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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30730 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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American economy is accelerating, capex is growing quarter by quarter (I won't cite anything, it's easy to find sources); and American innovation, in AI and robotics, promises the possibility of running industry on friendly shores with very limited high-skill labor, maybe only with Western expats, maybe with a few natives – which are trivial to recruit from that upper crust of India, 100-250 million strong.

If bullishness on AI is warranted, and furthermore AI is primarily compute-bound (with compute wholly monopolized by the US), then human capital is rapidly becoming obsolete, except in its capacity as warm bodies and tokens for political computation.

To me this is the key point in geopolitical considerations that is largely being ignored by most pundits. If America and the West generally can actually develop and leverage seriously useful AI systems a la ChatGPT, the economic gains will be literally unfathomable.

Now I don't think it will happen immediately, but even in the next 5-10 years as the current transformer models get developed into more narrow domains, I see the US being the major adopter. If they can do it right, correct implementation of AI technology will give a massive boost to geopolitical/economic power, and should quell fears about the fertility crisis, lowering IQ, etc etc.

If they can do it right, correct implementation of AI technology will give a massive boost to geopolitical/economic power

A while back I saw someone tell an AI optimist they're repeating verbatim the promises of the internet, and while all the tech around it made life quite a bit more convenient I have not seen any massive boosts to geopolitical or economic power.

and should quell fears about the fertility crisis

Unless your fears about the fertility crisis are "how do I cause a fertility crisis without triggering an economic collapse" this just plainly is not going to happen.

And if this is what you're aiming for, you're still in for a surprise. AI is a lot more likely to replace upper class managers and paper pushers than it is middle class grunts, and it's the latter you'll be running out of due to fertility.

The Web is eating the world and it being produced in California contributes massively to continued American growth on the backdrop of European stagnation, for instance.

But it can't run robots.

The Web is eating the world and it being produced in California contributes massively to continued American growth on the backdrop of European stagnation, for instance.

I don't buy it. If the web never happened, do you think we wouldn't have continued American growth on the backdrop of European stagnation?

But it can't run robots.

Computers had the power to automate countless manhours of tedious unproductive work, and all that happened is that we invented even more tedious unproductive work. Even if we get AI-controlled robots, I doubt things are going to be much different.

With every paper like this, I grow more AI-pilled. (or specifically LLM-pilled)

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