Americans benefit just like everyone else. The only people with a reason to panic are billionaires.
Assuming the business model around AI stays consistent with the unsustainable way it runs now, sure. But thinking longer term, once a winner is entrenched and control and usage patterns emerge and become general, China will possibly leverage AI dominance in the software space. Our tech middle class will become theirs.
Congrats on your retirement!, I also just pulled the trigger myself. I think industry managers will need to see AI fail for a few years before they wake the eff up around where to use it and how to control it. Its like we are using horse reins on cars lately. The problem is that AI makes very compelling demos. It lets you fill in the blanks with what looks like an instant, high functioning product. You dont initially see the long tail of mediocrity and imprecision. We are used to just assuming tech products are consistent, endlessly iterable, and user friendly.
It is useful, I’ll give it that. But… we are barely doing code reviews anymore though, which is terrifying. Exec says invest in extra scoping an extra testing, and ignore the software creation part, let AI do its thing and trust it. May work. May not. My replacement will find out, poor bastard. Good luck to them.
China now has better cars and better AI. When they take Taiwan they will control most microprocessor manufacturing. The US has squandered its post WW2 advantages and fiddled away everything via bad leadership, low standards, and our tolerance for industry grift.
Israel targets us one minute and fall over backwards pretending to be our friend the next.
I thought his biggest failure was his raining hellfire on whistleblowers, kids protesting, and immigrants, but I’m willing to debate this. The real sting is that we had such high hopes and we got …that, instead, and then Biden after. I was so happy when Obama was elected the first time.
Also Larry is not nearly as sharp or thorough as he used to be, and he’s turned into a bit of a crumugeonly headstrong dick in his old age. No 82 year old is as sharp as they ised to be, despite how people like to lie about it. No 70 year old feels 40 anymore either. He has made numerous mistakes inside Oracle, and now he has run the whole company straight off a cliff, as aging boomers will tend to do.
I dont know that we can collectively understand a number that big and what it means to us. People barely comprehend what a billion is.
Well, Oracle will implode and Ellison will be broke. He and his idiot son will probably have to sell off all their media holdings. So, a small silver lining. You cant eat it, but …
Dont worry, they will wait for the current tranche of laws to pass cementing that we can never create taxes specifically on the wealthy in the future. Like Californias prop 42
https://calmatters.org/politics/2026/10/newsom-tax-propositions-november-election/
Wasington’s IP26-645. Iowa’s comnstitutional ammendment. North Carolinas “constitional taxpayer protections”. Missouri’s ammendment 5.
Protecting the wealthys money is all the rage lately, a brand new booming legislative goldrush.
Then they will let the AI bubble implode-- not before. We have a few months still. Live it up. Play the market like its still the gilded age.
If theres one thing the US stock market has, its plenty of clueless bagholders with more money than common sense.
Until we run out of water and burn the surface of the earth to a crisp, yeah. Although to be fair, capitalism was going to do that either way.
I follow your logic, but maybe consciousness could be different, maybe it doesnt necessarily need to be contiguous with no time breaks. If an alien captured a human and froze them between interrogations, does that mean that human is not a sentient being anymore? Maybe sentience is more rooted in the richness of an entities interactions with itself in response to its surroundings.
Real ai to me would mean true agency. And an entity which has its own goals and relationship to its world.
It wont be a real AI, but itll be just enough to kill off a lot of the software industry.
After the initial dot com boom and bust (remenber pets.com?) I remember being told laptops and desktops were dead and we’d all be using tablets. Metaverse, google glass, self driving vehicles real soon, theranos will transform health care, NFTs, crypto. And now AI. Its all just a repeating toilet bowl swirl of empty speculation, exactly like a casino. And not a single one of those things came to much. I wonder if AI will leave much progress behind when it implodes. Maybe this time itll be different?
Take how much you spend in a typical year and multiply by 25. Pre-trump conventional wisdom theorized that you need that much, and you cant count the money you lock into the house you will live in, unless you plan to sell it when you need to and pay rent.