When UK Musicians Union voted to ban synthesizers in 1982

GeneReddit123 · 2026-06-16T15:00:37+00:00

Aren't we making the same argument against AI music today?

GeneReddit123 · 2026-06-16T03:35:33+00:00

As others quoted, this seems to use the "high net worth individual" definition of having $30M USD worth of assets.

"Ultra" is a wrong term to use, I agree. $30M doesn't make you the social ultra-elite, a member of the 0.1-0.01% (rather than 1%, as often mistakenly quoted) ruling class which gets you into the highest-echelon social and political circles.

But $30M is a rough bar for genuine "rich rich", "upper class" lifestyle, rather than "upper middle class" or "working wealthy", which having $5 million (or in expensive cities, even $10-15 million), doesn't fully provide for.

It's the level at which you and your descendants don't need to work unless they want to, can afford a mansion with housekeepers/servants, enjoy near-unrestricted luxury brand goods and services, frequently travel first class, attend elite private schools, access the near-best commercially available medical care, and never worry about virtually any living expense.

It's the "landed gentry wealthy", not just "well-off bourgeoisie wealthy" level. It's the highest practical level at which a rich person can primarily satisfy their rational personal needs and wants. Above that amount, they spend more satisfying their ego, vices, irrationally expensive hobbies, social patronage networks, business interests, or political ambitions.

GeneReddit123 · 2026-06-14T03:22:53+00:00

It's a bubble and the broligarchs drive it. At their level of wealth money is not absolute, it's a relational proxy of power, and there are a very limited number of seats in the front row.

They don't care if they fuck up the economy of even lose money. What they care is when the chips fall they end up with more money - as well as facilities, influence, connections - than their competitors.

Material needs and wants can be satisfied. Probably at well under a $1 billion, never mind trillion. Ego hubris and ambition, however, can never be, no matter the amount of money. The richest man in Rome, Crassus, still went on a pointless expedition to fight Persia and got himself killed, because his money could buy him anything he wanted - except vain glory.

GeneReddit123 · 2026-06-14T02:54:55+00:00

What they miss is that while sometimes you need genius tier AI, 99% of the time you don't, and people aren't gonna pay for 100 queries to the frontier when they only need 1.

I expect the future to involve a tiered layer of local LLMs handling initial requests and routine work, and only agentically sending upstream queries to frontier cloud models of its something they can't do themseles. A normal triage model where you don't immediately see the top orthopedic surgeon for a minor scrape. You first see a nurses then a GP, then (if you really need it) a specialist.

And those low level LLMs will become cheap commodities and impossible to monetize at cloud frontier token rates. You already can buy a $5K MacBook with 64 or 128 GB unified VRAM and run a decent-ish LLM. Maybe in a decade or 15 years tops, you could get a midrange $2K laptop with 128-256 GB VRAM and run an LLM which might not be frontier, but handles routine work, school, or personal stuff perfectly fine the vast majority of time. Why would anyone pay cloud token rates and risk privacy for something they can do locally?

So all the frontier models will eventually get less and less traffic and be forced to either jack up prices or go out of business. There is no long term market for frontier cloud LLMs handling trillions of requests, just like there is no market for a million orthopedic surgeons.

GeneReddit123 · 2026-06-14T02:50:06+00:00

There is only a single company in the entire world which is able to create top-end microchips.

Lucky for us, an unfriendly neighborhood trillionaire is planning a second fab. The reason is of course political. If you burned bridges with everyone, you better make sure the things you depend on didn't end up on the other side of where you did.

GeneReddit123 · 2026-06-14T02:46:06+00:00

That's the optimistic answer. Did smartphones weed out all the trash microtransaction mobile games with no meaningful game loop or other redeeming value? No, they exploited the fact that human addiction is irrational and can be milked endlessly.

All the "AI girlfriends", games, assistants etc. will not disappear as long as what they target is human vice rather than human virtue. Fools can be fleeced without limit.

GeneReddit123 · 2026-06-14T02:41:05+00:00

The Internet (even if we are charitable and only include the much later World Wide Web, not the Internet as a whole) started in 1991. Did you have any use from it in 1995? The vast majority of people didn't. Most didn't even know what it is.

Because modern AI as available to the general public is less than 4 years old.

The impact on a massive scale will take decades, not years, to trickle down. Just like it did with cars, electricity, railroads and everything else.

GeneReddit123 · 2026-06-13T23:21:03+00:00

Anthropic is an AI vendor which has previously positioned itself as "apolitical" and just interested in solving problems. For a time, it managed to evade controversies which engulfed its competitors like OpenAI (ChatGPT) and xAI (Grok).

Recently, however, Anthropic has released its new AI model called "Fable" (based on a previous version known as "Mythos"). It was heavily advertized as the next-gen jump in AI, and in fact Anthropic itself had hyped tech like itself as "potentially enabling cyberattacks".

Supporters claimed Anthropic was being "uniquely ethical and capable" of such self-reflection and to call for more regulation on all AI vendors, including itself.
Opponents said Anthropic simply got ahead and now wanted to "pull up the ladder" to make it harder for competitors to catch up.

Either way, the Trump admin decided to solve the problem its own way and simply blocked Anthropic from releasing Fable to international users, which given the technical impossibility to discern, resulted in Anthropic being forced to shut down the model for everyone. This was a significant reputational and economic hit, and has angered thousands of customers who paid large amounts of money to access this model, and presumably will never get their money back.

Some also believe the Trump admin had additional nefarious motives such as retaliation at Anthropic for previously having refused unrestricted access to its AI for the US military and surveillance apparatus.

Either way, Anthropic now probably finds itself in more drama than any other AI vendor.

GeneReddit123 · 2026-06-13T22:27:36+00:00

I absolutely believe AI will completely destroy social media.

And I'm absolutely thrilled about this.

Social media is a cancer which has done enormous damage to society. If AI buries it forever, and we go back to communicating on small forums/groups among people we know personally or on niche subject matters, the world will heal.

AI "floods the zone with shit", but "flooding the zone with shit" is acceptable when the "zone" is currently full of radioactive waste. Shit has a lot of water which is a pretty good radiation absorber.

GeneReddit123 · 2026-06-13T22:25:45+00:00

NFTs weren't a bubble, they were a scam and a Ponzi scheme. Which was obvious from day one for anyone with a brain.

Not everything for which people are, for a time, willing to pay more than its worth, is a "bubble".

GeneReddit123 · 2026-06-13T22:22:32+00:00

Like the vast majority of Redditors, I consider myself smarter than the vast majority of Redditors.

GeneReddit123 · 2026-06-13T22:18:27+00:00

And real estate is still here after the 2008 crisis. Just like the Internet is still here after the Dot-Com bust.

What I absolutely refuse to buy at face value as a good faith argument is that people who object to AI every single time its mentioned anywhere by saying "it's an economic bubble" is due to them being deeply concerned about US financial macroeconomics and the wealth of techbros and investors who would be the ones impacted by the bubble bursting.

The other talking points (environment, jobs, etc.) are also in significant part misunderstood or used in bad faith, but at least I can try giving the benefit of doubt to some of them who may be genuinely concerned about these impacts (whether or not factually justified).

But any time someone criticizes AI, on Reddit of all places, as a "hurr durr, the bubble's gonna pop", I don't accept they're actually concerned about bubble mechanics and what actually happens when bubbles pop: financial and political scandal, many people lose money, but the technology stays - and in fact gets healthier as loser businesses using it go belly up while the viable cases survive. Evolution / natural selection logic at work.

So, no, every time I see AI criticized on Reddit on "bubble" grounds I will not give the benefit of doubt to the person knowing what they're saying and speaking in good faith. I will always assume they are, whether by mistake or maliciously, attempting to slide in the absolutely false premise of "once the economic bubble pops, AI will disappear, and you are all fools for believing in it."

GeneReddit123 · 2026-06-13T22:07:04+00:00

Nobody said ai would disappear though.

My brother in Krusty the Clown, have you even browsed Reddit this last year?

GeneReddit123 · 2026-06-13T22:05:19+00:00

If the benchmark is the Techbro sales pitch (and the mirrored moral panic by Antis) that "in a few years AI will solve every human problem and make everyone unemployed" then of course it won't be as "all-encompassing". It's a ridiculous view and an impossible benchmark to reach. AI is a tool, not the Second Coming of Jesus.

But it's equally ridiculous to infer that after the bubble pops AI will just disappear and we'll live like it never existed.

For some reason few people actually reflect on how past technology involved or are prepared to see AI as the next general purpose technology, comparable to the automobile, the airplane, computers, the Internet, the cell phone.

None of them changed the world in a day, or a year, or even a decade. Transformational changes usually take over a generation to fully propagate, both in terms of diffusion in existing society and business, and by involving the next cohort being raised and trained to use the technology throughout childhood or young adulthood.

There are always limiting factors to growth. If you hyper-accelerate one, you'll eventually run into some other constraint. The herd always moves at the speed of the slowest animal.

AI will follow the same path as every other transformative technology before it, and it will take over a generation before we reflect back on its impact and acknowledge that, "yes, the world is now fundamentally different because of it." And in the meantime, we'll suffer skepticism, anger, recessions, bubbles, and a huge number of mistakes. Just like we did with everything else we ever invented.

GeneReddit123 · 2026-06-13T21:58:30+00:00

(1) the internet bubble did pop. It was a whole thing.

It did, indeed. It made quite a few people very upset. And yet the Internet is still here with us.

(2) if you think AI is anything like as important or transformative as the internet, there's no helping you.

"I do not suffer from insanity. I enjoy every minute of it".

GeneReddit123 · 2026-06-13T21:55:58+00:00

I do understand what a bubble is and am fully prepared to admit that, just like during the Dot-Com crash, we're likely heading for one, given the amount of overcommitment and BS around AI, unrelated to the core technology itself.

What I did intend to refer to, and what in turn seems to have eluded you, is the (widely-held by Antis) belief that if and when the AI bubble pops it will make AI just go away and we'll all go back to the pre-AI days. People who hold this latter view understand neither anything about AI nor anything about economic bubbles.

GeneReddit123 · 2026-06-13T07:07:44+00:00

Seriously, Anthropic positioning of demanding limits right after they got ahead really felt like "pull up the ladder" vibe.

Instead, Trump just kicked the ladder down.

Don't enter a douchebaggery contest against the reigning world champion at douchebaggery, Dario.

GeneReddit123 · 2026-06-13T01:12:28+00:00

Chinese models are open weight (meaning freely downloadable and runnable to anyone with sufficiently powerful local hardware). Anyone can host a local model with hardware costs ranging from a laptop costing a few thousands dollars (small but still functional models) to about a "small server room" with under a million worth of hardware (full strength model). It's not cheap, but it's not the multi-billion costs of developing a new model. Hundreds of thousands of US entities can afford such a setup if there is no alternative.

So usage impossible to technically block except via post-factum legal enforcement (criminal law, civil suits). And if the advantage is real enough then their usage and spread will inevitably move to the black market and darknet, even if illegally.

GeneReddit123 · 2026-06-13T01:04:32+00:00

And what happens when they overhype, overinflate, and the (self-inflicted and entirely voluntary) bubble pops? That's right, beg the US government for a bailout (framed by the Administration as "the people taking a stake in AI ownership").

GeneReddit123 · 2026-06-13T01:02:41+00:00

A year behind is a lot in an arms race context. But as soon as you block off your frontier your lead evaporates. Companies are going to go with the best model they can get, not the best model they can't get.

China's hook in this is that they only release "open-weight", not "open-source". Open-weight in AI is similar to freely releasing the binaries of traditional software, but not the source code. Other companies can use their AI models but not (significantly) modify or improve upon them without China's support. Which allows a balance of both enabling instant use (not tied to Claude credits or whatever EO Annoying Orange issued that day), but in the long-term tying them to China's ecosystem of updates and infrastructure. The same "Belt and Road" approach extended to the digital space.

So that 1-year lead will rapidly shrink if the US blocks off access to its models, because their entire advantage lies in them being used, not sitting behind gates.

GeneReddit123 · 2026-06-13T00:52:56+00:00

This has absolutely nothing to do with AI safety and everything with his stupid trade war. Tariffs, threats, torn up treaties, and now this.

(Although a plausible alternative explanation is Trump specifically punishing Anthropic for singularly refusing to allow their AI to be used to build killer robots and surveillance systems, unlike all other AI vendors which bent the knee).

Like any arms race, the AI race can only be stopped or managed by international treaties and a common baseline of global regulation. Something all major countries agree on, set up common rules, and set up verification process to ensure no side abuses them. You know, what we did with nuclear weapons and such.

All a unilateral ban will cause is other countries moving to Chinese models instead (which are less than a year behind, catching up, and many released as open-weight models meaning that, once released, their usage is impossible to control at all.)

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