michael-dean-k/

Universal basic income is a basic phrase. It’s only one of several approaches to reattribute wealth after our social contract nullifies.

One alternate idea is universal basic compute (UBC), which is about giving everyone free access to the most powerful AI models. Sam Altman recently said that UBI might not work, and we should try UBC instead. This is even more unlikely to work. Giving someone Claude Mythos, the killer model, doesn’t mean they can turn prompts into dinner. Access doesn’t guarantee results. It faces similar odds as entrepeneurship. But maybe it has enough agency so all you have to do is write “make me $10,000 this week”—in that case, everyone will run it, and then it’ something like a lottery, where some machines happen to beat other machines.

The more likely route is universal basic services (UBS), where a government or company provides you, for free, all the things you used to need money for: healthcare, education, housing, transportation, food. The engineering elite will harness their superintelligence to achieve such radical efficiencies that the cost of everything will crater. Maybe it's cheap enough to become a trivial expense. This is a nice idea, one where I can imagine myself focused completely on my art, with no need to slave away for a wage anymore. It’s also science fiction. I don’t doubt that this can happen in 20 or 30 years, but labor shock is coming a lot faster (in less than 5), meaning there will be a transition generation of turbulence.

Then there’s universal basic dividends (UBD) and universal basic equity (UBE), in which citizens get shares of collectively-owned assets, like shares in a frontier AI lab or robotics company. OpenAI was originally set up for something like this, until it weaseled out of it’s non-profit entity.

All of these have the same critical flaw, the U. Whether it’s a government or company, you can’t meaningfully redistribute to 7 billion people without destroying the parent entity. Instead, we may be looking down the barrel of a new definition of labor, less focused on productive output, and unfortunately, more so on data and attention, what a citizen truly has to offer in the eyes of a state. We'll find something to exchange for the money and services to flow down, but it won’t be unconditional. I suppose a contract, by definition, is never unconditional, and so neither should a social contract.

Silicon Valley has cannibalized The Fountainhead and inverted its meaning. They celebrate Roark-like rhetoric—innovation, disruption, individual genius—but then go on to act like Keating: obsessed with markets, perception, appeasement, hype, status, and conformity. To be Roark is to fundamentally not care what the market thinks or wants, which goes directly against the main ethos of “build things people want.”

Roark had an unshakeable ethical core, a vision for the world that the world didn’t want, yet. He was willing to endure hardship, poverty, and hate, but didn’t despair over it; he had patience, faith in his destiny, and saw no other point than to follow his dream even if all signs pointed to it being a dead end. He stuck to his vision long enough for it to manifest in the world, and eventually others saw the transcendent beauty in it (Roark is modeled off of Frank Lloyd Wright). Roark was a force of nature, understood by no one in his life time, but everyone afterward.

In contrast, Keating is a status-chaser that plays social games. He is practical, while Roark is extremely unreasonable.

The point of Fountainhead, to me, is that Roark tolerated pain without suffering for his virtues, making him far more like a Christ-like character than a capitalist. There is no doubt, anxiety, despair, spiraling. He accepts all pain and does what he needs to; it’s the reader that experiences the pain and questions his almost inhuman reactions.

AI summary of one of my threads:

"Paul Graham founded Y Combinator in 2005 and hand-picked Sam Altman—a founder from YC’s very first batch—as his successor, creating a mentor-protégé lineage that symbolizes the essential partnership between ideas and action in technology. Graham, the essayist, codified startup wisdom into executable blueprints, democratizing knowledge that had been locked in VC oral tradition and proving that clear writing is the mechanism of clear thinking; Altman, the accelerator, absorbed that intellectual operating system and is now applying its core logic—“startup = growth,” “build things people want”—to the ultimate technological lever: intelligence itself. Their relationship frames Graham as perhaps the most consequential pragmatic philosopher of the 21st century: not a thinker who wrote to be understood, but one who wrote to be executed, with Altman and the AI revolution serving as empirical validation of his text. Graham wrote the blueprint for the current world; Altman is using it to build the next one."

• p(1): The 1960s countercultural utopians had two factions, luddites and techno-optimists.
• p(2): A subset of Deadheads were early computer nerds. Stewart Brand called them “computer bums” in the 70s. In the 80s, they evolved into “netheads.” These people established the infrastructure that’s mainstream today. There are dozens of examples, the main one being a college dropout who was first turned onto LSD at a Grateful Dead show in 1972, Steve Jobs.
• p(3): It’s long been known that “WE OWE IT ALL TO THE HIPPIES.” Brand coined that in 1995. But I think the counter-culture really manifested into mainstream culture in the 2010s. Hitchhiking became Uber. Pad-crashing became AirBnB. Free love became Tinder. Organic freak food became Whole Foods. The human potential movement became self-help.
• p(4): However, Branson was off on a critical detail. He didn’t forecast how the decentralized ethos would become radially centralized, and how all the elements of the counter-culture would be sterilized once they scaled through technology. A millennial today can effectively live through the ethos of the hippies but with none of the risk or ownership.
• p(5): The Grateful Dead at the Sphere represents a culmination of this dynamic. The psychedelic trip itself no longer requires a drug,; it can now be experienced for $500 through a technological replica.

When AI leaders (Altman, Amodei) talk about the potentials and dangers, they always bring up curing cancer. Last night I heard Amodei say that curing cancer, Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, and mental illness would make everything worth it, even 100% job loss. This feels like blatant pathos, an appeal to emotion. I feel like they haven’t been pushed hard on the obvious—what do curing these diseases have to do with public chatbots and agents? Surely, someone isn’t going to use a public chatbot to cure cancer; there would be a specialized internal model with 100x the compute and medical experts. It’s a dishonest use case.

Curing diseases might be a side effect, but they’re obviously more focused on (1) the technical excitement of the problem, and (2) infinite leverage (a datacenter of 24/7 geniuses). There’s no compelling public answer for “why are you doing this?” The average fearful person can’t grasp the answer.

When Amodei was asked, “won’t we all be useless?” his answer was weak (along the lines of, “we’ll have to think about work differently”). How? Here’s my attempt at an explanation: there will be no jobs anymore because any single person will be able to launch and scale a business. Do you have an idea you want to bring into reality? Maybe you’ve had 100s of ideas you’d like to see in the world, but they stay trapped in your head because of the incredible challenge of starting even the most basic idea. What if they could all come to life?

I think the rise of AI will bring Silicon Valley culture as the default mode of work. No more jobs, but everyone becomes a startup. Maybe this sounds exciting to some, but only 1% of startups make it, at least in the current paradigm. I imagine there is a small % of people who want to be in “founder mode,” but maybe AGI will be solid enough that you won’t have to grind and sacrifice your life to spawn a company. You can effectively launch a bad idea from your couch, hope it goes well, forget about it, and earn passive income if it does.

We’re so used to the maxim of “idea are useless, it’s all execution,” but if execution becomes automated, then we’re in for the revenge of the idea guy.

Great Reddit comment on Open AI’s releases:

Isn't it eerie that a tech company, potentially wielding one of the most disruptive technologies ever, is presenting its "12 days of product releases" at a modest, four-chair table, sipping from mugs? While it's likely intended to be delightfully ironic, it feels almost like a bait-and-switch. They're giving a friendly, homespun face to what could shape a dystopian future of their own making.

The setting—something akin to a cozy living room—feels dissonant. They're discussing technology that operates at an almost incomprehensible level of abstraction, yet they're explaining it to us in what appears to be someone's home. They've abandoned the traditional Silicon Valley keynote spectacle for what they frame as an intimate conversation with us, the users.

Between the four of them, there’s a single MacBook and an iPad, as if the vast compute power of Microsoft Azure supercomputer network could somehow be distilled into two personal devices. I wasn’t expecting the grandiosity of a Steve Ballmer screaming on stage or the pomp of Google I/O, but this minimalism feels calculated, even unsettling.

And then there’s the context surrounding the company itself. OpenAI—a company in the throes of dramatic reinvention—has seen dozens of employees leave in protest, high-level executives resign without explanation, and even its CEO ousted and reinstated in a matter of days. It’s a level of instability and reinvention I’ve never seen before in a company of this scale.

I’m curious to see what the rest of these 12 days will bring, but this juxtaposition of power and humility feels deeply intentional—and slightly unnerving.