This statement that AI researchers are taking up smoking was made by Alexander Karp (CEO of Palantir), who just personally bought 37,000 acres of Swedish forest land, presumably in preparation for some form of AI-related geopolitical fallout. It was absolutely not a peer reviewed study or any sort of survey. It was likely something he heard in passing, a less-than-half-serious joke, or just a subjective questionable observation based on an N of a few. Regardless, this narrative was only picked up and amplified by media because he is the CEO of Palantir. He himself is a cigar smoker. Take that for what you will. I have seen no evidence that it is true -but if it were, I'd imagine there would be other indulgences, vices and financial/credit opportunities much more likely to be observed than smoking.
And island big enough to sustain itself preferable not with with winters as you will need energy (panels), food and barrier.
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.
This is how gossip and urban legends and other myths have always spread. The difference is the size of the network and how much distance a myth can travel in a very short time.
Now, the entire world can share the same piece of gossip, and it takes on an entirely different quality when it is global instantly.
> 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.
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.
Is this material to the core thesis of this microblogpost?
> 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
When a company publicly proclaims "omg, unchecked development will lead to AI destroying humanity!" (or similar), how brave/stupid would an employee have to be to go against the grain & *publicly* proclaim an opposing viewpoint?
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.
Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
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
I also like to be explicit about whether we're talking about general trends, or one specific case. People often try to establish general trends by talking about one specific case.
I wish it were more often even generalizing from one case, that would be a big leap in epistemic hygiene compared to the more common generalizing from zero cases!
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
In all fairness, I wouldn't be surprised if the claims are true, given all the psychosis and cult-like behavior within all slop corps. It honestly feels like the Virgin Mary episode of South Park.
I don't see anyone outraged? I see someone commenting on how internet "discourse" is just gossip when it used to be fairly rigorous. Which is accurate, especially here on hn where almost every comment just repeats something from another post ("modular is going to change world" as if we all didn't see the modular content marketing piece just above.....)
I can't claim to know anything about the RAND corporation. Maybe they don't deserve to be included in this next sentence, maybe they do.
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.
While the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty [1] has not entered into force, it has created a world where nuclear testing has ended. There were almost 2,500 nuclear detonations between 1945 and 1998.[2] Since then, the only nuclear detonations have been North Korea's six tests.[3] This is one of humanity's most impressive achievements, and I really don't think it gets enough attention. There's an old video on Youtube that has an animated map of all the tests (except North Korea's): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLCF7vPanrY
> it has created a world where nuclear testing has ended
Or maybe not. China has been credibly accused of starting low-yield nuclear testing in 2020, specifically configured to evade detection, albeit unsuccessfully.
If the odds of all-out nuclear war are, say, one in a million per year, that's pretty good. Seems very likely nuclear weapons would stop being an issue first. Worth it for the era of relative peace they ushered in.
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.
we're also a fresh eight months into there not being a nuclear arms treaty between the two largest nuclear powers for the first time in half a century so who knows what might happen
Nuclear war remains an ongoing threat, consider the list of countries with nuclear weapons:
- 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.
> I've always felt like the fact that no nukes have ever been dropped (in war) after 1945 was a pretty huge success story ... We invented this insanely powerful weapon
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.
I think it was also that logic of 'if we scare senators and thus everyone with the idea of their imminent mortality, this will guarantee massive funding for our military ventures'
You should read up on what this quote from the article is referring to
> 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.
"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."
More that we've almost killed ourselves with nukes several times, its mostly coincidences and individual bravery that have prevented the end of the human race.
This isn't as wild as it sounds; he's referring to the Anthropic Principle, and it's a valid way to look at it. We are having this conversation in this context because civilization is still intact.
Yes, statistics, the study of history, reflection on logical fallacies and other pesky worldly knowledge would not work, we need to, instead, account for multiverses.
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.
That is part of the human victory, but there’s still more to be done to close the chapter fully. There is still on-going developments and testing even into the past decade that are publicly known (and more privately known to have leaked) that have follow on effects for all current and future living creatures of Earth. This chapter of humanity is unfortunately still active to the determinant of all.
The people who almost got us into nuclear wars, also saved us from nuclear wars. How kind of them. Curtis "Bombs Away" Lemay was one of the founders. You should learn more, it's very interesting, and important, yet somehow often overlooked.
Didn't we already mostly move to that system, and don't a lot of people already argue that it's true?
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.
They have pensions in the US, it is called social security. But it is not self-sustainable and not good enough for medium-and-above income earners. It is basically a way to ensure seniors don't live in abject poverty.
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.
It's legal in some EU countries as well.
Companies outside collective bargaining agreements are under no obligation to provide you with any pension plan here.
> But it is not self-sustainable and not good enough for medium-and-above income earners.
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.
Listen, I love a good chance to call the US undeveloped as much as the next ideologically motivated POS but the reason the US got off of pensions and onto 401ks is because of how many pension funds had serious issues with mismanagement and inability to provide payouts over the years. And this change happened during the arguable peak of the US public's support for regulatory solutions so it's not like they said "oh we can fix this we a few rules but we're not going to because reasons", they legitimately didn't think they could fix it. So far the 401ks and IRAs that replaced pensions have been decent. And as the other guy says, you can argue that Social Security is basically a public pension.
Not only are we not all in a race to the bottom, in European countries we've got full on gerontocracy (e.g. triple lock in UK or pensioners having larger income compared to median worker in France). You know, we could actually think about younger people and stop subsidising boomer luxury communism.
> This reminds me of the report that AI researchers have taken up smoking as a way to signal their belief that AI will cure cancer before smoking kills them.
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"
The info about the RAND corporation was engaging, but... since the post promised to connect it to "strikingly similar to the rhetoric coming out of places like Anthropic" ... I was surprised that it entirely lacked quotes from Anthropic, save one link to another blog post that was itself, IIUC, a joke.
> This reminds me of the report that AI researchers have taken up smoking as a way to signal their belief that AI will cure cancer before smoking kills them.
Am I the only one who think that we are overestimating the hindsight of "AI insiders" in comparison to the rest of the world?
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?
I just saw a Backerkit campaign for an "AI male device." I will let you use your imagination for its purpose. It kind of gave me a bad feeling, like "wtf is in store for humanity?" Although certain men would find it "Utopian."
I will not believe this until every frontier AI lab socializes a significant portion of their “profit” (subject to making a profit). I’m not talking about “Every kid with a Trump account gets a single share of SPCX”. I’m talking about “50+ percent of the shares are in a trust that distributes regular dividends to every US adult”. I’ll even be nice and allow those shares to be non-voting.
I give it 3 years at most, if the progress doesn't dramatically slow down.
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?
> What would be the point for a few rich to concentrate even more wealth?
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?
The koolaid drinking coupled with the impotence or indifference in this place towards all those societal implications makes my head spin, sometimes. It’s just three years, but the AI Overlords have “policy recommendations” (this is PR, it’s marketing) for the proles, and what would even be the point? I mean, judging by the track record of billionaires who want to be trillionaires and who have no reason or personality trait left in them to care about anything but their immediate reality (cf. the reality they are inventing for the world)?
(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.
If there is nothing like UBI to give access to the AI-driven world then won't the 'have nots' fracture into their own subeconomy where they have to work for each other in order to survive, thereby giving them jobs again?
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.
>I wouldn’t be surprised to hear a lab like Anthropic announce they’re discontinuing all employer-sponsored retirement benefits.
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
All online discussions these days are like those chain email forwards of the last generation.
“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.
This statement that AI researchers are taking up smoking was made by Alexander Karp (CEO of Palantir), who just personally bought 37,000 acres of Swedish forest land, presumably in preparation for some form of AI-related geopolitical fallout. It was absolutely not a peer reviewed study or any sort of survey. It was likely something he heard in passing, a less-than-half-serious joke, or just a subjective questionable observation based on an N of a few. Regardless, this narrative was only picked up and amplified by media because he is the CEO of Palantir. He himself is a cigar smoker. Take that for what you will. I have seen no evidence that it is true -but if it were, I'd imagine there would be other indulgences, vices and financial/credit opportunities much more likely to be observed than smoking.
And we all know that CEOs famously never lie or make up “facts” to sell their products.
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!!
Karp is known for cross-country skiing, so the Swedish forest land is likely related to that and not fallout.
Ironically
>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
The original quote was from Shyam Sankar, CTO of Palantir, not Karp.
I heard it was Tim Cook, CEO of OpenAI.
When did he change his name from Tim Apple?
Since there’s a new John Apple
Thus proving the original point: it's hearsay all the way down
I'm not sure Sweden is where I would try to hide out if the world was ending.
Why? Genuinely curious
It's ice cold especially in winter. Winters are super dark and miserable.
I'd find some remote Pacific island personally :) Or New Zealand.
Where would you go? (Asking for a friend)
And island big enough to sustain itself preferable not with with winters as you will need energy (panels), food and barrier.
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.
> “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.”
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.
> That's also how politics has worked since (at least) 2015.
You accidentally added 1, 2, and 5.
This is how gossip and urban legends and other myths have always spread. The difference is the size of the network and how much distance a myth can travel in a very short time.
Now, the entire world can share the same piece of gossip, and it takes on an entirely different quality when it is global instantly.
Sankar may have gotten it from this article: https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/articles/silicon-smokers-mee...
https://archive.is/avuUH
Is this parody?
> 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.
There are real quotes from notable people.
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.
Is this material to the core thesis of this microblogpost?
> 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
No need to go to Twitter, you can do that right here.
When a company publicly proclaims "omg, unchecked development will lead to AI destroying humanity!" (or similar), how brave/stupid would an employee have to be to go against the grain & *publicly* proclaim an opposing viewpoint?
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.
It is literally their entire thesis.
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.
Guess the microblogpost is too ill-formed if anyone can claim any single sentence of it as its thesis.
Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
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
Old Internet culture isn't dead, after all.
I also like to be explicit about whether we're talking about general trends, or one specific case. People often try to establish general trends by talking about one specific case.
I wish it were more often even generalizing from one case, that would be a big leap in epistemic hygiene compared to the more common generalizing from zero cases!
https://fortune.com/2026/10/13/palantir-cto-shyam-sankar-ai-...
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
In all fairness, I wouldn't be surprised if the claims are true, given all the psychosis and cult-like behavior within all slop corps. It honestly feels like the Virgin Mary episode of South Park.
You did exactly what you are criticizing others for doing
People love saying this as a gotcha. Please do tell how so.
In both cases, one person is outraged by some comment made by someone undetermined on the internet.
I don't see anyone outraged? I see someone commenting on how internet "discourse" is just gossip when it used to be fairly rigorous. Which is accurate, especially here on hn where almost every comment just repeats something from another post ("modular is going to change world" as if we all didn't see the modular content marketing piece just above.....)
Can we see all these posts where those questions were asked with those answers?
> This is a meaningless example but
And the details are made up, but it is funny if we pretend it’s true.
I can't claim to know anything about the RAND corporation. Maybe they don't deserve to be included in this next sentence, maybe they do.
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.
While the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty [1] has not entered into force, it has created a world where nuclear testing has ended. There were almost 2,500 nuclear detonations between 1945 and 1998.[2] Since then, the only nuclear detonations have been North Korea's six tests.[3] This is one of humanity's most impressive achievements, and I really don't think it gets enough attention. There's an old video on Youtube that has an animated map of all the tests (except North Korea's): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLCF7vPanrY
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_...
> it has created a world where nuclear testing has ended
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...
I am not so optimistic. 80 years is one life-span. It feels absurdly short and quite possibly attributable to luck.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_close_calls
If the odds of all-out nuclear war are, say, one in a million per year, that's pretty good. Seems very likely nuclear weapons would stop being an issue first. Worth it for the era of relative peace they ushered in.
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.
we're also a fresh eight months into there not being a nuclear arms treaty between the two largest nuclear powers for the first time in half a century so who knows what might happen
https://spectrumlocalnews.com/us/snplus/military/2026/02/04/...
Saving the world isn’t a one-and-done job.
There hasn’t been an all-out war between nuclear powers either.
yet.
Nuclear war remains an ongoing threat, consider the list of countries with nuclear weapons:
- 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.
> I've always felt like the fact that no nukes have ever been dropped (in war) after 1945 was a pretty huge success story ... We invented this insanely powerful weapon
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.
People who have access to classified information are acting like the current Russian nuclear program is not just for show.
I think it was also that logic of 'if we scare senators and thus everyone with the idea of their imminent mortality, this will guarantee massive funding for our military ventures'
see: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/how-pentagons-propa...
You should read up on what this quote from the article is referring to
> 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.
I would read Ellsberg's book - a part of it can be read here:
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."
> because in some sense, they... did?
Isn't this just survivorship bias?
What do you mean?
Are you saying he's not accounting for the multi-verse where other worlds killed themselves and we just so happen to survive?
More that we've almost killed ourselves with nukes several times, its mostly coincidences and individual bravery that have prevented the end of the human race.
This isn't as wild as it sounds; he's referring to the Anthropic Principle, and it's a valid way to look at it. We are having this conversation in this context because civilization is still intact.
Yes, statistics, the study of history, reflection on logical fallacies and other pesky worldly knowledge would not work, we need to, instead, account for multiverses.
Sure, I think my various hedges that say "so far" acknowledge this. I still think 80 years is a success story given the usual patterns of humanity.
> I still think 80 years is a success story
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.
That is part of the human victory, but there’s still more to be done to close the chapter fully. There is still on-going developments and testing even into the past decade that are publicly known (and more privately known to have leaked) that have follow on effects for all current and future living creatures of Earth. This chapter of humanity is unfortunately still active to the determinant of all.
The people who almost got us into nuclear wars, also saved us from nuclear wars. How kind of them. Curtis "Bombs Away" Lemay was one of the founders. You should learn more, it's very interesting, and important, yet somehow often overlooked.
No retirement benefits. The next evolution of unlimited vacation. No really, it benefits the employee.
Didn't we already mostly move to that system, and don't a lot of people already argue that it's true?
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.
Maybe in the US, but that is illegal in Developed countries.
We’re not all in a race to the bottom.
They have pensions in the US, it is called social security. But it is not self-sustainable and not good enough for medium-and-above income earners. It is basically a way to ensure seniors don't live in abject poverty.
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.
It's legal in some EU countries as well. Companies outside collective bargaining agreements are under no obligation to provide you with any pension plan here.
> But it is not self-sustainable and not good enough for medium-and-above income earners.
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.
Listen, I love a good chance to call the US undeveloped as much as the next ideologically motivated POS but the reason the US got off of pensions and onto 401ks is because of how many pension funds had serious issues with mismanagement and inability to provide payouts over the years. And this change happened during the arguable peak of the US public's support for regulatory solutions so it's not like they said "oh we can fix this we a few rules but we're not going to because reasons", they legitimately didn't think they could fix it. So far the 401ks and IRAs that replaced pensions have been decent. And as the other guy says, you can argue that Social Security is basically a public pension.
Not only are we not all in a race to the bottom, in European countries we've got full on gerontocracy (e.g. triple lock in UK or pensioners having larger income compared to median worker in France). You know, we could actually think about younger people and stop subsidising boomer luxury communism.
Yes, it is terrible.
> This reminds me of the report that AI researchers have taken up smoking as a way to signal their belief that AI will cure cancer before smoking kills them.
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"
I thought it was going to be "due to recent market volatility".
Where the heck is my universal basic income?
You don't get one, because UBI is an attack on your dignity as a worker.
Unlike being laid off because AI replaced your department, that's very dignified.
"Hope for the best, plan for the worst" is the better general advice IMHO.
The worst needs some lower bound though. If the worst is AI kills us all what planning do I need to do.
>If the worst is AI kills us
Na, death is a release. Worst is AI keeps you alive forever as a pile of gelatin.
The info about the RAND corporation was engaging, but... since the post promised to connect it to "strikingly similar to the rhetoric coming out of places like Anthropic" ... I was surprised that it entirely lacked quotes from Anthropic, save one link to another blog post that was itself, IIUC, a joke.
> This reminds me of the report that AI researchers have taken up smoking as a way to signal their belief that AI will cure cancer before smoking kills them.
I can't even.
What if step one of the cure is don’t heat up your tissues and fill them with little spikes bioreactive chemicals?
Like AI will give us the solution to global warming: stop burning carbon and releasing methane. Who knew?
Am I the only one who think that we are overestimating the hindsight of "AI insiders" in comparison to the rest of the world?
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?
Reminds me of the anecdotes of people who gave away all their stuff right before they were to be raptured.
I just saw a Backerkit campaign for an "AI male device." I will let you use your imagination for its purpose. It kind of gave me a bad feeling, like "wtf is in store for humanity?" Although certain men would find it "Utopian."
I will not believe this until every frontier AI lab socializes a significant portion of their “profit” (subject to making a profit). I’m not talking about “Every kid with a Trump account gets a single share of SPCX”. I’m talking about “50+ percent of the shares are in a trust that distributes regular dividends to every US adult”. I’ll even be nice and allow those shares to be non-voting.
Until then it’s all talk.
I expected an interesting article about how most people underestimate change, but found nothing of the sort here, only a sarcastic comment.
Do people really think we will be working for another 20-30 years?
That seems very unlikely, and particularly so for software engineering.
I dread it but it is going to be amazing watching blue collar men and software lordlings trade places.
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.
This comment is more evidence to the whole point of the article.
A better question might be: Do people really think companies will still be profiting off software for another 20-30 years?
I think it’s very likely many, many people will be out of a job in 10 or so years.
I have no confidence anything will exist (UBI) to help those people survive.
I give it 3 years at most, if the progress doesn't dramatically slow down.
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?
> What would be the point for a few rich to concentrate even more wealth?
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?
The koolaid drinking coupled with the impotence or indifference in this place towards all those societal implications makes my head spin, sometimes. It’s just three years, but the AI Overlords have “policy recommendations” (this is PR, it’s marketing) for the proles, and what would even be the point? I mean, judging by the track record of billionaires who want to be trillionaires and who have no reason or personality trait left in them to care about anything but their immediate reality (cf. the reality they are inventing for the world)?
(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.
I'm to take for granted your baseless accusation that the labor market research is only marketing and that they don't care?
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.
If there is nothing like UBI to give access to the AI-driven world then won't the 'have nots' fracture into their own subeconomy where they have to work for each other in order to survive, thereby giving them jobs again?
>won't the 'have nots' fracture into their own subeconomy
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.
Utopia or Disaster?
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...
A disaster is far easier to make than a utopia.
If universal high income is just around the corner what sense does it make to enrich yourself right before it?
The answer, non of these filthy rich individuals making these claims actually believes it.
1. You can enjoy being filthy rich until that utopia arrives.
2. You are still fine in the highly unlikely event the arrival of this utopia is postponed or canceled.
"Utopia is right around the corner guys !! Ignore the family-sized bunker I’m building in my backyard lol it’s just a hobby project no big deal"
The smoking thing was a joke btw
This does not sound like he was joking, the people driving the clown car are not even clown competent IMO.
https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-researchers-smoking-ai-cu...
If it is more than just the one guy, it could also mean that they are expecting the AI to kill them before the cancer does.
Well then, they should stop building it.
As they say in a Mexican standoff, you first.
And lose paper billionaire status?
That report about AI researchers came from one guy at Palantir, its CTO.
Unless some bona fide "AI researchers" came forward and confirmed it, it never happened IMO.
Edit: Palantir snowflake can't handle facts
>I wouldn’t be surprised to hear a lab like Anthropic announce they’re discontinuing all employer-sponsored retirement benefits.
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
Ah yes, just like when the internet bubble popped the internet went away.
A nice read, thought provoking of how humans can be trapped by cult like behavior.