it's not just math and CS. it's a human trait. we are seeing it in the arts and creative fields where technology and AI in particular are making their impact felt. there will be much, much more of this sort of reaction in the years ahead. we'll all have to learn how to adapt. and in the process rediscover that what makes us valuable as people is not our skills but our souls.
I agree that all people have value, but what does that mean in practice? Everyone needs a certain amount of resources just to survive. Should other people give you those resources because you have a soul?
A lot of people enjoy making art as a hobby; very few of them have combination of talent, discipline, and luck necessary to achieve commercial success. When I walk through a local art festival, most of what I see is so bad that the artists would have to pay me to take it. While taste in art is highly subjective, those artists don't seem to get much attention from other customers either. Going forward there will probably be even fewer people able to make a living in the arts. I'm not sure what that means for society?
Everyone seems to wrap up their criticisms on AI and labor saving technology in general as though it's a personal affront when in reality, as it's always been, it's an economic problem. Once we have UBI or something similar, you will see most people's opinions on AI doing math and art, for example, start to change to one of cooperation, not adversarial.
Everyone seems to wrap up their praise of AI by claiming that it will bring an era of abundance with UBI. Once we don't have UBI because why the fuck would we, you'll see most people's opinions of AI start to change from one of cooperation to adversarial.
The steam engine produced raw power but that still needed to be controlled and directed for a multitude of purposes, which required putting dirt farmers through education to turn them into factory workers. If machines now do both the thinking and the hard lifting, why exactly would their owners need us for? From where they're standing, they're now looking at a pragmatic solution to global warming: just reduce the "energy requirements" of the population.
We will have UBI, one way or another, by force if necessary. The people today talking about AI would've been leading revolutions as they did in the 20th century once their lives were automated away.
The 20th century did not even have machine guns at first and the nobles still had a need of a capable workforce back then.
Between those, biological, chemical and nuclear weapons, missiles and drones and the fact that using them against the civilian population has no impact on the economy, I think you may need to rethink your use of force.
Or do you actually think that they're building humanoid robots to automate blue collar work? More like automate the boys in blue, with unwavering loyalty.
Revolutions often coincidence with genocides, yes. But in human history both have always happened. Any choice is merely a mirage of one if one looks at historical trends, it's no different today.
No, genocides often happen during and after revolutions too. If you don't want to believe it, pick up a history book. I'm honestly not even sure what point you're advocating for at this point, since you're arguing in tangents.
The point I'm trying to make is that you have ZERO chance of a violent revolution against an enemy that has all of the above mentioned weapons. The ONE chance you had was to flip it into a coup d'etat if you were worth more to the ruling class alive than dead but with automation of both labor and thought, the only thing that's still worth anything is capital.
Picking up history books is of no use if you only use their weight to gain muscle mass.
Do male chicken have souls? Because female chicken have the skill to lay eggs, and that's what makes the latter valuable and the former bonemeal upon birth.
Automation is... coming for those jobs a well, soon it'll be a niche for those nostalgic enough to desire a human... touch. Damn, these puns write themselves.
But on the topic at hand, demand is capped by the intentionally rare elite status, but then so is supply. Luckily (for some), we've had great success in selective breeding over our 10k year run on this planet between discovering agriculture and the great filter.
the human touch. In cooking you would call it cooking with love. You know the reason your grandmas cooking will taste better to you than any michelin star restaurant.
Even orgs like AP or Reuters cannot always be trusted. They do a more reasonable job in most cases, but this just makes it easier for when they do inevitably deploy influence operations bc they can hide behind their credibility.
I recently finally fully moved all my projects away from .env (for local dev) to infisical, thinking it'd be the way to stop agents from (accidentally?) peeking at my secrets. while I'm still glad I made the move, it's clear that local agents are still moving around my local environment with sufficient privileges and autonomy to use infisical cli however it wants. my work isn't high stakes enough to matter much and I have rotation scripts on hand, but it's hard to see how to fully close the door against this type of risk at this point.
There's a solution for this in Infisical! It's called secrets brokering and is built into the Infisical CLI: The Infisical agent proxy. Using this, your agent can use secrets without ever being able to fetch them back since they are injected into upstream requests. You can use this for local coding agents like Claude Code or Codex, and also have a standalone proxy with a separate machine identity for longer running agents (slack agents, hermes, openclaw etc.) Check it out here:
sama literally just said they wish they had bought more. the price drops are almost certainly due to good old fashioned hardware innovation (wafer scale with cerebras) and optimizing hardware development based on model architecture and inference costs. other inference providers will try to do the same if they can.
To paraphrase Monty Python
“supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony" (or authority based on a self declaration)
In the age of ai, where you can flood the zone with easily generated content, even a democratic society might struggle to maintain an stable sense of shared reality and history
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