The economics work out just fine. Their actual target business model is replace every knowledge worker. Their thought process is "look at all these people making 150k+, we can do their jobs for 10% of that, think how much money that would be if we had all of it"
Sure, the next step is complete regression to feudalism, but they aren't thinking that far ahead, they just want to take every job in existence that isn't physically turning a proverbial wrench.
the moment AI is capable enough to replace every knowledge worker and all knowledge workers are fired and/or dead the AI companies will just hike up the price for access to their bots until every company is paying at least as much if not more than what they were on human workers.
It doesn't work out for the owners of the capital. Their wealth is entirely based on their claims on future production that is consumed by people with money.
Then it's on to centralization of the "human" components of the workforce into company towns, robot armies and competition for natural resources that will be processed from raw.
It’s wild to me that anyone can have that thought and yet not think about what happens to everyone whose job you took. Especially in a country with citizens known for owning guns.
Especially after seeing what the “learn to code” movement has brought people into, I can’t imagine those people will just roll over and peacefully enter homeless encampments..
> Especially in a country with citizens known for owning guns.
This has always been a story Americans tell themselves to sleep better at night that has zero relation to reality.
The US is a country that has seen many injustices perpetrated by the government. From concentration camps for people of a certain descent to legal racial discrimination (and slavery before that) to wanton violence by security forces against innocent people (pick your favourite police/ICE/etc murder here).
When have armed Americans ever risen up against a government injustice? Best I can think of is the Oklahoma city bombing and I'm pretty sure that's not what you're all refering to.
Your list is embarrassing. Since 1973 (I'm not going further back because the recent examples are too bad to bother), there have been:
* 2 land disputes between federal land management and individuals that thought they deserve more rights over federal land. Hardly fighting against an injustice here, were they
* The BLM protests/unrest started by the murder of George Floyd. I don't recall Americans taking up arms against murderous cops, or anyone, really. The closest to arms taking I can remember is an underage guy going to a protest to "protect" against rioters, getting attacked and killing people in response. Hardly anyone fighting against government instilled injustice with their right to bear arms, is it?
* January 6, where a bunch of mentally challenged individuals tried to overturn the election results at the request of the loser of that election. There was no injustice done against the people in question, and they didn't use their arms against it, they just stormed a barely defended building. One of the shittiest coup attempts of all time, and if anything, for furthering injustice and government overreach than anything else.
Your fixation on "injustice" makes your point unfalsifiable. Any rebellion could be construed as righteous or treasonous. The point is that people really do take up arms against the govt all the time, and that fact has historically had major effects on the conduct of police and politicians
Hunger and desperation are really powerful motivators. And violence and rioting are basically socially transmitted diseases.
You don't need everyone to wake up someday and think "Hey, I think those Jacobins in France had a good point" to have a revolution. You only need a few detonators.
If the societal conditions are ready, nobody can really stop the masses once they are ignited.
Like a bunch of guys with guns couldn't defeat the well drilled and maintained British regulars that are backed by massive warships.
Or a bunch of dudes with guns in the jungles of Vietnam couldn't beat a modern military with fighters and bombers and tanks.
Or a bunch of dudes in the mountain wilderness with guns couldn't beat a modern military with satellites, smart missiles, night vision and drones
Or a bunch of dudes in the deserts of yemen couldn't defend against a modern military with aircraft carriers, realtime control of almost all communications, autonomous drones and missiles and 5th gen fighters
History and current events seem to be disagreeing with you.
They said it every decade since invention. My father who worked in IT since the 60s told me to become an electrician when I was kid as computers will replace all jobs soon. I did become an electrician, welder and have two doctorates; math and cs (which was part of the math dep then). But this time does feel actually different; cheap LLMs are good enough to do advanced work, better than most colleagues I worked with over the decades. Sure you need humans still, just not many. Robots are crap still mostly but we are just starting out… I will not have to worry in my lifetime, but if I had kids or grandkids, I would be worried. But I guess all generations, like my father, have that anyway; we will see.
Even your back of napkin optimistic math doesn't work.
The median white collar job in the US (picking it on purpose because it's a country with high wages, your math would be even worse in a France or Italy) is in the $60-70k. Yes you have to add benefits and etc, but we're still pretty far off 150k.
How much tokens does $80k buy you and do you think it's capable of replacing a human's output? For some, definitely. For plenty, I doubt it. Currently token costs are subsidised by the bubble frontier labs and already we're seeing tightening of budgets because it's costing more than expected
I think you never worked with ‘plenty’; most people I worked with in the past 40 years in IT I am suprised when they actually can walk in on their own. I would say most can be replaced by deepseek flash now, let alone Astra or Fable. I never know in what heaven HN people work, but my company is doing some fixing for a multinational with 20k ‘devs’, most outsourced and they are quite literally morons, far behind even bad LLMs. Their trick is basically to schedule as many calls with as many people as possible to look busy and make their timesheets somewhat plausible. And these are mostly devs. When you see the questions to jira tasks you worry about if they don’t forget to eat or go to the toilet randomly. Oh yeah, most are classified as seniors. An we visit many companies like this. So I am definitely confused how people on HN seem to think most humans can do something worthwhile.
But they haven't replaced every knowledge worker. The unemployment rate remains unaffected by all the AI progress. At some point the bill comes due, and if most of those jobs are still around, then what?
Same, my desktop is a top end full of ram beast that I thought I overpaid for because motherboards had gone up. Bought everything before the surge. Past me was damn lucky. Wish I had bought some stock tho.
The truly terrifying thing is that entirely too many actually do cheer this madness on (and far worse). It's almost as if we've learned absolutely nothing from the mistakes of history (except maybe how to repeat them, only "bigger and better"). I guess we're gettin' a Dystopia, whether we want one or not...
not that I'm intending to defend Sergey here but, if you could spend 0.04% of your net worth to protect 5% of your net worth (and probably all of your easy liquidity)... wouldn't you?
I think that argument should stop with advocacy for law. I have no problem with this when it's means playing optimally within the current laws, things like hiring world class tax attorneys. But if using your immense wealth to ensure the rules that everyone plays by favor you specifically, instead of the country/world, It feels like this is closer to bribing a judge than hiring a tax attorney.
I would normally agree with that, but in this particular case "everyone" is just over 200 individuals. And he could be opposing it on principle as well.
A one-off retroactive wealth tax is a rather questionable form of taxation even if (like myself) you are in favour of looking for ways to tax the super rich more effectively.
When I read about these one-off wealth taxes I find one thing really astonishing. The argument against wealth taxes in general is that people would change their behaviour, which would reduce the tax take over time. That's certainly true.
But then left wing economists believe that imposing it retroactively and calling it a "one-off" does not change people's behaviour. Technically, it cannot change their behaviour with respect to this specific taxation event.
But I find it utterly naive to believe that this sort of hit and run taxation will not change people's behaviour in other ways that would reduce tax revenues.
No one in their right mind would ever believe that a tax that brings in $100bn over 5 years will not have to be replaced by some other tax paid by the same group or by the somewhat less well off who decided to stay.
> if you could spend 0.04% of your net worth to protect 5% of your net worth
If I was anywhere near being a billionaire I wouldn't. There would be much better things to spend my time and effort on. That's not even counting the fact that I would probably care about the ethical aspect too.
0.95x of an obscene amount of money I can't spend is still an obscene amount of money I can't spend. That 5% wouldn't make any discernible difference in my life.
They’ll be back for the less rich people too until no more rich people are dumb enough to stay. Look at CAHSR. There’s no end to how much money California politicians can spend.
There’s not a revenue problem in California. There’s a spending problem.
It’s not a lack of due diligence, it’s a lack of prosecution of fraud. They think they can just unload to some sucker for a big payday. See also the entirety of cryptocurrency.
> They think they can just unload to some sucker for a big payday. See also the entirety of cryptocurrency.
That's also the entirety of the biotech VC industry, except even more so.
Biotech startups require far more capital to make it to market than tech startups, so biotech VCs take the role of early stage funding for R&D. Then the startup IPOs (with zero revenue and unlimited scientific risk) and uses that to fund its clinical trials, while the investors dump their stock. Then, because ramping up manufacturing and quality control takes even more money, the biotech startup sells out to a pharmaceutical company once its passed its trials or the results are promising enough to take the risk, closing the financing loop. Most of these startups stop existing before they even earn a single dollar in revenue, either because they fail or they're acquired by someone who can actually manufacture and distribute their product at scale. This has been the way of the industry for at least the last 20-30 years ever since the small molecule cliff hit like a brick wall.
So, the VC industry whose standard operating procedure is to unload companies onto public investors long before anyone even knows whether the drug or device would work, wouldn't touch Theranos with a thirty foot pole.
Because RSS is a way to give your bait content away for free without getting your ad revenue for it. Its a complete misfeature from the perspective of a site.
reply