u/MrSnitter

I got into a bit of an ideological scuffle with folks over at r/antiai after saying that categorizing current LLM chatbots as anything close to intelligent was false advertising. They reminded me of all the preceding technologies over the past 30 years which have been classified under the AI umbrella--NPCs, facial recognition, pathfinding, Simulated Annealing, etc.

Fine.

However, I took a look at the hierarchy of strength categories for artificial intelligence and lo and behold, GenAI, transformers, and LLM chatbots are all technically under the same umbrella as the former: Weak AI.

This is great. We should be calling it Weak AI 24/7. Sure, some euphemistically call it Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI). The other categories are Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), aka strong. And Artificial Super Intelligence. The latter two are sci-fi concepts that scare the crap out of the longtermist TESCREAL crowd.

But I'd go one further. The 'generative' label was added as if they could snatch all the positive connotations of that word without the negative ones. And, now that we know recursive-self improvement is mathematically impossible -- https://smsk.dev/2026/04/26/ai-cannot-self-improve-and-math-behind-proves-it/ -- and that model collapse and data poisoning are if not inevitable, much more likely than AGI or ASI.

When can we start calling it Degenerative AI?

P.S. My preferred term is Synthetic Imitation Protocols (SIMPs) but I imagine that'll be a harder sell.

Do you work for a living or do you live off of dividends and returns from capital investments? (If you earned a pension or are retired on savings from working and/or social security I'd still count that as working class since your labor created those conditions.)

After reading the latest newsletter--"Am I Meant to Be Impressed?"--I wanted to boil it down for some friends and family members. Can anyone help with this analogy / simile?

https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/comments/1t5gxih/free_newsletter_am_i_meant_to_be_impressed/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Microsoft and Google sinking $2 trillion in capital expenditures for AI for the next two years is like if Bob owns an audio equipment business and invests $100,000 in his son Ellsworth's podcast project, which earns $1,000 a year in revenue from subscriptions. Meanwhile, Ellsworth spends $27,000 a year in high-end equipment purchases and rentals from Bob's company. Bob is overjoyed and calls it great revenue--it's 70% of all the money he makes on rentals! But Ellsworth is running out of cash to pay himself and his team, so he gets a second investment of $100,000 from Becky, a Venture Capitalist. His plan is to simply 1000x his revenue. He grew it from $0 per year to $1000 per year once, so it should be easy. But in the meantime, he's going to need another $100,000 investment from Bob while he figures it out.

• Any thoughts on this or another simple illustration of how fucking dumb and circular all this is?

This academic paper by a mathematician and an information systems engineer has been doing the rounds and I'm curious if there would be a benefit to Ed chopping it up with the authors or someone familiar with it. I'm not sure if I buy their proposal that an automation tax would be the best solution to this clusterfuck. But I do like that they seem to have arrived at what appears to be a form of Marx's Crisis Theory--how workers whose wages are kept low to maximize profit cannot buy the products and a financial death spiral ensues.

Here's the abstract:

>If AI displaces human workers faster than the economy can reabsorb them, it risks eroding the very consumer demand firms depend on. We show that knowing this is not enough for firms to stop it. In a competitive task-based model, demand externalities trap rational firms in an automation arms race, displacing workers well beyond what is collectively optimal. The resulting loss harms both workers and firm owners. More competition and “better” AI amplify the excess; wage adjustments and free entry cannot eliminate it. Neither can capital income taxes, worker equity participation, universal basic income, upskilling, or Coasian bargaining. Only a Pigouvian automation tax can. The results suggest that policy should address not only the aftermath of AI labor displacement but also the competitive incentives that drive it.

Source: Falk & Tsoukalas · Wharton School + Boston University: arxiv.org/pdf/2603.20617

The authors also have some backgrounds in blockchain and crypto research, so who knows, perhaps not the right guest material? But it could be spicy.

My gut response is the industry will collapse before any real mitigation could get legislated like they propose. We do need regulation though. I know people are pushing code through AI and some are even getting something like a workable result some of the time, but my bet is once the *real* pricing actually kicks in, we end up with the most expensive Quibi of all time.