[djoldman]

If you're going to take the time to read Geohot, take it with a grain/boulder of salt: he appears to enjoy poking the bear / being provocative, sometimes outrageously. Sometimes he's writing hyperbole that he thinks is hyperbole to make a point or just enjoy taking the extreme stance. Sometimes he's dead serious.

Anyway, he touches on 2 points that I think don't get enough coverage:

1:

> Software didn’t eat the world, it largely removed one layer of friction then reintroduced it for the benefit of a few tech companies.

USA-style capitalism has shown itself to be fantastic at seeking profit. Unfortunately, it turns out that in the context of long standing regulation, it is far far more profitable to exploit regulatory loopholes and user/human irrationality/weaknesses than to increase productivity.

The upshot of this is that the arc of most companies is to first serve the user and then leverage that relationship to exploit market and consumer weakness. So you get UI dark patterns, non-colluding oligopolistic price manipulation, outsourcing of costs to public entities, etc. while the core value proposition erodes as the company strategy turns ever more into making profit by legal anti-competitive tactics.

This company arc is so prevalent it's boring: it's a reflection of the system and it's not Facebook or Google or [insert whatever], it's what the system allows and therefore incentivizes.

2:

> No matter how high quality your tokens are, they cannot turn lead into gold.... AI 2040 includes this picture of a datacenter in the ocean. Just like vaporware, you can generate a picture easily. But in reality, you have to deal with supply chains.

"Bullshit jobs" took over the zeitgeist for a turn awhile ago. So many jobs are so far removed from actually moving physical things around. It may be the case that AI will just accelerate how quickly companies generate reports about reports about possible strategies to address potential futures and pay employees to do it.

It seems that AI mostly accelerates paperwork, not production or real service work that tangibly improves real world outcomes. It's all: faster images, more and faster powerpoints, more accurate dictation to satisfy insurance requirements (that is it's own regulatory capture), etc. etc. There are exceptions, but they seem to be few.

[fragmede]

Except paperwork is how the world turns. Say you want to throw an event. A medium sized gathering. More than a couple of friends. What happens if someone gets hurt at this event? Who's liable? Who's insured for what? It's boring and annoying, but if you throw an event without insurance and something happens, you're gonna have problems. So that paperwork needs to happen. Yes, it's not "work" the same way as actually organizing a band or being in one to play for the event is, but it's work nonetheless. AI is able to lighten the load of that very real actual work thank needs to happen in an adult world with responsibilities and liabilities. You may not respect it and think it's "bullshit", but having a plan that isn't "lol, oops" for what happens when something goes wrong, which it will, isn't bullshit, it's called being prepared and not being irresponsible. We could all just fly by the seat of our pants and run away if something bad happens, but collectively we'd be worse off for that. If I could wave a magic wand and live in a world where accidents never happen, I would, but unfortunately, I don't have one, so we're forced to live in a world of paperwork and responsibilities.

[djoldman]

> Say you want to throw an event. A medium sized gathering. More than a couple of friends. What happens if someone gets hurt at this event? Who's liable? Who's insured for what? It's boring and annoying, but if you throw an event without insurance and something happens, you're gonna have problems. So that paperwork needs to happen.

People have been throwing events of medium size since... well, pretty much our entire existence. For most of that, we've done it without general liability insurance.

Then we made new or interpreted old laws making others far more responsible for our well-being. Whole industries are propped up on this: a ton of lawyers, insurance companies, insurance boards, government departments, etc. etc. Did we increase overall utility by spreading out the risk more optimally given the massive cost to support that system? I'm not sure.

And so so so much of all that exists to dot the i's and cross the t's. Government staffers write and debate the law changes, insurance adjusters fight the lawyers, photos are taken, reports are written, doctors have to write more, computer systems crunch numbers.

Many feel that their jobs are bullshit because so much of this seems to be in service of the process or some possibility that might happen as opposed to doing something that actually changes something directly/tangibly.