From: punditster@gmail.com   
      
   On 1/31/2026 12:03 PM, Noah Sombrero wrote:   
   > On Sat, 31 Jan 2026 10:30:53 -0800, dart200   
   >  wrote:   
   >   
   >> because billionaires don't have morals, and are slave to chasing what   
   >> they perceive as profit regardless of the effect of others   
   >   
   > The other part of having those guys busy chasing profit and buying   
   > yachts is that keeps them occupied so they don't start leading us into   
   > other ambitions they might have like taking over greenland or ruling   
   > europe.   
   >   
   Thank you for bringing this to my attention. Now get to work!   
    >   
      
   >> there's a reason rich people can't make it into heaven   
   >>   
   >> cause we can't even build heaven when rich people exist   
   >   
   > That's good.  But the whole blame is not on them.  We do like it that   
   > we can not feel responsible for the mess, and tremble to think it   
   > possible we are regardless.  In fact many of us feel freed to pursue   
   > banality to the extent our capabilities allow, because the rich are.   
   >   
   >> On 1/31/26 7:53 AM, Julian wrote:   
   >>> A few years ago, Dario Amodei was just another techie in San Francisco,   
   >>> toiling in relative anonymity and playing video games on Sunday nights   
   >>> with his sister, Daniela.   
   >>>   
   >>> Fast forward to today. Amodei is worth billions. He runs one of the   
   >>> fastest-growing companies in the history of capitalism, and flits around   
   >>> the globe — Davos one week, Washington the next — to warn about the   
   rise   
   >>> of an all-powerful artificial intelligence that could snuff out humanity.   
   >>>   
   >>> The 43-year-old engineer, bespectacled and with the earnest bearing of   
   >>> an academic, would be forgiven for feeling a bit of whiplash. Sales at   
   >>> Anthropic, the company he co-founded with his sister and that is behind   
   >>> the popular Claude chatbot, have risen from zero at the outset of 2023   
   >>> to more than $9 billion (£6.5 billion) last year. And this, apparently,   
   >>> is the thin end of the wedge.   
   >>>   
   >>> AI is now developing so fast that it is pushing us towards a reckoning   
   >>> unlike any faced by any generation. “It cannot possibly be more than a   
   >>> few years before AI is better than humans at essentially everything,”   
   >>> said Amodei. “I believe we are entering a rite of passage, both   
   >>> turbulent and inevitable, which will test who we are as a species.”   
   >>>   
   >>> In short, he is worried about the power of the machines that he, and   
   >>> others, are building. So last week, he did the equivalent of pulling the   
   >>> fire alarm, publishing a 19,000-word blog post titled The Adolescence of   
   >>> Technology. The gist: governments, companies and the public need to wake   
   >>> up to the tidal wave about to crash over society, in the form of   
   >>> machines, with Nobel prize-level competency, that will be as common and   
   >>> accessible as a toaster.   
   >>>   
   >>> “Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is   
   >>> deeply unclear whether our social, political and technological systems   
   >>> possess the maturity to wield it,” Amodei wrote.   
   >>>   
   >>> His missive read like a health warning for the human race. Bad actors   
   >>> could soon use AI to build bio-weapons. AI tools themselves might simply   
   >>> decide to exterminate humans. Mass job displacement and societal   
   >>> upheaval were almost guaranteed, within as little as one to five years.   
   >>>   
   >>> Beyond the alarmism, his post scratched at a deeper question. When   
   >>> OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released in November 2022, it was a “moment”   
   — a   
   >>> singular event that kick-started a global AI boom. Yet doubts have begun   
   >>> to percolate as governments and companies have swept aside regulations   
   >>> to frantically erect data centres and pour hundreds of billions into the   
   >>> sector. Anthropic and its rival OpenAI may be growing like weeds, but   
   >>> they are also losing astounding amounts of money. Thousands of other   
   >>> start-ups have cropped up in their wake, but none has yet made a dent in   
   >>> the universe.   
   >>>   
   >>> The law of averages means that most never will.   
   >>>   
   >>> So are we simply caught in a bubble, inflated by blinkered west coast   
   >>> techies? Or are we, instead, on the cusp of another “ChatGPT moment”,   
   >>> when the technology starts to deliver on the hype, for good and for ill?   
   >>>   
   >>> “I think 2025 was maybe the most interesting year in my entire career   
   >>> and probably life. I would expect 2026 to exceed that,” Marc Andreessen,   
   >>> the billionaire tech investor, said last week. “This stuff is really   
   >>> working now.”   
   >>>   
   >>> ‘Smarts’ aren’t all we need   
   >>>   
   >>> Nearly 3,000 miles from Silicon Valley, Ethan Mollick, a professor and   
   >>> co-director of the Generative AI Labs at Wharton business school in   
   >>> Philadelphia, offered a more nuanced view of a technology that is both   
   >>> advancing with incredible speed but seeping relatively slowly into the   
   >>> real world.   
   >>>   
   >>> He had recently finished teaching a class of MBA students in which they   
   >>> were given three days to launch a start-up, from conceiving a business   
   >>> plan to creating a prototype, with help from AI. “They did ten times   
   >>> more in three days than they would have got through in a semester not   
   >>> long ago,” he said. “That’s a real thing.”   
   >>>   
   >>> What he saw in his classroom appears to accord with Amodei’s own   
   >>> experience. Two years ago, AI was “barely capable of writing a single   
   >>> line of code,” Amodei wrote. Now, he said, it writes “all or almost all   
   >>> of the code for some people — including engineers at Anthropic. Soon,   
   >>> they may do the entire task of a software engineer end to end.”   
   >>>   
   >>> Now extrapolate this to every other task that requires grey matter. AI   
   >>> will be better, and not by a little bit: 10 or 100 or 1,000 times faster   
   >>> and smarter than humans. “It is hard for people to adapt to this pace of   
   >>> change,” Amodei said.   
   >>>   
   >>> Yet that dotted line — from coding agents to the end of the economy,   
   >>> society and the world as we know it — reflects Silicon Valley’s   
   uniquely   
   >>> simplistic world view, Mollick said; it’s based on the assumption that   
   >>> everyone will instantly bin the old way of doing things.   
   >>>   
   >>> “There’s this hand-wavy idea that smarts are all you need — that AI   
   is a   
   >>> bunch of geniuses in a data centre,” he said. “But a genius without   
   >>> hands, for example, may be enough to make it far less useful for a huge   
   >>> amount of work.”   
   >>>   
   >>> Indeed, OpenAI’s flashy new recruit, former chancellor George Osborne,   
      
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    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)