Unfortunately, "it would end life on Earth as we know it" is not, on its own terms, a thing that will stop it from happening. All it takes is the people who can make the decision deciding to do it because they think they will come out ahead, and not caring about what it may do to anyone else. And they don't even have to be right. They just have to think they will come out ahead.

Don't mistake talking about a thing as advocating for that thing. It leaves you completely unable to process international politics, and frankly, a lot of other news and discussion as well. If you can only think about things you approve of, your model of the world is worse than useless.

Pretty likely, I think, it'd be a geographically restricted war.

The countries wouldn't fire nukes against each other's mainlands but maybe against each other's fleets. Pretty likely

What even would be the goals of such wars?

Destroy the other country?

Take it over?

Be in a 1984 style „fake“ war forever?

You think they haven't done that sort of things yet?

If anything that would be a boost to Intel. One of their problems is GPU capex sucking the air out of the room.

There will be a dramatic reduction in “demand” and Nvidia will be stuck with a massive “surplus”

There will undoubtedly still be a market for Nvidia chips but it won’t be enough to keep things going as they are.

A new market opening up with the same demand as AI just at the point that AI pops would be a miracle. Something like being an unsecured bond holder in 2010.

>When the AI bubble pops, there’ll be a next thing

And what is that post-AI bubble "next big thing" exactly?

If there were, you'd already see people putting their money towards it.

>This is comically premature.

When you follow the progress in the last 12 months, it really isn't. Big AI companies spent "hella' stacks" of cash, but delivered next to no progress.

Progress has flatlined. The "rocket to the moon" phase has already passed us by now.

>We may already be there.

Numbers prove we aren't. Sales figures show very few customers are willing to pay $200 per month for the top AI chatbots, and even at $200/month, OpenAI is still taking a loss on that plan so they're still loosing money even with top dollar customers.

I think you're unaware just how unprofitable the big AI products are. This can only go on for so long. We're not in the ZIRP era anymore where SV VC funded unicorns can be unprofitable indefinitely and endlessly burn cash on the idea that when they'll eventually beat all competitors in the race to the bottom and become monopolies they can finally turn a profit by squeezing users with higher real-world price. That ship has sailed.

> They just need to become dependent on the bots to increase their productivity to the point where they feel they cannot do their job without the chatbot's help

Correct, but said technology needs to be self sustaining commercially. The cost the white collar worker pays needs to be enough to cover the cost of running the AI + profit

It seems like we are a long way off that yet but maybe we expect an AI to solve that problem ala Kurzweil

Why are this and the first reply being downvoted? Perfectly legitimate thoughts.

Anyway, I'd just point out that users don't even need to depend on the bots for increase productivity, they just need to BELIEVE it increases their productivity. Exhibit A being the recent study which found that experienced programmers were actually less productive when they used an LLM, even though they self-reported productivity gains.

This may not be the first time the tech industry has tricked us into thinking it makes us more productive, when in reality it's just figuring out ways to consume more of our attention. In Deep Work, Cal Newport made the argument that interruptive "network tools" in general decrease focus and therefore productivity, while making you think that you're doing something valuable by staying constantly connected. There was a study on this one too. They looked at consultants who felt that replying as quickly as possible to their clients, even outside of work hours, was important to their job performance. But then when they took the interruptive technologies away, spent more time focusing on their real jobs, and replied to the clients less often, they started producing better work and client feedback scores actually went up.

Now personally I haven't stopped using an LLM when I code but I'm certainly thinking twice about how I use it these days. I actually have cut out most interruptive technology when I work, i.e. email notifications disabled, not keeping Slack open, phone on silent in a drawer, etc. and it has improved my focus and probably my work quality.