scenarios

Kemp says we have been long brainwashed by rulers justifying their dominance, from the self-declared god-pharaohs of Egypt and priests claiming to control the weather to autocrats claiming to defend people from foreign threats and tech titans selling us their techno-utopias. “It’s always been easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of G... See more

In simulations designed to mimic real-world markets, trading agents powered by artificial intelligence formed price-fixing cartels — without explicit instruction. Even with relatively simple programming, the bots chose to collude when left to their own devices, raising fresh alarms for market watchdogs.

Put another way, AI bots don’t need to be evil

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In a world in which the computers were (1) numerous, (2) influential in setting prices, (3) trained by reinforcement learning to pick the stocks that go up, (4) extremely clever about maximizing their reward function and (5) otherwise left to their own devices, what would happen? I don’t know, man, but an intuitively plausible hypothesis is: They w... See more

What replaces GDP when so much economic activity is generated by open-weight models or intelligence priced at zero?