The idea is that cheap and readily available and upgradeable intelligence is going to massively increase our purchasing power and what everyone can order for the same cost basically.
If artificial doctors are cents on hour then you can see how that changes our behaviors and level of life.
But on the other hand from the other direction there is a wage decrease incoming from increased competition at the same time. What happens if these two forces clash? Will cheap labour allow us to buy anything for pennies or will it just make us unable to make a single penny?
In my view the labour will fundamentally shift with great pain and personal tragedies to the areas that are not replaceable by AI (because no one wants to watch robots play chess). Such as sports, entertainment and showmanship. Handcrafted goods. Arts. Attention based economy. Self advertisement. Digital prostitution in a very broad sense.
However before it gets there it will be a great deal of strife and turmoil that could plunge the world into dark ages for a while at least. It is unlikely for our somewhat politically rigid society to adapt without great deal of pain. Additionally I am not sure if hypothetical future attention based society could be a utopia. You could have to mount cameras in your house so other people see you at all times for amusement just to have any money at all. We will probably forever need to sell something to someone and I am unsettled by ideas what can we sell if we cannot sell our hard work.
Someone who sees the roads ahead should now make preparations at government level for this shock but it will come too fast and with people at the steering wheel that don’t exactly care.
LLMs cannot possess consciousness for three reasons: they execute as a sequence of Transformer blocks with extremely limited information exchange, these blocks are simple feed-forward networks with no recurrent connections, and the computer hardware follows a modular design.
Shardlow & Przybyła, "Deanthropomorphising NLP: Can a Language Model Be Conscious?" (PLOS One, 2024)
Nature: "There is no such thing as conscious artificial intelligence" (2025)
They argue that the association between consciousness and LLMs is deeply flawed, and that mathematical algorithms implemented on graphics cards cannot become conscious because they lack a complex biological substrate. They also introduce the useful concept of "semantic pareidolia" - we pattern-match consciousness onto things that merely talk convincingly.
They are making a strong argument and I think they are correct. But really these are two different things as I said originally.
You are making as strawman about sentience when I was talking about economical impact of abundant intelligence. I should just ignore it but I was curious yet you have nothing valuable to say aside from common misconceptions conflating the two. Thanks for trolling I guess
> The idea is that cheap and readily available and upgradeable intelligence is going to massively increase our purchasing power and what everyone can order for the same cost basically.
Seriously? You really don’t see who wins from this and who doesn’t?
> If artificial doctors are cents on hour then you can see how that changes our behaviors and level of life.
Yes, hundreds of thousands lose jobs and a couple of neuro surgeons become multimillionaires.
Okay, I see from the rest of the comment that we understand each other where it goes.
We could also literally have Star Trek. Think of all the scientific discoveries we could make if we had armies of scientists the size of our labor force.
But we will have to (painfully) shed our current hierarchies before that comes to pass.
Maybe so but humans have this strange primal need to hoard resources.
Probably a remnant from prehistoric times when it was a matter of life and death.
Will we ever be able to overcome this basic instinct that made capitalism such an unstoppable force? Will this ancient PTSD be ever cured?
I find the insinuation that mental illness is a fundamental part of the human experience to be deeply revolting. There is no excuse for hoarders and rapists.
Man if only there was a singular episode that covered this exact topic in Star Trek and resolved that no, actually slavery wasn't any different for artificial life.
In a direction where the AI model basically serves you everything live. No sites, no front end, just databases and model embodying them.
I mean why even code anything in the future where it is cheap and fast enough to just come up with everything each time based on each user need.
I am not saying it’s good but it’s lazy. And if one thing is for certain is that laziness prevails. Some even mistake it for progress.
But then, is human programming language really the most optimal way for an ai to steer the silicon? Some kind of bare AI OS with kernel, drivers and there in the middle a fat specialised asic ai chip to orchestrate everything.
America isn’t the only country on earth, it’s just one of hundreds of others. That alone makes me confident about future not being even 1/10 as gloomy as some people think.
We have a lattice of diverse legal and economic systems in the world and it takes just a single one to figure out the solution for others to learn from.
America routinely ranks fairly low on the "happiest countries" rankings. Currently #24 behind most of Europe, with the Scandinavian countries typically at the top.
What's so special about specifically the PhD student experience that isn't accessible once you have the PhD?
My experience has been that research became much more fulfilling after finishing my PhD. I got more research independence, the level of work I was expected to do increased, and as a bonus, my salary almost tripled. It was like having the world open up, and starting to really experience being a scientist without my PI protecting me.
I was curious about their decisions because if you're taking on the opportunity cost of a PhD, it's probably because you enjoy research, but if you enjoy research, you wouldn't keep going back to the starting point. So, without additional context, it seemed like they just wanted the credentials.
I think it was also worth asking because universities often want to know why you want another PhD, since from their perspective, spending that funding on someone with no PhD potentially creates a new researcher (vs spending it on an existing researcher). So, if they managed to get into a PhD program again, they probably had a good reason.
Their response about different countries is an explanation (especially from an immigration angle), it's not like I'm asking them to lay out all their personal circumstances behind the decision in detail.
Some people do not need to worry about material possessions as much as some others because of the random birth wealth lottery. Then they can pursue interests in less goal driven ways than it would otherwise seem wise
In many European counties it's easily feasible to just study all your life while working ~20 hours / week. I won no lottery but had no issue spending a decade of my life pursuing interests at universities while working 20-30 / hours a week in a comfortable software dev job.
If I'm paying for "free" education with my tax euros, I might as well use it.
There are lots of stipends etc. If you don't plan to have kids, and you don't care about luxuries, you will have healthy food and a roof and not be thinking about money. Probably the decision is to forgo luxuries and child raising, and hope you don't need to help a sick relative etc. if you want do to this forever. But it is not impossible in STEM.
That works as long as you don’t expect to graduate: in many EU nations, higher education students are required to complete at least 60 ECTS credits per year, or lose their study right / enrollment.
Honestly I love these things because they are so sturdy that you can do it. It’s like a slab of metal
I know people hate apple and I get it but like if you sign the pact with the devil you get many benefits from that ecosystem
Besides I can’t imagine going back to windows, I would have to use Linux. It wouldn’t be a tragedy alright but I am at the point where I like less customization and more the readiness and it just works aspect
I never found comfort in the endangered Linux ricing communities either that usually enriches the experience above just OS
Don’t take it personally but this amount of fear and paranoia about death on every corner sounds like a mental illness to me. Generalised Anxiety disorder to be precise. Maybe I am just not a parent.
In any case there are substances and realiable methods that fix whatever paralyzing existential dread anyone struggles with daily.
Probably best to use conventional route but I personally use special low thc, high cbg weed once a week with a medical grade vaporizer and once a year (early autumn) a moderate dose of golden teacher mushrooms. Although I understand that most people perhaps couldn’t due to not managing their own business but on a strict employment contract with urine tests.
I am really worried about their return entry. I got emotionally invested in the crew, meanwhile there have been voices saying Orion’s heat shield is made of garbagium and tested with undergrad level simplistic physics models.
Then I read about the NASA administrator being some sort of “charisma” bravado guy and the government pressures to get to the moon during Trump presidency.
How NASA safety standards are somehow 1/10 of the ones they impose on external private companies who would never be allowed to do crew launch with that kind of level of risk.
I think I am just going to forget about it for now until I hear about hopefully safe return in mainstream news so I don’t end up with heart attack. They really should take mainly single people without families on these missions imo.
Honestly if that was some kind of research paper, it would be wholly insufficient to support any safety thesis.
They even admit:
"[...]our overall conclusion is that catastrophic risks remain low. This determination
involves judgment calls. The model is demonstrating high levels of capability and saturates
many of our most concrete, objectively-scored evaluations, leaving us with approaches that
involve more fundamental uncertainty, such as examining trends in performance for
acceleration (highly noisy and backward-looking) and collecting reports about model
strengths and weaknesses from internal users (inherently subjective, and not necessarily
reliable)."
Is this not just an admission of defeat?
After reading this paper I don't know if the model is safe or not, just some guesses, yet for some reason catastrophic risks remain low.
And this is for just an LLM after all, very big but no persistent memory or continuous learning. Imagine an actual AI that improves itself every day from experience.
It would be impossible to have a slightest clue about its safety, not even this nebulous statement we have here.
Any sort of such future architecture model would be essentially Russian roulette with amount of bullets decided by initial alignment efforts.
There is literally not many things in life I hope so much for than starship success. Sounds strange perhaps but I just love space and I hope it succeeds.
Funnily I absolutely despise Musk at the same time for being absolute buffoon
I think that the reason you reject the claims and won’t even entertain the notion as a hypothetical is because you know deep down that you’ve been duped by Musk and can’t admit that fact publicly.
Should incontrovertible proof of the magnitude of the atrocities that he has committed come to light you’ll pivot and say that it was worth it because he’s taking us to Mars.
That’s how conmen work and Musk is a damn good one. The sooner you can admit that you’re duped is the sooner you’ll stop letting yourself be duped by him.
I’ll admit that I was duped by him too. I used to believe his stuff and this dream of mars.
He hasn't killed anybody. Nor has he been charged with any crimes.
google sez: "One estimate suggests Tesla’s impact, through emission reductions, has saved over 20,000 lives globally."
google sez: "A 2022 report suggested that Tesla and other electric vehicle technologies (which often include enhanced safety features) have contributed to saving thousands of lives."
Empathy is judged by what one is willing to freely give. Not by making someone else give, and not by spending someone else's money.
> It’s not like this attitude is unprecedented in aeronautics.
You'd be quite wrong. I've worked with many aeronautical engineers, and their primary concern is safety. I'm personally very proud that the system I worked on has never been at fault in an accident. When the MD-83 went down because of jackscrew failure, I was sweating bullets worrying that it was a 757. Whenever I board an aircraft that is a 757, I feel a lot of pride and I always ask to speak to the captain and ask him how he likes it. They always say they love the 757. Makes me happy!
Here's the deal. I feel the same way about it as you do Walter.
I don't really care about all those people who will die because of Musk's actions at Doge with USAID. Poor Americans, poor Africans, In the context of getting humanity to space are all just fuel for the fire -- just like the slaves in mittelwerk and Von Braun. You don't need to convince me that you care about human life and that Elon Musk does too with some nebulous numbers that indicate that Tesla cars save a smattering of lives through reduced collisions and emissions.
My criticism of Musk isn't that he's hurting people -- that's just what shitty people do and I can't stop him -- my criticism is that he's not actually going to do the cool shit that he said he was going to do. It's all a con.
I think they'll get Starship mostly figured out but it'll end up underdelivering on payload. I don't just mean like the way it already has but they claim to be fixing it in v2 and v3, I mean the final version that does launch and comes back to Earth will have a relatively underspecced payload compared to what he sold us as a bill of goods all those years ago. It won't facilitate going to Mars as he sells it but it will enable amazing orbital stuff that can maybe one day serve as a springboard to further space exploration.
But Mars, it just ain't happening.
If you listen to his recent interview with Dwarkesh[0] you'll see that Mars is off the table now. The moon is actually where the cool kids have always wanted to go to and not Mars. And we're building data centres in space now -- terawatts worth -- and robot taxis with robot chauffers or something?
Do you actually think that space will be the cheapest place to locate data centres by 2029? If not then, will it ever be? It seems pretty bogus to me. Why would he make such an outrageous claim? The physics seem to work out, but I'm not certain about the radiation issue in LEO. I don't know enough about it, but it seems to me that it will ultimately require redesigned hardware architectures that can handle this kind of stuff, the workload certainly seems amenable to it, so it should be doable. But designing new chip architectures, and producing and testing all this in three years, on top of everything else that will go into one of these satellites, on top of everything else that his companies are doing sounds too good to be true. This ain't happening in three years.
Do you actually think that Musk's companies will actually be fabbing terawatts of photovoltaics? He says they plan to do it all in house, so what does that mean? Are they going to make their own wafers? Their own ingots? Source their own sand? How long will take to scale up? I don't see hown they can ever compete with China and I'm sure China will knee-cap them at every turn to prevent a competitor in the solar market. I just don't see an American company ever producing a significant quality of solar panels ever again. Just like America is the pornography producing capital of the world and always will be I think it's going to be the same with solar for China. People specialize in what they're good at. That's just comparative advantage.
As for the Optimus Robot -- do you actually think humanoid robots are going to be a household item in the next five years? Worth shutting down to automobile assembly lines to convert into robot production lines? Seems a bit foolish to me when you could be selling cars, a proven product with a known market. I don't think I need to say too much about the robotaxi stuff -- this list of claims about self driving speaks for itself.[0]
When you listen to Elon Musk talk about these things in the interview and you look at his facial expressions and mannerisms, do you actually get the impression that he knows what he's talking about and not just blowing smoke up the host's ass? Because when I look at this stuff, I see a con-man. I see a flim-flam man doing the interview circuit to drum up some press for his impending IPO.
The way I see it Walter, you and others are still in denial about getting duped by Musk. I think on some level you're aware but pride prevents you from expressing doubts and you're still a ways off from admitting the possiblity that you could have been duped. I was duped too. It's okay to admit it.
Did you know that von Braun was jailed by the SS because he was spending too much time dreaming about planets and not enough about weapons? Von Braun was a dead man if he didn't do what they said. What would you do in his shoes?
As for Mars, I've advocated in this forum numerous times that a more practical goal was a Moon base. I doubt I'll live to see a man on Mars.
If Musk has 10 amazing goals, and delivers on 3 of them, is he a success or a con man? I say success. So what has he delivered on? Tesla, X, Grok, AI, Neuralink, The Boring Company (yes it is profitable!), reusable cheap rockets, and Starlink. Any one of those would be a storied lifetime achievement for anyone else.
Platitude alert: If you're not failing, you're not trying.
Who would you say is a more successful entrepreneur than Musk?
Musk can be both an successful entrepreneur and a conman. Just like how Musk can be a successful entrepreneur and an absolutely terrible father.
These things often go together like peanut butter and jam.
Ten amazing goals, and delivers on three is exactly how a con works -- The con-man over promises massively, delivers on the easier or more profitable stuff and then glosses over the stuff that they didn't deliver on.
The key difference between an overly ambitious but honest person and a conman is that a conman has absolutely no intention of folowing through on any of the things promise if they don't have to. They only deliver on what they have to to keep the con going and that's what Musk has been doing for well over a decade. I'm sure at some point he genuinely believed that self driving cars are right around the corner but he's come to realize that htey aren't and it doesn't matter because he can just make that same promise ove rand over and rubes fall for it time and time again.
As for your point regarding Von Braun, I highly recommend this biography[0] of him if you haven't read it. It contains details about that episode of his life and many more fascinating ones. I'm glad that you chose to defend Von Braun in your reply because it is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. People in the space community have been reflexively minimizing the hrm done by 'great men' for decades simply because they think space stuff is cool.
Just be honest with yourself about why you like Von Braun. You don't need to paint him in a sympathetic light becauase his persuit of something cool resulted in him making a pact with the devil that almost resulted in his death.
The question isn't whether or not a person like Musk is a successful entrepreneur or whether or not someone like Von Braun was a spectacular project manager. The question is whether not his current slate of promises -- space data centres, domestic robots, robotaxis etc... are credible.
I think that your choice to omit commenting on them is illuminating -- you know they're not credible. You know they exist to serve his financial interests and bolster his upcoming IPO with little regard for veracity or legality.
So yeah the question in my mind isn't "Does he do cool stuff?" but "is the cool stuff he does worth the negative externalities that he dumps on society?" and I think the answer to that is likely to be no.
Musk like all the other current crop of American oligarchs are weakening America's grip on the world and it will have calamitous effects on the American people.
> Ten amazing goals, and delivers on three is exactly how a con works
A very cynical take. I've tried and failed at many things, and succeeded here and there. Does that make me a con man? If you're not failing, then you aren't trying.
> is the cool stuff he does worth the negative externalities that he dumps on society?
Musk's Tesla is estimated to have saved 20,000 lives. And then there's Neuralink. And Starlink, which stepped in to help the hurricane Helene victims when FEMA fell flat.
> Musk like all the other current crop of American oligarchs are weakening America's grip on the world
That's quite a claim. I don't see any evidence of that.
> you know they're not credible. You know they exist to serve his financial interests and bolster his upcoming IPO with little regard for veracity or legality.
Assuming your arguments are so compelling that I must be secretly agreeing with you is the "false consensus fallacy".
My knowledge of von Braun comes from the book "V2" by Dornberger. As for the practical effect of the V2 program, see "Impact" by King. (Spoiler: the V2 program was enormously expensive yet ineffective, and shortened the war. It was ineffective because its guidance system was not accurate enough.)
Von Braun at one point was imprisoned by the SS and threatened with execution if he didn't stop dreaming about interplanetary flight and get busy with the military use of the V2.
Pretty much all the liquid fueled rockets of today can trace their lineage back to the V2. The Saturn V was a scaled up V2. Von Braun's team figured out all the crucial details of how to make a liquid rocket engine work:
1. boundary layer cooling
2. nozzle cooled by liquid oxygen, which also preheated the oxygen
I've taken some time to reflect on the comments that you've written here before responding.
You asked rhetorically what I would do if I was placed in Von Braun's shoes, as if it were the kind of thing that I had never taken the time to think about. But boy let me tell you it is definitely something that I've thought about. Far more than you I'm quite certain.
As it has been told to me, my grandfather was forcibly conscripted into the SS after the Nazis invaded Estonia. The choice was "Join up with the side that has better food and better weapons. Join the winning side and fight the Russians -- your sworn enemies. Or die." So he picked the better food and weapons. It worked out okay for him. Just like Von Braun. but not so much the side that he picked. Just like Von Braun.
I'm skeptical of the noble story that Von Braun tells about his arrest for dreaming about space too much or whatever. It's pretty self serving.
The truth of the matter is that Von Braun had many off roads before he wound up in the situation where he was made to don an SS uniform. And more off roads before he wound up under the SS gun. He didn't take them.
Why? Because he didn't care about that shit. He cared about space more than he cared about people. That's how every empire falls.[0]
I wonder what your father would say about that Walter.
Presumably he doesn't "admit" it because it isn't true. You aren't going to get anywhere convincing people if you make attacks on your interlocutor like this.
Those estimates are highly disputed because they all come from modeled projections, not anything attributed on the ground.
If a death toll like that was real and attributable it would be the only thing in the news, 24/7, until the next election.
The fact is, it’s not. Aid was relocated to other departments and continued. Significant insider pork was cut leading to a lot of very loud people complaining with hyperbole in their outrage.
Elon remains the most effective person in history at wielding wealth for the benefit of mankind. It is not particularly close and he has banked more credibility for moon-shot efforts (pun intended) than anyone on the planet.
> The fact is, it’s not. Aid was relocated to other departments and continued.
Source?
All the recent data I can find shows a more than 80% decline in global food aid, education, and vaccinations, as of February 2026.
Education aid for 23 million children, 95 million lost access to basic healthcare, and from March 2025 to Feb 2026, an estimated ~3 million preventable deaths caused by this.
Okay let me juice you with some "emotional words".
There is a direct line from his decisions to more than ten times the number of Americans KIA in the entirety of the Vietnam war.
Argue about how it happened all you want, the bodies are at his fucking feet. CEOs and leadership of organizations are accountable for their decisions.
"Emotional"
How about get a fucking working conscience.
Hundreds of thousands are dead, two thirds of which were kids. Children.
Sometimes the flaws of someone make him completely predictable. Very trustworthy to repeatedly pour billions in an attempt to become someone he fantasizes to be.
There are innumerable amount of assholes in history that sold things we use daily, sometimes at the expense of original inventors. It is hard to cope with the idea that greed, ambition and ruthlessness are the building blocks of everything that stands around us.
Sometimes it makes me want to reject everything I know of good and human and feed these traits until they fill the hollow parts of mind with wealth, empty fame and too many lonely sunsets on a private island.
His stated and oft-repeated goal is to save mankind by making it interplanetary.
It doesn't seem to be about personal aggrandizement. He has built no monuments to himself, has not named his company "Musk Inc", he doesn't run for office, etc.
Musk does not own a yacht or even a house.
> lonely
If he feels lonely, he can message me and I'd treat him to dinner.
It's pretty annoying to be a fan of space in 2026. On the one hand you have NASA, a shadow of its former self. Clearly there is something deeply dysfunctional with it.
On the other you have an old drug addict, still functional, thankfully, dead set on antagonizing every possible person alive. (I guess dems will probably shut his space program down after they win? Can he even get on good standing with them at all after everything that has transpired?)
What do you think of Musk's Neuralink company that has enabled quadriplegics to control things with their mind? What do you think of Musk's Tesla that has apparently saved 20,000 lives?
I don’t care about some imaginary balance of souls. Leave that to god if he exists.
The ability to save someone doesn’t enable you to senselessly hurt many others.
You should read Ursula K. Le Guin's: "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
A healthy person or society does not find enjoyment or entertainment in the torture of another. The act of senseless infliction of harm betrays a lack of empathy and moral spine, which is fundamentally incompatible with the role of a "savior" or truly moral agent.
The good he does doesn't require the harm he causes, so the good cannot justify it.
The link blames the Trump administration, not Musk.
google sez: "The World Health Organization (WHO) is the UN's specialized agency for health, aiming to ensure the highest possible level of health for all people. It acts as a global leader, directing health emergencies, promoting healthier lives, expanding universal health coverage, and setting international health standards based on science."
If artificial doctors are cents on hour then you can see how that changes our behaviors and level of life.
But on the other hand from the other direction there is a wage decrease incoming from increased competition at the same time. What happens if these two forces clash? Will cheap labour allow us to buy anything for pennies or will it just make us unable to make a single penny?
In my view the labour will fundamentally shift with great pain and personal tragedies to the areas that are not replaceable by AI (because no one wants to watch robots play chess). Such as sports, entertainment and showmanship. Handcrafted goods. Arts. Attention based economy. Self advertisement. Digital prostitution in a very broad sense.
However before it gets there it will be a great deal of strife and turmoil that could plunge the world into dark ages for a while at least. It is unlikely for our somewhat politically rigid society to adapt without great deal of pain. Additionally I am not sure if hypothetical future attention based society could be a utopia. You could have to mount cameras in your house so other people see you at all times for amusement just to have any money at all. We will probably forever need to sell something to someone and I am unsettled by ideas what can we sell if we cannot sell our hard work.
Someone who sees the roads ahead should now make preparations at government level for this shock but it will come too fast and with people at the steering wheel that don’t exactly care.
reply