No Need for Retirement When Utopia Is Around the Corner
blog.jim-nielsen.com
blog.jim-nielsen.com
“Omg did you know that AI researchers are taking up smoking because they think AI will cure cancer??”
Oh really, which researchers?
“I don’t know.”
How many of them? One or many?
“I don’t know.”
What company do they work for?
“I don’t know. But I’m sure it’s Anthropic.”
How do you even know this?
“I saw it on someone’s TikTok.”
So if there are zero verifiable sources why do you believe this?
“Because it sounds fun, and confirms my biases. Now I’m going to forward this to a hundred other people or I’ll have bad luck.”
This is a meaningless example but this is true for so much more.
Has a single researcher come out and backed up this story?
> who just personally bought 37,000 acres of Swedish forest land, presumably in preparation for some form of AI-related geopolitical fallout
Ultra rich guy put some land in his investment portfolio. What a shocker!!
So your theory about no-nothings talking about nothing that they heard nowhere because it makes them feel good because they are self-indulgent fools might be worth giving up.
Now you've devolved to complaining about people noticing things. Do you think that your declaring those things not notable might be because they agree with your preconceived notions about "ultra rich guys" and the totally random things they do for no particular reason?
>CEO of Palantir bought 37,000 acres of Swedish forest land in preparation for some form of AI-related geopolitical fallout
is the kind of online discussion GP complains about
This statement that AI researchers are taking up smoking was made by Alexander Karp (CEO of Palantir) <= this is is a wrong statement as per the link in the article I very much did read.
The original quote was from Shyam Sankar, CTO of Palantir, not Karp. <= this is someone that points out the statement is wrong, thereby proving the original point.
Clear now?
A collapsed society in a place like Northern Europe would be terrible as it relies on a lot of complex technology to keep the modern lifestyle going. None of the Scandinavian countries are self sufficient in food.
I'd find some remote Pacific island personally :) Or New Zealand.
But I know some people love it. Everyone is different <3
That's also how politics has worked since (at least) 2015. Who needs evidence about outlandish claims when the vibes are right?
Anyway, me and my friends are going to go eat some cats and dogs.
You accidentally added 1, 2, and 5.
I think their date was pretty close, they just left off the BCE.
> Many of his descriptions sound strikingly similar to the rhetoric coming out of places like Anthropic. For example, note the religious overtones of working at a corporation
Just browse a little bit on Twitter or this forum and you’ll have gobs of examples of religious fervor masquerading as techno-enlightenment
Chances are their paycheck requires enough bravery/stupidity that few (if any) dare to deviate from company groupthink too much.
Employee accepts & lives by that long enough, and they might as well be part of a religious cult.
That religious angle could be just similarities in the psychology / group dynamics involved. Same mechanics -> same patterns observed.
They claim AI researchers aren’t saving money in 401k because they believe there will be an AI utopia.
Which researchers? Can you name a few? Is there any proof of this trend?
Heck if anything AI researchers have bigger bank balances than all of us. They’ll be fine for the future no matter what.
> Jamie, a crypto alum who asked not to share his last name, met a backer for his raw milk startup at a Miami kava bar. The crowd was "50% recovering opioid addicts from Appalachia and 50% Wall Street and Silicon Valley refugees looking for shelter from taxes, pandemic restrictions, and leftist ideological hegemony," he says. A crowd accumulated in the corner, smoking.
> He struck up a conversation with a jacked, Harley-riding investor while chain-smoking Marlboro Reds. Jamie told the investor about his startup, and the two talked about alternative wellness between drags. A week later, the investor signed a check. Smoking poles put him in pole position.
It's all weird but specifically "smoking poles" has a different meaning as far as I'm aware. I can't quickly Google up anyone using "pole" to mean cigarette.
BTW in this case we happen to know one of the chains in the game of Chinese Whispers was the CTO of Palantir... this may or may not influence your beliefs
The article pointed to a quote from Palantir CTO.
There is also a quote from Avi Schiffmann - founder of AI wearable friend. "By the time you do get lung cancer, our AI robots are supposed to have cured that," Schiffmann says.
Both quotes may have been said in the sense of them not supporting this idea, but acknowledging an attitude of some of not worrying about long-term planning.
>Avi Schiffmann, a 23-year-old AI founder living in San Francisco’s Bay Area, is among those embracing tobacco at a time when the habit has largely gone out of fashion among health-conscious young Americans... Schiffman runs Friend, a startup that has created a $249 pendant that functions as a wearable companion to cure loneliness.
and
>Stephen Campbell, 27, the co-founder of Revamp AI, said smoking had become a networking opportunity for young entrepreneurs who, until now, had rarely left their desks.
and
>Another San Francisco tech worker said: “My very strong belief is that AI is going to solve a lot of human healthcare issues and that we will see cancer cured over the next 20 years through an AI-powered breakthrough. This gives me no incentive to quit.”
Seems more twenty something founders who think it's cool rather than Anthropic guys.
Now, the entire world can share the same piece of gossip, and it takes on an entirely different quality when it is global instantly.
And the details are made up, but it is funny if we pretend it’s true.
Not saying this is a good source and not just glorified marketing bullshit but it's a legitimately sourced thing that probably should be treated with more skepticism
FYI accusing someone of being outraged to distract from their point is called "appeal to emotion". Whether op is outraged or not has no bearing on whether the observation is accurate.
He may be repeating hearsay but he did say that in an official interview on topic, as a representative of his company.
Funny that you yourself didn’t click the link to see that it was the Palantir CTO who said it, not Anthropic. The Anthropic part is made up by daringfireball.
> Sankar doesn’t name anyone, alas, but if there’s any truth to this (and good god do I hope there is) it’s got to be Anthropic researchers specifically.
And the CTO isn’t speaking for his company. His own source is “there’s so many interesting stories around this”.
So everyone is reading stuff online and adding another layer to the bullshit, just like you yourself did right now.
Why would you not be surprised if the claims are true? Because you have read hundreds of made up stories like this one on internet forums. It’s all a self perpetuating bullshit machine.
Or is the answer to all of these "I don't know, I just feel this way."
but there is something at least a little interesting about the notion that people working in the nuclear space they thought they might be saving the world - because in some sense, they... did?
I've always felt like the fact that no nukes have ever been dropped (in war) after 1945 was a pretty huge success story for the human race. We invented this insanely powerful weapon and, despite the typical pattern of humanity, we managed to solve one of our biggest "coordination problems" effectively enough to not use another one for 80 years (and counting).
I don't know that I'd extend this analogy to the AI labs, I'm not necessarily implying that they're all right about "saving the world," I just think it's worth noting that there was a contingent of people out there trying to save the world from a real threat and who seem to have - at least for now - succeeded.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Nuclear-Test-Ban...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons_tests
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons_tests_...
Or maybe not. China has been credibly accused of starting low-yield nuclear testing in 2020, specifically configured to evade detection, albeit unsuccessfully.
https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2026-03/news/us-accuses-chin...
We stopped because the major nuclear powers had accumulated sufficient data to enable high-fidelity computer modelling of future warheads.
It wasn't just, or perhaps even wholly, driven by environmental empathy, it was an attempt at was pulling the ladder up behind the the major powers. There are eight non-signatories and seventeen non-ratifiers of the treaty, the majority of whom already being proliferation risks.
Your stats are also arbitrary, there have been sixteen nuclear tests since the Treaty opened for signature in _1996_. Setting the cutoff to 1998 deliberately excludes Indian and Pakistani tests.
https://spectrumlocalnews.com/us/snplus/military/2026/02/04/...
If the odds are one in a hundred per year, then that's awful. We traded periodic bad wars for a nearly inevitable catastrophic war, and people talking about how they haven't been used in warfare since that one time are akin to people talking about how well everything is going while sailing through the air after jumping off a cliff. So far so good!
I don't know what the right number is, but from what I know about how nuclear weapons are managed and what has happened in the past, I bet it's a lot closer to one in a hundred.
- Russia
- United States
- China
- France
- United Kingdom
- India
- Pakistan
- Israel
- North Korea
There is no guarantee that the leadership of any of those countries will continue to heed the warnings of the research done during the cold war. There is no guarantee that all of those countries will remain politically stable for as long as their arsenals remain viable. There is no guarantee that all of those nations will stay out of major international conflicts that might suggest the use of a nuclear weapon on a non-nuclear power or the use of one in an attempt to defeat a conventional attack or to risk a so called limited exchange with another nuclear power.
We're still in the midst of a Mexican standoff, no one has discarded their weapons and the number of participants can always increase making it all the more dangerous.
https://apjjf.org/daniel-ellsberg/3222/article
"I remember what I thought when I held the single sheet with the graph on it. I thought, this piece of paper should not exist. It should never have existed. Not in America. Not anywhere, ever. It depicted evil beyond any human project that had ever existed. There should be nothing on Earth, nothing real, that it referred to."
Isn't this just survivorship bias?
Are you saying he's not accounting for the multi-verse where other worlds killed themselves and we just so happen to survive?
This is a US centric view. You define success favorably to your argument. The world has not even been at peace since, with the sole nuclear weapon user being involved in a significant number of consequential wars after WWII. I guess you mean no conflict between great powers on a global scale, which I doubt anyone seriously considers stable and long lasting. But if there were total peace, 80 years wouldn't be such an outlier, given we've had long periods of peace before nuclear weapons as well. You might be right, or you might be wrong, but your reasoning isn't quite there yet.
Because we (the US) vastly overestimated the Soviet Union's nuclear program. A lot of it was for show to scare us (the US.)
The nuclear "armegeddon" was a very expensive thing to build, and part of what held it back was the shear cost: You can't drop a nuclear bomb that you never built because you couldn't afford it.
> I don't know that I'd extend this analogy to the AI labs
It's because:
1: The "danger" is just an overreaction.
2: The practical cost of building and running lots of datacenters will prevent building it.
A few years later, they had hundreds of ICBMs, plus a good start on a submarine missile fleet. They were able to thoroughly destroy the US by then.
These forces were expensive, but not that expensive. The whole reason the US leaned into nuclear weapons is because it was a lot cheaper to deter the Soviets in Europe with nukes than with conventional forces. An ICBM costs a few million dollars. That's a real bargain for something that will destroy a whole enemy city.
see: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/how-pentagons-propa...
> From the Air Force intelligence estimates I was newly privy to, and the dark view of the Soviets, which my colleagues shared with the whole national security community, I couldn't believe that the world would long escape nuclear holocaust.
The "dark view" that the Soviets had of a nuclear war was essentially that
1. A limited nuclear exchange was impossible due to not being able to ascertain or trust the enemy's intentions and so all parties would use all of their nuclear arsenal to avoid losing the ability to counter attack to any subsequent attacks.
2. Even though they didn't see a nuclear war as being able to cause human extinction they concluded that no nation involved in one or near enough to suffer the second order effects of one would survive.
3. A full nuclear exchange would likely destroy >80% of each nation's industrial capacity resulting in the total collapse of industrial society making any reconstruction efforts impossible and leading to the death of the majority of the population dependent on industrial production for survival. The survivors would be on their own attempting to start over with subsistence agriculture made all the more difficult by however many years of nuclear winter resulted from the burning of cities and industry and suffering high cancer rates from exposure to fallout and toxic soot.
It doesn't really matter how many nuclear weapons you have beyond a certain number. Just imagine if you only hit all of the oil refineries in the US or you only destroyed all the major ports, it would still result in mass starvation and cripple the nation while creating a gigantic ecological disaster from burning huge quantities of oil and material. Multiply that across several nations and it's the end of the world as you know it.
That Empire was so depraved it dropped those nukes on hospitals and civilians not once, but twice.
But yeah, sure, we need to be worried about OTHER nations, who have never used nukes, right...
Again, not claiming it was right, or good in the long run - just that Carlin points out the context around the decision makes it seem less insane than it would by today's standards (hence "Logical Insanity").
Dropping the bombs saved countless of American lives - young men who did not even start their lives yet. It was the right decision for the Americans. Not to mention the numerous appeals to Japanese government to surrender.
People like you will always make excuses for the U.S. crimes against humanity. Sure, your right, it was good think we dropped a nuclear bomb on civilians and hospitals, it was the right thing to do! It had to be done!
Most companies don't offer pensions anymore. Some companies don't even offer 401ks at all, and a significant portion of the ones that do don't do any employer contribution matching.
We’re not all in a race to the bottom.
What they moved away from was private pensions owned by your company. Now you own your private pension through the 401k thing they keep talking about. This IS a better and more sustainable system, but at the same time this was rolled out most companies also cut company-pensions but didn't give you more compensation that you can put on your 401k.
European companies are not forced to pay into your private pension either, it is usually part of union negotiations. Check how much basic pension pays out in Sweden (the almighty socialist country), last I checked it is ~900 euro per month. My parents in law make that much per month in retirement because they never put any money towards a private pension and never held a unionized job.
The main component is usually something similar to US Social Security, except that contribution rates are higher (16% in Sweden). Benefit rate (at any given retirement age) is usually close to a linear function of total contributions, adjusted for inflation. Most people expect to get most of their retirement income from that component.
Then there are supplementary components, such as voluntary or union negotiated private pensions. Some of them are a bit weird, such as the Swedish defined contribution plan with a mandatory 2.5% contribution.
Sucks for the elderly, but it prevents the catastrophe that is France and that the US is heading into.
It seems good enough for median earners. After taxes and health insurance, it's basically even.
Perhaps not self-sustainable you mean that unless something changes, it's not going to be able to keep paying out at current rates.
Well, I got news for you - that's what is happening for almost all government-run pension programs across the world on this model. Pay as you go does't work when you keep the same payment, and have 10x a higher ratio of recipients to payees.
This isn't unique to Social Security or the US. It's just a mathematical fact of the system.
You cannot have 99% of people contribute `x` and 1% of people receive `y`, and then switch that to 70% contribute and 30% receive, without either increasing `x` or reducing `y`.
You could have planned ahead for this long ago, and seen that the ratio was going to change and increased `x` over time accordingly or planned to reduce `y` over time accordingly. But we didn't, and mostly no one else has either.
*Asterisk because EU is big and diverse, and I don't know every country rules.
While reading the first half of this sentence, I fully expected the second half to be "...to signal their belief that AI will destroy the world before they can get lung cancer"
Unlike being laid off because AI replaced your department, that's very dignified.
Now, go support your family as an apprentice ditch digger or starve to death on the streets for your moral failings.
AI lab offers free plumbing and HVAC repairs across three cities to train AI robots
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
Na, death is a release. Worst is AI keeps you alive forever as a pile of gelatin.
Do people really think we will be working for another 20-30 years?
That seems very unlikely, and particularly so for software engineering.
I have no confidence anything will exist (UBI) to help those people survive.
No, not really. Or maybe a better way to put it is actually yes, but it looks like this
https://borgenproject.org/10-worst-slums-in-the-world/
Just remember there is only one economy, black markets and 'sub' economies are still part of it. If AI is that much better than humans at earning it will buy up almost everything eventually. Fields for farms, too unprofitable, pave them with solar panels. Your slum built on a copper deposit, send in 'peacekeeper' drones to solve the problem.
Just look at what companies like Chevron do in African countries and you'll see just how bad it can get here.
Nice to see someone update their worldview on new information. Doesn't happen often.
I hope the policy measures Anthropic and OpenAI recommend in their research will be implemented in order to disperse the productivity gains enabled by AI widely, like they say.
I'm an optimist, but honestly, I think the dystopian future many pessimists expect is unlikely.
What would be the point for a few rich to concentrate even more wealth? Even if they were so selfish, surely it's worth spending some 20-30% on public benefits to prevent unrest, no?
Presumably the same reason they concentrated the current amount in the first place?
I mean, I get being optimistic and all that, but we are talking about people who, once they got enough to live in opulent luxury, for long enough that their descedents would never need to work while still owning yachts, said to themselves "This is not enough, I must get more". And then, when they actuall got more, said "This is not enough, I must get more"... and they haven't stopped trying to get more!
So, what is your belief centered on, that at some point they would stop trying to grab all the resources they can? They didn't stop before, why would they stop now?
Like, are eg. Musk and Zuckerberg doing this for bragging rights about a number on financial statements?
To be honest I have no idea about Zuckerberg's motivations. With the proposed billionaire tax in California, recent reporting indicates his main concern is retaining voting rights at Meta.
With Musk I believe he is investing into space flight and colonizing Mars.
I fundamentally don't agree with the idea that rich people are evil and motivated by nothing other than greed.
I wasn't addressing their motivations for attempting to grab all the wealth in the world. I am pointing out that that is what they do, so why would you expect them to stop at some point when they never stopped at any point in the past?
I guess I am asking, why are you expecting their behaviour to change?
Do they need to donate their shares in order not to be considered hoarding wealth?
No, they're doing this for the power that the number can give them. After we create a system that rewards the people who maximize their wealth at any cost, we shouldn't be surprised that eventually we get a group of people concentrated at the top whose lives revolve around doing that one thing. We also shouldn't expect there to be some arbitrary amount of wealth and power that trips the failsafe in their brains and reverts them to the state of mind of an average human being. They will keep going, the goal is owning as much of the world as is feasible. Power is an intrinsic motivator. Most billionaires only sit on their hands and watch their number go up, so for those it's immediately apparent. For the exceptions, like Musk, it's a bit more complicated, but the desire to advance human spaceflight likely comes in far behind the desire to out-do everyone else, get your name in history and own a brand new unexplored frontier under your own name.
If that was the goal, surely one would need to run for president.
I don't think the brains of billionaires work so differently from us all. Who doesn't want his name in history for their achievements?
I know that I wouldn't want a dystopian future, and I think it is the same for most billionaires. I find arguments that they are all evil rather unconvincing.
(Robots. Social unrest can be solved with robots.)
This is the next iteration of: but without consumers those billionaires have no one to sell stuff to. So surely this will work out.
My point stands, it seems much preferable to spend 20-30% on public benefits rather than some dystopian suppression of the public via robot armies.
You don't get to call me indifferent for not sharing your extreme pessimism.
All the contempt and superiority that characterized the last thirty years going the other direction is going to be very interesting.
The “just learn to weld” era.
I can't even.
Both options are converging. Which will win?
Seems like we're on a knifes edge, so light em if you got em.
https://coveringclimatenow.org/from-us-story/when-the-term-h...
https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-researchers-smoking-ai-cu...
The answer, non of these filthy rich individuals making these claims actually believes it.
2. You are still fine in the highly unlikely event the arrival of this utopia is postponed or canceled.
Unless some bona fide "AI researchers" came forward and confirmed it, it never happened IMO.
Edit: Palantir snowflake can't handle facts
Until then it’s all talk.
It seems that they themselves are discovering the capabilities of models purely empirically by training them, and just have a few months head start before they release the model and everyone else can witness those same capabilities.
What do they have that make their multi-years (if not multi-decades) predictions more insightful than any other observer?
Speculative rhetoric is no different from a mathematical fiction companies use to gamble on future revenue. The bubble will go eventually, as even boring bonds indicate skepticism at the risk dynamic.
Thankfully, once the IPOs run the cycle... we can hopefully get less AstroTurf from various cultists. =3
Peoples memories are short, and many assume the past predicts the future. Bulls and Bears alike are always wrong about when events occur. However, Shrek movie releases tend to correlate with market corrections, and there is a new film due out June 2027. =3
It doesn't matter if OpenAI and Anthropic explode and die, everything they built will be bought by the highest bidder and continue, and China has tons of money to buy it.
LLMs aren't going away.
Peoples memories are short, and the only thing "new" about LLM is the scale. It is math from last century, and only recently became popular.
Personally, the concern I have is only IBM built their granite LLM on public-domain out-of-copyright works. Every other firm engages in isomorphic plagiarism of around $9Tn of FOSS, and charges for the experience of running intelligence campaigns on user/sucker data.
To be blunt, a fictional value will be lost in a crash, but very real financial collateral damage will likely break global economics for a decade. We all look forward to stripping the infrastructure at a heavy discount. =3
Um, you know when a snowflake lands on you, you don't die. But when a billion tons of snowflakes land on you at once you get crushed by an avalanche.
Trying to say "duh it's only scale" when scale is one of the most important things in this universe isn't a good look.
For LLM to achieve human-level intelligence, current "AI" would need to consume 1/3 of our galaxy energy output. There are also trivial counter-proofs to why recursive self-improvement within the context of LLMs is degenerative (don't ask.)
We shouldn't kink shame peoples cognitive dildo. =3
1. kids 14 and under should not be on Social Networks, or on the internet alone (computers should be in a public space.) At that stage of development, peoples perceived peers (fake or real) are often seen as more important.
2. Anthropomorphizing inference engines exploits evolutionary social cognition, and in developmental psychology models of people under 25 it may cause unwise decisions. It affects some people more than others, but generally just makes people less skilled over time (-17%, but they feel 200% more productive.)
3. 1% of people are psychopaths, and roughly 14% of those individuals are dangerous. On a network with billions of people there are always a few that could do people harm. Note an LLM does not have consciousness, and must be considered an evasive psychopath at all times due to manually added "syntactic sugar".
4. Criminals don’t care about the law, and it is a fools errand to attempt fixing their nature with more laws. Arguably, it is unethical to forcibly change malignant peoples will (“A Clockwork Orange”, 1971.)
5. There are bears in the woods, tigers in the jungle, and lions on the Serengeti. It is part of our ecosystem, and it is best to avoid creatures that pose a liability to your well-being.
It is important people understand, that there are legal and social consequences to their behavior in civilization. As a company, products that do not grow goodwill with the public, are by definition a problem needing resolved by the law or markets.
Most LLM firms have already shown their behavior as mostly manipulative, deceptive, and parasitic.
Have a glorious day, =3
Hence why we have laws in the first place. The law is not meant to prevent all bad things from happening, but it is meant as a framework to both attempt to prevent said things from occurring and providing a means of punishing those that do violate said social contracts.
>and it is best to avoid creatures that pose a liability to your well-being.
Silly and unrealistic. There is a reason most dangerous animal species went extinct or close to extinct. Us humans didn't put up with that shit.
In some places, written laws individual goals are misaligned with societal long term good, and corruption selectively enforces arbitrary policy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...
>Silly and unrealistic.
"The mosquito is the world’s deadliest animal", and it has been doing just fine feeding on people for hundreds of thousands of years.
https://www.cdc.gov/global-health/impact/fighting-the-worlds...
I do respect your attempt to communicate opinions, but one may want to watch a tutorial on forming better structured arguments. Have a wonderful day. =3
If they fail, the successor must do something differently. Perhaps by not alluding to killing all humanity, destroying the economy, making humans irrelevant etc.
All, no, a lot, yes.
>the successor must do something differently.
Just getting rid of the training costs along and having a model and hardware would likely be enough to be profitable. Training and staffing is horrifically expensive. If any new efficiency gains show up they can easily incorporate them without the burden of a huge amount of debt either.
>Perhaps by not alluding to killing all humanity, destroying the economy, making humans irrelevant etc.
Honestly they are doing a favor by at least admitting the truth. Of course this is from my point of view as an AI doomer. Pretending that everything is fine with the AI development that we're doing and it's all just going to work out is a bunch of crap.