The 0.001% has a controlling stake in AI, so they're in the clear.

The 99.999% needs to assert their controlling stake in the technology. I don't know what this looks like. Maybe ubiquitous unionizing, coupled with a fully public and openly-trained LLM.

There are already several fully open source LLMs. You can start participating in those projects today.

https://www.bentoml.com/blog/navigating-the-world-of-open-so...

Are most of these distilled from other models? I'm talking about publicly owned and fully open foundation models, which will require significant government-level investment into GPU farms and training.

No chance of it happening in the US due to lobbying pressure, but maybe in a more civilized country... (unless a distributed SETI@home-type architecture becomes viable)

I don't understand your comment. The USA is the most civilized country in the world. And some of the LLMs linked above are fully open source.

The monkeys claimed ownership of the world's resources according to monkey law. I guess we are now subservient to the monkeys.

Well, feel free to drive yourself to another society once we get ours fixed.

It's the toxic American hyper-individualist mindset. As an American, I hate it so much.

Hyper-individualism goes a long way in eroding racism and sexism though, urging people to view others as individuals rather than members of some larger group. I’d rather hyper-individualism than hyper-collectivism. Once you consider someone first as a member of some other group, the marginalization and then erasure of that other becomes easier.

No, they're a "fuck the C-suite, we're the ones who actually run this joint."

I'd say commercial automobiles probably have a net positive effect. (Though their impact on pollution and climate change can't be discounted.) But daily life in walkable and public transitable European cities is so, so much nicer and healthier than in most American cities. I'd trade ubiquitous personal automobiles for that in a heartbeat.

There's still plenty of cars in europe. Biggest advantage of europe is even the major cities are only so large in footprint, like even berlin is barely over a dozen miles across. Major US cities could be 40-60 miles across. Greater LA maybe over 100 miles across depending on how you measure, all contiguous development. The northeast corridor is nearly contiguous urban/suburban development over a ~450 mile snake from washington dc to boston. Makes a little 10 mile rail line in berlin capture a much greater share of potential trips within the berlin urban area than a 10 mile rail line pretty much anywhere in the US. LA has a light rail line that is over 50 miles long.

I can't imagine most people working on gain-of-function virology expect it to make the world worse.

Many engineers want nothing more than to eventually become managers. So this is not surprising. But your job is not what it was before.

Not really managers, I would put the new role more in the senior engineer / architect category. Those still have to deal with deeply technical things like design, architecture, problem decomposition, research, domain expertise, code review, collaborating with technical peers -- all of which (people) managers don't typically do.

If you ever wanted to climb the senior technical ladder, this is now the quickest way to experience it. Except instead of other people you get to work with agents which, while a very different experience, requires largely the same skills.

So yes, your job is not what it was before, but with career growth it typically was not anyway.

I think it's much better for society for companies to overhire than underhire, especially when they can easily afford it.

This is an idealistic view and makes hiring seem like charity.

There will always be steep corrections when they overhire driven by economic cycles or otherwise (and we're living through an otherwise).

Thing is, the companies doing these layoffs rarely actually end up losing money from overhiring. They’re still profitable. Just not profitable enough for the people on top.

That’s a bit perverse. In democracies, corporations ultimately exist to serve society, not shareholders.

The plutocracy is forgetting that a working and productive populace - with fair wages and representation - is their end of the deal for disproportionally benefitting from the fruits of labor from others; and directly prevents violence against the status quo. See: The top articles in the last 3 days.

Sure, but all they have to do is not hold up their end of the bargain. Who enforces that? These are just norms from 60 years ago that the rich decided they no longer have to follow.

They’ve started treating incorporation like a modern day papal indulgence, something that absolves whatever they do in the name of profit. It doesn’t. Limited liability buys you forgiveness in court but it doesn’t buy you forgiveness in the court of public opinion. Doing harm for a company is still doing harm.

I think you are correct in asserting the mercy-disciple of market forces.

I also think that counter points on the inhumanity of firms, misses that economies are an objective way to structure incentives to achieve subjective ends.

If you want more money to travel to other parts of the pyramid, or you want to disincentivize certain behavior, then economic incentives can be set up to achieve those goals.

Expecting firms to do charity is pointless. Expecting firms to optimize under constraints is not.

At societal scale hiring people is self-interest, not charity. Otherwise you'll get to exactly where the US is heading now: large parts of the consumer market are mostly dead because people have no discretionary spending power left, and the only way to make money as a business is to become a monopolist.

That's the problem, they can't afford it

They can afford it. They just want to make even more profit.

I think the media and politicians are reflecting popular sentiment, not the other way around.

“You cannot give me anything, because all that you have is stolen.”