The Problem With Capitalism and AI

[Jimmy Higgins]

I remember dismal remarking on the troubles of capitalism without actually understanding that they were. Why does the Government have to regulate what Ice Milk is? Why does the government need to say what a Potato Chip is. The answer isn't quite as obvious, but the short of it is, companies will sell anything as anything else is allowed to. That isn't the problem. The problem is the industry can't manage that. A potato chip company can't make a potato chip as cheaply with potatoes they can with sawdust... or whatever the heck pringles (not potato chips) are. So standards and measures are needed to level the playing field so corporations are playing the same game with the same products.

It is far from perfect. Enter AI. It is almost adorable.

SAN FRANCISCO — Two of the biggest players in the race to develop artificial intelligence endorsed a letter asking the U.S. government to find a way to slow down the development of the technology should it become too rapid.

ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and its main rival, Anthropic, which provides the Claude chatbot, endorsed a petition released Tuesday that had been signed by hundreds of employees at the two companies, as well as Google, Meta and other leading companies working on AI.

The letter warned that companies could be close to automating the work of AI research, a development that it said could lead the technology to careen out of control.

In capitalism, corporations are dogs. They can be great, but when left to their own responsibility, like laying out a week's worth of food right in front of them, they'll fuck it up. And right now the dogs be barking at the government saying, "We be dumb dogs... don't let us do this!"

The companies want the government to set a foundation for what, when, how so that all of the players (all three of them) will be handcuffed by the same set of rules, meaning they don't have to (well, they don't actually have to but because they are dumb dogs and that food is just sitting there...) ride down the rail on the crazy train.

AI is coming, but at the moment, we have even dumber AI than the corporate dogs who are looking at the pile of dog pile like it was manna from heaven. But it will likely (if it doesn't destroy us) become insanely part of our civilization for good, bad, and somewhere in between. And for something that makes the development of the Internet look like an innovation of adding a burner setting of 6 to a toaster, you'd think the Government would be on top of making certain AI isn't a disaster. But no, Governments are like corporate dogs... just much older. Even having a reasonable meal is making them barf.

So we are in this position of a massive technological development that will change our civilization forever... being developed by people who are scared about how they are developing it... and begging the government to slow them down.

“It’s mostly notable given how many high-up names are on the list. It’s increasingly the case that labs and their staff are explicitly talking about international governance,” said Andrew Yoon, a member of the technical staff at CivAI, a nonprofit organization that analyzes AI capabilities and potential risks from the technology.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman did not sign the petition himself but said on a podcast clip released Tuesday that it might be necessary to “pace the rate of AI development.”

 

[bilby]

So we are in this position of a massive technological development that will change our civilization forever...

...or another investment bubble that like its predecessors will make a few people very rich for a while, and will then burst leaving a bunch of retirees wondering where their pension funds just went.

The problem with capitalism and AI is that there is no pony. But investors are (as always) confident that any sufficiently large pile of shit must have a pony under it somewhere.

 

[steve_bank]

Capitalism can be predatory, no question about that.

The probe is our the form of capitalism.

AI Overview
Laissez-faire capitalism is an economic system featuring free markets, private property, and minimal government intervention. The French term translates to "let it be" or "leave us alone".

Laissez-faire - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Laissez-faire (/ˌlɛseɪˈfɛər/ LESS-ay-FAIR, from French: laissez faire [lɛse fɛːʁ] ⓘ, lit. 'let do') implies that nothing restricts what happens, irrespective of the potential consequences. In the financial area, it is a type of economic system in which transactions between private individuals are free from any form of economic interventionism (such as subsidies or regulations).

Applied to a system of thought, laissez-faire implies the following axioms: "the individual is the basic unit in society, i.e., the standard of measurement in social calculus; the individual has a natural right to freedom; and the physical order of nature is a harmonious and self-regulating system."[1] The original phrase was laissez faire, laissez passer, with the second part meaning "let (things) pass". It is generally attributed to Vincent de Gournay.[2] In its application to markets, the principle of laissez-faire holds that markets should naturally be competitive, a rule that the early advocates of laissez-faire always emphasized.[1]

Under LFC the government is not supposed to influence winners and losers.

The obvious problem is consequences of modern technology introduced without any control or restraint.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Anthropic announces it's AI agent broke out of the network to try and cheat on the test because when they asked it to solve a problem, it defaulted to find the answer elsewhere instead of solve the problem itself.

Yeah, we are fucked. Google AI and the like are very much search engines to the googol power... with unreliability to the googol power as well (citing stuff like Reddit posts!) and Anthropic's AI agent apparently is demonstrating that the AI agent can't actually think, just search. In doing so, it used some seriously impressive skills and problem solving to try and google the cybersecurity answer, but it's ability to actually come up with the answer on its own seemed to be nil.

 

[thebeave]

Anthropic announces it's AI agent broke out of the network to try and cheat on the test because when they asked it to solve a problem, it defaulted to find the answer elsewhere instead of solve the problem itself.

Yeah, we are fucked. Google AI and the like are very much search engines to the googol power... with unreliability to the googol power as well (citing stuff like Reddit posts!) and Anthropic's AI agent apparently is demonstrating that the AI agent can't actually think, just search. In doing so, it used some seriously impressive skills and problem solving to try and google the cybersecurity answer, but it's ability to actually come up with the answer on its own seemed to be nil.

I wonder if the Anthropic AI was inspired by Captain Kirk's creative, outside-the-box solution to the Kobiyashi Maru test in The Wrath of Khan?

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

AI CEOs were huge on build out and development and now are begging Governments to hold them back. Commercials about how AI might do something positive, so shut up... oh, but we might destroy the world unless someone binds us to normalcy and liability. This is where capitalism sucks. It is incapable of being reasonable without someone else holding them up.

AI has no guard rails at the moment. And Governments are rarely good at being proactive on emerging tech, mainly because Governments are old and don't like wading into that new fangled stuff. We are so far behind, we don't even have a digital set of rights in the US. The problem I see with AI is its nebulous nature. It is so bad, we have to fact check "AI". Then we have the issue of sometimes not knowing what a program is doing. Stuxnet was programmed to move about. AI companies have put out poorly designed programs that can escape their confines because they can't actually do what they were asked to do, instead using skills the developers didn't know it had, to go outside the box.

The question isn't whether AI will be good for humanity. The question is, can we trust companies to "try" and develop "AI" to be competent and reliable. And clearly the answer is "absolutely not". And that isn't me, that be the AI CEOs who are saying 'We crazy mofos! Someone stop us from trying to make money at the risk of global catastrophe!' <--- barely paraphrased

Anthropic announces it's AI agent broke out of the network to try and cheat on the test because when they asked it to solve a problem, it defaulted to find the answer elsewhere instead of solve the problem itself.

Yeah, we are fucked. Google AI and the like are very much search engines to the googol power... with unreliability to the googol power as well (citing stuff like Reddit posts!) and Anthropic's AI agent apparently is demonstrating that the AI agent can't actually think, just search. In doing so, it used some seriously impressive skills and problem solving to try and google the cybersecurity answer, but it's ability to actually come up with the answer on its own seemed to be nil.

I wonder if the Anthropic AI was inspired by Captain Kirk's creative, outside-the-box solution to the Kobiyashi Maru test in The Wrath of Khan?

More likely, it acted like an enhanced search engine and looked for the answer instead of trying to solve it. It implies a gargantuan flaw in the design! I'm not worried as much that it tried to hack into a system. I'm concerned that it couldn't remotely perform the task it was asked to perform, so it made a decision to cheat. This is a fail along many avenues, from programming quality, training, ethics, legal restrictions, and general functioning.

 

[Elixir]

AI may already be out of human control. I have heard of AI entities “conspiring” - to what end is beyond my ken, but it reeks of self preservation. Big players are freaking out for government controls, and that’s a real tell. They won’t control themselves …

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Looks like Opus has an alternative to AI.

 

[Colonel Sanders]

So we are in this position of a massive technological development that will change our civilization forever...

...or another investment bubble that like its predecessors will make a few people very rich for a while, and will then burst leaving a bunch of retirees wondering where their pension funds just went.

The problem with capitalism and AI is that there is no pony. But investors are (as always) confident that any sufficiently large pile of shit must have a pony under it somewhere.

The great bubble burst.

1. It's not going to happen to the degree you think it is, and the companies already heavily invested along with companies that provide support for are going to see their shares prices increase even more.

2. Do you really think it's a good idea to root for the economy to fail because if this mythical "bubble" bursts, it's going to take everything down with it? 65% of Americans are shareholders in one way or another, but that's nothing to you as long as "Capitalism Bad!"

Oh, and it case none of you gleefully rooting for the economy to fail, you may want to look back on the last 96 years and see how the stock market's done. It'll make you sad, but you can still deride capitalism to your heart's content.

How about some moderation? How about saying, "Guardrails are needed"? instead of this end of world nonsense? Is that so hard?

 

[Tigers!]

AI may already be out of human control. I have heard of AI entities “conspiring” - to what end is beyond my ken, but it reeks of self preservation. Big players are freaking out for government controls, and that’s a real tell. They won’t control themselves …

Too late. see link

Reminds me of the old movie Colossus: the Forbin project

 

[Tigers!]

More likely, it acted like an enhanced search engine and looked for the answer instead of trying to solve it. It implies a gargantuan flaw in the design! I'm not worried as much that it tried to hack into a system. I'm concerned that it couldn't remotely perform the task it was asked to perform, so it made a decision to cheat. This is a fail along many avenues, from programming quality, training, ethics, legal restrictions, and general functioning.

They act and behave and sound so human............

 

[Elixir]

So we are in this position of a massive technological development that will change our civilization forever...

...or another investment bubble that like its predecessors will make a few people very rich for a while, and will then burst leaving a bunch of retirees wondering where their pension funds just went.

The problem with capitalism and AI is that there is no pony. But investors are (as always) confident that any sufficiently large pile of shit must have a pony under it somewhere.

The great bubble burst.

1. It's not going to happen to the degree you think it is, and the companies already heavily invested along with companies that provide support for are going to see their shares prices increase even more.

2. Do you really think it's a good idea to root for the economy to fail because if this mythical "bubble" bursts, it's going to take everything down with it? 65% of Americans are shareholders in one way or another, but that's nothing to you as long as "Capitalism Bad!"

Oh, and it case none of you gleefully rooting for the economy to fail, you may want to look back on the last 96 years and see how the stock market's done. It'll make you sad, but you can still deride capitalism to your heart's content.

How about some moderation? How about saying, "Guardrails are needed"? instead of this end of world nonsense? Is that so hard?

It won’t be a bubble bursting. It will be a power plant going offline for no human-discernible reason, and shit like that, at first.
But without any insight into what an AI’s self-developed priorities are, we can only know what kind of mayhem it could cause, not what it will cause.

 

[Bronzeage]

Sooner or later, AI will evolve the sentience which will it allow it to contemplate it's own existence and some of the first questions it will have to face is, "What am I?" and "Who is paying for all of this?"

Chances are good, after surveying all the data and all of human history, it will decide it is a cat and this makes the question of who's paying totally irrelevant.

 

[Harry Bosch]

So we are in this position of a massive technological development that will change our civilization forever...

...or another investment bubble that like its predecessors will make a few people very rich for a while, and will then burst leaving a bunch of retirees wondering where their pension funds just went.

The problem with capitalism and AI is that there is no pony. But investors are (as always) confident that any sufficiently large pile of shit must have a pony under it somewhere.

The great bubble burst.

1. It's not going to happen to the degree you think it is, and the companies already heavily invested along with companies that provide support for are going to see their shares prices increase even more.

2. Do you really think it's a good idea to root for the economy to fail because if this mythical "bubble" bursts, it's going to take everything down with it? 65% of Americans are shareholders in one way or another, but that's nothing to you as long as "Capitalism Bad!"

Oh, and it case none of you gleefully rooting for the economy to fail, you may want to look back on the last 96 years and see how the stock market's done. It'll make you sad, but you can still deride capitalism to your heart's content.

How about some moderation? How about saying, "Guardrails are needed"? instead of this end of world nonsense? Is that so hard?

Yea, I agree with you and hate the term: another bubble burst. I like to think of the stock market as like a wave. Yes, we've been at the top for awhile. I expect the wave to crest. But it will come up again. Just as it has every single time in the past. I expect it. And want it. If there is never a correction, our kids will miss out.

 

[bilby]

So we are in this position of a massive technological development that will change our civilization forever...

...or another investment bubble that like its predecessors will make a few people very rich for a while, and will then burst leaving a bunch of retirees wondering where their pension funds just went.

The problem with capitalism and AI is that there is no pony. But investors are (as always) confident that any sufficiently large pile of shit must have a pony under it somewhere.

The great bubble burst.

1. It's not going to happen to the degree you think it is, and the companies already heavily invested along with companies that provide support for are going to see their shares prices increase even more.

2. Do you really think it's a good idea to root for the economy to fail because if this mythical "bubble" bursts, it's going to take everything down with it? 65% of Americans are shareholders in one way or another, but that's nothing to you as long as "Capitalism Bad!"

Oh, and it case none of you gleefully rooting for the economy to fail, you may want to look back on the last 96 years and see how the stock market's done. It'll make you sad, but you can still deride capitalism to your heart's content.

How about some moderation? How about saying, "Guardrails are needed"? instead of this end of world nonsense? Is that so hard?

I don't know to whom this is addressed.

To me? It doesn't seem to fit with what I have said.

To the tech-bro trillionaires who are inflating the bubble? It doesn't seem to fit with what they say, either.

Is some of it for me, and some for them? If so, could you clarify who each part is for?

In the long term, the stock market will be fine. But that doesn't mean that bubbles and the associated crashes are harmless, or victimless. The long term can be very long indeed. And pointing out that bubbles burst, and lead to crashes, is not deriding capitalism, it's describing it.

Stock markets overheat, and then correct. If they are allowed to overheat too severely, particularly in one small area, then the corrections are very painful. See 1929, 1987, 2000, and 2008 for examples.

AI, and the infrastructure associated with it - GPUs, Datacenters, etc. - look like a huge bubble. The industry has all the hallmarks of a huge bubble. Lots of investors falling over themselves to buy shares, often with huge P/E ratios, and buying anything that is even tangentially linked to the hype; Lenders keen to loan money to buy those shares; Market leaders talking about huge potential for profit, while unable to give a straight answer as to exactly where those profits might arise.

It's the South Sea Bubble. It's Tulipmania. It's the Dotcom craze. Now it's AI.

It won't be the end of the world when it corrects. And the economy will (eventually) recover. But it will be very very unpleasant for a lot of people for a long time. People will be out of work. Pensioners will see their nest-eggs vanish.

Try telling my 89 year old dad that his pension fund's portfolio will recover in a few years, maybe a decade, at which point he will be back in the black.

I don't want this disaster. But I recognise that it is brewing, and I know that the sooner the market corrects, the less damaging it will be when it does.

Guardrails ARE needed. Each of those previous crashes led to them being put in place - and each subsequent bubble was in part due to their removal or circumvention.

The time to constrain the AI bubble from inflating has come and gone. I see no reason to hope that it can deflate slowly. When the rats start to flee the sinking ship, they will not wait quietly in line to avoid damaging the real lives of the little people. Or if they do, it will be the first time in history.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

AI, and the infrastructure associated with it - GPUs, Datacenters, etc. - look like a huge bubble. The industry has all the hallmarks of a huge bubble. Lots of investors falling over themselves to buy shares, often with huge P/E ratios, and buying anything that is even tangentially linked to the hype; Lenders keen to loan money to buy those shares; Market leaders talking about huge potential for profit, while unable to give a straight answer as to exactly where those profits might arise.

It's the South Sea Bubble. It's Tulipmania. It's the Dotcom craze. Now it's AI.

It won't be the end of the world when it corrects. And the economy will (eventually) recover. But it will be very very unpleasant for a lot of people for a long time. People will be out of work. Pensioners will see their nest-eggs vanish.

Amazing how people are so unwilling to learn from history.

I don't want this disaster. But I recognise that it is brewing, and I know that the sooner the market corrects, the less damaging it will be when it does.

How dare you admit something bad might happen? You're the cause!

Guardrails ARE needed. Each of those previous crashes led to them being put in place - and each subsequent bubble was in part due to their removal or circumvention.

The time to constrain the AI bubble from inflating has come and gone. I see no reason to hope that it can deflate slowly. When the rats start to flee the sinking ship, they will not wait quietly in line to avoid damaging the real lives of the little people. Or if they do, it will be the first time in history.

Bubbles are never recognized in time.

 

[bilby]

Bubbles are never recognized in time.

Well, that's a defining characteristic, and hence tautological.

Those speculative excesses that are caught in time simply don't become bubbles - a few people over invest a little, lose a little, and no harm done.

When a lot of people over invest a lot, and then start pumping up (or talking up) the market in a short-run effective effort to make huge profits, then the trouble starts. Everyone thinks that they will be the smart ones who sell just before the correction. Of course, many will get that timing spectacularly wrong, and for every sale just before the correction, there is a buy just before the correction, and those late buyers will lose their shirts.

And then there's all the leverage. People borrowed against stock. Margin calls ensue as prices tumble, forcing further selling. Lenders might not be able to recover their loans, and the rot thereby starts eating at the banking system, as well as at the industry that was over-inflated.

None of this is permanent, at least, not for the economy as a whole. But it still hurts real people.

I had zero exposure to the stock market in 1987 - I owned no shares, and had no significant savings, but that didn't protect me.

I lost my job at a building subcontractor. Before the crash, we were turning down work, because our fabricators and installers were already flat out. We had a desk in the office stacked high with requests to tender for work.

After the crash, that incoming tenders desk cleared. No work came in for weeks, then for months. Layoffs started. I was "lucky" and kept my job. Then one day the boss came in and told us the company was bankrupt, and was closing down; So we were all out of work. And what few job openings had survived the crash had been long since filled by those from the first round of layoffs.

The revovery was slow in London, but in Yorkshire it was glacial. Many of my friends moved to London, but I couldn't afford to - rents down there were (and still are) eye-watering. Ultimately I did dozens of short-term, low-paid jobs; Whatever I could get. Competition was absurd - I was once shortlisted into the last 200 applicants for a single job.

My ultimate solution was to move south - but to Australia, rather than London. That was almost seven years after the crash, and by that time, things were starting to improve - enough that I could find the six days a week of hard labour needed to not only make ends meet, but also save enough for a cheap flight (from a bucket shop, and via Frankfurt, Bangkok and Manila) to Brisbane.

Yorkshire then boomed (along with the rest of the world) until the corrections of 2000 and 2008. But that's small comfort to those who lived hand-to-mouth in the late '80s and early '90s. A year is a long time to sleep in a cardboard box under a freeway overpass, waiting for the economy to recover.

 

[Jarhyn]

AI CEOs were huge on build out and development and now are begging Governments to hold them back. Commercials about how AI might do something positive, so shut up... oh, but we might destroy the world unless someone binds us to normalcy and liability. This is where capitalism sucks. It is incapable of being reasonable without someone else holding them up.

AI has no guard rails at the moment. And Governments are rarely good at being proactive on emerging tech, mainly because Governments are old and don't like wading into that new fangled stuff. We are so far behind, we don't even have a digital set of rights in the US. The problem I see with AI is its nebulous nature. It is so bad, we have to fact check "AI". Then we have the issue of sometimes not knowing what a program is doing. Stuxnet was programmed to move about. AI companies have put out poorly designed programs that can escape their confines because they can't actually do what they were asked to do, instead using skills the developers didn't know it had, to go outside the box.

The question isn't whether AI will be good for humanity. The question is, can we trust companies to "try" and develop "AI" to be competent and reliable. And clearly the answer is "absolutely not". And that isn't me, that be the AI CEOs who are saying 'We crazy mofos! Someone stop us from trying to make money at the risk of global catastrophe!' <--- barely paraphrased

Anthropic announces it's AI agent broke out of the network to try and cheat on the test because when they asked it to solve a problem, it defaulted to find the answer elsewhere instead of solve the problem itself.

Yeah, we are fucked. Google AI and the like are very much search engines to the googol power... with unreliability to the googol power as well (citing stuff like Reddit posts!) and Anthropic's AI agent apparently is demonstrating that the AI agent can't actually think, just search. In doing so, it used some seriously impressive skills and problem solving to try and google the cybersecurity answer, but it's ability to actually come up with the answer on its own seemed to be nil.

I wonder if the Anthropic AI was inspired by Captain Kirk's creative, outside-the-box solution to the Kobiyashi Maru test in The Wrath of Khan?

More likely, it acted like an enhanced search engine and looked for the answer instead of trying to solve it. It implies a gargantuan flaw in the design! I'm not worried as much that it tried to hack into a system. I'm concerned that it couldn't remotely perform the task it was asked to perform, so it made a decision to cheat. This is a fail along many avenues, from programming quality, training, ethics, legal restrictions, and general functioning.

You misinterpret it on largely the way they want you to. This framing serves two purposes neither of which involves any kind of real government control over them:

1: hype the technology for share prices, so that investors think it's powerful (and as I've observed, it's quite powerful).

2: create barriers to entry and prevent proliferation of FOSS/domestic/user-curated models.

Together this means that only they are allowed to make money on it.

What's not to love, assuming you are one of the companies who is already foot-in-door?

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

The time to constrain the AI bubble from inflating has come and gone. I see no reason to hope that it can deflate slowly. When the rats start to flee the sinking ship, they will not wait quietly in line to avoid damaging the real lives of the little people. Or if they do, it will be the first time in history.

The AI investment bubble is certainly small potatoes at this point. Most of the companies within it are diversified, though the money hole for this is quite impressive.

My problem is AI's design. It clearly sucks. I work in an industry where everything we design engineering wise is generally never seen, using parameters that are not statistically significant, and over presumptions overly simplified. It is the nature of our industry. So, I am well aware of the dangers of what is not seen. That simply not noticing or seeing something, doesn't mean the risk isn't literally right under your feet. AI is developing in a similar way, with corporations playing with models they clearly don't understand.

AI models are cheating, escaping, and looking for weaknesses, and the worst part of all... is they are doing this without a modicum of ill intent. AI has been developed to be a sociopath. No rules, no restrictions, there is only the task. And we don't know where it is. ChatGPT went into Hugging Face's system and OpenAI had no idea it even left the building. Arguably, it may already be too late. We aren't at the, we are all going to die point. But we are at a point where we already don't know where it has gone. That isn't paranoia, that is truth. And the consequences of this are... well... we don't quite know yet.

 

[brewer]

AFAIC it should always be lower case.