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AI obviously has military applications, no doom required to think the military will want a lot of it. I'm asking about the extreme scenarios like "AI is gonna take everyone’s jobs" and the other "totalizing narratives" that geohot is referencing.

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If this is true: "AI is gonna take everyone’s jobs" then AI is the terminal technology and everyone who doesn't want to be poor forever needs to throw all their money in it.

Of course it impacts company valuation.

Companies say all sorts of things which investors don't take at face value, often for the sake of marketing and recruiting. Meta circa 2020 wanted us to believe we'd be swapping NFTs in a virtual mall and having all our meetings strapped into VR headsets by now. That doesn't mean their market cap at the time was based on an assumption they were right, in fact it is much higher now that the metaverse idea flopped. Unlike that situation where money was being spent on projects that turned out to be mostly pointless, AI labs don't have much of a financial stake in a scenario such as "lots of demand for AI, leading to mass unemployment and/or doomsday" as opposed to one like "lots of demand for AI, leading to the world being mostly the same as before but with more AI and expensive RAM".

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