I love this question. If history is a guide, some version of that is what will happen (employment doesn't seem to go down, despite technological progress and population + economic growth).
I suspect the root cause is that it's harder and scarier to imagine good outcomes. It exposes us to disappointment, and when you do it publicly, it looks "crazy".
Another explanation is that there's no direct consumer for "more." Individuals, corporations and states are not in themselves interested in "a larger amount of science," or anything analogous, despite the fact that they would all benefit ambiently.
The net effect is that it's only "safe" to claim reduced risk (i.e. lower costs).
I suspect we’re at the stage of technological civilizational development where, especially with LLM-assisted gradient descent seeking upon the results, basic science, research and engineering for the pure sake of establishing search space beacons of what is found to be true and what is not, irrespective of immediate industrial applications payoff, are valuable economic inputs in and of themselves into ever-expanding training corpus. It has never been easier for people in different fields to now search knowledge spaces in LLM’s, for applicability to their problem spaces of discoveries in seemingly unrelated spaces.
From my perspective, we are desperately short of scientists, researchers and engineers, but we are using an outdated economic model to leverage their findings. LLM’s are a large part of Bush’s Memex and Jobs’ bicycle for the mind visions for intelligence amplification, and in some ways exceed them. I hope we trampoline from how we currently use basic seeking efforts for knowledge.
Is the demand low because the capital requirements to perform the research aren't there? Excluding wages...granted, for an average research project I don't know what % goes to wages and admin overhead. Probably the bulk?
I do the same, but delegate to codex instead via the /smux skill. It's expensive, but I get one long-running Claude context window and one frequently compacting codex, and this saves me from needing to re-gather context all the time.
Per the OP's technique, I'll use Fable for intensive planning moments, then switch back to opus when things are going well.
1. A compiler for real-time tensor processing (arbitrary DSP, ML). In something like LISP or Haskell, the goal is to compile lambda calculus for fast/reliable execution—as such, you can express a program in a fully general language that can represent any computation and execute it without explicitly modeling the lower levels of the machine. I'm building a compiler that does the same thing for the subset of programs that are guaranteed to execute on-budget. The effect: you write code that looks like DSP/ML math and it compiles/runs optimally with execution guaranteed by construction.
2. My take on an agent framework ... append only log + content hypergraph in Elixir, tools that regularly pull data from other services into Postgres—built as a kind of 'exoskeleton' around claude/codex so it's not competing with fast-moving tools.
Ah, interested to dive in—and have a project it could integrate with.
I built a similar thing recently, for agents, aimed at enabling prolog queries over handles in markdown corpora (and code): https://github.com/flowerornament/anneal. A true slopwerk in comparison to this, however.
I suspect most people don't even know there's a there there.
For instance, while I now know that file systems have permissions, before I became a programmer, I spent maybe ten years thinking of permissions as a special, obscure system thing that you should never touch.
For that matter, I suspect many people don't know basic things like that a file system isn't inherently the operating system.
And, where would you go to learn this information? Your Mac doesn't ship with a manual—how would you know one exists? Furthermore, I would wager that perhaps most people have never learned how anything works requiring a manual and are simply unaware that that's a thing.
All to say, I'm not sure "refusal" is the right term.
When I was an undergraduate biology student in 1991 a suitemate told me I should go to some desk in some building over by Muir and get an account on the VAX. There were strange rooms all over campus that were open 24/7 and were loaded with green and amber screen terminals with integrated keyboards. Lots of sessions for CS lectures were held in these rooms and there was always interesting notes on the white boards (most rooms still had black boards or green boards, but think the chalk was too dusty so these rooms usually had the white boards.
Once I saw an instruction that was circled with an arrow pointing to is that said:
man man
man -k -or- apropos
and that was how I learned about computers.
I just typed `man man` in a terminal on my Mac, and luckily its still there.
Sadly, I think this is true, and it's starting to seem like my own personal political imperative is to remind people that AI can be insanely personally empowering.
Many people around me are just missing the boat, or don't care, but many are also able to finally accomplish all kinds of things they've been barred from in the past.
LLMs are best seen, I think, as an imagination amplifier. If you're in the mindset of finding ways to improve society and help other people, there is no shortage of opportunity, and increasingly, capability.
This could be true, but I think it amounts to wishful thinking. The human empowerment phase of AI is transitory and brief. Once you get into RSI and AGI the human is increasingly left out and disenfranchised. The multiplier of your personal effectiveness directly proportional to how much the AI is doing relative to you. Being 2x more effective is great - AI does half the work. 5x, 10x, 100x? When the AI does 99% of the work you maybe start to worry - the bottleneck to 'your' productivity is now you and you are going up against much faster and more powerful entities than yourself. This mindset is rooted in a short term gain that risks a long term loss.
That’s a fair framing. I like the idea that the two debates could be separated. Personally I find it hard to believe that a super intelligence would not completely disempower humans over any reasonable time frame (50 years), but you are right that there is a chance. There are some optimistic scenarios either way but the odds are indeed long. You can approximate things reasonably well by framing the priority as whether you think P(take off can be stopped) is higher than P(survival post take off).
This is the exact same sentiment I felt at the dawn of the Internet. I felt it was going to empower individuals, tear down borders and barriers, and bring humanity together.
Instead we ended up with an ad fueled dopamine/outrage slot machine.
We're seeing the same thing happen with AI on a condensed timeframe. Yes, its useful. Yes, it lowers barriers and amplifies what individuals can do, just like the early internet did.
However, the same pattern will repeat itself because the exact same forces that bent the arc of the internet towards its current state haven't gone anywhere; if anything they've just become stronger.
I don't completely disagree, but that's not the entire story, and the efforts of those who fought for good outcomes matter profoundly.
For instance, we do in fact have global, effectively ad-free, E2E encrypted messaging. A lot of people put in a lot of work on many fronts to design that, prioritize it, and deliver it at world-scale (mostly) legally.
The fact that the ad model became completely dominant is a real tragedy, but I think the deeper mistake with that idea was that "connecting people" is more complicated than it seems and has had many unforeseen consequences.
As a Western well-to-do person, to the extent I can tune out the slot machine, the dream actually has come true in many ways. I have friends and colleagues all over the world, travel is easier, coordination is easier, and politically my voice matters in ways it never would have in the past.
I was reading mailing lists from the early 2000s the other day and it was wild to remember a time when you literally had no idea what was happening in other parts of the world—when nearly all information was mediated through centralized authorities. People were sharing 'suppressed' reports on grass-roots political action other countries with a sense of self-importance that would be cringe today.
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