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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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Yarvin is simply wrong if he thinks that almost everyone is currently a zero marginal product employee. Businesses often act in stupid ways, but overall they're not that stupid.

As for the mass automation of employment happening in a brief period of a few years, I have some doubts. This is for two reasons:

  1. Even the best AI that I am aware of is, currently, not very intelligent. All the theorizing about the AI revolution is based on extrapolating the "AI getting smarter" curve of the last few years. But there is, as far as I can tell, no clear reason to believe that the curve will continue shooting up instead of plateauing for a long time. Current AI can barely do simple, entry-level software programming tasks. It's great if you want it to basically just summarize Stack Overflow entries for you so that you don't have to Google them yourself, but no intelligent person would let it write the business' code without heavy human supervision. Of course, this could very well change soon, but I haven't seen anything other than curve-extrapolation to justify the massive AGI/ASI hype that is happening online.

  2. Even if hardware becomes significantly cheaper, I am not sure that it would become economically competitive at things like fruit-picking any time in the near future. It's just really cheap to hire a third world indentured servant to pick the fruit, rather than buying a robot. Now the Uber drivers and so on, sure. I feel bad for them and I hope that they are planning post-AI careers. Self-driving cars are still limited in some ways, and there is no way I would trust one to drive me 100 miles on the highway, but at least now they can usually roam a city effectively. But there are many jobs where it's hard for me to imagine AI becoming economically competitive against humans any time in the near future.

For me the funniest thing about the whole AIpocalypse is that effectively, if the curve does manage to continue going significantly upwards, it will mean that the very software geeks who made the AI will be likely among the first who automate themselves out of having jobs. Now, I have compassion for the software geeks. After all, they are trapped in the cold Darwinian logic of "if I don't do it, someone else will, and then they will put me out of a job". But I do find it darkly funny. People who bullshit for a living because they have good social skills, and literal prostitutes, will likely still be making good money, at least for a while, even if 90% of programmers have been replaced by AI. In an AGI world, humans will probably increasingly find the very fact of someone being human to be economically valuable. Which means that the hard-striving, tech-loving engineer will be among the first to be replaced by the products of his own creation, hoist on his own techo-autism petard, while meanwhile the smooth-talking salesman and the sexy escort will continue to find people willing to give them money.

Even if hardware becomes significantly cheaper, I am not sure that it would become economically competitive at things like fruit-picking any time in the near future. It's just really cheap to hire a third world indentured servant to pick the fruit, rather than buying a robot. Now the Uber drivers and so on, sure. I feel bad for them and I hope that they are planning post-AI careers. Self-driving cars are still limited in some ways, and there is no way I would trust one to drive me 100 miles on the highway, but at least now they can usually roam a city effectively. But there are many jobs where it's hard for me to imagine AI becoming economically competitive against humans any time in the near future.

Ironically I'd probably trust an AI car more on the highway than in an urban area. Higher speed, but far less complexity and random variables compared to a Pedestrian & Obstacle rich area.

The style he writes in combined with the place it was cut off was confusing - he's not saying almost everyone's currently zero marginal product, he's saying that'd be true after AGI