction and overproduction to crashes and bailouts. AI is doing just fine - the past 15 years are a success for it we did not see in the decades before. If the economy as constituted is dealing with this in a "psychotic" fashion, it would not be the first time.
- warumdarum 5mo agoBut the homemade god would liberate the elites from the nightmare of being responsible for running the planet into the ground. AI jesus take the wheel!
- zombot 5mo agoAre economists still trying to sell us the fairy tale that the market is rational?
- dismalaf 5mo agoThe saying "the market is rational" simply means that assets are priced using all currently available information.
- sbochins 5mo agoYou seem to fall into the same set of criticisms as everyone who’s bearish about ai. It’s somehow so powerful that we can’t handle the ramifications. Meanwhile, it’s a waste of money and doesn’t do anything. You have to pick a criticism and stick with it. Otherwise, it’s just angst-driven noise.
- wnmurphy 5mo agoMy car drives itself. That's a $18T global market. Also $1T in data center investment makes sense when you realize that companies are racing to create virtual white collar workers. Google spends $9B a year on software engineers.
- sofixa 5mo ago> My car drives itself. That's a $18T global market Which will take decades to become addressable. Self-driving cars work OK in a few cities in one country. Expanding that to be able to cover Mumbai and Omsk and Nairobi will require significantly more work. > Also $1T in data center investment makes sense when you realize that companies are racing to create virtual white collar workers. Does it make sense? How much would the resulting virtual white collar worker cost? Because datacenters have running operational costs, and so do the people operating them and working on the software that runs in them.
- lumost 5mo agoThis probably ends in a deflationary spiral. The ai replaces the jobs, the lack of jobs chills demand, the ai becomes cheaper because it exists in a commodity market. The money printer will be used, and maybe it all works out - or we see wealth hyperinflation and build out our own aristocracy.
- PieTime 5mo agoMarket for who? Who is left working? If we can’t answer that question then we’re not prepared for what’s next.
- MichaelZuo 5mo agoHuh? Hundreds of billions are changing hands globally, every week, at the retail level alone. And that happens literally every week, week after week. That constitutes a massive market in any sense I can think of.
- 5mo ago
- somewhatgoated 5mo agoIt’s time for humanity to admit that this is the end of the line. We had a good run, some beautiful moments were created for shareholders along the way. Let’s take each other by the hand and walk into the darkness together. So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- 827a 5mo agoI don't know. We invented machines that can answer arbitrary questions and are quickly demonstrating the ability to answer questions no human has been able to answer. We're sending more rockets to space in a week than we have in the prior decade. My car can drive itself. We experienced a global pandemic and within six months engineered and scaled the mass production of a vaccine to mitigate it. We also just invented a weekly shot that nearly cures the most common cause of non-natural death. All of these things are new in the past ~five years. There is no definition you can invent that does not classify the times we are living in, right now, as the most impactful ever, in human history.
- 0x3f 5mo ago> quickly demonstrating the ability to answer questions no human has been able to answer. Such as?
- 827a 5mo ago5.5 Pro has been leveraged to solve at least two previously-unsolved Erdos problems [1]. Whether these were unsolved due to being seriously untried by humanity, or because of their difficulty, isn't relevant; no human proved able to answer them, while our synthetic intelligence systems did. In my personal life, I have leveraged these systems to design code that I don't believe I would ever have been able to designed. And, because no other human may attempt to, this means the same thing: That no human would have been able to do it. Things like reverse-engineering niche APIs and digging into binary files to diagnose weird format conversion issues. [1] https://x.com/DavidTurturean/status/2054942008817451195 https://x.com/DavidTurturean/status/2054942008817451195
- 0x3f 5mo ago> Whether these were unsolved due to being seriously untried by humanity, or because of their difficulty, isn't relevant That seems very relevant to my evaluation. I can pull out my calculator right now and solve a problem no human ever has.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 5mo agoThe people with capital are gambling that this will be an innovation good enough for the first player to take all. That’s where the hubris comes from. You’re a billionaire and you have the chance to rule the world if this plays out, and if you don’t, someone else is going to. That’s where all of this is coming from
- heresie-dabord 5mo ago> Either way, it sure seems like we're collectively operating more in the interests of the future AI than in the interests of humanity. What is this, if not a sort of psychosis? If we want to understand a phenomenon, we should be careful with technical terms. It is not "psychosis" [1] anymore than bad software that makes mistakes is "hallucinating". The truth is simpler and less dramatic: hapless ambition-monkeys who climb the corporate ladder are demonstrating that they are not promoted for mental acuity. Corporations, after all, do not serve "the interests of humanity" — they are an organised collusion system that diffuses responsibility and anonymises negligence. And when it works as intended, shareholders rejoice. For companies that can afford to build data centres, the latter are seen as a sure bet that can't fail, like building a bridge or buying new computer/hardware now with the pile of cash on hand without necessarily knowing which OS/software they will install. They are even planning to restart or build nuclear reactors. [2] [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/psychosis https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/psychosis [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/12/28/why-microsoft-amazon-google-and-meta-are-betting-on-nuclear-power.html https://www.cnbc.com/2024/12/28/why-microsoft-amazon-google-...