For the guys in this story, my translation is, "We were totally fine with making money with no effort, because F paying more employees than we need to. This social media campaign is our backup plan to ensure we get some press and attention out of it even if it fails. We'd totally be cool with making a lot of money though. Please visit our quirky AI shop and buy our stuff."

This is going through some people’s minds the more pushback grows (see Altman molotov, Maine data center moratorium)

"where union" in short.

Perhaps the concept is too foreign for white collars, or on average folks think they'll be OK and it's the juniors who'll go... maybe too focused on immediate needs... a belief unionization is the wrong response... (and I'm not advocating for anything in particular btw)

A union has the power to organise one thing, to withdraw labour. In the industrial era, the threat of all the workers not showing up was a threat to end a business.

If AI does what is promised, to replace labour, then a threat to withdraw labour is only threatening the owners with a good time.

Nick Hanauer understood this fourteen years ago. Very few others did. And despite him spending his own time and money to explain it in simple English, nobody in his peer group wanted to hear it -- his TED talk on the subject ... took several years before it was published. Just a coincidence, I'm sure.

FA (for a decade or so) FO, I guess?

https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_hanauer_beware_fellow_plutocr...

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchfor...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2gO4DKVpa8ns than humans, and more potentially unemployed white collar workers than the police, military and national guard combined.

Just like they convinced the younger generation that "boomers" stole their future.

It doesn't, it won't, and it shouldn't. It's not explored in game theory and criminal justice tries to conceal this but the starving will kill and eat each other long before they organize and mob the wealthy.

It plays out in every prison riot, governmental collapse, and other condition of anarchy.

This idea that the poor will mob the rich is feel-good Hollywood idealism that has been wholly undermined by identity politics. The poor will sooner kill and eat you just because you're easier to reach.

Strikes me as a repulsively mean-spirited take, ironically proving the artist’s point.

To me, it seemed like a modern day tech-take of human cock-fighting.

The problem is with adolescents taking them. Adolescent boys see a really nice immediate payoff for taking PEDS (better musculature and better sports performance->more popular) while the downsides are in the future. It's really hard to fight that.

Even when I was in high school several decades ago, we had a handful of people on PEDS. And we were a tiny school with no significant sports programs. I can't imagine what it's like now with social media pushing everything.

The incentive to cheat and hide was one of the points from the podcast. In Cycling, in order to win, you have to compete with other cyclists who are doping, and doing so in such a way that they are unlikely to get caught. In order to win, you have to dope and not get caught. Youre not forced to dope, but the option is there, and yours to take should you choose.

Not saying we should be promoting them, but if we can eventually get to the point where we eliminate the really bad side effects and get most of the benefits it's going to be a great thing for everyone, the next thing after GLP-1.

My issue was the disingenuous use of a "5-year post compete" monitoring as justification for Enhanced Games.

Indeed, the capitalist’s creed!

create value because the windows have to be replaced and employees are paid for their labor in doing that.

destroy value bc they -1 inventory each time a window is broken

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

The fallacy is to think value was created by buying someone's labour to fix the window. This is value that's been displaced from something productive to something unproductive.

Instead of going from 0 to 1 (invest the money and create value), you went from -1 to 0 (spend money to fix the window to get back to where you were) and, overall, the value of a perfectly good window got lost.

In other words, everybody but economists and certain philosophers. :-)

-crowded theater (negative value example)

Words can be pretty much actions depending on who you are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...

well, yeah that is the world the AI guys want...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_act

I do not.

I feel more comfortable that the people exploring seem to have their head screwed on and don't appear to be dismissive of the harm they might cause.

Pickaxes and shovels and whatnot.

E.g., https://www.infantswim.com/

I see these kids come on deck and enter the water and its hard to not notice their development is behind to those of their peers that went to a swim club that was proper learn to swim to thrive in the water as opposed to just that survive mentality. They are the most watched in case something happens.

So yea, don't just throw em in.

2 year olds are behind already?

Lots of people write wills, doesn't mean they're looking forward to dying or think they can do much about it. Heck, a lot of people don't even watch their diet and do exercise to maximise quality of life and life expectancy.

* I think that by the time AI is good enough to run a retail store, there's a decent chance there won't be any retail stores left anyway. It's like looking at Henry Ford's production line factories and thinking "wow, let's apply this to horse-drawn carriages!"

How are you supposed to know what sort of regulation is needed if you don't even know what the issues are yet? Similarly, won't it be much easier to make the case for regulation if you can point to results of experiments like this one instead of just hypotheticals?

We’re doing this because we believe this future is coming regardless, and we’d rather be the ones running the Torment Nexus.”

The more typical AI fondation model company claim of “it’s so dangerous only we and people that pay us enough should hand access” is what I think is BS.

I don’t see anything wrong with trying to understand something, which is what this seems to be about. I also don’t see anything wrong with an AI operated store generally, and it of course makes sense, and is valuable, to learn about how the limitations.

“It only remains to point out that in many cases a person’s way of earning a living is also a surrogate activity. Not a PURE surrogate activity, since part of the motive for the activity is to gain the physical necessities and (for some people) social status and the luxuries that advertising makes them want. But many people put into their work far more effort than is necessary to earn whatever money and status they require, and this extra effort constitutes a surrogate activity. This extra effort, together with the emotional investment that accompanies it, is one of the most potent forces acting toward the continual development and perfecting of the system, with negative consequences for individual freedom.”

-- Industrial Society and Its Future (1995)

I am about to go on a long rant, but there is so much money sloshing around the capital allocation machine going towards a vision of the AI managed and optimized future that the propaganda machine for these rose colored delusions must work in overtime. What disappoints me is the question of where the heck are the bears? Did they all go into hibernation 5 years ago when QE gave the retail kindergartener a handgun to pump low quality tickers to the moon? have we just societally accepted that everything should be a hyperreal version of sports gambling now and the world is and ought to be an efficient market of hyperstition?

I may be old and grumpy saying this, but this all sounds dumb and corny. I would like some of the very capable traders who make money repricing mispriced assets to find a way to make money deflating this bubble and bring this environment back to sanity. And I say this as someone who likes the capabilities of AI but continue to see it do little to none of the hard work solving incompressible problems that continue to create and retain enterprise value.

To get off my soapbox for a second and get back to your quoted passage -- what they're really saying is "We are working very hard to make this future coming, and we think so little of your intelligence that we believe you'll fall for the fear tactic of believing it's inevitable, ignoring the fact that it won't happen without someone's hands. And in this case, it is very much our hands, which are incentivized to not just do it but to do it so well that we ensure we do everything possible to make this happen. Part of which means persuading you that it is guaranteed to succeed. If we ever let the honest truth slip that what we're proposing is extremely hard to pull off with pure AI and we're just going to be a any other commercial real estate investor like anyone else, the jig is up."

That's what every single one of these kinds of hypocritical navel gazing faux-concern proclamations amount to for me. Astroturf.

I would go further and say that there is just no such thing as "this future is coming regardless" once you get out of the realm of physical facts. One of the things that by turns depresses and enrages me about so much punditry (especially in tech) is this notion that there is some sort of inevitable socio-techno-psychological force propelling human society in certain directions regardless of the will of actual humans.

Nonsense. We as humans make our society; it is nothing but what we make of it; we can make it what we want.

As you point out, people who say otherwise are usually really saying "too bad for you who don't want the future to be this way, because I do want it to be this way and I'm working to make it happen".