Thanks for the insightful post. Yeah, if this was a practice test for our society on how to handle AGI, I agree we failed it.

As shown by the several of the AI company efforts (including OpenAI transforming into a for-profit), our current socio-economic system with its incentives to race ahead competitively regardless of the risks to society (so, privatizing gains, while socializing costs and risks) may ultimately just be incompatible with ever-more-high technology.

As Bucky Fuller wrote: "Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment.... Humanity is in 'final exam' as to whether or not it qualifies for continuance in Universe."

I think we only have a chance of passing such a test -- whether it is about AGI, nuclear energy, nanotech, biotech, or even just plain old networked computing used by sprawling bureaucracies -- if we appreciate the humorous irony mentioned in my sig: :-)
"The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Even that might not be enough -- but it is the main hope I have to offer.

Nah, 10 years ago they still had the same definition the GP is using: AI is a machine that can do things machines cannot currently do.

That does not change the fact that as soon as one develops a self-improving AI, the world will become a very different and probably very awful place.

Why? It's funny, a bunch of people believe AI is absolutely impossible because you can't create a soul or brains are magic or hyperdimensional pineal gateways or something. The rest seem to believe it can do anything including instantly becoming so intelligent it's magic.

So the answer to the GP's question is "yes."

I don't think you need AI for that either. LinkedIn was just as douchey before.

Improving capital is where that extra capital comes from.

Capital is the means of production, minus land and labour. It's fairly comprehensive to think of it as all the tools, procedures, etc. that make up a business, whether that business is one guy in the yard of his hut or a multinational corporation. It's reasonable to think of a business itself as a machine, and the machine is capital.

Improving capital means making it work better. Designing and building better tools and procedures to produce whatever you're producing more efficiently. If you take some funny rocks, bake them in a pile of mud you carefully designed, and pound them into swords, you've improved capital. If you buy a hammer, an anvil, a forge and some iron, and learn to make horseshoes, you've improved capital. If you buy some guy's smithy and figure out you can make horseshoes cheaper by casting or stamping them, and build equipment and procedures to do that, then you've improved capital again. You started with existing capital, assembled it into a machine and/or innovated a bit and ended up with a machine (which is capital) that produces something valuable its original parts did not.

The most basic feature of capitalism is the idea that the benefit from doing those things should go to the person(s) responsible, and by doing so will encourage people to improve capital. Related ideas are that anybody who wants to should be able to engage in that process and, almost always, that a free market determines value.

That idea is opposed to, for example, feudalism, where improvements you make will primarily benefit the lord, or communism, where they benefit the group. You figure out how to make horsehoes better or make a field produce more and you maybe get a nice thanks from the boss man, but the same ration as before.

Capitalism existed long before corporations, particularly modern ones, legal liability, or anything like that. Many people identify capitalism with things that are distinctly non-capitalist because they're frustrated with aspects of "capitalism" that aren't capitalist at all. Corporations, for example, are typically very similar to fedual systems internally, and both employees and employers expect them to be.

Running on a computer provided by friendly aliens, no doubt. Just like the pyramids.

Yes, changing how the device works after being sold is a reasonable argument. Most people, including the OP, get the reasoning backwards though. It was to extend the useful life of the device, not to shorten it. They could have gone the old way and just have the battery say fuck you after a certain number of charge cycles.

The "my device, my rules" argument leads to ridiculousness. They should stop with all the constant current charging nonsense. Let the user decide how fast they want to charge. And they could charge longer. The theoretical max for a lithium cell is around 5 V but they only charge to 4.2 V!

It would certainly make it more exciting to get on a plane or anywhere you're in close quarters with people charging their phones too.

Thanks! I've been seeding my sig across the web for almost twenty years in hopes it would eventually become part of AI training data -- hoping that future AIs would appreciate the irony outlined it and make decisions informed by that insight (even if most humans might not). It would be very gratifying to know I succeeded! :-)

"The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Capitalism is about people benefiting from improving capital, which is basically private property rights.

Money != capital.

For the same price you can get a much more capable machine in the Mac mini

It's rough carrying your monitor around with you.

With the Neo you are not going to be able to do much more than browse the web, use web application, play simple games, and use it as fancy typewriter.

Heavens, what ever did we do before the 2020s? Play simple games and use fancy typewriters I guess. Although I do wonder where the first web app came from, the one that let us make all the other web apps.

Indeed, yes that is the core issue! Although, if we look at history, like in the book "The Dawn of Everything", for thousands of years humans have lived in a variety of ways, so alternatives are possible.

Dawn on Everything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The "Dictionary of Alternatives" lists both historical and imagined possibilities for social organization: https://archive.org/details/di...

Mike Kashtan person writing stories on envisioning a socially healthier future:
https://nglcommunity.org/about...
"Miki Kashtan is a practical visionary pursuing a world that works for all, exploring the application of the principles and tools of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) to social transformation. She dreams of local and global systems based on care for the needs of all life. In her work with individuals, she focuses on supporting movement towards rapid empowerment in service of the whole. In her work with organizations, she focuses on creating and supporting collaborative systems and processes. In her work with multi-stakeholder groups, she focuses on transcending polarization and advocating for solutions that work for everyone. Inner freedom, nonviolence, dialogue, collaboration, interdependence, leadership, conscious use of power, and a commitment to structural change are the lenses through which she looks at every moment and interaction. Some of her deepest sources of inspiration are many feminist theoreticians, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Marshall Rosenberg, Mary Parker Follett, radical economics, and the commons movement. Miki strives to bring together theory and practice, spiritual commitment and conceptual clarity, radical vision and practical applications, heart and mind, self and other, personal change and social transformation."

James P. Hogan in his 1982 sci-fi book "Voyage from Yesteryear" and some other books illustrates a conflict between scarcity-thinking and post-scarcity-thinking.

Also: https://www.aeinstein.org/
"The Albert Einstein Institution (AEI) is a nonprofit organization founded by Dr. Gene Sharp in 1983 to advance the study and use of strategic nonviolent action in conflict. For over 40 years, we have been committed to the defense of freedom, democracy and the reduction of political violence through the use of nonviolent action. Our goals are to understand the dynamics of nonviolent action in conflicts, explore its policy potential, and communicate this through publications and other multimedia resources, consultations, and educational workshops."

Or something I just saw today:
https://dictionaryofradicalalt...
"This platform aims to share worldviews and practices around alternatives processes in a collaborative way."

The same thing is to true for maintaining physical and mental health in our modern world, where organizations caqn exploit our natural preferences tuned toward scarcity to control us using manufactured ultraprocessed abundance not designed for maximizing health.

"The Pleasure Trap: Mastering the Hidden Force that Undermines Health & Happiness"
https://www.healthpromoting.co...

Similar: "The Pleasure Trap: Dopamine Nation Explains Why We Feel So Empty; In the age of infinite abundance, we are somehow running on empty.
https://danielyeepsych.substac...

More general:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose is a book by Deirdre Barrett published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2010. Barrett is a psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. The book argues that human instincts for food, sex, and territorial protection evolved for life on the savannah 10,000 years ago, not for today's densely populated technological world. Our instincts have not had time to adapt to the rapid changes of modern life. The book takes its title from Nikolaas Tinbergen's concept in ethology of the supernormal stimulus, the phenomena by which insects, birds, and fish in his experiments could be lured by a dummy object which exaggerated one or more characteristic of the natural stimulus object such as giant brilliant blue plaster eggs which birds preferred to sit on in preference to their own. Barrett extends the concept to humans and outlines how supernormal stimuli are a driving force behind today's most pressing problems, including modern warfare, obesity and other fitness problems, while also explaining the appeal of television, video games, and pornography as social outlets."

The Dawn of Everything describes a time some thousands of years ago where walls started going up around cities and kings appeared. One take on that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"McNeill also makes a broader comparison of civilization [or militarism?] to disease, as a "macroparasite" that weakens societies but also confers political and bureaucratic protection as endemic diseases can confer protection against severe outbreaks of infection."

As I see it, there were "pre-scarcity" times, and then "scarcity" times (the last few thousand years as populations grew in excess of technological capacity) and now we have the e potential for "post-scarcity" times -- but only if we don't squander all that abundance (like Bucky Fuller warned about).

So, another way is possible. But as you imply, it takes a lot of (social) work, and it is a constant struggle (like the perennial fight against mildew in a home in a damp climate). We could use robots to help in that struggle, or we could ironically use robots to spread more "mildew" (mil-do?).

By me from 2010: https://pdfernhout.net/recogni...
      "Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead? ...
        There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ..."

Or as I summarize in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

This is "victory" because the Dems like the environment, so stopping anyone from knowing about it is ergo "beating the Dems".

Same reason the Republicans were all about demolishing the ACA (an act written by a Republican and then edited by Republicans because the Democrat proposals weren't acceptable to them). The ACA was voted on by Dems and therefore had to be destroyed, the fact that it has led to many Americans being without any healthcare at all and more than a few dying as a result is considered an acceptable price to pay for killing something Democrats voted for.

"Victory" is not about doing anything worthwhile, it's about "owning the Dems".

Of course they colluded with foreign powers. However, it's irrelevant. Since the legalisation of corruption (Trump abolished any enforcement of corruption laws), the US has slid from an already disastrous level of corruption into total degeneracy. It will take years, maybe decades, simply to root out all of the evil that is now in place and by then those who committed treason will either be safely overseas, or their records will have been "accidentally" destroyed, making any investigation impossible.

I would point out, though, that the countries the GOP has historically strong ties with also have extraordinarily high levels of corruption - and have done for a long time - and nobody bothers to do anything about it. This is what Trump is relying on. Once corruption at this level is normalised, everyone just accepts it and moves on.

Worse, I just don't see any serious will to fix the issue amongst any of the other political groups in the US. The Democrats aren't being honest with themselves over why they lost in 2024, and have swung so far to the right themselves that Ronald Reagan would have considered them right-wing extremists.

This is something voters can fix, but almost half of Americans have totally disengaged at this point and the other half believes themselves so powerless that (to use a Douglas Adamsism) they're only concerned with preventing the wrong lizard from being elected.