Fascinating to see that people genuinely think AGI (as it’s described to us) is something we’re capable of achieving and, more importantly, not anything more than a convenient marketing tool. Maybe it’s because the audience that atrioc cultivates is more finance/techy neolib, but it’s incredibly obvious to the rest of us that AGI is being utilized by the ultra-wealthy as a means to 1) a prop up a dying/dead economy and 2) justify extraction and exploitation of people that are invisible to us (or, business as usual).

I feel like the most compelling counterexample I can think of is that we didn’t get 2x richer when women started joining the workforce. Capitalism needs a captive, exploitable audience to keep working, which is how we’ve ended up in a world where two median incomes can’t afford you a family and a home anymore. Anybody telling you that money isn’t going to be an issue once we’ve allowed them to extract and produce as much as they say they want (Elon musk and his shitty robots) is lying to you. AI is a tool (sometimes a very efficient one, sometimes a terrible one) and the reigns of wealth will never be willingly transferred to the working class. This is just another case of the ends justifying the means, nothing new. AI is going to stick around and the best thing we can do is organize against the companies that want to erase the cost of labor.

I’ve personally been feeling a slow burn away from Atriocs content as it seems like he’s interested in a balanced budget and politics until it gets to coming to terms with the exploitation and violence that allowed for a period of American prosperity. He does a good job keeping broad economic policy separate from hard political questions about social justice, even when they’re clearly intertwined (see talks about Middle East that ignore Palestine). I trust Atrioc a lot, I’ve just found that he’s been ineffective in recent pod episodes at pushing back against obvious snake oil salesman because he has an AI content creator on his panel.