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flyingfox
31.7K posts
flyingfox
@flyingfox44
Self proclaimed pleb, tin hatter and clown.
God’s country Katılım Mayıs 2015
637 Takip Edilen562 Takipçiler
AI accelerationists are doing a terrible job of selling the idea of a world of complete human disempowerment.
Why would we want to live in a world where we're merely slaves or pets of a machine? Why wouldn't we just ban AI instead?
This is a bad sales pitch.
Jason Abaluck@Jabaluck
I think it's worth separating two worlds: a) Partial automation -- AI automates some stuff but not others (like a supercharged version of past technology), with wages falling for some and increasing for others. In this world, I agree completely about disempowerment. Promises to prevent job loss will be hugely politically popular, and sometimes defensible for political economy reasons. b) Full automation -- the world in a) lasts as long as most people can delude themselves into thinking they are adding value relative to a machine, which I think will last for some time: threadreaderapp.com/thread/1870884…. But once it becomes unmistakable that few people can, norms about work will shift quickly. If humans still have a say in the matter, norms about governance will shift as well -- if aligned, the machines will also be better than humans at normative reasoning and policy-making (a subset of automating everything!), so politician will be one of the jobs which is automated.
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The human brain: 2% body mass, but consumes 20% of its energy. Cortical neurons fire 0.16 times per second. BUT they are capable of firing at 40 or more. A 250-fold gap. If more than a few percent of neurons fired at high rates simultaneously, the brain would literally overheat. So less than 1% fire at any given moment. Frontier AI models have the same two constraints: sparse activation and thermal limits. Mixtral activated 27.6% of its parameters per token. DeepSeek-V2 activated 8.9%. DeepSeek-V3 has 671 billion parameters and activates 37 billion of them. That's 5.5%. NVIDIA hit the same wall. The GB200 generates 120 kilowatts per rack. Air couldn't cool it. They switched to liquid and unlocked 30% more compute. Now, what would happen if we could cool our brains? Neurons that fire faster produce measurably higher IQ scores, but three things stop us: heat dissipation, oxygen delivery, and ion channel reset time. There's already a device that achieved a 3°C brain temperature drop in 30 minutes by running chilled saline through the nasal cavity. So the first human IQ-overclock device might look less like Neuralink and more like a beer helmet with tubes running up your nose.
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@IliaMozias @GestaltU As always, the reality is somewhere between the narratives. China has a lot of problems, some which may well be insurmountable but they have also been doing things covertly for a long time and this may only ever come to light if the ever decide to “pull the trigger”.
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Do not know about schools, but the only studies that will be written will describe how Western imagination managed to see, in the delusions and ignorance of the bureaucracy of a very closed and self-focused country, wisdom and strategy. A whole chapter will be devoted to the “sophisticated Chinese silence” — which is, in fact, their usual reaction.
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The only question that matters in the next few weeks is whether Beijing concludes that the Iran escalation cutting off 40% of Chinese oil imports was deliberate and therefore demands a strategic response, or concludes that it was reckless and impulsive, and therefore waits it out. Those two readings lead to very different worlds.
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@mb_policy Absolutely. But when you are potentially at a point where entire tenants of modern society ( commerce, ip etc) might be completely up-ended then it does give reason for pause ( as in to think, not of progress).
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@flyingfox44 Schumpeter understood this: creative destruction transforms obsolete value into new productive capacity. Progress requires it.
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And what happens when these economic interactions cease to have economic value?
Matt Ridley@mattwridley
250 years ago today Adam Smith gave the world a fantastic insight. That order, cooperation and prosperity are not ordered from above by priests or chiefs but emerge from the social interactions of ordinary people. It’s the most revolutionary and benign idea ever proposed.
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250 years ago today Adam Smith gave the world a fantastic insight.
That order, cooperation and prosperity are not ordered from above by priests or chiefs but emerge from the social interactions of ordinary people.
It’s the most revolutionary and benign idea ever proposed.
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I should have said something. This was THE foundational economic work.
Matt Ridley@mattwridley
250 years ago today Adam Smith gave the world a fantastic insight. That order, cooperation and prosperity are not ordered from above by priests or chiefs but emerge from the social interactions of ordinary people. It’s the most revolutionary and benign idea ever proposed.
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@IliaMozias @GestaltU At some point in the future, there will be entire schools dedicated to this. Their strategic response hasn’t been to build and show off a navy, it’s been much more stealthy and maligned.
That doesn’t make them the dominant power but does mean we are in a lose-lose situation
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China has no strategic response whatsoever. They are not ready for this kind of escalation and simply do not know how to behave in such situations. People tend to think of China as a major geopolitical player, and sometimes they themselves seem to imagine that as well, but in practice it may be more accurate to see them as a cautious merchant interested mainly in small profits. So no strategic response is likely to come.
The more interesting question is how this might influence their policy toward Taiwan.
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The UK used less coal in 2025 than they did in 1600, when Shakespeare was writing Hamlet. Source: carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-em…
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Dystopian AI scenarios are drowning out conversations about how to use the technology to bring about a future of shared prosperity, says @claudia_sahm (via @opinion) bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
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@LevyAntoine Economics is not a physical science that you “observe by experiments”. You are observing a dynamic, complex system that is shaped by policies … which are themselves based off of the empirical or theoretical works of economists … don’t “hide” behind the science label.
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@TOzgokmen Amen. The biggest problem with economics is that it tries at every instance to abstract out people. People being the very entity at the centre of all things economics or otherwise.
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@1RossGittins The biggest mistake of economics has been to abstract out people from all their models. As Pikety showed, over half of all "growth" is due to increase in population.
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I can't believe someone would write that.
Our job is to understand economics as rigorously as possible, being careful that our unavoidable biases don't spill over to our analysis.
If you define it as "coming up with proposals to solve wealth inequality", you're a partisan hack.
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No, as scientists, it's absolutely untrue that "our job is to come up with solutions".
That you would think it is is actually very revealing about your conception of science as advocacy, and thus how seriously we should be taking your analyses.
Morten N. Støstad@MortenStostad
This is also directed to all the other economists who have come out in opposition to the proposed wealth tax. Critiques are easy. But our job is to come up with solutions. If not a wealth tax, what is your proposal to reduce wealth inequality? Or do you propose we do nothing?
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If labour's share of global income had stayed at its 2004 level, workers would have received an additional US$2.4 trillion in 2024 alone. This isn't the inevitable result of technological change—it's a political choice about who shares in the risks and rewards of collective value creation.
Delivering a keynote today at the @ILO Innovation Day (13:15 CET) on why innovation systems must be built on a new social contract between labour, state and market.
Watch live ➡️ live.ilo.org
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There. Is. No. Moat.
Danila Poyarkov@dan_note
Figma shipped a silent patch specifically to kill figma-use — my open-source tool that did what they wouldn't: an MCP server that creates and modifies designs, JSX export, design linting. Then they scrambled to catch up with their own MCP server. So I spent the weekend recreating @Figma from scratch. OpenPencil: reads and writes .fig files, AI chat with full design tools, P2P collaboration with zero servers, ~7 MB app. No account, no subscription. Three days, one developer, MIT license. openpencil.dev
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