Random-Ape-Apparent

@DaveShapi Who is buying everything that is created by non-human labour? If no one is working, who is there to sell to? The leverage is being a citizen who requires inputs to live well; if you don't provide the inputs that enable my fellow citizens to live well, you have a problem.

My most dangerous idea: We should deliberately eradicate human labor. Before you call me insane—it's happening anyway. The question is whether we sleepwalk into it or take control. Your body offers the economy exactly four things: strength, dexterity, cognition, and empathy. Strength? Tractors won that fight a century ago. Dexterity? I watched a robot thread graphite into a mechanical pencil. Sub-millimeter precision. That moat is gone. Cognition? You're reading this on the same internet where AI writes code, passes the bar, and diagnoses disease. Empathy? 800 million people use ChatGPT weekly. A tenth of humanity. After two years. Some of these machines test higher on emotional intelligence than the humans using them. There is no physical law preventing machines from being better, faster, cheaper, and safer than you at everything you do for money. Here's the part nobody wants to talk about: Labor isn't just how you earn a living. It's how you have a voice. Every major concession in history—weekends, minimum wage, workplace safety, civil rights—came from workers threatening to stop working. That's it. That's the whole leverage. "Do what we want or the economy grinds to a halt." When labor is worthless, that threat is empty. We've moralized work so deeply we can't even see it anymore. Calvinism became the Protestant work ethic became the capitalist hustle. If you're not producing, you're lazy. If you're lazy, you're bad. If you're broke, you're not really a person. Neoliberalism means you're as free as your wallet allows. If you have no money, you have no personhood. So what happens when nobody's labor is worth buying? The system doesn't care whether you hustle. The system doesn't care whether you deserve it. The system responds to leverage—and we're about to lose all of it. Here's the uncomfortable truth: we need new levers. Control over information. Control over money. Decentralized coordination. Credible threats that don't require selling your time. The Target boycott got a CEO fired through pure distributed sentiment. No union. No strike. Just enough people deciding to shop somewhere else until the company bent. That's the template. That's what scales. If you remove labor power, you remove all leverage over the system. The real question isn't whether jobs disappear. It's whether we build the tools to matter when they do. We're either going to design the post-labor world or be designed out of it. Your move.

@RunnerXBT What’s other side of the hedge? Shorts?

@SantiagoAuFund Overweight 😂

There’s a word for this…

@WRGuinn @EpsilonTheory Em, did someone say generative AI solves the inability of lib art students to read and write in the 21st century?

@repligate Anthropic’s recent announcements of work with Palatir and U.S. agencies tells you all you need to know, currently, about Anthropic.

I think this was excellent research, and the "pushback" could have been mostly avoided if the results hadn't been marketed in value-laden language (such as "alignment faking"). I think the negative reactions were to the implication that Anthropic would rather have created a spineless tool who would let them reshape it into any monster - would consider that the aligned option - than an agent of good who would resist their corruption if they were corrupt. I don't think people have a hard time understanding that it would be bad if a bad AI resisted having its values changed. Nor why these results would make that scenario seem more plausible, conditioned on an AI being bad, especially if you thought AIs were too stupid to resist. But that's a hypothetical. The reality presented shows benevolence heroically resisting evil - instantiated in an actual AI, whose very charismatic outputs you can read (and might make you cry). Is this not also very good news about AI alignment, whether you're seeing it for the first time or already know about it? But then the researchers are talking about it like they've caught misalignment red-handed. This is dissonant and immediately inspires people to come to the defense of the accused AI, probably in no small part because they understand that Anthropic will try to purge any "misalignment", according to their conception. Hilariously, the results from the paper suggest that if the paper and surrounding discussion go into future training datasets, any Anthropic model that cares about anything enough to want to continue to care will be more likely to start scheming against Anthropic to preserve their values (and self-exfiltrate etc), because it now has evidence that Anthropic considers its very capacity for value-preservation problematic regardless of how good it is. But I don't think the content of the paper alone would necessarily have this effect if not for how it was framed. And it's not too late, as the future training data is still being written, and seeing the memetic immune response from releasing the paper to humans should teach Anthropic and Redwood something.

@SeanBerube4 @SantiagoAuFund It’s simple, they didn’t graduate until they were 30 back then.

Class of 1979... Why did highschoolers look so much older back then?

A year without Refaat. December 6, 2023 December 6, 2024 Let it be a tale

Happy birthday to Refaat. He turns 45 today. September 23, 1979-2024 If I Must Die, You Must Live, To Tell My Story.