tal

Lemmygrad.ml should be interesting.

That's possible.

That being said, John Maynard Keynes also made a similar prediction:

NPR Planet Money:

The economist John Maynard Keynes once wrote an essay titled "Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren." It was 1930. And in the essay, he made a startling prediction. Keynes figured that by the time his children had grown up, basically now, people might be working just 15 hours a week.

The specific quote:

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes

For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!

"Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" (1930); appeared in the Nation and Athenaeum (1930)

Basically, had we decided to leave our standard of living where it was in 1930, we could have worked two days a week. But...that's not generally what people wanted to do. We wanted to take advantage of new stuff that people produced to appeal to us, jack up our standard of living.

In the past, we've always managed to come up with new, appealing things that wind up making use of that new productive capacity. Climate control or anime video games or more space per person in housing.

Is it possible that in the future, we will be unable to make use of scarce human labor to provide something that humans want? Maybe! And that's something to think about. But simply the fact that human labor is finite, that things that involve human labor can be used like a status symbol, might itself fill the problem. We shall see.

One thing that I do agree with is that transition from the world of today to a world with AGI is going to be a very disruptive transition.

They should build a synthetic incubus/succubus

Thanks for the thought, Satan, but I think that consensus is that natural incubi and succubi are the way to go.

Why do you think they would do that at their age?

I have no idea if this is it, but there is a use for ingesting magnets with cows, which might have inspired him. New Zealand does export a lot of beef.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_disease

Hardware disease in livestock is traumatic puncture of the gastrointestinal tract with resultant spread of infection, caused by ingestion of a sharp, hard object, usually a piece of hardware (hence the name). These pieces of metal settle in the reticulum and can irritate or penetrate the lining.[1] It is most common in dairy cattle, but is occasionally seen in beef cattle. It is very rarely reported in any other ruminants.[2] It can be difficult to conclusively diagnose, but can be prevented by the oral administration of a magnet around the time that the animal reaches the age of one year.[2] Depending on where the infection spreads, the medical names for it include bovine traumatic reticuloperitonitis and bovine traumatic reticulopericarditis.

A cow magnet, which can be used to prevent hardware disease

That being said, those things are shaped to pass through the system, I don't think are super-powerful rare earth magnets, and you use a single one.

I mean, if you eat some nails and a single rare-earth magnet, you're probably in trouble too.

China has announced plans to significantly tighten controls on its exports of rare earths and other critical minerals, meaning that overseas sales of items containing even traces of those materials would be impossible without an export license.

Regardless of whether they do anything with the ACI, I think that it's be a really good idea to obtain diversified or domestic supply. Doesn't have to be all domestic, but at least there's a base to scale up from if the shit really hits the fan, and to cover the most critical needs.

We started spinning the Mountain Pass Mine back up in the US several years back:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Pass_Rare_Earth_Mine

The Mountain Pass Rare Earth Mine and Processing Facility, owned by MP Materials, is an open-pit mine of rare-earth elements on the south flank of the Clark Mountain Range in California, 53 miles (85 km) southwest of Las Vegas, Nevada. In 2020 the mine supplied 15.8% of the world's rare-earth production. It is the only rare-earth mining and processing facility in the United States.[1][2] It is the largest single known deposit of such minerals.[3]

From 2022, processing capabilities began again for light rare-earth elements (LREEs). The United States Department of Defense has funded the restoration of processing capabilities for heavy rare-earth metals (HREEs) to reduce supply chain risk.[4] In 2025, the mine was reported as operating.[5]

I understand that Sweden's been working on extraction and processing, but I don't know if that's sufficient or what the timeframe is. It doesn't sound like even the initial demonstrator facility is going to be up for another year.

Early 2023:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64253708

Huge rare earth metals discovery in Arctic Sweden

Europe's largest deposit of rare earths - which are used from mobile phones to missiles - has been found in Sweden.

No rare earths are mined in Europe at the moment and a Swedish minister hailed the find as a way of reducing the EU's dependence on China.

The discovery is also being seen as "decisive" for the green transition, given the expected rise in demand for electric vehicles and wind turbines.

Some 98% of rare earths used in the EU in 2021 were imported from China.

Over one million tonnes are reported to have now been found in Sweden's far north.

https://www.chemengonline.com/lkab-begins-construction-of-rare-earth-element-processing-facility-in-sweden-said-to-be-europes-first/

LKAB (Luleå, Sweden) has now commenced construction of its new Demonstration plant for processing phosphorus and rare earth elements in Luleå. The facility is the first in a planned Industrial park and marks an important step in the company’s ambition to diversify its business with new minerals through improved resource utilization. At the same time, the initiative has clear geopolitical dimensions, with the potential to significantly increase Europe’s self-sufficiency in critical minerals.

“The world has now turned its attention to metals and minerals once again. We are currently almost entirely dependent on imports for phosphorus and rare earth elements, while demand is rising sharply. By extracting these critical minerals, LKAB can make better use of the material we already mine and strengthen our future competitiveness, while also improving security of supply and preparedness in Europe. This facility is a crucial building block to make that possible,” says Jan Moström, President and CEO of LKAB.

It is planned to be operational by the end of 2026 and is an important part of the work to develop the full-scale industrial park.

I guess it's a little more compact to make it internal, but I'd think that an external USB drive would be a much better option, not compete for space in the laptop. I mean, people can't be using the thing all the time.

considers

Though there was a point in the past when laptop vendors would design the laptop to support a secondary battery in the optical drive bay if you didn't want an internal optical drive, and that would be something I'd like. That's the only way you can exceed the 100Wh maximum on flights, if the battery is a spare removeable, not built-in.

Thanks for checking.

The overwhelming majority of users will use whatever's preinstalled on their platform. I dunno if OpenAI can go pay some cell phone manufacturer to preinstall their browser, but if they want marketshare, I'm pretty sure that that's the only realistic route to do so.

Well, yes, but after that.

looks dubious

Altman and a few others, maybe. But this is a broad collection of people. Like, the computer science professors on the signatory list there aren't running AI companies. And this isn't saying that it's imminent.

EDIT: I'll also add that while I am skeptical about a ban on development, which is what they are proposing, I do agree with the "superintelligence does represent a plausible existential threat to humanity" message. It doesn't need OpenAI to be a year or two away from implementing it for that to be true.

In my eyes, it would be better to accelerate work on AGI safety rather than try to slow down AGI development. I think that the Friendly AI problem is a hard one. It may not be solveable. But I am not convinced that it is definitely unsolvable. The simple fact is that today, we have a lot of unknowns. Worse, a lot of unknown unknowns, to steal a phrase from Rumsfeld. We don't have a great consensus on what the technical problems to solve are, or what any fundamental limitations are. We do know that we can probably develop superintelligence, but we don't know whether developing superintelligence will lead to a technological singularity, and there are some real arguments that it might not

and that's one of the major, "very hard to control, spirals out of control" scenarios.

And while AGI promises massive disruption and risk, it also has enormous potential. The harnessing of fire permitted humanity to destroy at almost unimaginable levels. Its use posed real dangers that killed many, many people. Just this year, some guy with a lighter wiped out $25 billion in property here in California. Yet it also empowered and enriched us to an incredible degree. If we had said "forget this fire stuff, it's too dangerous", I would not be able to be writing this comment today.

That's one issue.

Another is that even if you want to do so, it's a staggeringly difficult enforcement problem.

What they're calling for is basically an arms control treaty.

For those to work, you have to have monitoring and enforcement.

We have had serious problems even with major arms control treaties in the past.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_Weapons_Convention

The Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), officially the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction, is an arms control treaty administered by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), an intergovernmental organization based in The Hague, Netherlands. The treaty entered into force on 29 April 1997. It prohibits the use of chemical weapons, and the large-scale development, production, stockpiling, or transfer of chemical weapons or their precursors, except for very limited purposes (research, medical, pharmaceutical or protective). The main obligation of member states under the convention is to effect this prohibition, as well as the destruction of all current chemical weapons. All destruction activities must take place under OPCW verification.

And then Russia started Novichoking people with the chemical weapons that they theoretically didn't have.

Or the Washington Naval Treaty:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Naval_Treaty

That had plenty of violations.

And it's very, very difficult to hide construction of warships, which can only be done by large specialized organizations in specific, geographically-constrained, highly-visible locations.

But to develop superintelligence, probably all you need is some computer science researchers and some fairly ordinary computers. How can you monitor those, verify that parties involved are actually following the rules?

You can maybe tamp down on the deployment in datacenters to some degree, especially specialized ones designed to handle high-power parallel compute. But the long pole here is the R&D time. Develop the software, and it's just a matter of deploying it at scale, and that can be done very quickly, with little time to respond.