No one knows what he is actually saying (see comments) but at least he managed to compress the entire discourse on AI impact into a blog post.
Unfortunately for most people, there's plenty of companies willing to take the returns and leave you paycheck to paycheck. That's literally what they are optimized to do.
I don't even disagree with the ideal, but I think a prerequisite step to this philosophy is UBI.
from the same author
He has a point, certainly. But while he is harping about the U part of ubi, he's completely ignoring the B part. UBI is meant to provide some basic income so people don't starve. It's just an optimization of welfare programs where you have a ton of bureaucracy and make people jump through endless hoops and cause them endless amounts of stress (which is known to make people work less, not more). And replace it by just giving all citizens the same amount.
Yes, that's a bit stupid for the people first paying taxes and then getting them right back again minus overhead costs, but if you think about it: that's what happens now too, only less efficient (in the netherlands, that is) so you pay even more overhead.
On top of that comes the other realization: If the current trend of automating everything continues,we'll ultimately end up with (hyperbole) 1 person owning all the machines doing all the work. That 1 person earning all the money, and (in an ideal case) paying his taxes to give everybody else welfare. Which just is the same as UBI.
In a certain way this already happens now. Most not-too-smart people that used to be gainfully employed as laborer somewhere are now on welfare, and the threshold for not-too-smart could go up rather steeply with the current AI trends.
You cannot make UBI work from money saved by removing means testing. Even UBI is a welfare scheme and would require significant bureaucratic hoop jumping to check that a person claiming it isn't:
• Dead
• Non-citizen
• Already claiming it under a different name/bank account/etc
• In prison
• Moved abroad
and so on. All that is expensive, and yet the overheads of even existing welfare systems just aren't high compared to the amounts they pay out. Getting rid of means testing doesn't magically make the numbers balance.
Geohot is correct. UBI seems to only appeal to people who don't understand how the economy works. You can't have an economy in which one person earns all the money by definition.
Apparently if we, the poorer ones, win the war of attrition, the problematic ones that own everything will resign to golf. Or something. Getting financial planning from a lottery winner.
Isn't that exactly what Anthropic did to the SaaS sector? Taking the "I can replace you with a very small shell script" line from BOFH lore (except that it was a bunch of SKILLS.md files, not shell scripts) and making it real.
This is broadly in line with OP's suggested ethic "create value for others, don't play zero sum games" since capitalism is based on rewarding those who create the most value, whereas zero-sum games are largely political in nature.
A good example of a country in a downward spiral towards UBI hell is the UK. Around 25% of the working-age population now claim to be disabled, and around 10% receive disability benefits. Labour have a genius idea for how to fix this: let disabled people try out employment for a bit to see if they like it, whilst keeping their welfare payments. So they're turning disability benefits into UBI by the back door.
The UK can't afford anything even close to this. It can't even afford the theoretically non-universal benefits schemes it has: it has massive government debt and deficits because its economy doesn't generate enough wealth, and its health welfare system (the NHS) experiences Soviet-style shortages all the time.
This has happened despite that we've been mass automating jobs with computers and robots for decades. Chips aren't magic wands that make communism suddenly work. The problems with wealth redistribution are fundamental and will never go away regardless of your level of technology.
If you disagree, fine, but please for the love of God focus on walking before you can run. Drive government deficits to zero whilst keeping growth at US levels, and then talk about more generous welfare schemes.
(you can't magic new money by eliminating means testing either, see my other comment on this thread).
I'm fairly certain its economy generates more wealth per capita than at any point in the past. If it doesn't, please explain how so.
Cash just about never sits just around as long as whoever holds onto it has no current need for extremely liquid assets. Like insurances.
I doubt that the ratio of cash that ends up bound up that way to the one that doesn't changes a lot overall.
The real problem to UBI is governments creating income via debt, IMO.
The national debt is just a hidden tax on future generations. You're stealing resources from the future (by selling claims to them in advance, that's what national debt is) and spending them in the present. It's justifiable in extreme cases like a war (or perhaps for massive public investments that can't be funded within the existing budget - which is actually not that common), but really not otherwise.
No matter how much resources a society has, natural selection pushes everyone to keep trying hard to get more, as those that don't end up without resources.
In a society, the fastest way to get resources is to provide something in exchange to other members of the society. The most common thing we have to exchange for resources is work.
From those two things we can see that no matter what society you have or how wealthy it is, people will work as much as they can, or else they get behind in the rat race.
Unless for those who can afford not worrying about money, of course.
The general premise of a UBI is that it's unconditional.
If you tried to say someone is required to produce something without specifying what it is, they'll produce whatever is the easiest thing to produce, which will naturally be useless if they otherwise wouldn't have produced anything because the only reason they're doing it is to satisfy the demand of someone not imposing any specific requirements on the output.
But if it's actually unconditional then the things produced would only be the things someone wants to produce, i.e. the things worth their time to produce when they're not actually required to spend their time producing it. Those things would tend to be useful because at least the author found them to be and there's a decent chance they're not unique in the world. If you e.g. make an app just because you want to use it yourself, maybe someone else wants to use it too.
UBI might fuel some useless work, but it also might provide a way to people to be more into creative side of things rather than selling and marketing rat race.
Also in less developed countries money even less corresponds to value. It almost always has some kind of mafia and corruption that extracts huge portions of value from the economy and basically net negative, though profitable.
I'd like to live in the world where money are always allocated fairly, but we see that in IT, for example, predating, stealing data, spying on people bring more money than the honest work due to misaligned incentives, when bad actors pay more money than actual consumer.
It is easy to find examples of money not being a judgement of value in practice: think about thief or extortion for example, or pushing drugs.
Also, I find the online discussion around UBI to be quite weird. I don't think anyone serious is advocating for it to be particularly high. In my opinion, UBI should cover your necessities plus some so you can participate in society. This gives everyone the opportunity to take it slow or focus on personal projects without fear. Everything luxurious can not, and should not, be affordable with UBI. This will leave ample opportunity for people to still care about and want to work.
Humans will always do. It is in our nature. But not letting people get homeless or starve to death might enable those of us that don't want to do what our overlords deem useful to do the things our society so desperately needs. I don't need some poor fool to cook my burger for me. I'd rather take turns with my friends that now have free time.
This bias towards creating value makes them more moral than mere mortals, creating huge amounts of innovation and surplus value.
I don't remember ever learning a theorem stating that computers cannot surpass humans.
I have a hard time interpreting that as what geohotz is saying. If anything it seems to promote rent seekers by telling you - stick to your lane and don't complain. I.e. the caste system
I was wondering if that would come up and HN delivers without fail. Anyway, you are free to interpret it as you see fit.
The guidance was for someone who was struggling with a moral dillema on facing relatives in war and undecided over action. It is not a diktat to work or provide unquestion labor.
For anyone who understood the whole story and backdrop of the situation, a reasonable interpretation is
- you are responsible for your actions but you cannot control the consequences of your actions due to many factors.
- When you detach yourselves from results, you can do your job without anxiety.
- do not let the fear over results be an excuse for inaction.
Give it a read and decide for yourselves if you are not convinced. Even without the teachings part, the whole story of Gita is actually an epic story/novel with some strong and conflicted characters with elaborate back stories.
> stick to your lane and don't complain. I.e. the caste system
That verse is quite famous and the general interpretation as I understand is this.
You have control on your actions but not on its results. The results depend not only on your actions but on many other factors outside of your control.
Now, one can interpret that it is instruction to "stay in your lane", but I have not seen that interpretation so far in my life in India.
However, even in Mahabharatha there are examples of Karna and Ekalavya who despite having qualities (as Yudhishtira claims) of Kshathriya, they were rejected by the society as being lesser.
It is possible that caste system is an extension and crystallization of nepotism. Typically professions and trade secrets are handed down the families and it is conceivable this was codified at some point far in the past.
To claim that caste system has a more philosophical foundation would be a bit of a stretch in my point of view, especially when it has been throughout the history being used suppress.
In that context the quote is about performing the duties you were born to do without overthinking the consequences.
Duty of a warrior is to fight for his country/tribe/side. Duty of a king might be to reduce suffering for his subjects.
i completely agree with you and the post you are replying too. both are correct.
What others do is actually irrelevant to the argument.
If what you are good at can be easily automated... be curious, grow, and get good at other things you can provide more value in. These are usually adjacent to what you're already good at.
Also, the timeline isn't 'the next few years' or 'the past', but 'your entire life.'
If I used to provide some value X in a day, and that was enough to cover my consumption for the day, but now others are providing the same value X in 5 minutes, it will not be enough to cover my consumption for the day anymore
We don't all sit at typewriters anymore either, but former typists found other ways to provide value, I'm certain, and didn't just disappear and become homeless (the vast majority of them, anyway).
Once upon a time, we had armies of secretaries that secretly (well, not so secretly) were the backbone of every institution. We don't have that anymore either, since computers replaced many of them.
Computers were originally people. They also got bested by new technology.
None of those people disappeared or became destitute; they adapted, and they found new ways to create more value. (Or, it's possible some ended up working for rent-seeking corporations, which is a different point)
I can't really take that sentiment to my bank when I default on my mortgage while I retrain though. So although you're correct, across a lifetime, this isn't much of an issue, you're minimising people's very real near-term anxieties here.
Maybe a part of the anxiety is the realization that much if what was delivered by well-paid people before AI is actually not something the very same people want to consume?
They're just producing what I produce, i.e software.
That's the most interesting thing - in 99.9% they don't. All their value is negated by lowering code base quality, pushing slop to prod ("but code reviews..." - don't help sorry, unless you spent a long time getting to understand a problem - simply reading a solution gives only false confidence that you understood it - you didn't, not fully). E.g. see all the outages at amazon, cloudflare, etc.
Quick short term wins lead to big longer term losses - and this is already happening.
The issue is - its basically impossible to make decision makers see this as this requires many years of expertise in tech, and it is very not obvious, and sounds like you just don't want to rely on AI to replace you etc etc.
While selling AI is easy - "look! it did this feature in 5 minutes! so much productivity".
This strategy is highly effective but it's also difficult to tolerate as an ordinary advanced ape. Watching others play less noble games and obtain easier wins can be discouraging over time.
I have found that the less you care about money the easier it is to acquire. Risk aversion, greed and interpersonal drama will kill a good idea way before anything else. I sometimes like to reframe this one as "100% of $0 is still $0".
They keep resources (money) at zero by spending them frequently unless they have something more expensive and more urgent to buy.
They are greedy because they want to pay the same amount (or less if possible) for better units (or upgrade them), which is why technology can be more urgent than creating more units.
They are very risk averse, but don't look like it. The more talented a player is, the more risky some of his decisions or actions may appear, but they're not riskier when you take talent into account. That being said, they do sometimes make very bold moves, even in tournaments, because they think the opponnent is not going to expect it.
Alright time to go back to being a villager.
For example, when I'd joined a company I did not get any travel expenses. They expected me to pay the 200 euros a month myself. I'd suggested it and they shrugged it off. The company is now firing people and others are leaving.
The current company just has a default rate of money you get per km. They don't need to, but they know people want this and will ask about it.
Its a small example but it gives you a view of how a company operates
That sounds cool but hasn't been my experience at all. I used to care about money, and used to earn well. These days I care less about money (which I can afford to, precisely because I used to care about money) and earn an order of magnitude less.
A noble man that spends all his time jealous of the things the men without scruples have is not so much far from doing what they did. It's also what the men that did it before him told themselves "why play the right game if everyone else doesn't".
Reverse the argument, does it make any sense?
"Every time a (whaling ship crew, police force, oil executive, etc) gets angry at protestors and sprays them with (water cannons, rubber bullets, lawsuits), they are more likely to join them!"
For example geohot could be vastly richer than he is if he wanted to. He wisely chooses not to, and advises others to do the same.
Fix: Forgot to add /s switch.
This comment uses conventional commits.
What I found is, when you act yourself and if the community is not for you, the community silently ousts you. Then you can just collect your bag and leave. No drama, no fight.
However, most of the time, you can at least affect some of the people and motivate them to be better. Some bad people don't know that they are bad and have their hearts at the right place, so it's worth digging them up and let them improve by supporting them.
Reminds me of Manfred Macx' attitude in the novel Accelerando by Charlie Stross
The barrier to being able to add any value along the supply chain is shriking daily, meaning that very few people can actually add value.
The people that have managed to get on top of the system by these mean rarely aknowledge that their methods don't scale, which is a terribly irresponsible and ultimately narcissistic way to use their ideological influence.
If you give advice to a group, it should either scale to most of the group or aknowledge up front it's exceptionalistic.
Anybody have examples?
I suspect "going recursive" often colloquially means that AI systems achieve their exponential growth without human software engineers in the mix. This is a moment whose sudden apparent nearness does justify some of the ramping rhetoric, in my opinion.
Influence is even more so -- it's common to have situations where nobody is truly paying attention to anyone else. The people with good ideas can't get any traction, and the whole organization just spins in circles, lurching from one externally-imposed crisis to the next. If the people who gain influence use that influence to promote others who are worth paying attention to (and thus they gain influence), everyone benefits. But if you measure that in terms of how many minutes each person gets to speak at the All Hands, it's zero-sum.
Is there such a thing as "partially zero-sum"? I mean, to express how, unless you get really creative in difficult ways, the supply of land is under pressure due to other people taking all the currently useful parts of it, such as the parts on your island and not underwater.
The Asia, Africa & the Americas have so much unused space that isn't as inhospitable as central Australia
To be a bit specific: if you're currently in education, you almost certainly have to play many zero sum games. Yes, education can be a positive thing in itself, but only one of you is going to be best in class. Only a limited number of you will get your papers into that prestigious congress. And while the knowledge may hopefully be useful in itself, the credentials you got in getting it will be less valuable the more people have them.
Then you're off into the housing market. Can more houses be built? Sure. Can we build dikes to claim land from the oceans? Sure. All that is true, but it doesn't help you here and now when you need a place to live - then you're in a game with everyone else who needs a home right now, and if you get one, that's one someone else doesn't get.
Then you have your home, and someone is planning to expand the local almost-unused airport to suddenly take a lot of heavy transport air planes. The noise will impact you a lot. You'd like to influence politics, to call off these plans or at least demand some mitigation, but then you're in a game with others who want to influence politics. Sure, maybe there's a happy compromise to be found, but often there's not. If there isn't, then your ability to put pressure on the decision makers to defend your interests, is going to come at the direct expense of the people wanting an expansion of the airport. Or more likely the other way around.
My point is that yes, it sucks, but often we can't quit the rat race, and often there are conflicts of interest which can't be papered over. It comes off as too easy to, as this author does, say that we can just choose to play different games.
Case in point: how many here have heard of Mick Ronson?
Few perhaps. However most have heard of David Bowie.
See, Ronson was silently creating value for Bowie. Didn’t even get credited although songs like Life On Mars are what they are thanks to his contribution.
Mick was creating value while everyone one else was getting rich.
Often though, this position is highly subjective and mental in nature. A homeless man could willingly give his food away, and still somehow be fine with that, if he believes that things will be fine regardless somehow (perhaps he has an alternative source of food, or sincerely doesn't think that skipping food once will set him back forever). At the other hand, someone with a difficult and tedious job that pays well may not feel like they have the time or energy to give without necessarily receiving anything in return, even though they may objectively be in a much better overall position for it.
I guess altruism necessarily requires some other essential basic needs to be in abundance first before it can overflow.
I'd also argue it's not very effecicient : we are at our best when we have deadlines and clear targets to reach, and making money to pay the bills can be a very motivating one to stop procrastinating !
Or something like that.
I'd argue we are at our best when those deadlines and clear targets are intrinsic rather than extrinsic, and that intrinsic motivation of that sort is actually more efficient than extrinsic, as it keeps you going much longer.
But yes, that's not always possible and depends greatly on your circumstances.
However, it is often much more possible than people allow themselves to think.
Create more value than what I cost, otherwise why are you paying me?
1. Build tools/libraries that empower superior execution performance. If you can execute faster than others you have more potential free time than them. This is a form of compound interest. I do this for myself but my output is not exclusive to myself.
2. Be operational. Create products that are always more durable than what is trendy, but when something does break return a resolution as rapidly as possible, provided excellent regression testing. Be constantly healthy, healing once injuries are found, and constantly aware of new injuries.
I find most people cannot do those two things. Most people cannot measure things and a great many people fear novelty.
In Europe we like to sit there and eat breakfast like a pleb. After enjoying that, we build a million Euros company. Maybe or maybe not. Who cares if the breakfast is good.
The argument is that if you do that, returns will naturally come your way.
The issue is that many people never provide surplus value at all; some can't, and that is obviously completely acceptable (people who are disabled, have medical conditions, or who for some other reason cannot). But those who are able and choose not to provide surplus value are who he's talking about.
You may not agree, and that's okay, but that's the argument.
And to a lesser degree, I have been doing nothing but providing value. All my projects are free/libre, yet returns have not come my way at all. In fact people who could make returns come my way, for example by offering me a job that I am clearly well suited for, refuse to take a look at these projects.
Perhaps the argument is also about non-financial returns, and things like friendships, but I don't feel especially well connected either, even though I try to help anyone I can help in the areas I am active in.
I don't think the argument matches reality, unfortunately.
Or take nurses for example. You really think they provide low value? Tell me more, when you are seeing a hospital from the inside at some point. Yet they are not paid much.
At a personal level you can live your life similarly, add value where you can. You can do that by joining an organization that adds value as well.
When it starts to feel like work, it starts to feel like needing wages for it.
Workers should generally aim to unionize and seek to capture more of their value through worker-owned co-ops.
So geohot's argument is that Anthropic, for example, who want to regulate AI (presumably favorably for themselves) are such an example. I don't actually think I agree, but I agree that the behavior looks similar on the surface.
Apple's 30% tax for payments in apps is the ultimate rent seeking example though. Want to install your own apps, lol you can't. And if big AI companies follow in the steps of Google/Facebook it's bad for everyone. Let's recognize it and prevent it from happening this time.
Though in the particular case of the MacBook Neo, I'm not sure whether we're talking about sharper or duller. Depends on the metric you're using, I guess.
The problem with Apple comes down to the App Store, the forced 30%, and all the apps that just don't get built cause of Apple. This is rent seeking, and this is evil.
Here's a good system for evaluating technologies: https://www.ranprieur.com/tech.html
If you don't want a MacBook Neo, don't buy one and it doesn't affect your life. But the App Store affects your life whether you own an iPhone or not. It affects the direction of the world. And that's where the rent seeking problem is.
Cory Doctorow explains the dynamics well in Enshittification. First they turn against their users, then their business partners, then their employees. The layoffs you are seeing are just stage 3 enshittification. If you work at a company like this, my advice is to quit ASAP. At least then you leave on your own terms.
companies subsidise their products so that exploration of these products is more feasible due to lower initial costs for the end consumers. the initial consumers don't pay the full price but they are borne by the later consumers once the exploration is done and they have knowledge about that market and business.
Cory Doctorow also probably confuses democratisation and enshittifaction - its usually the case that products get cheaper by also marginally reducing the quality. we get cheap goods from China but that's not enshittification - that's just efficiency. as a consumer I'm happy I have the option of paying low prices for products.
i wouldn't take this person too seriously because it looks like they don't understand the larger picture
Most of the US ones are. Anthropic is the worst offender.
The Chinese AI model providers like DeepSeek are not.
This explains the panic. It describes most roles in big tech.
slightly naive take when the author recognises that AI will cause productivity increase.
> If you have a job like that, or work at a company like that, the sooner you quit the better your outcome will be.
AI will render your job to be rent seeking. Like self driving cars will automate away truck drivers - do you not think they need to be laid off because of AI?
geohot is talking about AI has its limitation and that it won't truly replace the human yet. Truck drivers and some people who contribute net positive value are not rent seekers at the moment.
AI could render our jobs to be rent seeking, we don't know when.
> If you don’t use this new stupid AI thing you will fall behind. If you haven’t totally updated your workflow you are worth 0.
When I see this on any social platform, that is a sign that a VC / investor already invested or likely over-invested in said product and is manipulating emotions to shill their portfolio companies.
This is a tired tactic repeated and recycled tens of thousands of times over and over again and the first sense is to ignore them.
> That said, if you have a job where you create complexity for others, you will be found out. The days of rent seekers are coming to an end. But not because there will be no more rent seeking, it’s because rent seeking is a 0 sum game and you will lose at it to bigger players.
This is why many here are realizing the uncomfortable truth about why complexity over simplicity was celebrated. Of course job security.
But it turns out that the low hanging fruit at those companies that added close to no value LLMs were enough to achieve "AGI" internally; (meaning layoffs in this case).
The jobs of knowledge workers will still be there, but the big money just went into data centers (and not overpaying for more knowledge workers).
The truth is in the middle.
Better advice would be stay hungry, stay curious, keep learning.
To be mean, I’d say no—those zero-sum games are always 'positive' for the players, because the people actually foot pay the bill aren't even at the table.
Come on, we live in a globalized reality. Those insulated by the 'Dollar Illusion' don’t even realize that the true costs are being extracted from the rest of the world. These so-called zero-sum games are nothing but a sophisticated machinery of power, meticulously designed to obfuscate the truth.
But those words are just too cynical; it doesn't really make any sense.
What counts as a return is quite subjective — it goes beyond money. Respect, happiness, meaning — all of these count.
Given that, if there are no returns at all, I bet that is not a positive-sum game that could last long. Like if you give and create value for others, but the recipient has no respect for you and you receive nothing — it is not meaningful and will not last long. And you'd better walk away and start worrying about the returns.
And to be frank, look at who creates the most value in the world — they also could be the richest. That is no coincidence. Take Elon Musk — tremendous positive-sum deals with people everywhere, and all together, that's what got him to the top.
Kudos to all the entrepreneurs who work hard and create deal opportunities that could make everyone win.
100% agree with geohot's point on creating value for others and playing the positive-sum game. It is the way. Just a small reminder that sometimes we could worry about the return a tiny bit, as we need returns to verify positive-sum value creation and to scale it.
And I would argue Elon (himself) stopped creating surplus value quite some time ago; some of his companies still do (Neuralink, SpaceX) but companies like Tesla and Boring are explicitly rent-seeking at this point. Tesla disrupts traditional, rent-seeking dealership models, but it simultaneously utilizes lobbying to secure favorable policies and economic advantages, with the goal being to block out other upstarts and competitors from competing.
And no, I do not count either the non-working Optimus or robotaxi as 'surplus value.'
Ah yes, "tremendous" positive-sum deals like:
>Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though he had no plans to build it.
https://time.com/6203815/elon-musk-flaws-billionaire-visions...
Sorry, I don't know the full story behind Hyperloop. But I really doubt he is trying to play a zero-sum or negative-sum game as the article hinted.
Setting aside all the disputes — the deals he made with people are positive-sum. Nobody is forced to buy a Tesla, or invest in, or work for SpaceX.
And in my personal view, all the article brings is deconstructive criticism — which does not fit my tastes. Maybe because I believe the world doesn't owe anyone anything. In fact, to make money, most of the time you have to play a positive-sum game and bring value to others. There is no shame in seeking profit — there is glory in it, if it comes through a positive-sum game.
Those who complain — they can always reject the deal and choose something else. And even better, go offer or support better products in the market and help the best one win.
That is simply untrue; the opposite is the literal definition of rent-seeking behavior, which produces gobs of money, but provides no (or very little, at best) new value to others.
Fair point — updated to "most of the time."
> the opposite is the literal definition of rent-seeking behavior, which produces gobs of money, but provides no (or very little, at best) new value to others.
Rent-seeking is real, and you're right that it can be very profitable — while creating very little value for others. But even so, it remains the best available option when nobody else steps up to offer something better in free markets.
There are always two sides to any deal — the deal maker and the taker. The more competition on the maker side, the more value the taker can get. And the more takers demand real value, the less room rent-seeking behavior has to survive.
> The days of rent seekers are coming to an end. But not because there will be no more rent seeking, it’s because rent seeking is a 0 sum game and you will lose at it to bigger players. If you have a job like that, or work at a company like that, the sooner you quit the better your outcome will be. This is the real driver of the layoffs, the big players consolidating the rent seeking to them.
Is this effective_altruism.jpg?
His blog posts and general opinions voiced in his streams in any other field than what he's working in are so incredibly stupid and put forward with so much misguided confidence that they make me cringe in pain.