You would also be in prison if you disclosed anything about Los Alamos during its development. It was a completely different environment than a single private company.
Someone left a company whose executives and senior researchers think their product will be the most important thing in the world after their IPO. Given that this person is already disclosing some elements of internal company sentiment, why not share any of these civilization-ending scenarios of this technology that these senior researchers are dreaming up? If they are so potent and necessitate leaving behind based on moral grounds, why not tell the whole world so we can stop it? We have to ask ourselves this question before resorting to pop-culture representations of fictional technology.
Constructed human life is just more complicated than the AI capitalists would want you to believe. For example, even if an AI model can design a circuit-board, does that mean it's inherently useful? You need to source the wafers, cut them, package them, advertise them, etc. Given LLMs by their nature are confined to language and language-adjacent tasks, that is a very small percentage of the overall reasoning needed to make changes in the real world. In reality, LLMs are the intended way to extract maximal surplus-value from white-collar workers. We may see an increase in innovation as a result of that, but not because AI necessarily did it, in the same way that the power loom didn't create computers because its textiles clothed the computer scientists.
A post-labor world is necessarily a post-capital world. It is pretty impressive that the only way we can envision this happening is by inventing a species of robots that somehow concurrently A.) have all the same reasoning and functioning capabilities as humans and B.) are completely subservient to humans to perform labor. Specifically addressed to TFA: you are already part of the permanent underclass.
I have to disagree that post-labor necessarily means post-capital. Production requires multiple other scarce inputs, which is why I also make the explicit assumption in the post of significantly accelerated scientific progress that will also reduce the cost of energy, externalities, etc
Just because we've been doing something forever does not mean that a recent resurgence in policy interest and a re-evaulation of the social worth of these projects is a waste of time.
