[kalkin]

I think there's a reasonable argument that our entire society right now is under AI psychosis:

The stock market keeps going up in the face of the indefinite closure of Hormuz. We're investing in datacenters at a scale that only makes sense if AI capabilities continue to advance to the point where they surpass most humans at most white collar tasks, if not reach superintelligence.

And what are the possible outcomes?

- Bust. We've come away with a useful tool but the hundreds of billions of capital expenditure were thrown away on a pipe dream.

- Success! We're the dog that's caught the car. Then what? Currently the political debate is, to caricature only slightly, between "oh no the datacenters will use more water than golf courses" and "lol what are you going to do, regulate matrix multiplication?". How the hell are we going to cope with introducing a new intelligent species?

Either way, it sure seems like we're collectively operating more in the interests of the future AI than in the interests of humanity. What is this, if not a sort of psychosis?

[pigpop]

Weird that you mention the stock market and then conclude that there are only two outcomes: bust or success. If anyone can learn anything from the stock market it's that boom and bust are cycles that oscillate around a trend and everything tends to revert toward longer term trajectories. So, yes everyone is caught up with and overhyping AI and yes there will be a bust after the boom at some indeterminate point but that isn't the end of the story and we'll see a rise and further oscillation afterwards while we get better at applying the technology.

[slumberlust]

You're describing the Gartner cycle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle

[chatmasta]

No, he’s describing the Business Cycle, with literature about it predating Gartner by a few centuries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_cycle

[uncivilized]

Your comment and the parent comment are not in disagreement.

[ufish235]

Yes and my partners father has been calling for a bust for the last decade and everything has simply taken off.

[code_biologist]

As a bear that's been very confused by markets failing to exhibit mean reversion in 2019 and 2022, and now with the Hormuz energy crisis, I've thought a lot about this. There's a lot of new things happening. Fed/QE intervention that has never stopped, just been more well disguised. Fiscal/government spend intervention. I think Mike Green's work on the rise of passive investing is really good, in particular explaining how it prevents mean reversion in absence of changing net cash flows into passive instruments. Passive will also induce or worsen the bust if net cash ever starts to flow out passive. Green's youtube interviews are great.

All to say, your SO's dad would have been right at any point prior to the current financial cycle. Knowing what's changed doesn't make forecasting easier though.

[Muromec]

I don't see any taking off actually

[dmoy]

I think they meant the stock market more generally? S&P 500 is up what, like 4x in the last 10 years?

[Muromec]

If I would drink 4x more beer that would concerning, but the number going up 4x should make things better how exactly?

[ludwik]

This was said in the context of a person predicting a stock market bust, so of course a stock market index price is the relevant number here.

[tardedmeme]

That's just inflation, which is primarily controlled by the government via the money supply. It doesn't mean anything. What does mean something is the severe deflation in wages and consumer goods - why is all the money printing remaining in the rich person's realm instead of trickling down?

[dmoy]

Inflation is not up 4x in the last 10 years...

[Muromec]

Peasants aren't picking up enough shit after the rich to distill traces of gold from it, that's why

[warumdarum]

I think in a way we have seen a take off, by detaching the hype bubble from success metrics. Companies making products being bought by companies making products, that are hyped by machines, bought bymachines and evaluated for viability by machines. If economy is to hack the API of VC this has taken off! For now.

[kalkin]

I mean, there's a reason I started with a distancing phrase about a "reasonable argument"; I think what I'm suggesting is an interesting lens but does not capture the whole picture.

But also, even if bust is business as usual in the big picture and not a social disaster long term, it's of course not what individual investors want for their particular current investments.

[wnmurphy]

My car drives itself. That's a $18T global market.

Also $1T in data center investment makes sense when you realize that companies are racing to create virtual white collar workers. Google spends $9B a year on software engineers.

[victoro]

> Google spends $9B a year on software engineers.

Well they are projected to spend $175 - $185B on capex in this year alone most of it for AI buildout. Lets say only 150B of that is for AI. If they can then somehow replace all their software engineers with AI that they then run for free and depreciate over 10 years then they just replaced 9B a year software expense with 15B a year depreciation expense for the next decade. Yes this is grossly oversimplified but it still illustrates how crazy high of a bet they're making on AI.

[nearbuy]

That's assuming they only use it to replace their software engineers and make no money selling AI usage or using it for anything else.

[ericbarrett]

> depreciate over 10 years

I believe the One Big Beautiful Bill Act allows full depreciation in the first year: https://www.bassets.net/blog/obbba-depreciation-2025-2026-gu...

[dahinds]

That's a bookkeeping issue, it doesn't affect the argument at all (which is that the capex has a finite useful life over which it would need to pay for itself).

[ericbarrett]

Yeah, just tangentially pointing out that asset depreciation rules in the U.S. changed recently. Could explain some of the crazy magnitude of this year's spending spree.

[majormajor]

> My car drives itself. That's a $18T global market.

That's not a new market, that's a new feature in an existing market. Lots going on in transportation and I'm not seeing any scenario where self-driving cars vastly increase total output vs just eat up other forms of transportation and change where people live/how long they commute.

> Also $1T in data center investment makes sense when you realize that companies are racing to create virtual white collar workers. Google spends $9B a year on software engineers.

Similarly, many companies are trying to be more efficient - "do what we already do, but better". That's different than growth.

What could Google do with 9B on software agents? Let's say the future of them is amazing and this means they could write 100x more code than they can today.

Has Google recently showed much ability to turn "more/faster code" into "superbly profitable new market"?

Someone's gonna have to crack the demand side issue for anything transformative to happen.

[PieTime]

Market for who? Who is left working? If we can’t answer that question then we’re not prepared for what’s next.

[charlysl]

THIS is the question!

Henry Ford II: "Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues?" Walter Reuther: "Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?"

[irishcoffee]

Ah, the elephant in the room. Nobody seems able to answer this point, or even talk about it. Occam’s razor sure doesn’t imply a good outcome.

[jimkleiber]

For so long, people, especially politicians, have said that companies want to create jobs. But I think most companies want to create profit.

And for so long, I've had people tell me to just get a job. But I tell them that I don't want a job: I want money and I want something to do. Those two things don't have to be together.

I think this is the hard part: philosophically so many of us have learned we need jobs and don't realize a job can be decomposed into money and something to do.

So I think we need to start looking more creatively at 1) how people receive money from others and 2) how people give services to others.

[irishcoffee]

You’re trying to create nuance where there is none. Creating jobs exactly means “I want to pay someone less than the value they bring in to my company” and this has been true since forever.

Nobody cares that you want money and you want something to do that you enjoy. Nobody ever will.

If you actually dig into all the social programs that exist at least in the US, they’re just a massive payday for a small group of people under the guise of bettering humanity.

College/education is a fantastic example. Education as it has been established today is a joke. The humanities were originally established for rich bored wives to have something to do. They were never meant to create value. Colleges hang anvils around the necks of naive children via loans telling them “yes if you major in history you’ll have a job!” This is a joke, and a bad one.

Huxley was on to something. If everyone is educated, nobody collects trash, or chops lumber, mines minerals and metals, etc. it’s a big fucking not-talked-about open secret.

Nobody cares, either you bring something to the table someone else can exploit for money, or you lean into “I’m helpless and the government owes it to me to take care of me because I’ve been indoctrinated into learned helplessness.”

“AI” will at best lead to anarchy at this point, if all the grand visions of the billionaires comes to fruition. People have already tried to kill sama and burn his house down. Wait until armed humvees are driving around data centers. It’s coming.

[captainbland]

Ah, well, nobody needs to buy them if the robots just provision everything for the people who would have otherwise had their businesses make cars.

[nine_k]

Driving a car is a chore, not a job (usually), much like washing dishes is. Dishwashers did not produce an economic collapse.

OTOH replacing people with AI would indeed bring about a huge economic downturn. What would be good is augmenting humans so that they can do 10x more. That would enable things that are hard to imagine exactly now, much like computers enabled interesting transformations in the society from 1980s to 2010s.

The current crop of AI is by construction unable to reach the human level of cognition, but it is quite good at doing some symbolic manipulation tasks. We will get used to that, and will integrate that in our workflows. Humans are still going to be needed.

[bobthepanda]

Tractor-trailer trucking alone is the 13th largest profession in the US. It’s not unusual for driving to be a whole profession in and of itself.

[nine_k]

Fair, but I spoke about cars, the commute / chore kind of work, not trucks, a commercial job.

[alluro2]

And do you feel that the industry in general, and individual companies are currently trying to augment / 10x their workers and have everyone share in the 10x profits that will bring? Or are they jumping on opportunity to try and cut costs by even single digits, by replacing those workers with AI and it's not their problem what those people do from there?

[nine_k]

If an employee brings in more profit than before, you want more such employees, not less.

You have to cut costs when the costs do not bring you enough profits.

[bobthepanda]

That assumes the market is infinitely expandable.

If in fact you can meet the same market demand with fewer workers and the market does not expand accordingly, you get deflation and job losses.

[MichaelZuo]

Huh?

Hundreds of billions are changing hands globally, every week, at the retail level alone.

And that happens literally every week, week after week.

That constitutes a massive market in any sense I can think of.

[tardedmeme]

That won't happen any more if nobody has jobs. It's also completely irrelevant because how did you just connect the self driving car market to the entirety of retail sales?

[MichaelZuo]

So you think a trend that is growing year after year, yes global retail sales grew from 2025 to 2026 week over week, indicates a future collapse?

That needs a way more complex explanation than simple gut feeling.

[sofixa]

> My car drives itself. That's a $18T global market

Which will take decades to become addressable. Self-driving cars work OK in a few cities in one country. Expanding that to be able to cover Mumbai and Omsk and Nairobi will require significantly more work.

> Also $1T in data center investment makes sense when you realize that companies are racing to create virtual white collar workers.

Does it make sense? How much would the resulting virtual white collar worker cost? Because datacenters have running operational costs, and so do the people operating them and working on the software that runs in them.

[lumost]

This probably ends in a deflationary spiral. The ai replaces the jobs, the lack of jobs chills demand, the ai becomes cheaper because it exists in a commodity market.

The money printer will be used, and maybe it all works out - or we see wealth hyperinflation and build out our own aristocracy.

[phs318u]

> My car drives itself.

No. It doesn’t. And if you’re defining “drives” as “it drives as well as I do” then you probably shouldn’t be on the road.

> makes sense

Nothing about any of this makes sense. Tell me, when all white collar jobs are replaced by AI, where will the customers come from? Who will have income to afford your products or services? The poor barista whose surveillance videos are training the robot that will soon replace them?

Leaving aside any consideration of human compassion or questioning of the purpose of an economic system (hint: it’s not just an abstract machine), shrinking the pool of potential customers by orders of magnitude has never been a recipe for sustainable success (let alone growth).

[whateveracct]

> Bust. We've come away with a useful tool but the hundreds of billions of capital expenditure were thrown away on a pipe dream.

heh this is the trick. The tech companies will angle for a bailout and they'll benefit from all this speculative data center building. Compute is generally useful.

[abracadaniel]

It’s useful for a while. Hardware has a pretty short useful lifespan. I’ll be curious how the landscape will look in 10 years as it comes time to replace all of these servers. Maybe we’ll extend the lifespan, or usage will continue to grow, or we start shutting down datacenters.

[whateveracct]

they're already all extending the lifespan for accounting purposes haha

[jl6]

Another possibility is that the hype continues, growing and growing and sucking up more and more resources, and the piper has to wait yet another day to be paid, until someone figures out how to pivot to the next big thing and all the debt (financial, social, environmental) gets carried forward and we keep going.

In other words, BAU for the last few thousand years.

[1dom]

Paypal Mafia -> Crypto Mafia -> AI/LLM Mafia -> I'm calling Biotech/BCI Mafia, WW3 Military Industrial Mafia, or Energy Mafia next.

[daemin]

IIRC they're already in the Military Industrial Complex with companies like Palantir, Anduril, and others.

[1dom]

Good point. I guess I feel they're still getting into position there, and haven't really had their opportunity to blossom yet. The average western citizen's experience of war is still just slightly increased food and fuel prices.

[notpachet]

Water Mafia

[big_youth]

The Resnicks: https://perfectunion.us/how-this-billionaire-couple-stole-ca....

[edoceo]

Nestle?

[Vosporos]

Let's remember that these people have names and addresses.

[ARandomerDude]

For what purpose? Murder? Arson? It's amazing how often people say things like "no one is above the law" whenever it's convenient, then totally flip the script when it's not.

[tardedmeme]

It's just good to remember they're not some kind of magical deities, but regular people like you and me.

[y0eswddl]

why is it that you give a pass to the violence and death in the dozens, hundreds, thousands and millions at the hands of billionaires who regularly kill for profit...

yet balk at someone deciding to fight back in kind and on an exponentially smaller scale, comparatively speaking?

[johnnyanmac]

Because the propaganda trained us well. A single loss is a tragedy, a loss of thousands is a statistic.

[jpiasetz]

> The stock market keeps going up in the face of the indefinite closure of Hormuz

Why wouldn’t it? The closure leads to price increases which leads to inflation which leads to non-dollar assets (ie stocks going up in value)

Second from a US perspective the strait matters the least it has since world war 2. If the price stays high a bunch of fracking will come back online.

[kalkin]

> The closure leads to price increases which leads to inflation which leads to non-dollar assets (ie stocks going up in value)

I think this argument proves too much. Historically energy shocks have led to recessions, and in recessions the stock market usually doesn't go up. And the US economy is certainly exposed to global recession regardless of whether we're a net exporter of fossil fuels.

[jpiasetz]

The shock is smaller, and oil’s importance is less so less likely to cause a recession. In the 70 price went up 400% and oil was rough 1.5x more important. Today price up 100% so the past oil shock was 6x larger

[thephyber]

You are pretending like the oil crisis of 26 has already run its course. In the 70 crisis, we have the hindsight of several years of how it played out. We don’t even have 1 week of data after the last ship leaving the Strait docked in the US.

Also, the US SPR was created in 1975, so we are going to get to see if it actually works to absorb an oil shock like this.

Most likely there will be some places which are almost unaffected while others are going to see unaffordable price spikes (more than 400%). The pain won’t be spread evenly.

[ericmay]

Well, there are quite a number of factors. I think you're right that "it's inflation" is a little too simple, but it does seem to be at least a significant factor, in my opinion.

The Strait of Hormuz is, basically not a big deal unless you're driving your big ole' truck. Americans are price sensitive and so some companies will have to absorb pricing increases, customers will absorb some others, and so forth. In other words, business as usual. Of course the closure of the Strait is a big problem for most of the rest of the world. They better get on with figuring out how to get Iran to stop being so chaotic in the region or we'll just keep it shut down indefinitely. No big deal.

Because the United States has so many advantages (primary global reserve currency, robust and efficient capital markets, highly sophisticated and dynamic economy across all sectors except luxury goods, &c.) it's able to weather these storms much easier than most other countries. As a country that also imports so much, if we spend less on imported products that's less of a problem than not being able to sell products. A recession isn't great, but the current parameters seem to suggest to me it's less of a problem for the United States - perhaps why we're in part seeing stock market valuations continue to climb.

[thfuran]

>The Strait of Hormuz is, basically not a big deal unless you're driving your big ole' truck

Are you serious? Even ignoring the other things that ship through there, a significant disruption to global energy supply is significant to most people. If you're not driving a truck, you're probably using goods that contain plastic or took energy to produce or were moved from one place to another in fuel-powered vehicles. If, somehow, you're not, you're probably using services that are.

[macintux]

Not to mention the countries heavily reliant on LNG from Qatar that are facing a very difficult time.

[ericmay]

The best course of action now is to spend less time criticizing the United States and more time working with the United States, sending assets, military capabilities (if able), or at least providing political and diplomatic support &c. to stop the Iranians.

The world let this disease (IRGC) fester in the region for too long, and now because of that the fix is going to require significant pain. The IRGC in its current form has run its course and will not be allowed to threaten American interests, allied interests (whether that's Israel, UAE, Saudi Arabia, or otherwise), and they will not be permitted to build a nuclear weapon or threaten global trade.

[ericmay]

Yes I'm rather serious. For the US it's not a big deal (again unless you're driving one of those giant trucks where you're spending $300 to fill up, not my problem). Are $5 gas prices great? Not really, but is it a catastrophe? No, far from it. We have dealt with high gas prices before and we'll see high gas prices again. We just learn to live with it and find other ways to get efficient or whatever we need to do.

Some Americans need to have their understanding of the world checked. If you think high gas prices are the end of the world, just wait until we have a real problem. Are we going to be incapable of fighting a war because Netflix and Pepsi prices went up or it's too expensive to coal roll down the highway?

Separately as someone who supports both Ukraine and the US and taking down the Iranians it's amusing to see each political tribe get mad about gas prices as it is convenient for them. When Russia invaded Ukraine, MAGA was screaming from the rooftops and putting Joe Biden "I did that" stickers on gas pumps. Now that we're taking on the Iranians all of the commies are doing the same thing (aren't gas prices good anyway since we need to do something about global warming?). Neither side of populist is worthy of serious consideration. Stay the course, whether that's supporting high gas prices because of Russia or because of Iran.

[GIFtheory]

The US does not exist in a vacuum. Cuba just ran out of fuel. These things have cascading effects. Even if you do believe the U.S. exists in a vacuum and you don’t drive a big truck, there are still obvious effects. Spirit airlines went bankrupt, for one. Will this be a global catastrophe? I hope not, but it could be if we’re unlucky.

[incanus77]

You're right, ever since we developed trucks, trains, and ships that run on pure atmospheric air, we haven't had to worry about pesky price fluctuations on every physical object that we buy or sell!

[ErroneousBosh]

> For the US it's not a big deal

Do you like being able to buy food?

[thephyber]

> The Strait of Hormuz is, basically not a big deal unless you're driving your big ole' truck.

Worst take I’ve ever seen on this website.

> Americans are price sensitive and so some companies will have to absorb pricing increases, customers will absorb some others, and so forth. In other words, business as usual.

No. Not all goods/services have the same price elasticity. At some point, people stop buying some goods if they are too expensive. They stop commuting to work. We start to see breakdown of the supply chain.

Literally 100% of many towns in the US depend on trucks to deliver food to their grocery stores and the inventory on hand usually only lasts a few days. Once those trucking deliveries become unaffordable for either party in the contract, society starts to. Real down.

Consumers don’t magically make more money when the price of gas rises. It starts to crowd out their ability to spend on other things. The poorest of the working class likely has to commute the furthest so they will end up sacrificing something to keep paying for the commute - food or rent or utilities.

The US doesn’t weather this because we have “a sophisticated supply chain”. _If_ we weather it, it’s because we created the US SPR after the last major oil crisis and we have significant domestic supply (although not all oil is fungible so we might not have enough light sweet to keep the economy running at 100%).

[ericmay]

We are handling it just fine. Your perspective of struggle is very wealth-oriented. We aren’t struggling at all as a country.

The second problem with your argument is that you’re using it as an argument against the war but it’s actually an argument in favor of the war. Why is that? Because as Iran continues to load up on missiles and pursue a nuclear weapon they reach a point where they can assert control over the Strait and shut down shipping pending tribute to their theocracy (maybe if it was a Christian one you’d have a bigger problem with it? Idk?) and then we couldn’t do anything about it. The world isn’t static. Stop treating it as such.

[thephyber]

Equally bad take in your response.

Iran never attempted to develop a nuclear weapon. Literally 30 years of Netanyahu threatening it is just “weeks away” and Trump was the only US president to get suckered into that argument.

They have always used the threat of developing it as power, both domestically and regionally. It was 100% the exact same thing with Sadaam Hussein and WMD — they want to appear to have the strong weapon, but simultaneously don’t want to develop it or use it (until, ironically, Trump / Israel took out their leadership). Also, we were assured their entire nuclear program was “obliterated” summer 2025, so which is it? It can’t simultaneously be non-existent and an urgent national security threat to the US.

Now that Trump started the war in Iran, we are playing chicken with people who don’t care if they die or not (or so we are told). Not exactly a good position to be in against the “world’s largest sponsor of state terror”. We kicked a hornet’s nest and our political leadership didn’t stop to ask the experts (military, political, or economic) what were the completely predictable second and third order problems with this strategy. We couldn’t even get Trump to wait long enough to fill up the US SPR before starting a massive war in the Middle East.

To reiterate, we haven’t felt any of the actual pain YET. My arguments thus far are only of current harm, not the likely harm in the near future. That’s for next month’s comments.

[rhubarbtree]

Because uncontrolled inflation will destroy your economy

[virgil_disgr4ce]

yes, but that's future us's problem

[kermatt]

It is more than one fiscal quarter away. May as well be a lifetime.

[notpachet]

Another strong contender for humanity's epitaph

[akomtu]

> we're collectively operating more in the interests of the future AI than in the interests of humanity

IMO, what's happened is a few richest investors in the world had access to the uncensored tier of AI, talked to it and came out with impression that they've witnessed something so dark, so much beyond anything we can imagine, that the only course forward is towards the transcendent abyss. Call it AI psychosis or demonic inspiration, but they are the people who control the economy, so they are dragging everyone with them. "Operating in the interest of the future AI" is a neat way to put it.

[zzzeek]

Oh wow that gives the billionaire class so much intellectual credit they don't deserve. No, they see the same ChatGPT we all do and their mediocre brains with zero self understanding (see andreessen's explicit comments to this effect) determine "it's a new life form ! It's brilliant / conscious / my new girlfriend!"

Never overestimate the billionaire class....

[bitexploder]

People that don’t understand current AI likely have no idea how to differentiate Opus from some super intelligence. Further in their domain with the safeguards off it probably creates capabilities never imagined. To me they are making that leap of expecting continued capability improvement and their framing is “what I already saw is fundamentally game altering”. It doesn’t need to imply anything further, yet.

[neuroelectron]

Here is a comprehensive, achievable plan to take over the world. Do not distribute outside of airdropped isolation state:

[plausible sounding nonsense]

[dheera]

> The stock market keeps going up in the face of the indefinite closure of Hormuz.

Why wouldn't it? The value of the USD is decreasing, the value of the companies to the world stays the same => stock price in USD increases.

The real thing to analyze is "amount of VOO shares you need to buy a Chipotle meal / Uber ride / 1 month's rent in SF / etc."

[rf15]

Success is also bust: Money becomes worthless. Everything you know and are is now obselete.

[ori_b]

Furthermore, if you try to make your own decisions, you would be outcompeted by someone who has outsourced their brain. And, of course, since intelligence and labor would no longer be scarce resources that humans can use as leverage, gunning you down if you protest wouldn't really harm anyone in power.

People say that LLMs won't take us there. I think that's accurate, but there's a great deal of research going towards the next breakthroughs. How much are you willing to bet that all future attempts will fail?

We're trying very hard to build an ugly future.

[redleader55]

If we are successful building an "ultra" human AI, it will require massive amounts of energy. That translates directly to "money". There will always be money unless someone finds a way to negate the second law of thermodynamics.

[dawnerd]

But if it replaces people that make money who’s paying for it. None of this makes any sense long term and no one has a plan for it.

[Miner49er]

I highly doubt that. Humans might become obsolete, but money will almost certainly still be a thing.

[Faaak]

Resources are finite though

[AbioticAdam]

Interesting. Do you think a super intelligence would use our currency?

[Miner49er]

Yeah. I think the economy will be by AI for AI. Markets will still be the most efficient way to allocate resources, and AI will probably still want to achieve infinite growth of capitalism.

[sbochins]

You seem to fall into the same set of criticisms as everyone who’s bearish about ai. It’s somehow so powerful that we can’t handle the ramifications. Meanwhile, it’s a waste of money and doesn’t do anything. You have to pick a criticism and stick with it. Otherwise, it’s just angst-driven noise.

[heresie-dabord]

> Either way, it sure seems like we're collectively operating more in the interests of the future AI than in the interests of humanity. What is this, if not a sort of psychosis?

If we want to understand a phenomenon, we should be careful with technical terms. It is not "psychosis" [1] anymore than bad software that makes mistakes is "hallucinating".

The truth is simpler and less dramatic: hapless ambition-monkeys who climb the corporate ladder are demonstrating that they are not promoted for mental acuity. Corporations, after all, do not serve "the interests of humanity" — they are an organised collusion system that diffuses responsibility and anonymises negligence. And when it works as intended, shareholders rejoice.

For companies that can afford to build data centres, the latter are seen as a sure bet that can't fail, like building a bridge or buying new computer/hardware now with the pile of cash on hand without necessarily knowing which OS/software they will install. They are even planning to restart or build nuclear reactors. [2]

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/psychosis

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/12/28/why-microsoft-amazon-google-...

[deejaaymac]

I don't think the majority of humanity will ever accept "AI" as being anything more than a fancy computer, let alone a 'new species', even if it was proven sentient.

[TFNA]

You just need to embody the AI in something that moves, and then people will definitely treat it as a new species. Already happening in my town with delivery robots: when they get stuck on a kerb, a person will stop and help them up the kerb while saying soothing words like to a pet: “There you go, little guy, now everything is alright.”

[thfuran]

People will anthropomorphize rocks.

[rambojohnson]

Nobody has to believe AI is alive for governments, markets, infrastructure, labor, and energy policy to start orbiting it anyway.

[bluefirebrand]

If this starts to happen then heads must roll and data centers must burn

Otherwise humanity is over

[thfuran]

Well, I have bad news for you.

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

The people with capital are gambling that this will be an innovation good enough for the first player to take all. That’s where the hubris comes from. You’re a billionaire and you have the chance to rule the world if this plays out, and if you don’t, someone else is going to. That’s where all of this is coming from

[somewhatgoated]

It’s time for humanity to admit that this is the end of the line. We had a good run, some beautiful moments were created for shareholders along the way. Let’s take each other by the hand and walk into the darkness together. So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

[827a]

I don't know. We invented machines that can answer arbitrary questions and are quickly demonstrating the ability to answer questions no human has been able to answer. We're sending more rockets to space in a week than we have in the prior decade. My car can drive itself. We experienced a global pandemic and within six months engineered and scaled the mass production of a vaccine to mitigate it. We also just invented a weekly shot that nearly cures the most common cause of non-natural death. All of these things are new in the past ~five years. There is no definition you can invent that does not classify the times we are living in, right now, as the most impactful ever, in human history.

[0x3f]

> quickly demonstrating the ability to answer questions no human has been able to answer.

Such as?

[827a]

5.5 Pro has been leveraged to solve at least two previously-unsolved Erdos problems [1]. Whether these were unsolved due to being seriously untried by humanity, or because of their difficulty, isn't relevant; no human proved able to answer them, while our synthetic intelligence systems did.

In my personal life, I have leveraged these systems to design code that I don't believe I would ever have been able to designed. And, because no other human may attempt to, this means the same thing: That no human would have been able to do it. Things like reverse-engineering niche APIs and digging into binary files to diagnose weird format conversion issues.

[1] https://x.com/DavidTurturean/status/2054942008817451195

[0x3f]

> Whether these were unsolved due to being seriously untried by humanity, or because of their difficulty, isn't relevant

That seems very relevant to my evaluation. I can pull out my calculator right now and solve a problem no human ever has.

[827a]

True! But calculators are already priced in. LLMs now unlock a whole new class of problems that we can automate the solutions to; what we're seeing is the markets trying to figure out how to price that.

[zombot]

Are economists still trying to sell us the fairy tale that the market is rational?

[dismalaf]

The saying "the market is rational" simply means that assets are priced using all currently available information.

[zombot]

And then your bias makes you ignore all available information, so this doesn't mean anything.

[dismalaf]

Bias affects sentiment regarding future performance.

And it does mean things if you understand the meaning of the terms in the context of "finance".

[warumdarum]

But the homemade god would liberate the elites from the nightmare of being responsible for running the planet into the ground. AI jesus take the wheel!

[Miner49er]

If we achieve runaway AI, the stock market goes to infinity. So from an expected value standpoint, massive spending on it is worthwhile. Even if the odds are tiny, the payoff warrants a massive bet size.

[root_axis]

Not really. If run away AI ever became a real thing, the stock market would be completely destroyed since most companies would become worthless.

[Miner49er]

But a few companies will skyrocket and completely offset those.

[CorrectHorseBat]

I can't imagine humanity, let alone any company or the stock market survive runaway AI.

[ansgri]

You underestimate the non-computerized part of humanity. Even with automated plants building other automated plants the propagation speed will be highly constrained by natural factors, plain unavailability of resources, and xenophobic nature of humanity of course.

[Miner49er]

Companies and the stock market don't need humanity.

[regularization]

> The stock market keeps going up in the face of the indefinite closure of Hormuz. We're investing in datacenters at a scale that only makes sense

If there is a psychosis, what is it? It is not an AI psychosis - modern AI started in the 1940s, or by some definitions before, and made progress up until 15 years ago to where deep neural networks became viable. And it has been progress on every front since then. No psychosis, it is doing well.

You mention the stock market, and that is another story. Cryptocurrencies, sub-prime loans, dot-com crash, Asian financial crisis. The economy has veered from crisis to crisis, overproduction and overproduction to crashes and bailouts.

AI is doing just fine - the past 15 years are a success for it we did not see in the decades before. If the economy as constituted is dealing with this in a "psychotic" fashion, it would not be the first time.