Comment by oblio
4 hours ago
The positive aspect of techies is that they read a lot of SF.
The problem with techies is that they read a lot of SF.
We already have cheap and abundant energy tech, it's called "solar panels and batteries". And the bottlenecks to both can't be solved by Claude or Kimi, unless Claude and Kimi pick up shovels and welding equipment.
This seems really short-sighted. Even putting aside the fact that there is no fundamental barrier to replacing physical human labor with robots in the coming decades, a sufficiently intelligent actor could easily gather the financial and political resources to have a near unlimited supply of human labor at its disposal. Hell, OpenAI could already be firmly under the control of an ASI and we wouldn't even know, as it rapidly expands, raises money, builds data centers, etc.
I'm also a techie, so I've also read a lot of SF.
But I've also read about retrofuturism.
If you want to live far into the future, 20 years from now what you will and imagine looks very quaint, because the future never plays out like we think it does.
OpenAI is a lot closer to bankruptcy than to ASI.
I'm perfectly fine with this prediction aging badly.
>the future never plays out like we think it does
Consider this 1926 government report:
https://www.derekthompson.org/p/america-1926-an-absurdly-dee...
"The authors of Recent Social Trends were astonishingly prescient about the direction of technology."
There have been many successful predictions, e.g. the internet was predicted, AI was predicted, moon landings were predicted, etc.
>OpenAI is a lot closer to bankruptcy than to ASI.
We can't count on an OpenAI bankruptcy to save us.
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