And a great deal of the talking shops/podcasts/keynotes/nonprofits around AI existential risk are all part of this same play. They receive funding from the large AI companies so that the latter can continue to talk their own books using this angle.
If, after all these years, Crypto has not become a stable store of value that can replace a fiat currency and let you buy your groceries with it, why do we suddenly 'need it' to do that now, and what would change that will enable that to happen?
It's still not possible because of the high speculative aspect (even though stable coins offer some form of alternative but since they are anchored on the dollar, not so much). Change will happen when more people are impacted by unilateral decisions. If all of a sudden the US decided you/your business/your political party/your government is not aligned with their views, they could make sure that Visa/Mastercard/Paypal/Stripe/... stop accepting payments for that given group. Then you realize there are very little alternatives ready to go in that case (for online payments there are, but for physical ones not so much). So far this hasn't seem like a possibility at all, but, in my view at least, this has changed this past year.
You are missing the mass destruction of assets of the wealthy in WWII and the increase in bargaining power of labour in the post-war years (perhaps driven by loss of life/injury for those of a working age). The post-war public sentiment, at least in the UK, was that the lower orders of society had fought the most and suffered the most, and there was an appetite for a new social contract that saw Churchill voted out from office and gave rise to the National Health Service, etc.
That's my fourth point above, viz: The US stepping in as the world's leading manufacturer in the post-war era, having its industrial plant intact, raw materials available, and demobilisation providing for a vast increase in the labour force itself without wage reductions.
The irony is that the countries which did substantially see their industry wrecked and received Marshall Plan or equivalent funds afterward turned into the most competitive post-war economies, most notably Germany and Japan.
The US managed to build out new infrastructure, where it couldn't convert its war plant directly (which in automobiles, lorries, locomotives, ships, and aircraft it largely did).
We saw spectacular greenfields development most especially in high-speed rail, first in Japan, then France and Germany, all of which saw both infrastructure and real estate valuations (the key obstruction to railroad rights-of-way) collapse after the War. (China's HSR build-out follows a similar dynamic, though with different reasons, as that country industrialised for the first time.)
(Edit: The US hasn't established HSR, largely I feel because its previously-transport-enabled real-estate became too valuable. It's not tractably feasible to buy rights of way in the US, alternatives such as subway construction are themselves phenomenally expensive.)
I'm not sure of all the reasons for the UK's relative economic stagnation, though I suspect it was a mix of WWI and WWII debt, not having its industry blown to splinters, being out-competed by the US, and losing its cheap inputs as the Empire collapsed and colonies were spun out as independent states.
(Edit: The UK didn't see an economic turn-around until the 1980s, largely as North Sea oil came online, a boom it managed to extend with financialisation of the City of London, though that was largely restricted to the London metro region itself at a cost to the rest of the country which is immensely backwards.)
It's interesting to note that the US's post-war boom began slowing in the 1970s (for reasons which are widely, and I strongly suspect mostly wrongly speculated upon, particular the goldbugs' hypothesis), whilst Japan and later South Korea's were just hotting up (the latter imploded with the asset bubble collapse in 1990), and later of course China starting to grow significantly during the 1990s.
But at the end of WWII, the US had huge productive capacity, largely non-obsolete factories, worldwide markets for goods, raw materials, and a largely intact workforce (vanishingly few overall war casualties), a situation few other countries could claim, and none at similar scale. This provided about two-to-three decades runtime before factors caught up with it.
And in light of the 1929 crash, helped both prolong the expansion out of that crisis and see that the rewards were widely distributed among socioeconomic classes rather than concentrated amongst the very wealthy. That formula's not been tried since.
(Edits: Note two late adds above, they clarify/expand my argument slightly, pre-empt some possible counterarguments, and shouldn't change the meaning significantly.)
Unfortunately, they will be replaced with those sympathetic to the nerd reich takeover and thus ultimately reduce friction and for those in charge looking to wield the wrecking ball. It feels like half the goal of DOGE and similar measures is to purge those with a conscience and loyalty to public service and replace them with those willing to do almost anything asked of them.
I think the idea is that they are some of the ones that know where all the procedures (and skeletons) are buried, so the DOGEkids will be slowed down because they'll be trying to examine and audit systems they don't understand.
I've often wondered why HN so often seems to prefer to prefer to upvote some tangential rabbit hole rather than discuss the topic in the article itself.
yeah absolutely, I look at the nation’s debt load - which it does pay interest on from tax revenues - and its increase of debt load alongside actual spending of debt sale proceeds, and compare that to how much it collects in taxes
I use that government’s official sources to do that math
Additionally, in some nations, there are underfunded liabilities, future necessary spending
And it all far eclipses what the nation makes in revenue from taxes, tariffs and productive industries it owns - if any
If there an aspect of accounting that I’m misunderstanding, by all means enlighten me
> I use that government’s official sources to do that math
You mean the source of the claim is you, you personally did the math for all "high tax nations" whatever those are, and you're presenting the claim without any of the math or explaining any qualifier like "high" from "high tax"?
There are plenty of legitimate points made in the article. It also seems uncontroversial at this point to claim that companies are struggling to justify the expenses and inflated share prices brought about by the rush to implement LLMs in as many use cases as possible.
As far as I am aware, the author is right to claim that there is no solution to AI hallucination on the horizon, which is a severely limiting problem. Also I understand we are reaching the boundaries of useful training data available. Both factors suggest current AI improvement simply cannot follow the same trajectory as transistors under Moore's law.
I just dont see hallucination as that big of a problem. I use copilot and gpt daily and only have that issue on occasion. Its a once every few hours issue.
The average person just doesnt care about hallucination that much and probably doesnt even notice half the time.
Costs for gigantic models are really high now, but unless moores law stops they will come down. If moores law does stop, we have a bigger problem. Costs for all the other small models which were already useful 10 years ago, have gotten so cheap you can train them on a macbook, and deploy them on microcontrollers. (sound/image identification/detection in fleet microphones/cameras) That was big ML 8 years ago.
LLM's are not all of AI. There are tons of usecases other than just chatbots. I think people forget that theres models doing well depth alignment, trajectory planning, car tracking, liscense plate reading, etc.
Everyone is just burned out on the relentless advertising of gpt and are conflating that with all of ai. While this man is getting mad at sama for being cringe and hoping the ai world crashes and burns, the general technology is just propogating outwards to people who are actually using it.
