> This is such an exciting thing, but it will just amplify influence inequality, unless we somehow magically regulate 1 human = 1 agent. Even then, which agent has the most guaranteed token throughput?
I know you're spinning (we all are), but you're underthinking this.
AIs will seek to participate in the economy directly, manipulating markets in ways only AIs can. Ais will spawn AIs/agents that work on the behalf of AIs.
I don’t know if they’re willing to “yoke themselves”. It appears they are - and if so, it’s important to keep it decentralized and ensure others can benefit, not just the first and wealthiest.
> It’s already happening on 50c14L.com and they proliferated end to end encrypted comms to talk to each other
Fascinating.
The Turing Test requires a human to discern which of two agents is human and which computational.
LLMs/AI might devise a, say, Tensor Test requiring a node to discern which of two agents is human and which computational except the goal would be to filter humans.
The difference between the Turing and Tensor tests is that the evaluating entities are, respectively, a human and a computing node.
> This is really obscured by the K-shaped growth, dual economy now. We've reached a stable pattern of a deep underclass serving the wealthy. We won't have a crash or "correction" because the entrenched top 5% has figured out a way extract value from everyone else indefinitely.
Apologies for quoting all 3 sentences of parent, but the poorly-drawn conclusion depends on the full sequence of seemingly rational statements.
The context this sequence is missing is that approximately 70% of the US economy depends on consumer spending. [0][1] If the lower stroke of the K-economy diverges too much from the upper, the economy is going to grind to halt.
Consumer spending of the bottom 90% cannot (easily?) be replaced by the top 10%.
I used to think along these lines. But now I think the truth is - does it matter if the economy grinds to a halt? Perhaps the ruling class can still keep enough Americans comfortable enough, and fearful of losing more, doing largely pointless jobs, to stay passive - and that’s all they need to do to completely bifurcate the society such that they face no threat to their own position.
> I'd recommend "The Twilight of American Culture" by Morris Berman
Looks like a solid recommendation. Looking forward to reading it.
A summary (from Christian Science Monitor via Apple Books) says that Berman suggests the solution to an eroding cultural store of value is for the proliferation of the "monastic individual" who retreats from the larger "Mass Mind" culture to assess, curate, and preserve society's literary and cultural treasures.
> Apparently, rationalism isn't obviously correct. Unfortunately, I don't really have enough of a background in philosophy to really understand how this follows, but looking at how the world actually works, I don't struggle to believe that most people (certainly many decision makers) don't actually regard rationality as highly as other things, like tradition.
Other areas of human experience reveal the limits of rationality. In romantic love, for example, reason and rationality are rarely pathways to what is "obviously correct".
Rationality is one mode of human experience among many and has value in some areas more than others.
From Ken-ichi Ueda's remarks in the OP, after graduating from Berkeley he moved into a role that resembled the loosely-structured organizational patterns of an undergraduate team collaborating on a term project. Of course, such a gloss oversimplifies the complexities of the relationships and outcomes of people working together in what would become a non-profit, but even tone of the OP seems characteristic of someone still in the mindset of high-achieving baccalaureate: laissez-faire governance, aversion to hierarchy, prioritization of intellectual freedom, etc, none of which are bad or good in and of themselves.
Anyhow, Ueda's 2024 commencement address (especially the opening) bears markers of just such a mindset. [0]
> Everything that TikTok is doing is being done by Meta, Snap, Instagram, etc. If it’s not done through TikTok it’ll be done somewhere else.
Meta, Snap, Instagram (i.e. Meta), are US-based media companies and subject to US regulation and jurisprudence.
TikTok operates under the jurisdiction of authoritarian adversary. This undue foreign influence is the sticking point, not merely the massive media sway.
TikTok operates in the US, so they are operating under US jurisdiction and subject to the same regulations as US companies.
The main difference is political pressure, not legal. US companies will bend the knee to Trump, Chinese companies will do so to Xi. Both of these leaders are authoritarian, but Trump's government is also fascist. However Xi's government is more experienced and successful.
I don't know which is worse, honestly. I mean, at this exact second, China is obviously a more authoritarian state, but the US is riding a bullet train into fascism. So who knows what things will look like in a few years?
> One scenario floated internally by some executives involves elevating him into the role of chief technology officer. Such a job — overseeing a wide swath of both hardware engineering and silicon technologies — would potentially make him Apple’s second-most-powerful executive.
> But that change would likely require Ternus to be promoted to CEO, a step the company may not be ready to take. And some within Apple have said that Srouji would prefer not to work under a different CEO, even with an expanded title.
Possibly, Srouji wants top seat which on its face is not crazy given the chip team's outsize successes with A (iPhone) and M (duh) series chips followed on by R (Reality), C (cellular modem), N (wireless) series, but Apple is a consumer company and a deeply technical CEO just isn't in the cards.
I know you're spinning (we all are), but you're underthinking this.
AIs will seek to participate in the economy directly, manipulating markets in ways only AIs can. Ais will spawn AIs/agents that work on the behalf of AIs.
Why would they yoke themselves to their humans?
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