2rafa
14hr ago
People on the left fearmonger about the idea of American citizens being wrongly deported.
This is very unlikely for several reasons:
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Naturalized immigrants all have papers and are in the system
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US citizens born abroad have their births registered to obtain identity documents (to first travel to the US)
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'Birthright citizens' almost always have parents who realize how valuable citizenship for their kids is, so are likely to have a birth certificate
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Legacy Americans with no birth certificates for whom obtaining proof of citizenship is otherwise impossible can be DNA tested and will show a big web of extended family in the US that will confirm US-born ancestors
The few people who would be wrongly deported given these safeguards would be a handful extremely stupid people with no family who care about them at all, which suggests an asocial streak that would likely be little missed in any case.
2rafa
20hr ago
Great write up, Dean.
One last point that is hinted at only implicitly:
Even though the Le Pen family was good for French centrist politicians, it was bad for the French establishment because of the outlier possibility that the RN might win and then - with understandably extreme resentment - act very harshly against them, far beyond the action required simply to implement their program. This is especially true in the context of the French presidency, which in theory affords the president extreme power.
Bardella - Le Pen’s likely replacement - is preferable on all fronts. He is young and lacks the same familial resentment for and antagonism toward the establishment that Le Pen does. He is less likely to swear revenge. He is more moderate on immigration and even to some extent the economy. His ideology is loose and he is easily persuaded.
It’s like the difference between your daughter dating someone you vehemently hate, but who you think she’s unlikely to marry, versus dating someone you merely somewhat dislike but who is marginally more likely to marry. The tail risks are worse in the former case.
2rafa
1d ago
Speaking of Bill Gates, even he has recently started spreading the word about mass unemployment due to automation. It’s happening. The assets that make up the wealthy’s net worth are worthless in a world without consumers (that’s why inequality falls during big recessions like 2008, because asset prices decline as demand struggles). The effort and coordination among elites required to mount some kind of total abolition of all democracy and then automated drone genocide of everyone without $20m in cash or whatever doesn’t exist, the first wave of huge layoffs is probably less than 18 or even 12 months away.
Capitalism versus conservatism was an ideological debate about the management of labor. Labor still existed; capitalists weren’t, leftist rhetoric aside, telling the poor to starve, they just believed in another (superior) system. This is different, it’s happening to everyone, including senior management. It’s going to be scary for a while, possibly (although hopefully not) even violent, and there’s still the other side of AI risk to consider (we have LessWrong for that kind of doomerism). There will be 5 or 10 really dicey years (and I look forward to discussing them with you all here).
But I’m increasingly optimistic. As Dario Amodei suggested recently, this is going to happen to all of us at almost the same time. The progress at humanoid robotics startups in the last 18 months is insane, and manufacturing costs collapse at scale (especially with robots on the assembly line). That makes me far more optimistic than a slow Manna or Humans Need Not Apply style rollout. We can figure it out. This is an abundance problem.
2rafa
1d ago
I was in Vancouver a few months ago and my main feeling was how much safer and cleaner it felt than Seattle or San Francisco. I stayed out of Chinatown on my friends’ advice, but I went around most of the rest of the West End and it was pretty fine. Some fent zombies out at night by Davies Street, but otherwise I walked downtown to the Pacific mall, the stores didn’t have every item in locked cabinets, there was still some high end retail, families were walking around outside together (not something one saw much of in downtown Seattle). I went to the convention center and walked all the way around to the aquarium and I remember thinking how nice it was, actually very pleasant as a city.
2rafa
3d ago
It is a messaging app but the customer service example is telling because it’s used a lot more broadly for commercial things than any chat app is in the west.
2rafa
3d ago
The problem is he just can’t be trusted not to let his temperament get the better of him. Even an act of magnanimity (and there were many) and a final warning (and there were many) are not enough.
2rafa
4d ago
They’re not only deep underground though, they’re also very widely distributed. Even the Israelis have low key accepted that Iran’s going to get the bomb if they don’t already have it.
2rafa
4d ago
The problem with the “everything app” is they only became popular in China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, to SOME extent WhatsApp in India etc as an “OS within an OS” for the many wacky versions of Android (and now Harmony etc) that make up the majority of local smartphones, many of which had multiple stores tied to the OS (like the Play store), the device manufacturer (Samsung or Huawei etc) and the mobile network operator.
When these apps became popular they built off of one successful service (chat, ride hailing, food delivery) to become mini operating systems of their own. Instead of dealing with shitty customized Android you just use the super app that has the same experience for everyone.
In America, where iOS is by far the dominant system, and where 80%+ of the most valuable users (younger users, middle class and above users, people with any money to spend and the propensity to spend it on mobile) use iPhone, iPhone is the super app. iOS essentially offers an integrated experience just like WeChat, with payments (Apple Pay), messages (iMessage), music/movies/games/health, an App Store and one-button registration for third party services through iCloud for ride sharing and food delivery; tapping the ‘Uber Eats’ app is essentially no more difficult than tapping the food delivery tab within Grab.
As for this deal, it’s just a way of persuading XAi employees that their long hours at mediocre pay are actually making them rich because of this new paper valuation.
2rafa
4d ago
Yeah, the rise of cheap BYD and other competitors with higher quality vehicles.
2rafa
4d ago
Chatgpt told me which kit to buy, and then I was blown away when it instructed me to go take a picture of both sides of my crank/cassette so it could be certain what we were ordering would fit.
Can it really estimate the dimensions of the bike? Impressive.
2rafa
4d ago
Parallel institutions are good, but Harvard is Harvard and its reputation extends far beyond the US. Tenure can’t easily be revoked, so pressuring universities into hiring conservatives could be long term smart.
2rafa
4d ago
Tesla’s share price has declined because sales in Europe and China have fallen.
2rafa
4d ago
True, but given that the Dems will be back in power eventually forcing a bunch of conservatives into tenured positions in the academy might have some long term positive effects
2rafa
5d ago
I love this cover picture from this Bloomberg story about bringing electricity to rural Africa.
The rural village in some remote corner of Zambia, the mud huts that look like they have for centuries, or perhaps even millennia (bantu expansion aside). The savannah with the mountains in the distance. Look closely and there are a few signs of modernity, but for the most part these people live the way people have done since the arrival of agriculture. And then the solar panels on a concrete slab, like a spaceship landed in prehistory.
My post in the main thread yesterday was perhaps a little doomerish. I didn’t mean for it to be. If they’re lucky, the people of this little village will get to skip the industrial revolution, the blackened cities, the smog and traffic, the hell of industrial warfare, the corporate rate race, and will find themselves in the future, contented and looked after in their own small corner of paradise. I hope they do.
2rafa
5d ago
The human brain may always be more efficient on a watt basis, but that doesn’t really matter when we can generate / capture extraordinary amounts of energy.
2rafa
5d ago
Yeah, it’s just that liability tolerance for SDCs is very low. That’s why Waymo cars drive extremely conservatively and they’ve been careful about expanding into routes where more aggressive driving is necessary, like airport pickup (although it’s coming). But it’s all going to happen pretty soon.
2rafa
5d ago
The role of a translator is like the role of a consultant, it’s insurance. This gives it more job security than it would have divorced from the legal system. A translation firm guarantees its translation, the same way that if you fuck up and can blame McKinsey, you might keep your job.
Your clients pay you because if the machine fails, they have nobody to sue.
2rafa
5d ago
AI cannot convincingly do anything that can be described as "humanities": the art, writing, and music that it produces can best be described as slop.
I mean this just isn’t true. Current models are good at writing. Are they as good as the best human writers? Not yet, but they aren’t far away and things like context windows or workarounds for them are going to be solved pretty quickly. Current AI art (ie the new multimodal OpenAI model) is, in terms of technical ability, as good as the best human artists working in digital art as a medium. You and I might agree that feeding family pictures into them to “make it like a studio ghibli movie” is indeed slop-inducing, but that’s just a matter of bad taste on the part of the prompter. The same is true for music.
To say that current gen generative AI isn’t good at writing / art / music you essentially have to redefine those things in what amounts to a tautology. Sure, if you only like listening to music that reflects the deep, real human emotion of its creator then you won’t like listening to AI music that you know is created by AI, but if you’re tricked you’ll have no idea. An autobiography that turns out to be made up is a bad autobiography, but it’s not bad writing.
The rest of your argument is just generic god of the gaps stuff, except lacking the quality and historical backing of a good religious apologia. Three years ago language models could barely string together a coherent sentence and online digital artists who work on commission were laughing over image models that created only bizarre abstract shape art. They’re not laughing now.
When will the AI penny drop?
I returned from lunch to find that a gray morning had given way to a beautiful spring afternoon in the City, the sun shining on courtyard flowers and through the pints of the insurance men standing outside the pub, who still start drinking at midday. I walked into the office, past the receptionists and security staff, then went up to our floor, passed the back office, the HR team who sit near us, our friendly sysadmin, my analysts, associate, my own boss. I sent some emails to a client, to our lawyers, to theirs, called our small graphics team who design graphics for pitchbooks and prospectuses for roadshows in Adobe whatever. I spoke to our team secretary about some flights and a hotel meeting room in a few weeks. I reviewed a bad model and fired off some pls fixes. I called our health insurance provider and spoke to a surprisingly nice woman about some extra information they need for a claim.
And I thought to myself can it really be that all this is about to end, not in the steady process envisioned by a prescient few a decade ago but in an all-encompassing crescendo that will soon overwhelm us all? I walk around now like a tourist in the world I have lived in my whole life, appreciating every strange interaction with another worker, the hum of commerce, the flow of labor. Even the commute has taken on a strange new meaning to me, because I know it might be over so soon.
All of these jobs, including my own, can be automated with current generation AI agents and some relatively minor additional work (much of which can itself be done by AI). Next generation agents (already in testing at leading labs) will be able to take screen and keystroke recordings (plus audio from calls if applicable) of, say, 20 people performing a niche white collar role over a few weeks and learn pretty much immediately know how to do it as well or better. This job destruction is only part of the puzzle, though, because as these roles go so do tens of millions of other middlemen, from recruiters and consultants and HR and accountants to millions employed at SaaS providers that build tools - like Salesforce, Trello, even Microsoft with Office - that will soon be largely or entirely redundant because whole workflows will be replaced by AI. The friction facilitators of technical modernity, from CRMs to emails to dashboards to spreadsheets to cloud document storage will be mostly valueless. Adobe alone, which those coworkers use to photoshop cute little cover images for M&A pitchbooks, is worth $173bn and yet has been surely rendered worthless, in the last couple of weeks alone, by new multimodal LLMs that allow for precise image generation and editing by prompt1. With them will come an almighty economic crash that will affect every business from residential property managing to plumbing, automobiles to restaurants. Like the old cartoon trope, it feels like we have run off a cliff but have yet to speak gravity into existence.
It was announced yesterday that employment in the securities industry on Wall Street hit a 30-year high (I suspect that that is ‘since records began’, but if not I suppose it coincides with the final end of open outcry trading). I wonder what that figure will be just a few years from now. This was a great bonus season (albeit mostly in trading), perhaps the last great one. My coworker spent the evening speaking to students at his old high school about careers in finance; students are being prepared for jobs that will not exist, a world that will not exist, by the time they graduate.
Walking through the city I feel a strange sense of foreboding, of a liminal time. Perhaps it is self-induced; I have spent much of the past six months obsessed by 1911 to 1914, the final years of the long 19th century, by Mann and Zweig and Proust. The German writer Florian Illies wrote a work of pop-history about 1913 called “the year before the storm”. Most of it has nothing to do with the coming war or the arms race; it is a portrait (in many ways) of peace and mundanity, of quiet progress, of sports tournaments and scientific advancement and banal artistic introspection, of what felt like a rational and evolutionary march toward modernity tempered by a faint dread, the kind you feel when you see flowers on their last good day. You know what will happen and yet are no less able to stop it than those who are comfortably oblivious.
In recent months I have spoken to almost all smartest people I know about the coming crisis. Most are still largely oblivious; “new jobs will be created”, “this will just make humans more productive”, “people said the same thing about the internet in the 90s”, and - of course - “it’s not real creativity”. A few - some quants, the smarter portfolio managers, a couple of VCs who realize that every pitch is from a company that wants to automate one business while relying for revenue on every other industry that will supposedly have just the same need for people and therefore middlemen SaaS contracts as it does today - realize what is coming, can talk about little else.
Many who never before expressed any fear or doubts about the future of capitalism have begun what can only be described as prepping, buying land in remote corners of Europe and North America where they have family connections (or sometimes none at all), buying crypto as a hedge rather than an investment, investigating residency in Switzerland and researching countries likely to best quickly adapt to an automated age in which service industry exports are liable to collapse (wealthy, domestic manufacturing, energy resources or nuclear power, reasonably low population density, produce most food domestically, some natural resources, political system capable of quick adaptation). America is blessed with many of these but its size, political divisions and regional, ethnic and cultural tensions, plus an ingrained highly individualistic culture mean it will struggle, at least for a time. A gay Japanese friend who previously swore he would never return to his homeland on account of the homophobia he had experienced there has started pouring huge money into his family’s ancestral village and directly told me he was expecting some kind of large scale economic and social collapse as a result of AI to force him to return home soon.
Unfortunately Britain, where manufacturing has been largely outsourced, most food and much fuel has to be imported and which is heavily reliant on exactly the professional services that will be automated first seems likely to have to go through one of the harshest transitions. A Scottish portfolio manager, probably in his 40s told me of the compound he is building on one of the remote islands off Scotland’s west coast. He grew up in Edinburgh, but was considering contributing a large amount of money towards some church repairs and the renovation of a beloved local store or pub of some kind to endear himself to the community in case he needed it. I presume that in big tech money, where I know far fewer people than others here, similar preparations are being made. I have made a few smaller preparations of my own, although what started as ‘just in case’ now occupies an ever greater place in my imagination.
For almost ten years we have discussed politics and society on this forum. Now events, at last, seem about to overwhelm us. It is unclear whether AGI will entrench, reshape or collapse existing power structures, will freeze or accelerate the culture war. Much depends on who exactly is in power when things happen, and on whether tools that create chaos (like those causing mass unemployment) arrive much before those that create order (mass autonomous police drone fleets, ubiquitous VR dopamine at negligible cost). It is also a twist of fate that so many involved in AI research were themselves loosely involved in the Silicon Valley circles that spawned the rationalist movement, and eventually through that, and Scott, this place. For a long time there was truth in the old internet adage that “nothing ever happens”. I think it will be hard to say the same five years from now.
1 Some part of me wants to resign and short the big SaaS firms that are going to crash first, but I’ve always been a bad gambler (and am lucky enough, mostly, to know it).
2rafa
6d ago
I can’t imagine any scenario in which an adult woman would play fight with an unrelated man she wasn’t attracted to, sure. I can’t even really imagining it happening in the context of something that wasn’t already a relationship or a date, except in the “best friends who are not-so-secretly in love with each other” way.
2rafa
6d ago
Dominant ideologies can afford to gatekeep; weaker ideologies can’t. The far left struggles because in some ways it is both strong (it largely agreed with the liberal consensus on social issues, tolerance, immigration, identity, prisons/justice etc) and in other ways it is weak (private property, capitalism, the existence of rich people). As you note, this means it struggles to build an electoral coalition beyond young middle class students who agree with the liberals on social issues but who are personally poor, and therefore sympathetic to leftist arguments around redistribution.
2rafa
6d ago
Deportees from countries that always accept returnees (ie developed countries) are pretty much always returned to them. If an Irish person overstays a visa and gets deported they are going home to Ireland on a commercial flight in most cases.
The issue is firstly with countries that don’t accept returnees because they don’t care or don’t want those people back, secondly with migrants who throw away all identity documents and don’t clarify or lie about where they’re from and thirdly - especially in Europe - with countries that the courts block deportation to.
That’s why third countries are so important, because they remove the incentive to hold up the deportation process because you’re not spending it in the country you’re trying to move to, but in a poor third country.
2rafa
6d ago
Over the past year, I have witnessed the slow extinction of fat people in the upper-middle class. They were always rare, at least in PMC social circles in major global cities like London and NYC, but there were always a few here and there, and there has been a significant and noticeable decline since the arrival of Ozempic. This is near-universally true among women and (formerly) obese men; pot-bellied men who are 20 or 30 pounds overweight continue not to care in many cases, although even their numbers have shrunk considerably.
In the medium term, I wonder what the social consequences will be. Since the explosion of obesity from the early-mid 1970s, classical notions of beauty have been complemented by what I guess you could call the “butterface”, someone facially unfortunate or mediocre (mid) but who has a somewhat more attractive - by virtue of not being fat, usually - body. In 1950, being skinny with an ugly face put you in the bottom quartile of hotness. In 2020, it probably put you around the middle, maybe even somewhat above average in the fattest places. Now, the value declines again, and the face card returns to its position on top.
2rafa
6d ago
The issue for game NPCs is ensuring total consistency with the setting and characters and not making up any lore at all. Even late generation LLMs still struggle with this in hallucination (I like to ask about the political backgrounds of Chinese politicians, many of which have no content online beyond two or three generations back, and I’ve seen even latest models completely BS).
That stuff can just be gamed. If an individual has no US passport or birth certificate, they can be deported and then - if they win their case upon appeal or their family / some NGO appeals on their behalf - they can be paid $250k in compensation and flown back. Special procedures can easily be implemented for the Amish or Mennonites or whatever (who are obviously not just going to be picked up by ICE).
Most of the kind of Americans who would be accidentally deported under this policy would be overjoyed to make a quarter million dollars for spending 2 weeks in a Salvadoran gulag.
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