[kingstnap]

Its hard to read the first half of this as anything other than regulatory capture propaganda. It really all ties together as:

> AI has become a major commercial technology

>Frontier AI models, like airplanes, should be required to go through technical testing and auditing, and their release should be blocked or reversed as a threat to public safety if they do not meet high standards of safety

> AI companies that develop advanced AI models must have strong security standards that protect their model weights

Anyway Dario's financial interests aside. This is an interesting breakpoint for me.

> Second, any response to AI-driven job displacement needs to address both the need to provide for everyone economically, and the need for people to find meaning, purpose, and agency. The latter is ultimately more important

To me this reads as an out of touch statement. I think the majority of people on earth work to keep a roof over their heads. Of course work can be a source of meaning, purpose, and agency, but to call it the more important aspect on a societal level is a sort of rich person like Dario statement to make.

[opsnooperfax]

He has to pull up the ladder before people realize doubling cost for a 5% gain is bonkers. The cat is out of the bag. They can try to sabotage, but we’ve already come to far

[barrkel]

Working to keep a roof over the head of yourself and those you love is an identity. It's social proof that you have value, that you can do something for someone else.

[annzabelle]

I was funemployed for a 9 month stretch last year (layoff severance package, followed by waiting for a visa and traveling), and when I wasn't traveling, I found my life kind of falling apart with a lack of structure. I tried to schedule workout classes and hobbies, as well as involvement in my church, but it just didn't fill my time, and none of my friends were free during the day. I spent a lot of time with my retired parents, but the time we spent together became very low quality, and it was tinged with the knowledge that I ought to be doing something else with a lot of my time. I also spent a lot of time scrolling.

I started work again 3 weeks ago, and I find myself using the time outside of work much better because there is less of it.

I would still love a 30 hour work week, and if I had young children, I am certain that I would cherish time off much more.

[sph]

It is simply because you have spent all your life being told what to do with your working hours, that you cannot self-direct and find a productive use for your time other than lazying around.

The fact that you call it ‘funemployment’ is proof of this, which is perfectly fine if the goal is relaxing between jobs. Plenty of people that work for themselves have no such notion.

[barrkel]

It takes time to re-ground yourself, to renew your ambitions to new circumstances.

It usually takes more than a year even for employees.

[sph]

Oh yes, it's been 3 years for me of being 'untethered' and it's still so easy to just waste my day if I am not careful with distractions. And the feeling that I should just stop being silly and I should find a normal job like a normal person will often find me and ruin my days.

[annzabelle]

I honestly think it's a temperament thing. Some people are built for sustained focused work outside of structured workplaces and schools, but many of us aren't.

I personally am happiest with a structured in person workplace environment, because I struggle with self direction even in a remote 9-5. I have ADHD and struggled to remember/do homework my whole childhood, if that explains anything. In summers or other gaps in employment or school throughout my life, I've often started with ideas of projects or self study I want to do, but they all fizzle out in a week due to lack of discipline.

I'm not undisciplined in every context - I'm a good employee at in person jobs, and I started running in my early 20s and run 15+ miles a week in the cold, rain, and dark, but my discipline just falls apart when I'm trying to fill a whole week.

I think these traits are much more common than happily self-employed or early retired people think.

[SaucyWrong]

As somebody who is currently rounding month 6 of funemployment, I agree wholeheartedly with this statement.

[thepasch]

Working to keep a roof over the head of yourself and those you love is a necessity. It can become an identity if you enjoy what you do, sure, but that is not a given for, I'd say, a big majority of the workforce, globally.

[slyzmud]

I agree with you, 99% of the people work just to pay bills, but that doesn't make the other part false.

I'm a software engineer and love thinking about problems methodically. Every time I hear a someone saying that programmers are no longer required (even if I don't agree with that) if feels really bad, it's equivalent to saying that what I do best in life has no value anymore.

To put it on other words: I really like philosophy, but what value do they provide in modern world? Who pays for the work of a philosopher? I think people will start of thinking of programmers like that eventually.

[poslathian]

I’m lucky to have more than my share of really exceptional programmers to hang out with and they all say the same thing: “I haven’t been writing code for months and don’t expect to again”

This is a way different sentiment than “programmers aren’t needed anymore” - I’m just seeing ambition, motivation, and fun go up in lockstep.

I first heard this in November and slowly one by one it’s everyone whose opinion I respect.

FWIW the other popular topic is how abysmally stupid and limited these amazing tools continue to be, despite also being magic.

Oh and that none of us have gotten token maxxing to succeed, despite lots of trying.

[besterman23]

You’re arguing to a subset of people who have made work their entire life and have retroactively justified their sacrifices with thoughts such as high compensation means what I do is socially valuable. However, at the same time they work at Meta or something making internal tools to make product developers 5% more efficient at tweaking the addiction algorithm to gain 0.2% more screen-time per user.

[thewebguyd]

You have value just by virtue of being a living being. No one needs work to have or portray value, that's just capitalist propaganda.

My own identity certainly isn't "IT manager," nor do I derive life meaning or self actualization from what do to collect a salary to feed myself and have shelter. In fact, my career/job is by far the least important thing in my life, I have it purely out of necessity.

[barrkel]

You don't need to work, but you need to have value in your tribe. You need the respect of peers. You need to feel part of a team. You need to feel like you contribute something to the lives of those you love.

[danaris]

> No one needs work to have or portray value, that's just capitalist propaganda.

To be fair, it was Puritan propaganda for a long time first.

[FergusArgyll]

Can you explain how this is attempted regulatory capture? To start a lab now which can actually compete for the frontier (i.e. and pass the "Threshold of compute" needed to get regulated) a lab / company would need a ton of money. Surely a well funded operation of that kind can deal with the regulations.

[kingstnap]

Well he explicitly calls for regulations that ban open weight models, which of course hugely threaten Anthropic's API business model. If we got a open weight model actually around as good as Opus 4.6 that would be extremely bad for them.

Regulating competitors out of existence like that is textbook regulatory capture.

Dario is also huge on regulations banning Chip exports to China, who are the only other real competitors to US Labs, open weight or not.

Also invariably, such corporations always create regulations that are easier for them and harder for competitors.

[gck1]

You'd need a ton of money if you followed the unoptimized, cash burning mindset of existing AI labs. There's probably a ton of optimization that is just sitting on the table. Chinese labs have proven it can be done for way less money.

Then there's running inference service of open weights, which doesn't necessarily require opening a lab. You can grab Chinese model weights and sell inference.

Anthropic wants to make sure nobody can open a new domestic lab, or provide inference services of unauthorized open weight models, or release open weights if model is good. It is regulatory capture - it covers all areas that are dangers to Anthropic's bottom line.

[thayne]

For one thing, the financial barrier may not necessarily stay that high forever.

For another, such regulations could prevent a competitor from making the weights open for their model to try and disrupt the competition.

And finally, Amodei would no doubt want to be involved in designing the tests the AI needs to pass, and could (and likely would) design it in a way that Anthropic models would be able to pass easier than competing models.

[MattDamonSpace]

It’s just not insane to imagine that ONCE AGAIN the people making the technology might not have any fucking clue what will come of it

Seriously does anyone besides Jules Verne have a decent track record of predicting “The Future”?

lol oh color me shocked, another ape is loudly declaring “this is the way the world will be”

[sph]

Sci-fi writers have a great track record of predicting the future.

Scientists and engineers have an abysmal track record of predicting the future.

You know to be concerned when a claim is dismissed with ‘that’s just science fiction, it will never happen’

[lostmsu]

> Sci-fi writers have a great track record of predicting the future.

Broken clock... They are good at exploring possibilities, but none of the famous one predicted today.

[sph]

Quite the extraordinary claim. What of today writers of the past did not predict?

Mind you, no one is able to predict the future with accuracy. I am not saying that a single person has gotten all their prediction right. That's ludicrous. But while scientists and engineers are focused on today's possibilities, the ones that are allowed to imagine what the future might look like are called writers.

[danaris]

Most sci-fi from prior to the smartphone age did not foresee pocket-sized interconnected computing and communications devices, and certainly did not foresee how they would be commonly used. Where they addressed it at all, they largely predicted computing to either remain in roughly the form factors of the ages they were writing in, or move to something holographic and largely impractical, with the most commonly-expected advancement being sentience (and that sentience being expected well before 2026 in many cases—eg, 2001: A Space Odyssey).

Despite certain people's protestations to the contrary, we are nowhere near having a human-level conversational computer assistant able to fuzzily interpret our requests correctly every time...but our computing is also not primarily done on "comconsoles" or any of the other versions of stationary computers, nor are we jabbing and swiping our hands at interfaces projected on the air in front of us.

More generally speaking, except in the hardest of hard sci-fi, the most common kinds of advancement "predicted" are those that are convenient for the story. This means a lot of faster-than-light travel, universal translators, and for visual media many voice-enabled interfaces of one sort or another, as well as the aforementioned holographic interfaces (so we can see the user's face and the interface at the same time).

[ggrelet]

In Dan Simmons' Hyperion, the characters have a device called comlog. It's a portable device which connects to a broad network. It also has the ability to read vital constants.

The author is quite vague about it, no doubt, and that's one of his staples. But he foresaw something human would carry to get connected to other humans and information.

(That book won the Hugo award in 1990)

[lostmsu]

You are claiming sci-fi writers predicted better than scientists. No way that's true from the perspective you lean on here, where you appear to take all scientists vs all writers or something along the lines.

[hintymad]

> Its hard to read the first half of this as anything other than regulatory capture propaganda

I wonder if any tech company managed to thrive long in history by betting so violently on fear mongering and regulatory capture.