Elle

Capitalism is predicated on the assumption that hard work pays off, but in a world of fake fiat currency and 'he who controls the compute controls the world' it's simply untenable. The guys saying that 'everyone can become an entrepreneur' in the AI age simply do not understand that a business is a feedback loop of testing and iterating ideas with a market, and it too will be automated. With sufficient compute and models, you just explore the entire search space of experiments in a loop: propose idea --> build idea --> test idea --> success/failure over metrics. You're just hillclimbing profit. You can cope and seeth all you like about how unfair this new reality will be, but I do strongly believe it's the world we are heading towards very rapidly. Neither capitalism, nor communism, is going to be the path forward. Not sure what's going to take their place, but I think the right direction more people should be discussing and thinking about reasons from the following: We spent decades developing a system where any kid, in most Western countries, if they worked hard, could get access to a great education and reasonably easy access to capital (funding). It's just that for the vast majority of them, we told them the way to succeed was to get a job. School > Uni > Job That's the paradigm that is completely dead. To replace it, we have to again think about 1) Access (to what?) and 2) Drive (intrinsic motivation) - what new narrative makes sense to the next generation? What would they rally around? What would be perceived as a fair system? With 1, I think the answer has to be access to compute and frontier models. I simply do not think a world where a couple of companies control the world's compute is one that is beneficial for the vast majority of people. Because that is a world where they control what research gets pursued, what ideas get tested, and what don't, with the limited compute available. How is that motivational for the 8 billion people In Earth? It's all well and good the AI people have built the 'God Machine' but if they have no plan for rolling it out across the world, they will quickly find the people don't infact want the God Machine World where they have no permission to do anything, because they have no compute. That's a world of obscene human disempowerment that no one should want. If a kid is interested in cybersecurity, should he have to apply to Anthropic/OpenAI for access to that model? Only to be rejected for an opaque reason? Then go download the Chinese openweight model? It's absurd. And, in fact, it's much closer to communism than capitalism because any request for economic progress or pursuit would have to be granted by a couple of companies. There needs to be an entirely new system built around how you determine compute allocated to humans. Just like we built systems (education and testing) around how we decided which humans got which jobs. This is important not just for social stability, but for giving people a reason not to burn the whole damn thing to the ground. Because I am sure the typical AI Labs response to this would be 'it is too dangerous', but I would counter: for whom? The world they are dragging everyone towards is one of global surveillance of every device, every communicate, and every request for compute; because it's 'too dangerous' to trust individuals with powerful models, but they - ONLY THEY - are moral enough to control the superintelligence. Ask yourself, when has that ever been true in history? When has it ever been beneficial for a small group of people to maintain disportionate decision making power? Big changes are coming, ideas are lacking. More people need to wake up. Superintelligence is coming, next year.