Commodified Intelligence

I wonder if op has read butterick’s “extinction level capitalism” post which makes a similar argument.

the intrinsic value argument for gaining knowledge doesn’t move me. I feel that this post ignores the fact that dumb decisions would still have costs in a commoditized intelligence world. The costs of stupidity go up as technology improves. Drunk driving is more dangerous than drunk horseback riding ect

Personally I've been thinking of it as commodified skill, which has maybe a smidge of a more positive interpretation if you (as I do) model our current world as terribly skill-starved in nearly every domain. If we get it right, we can get "any skill, too cheap to meter, available to everyone" which will instantaneously solve a whole host of societal problems, if only we can actually get and keep it accessible to the broad majority of humanity. But I broadly agree.

If you’ve paid attention to the HuggingFace hacking scandal and to what’s going on in mathematics, we’re well past the “stochastic parrot”, and have entered a world in which a sufficient amount of raw capital and verifiable constraints can solve complex problems.

Unconvincing. An unsupervised swarm of stochastic parrots told to emulate hacking and piped directly to shell managed to eventually exploit something. Like, yes, it can do harm, but that has absolutely nothing to do with intelligence. The parrot may well be able to do your job, because you don't really need to think to implement yet another CRUD service. You may take psychic damage from being forced realize that your job was one of the bullshit ones, but it would've still been one even without the parrot.

To put it in maximally edgy terms, there is a moral imperative to firebomb something, where datacenter ∈ something, but not for the specific purpose of slowing AI.

This resonates strongly with me. Thank you for writing it.

The risk isn’t that the AI bubble is going to crash the markets

That will happen too. For the mid term economic outlook, it doesn't matter that the tech is powerful (and it can be powerful and bad, btw), it just matters whether the businesses are good: and they aren't good (paraphrasing a recent Eisman interview).

I agree with the gist here tho: we are in the midst of a massive partitioning. Those who are committed to autonomous subjectivity and human creativity will be strongly differentiated from those who are willing (and maybe even eager) to devolve into mere stimulus response nodes in the system. We've been edging that way for a long time (centuries) but now we're in the quickening of this transformation.

We are also seeing differences that used to be latent or minor become very pronounced: i.e., people who can see when a generated image of food looks like a film of cyber-maggots vs. people who don't have the perceptual or sensory refinement to notice; people who are easily impressed by quantity of useless activity vs. those who can quickly tell when frantic activity doesn't actually deliver value; "builders" vs. "understanders"; "thinkers" vs. "reactors".