| You’re 100% correct, which is why I opted for a broad investment approach rather than trying to pick “winners”. My thought process RE: superintelligence/AGI is generally this: * I personally don’t believe it’s likely to happen with silicon-based computing due to the immense power and resource costs involved just to get to where we are now; hence why I invest broadly to capitalize on what gains we actually attain using this current branch of AI research across all possible sectors and exposure rates * If we do achieve AGI using silicon-based computing, its limited scale (requiring vast amounts of compute only deliverable via city-scale data centers) will limit its broader utility until more optimizations can be achieved or a superior compute platform delivered that improves access and dramatically lowers cost; again, investing broadly covers a general uplift rather than hoping for a specific winner * If AGI is achieved, nobody - doomer or booster alike - will know what comes next other than complete and total destruction of existing societal structures or institutions. The stock market won’t explode with growth so much as immediately collapse from the disintegration of the consumptive base as a result of AGI quite literally annihilating a planet’s worth of jobs and associated business transactions. In this case, a broad spread protects me from harm by spreading the risk around; AGI will annihilate the market globally, but not all at once barring a significant global catastrophe instigated by it * Which brings me to the worst outcome, where AGI follows the “if anybody builds it everyone dies” thought process: investment is irrelevant because we’re all fucked anyway. And that’s just my investment approach. I’m too pragmatic to believe we’re at the bottom of the sigmoid curve, but too wise to begin guessing where we actually exist on it at present or how much is left in the current LLM-arm of AI research; I’m an IT dinosaur, not an AI scientist. What I can point to is the continued demand destruction of consumer compute through higher costs and limited availability due to rampant AI speculation as proof that the harm is already here in a manner most weren’t predicting, while at the same time actual job displacement by AI is limited to the empty boasting of executives using it as a smoke screen for layoffs after RTO mandates failed to thin headcount sufficiently. In the USA in particular, we’re facing a perfect storm of: * consumer confidence collapse leading to a decline in spending on all goods, especially luxury ones, by all but the most monied demographics * data center-driven cost increases (energy) and resource destruction (land, water, fossil fuel use) * the eradication of government support for renewable energy that would’ve kept these costs in check * the widening wealth gaps creating a new underclass not seen since before WW2 In other words, most of the discourse continues to revolve around hypotheticals of tomorrow rather than realities of today. That would be the lesson I’d hope more people take away from something like this, so we can finally begin addressing issues themselves rather than empty online circle jerking about who is right or wrong. |
> the widening wealth gaps creating a new underclass not seen since before WW2
I go back and forth on this. I think the reality is that "underclass" is a moving target. AI and automation makes things so cheap that today's underclass lives better than kings ever did.