You know the quote "it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism"? Well, AI has allowed me to start imagining the end of capitalism. I'm not claiming we're necessarily very close, but I can clearly see the way from here to a post-scarcity society.

How do you square that with all current AI development being intensely capitalistic?

All kinds of things commit suicide, intentional and unintentional.

> I can clearly see the way from here to a post-scarcity society.

I would be interested to hear the way that you see. I don't have any problem seeing a huge number of roadblocks to post-scarcity that AI won't solve, but I am open to a different perspective.

Ok, so as a disclaimer: this obviously leans towards science-fiction, both because that informs my view of the world, and because I think that any prediction of the future must incorporate science fiction.

My own experience, using ChatGPT and Claude for both dev and other business productivity tasks, lends credence to the METR model of exponential improvement in task time-horizon [0]. There are obviously still significant open technical issues, particularly around memory/context management and around online learning, but extensive work is being done on these fronts, propelled amongst other things by the ARC-AGI challenge [1], and I don't see anything that is an actual roadblock to progress. If anything, from my perspective, it seems appears that there are significant low-hanging-fruit opportunities around plain-old software engineering and ergonomics for AI agents, more so than a need for fundamental breakthroughs in neural network architecture (although I believe that these too will come).

So then, with an increasing time horizon and improved task accuracy (much of it assured by improvements in QA mechanisms), we will see ourselves handing off more and more complex tasks to AI agents, until eventually we could have "the factory of the future ... [with] only two employees: a man and a dog", and at that stage I believe that there would be no imperative for humans to work (unless they choose to, or have a deeply ingrained Calvinist work ethic). And then, as you said, we're down to the non-technological roadblocks.

Obviously capitalists would fight to stay in control, and unlike some who expect a fully peaceful and organic transition, I do expect somewhat of a war here (whether kinetic or cold), but I do envision that when push comes to shove, those of us who believe in the free software movement and the foundational principles of democracy will be able to assert shared national/international (rather than corporate) control over the AIs and restructure society into a form where AI (and later robots) perform the work for the benefit of humans who would all share in the bounty. I am not an economist and don't have a clear prediction on the exact form this new society would take, but from my reading of the various pilot implementations of UBI [2], I think that we will see acceptance towards a society where people are essentially in retirement throughout their life. Just as currently, some retired people, choose to only stay home and watch TV, while others study, do art, travel the world, help raise and teach future generations or contribute to social causes close to their hearts, so we'll all be able to do what is in our hearts, without worrying about subsistence.

You may say that I'm a dreamer...

[0] https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-com...

[1] https://arcprize.org/leaderboard

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income_pilots

That's hypothetically possible if a government somehow forced corporations to redistribute their wealth. But a civil war is equally likely. Where society is destroyed after poor people with guns have their say.

The only reason this shit is getting pushed on us as hard as it is because of hyper-capitalist psychos like Thiel and Altman. You are buying into the capitalist hype by actually thinking these systems will be used for anything other than fattening the capitalist's wallets, anything else is a sci-fi fantasy

dude again, we have computers that can talk and make decisions. We have birthed something here. We have something, this is big.

I had a computer that could talk and make decisions in 1982. It sounded pretty robotic and the decisions were 1982-level AI: Lots of if statements.

I'm not really trying to be snarky; I'm trying to point out to you that you're being really vague. And that when you actually get really, really concrete about what we have it ... starts to seem a little less magical than saying "computers that talk and think". Computers that are really quite good at sampling from a distribution of high-likelihood next language tokens based upon complex and long context window is still a pretty incredible thing, but it seems a little less likely to put us all out of a job in the next 10 years.

>I had a computer that could talk and make decisions in 1982.

And it became and industry that as completely and totally changed the world. The world was just so analog back then.

>starts to seem a little less magical than saying "computers that talk and think"

Computer thinking will never become magical. As soon as we figure something out it becomes "oh that is just X". It is human thinking that will become less magical over time.

The "talking and making decisions" part didn't change the world, though. It was the digital spreadsheets and letters that did.

Define "make decisions" such that an 'if' statement does not qualify but an llm does.

LLMs may be a stepping stone to AGI. It's impressive tech. But nobody's proven anything like that yet, and you're running on pure faith not facts here.

i mean, if given the choice between using a coding agent like the codex ui, or a CS intern, I would take the coding agent every time. to me its self evident whats going on

I get a new batch of CS interns for my team every year, and I use Claude Code every day. I think Claude is pretty amazing and it definitely provides value for me, but I would choose the intern every time. I am really skeptical of any claims of getting the kind of productivity and capability growth out of an LLM that would make it an adequate replacement for a human developer.

Well frankly your lack of concrete arguments makes it seem a lot like you don't actually understand what's going on here.

I'm enjoying the new LLM based tooling a lot, but nothing about it suggests that we're in any way near to AGI because it's very much a one trick pony so far.

When we see generative AI that updates its weights in real time (currently an intractible problem) as part of the feedback loop then things might get very interesting. Until then it's just another tool in the box. CS interns learn.

Even by HN standards, this is just an incredible comment. You’d think it’s satire, but I doubt it.

One of the reasons I like to swing by HN on the weekend is that the flavor of the comments is a lot spicier. For better or worse.

Is that a thing now?

Has been for a while, the difference isn’t huge but it does seem to be a difference.

Slightly different cohorts.

ive been on HN for about 15 years :)

Yet your account is only 3 years old. Do you just constantly have to hide the silly things that you say?

see i was thinking my comments didnt go far enough in describing what we are witnessing

You should post something more substantial than this.

its a problem of imagination, "situational awareness". People are simply not aware of what we have discovered, their minds cannot see beyond a chatbox. thats not even to mention the smoothness of the loss functions the big ai labs are seeing, the smooth progression of the scaling laws. its all there, it progresses daily

The last thing we need is a bunch of random chatter, but that’s all these things can do. They can’t make decisions because they don’t actually relate to the real world. Humans (like you, apparently) may think a talking computer is a magic oracle but you’re fooling yourself.