What's Next?

when ai takes over the world

Here’s an AI guy that says your job is gone already, because AI has already made lawyers and programmers obsolete.

Here’s Veronique de Rugy that thinks that Congress may actually do something about entitlements when they run out of money in 2030. Not.

Here’s Edward Ring wondering whether the Dems will choose Newsom the moderate or Mamdani the extremist in 2028.

I think that the real “tell” is that Democrats all over the US are going all the way for tax increases, whether it’s California and its wealth tax on billionaires, or Gov. Spanberger in Virginia, or the Democratic establishment in Washington trying to push through an unconstitutional income tax.

This is not that hard. The only thing that matters to politicians is to pass new laws to gift their supporters. And these days that means government employees and NGO operators. Not to mention Somali pirates.

You could say that the Republican party doesn’t care about government employees. But it does care about not messing with Social Security and the Healthcare Industrial Complex.

You can see Trump tweaking this or that. There’s a “tell” there too. He daren’t go for the gold. And I’ll bet that when Democrats get together for a brewski they dream together about Republicans making the fatal error to, e.g., transform Social Security into a real savings program, and how grandpas and grandmoms would be out in the cold. I can’t imagine the Narrative that they would all be reciting in unison. It would make Schumer’s Jim Crow 2.0 seem like chit-chat.

The AI guy, software guy Matt Shumer, is the scariest. He says the latest models from OpenAI and Anthropic are mindblowing.

I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just... appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing.

Yeah. Read the whole thing.

Dario Amodei, who is probably the most safety-focused CEO in the AI industry, has publicly predicted that AI will eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years.

Imagine a lawyer not needing any lawyer assistants. Or an executive not needing creative advice.

A lot of people find comfort in the idea that certain things are safe. That AI can handle the grunt work but can’t replace human judgment, creativity, strategic thinking, empathy. I used to say this too. I’m not sure I believe it anymore.

The most recent AI models make decisions that feel like judgment. They show something that looked like taste: an intuitive sense of what the right call was, not just the technically correct one.

Hey, I know! “AI: design me a nuclear plant that can power the biggest server farm in the world.”

But here’s what I want to know. Before the Industrial Revolution government was not all that powerful. Then, not later than the 20th century with oil and autos and mass production and mass media it learned to control everything (and made a complete hash of it). Is AI going to make government even more powerful, or will it create ways for humans to dodge and weave around the politicians and the administrators and the activists and the intelligence community?

The simple answer is that we don’t know.

But the guy says that the corporate Thing right now is to say that all layoffs are due to AI.

Politicians and activists: what do you think about that?