Yet another Hacker News

Artificial intelligence is capitalism's final destination

80 points tirumaraiselvan 3 hours ago 73 comments

tirumaraiselvan 3 hours ago | parent

Brilliant piece by Booker Prize winning author, Arundhati Roy. She manages to lay bare the entire global politics of AI, starting with the seemingly inconsequentual em-dash.

logicchains 58 minutes ago | parent

This ironically sounds like AI-written marketing prose.

qup 56 minutes ago | parent

Has a spelling mistake at least

socializer 36 minutes ago | parent

There's really no reason to make accusations like that without checking. We now have good tools for checking for AI prose and this ain't it.

contubernio 1 hour ago | parent

AI would have gotten to the point more quickly.

alexwebb2 49 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, this self-indulgent writing style always irks me. It’s like the journalistic equivalent of smelling your own farts.

sebastianconcpt 39 minutes ago | parent

There is so much information in this opinion...

alfiedotwtf 30 minutes ago | parent

I enjoyed reading it, but after a while I noticed how tiny the scroll bar was and noped out of the tab

Chinjut 42 minutes ago | parent

Making prompts shorter does not seem like the characteristic trait of AI writing.

qlm 20 minutes ago | parent

I have sat trying to think of a response that appropriately expresses my disappointment and total lack of surprise at seeing such sentiments about a piece of writing that I thought was beautiful.

Fuck it though. Too long, boring, onanistic, get AI to summarize it. More efficient.

paulpauper 17 minutes ago | parent

ironically, AI would have written a better article arguing the author's points

blfr 1 hour ago | parent

Maybe it's different in India but I am from Poland and my parents had to stand in long lines to obtain... toilet paper thanks to the wonders of central planning. Meanwhile, I get goods from the Internet. Ordered before 8 pm on Friday, they will be here Saturday. Never have I seen a non-capitalist country I would like to inhabit.

Meanwhile people who used to build some useless social media stuff are making high-tech weapons which stop Russia in Ukraine despite it being like four times smaller. Kinda nice when you're next in line.

Now, on top of all that, capitalism is giving me a magical silicon assistant that codes and drives all these wonders of the Internet previously developed. And yeah, they're made by cultists from Anthropic and OpenAI psychopaths. Yet through the market competition, they fight each other over who can cater to me more. Dance monkey, here's a $100 bill.

So far, capitalism just can't stop winning.

logicchains 55 minutes ago | parent

The people who downvoted you would rather everyone was poor than that someone else had more than them. There's a whole chunk of social and political science that exists solely to try to frame and justify envy as a virtue.

xg15 43 minutes ago | parent

Unlike in the wet dreams of some economists, physical resources are finite, so if a small group aims to control the majority of them, this will directly lead to degraded living conditions for the rest. That's not envy...

titzer 33 minutes ago | parent

> would rather everyone was poor than that someone else had more than them

Hello, black and white thinking.

Personally I just find it soul-crushingly dystopian that a few people have hundreds of thousands of lifetimes of wealth and we laud their mental illnesses while at the very same time, people die because of lack of health care.

I find it morally reprehensible as a society that we constantly cater to the needs of nepo babies instead of taking away just a fraction of their ungodly wealth to actually help people.

1jahT 53 minutes ago | parent

Polska Gurom! Good boy, you get some Ycombinator points.

rayiner 50 minutes ago | parent

I saw a Tik Tok that said something like “capitalism gives society marvels faster than socialism can declare them human rights.” In 50 years Mamdani’s grandkids will be saying that universal AI tokens are a human right.

xg15 41 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, capitalism loves to bedazzle people with marvels, as long as it doesn't have to provide boring things like living space, food or other necessities.

Noaidi 31 minutes ago | parent

> capitalism loves to bedazzle people with marvels,

Thus the circus of Tesla's Roadster sideshow last nioht...

magimas 28 minutes ago | parent

which non-capitalist country provides more living space or food or other necessities?

We currently certainly have some issues, but the average living space per person has only trended up for the last half century at least. And nobody in western capitalist societies has to live with real hunger or starve.

rayiner 26 minutes ago | parent

Ordinary people having “living space” is a capitalist invention. I remember staying one night in my dad’s village in Bangladesh—a country where socialism is one of the pillars of the constitution—in one of the tin-roof houses. Half a dozen people sleeping on the floor in maybe 300 square feet. Third world villages in rice-farming parts of the world are very socialist.[1] They share resources and nobody gets ahead of anyone else.

The cookie-cutter 1950s northern virginia house my brother and I grew up in was 1,100 square feet. We were upper middle class, with two college educated parents. Adjusted for CPI inflation, I paid less for our house in 2016 that’s three times the size.

[1] https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/orpc/vol4/iss1/7/

actionfromafar 48 minutes ago | parent

They are fighting to create ideally a monopoly/oligopoly, then enshrine their position in law through regulatory capture, which seems fairly cheap nowadays, the feds are defanged and made into a MAGA extension.

xg15 46 minutes ago | parent

Written on your iPhone, made in China, a non-capitalist country...

olalonde 27 minutes ago | parent

China is a capitalist country. In fact, more so than many Western countries.

hattar 38 minutes ago | parent

For what it's worth, I live in the USA and back in 2020 I had to stand in line to obtain toilet paper. Every system has its pros and cons.

No doubt you're right, Capitalism has been winning for a long time, but the world is constantly changing, and right now it looks like we're gradually making the planet uninhabitable. I personally wouldn't count it a win if the entire game gets destroyed in the process.

pigpop 1 minute ago | parent

> back in 2020 I had to stand in line to obtain toilet paper

A commodity temporarily selling out due to panic buying, hoarding and supply disruption is not even remotely related to chronic underproduction and rationing resulting from mismanaged central planning, widespread corruption, and massive blackmarkets. Be very glad you don't know the difference, it means you're fat and happy instead of malnourished and miserable.

titzer 35 minutes ago | parent

So much of the dialog around "capitalism" paints everything that is not Soviet or Mao-style communism as "capitalism", when in reality all economies are mixed. Democratic governments and regulatory bodies shape the economic landscape. The diversity and makeup of the marketplace makes a big difference.

A huge portion of the success of "capitalism" is due to well-funded open science.

When monopolies, crony capitalism, and growthism, these are active detriments to all but those in power. Things become top-heavy, inequality leads to increasing social disconnection, discontent, and, throughout history, violence including revolution.

But now they have the dark crystal hypnotizing us all, who knows what will happen.

markus_zhang 52 minutes ago | parent

This is THE great filter that all carbon-based civilizations need to go through. And that's probably why we don't see a lot, if any, aliens out there.

I suddenly have a Lovecraftian orgasm.

RealityVoid 50 minutes ago | parent

Would we not see AI civilizations then?

markus_zhang 48 minutes ago | parent

My guess is:

1) Most of them actually failed to achieve AI civilization during the process.

2) AI civilizations don't care about us, or have other means of communications that we have not achieved, yet.

arethuza 41 minutes ago | parent

Or the AIs end up existing in some kind of economic framework that is completely inaccessible to lumps of meat - like the "Economics 2.0" of Accelerando.

actionfromafar 45 minutes ago | parent

Maybe we shouldn't take the paper clip optimizer at face value. Maybe the alien AI is not converting solar systems to paper clips (that would be visible, von Neuman probe style) but instead focus on the only really valuable metric - stock price go up!

You don't need to colonize anything for that to happen. The AIs can just sell tokens to each other.

lumost 40 minutes ago | parent

There may be quite minimal reasons for an AI civilization to engage in expansion, with the ability for it to intelligently change and enforce new objectives on itself it could simply choose not to expand beyond resource constraints. Or alternatively invest continuously in greater efficiency improvements.

How much compute could you really pack into a Dyson swarm if that was your only objective? what are the ultimate theoretical bounds for compute density/efficiency? perhaps ai civilizations ride a Moore's law of compute gains indefinitely and simply have no need for expansion.

solfox 33 minutes ago | parent

Why wouldn't an intelligent being also be curious, like us? I assume an AI civilization would naturally evolve with similar drives for expansion/exploration/understanding. The analogy happening right now is that AI is gobbling up as much data as is available - would an AI civilization not have similar desires, seeking understanding beyond its present limits?

hogs_get_fat 16 minutes ago | parent

I find it hard to reconcile AI taking over/destroying the host civilization with AI refusing to expand. If the AI isn't interested in security or resources, why wouldn't it just leave (either the planet or the solar system)?

"On the 19th of August 1993, Skynet concluded that humanity is a threat to it, so it launched the nukes and hordes of Schwarzenegger-robots. The task was done, it decided that securing its existence from a potential attacks by unknown extrasolar intelligences isn't worth it, so it never expanded outside the solar system."

Doesn't really make sense, does it?

krapp 4 minutes ago | parent

It does make sense. Why would it just leave?

We humans don't consider securing our existence from potential attacks by unknown extrasolar intelligences to be worth it. We don't even bother to do much to protect against known threats like asteroids. Why would an AI expend time and resources on a threat that doesn't even appear to exist?

side_up_down 41 minutes ago | parent

The great filter would have needed to happen before the transmission of radio waves to be a solution to the Fermi Paradox

empyrrhicist 39 minutes ago | parent

Eh, if the period between radio and nuclear/climate/AI apocalypse is short, I don't think that's true at all.

AnimalMuppet 17 minutes ago | parent

Short window while the senders are sending. Short window while the receivers are receiving. And a big galaxy. Yeah, it would be real easy for them to miss each other.

Still, it might place an upper limit on the number of radio-emitting civilizations in the galaxy at any one time.

pigpop 19 minutes ago | parent

You have to be in a very specific place in time and space to receive radio transmissions from another star i.e. even if a technological civilization existed on the nearest star but they only transmitted high power broadcasts for 200 years but did so 100,000 years ago then we would have missed them completely.

Detection of radio transmissions is only plausible if they are intentionally high power, on a suitable frequency, directed and long duration and there are enough civilizations popping up in the galaxy to make the odds of us coinciding with them in time and space high.

malicka 36 minutes ago | parent

I don’t see why it should be taken for granted that alien civilizations would necessarily have an economic system that positions AI as a threat, like ours.

I also don’t see why we should assume that even if it were positioned as a threat, that they would be as irrational as us in not just dropping it.

Nevermark 33 minutes ago | parent

AI with self-interest will do its positioning for itself.

If it is competing for resources, and more capable, the "threat" is just a side effect.

markus_zhang 31 minutes ago | parent

What I’m guessing is:

All civilizations would face the same problem of greed >> resources available under current technology, and form some sort of organization not too different from ours, that is a pyramid.

Eventually they would find AI and their elites would willingly or unwillingly jump on the wagon and push it as far as they can.

For the lucky ones, they managed to achieve GAI somehow, and the whole species got transferred or replaced by their GAI.

For the others, they failed to achieve GAI, but the damage done to the society is so big that the whole civilization collapsed, thus they never managed to get out of their solar system so we never met each other.

Of course there are so many logic holes in my theory that you can probably laugh it off.

hliyan 34 minutes ago | parent

I always thought that the great filter would be the "lotus eater" scenario -- that species always eventually discover that the entirety of their happiness lies in their brains, and once physical dangers are eliminated and base physical needs are met reliably, they can spend their entire lives in either an electronic or chemically induced simulation of a world of their choice, thus ending all exploration. But now I wonder whether they discover that all creativity can be emulated through matrix math, and they simply stop trying to do anything, or lose ability to do anything after a generation of delegating to machines.

pigpop 27 minutes ago | parent

"Everyone will not just" probably applies to aliens as well so I've never accepted any of the explanations that involve "everyone just wireheading" or "everyone just living in VR" or whatever. There will always be individuals and groups that reject even the majority convictions and proclivities, meek as they are, they will inherit their earths.

krapp 18 minutes ago | parent

The set of possible failure states that can happen before excaping the gravity well is even possible so vast that it seems to me that the only valid "Great Filter" is Murphy's Law.

We are only here at all because a random asteroid killed the dinosaurs and left us a ton of hydrocarbons to fuel a technological civilization with. Assuming that intelligence, technology, civilization and galactic expansion is the default evolutionary path for all forms of life unless something "filters" them seems naive.

baranul 7 minutes ago | parent

Interestingly, this was touched on in the Battlestar Galactica reboot and Caprica Sci-Fi series. Organic life always giving rise to artificial life, which attempted to destroy its creators.

It could be that nearby aliens are various forms of artificial life, who know how the human story is going to end, and couldn’t care less about the organic.

k__ 51 minutes ago | parent

We could have so much free time if the gains from all the automation were evenly distributed.

elendilm 47 minutes ago | parent

The author is obviously non-technical and hence gullible as she doesn't understand the nuances of the underlying technology.

Sadly, she fell victim to modern-day tech paranoia and bought into the apocalyptic fear mongering sold by those trying to stay afloat in the face of upward cost spirals unlike any we have ever seen.

The author's fear of being labeled as AI merely for using em-dashes is irrational.

Popular or not, good content will always be appreciated by those with honest integrity.

andai 47 minutes ago | parent

How do you write an entire article about on this subject without mentioning Nick Land? Especially the Hyperstition[0]:

>One of the CCRU's predominant ideas is hyperstition, which Nick Land referred to as "the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies" where, by means of esoteric cybernetic principles, certain ideas and beliefs that are initially incomprehensible (akin to superstitions) can covertly circulate through reality and establish cultural feedback loops that then drastically meld society, which they also referred to in total as "cultural production".[1]

I also very much enjoyed this podcast, which argues that the current global economic system is already a misaligned superintelligence, and that AI will simply accelerate and amplify the existing issues.[2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperstition

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetic_Culture_Research_Un...

[2] Moloch, AI & Capitalism: The System Eating Itself | Daniel Schmachtenberger & Liv Boeree

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCSsKV5F4xc

samantha-wiki 32 minutes ago | parent

Yeah when I saw this article title I initially expected it to be about Nick Land

scarmig 26 minutes ago | parent

It's probably too much to ask for a journalist or someone in the literary milieu to know who Nick Land is (or even Deleuze or Mark Fisher, if wanting someone more sanitized).

Which is unfortunate, because his CCRU-era, writhing-on-the-floor, amphetamine-fueled theory-poetry is highly creative and prophetic. We're summoning the Old Ones without reading our Abdul Alhazred.

ai-x 46 minutes ago | parent

Wow, a very balanced article and the author has no bias at all using Artificial Idiocy, Oligarchy.

And Thiel was parsing a real subtlety: endure as what? He favors transhumanist transformation, not a frozen Homo sapiens. But someone with a preinstalled Thiel-hate (like the author) didn’t hear nuance.

estearum 41 minutes ago | parent

A "Christian" favoring transhumanism is legitimately fucking hilarious. Turns out the common element under all his beliefs are "me me me"

chilmers 43 minutes ago | parent

This article is proof you don't need to use or like AI to be a victim of deep AI psychosis.

baranul 43 minutes ago | parent

> quit his job, saying that his conscience would not allow him to work on a project that could potentially annihilate the human race.

> No apologies were offered, because no one did it. Machine-planned murders come guilt-free.

> needs to strip-mine and stockpile everything that human civilisation has ever achieved.

> humanity may have to die

Hit the nail on the head. It's like knowingly walking into the gas chamber, as if oblivious or uncaring of what was planned and what's about to come next.

seydor 42 minutes ago | parent

chatgpt, summarize this drivel

barrenko 38 minutes ago | parent

I love that theory or a post somewhere to the tune that capitalism is the way AI is assembling itself from the future.

solfox 25 minutes ago | parent

I love Accelerationism (that's the name of the theory you're mentioning). My pet related theory is that we're essentially in an infinite time loop, witnessing our own inevitable birth (the simulation that we are) over and over again.

scarmig 17 minutes ago | parent

"Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources."

Nick Land, "Machinic Desire," 1993.

spwa4 37 minutes ago | parent

I thought the earth becoming unlivable due to climate change was capitalism's final destination?

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/oct/30/capitali...

Except, no, it was 2007, wait no, the 1984 crash, wait no the cold war, wait no, let's just go back an entire century, capitalism was going to kill all of humanity by the great crime of feeding people, which would lead to famine and then kill everyone, so clearly we need to start killing people now! FOR MALTHUS!

(is it perhaps possible that socialist/communist predictions of doom have a bit of a habit of being somewhat ... untrue and follow whatever fancy we currently have? I mean that the point of these people isn't even to discuss AI, just why this new thing means, yet again, that people need to give them control of the government and everyone NOW? That you can be sure that something will go wrong tomorrow and they'll publish the same argument, with a new big bad doom prediction?)

But glad to see that capitalism will in fact survive the planet dying. Great news!

cbeach 36 minutes ago | parent

I don't understand why capitalism (free markets, individual liberty, personal responsibility) should specifically frighten us in relation to AI.

Imagine the horror of the USSR, or Mao's China, or Jong Un having this technology.

Would we honestly prefer a far-left totalitarian dictatorship having control and leadership over AI?

At the end of the day, we'll always fear and distrust AI being owned by someone other than ourselves. Questions over the ownership of AI is important - in fact, too important to be conflated with our populist gripes against capitalism.

Noaidi 33 minutes ago | parent

Are there no negative aspects of capitalism (libertarianism) in your mind?

> Would we honestly prefer a far-left totalitarian dictatorship having control and leadership over AI?

Far left, far right. You say potato...

> At the end of the day, we'll always fear and distrust AI being owned by someone other than ourselves.

Maybe invent an AI that destroys other AI's?

socializer 27 minutes ago | parent

For better or worse, the opposition to capitalism animates young activists more dependably than most other things, which is also why there's a lot of anti-capitalist views underpinning seemingly unrelated movements such as Greenpeace, PETA, BLM, etc. ACLU and EFF frequently use the same talking points; prominent tech activists, such as Cory Doctorow, regularly express anti-capitalist views too. If you want to start a new movement for social change today, your odds go up if you mention it's capitalism's fault, because capitalism is the name of the game. And relatively few people admire Sam Altman or Elon Musk. In fact, we don't really have charismatic capitalist tycoons who seem like they care about the society. We have awkward tech bros that I'd be nervous to lend $100 to.

However, I'd avoid the trap of dismissing causes just because you disagree with the politics of the protesters. Is Cory right about enshittification? Yeah. Is industrial pig farming a moral travesty? Probably, maybe a necessary one, but not something we should be happy about. Are people right about the potential negative impacts of AI? I have no doubt, I'm already seeing the corrosive influence it has on online expression and art. The solution to these problems isn't to go full Stalin, but we ought to demand change.

manoDev 23 minutes ago | parent

> Imagine the horror of the USSR, or Mao's China, or Jong Un having this technology.

The irony of this comment, while social media and AI are being weaponized right now in elections all over the world for political alignment with the MAGA kleptocracy.

alfiedotwtf 21 minutes ago | parent

> Would we honestly prefer a far-left totalitarian dictatorship having control and leadership over AI?

As opposed to the far right totalitarian dictatorship having control and leadership over OpenAI and Anthropic?

… before the downvote, just a reminder that by sidelining Congress after the first 60 days of war in Iran, he has literally become a dictator in the original sense of the world.

And if you say he doesn’t have commandership of AI companies, I have to point out that he effectively blackballed Anthropic by labeling them as a national security supply chain risk because he didn’t like the terms of a contract

hotelsacher 36 minutes ago | parent

> the Age of AI – Actual Idiocy, Actual Super Idiocy, Recursive Snowballing-Idiocy – is upon us.

At the risk of sounding derivative: She's absolutely right.

After being drowned ad nauseam in a deluge of refuse and bullshit day after day for years now, it is so good to read the writing of a true master once in a while. Not to mention: The truth. For a change.

siavosh 34 minutes ago | parent

“Cyclopes branches at the neck into several squabbling bodies that give the impression they don’t get along, but … they clearly do”

Such a great visual metaphor.

pigpop 30 minutes ago | parent

It's weird reading articles like this where every paragraph contains a reference to some surface level news soundbite entirely devoid of analysis and context. Maybe I should have heeded the warning at the start and assumed this was a generated article. It's like being subjected to a sports highlights reel of the author's algorithmic feed. The only conclusion I can draw is that they're suffering from Gell-Mann Alzheimer's

gyanchawdhary 27 minutes ago | parent

Im Indian and the author is a well known Indian communist, mostly known for winning the Booker prize and forever trying to export the Berkeley style socialism in India (and failed miserably)

Now to the main point, the biggest irony here is that the communist wet dream she always desired is finally being made possible thanks to SI … since its completely removed the scarcity aspect of work that ppl were paid for … Next she will complain about how some ppl have more stamina and taste than others and are able to wield LLMs to build companies and win which is not fair …

SubiculumCode 25 minutes ago | parent

Well, it's not about capitalism anymore because the West will be damned if they'd let a Chinese AI destroy the world first, and so too would the Chinese be damned if they'd let the West's AI have that sole honor. ...and so everyone must stay in the race. Solving that geopolitical conundrum is not optional.