💯💯💯 A.M.E.N. I’m sure to sound like a bumpkin… but how on Earth can AI successfully grow and be ‘profitable’ when the society that “depends” (🤮) on it is going to be so poor that we can’t afford to EAT much less engage in the wonders of regurgitated recursive programming? I don’t have much in the means of capital.. but all that I have is going to old-school AI = Agricultural Intelligence, so that I can somehow get off of the pharmaceutical-industrial food complex that is going to kill us one-way-or-one-way!
This raises a serious set of economic/philosophical questions that need to be dealt with but haven’t yet been asked. I’ll give you one: given an economy, tax structure, and measurement scheme based on labor as a major factor, what happens when labor is no longer even a minor factor? Another: if all or most production (goods AND services) is automated, how is consumption funded (who pays for it and how), and if there is no consumption, why produce? (Ok, that’s two or three questions, but I did say they were a set).
Along those lines: in a society where labor no longer exists, and no one is compensated roughly in line with that labor, on what basis are the goods and services distributed? For instance, can everyone have a private jet? Can ANYONE have a private jet? What decides the answers to this question?
If we are stuck here on Earth in the current paradigm, it will be whatever entities/sycophants/psychopaths control the weaponry…. But I am opting for a new paradigm where private jet distribution is based on a social credit score gauged on dedication to kindness to animals 😆 Just kidding!!! Kind of….
""Chartreuse is a French herbal liqueur that has been made by Carthusian monks since 1737, reportedly according to instructions set out in a manuscript given to them by François Annibal d'Estrées in 1605. It was named after the monks' Grande Chartreuse monastery, located in the Chartreuse Mountains north of Grenoble, France. Today the liqueur is produced in their distillery in nearby Aiguenoire""
😬😅 In my defiance of this AI situation I don’t even have a chatbot installed… but I will think about phoning a friend for help because it WOULD be interesting since they lack a palate and spirit…. If you will.
Scott... CULL the majority of modern moron slaves that are turned OBSOLETE with the introduction of A.I./Robots/Automated Moving Systems.
Without huge herds of MMS/3i's there is very little need for "governments"... Corporations will gladly fill the vacancy with a proper level of service/price!
Did Word Perfect take your world away in 1990? Did the secretaries all go to the poor house? No, they got new jobs in the back office etc. and every manager had to fill the gap himself after hours while his typewriter salesmen learned to xerox.. When you flood a pool, will the water disappear? No, it will redirect to more useful ends. Will the programmers disappear? No, they will move up to QA roles so the software they used to make is now 100 bigger....but not better... They will spend most of their time skimming and correcting "automated" code jobs that are more "productive" on paper, but not qualitatively better than their manual work. It's a monumental hoax directed at extracting data from you. If your 3% annual growth train reaches the wall of diminishing returns, you have to do something. AI is that something, copper wrapped in gold.
Hardly an apt analogy. AI aims to *replace* human workers, not make them more productive. Given that software is growing larger and more complex, negative growth in productivity is not sustainable. Automating jobs has a tipping point beyond which the economy as we know it ceases to function, and unless we know and influence what will replace it, we’re toast. The law of large numbers is a built-in limiter to constant growth, and perhaps constant growth as a goal is part of the problem.
Pleased to meet you Scott:) No worries. You can never be "replaced". How will you be replaced by a word puzzle data harvester built to never touch the ground? You may loose your current occupation, but if you take it with a smile and move on with both feet on the ground and a good attitude, I can assure you, you will be better off some time from now in a new role you enjoy more. 7 years ago when you called your insurance company you were lead through a maze of menus. Today, first thing you get is a nice and personable human offering to help. Why? Because you ditched the ones not honoring your basic tenets: You are human.
We’re already seeing signs that entry level positions are being automated. Taken to its logical conclusion, we are one generation from not being able to replenish the senior professionals we have now. AI is not capable of doing those jobs, and the current track of AI development won’t make it able to, so what happens when we no longer have capable humans doing the work that humans need to do? Your answer is too simplistic and ignores what’s really going on.
Such a valuable discussion. Thank you for your input. It's gonna be a bumpy road, but on the other side you will see that "AI" as you see it today was a hoax.
This Ponzi scheme will collapse along with the civilisation that built it, and the parasite, having sucked the life out of its host, will move on to another host – one with better prospects
",,,the market is simultaneously lending these companies hundreds of billions of dollars and buying insurance in case they can’t pay it back."
I guess people have forgotten how well insurance like this worked when companies like AIG were the underwriters. Can you spell "counter-party risk"?
Makes perfect sense to borrow rather that put perfectly good cash into this. If the whole thing blows up (as it most likely will), they'll be playing with OPM (other people's money). Between now and then, how much do you want to bet that their existing capital gets firewalled off somehow?
In the current state of the market, we should be glad someone is attempting some post facto risk management instead of letting the algos go hog wild on hype.
May we talk as adults here? I am actively engaged with 40+ years of experience in industrial construction and may emphatically state that there is no reality to any of the estimates on the provided timelines. Anything we collectively sought to build three years ago, but financed in the last few years, remains years out to completion, while anything we finance today is five-plus years out to completion This is how our reality works.
There is this thing about black holes Ive read about some years ago.
Apparently when its a really big one, it should be possible to cross the event horizon, the point of no return, without noticing anything odd.
Its only when you want to turn around or alter your course that you find out your a doomed and about to get turned into spaghetti. Or whatever it is, that happens beyond the event horizon.
It feels like this, except we are dealing with insanity on a massive scale, a singularity of idiocy. And we are long past the point we could turn around.
"Larry Page was quoted saying 'I'm willing to go bankrupt rather than lose this race'.": How about "winning" this race and going bankrupt anyway? That may well happen, because ...
"[Yann LeCun's] argument was that LLM capabilities were fundamentally limited.": I agree (and I speak as a published researcher in computer science at UC Berkeley and the Swedish Institute of Computer Science - Google-Scholar me if you care), and LeCun and I are very far from the only ones. For example:
"... systems with human-level reasoning are unlikely to be achieved through the approach and technology that have dominated the current boom in AI, according to a survey of hundreds of people working in the field. More than three-quarters of respondents said that enlarging current AI systems ... is unlikely to lead to what is known as artificial general intelligence (AGI). An even higher proportion said that neural networks, the fundamental technology behind generative AI, alone probably cannot match or surpass human intelligence."
"Transformer" models, a category that includes all the currently prominent LLMs, are basically "one weird trick", but human intelligence is a whole bag of tricks that evolved over millions of years and mostly aren't understood by neuroscientists yet. So although I don't know of any good reason to doubt that something meriting the term "artificial general intelligence" is possible, I also don't know of any good reason to expect it to materialize in less than 20 years, and that's generous. Moreover, I'm confident that, like most scientific progress, it will emerge not from the likes of Google and Microsoft but from publicly funded research, mostly at universities (and not necessarily American ones).
All along, the LLM craze and its cheerleaders have reminded me of nothing so much as Charles Mackay's celebrated book "Extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds".
As I keep saying to anyone that want to listen: we need another technological leap like transformers to achieve the next step. The current systems are 'cool' and 'great' and a lot of things, but they're not "intelligent" per se.
I would like to pushback though on the public <-> private angle: it's amazing what common people can do in their garages. And THAT is what we need. Unis won't face the same constraints in terms of processing power and budgets that grassroots have. So it's unlikely they're incentivized enough to really dig through.
<<The Dutch tulip bulb craze, or tulip mania, peaked between 1634 and February 1637. During this period, prices for rare tulip bulbs skyrocketed due to speculation, with single bulbs sometimes costing more than a house or 10 years of a skilled artisan's wages before the market collapsed abruptly in early 1637>>
Suddenly, the Dutch fascination with Tulip bulbs looks totally rational by comparison.
These brainiac tech bros must have access to the really, really good magic mushrooms...
Remember when all those tech ceos got direct commissioned as colonels a few years back? Yeah this is to conceal massive capex for a manhattan project level buildout for the govt I bet.
I sometimes wonder who buys up all these bond issuances and debt. Are they institutional investors or the Gulf states? In any case, what is happening in the Middle East will greatly affect this bubble as it affects the whole chain on so many levels from access to helium, metal extraction, chip production and of course energy.
Here's another unrecoverable waste stream for silver: RFID adhesive tags for parcel and merchandise logistics. The conductive antenna contains a small amount of silver. I wonder how many hundreds of millions of these things get discarded daily?
Ah, reverting to the old math. Your instincts look sound. I recently spent a shit-ton of cash there (COSTCO) loading up in preparation for the looming apocalypse.
They are not building the infrastructure for people to use AI. They are building it so AI can use people.
And don't worry about the debt, it's about to be inflated away (like your investments and savings), so that $1 trillion on/off your balance sheet is only $25 billion in new digi-bux. Problem solved!
In Spain you can still get a hunting license as way to get a long firearm. You have to get through a couple of administrative hurdles but is still feasible. For now.
3D printers to the rescue! Of course, you'll need to get the nitrate for your black powder by collecting\boiling your urine but there IS a path to discreet firearm ownership if you are committed...
Well I work now as a plumber / electrician and I’m stocking literal electrical wiring and water piping and will advance buy a couple of power tools I was planning to get in the future…
I don't know much about finance nor AI, but it seems the energy required to run data centres is enormous, so expensive, plus don't they need water to cool things, or would A Con do it? Will governments, all invested in AI, technocracy, say the project is too big to fail, like the cheating banks and so give them money? Escape Key has written much on what's already happening, compliance, how things were/are set up with public/private partnerships. If losses, tax payers pay but all profits retained by private partners. So maybe they don't need to worry.
I know of no good reason to doubt that Sanders means it. Not only is it consistent with his politics overall, but it's a popular position; see, for example:
💯💯💯 A.M.E.N. I’m sure to sound like a bumpkin… but how on Earth can AI successfully grow and be ‘profitable’ when the society that “depends” (🤮) on it is going to be so poor that we can’t afford to EAT much less engage in the wonders of regurgitated recursive programming? I don’t have much in the means of capital.. but all that I have is going to old-school AI = Agricultural Intelligence, so that I can somehow get off of the pharmaceutical-industrial food complex that is going to kill us one-way-or-one-way!
This raises a serious set of economic/philosophical questions that need to be dealt with but haven’t yet been asked. I’ll give you one: given an economy, tax structure, and measurement scheme based on labor as a major factor, what happens when labor is no longer even a minor factor? Another: if all or most production (goods AND services) is automated, how is consumption funded (who pays for it and how), and if there is no consumption, why produce? (Ok, that’s two or three questions, but I did say they were a set).
This is going to take a lot of whiskey.
Along those lines: in a society where labor no longer exists, and no one is compensated roughly in line with that labor, on what basis are the goods and services distributed? For instance, can everyone have a private jet? Can ANYONE have a private jet? What decides the answers to this question?
If we are stuck here on Earth in the current paradigm, it will be whatever entities/sycophants/psychopaths control the weaponry…. But I am opting for a new paradigm where private jet distribution is based on a social credit score gauged on dedication to kindness to animals 😆 Just kidding!!! Kind of….
Your wealth is based on the number of rescue cats and dogs you care for. Sort of like cattle or sheep in the Old Testament. I’m game.
The same thing that always decided it: violence.
I am on the quest for the proper whiskey to contemplate this. I’ll be back. 🥃
whiskey... whiskey...
Limoncello! Amaretto! Spiced Gin!
People nowadays consume way too little of fruit:
https://www.kozelj.si/kartuzija-pleterje/pleterska-hruska-0-7l/3830018790085
p.s. This is also made by Monks
Oh, I love that one too. I need to retire early to travel Europe. Dunno if the wife will be happy with me and strong spirits 🤣
Can we add Chartreuse to this list? I’m hoping for an additional spirit-ual component 🤭
""Chartreuse is a French herbal liqueur that has been made by Carthusian monks since 1737, reportedly according to instructions set out in a manuscript given to them by François Annibal d'Estrées in 1605. It was named after the monks' Grande Chartreuse monastery, located in the Chartreuse Mountains north of Grenoble, France. Today the liqueur is produced in their distillery in nearby Aiguenoire""
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartreuse_(liqueur)
I didn't know that one. Really got to try it!
YES!!! An herbal tonic - basically like a vitamin drink blessed by supernatural forces 😆.
It's divine
Make mine an absinthe...
🥳💯 Wormwood very good for cleansing! And tasty!
It might be fun to ask the various AIs about this - what is the proper whiskey here 😜? If you do so, please post it 😄!
😬😅 In my defiance of this AI situation I don’t even have a chatbot installed… but I will think about phoning a friend for help because it WOULD be interesting since they lack a palate and spirit…. If you will.
Like any good researcher, you will share your findings so we can replicate your results, right?
I'm volunteering for peer reviewing the source materials!
Noted. 🥃✅
ABSOLUTELY. I live in the middle of nowhere, so will have to special order this in. But I WILL. And will report back 🥃📝
Scott... CULL the majority of modern moron slaves that are turned OBSOLETE with the introduction of A.I./Robots/Automated Moving Systems.
Without huge herds of MMS/3i's there is very little need for "governments"... Corporations will gladly fill the vacancy with a proper level of service/price!
Not if I can help it. That’s a worst case scenario.
That might be a "worst case scenario" for you and me (regular MMS) but for Them it's just a high priority Goal.
Did Word Perfect take your world away in 1990? Did the secretaries all go to the poor house? No, they got new jobs in the back office etc. and every manager had to fill the gap himself after hours while his typewriter salesmen learned to xerox.. When you flood a pool, will the water disappear? No, it will redirect to more useful ends. Will the programmers disappear? No, they will move up to QA roles so the software they used to make is now 100 bigger....but not better... They will spend most of their time skimming and correcting "automated" code jobs that are more "productive" on paper, but not qualitatively better than their manual work. It's a monumental hoax directed at extracting data from you. If your 3% annual growth train reaches the wall of diminishing returns, you have to do something. AI is that something, copper wrapped in gold.
Hardly an apt analogy. AI aims to *replace* human workers, not make them more productive. Given that software is growing larger and more complex, negative growth in productivity is not sustainable. Automating jobs has a tipping point beyond which the economy as we know it ceases to function, and unless we know and influence what will replace it, we’re toast. The law of large numbers is a built-in limiter to constant growth, and perhaps constant growth as a goal is part of the problem.
Growth should be measured in weight. Silver weight. % only serves xls pushers.
Pleased to meet you Scott:) No worries. You can never be "replaced". How will you be replaced by a word puzzle data harvester built to never touch the ground? You may loose your current occupation, but if you take it with a smile and move on with both feet on the ground and a good attitude, I can assure you, you will be better off some time from now in a new role you enjoy more. 7 years ago when you called your insurance company you were lead through a maze of menus. Today, first thing you get is a nice and personable human offering to help. Why? Because you ditched the ones not honoring your basic tenets: You are human.
We’re already seeing signs that entry level positions are being automated. Taken to its logical conclusion, we are one generation from not being able to replenish the senior professionals we have now. AI is not capable of doing those jobs, and the current track of AI development won’t make it able to, so what happens when we no longer have capable humans doing the work that humans need to do? Your answer is too simplistic and ignores what’s really going on.
https://no01.substack.com/p/musing-about-ai-and-robotics
If you give me an example of your worries, I will do my best to unravel it to the components.
Such a valuable discussion. Thank you for your input. It's gonna be a bumpy road, but on the other side you will see that "AI" as you see it today was a hoax.
"Farm Smarts" is what you want. ;-)
Yassssss! 😄🥕
That's called being “wise". AI is the mother of all rug pulls.
🙏 I often question my sanity at this point, but it all seems so awful and soul-less to me… beyond the absurdity of growth they forecast!!
This Ponzi scheme will collapse along with the civilisation that built it, and the parasite, having sucked the life out of its host, will move on to another host – one with better prospects
'Agricultural Independence'.
🔥🔥🔥 BETTER!!!!
",,,the market is simultaneously lending these companies hundreds of billions of dollars and buying insurance in case they can’t pay it back."
I guess people have forgotten how well insurance like this worked when companies like AIG were the underwriters. Can you spell "counter-party risk"?
Makes perfect sense to borrow rather that put perfectly good cash into this. If the whole thing blows up (as it most likely will), they'll be playing with OPM (other people's money). Between now and then, how much do you want to bet that their existing capital gets firewalled off somehow?
It’s the dot com and derivative crashes all rolled into one.
Bernie Madoff would Absolutely Love this Set Up!!!!
money is not real
other ppls money is just as unreal perhaps even more since it aint yours
sh*tcoins are even less real. we are going into negative (-) territory now.
wait let me get my quant - he will explain it to you...
In the current state of the market, we should be glad someone is attempting some post facto risk management instead of letting the algos go hog wild on hype.
This is a dystopia!
May we talk as adults here? I am actively engaged with 40+ years of experience in industrial construction and may emphatically state that there is no reality to any of the estimates on the provided timelines. Anything we collectively sought to build three years ago, but financed in the last few years, remains years out to completion, while anything we finance today is five-plus years out to completion This is how our reality works.
Thanks Jim, you might have noticed I worked in the ideas you expressed in your comments in the article 😉
Which means one of two scenarios: investors will get bored and want to pull their money, or the crash is delayed by five years. Take your pick.
There is this thing about black holes Ive read about some years ago.
Apparently when its a really big one, it should be possible to cross the event horizon, the point of no return, without noticing anything odd.
Its only when you want to turn around or alter your course that you find out your a doomed and about to get turned into spaghetti. Or whatever it is, that happens beyond the event horizon.
It feels like this, except we are dealing with insanity on a massive scale, a singularity of idiocy. And we are long past the point we could turn around.
"Larry Page was quoted saying 'I'm willing to go bankrupt rather than lose this race'.": How about "winning" this race and going bankrupt anyway? That may well happen, because ...
"[Yann LeCun's] argument was that LLM capabilities were fundamentally limited.": I agree (and I speak as a published researcher in computer science at UC Berkeley and the Swedish Institute of Computer Science - Google-Scholar me if you care), and LeCun and I are very far from the only ones. For example:
"... systems with human-level reasoning are unlikely to be achieved through the approach and technology that have dominated the current boom in AI, according to a survey of hundreds of people working in the field. More than three-quarters of respondents said that enlarging current AI systems ... is unlikely to lead to what is known as artificial general intelligence (AGI). An even higher proportion said that neural networks, the fundamental technology behind generative AI, alone probably cannot match or surpass human intelligence."
(https://web.archive.org/web/20250305233251/https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00649-4)
Or another:
"These findings highlight the need for a fundamental shift in the design and development of general-purpose artificial intelligence ..."
(https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07930-y)
"Transformer" models, a category that includes all the currently prominent LLMs, are basically "one weird trick", but human intelligence is a whole bag of tricks that evolved over millions of years and mostly aren't understood by neuroscientists yet. So although I don't know of any good reason to doubt that something meriting the term "artificial general intelligence" is possible, I also don't know of any good reason to expect it to materialize in less than 20 years, and that's generous. Moreover, I'm confident that, like most scientific progress, it will emerge not from the likes of Google and Microsoft but from publicly funded research, mostly at universities (and not necessarily American ones).
All along, the LLM craze and its cheerleaders have reminded me of nothing so much as Charles Mackay's celebrated book "Extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds".
💯!
As I keep saying to anyone that want to listen: we need another technological leap like transformers to achieve the next step. The current systems are 'cool' and 'great' and a lot of things, but they're not "intelligent" per se.
I would like to pushback though on the public <-> private angle: it's amazing what common people can do in their garages. And THAT is what we need. Unis won't face the same constraints in terms of processing power and budgets that grassroots have. So it's unlikely they're incentivized enough to really dig through.
My 2ct
This appllies also No1, in the end engineering is the only sane discipline IMHO:
https://interestingengineering.com/videos/bizarre-device-never-invented?utm_source=newsletter-video&utm_medium=mailing&utm_campaign=newsletter-02-04-2022
"sane"
<<The Dutch tulip bulb craze, or tulip mania, peaked between 1634 and February 1637. During this period, prices for rare tulip bulbs skyrocketed due to speculation, with single bulbs sometimes costing more than a house or 10 years of a skilled artisan's wages before the market collapsed abruptly in early 1637>>
Suddenly, the Dutch fascination with Tulip bulbs looks totally rational by comparison.
These brainiac tech bros must have access to the really, really good magic mushrooms...
they dont need drugs.
they get high from robbing investors!
"I need a drink - and by now probably a consult with AA."
Try puffing some ghanja instead. Better buzz and no hangover the next day:)
and just as much braindamage after years of doing it
Possibly, but at least your liver will be in better shape:)
and you'll have had such a pleasant time..
Remember when all those tech ceos got direct commissioned as colonels a few years back? Yeah this is to conceal massive capex for a manhattan project level buildout for the govt I bet.
They were commissioned in June of last year, just nine months ago - not years. But I get it, the time warp of this dastardly era is very real.
Wow. I couldve sworn it was years ago.
I sometimes wonder who buys up all these bond issuances and debt. Are they institutional investors or the Gulf states? In any case, what is happening in the Middle East will greatly affect this bubble as it affects the whole chain on so many levels from access to helium, metal extraction, chip production and of course energy.
Here's another unrecoverable waste stream for silver: RFID adhesive tags for parcel and merchandise logistics. The conductive antenna contains a small amount of silver. I wonder how many hundreds of millions of these things get discarded daily?
https://inovarpackaging.com/what-is-an-rfid-tag/
Interesting!
1.21 gigawatts.... Nice "back to the future" reference.
😉 I like easter eggs
toooooooo funny. i didnt catch that. perhaps if i had heard it mis-pronounced
Dumping MSFT out of my wife's IRA, and putting the lot into Costco.
Don't do it on my behalf 😉. Although stocking up on some Sn there sounds wise.
Ah, reverting to the old math. Your instincts look sound. I recently spent a shit-ton of cash there (COSTCO) loading up in preparation for the looming apocalypse.
Total control over the serfs can't come soon enough.
They are not building the infrastructure for people to use AI. They are building it so AI can use people.
And don't worry about the debt, it's about to be inflated away (like your investments and savings), so that $1 trillion on/off your balance sheet is only $25 billion in new digi-bux. Problem solved!
Got Ag/Au?
We could soon reach the point were the next best investment is Pb…
No keeping your Au/g without it.
In England of course, we have to use kitchen knives and strongly-worded letters.
Some of us have well-sharpened garden implements at the back door. A hand-held hoe will also do in a pinch ...
we've been practising low drone flying...
That'll come in handy in WW3.5
In Spain you can still get a hunting license as way to get a long firearm. You have to get through a couple of administrative hurdles but is still feasible. For now.
you can in England but then of course, the authorities know where every licensed gun is, and can confiscate them because ‘terrorism’.
I only am aware of their (3D printers) utility through reading several gun building sites-I have zero personal expertise to share, sorry...
3D printers to the rescue! Of course, you'll need to get the nitrate for your black powder by collecting\boiling your urine but there IS a path to discreet firearm ownership if you are committed...
I bought silver at £12.50; i'm still buying it at £75. I also started buying Cu, as Ag is now too expensive in fiat to spend.
Or Sn? 😉
I’m buying literal physical Cu & Al…
what is best form to buy?
Well I work now as a plumber / electrician and I’m stocking literal electrical wiring and water piping and will advance buy a couple of power tools I was planning to get in the future…
That’s exactly how hyperinflation starts - it’s all our fault!
Your skills will be worth their weight in gold (intended).
Peace :-)
I don't know much about finance nor AI, but it seems the energy required to run data centres is enormous, so expensive, plus don't they need water to cool things, or would A Con do it? Will governments, all invested in AI, technocracy, say the project is too big to fail, like the cheating banks and so give them money? Escape Key has written much on what's already happening, compliance, how things were/are set up with public/private partnerships. If losses, tax payers pay but all profits retained by private partners. So maybe they don't need to worry.
Bernie Sanders has been calling for AI data center moratorium for weeks, maybe months. He / his staff would likely be interested in this column.
Feel free to share it! With proper attribution obviously - I have bills to pay in clout since the writing certainly isn't doing it financially 😄
But seriously, if it helps the conversation move forward, that's the whole point.
Bernie would sell us out in a New York second. He's a finger in the wind populist when it serves him.
he's batting for the same team. i dont get it?
Yup, you nailed it. Plus 10.
I know of no good reason to doubt that Sanders means it. Not only is it consistent with his politics overall, but it's a popular position; see, for example:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/08/us-data-centers