I think the causal relationship is often the reverse: When things are going well your limiting constraints move from outside the company (e.g. long sales cycles) to inside (e.g. engineering, operations). That feels a lot more intense because founders / board / investors are focused internally and driving up intensity, as that is the limiting factor for company success. When it’s not going so well the intensity stays more in the board room.
But your code was probably written by a human. This proof was generated by an LLM. Is it surprising then that it’s easier for an LLM to read than for a human?
I find it overly harsh too. I think the reaction is much more about the devaluation of innate ability, and skills / knowledge built over a lifetime. If another mathematician had solved it then you can refocus on another problem and get another chance. Now that an LLM has done it it’s very unlikely you’ll ever solve another open problem.
Something more dramatic than the fall of the Roman Empire then? I doubt it. But we definitely have a potent cocktail on our hands.
The scariest ingredient as I see it is AI. Overproduction of elites is always a destabilizing factor, and much of the well educated workforce may now turn out to be overproduction.
Civilizational collapse occurs when society runs afoul of its basic contract and cannot provide its foundational services anymore. That can mean starvation, it also is given e.g. in the situation of elites running low on trust. Leading to social unrest spinning out of control, or former allies refusing to play along with political shenanigans.
In order to evade catastrophic civilizational collapse, you need viable and timely avenues for course-correction or adaptation. Those are presently being blocked by the very elites profiting from the system they bleed dry.
I believe it is the ratio of people who collectively do constructive things vs those who don't. Constructive deeds require things like vision, planning, curiosity, knowledge, experience, networking, tools, resources and empathy too
People who lack enough of those req will actively get in the way.
Things like building a house for little Jimmy in it self isn't hard at all. You can also give him some [digital] textbooks, answer his questions and create a position as an apprentice wizard. There is nothing hard about doing that.
Sure, some people will try to get in the way but one unmotivated saboteur vs an army of millions isn't going to change anything.
Sometimes constructive is to preserve and protect. Don't argue with those trying to stop sensible efforts and don't pay them to get out of the way. You put them in cages or otherwise ruin their everything until they get out of the way.
But if you fail to do that and their numbers grow there is no alternative but to wait until they've destroyed enough of the good stuff for them to become miserable enough to change sides. It might take a thousand years but we will build a new glorious civilization and it will sit there waiting for people to stop caring again.
We are of course far over that hill already but destroying everything takes quite a bit of time.
I think breaking the social contract is a symptom. One that produces destructive effects, but not a root cause. It's been a couple decades since I read Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies, but my recollection of his thesis is societies collapse because the cost of continuing to operate (resolve challenges, keep the various internal processes going) is too high; i.e. either you pay (in resources) more than you get back/save, or the cost of fixing systems it impossible to avoid collapse.
Assuming that you mean dramatic in the sense of a sudden, singular event in time which many societies and value systems were upended, why do you think that was the case for the Roman Empire?
Elite overproduction I think refers to the unemployment rate of people who graduated from elite universities. I think that rate is probably still not high enough to be concerning for now.
My point is that any such metric may turn out to have been wildly off in a post-ASI world. Ten years ago or even today it may have seemed fine to educate a large part of the population for ”elite” jobs, but after ASI that may instead be looked at as a massive overproduction of ”elites”.
> Overproduction of elites is always a destabilizing factor, and much of the well educated workforce may now turn out to be overproduction.
If society decides that it doesn't want science, disease control, or software engineering, and gets rid of the jobs those people were doing up until two years ago, and then calls them "overproduced elites" and tells them to get "real jobs" (when many of their jobs weren't even automated, just abandoned at the cost of their output), that is a political decision.
But not necessarily an explicit one. It may turn out to be the natural path forward and the political decision is then to not do anything to prevent it.
I’d be okay with UBI and hobby intellectual work for the rest of my life. But I’m not a mathematician. Many of them probably have more of their identities tied up with their cognitive abilities and social standing.
And how! All the “nothing has changed, stop whining posts” are neglecting that they haven’t had to go look for a job. My previous company became quite toxic about LLMs and employee usage. It’s not “move over to the paradigm or get left behind” instead it was “jump on the hype-wagon and sing LLM’s praises all day, every day or you’re out”.
ZIRP is over but rates are not especially high and yet I don’t remember job market being that bad. Maybe employers are taking wait and see approach and avoid hiring developers they expect to layoff in a year or two if models will continue to improve and becoming cheaper at the current pace.
Not that it explains all job market weirdness but you do have a problem on the hiring side with having to deal with the flood of AI generated applications. I assume that’s going to have a slowing effect on the typical apply/interview/hire process.
I think that models will improve and get cheaper. I think we'll see Opus 5.5 tier models open weights in six months.
You are probably right that some companies are factoring AI into headcount but I'd imagine that the interest rate and energy crisis are bigger concerns
It was long predicted that the sign that AI is here in macroeconomics is rising interest rates, because investors can get MUCH higher rates of return doing AI investments than borrowing governments, why would I lend money to Greece when I can lend it to Anthropic?
I own my company and directly participate hiring. What’s changed among me and my peers is that we’re on incredibly precarious economic grounds with no telling what’s going to happen next month.
LLMs haven’t done much in the way of informing me or others I know regarding “who and how many”.
I would wager that most of them are AI generated. The cost of generating a neat looking LaTeX resume and adding vibe-projects to one's GitHub is very low...
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