The AI Future

[applegrove]

The AI Future

September 10, 2025 at 10:12 am EDT By Taegan Goddard 86 Comments

https://politicalwire.com/2025/09/10/the-ai-future/

Geoffrey Hinton: “What’s actually going to happen is rich people are going to use AI to replace workers. It’s going to create massive unemployment and a huge rise in profits. It will make a few people much richer and most people poorer. That’s not AI’s fault, that is the capitalist system.”

More from Hinton: “We don’t know what is going to happen, we have no idea, and people who tell you what is going to happen are just being silly. We are at a point in history where something amazing is happening, and it may be amazingly good, and it may be amazingly bad. We can make guesses, but things aren’t going to stay like they are.”

[usonian]

1. Consequences? NOBODY CARES. Go for the quick buck.

"We're rich. We can afford to ride out any unintended consequences"

And you can't.

And that, folks, is the story of capitalism.

We're fighting every battle except the one that counts, the one against the country being run entirely by oligarchs.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/13244015

[Bernardo de La Paz]

2. AI (not this wave, but the next) is a great opportunity to distribute wealth more fairly, equitably and rationally

A lot of people worked just as hard as anyone working in or profiting from AI.
A lot of people are as smart as anyone working in or profiting from AI.
A lot of people worked just as hard as anyone AND are as smart as any working in or profiting from AI.

Massive wealth always depends on luck. Great luck. Born in Ohio instead of Calcutta slums, for example.

Current wealth and income inequality are at unsustainable levels. This is a great opportunity to make life less brutal for billions of people. Humanity needs to seize this opportunity while it can be done peacefully.

[usonian]

3. I have always seen technology as liberating, and it gave me a good career.

But money is power. Just as oil companies bought every solar company they could in the 60's and beyond, basically to shove it in the closet, don't think that big interests won't drain this one dry, and leave only scraps to the little guy.

It has made the job market absolutely impossible with chicanery on both sides of the HR door.

Every new thingy is opportunity for small players to make a small living. I did.

I USED the technology but did not play in the battlefield. I built home computers before there were home computers. If I tried to compete, anyone not named Apple, IBM (Lenovo) or Dell or a couple of others, isn't any more.

I worked for Sun Microsystems, and the mighty company was bought by Oracle and is living in Larry Ellison's basement, or ADU, I guess. Freakin awesome technology. It was. Larry just beat out Elon for the filthy richest person on the planet.

The wealthy are going to snuff out anything that challenges their 90% or more dominance rapidly, or make it irrelevant.

Look at the billion dollar deals and M&A going on daily.

Income inequality will change only when we change it politically.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/13244015

In short, a peaceful revolution.

[jfz9580m]

4. I mostly only follow Yan Lecun in that field

https://www.businessinsider.com/yann-lecun-meta-ai-guardrails-geoffrey-hinton-2025-8

https://www.businessinsider.com/world-model-ai-explained-2025-6

He strikes me as pretty sane and his work is cool.

I am struggling with human cognition, not for everyday stuff, but definitely wrt how to get back quietly into scientific research in my field if that’s an option even.

I was looking at this a bit bleakly and thinking it’s not just ai that’s struggling with all that:

https://www.businessinsider.com/world-model-ai-explained-2025-6

"We need AI systems that can learn new tasks really quickly," he said recently at the National University of Singapore. "They need to understand the physical world — not just text and language but the real world — have some level of common sense, and abilities to reason and plan, have persistent memory — all the stuff that we expect from intelligent entities."

Good stuff :

Computer scientist and MIT professor, Jay Wright Forrester, in his 1971 paper "Counterintuitive Behavior of Social Systems," explained why mental models are crucial to human behavior:

Each of us uses models constantly. Every person in private life and in business instinctively uses models for decision making. The mental images in one's head about one's surroundings are models. One's head does not contain real families, businesses, cities, governments, or countries. One uses selected concepts and relationships to represent real systems. A mental image is a model. All decisions are taken on the basis of models. All laws are passed on the basis of models. All executive actions are taken on the basis of models. The question is not to use or ignore models. The question is only a choice among alternative models.

(If I am not mistaken, that’s the scientist who wrote that treatise on the limits to growth, which fundamentalists and pro-business think tanks attacked self-servingly along with the useful idiots (of the awful Betsy Hartmann type) of society.)

Worth a read:

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/15-988-system-dynamics-self-study-fall-1998-spring-1999/65cdf0faf132dec7ec75e91f9651b31f_behavior.pdf

While (some scientists aside), I generally think a pox on MIT, Stanford, Harvard etc., Forrester seems okay.

Anyway sobering food for thought. I don’t really buy the hype on AI (or anything). But these assholes can be expected to make the working woman’s life about as hard as it gets and competitive in all sorts of unfair ways on the one hand, while you can’t really argue with it otoh without being this lame and whiny person.

I hope they (these AI creeps etc.) all get diarrhoea ;-/. I better log off and go focus on work.