Seems like a good time to enshrine human rights and the social safety net by ratifying the ICESCR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Covenant_on_Econ...) and giving human rights the teeth they need.

I used Anthropic to analyze the situation, it did halfway decent:

https://unratified.org/why/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47263664

>- 'Automation will lead to immediate devaluation of human labor that is routine. Society needs to decouple a person's "worth" from their "utility as a tool".'

I have this vision that in absence of the ability for people to form social hierarchies on the back of their economic value to society, there will be this AI fueled class hierarchy of people's general social ability. So rather than money determining your neighborhood, your ability to not be violent or crazy does.

> 'An economy without human interaction could lead to entropic decay as machines lack biological drive for anti-entropic organization.'

Not quite the point the quote makes, but it reminded me of the short SF story "Exhalation".

https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/

I think its important to remember that humans are not that far removed from the native animals that we share the earth with. Civilization is just a thin layer of rules we use to try and keep the peace between us.

Just being born doesn't entitle somebody to food and shelter, you have to go out and find it. You have to work.

A magpie is not provided food and shelter, it has to hunt, fight for territory, and build its nest.

Humans don't have some inalienable "worth". But if you can work, you might choose to trade it for some food and shelter.

AI is not going change that. We might think the AI owners have a moral obligation to feed people who can't find work, but there is no guarantee this will happen.

Also, for the short term at least, we need to stop talking about AI like its a thing, and talk about the companies that build and own the AI. Why would Google build an AI that can do everyone's job, then turn around and start building farms to feed us for free?

Do we perhaps imagine our Governments are going to start building super automated farms to feed us. How are they going to pay Google for the AI with no tax income?

Am working on making this layer currently. It’s a more interesting problem even when you remove AI agents from the picture, I feel a context layer can be equally as useful for humans and deterministic programs. I view it as a data structure sitting on top of your entire domain and this data structure’s query interface plus some basic tools should be enough to bootstrap non trivial agents imo. I think the data structure that is best suited for this problem is a graph and the different types of data represented as graphs.

Stitching api calls is analogous to representing relationships between entities and that’s ultimately why I think graph databases have a chance in this space. As any domain grows, the relationships usually grow at a higher rate than the nodes so you want a query language that is optimal for traveling relationships between things. This is where a pattern matching approach provided by ISO GQL inspired by Cypher is more token efficient compared to SQL. The problem is that our foundation models have seen way way way more SQL so there is a training gap, but I would bet if the training data was equally abundant we’d see better performance on Cypher vs SQL.

I know there is GraphRAG and hybrid approaches involving vector embeddings and graph embeddings, but maybe we also need to reduce API calls down to semantic graph queries on their respective domains so we just have one giant graph we can scavenge for context.

I know some very smart guys that don’tknow how to use a microwave. And what? Doesn’t mean much

10 years ago self-driving EVs were going to make it so nobody owns a car.

There was a lot of hype. We are possibly still on track to get to that world. But it might easily take another 10-20 years :)

AI will change things, but don't underestimate the timeline.

Also even if we get a super intelligence in a box, it probably won't fold my laundry. Super intelligence might not unlock as much as we dream.

> we'll continue to have a choice to be problem solvers over just consumers.

that's if we still stay relevant and competitive compared to AI in problem solving.

“ If models stopped advancing today, we could still reach effective AGI with years of refining harnesses.”

Unless you’re a machine learning engineer with something to share, our current models are not even close to general AGI, and won’t make it.

My understanding (as just an engineer) is that LLMs continue to improve at crazy rates, but it’s clear this is not the answer for AGI.

"Historically there is no evidence of that happening with tech revolutions - or rather perhaps you could say to some extent - you can not say that we are an internet-first society, or cars-first society or mobile phone - first society despite these being profound technological revolutions."

I'm... not actually sure I agree. The US *has* become a more cars first society. Our cities are designed around cars: parking space requirements for business, lacking of biking infrastructure in favor of more lanes, even the introduction of jaywalking as a crime. We've become much more of an internet first society too, we don't use books for research, our banking is largely done online, even humans social circles have moved much more online (probably to the detriment of society).

None of those technologies are as powerful/disruptive as where it seems that AI and LLMs are headed, so it's possible that societies shift towards "AI-first" will be more profound that it was for any of the other technologies listed.

People could not imagine how the PC was going to be a dominant computing paradigm until it was. I think I would argue in the direction that "this seems less likely". But I have been in this game almost 30 years. Anything goes. Also America looks "car first" empirically speaking from where I sit. The thing I am asking is if AI alters the collective human survival loop enough. Cars absolutely did. If people collectively can use AI to create a survival benefit they will. If enough people do this it starts looking more and more like an essential thing and not separable from the societies survival. So maybe it is the framing of "x-first" it is more like "x-dependent" perhaps? And what is a survival benefit? Just ask your brain why we go to work every week :)

Exactly this. General purpose intelligence and automation allow a clean break between capital and money as we understand it.

Money is used only to pay wages. It has intermediate uses, storage, leverage, etc but at the edge all you can do with money is pay wages. Nobody pays the dirt when you take out the metal, nobody pays the forest for the trees, nobody pays the chickens for the eggs or the cornfields for the crop. Ultimately it’s wages all the way down.

If you don’t have to pay wages, you don’t need money, you just need self replicating automation, energy, and access to land and resources mine or farm the raw materials you need.

If you zoom out to space, it’s essentially grey goo with maybe some humans at the top for a while at least.

Inside the gilded walls, if you want something, you don’t buy it, you build a factory to build it, even if it’s a one off.

If you need money for something because you don’t have enough reach and power yet, you just mine gold or bitcoin.

You don’t build products to sell, you don’t need customers. You just need energy, resources, and the kind of power that comes with 20 million self replicating robots to project your will. You don’t need government, and you certainly won’t be funding it. Government is a really complex system to administer a monopoly of coercive force for the common good. You have your own monopoly of force operating for your good.

The difficult part in the capital flywheel has always been humans in the sticky parts. Take them out and that baby will hummmmm.

Pesky humans outside the gilded walls will be accommodated in the same way we accommodate ants at a construction site.

So I'm not the only one who got that impression....

Right now, 30 seconds ago, I asked ChatGPT to tell me about a book I found that was written in the 60s.

It made up the entire description. When I pointed this out, it apologized and then made up another description.

The idea that this is going to lead to superintelligence in a few years is absolutely nonsense.

Right, if thought of as a tool for automation then AI is going to add productivity/efficiency gains, disrupt industries, cause some labor upheaval, etc.

If someone is proposing that an "AI first" society is inevitable, I'd ask if they think we live in a "computer first" or "machine first" society today?

If its so existential and society-altering as "AI first society" implies, then we'd more likely have the Dune timeline here as humans have agency and stuff happens. At some point those in control take so disproportionately that societal upheaval pushes back.

What we want doesn't matter, what they want does.

>The "Moloch problem" or "Moloch trap" describes a game-theoretic scenario where individual agents, pursuing rational self-interest or short-term success, engage in competition that leads to collectively disastrous outcomes . It represents a coordination failure where the system forces participants to sacrifice long-term sustainability or ethical values for immediate survival, creating a "race to the bottom"

https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch

Evolution never lets you relax, it only breeds more effective predators.

The way many corporates are using the models nearly interchangeably as relative quality/value changes release to release, AND the API price drops do make me question what the model moat even is.

If LLMs are going to make intelligence a commodity in some sense, where does the value end up accruing will be the question. Picks/shovels companies and all the end user case products being delivered? Mainframes value didn't primarily accrue to DEC. PCs value didn't really accrue to IBM. Internets value didn't accrue to Netscape. Mobiles value didn't only accrue to Apple.

One reminder that new efficiency / greatly lowered costs sometimes doesn't replace work (or at least not 1-1) but simply makes things that were never economical possible. Example you hear about AI agents that will basically behave like a personal assistant. 99% of the rich world cannot afford a human personal assistant today, but I guess if it was a service as part of their Apple Intelligence / Google something / Office365 subscription they'd use it.

We seem to be continually creating new types of jobs. Only a few generations ago, 75% of people worked on farms. Farm jobs still exist you just don't need so many people.

The type of work my father and grandfather did still exist. My father's job didn't really exist in his father's time. The work I do did not exist as options during their careers. The next generation will be doing some other type of work for some other type of company that hasn't been imagined yet.

From your link: > Closing that gap, building systems that capture and encode process knowledge rather than just decision records, is the highest-value problem in enterprise AI right now.

I buy this. What exactly is the export artifact that encodes this built up context? Is it the entire LLM conversation log. My casual understanding of MCP is service/agent to agent "just in time" context which is different from "world model" context, is that right?

i'm curious is there's an entirely new format for this data that's evolving, or if it's as blunt as exporting the entire conversation log or embeddings of the log, across AIs.

Hi Phil,

Your article is great! As someone who's working in this space, your points just improved our presentation and selling a lot. We have been talking with C level finance executives about building semantic layers, and i can confidently say that the way you presented the value proposition of the context layer is going to improve our conversion rates.

Thank you so much! This is one of the best analysis i have ever heard about the subject.

It's not a commodity due to the simple observation that revenue run rates of frontier labs are growing exponentially and gross margins are still fine. It's easy to just say it is but the narrative violation keeps occurring in reality.

100%

Currently integrating an AI Assistant with read tools (Retrieval-Augmented Generation or RAG as they say). Many policies we are writing are providing context (what are entities and how they relate). Projecting to when we add write tools, context is everything.

> For now this challenge is text only.

That is like saying, "My program is better than any human, but binary inputs only!"..

Even restricted to text, the LLMs are not better than a human who is expert in a domain. Try talking to it regarding any topic. Even in topics that I am not an expert it, the responses from LLMs quickly becomes bland and uninteresting and devoid of additional information..

This is true even in tech things that after a certain point, I stop talking to it and search for a blog/post/so answer written by a human, which if found, would immediately break the plateau of progress that I was facing with the LLM.

This is a “no true scotsman” challenge. People are going to say llms can’t do certain things and you are going to say they can.

Not very interesting.

LLMs without tooling can not do most tasks. It’s the tools and skills that enable them to do things.

So you may as well ask “is there anything a python script can’t do”. It’s just not a meaningful question.

Sure. “Tell me a joke”

They can't beat even a mediocre chess player at chess.

* code

* write interesting prose

* generate realistic images