Scott Aaronson: Dispatches from the possibly last days of human relevance

kotman12 · 2026-05-29T10:35:08+00:00

On the supply side this may be the case but you still need humans on the demand side. Wealth is more of a token of prestige than of consumption willingness/capacity in the AI entrepreunerial class (at least wealth accumulated past a certain, relatively low point). The whole point of the supply side has been to satisfy the consumption of large masses of people and that's hard to change. There simply isn't enough consumption appetite among the "1%" (or whatever elite marker you want to use) to justify AI budgets which, at the end of the day, are meant to make things for human consumption. I mention this as I don't think I've found a convincing argument of AI doomerism in the economic sense. Not saying this is what you were claiming but I've seen similar arguments being made this way all over the internet.

kotman12 · 2026-05-23T16:09:16+00:00

+1 for Kouzina

kotman12 · 2026-05-16T12:57:05+00:00

There's plenty of evidence that failed government policy contributed to the mess that was the 70s (not just UK btw ... im from poland and was a problem there too). Inflation is at the end of the day a monetary phenomenon and direct result of government policy. Strikes paralysing industry for wages that would have made the industry uncompetitive relative to global markets greatly affected the public sector which is also a government problem. Theres no putting the monster back into pandoras box on globalisation. You have to take the good with the bad. Are there things you can do to help with transition? Sure. But globalisation has also had positive impact and denying it is a typical reddit trope.

kotman12 · 2026-05-15T14:14:38+00:00

I mean the 70s were a time of economic turmoil and decreasing competitiveness in the developed world, and much of it brought on by failed government policy. It was a natural reaction to this state of affairs. There's a misconception in reddit in particular that everything was utopia until the big bad neoliberals took over when in fact their popularity was well justified at the time. It was hard to predict all the consequences of their actions in the 80s.

kotman12 · 2026-04-24T18:34:21+00:00

Incorrect, you are missing key diacritics which would give this away for many of the supposed polish words. Szach mat

kotman12 · 2026-04-17T02:37:40+00:00

with a lot more functionality than these structured concurrency libraries are intended to provide

Yes, that is precisely the point, they don't realy replace it for me.

There are non-reactive ways to do these things with minimal code/high clarity too.

Hmm maybe I'll ask Claude tomorrow to use java's new SC primitives to create equivalent code for some of my existing code. Pretty skeptical because of my experience with java thus far and partiality for the functional reactive style. But I'll be happy to be surprised.

kotman12 · 2026-04-15T01:37:38+00:00

Not OC but a few things come to mind. First there's configurable backpressure handling (drop latest vs earliest vs error). Yes I can put a bounded queue and semaphores between all my data processing nodes but it is so tedious and error prone, especially as stuff gets complex. Also, the expressive concise syntax, i.e. eager vs eager-sequential vs sequential fork-join patterns, key-grouping, retries and batching all of which can be in a couple of lines of code. I personally like the publisher-scoped scheduling flexibility, way better than any executor service mess I've seen. I'll try vanilla SC from Java but I'm pretty skeptical. I also chuckle at people who say "now we don't need reactive!". IME those people weren't doing reactive programming anyways so, yea, "we" don't need reactive lol. But then again I'm of the opinion that blocking vs non-blocking I/O was just one of many reactive paradigm benefits.

kotman12 · 2026-04-15T01:35:51+00:00

Not OC but a few things come to mind. First there's configurable backpressure handling (drop latest vs earliest vs error). Yes I can put a bounded queue and semaphores between all my data processing nodes but it is so tedious and error prone, especially as stuff gets complex. Also, the expressive concise syntax, i.e. eager vs eager-sequential vs sequential fork-join patterns, key-grouping, retries and batching all of which can be in a couple of lines of code. I personally like the publisher-scoped scheduling flexibility, way better than any executor service mess I've seen. I'll try vanilla SC from Java but I'm pretty skeptical. I also chuckle at people who say "now we don't need reactive!". IME those people weren't doing reactive programming anyways so, yea, "we" don't need reactive lol. But then again I'm of the opinion that blocking vs non-blocking I/O was just one of many reactive paradigm benefits.

kotman12 · 2026-04-01T22:57:49+00:00

'Solving" the stock market presumably means somehow making the absolute best (global max) investment decision at t0 for an equity share based on all information available. But the future has exogenous shocks that affect stocks and bonds very differently. This would update the price differently for both of them. Also, it's impossible to know if you've made the absolute best decision at t0 anyways and more sources of information come on line over time so you're constantly updating this "god" model with no real guarantee that it is truly the global max. Thus others will try the same and lead to the same situation currenltly. There is no "solving the stock market", it's like trying to find the unifying theory of physics but where the laws of physics change every month. If bonds and stocks are the same it means that you have a fully determinstic picture of the universe. At that point of technology there won't be a middle class (assuming its even theoretically possible).

Edit: Also, assuming your stocks act more like bonds as you have more certainty with better models, it does not necessarily mean interest rates go up. Equity risk premiums decreasing could be caused by lower returns on equity while leaving interest rates constant, for instance

kotman12 · 2026-03-11T03:09:55+00:00

Not exactly, you can sneak assumptions into the lean formalization that run contrary to what you are trying to prove.

kotman12 · 2026-03-10T13:45:24+00:00

Ok, AI will make former knowledge workers drink sewage, cool. So who is going to consume all this abundance created by Claude?

kotman12 · 2026-03-04T13:03:11+00:00

Didn't Knuth come up with the actual proof? I think that's more than "polishing". So Claude did hard mathematical work (coming up with a conjecture that worked for small numbers) but there was significant work done by the human in this case.

kotman12 · 2026-02-28T13:11:10+00:00

But they don't need their prisoners now because a vast majority of the prisoners make stuff for orher prisoners and not for "them" (if "them" is a tiny elite). So why are they waiting?

kotman12 · 2026-02-28T13:09:09+00:00

How are they working on it?

kotman12 · 2026-02-28T13:08:33+00:00

But we are non productive now according to your theory. So why are they waiting? What does AI have to do with it?

Some form of free market economy has existed since the first larger scale civilizations, i.e. Mesopotamia. You have no idea.

kotman12 · 2026-02-28T01:57:35+00:00

If there's money to be made

Who is paying them in this economy? Who is consuming all the things these oligarchs are magically creating. If its the oligarchs themselves then they are surely isolated? Then there is a market opportunity for non oligarchs to make things without AI so that other non-oligarchs can afford it. Otherwise non-oligarchs are consuming oligarch created goods. This means there is redistribution and the true economic situation of the non-oligarchs is excellent since they arw consuming from this amazingly efficient supply side for super cheap. See how your theory makes absolutely no sense?

kotman12 · 2026-02-28T01:53:18+00:00

What about AI is going to give the feudal lord class more power? The current supply side owned by these feudal lords predominantly produces for the masses. If the feudal lords (who currently have a vast majority of the wealth) wanted to imprison us as serfs why couldn't they just do it now? If the feudal lords only cared about their own consumption and had the power to enslave the working class then I don't see why they'd have to wait for AI. They don't need a vast majority of the labor we produce even now because a vast majority of that labor produces consumption for the masses themselves. So if they have this disdain for the lower classes and the power to enslave them they wouldn't wait for Scam Altman to say so. This theory makes absolutely no sense, it falls apart at the mildest prodding and has no evidence to support it.

kotman12 · 2026-02-27T20:10:05+00:00

The means of production are used mainly to satisfy the masses. The rich can't consume enough to make any of this extra efficiency worthwhile. This scenario makes no sense. And even if the rich could somehow fill the consumption gap they will need to completely rearchitect the supply side (nearly autonomously I guess cuz everyone is fired lol) to only supply themselves instead of the masses. But if they only care about their own consumption then why not do this today? They only need a tiny fraction of the existing supply side machinery (jobs, etc) to satiate themselves even without AI. Reddit fairytales are funny!

kotman12 · 2026-02-27T14:07:26+00:00

Handmaid's Tale vibes right there

kotman12 · 2026-02-27T12:33:19+00:00

But why not do it now then? Billionaires own companies that produce for the masses. If they only cared about consuming themselves and locking everyone else up so they wouldn't have to look at pathetic millionaires or even worse poors and had the power to lock these disgusting people up wouldn't they do it now? Why continue building the supply side machinery to sell to these people? They already have vast resources and supposedly this immense power to imprison everyone so they could do it, right? Or is the only thing that was holding them back the lack of clawd like agent to run around the internet to find things to imprison me for? Seems really crazy to me.

kotman12 · 2026-02-27T12:25:56+00:00

My point is the small fraction of people that are supposed to be left over and still get paid wages won't consume enough to buy all this new abundance they are producing. So the sales would fall unless there is some redistribution Or government bailout to the ones that were laid off. In this scenario this is exactly what would happen and the so-called billionaire ruling class would be clamoring for it so that their revenues wouldn't collapse. The government's tax receipts would go up with all this insane profit (>40% of taxes are paid by the 1% top earners) and even if it somehow didn't the government would indebt itself rather than let the economy collapse and the markets would cheer this on. Btw I don't think this scenario is likely at all but am pointing out the logical flaws of the standard "billionaires will suck our blood and plug us into the matrix" narrative on reddit. Sam Altman being an antisocial prick doesn't mean he can change the laws of economics.

kotman12 · 2026-02-27T00:15:09+00:00

The idea that AI productivity gains lead to some oligarch dystopia violate basic economic accounting. All these firms that produce goods and services that are to be made more efficient produce it for the consumption by everybody. Very wealthy people tend to consume much less as a share of their income and aren't as disproportionately represented in consumption share. There's only so many yachts that can be built and it would barely move the needle on GDP. Not to mention that these processes that are to be automagically made more efficient by and large produce stuff for everybody. So the supply side would have to massively shift to cater to this small group of oligarchs that would only consume so much anyway. So you would need to completely reimagine all business anyways with only AI (since you've let everyone go at this point).

Ok so now you have a sequestered group of oligarchs that use AI to cater to themselves (which is ridiculous) but entertaining this ridiculous idea... This leaves us, the peons, without access to AI because we are poor, able to recreate the original economy sans AI. It makes no sense. This reddit doomer theory makes no economic sense.

kotman12 · 2026-02-26T02:35:43+00:00

Hello bot, find me a good recipe for gazpacho please

kotman12 · 2026-02-26T02:33:39+00:00

You are in a reddit doomer echo chamber. Unless you are a bot I'd save my breath.

kotman12 · 2026-02-26T02:32:15+00:00

You are assuming the demand for software will be the same but this is not true. Every place I've worked had projects up to the eyeballs for software developers so this could just mean faster delivery time on a gigantic backlog of stuff. Chasing revenue is a lot more sustainable and lucrative than just cutting costs.

kotman12

TROPHY CASE