The Intelligence Curse - II of III

Unfortunately, the mass automation of jobs is not a new occurrence; those in power have been attempting to do away with those pesky workers and all the money they require to live for quite a long time. AI systems provide a new way to try to minimize those costs. While executives suggest that AI is going to be a labor-saving device, in reality it is intended to devalue labor by threatening workers with technology that can supposedly do their job at a fraction of the cost. 

Virtually anything in banking could be done by AI. A single software update by Anthropic got rid of an entire strata of the legal profession. Once everybody was saying you should become a programmer. The former chief of Google, Eric Schmidt, said that they won't need programmers anymore. They only need them for supervising, for checking, for systems design. But AI will soon be able to do that. They're advising you to study things like English literature, history, the classics. 

There was a report a few months ago by the American research company, Citrini, which came up with a very alarming scenario that AI would take over more jobs than we thought. It will be the first technology ever that destroyed more jobs than it creates. All the other technological innovations of the past, electricity, the steam engine, the internet, created more jobs than it destroyed. But there is another scenario. 

The AI industry pays a pittance to many people to train their AI models. There is work called content moderation - cleaning the data that they use to feed into their models. This category of work is generally called data work. It is literally the work that the AI industry needs to make their technologies exist. This kind of work has become the number 4 fastest growing job in the US, according to a Linkedin report from earlier this year.

In the vast majority of cases, AI is not going to replace your job. But it will make your job a lot shittier.  It will turn work into a gig work version so that they can take your expertise and your knowledge. There are extremely highly educated individuals with college degrees, master's degrees, PhD degrees, law degrees, and also people who have been working within different industries as scientists or lawyers or doctors for years who are now turning to such data work as another job. 

These are incredibly awful jobs to work. In one podcast, there was a story about one woman who was an Ivy League PhD graduate who then applied to 200 jobs and didn't get any of them, so she ended up in data work. She described an extremely piecemeal, anxious process where she's drip-fed this data work. An email will arrive in her inbox informing her that a project is available for a certain amount of money and asking her if she wants it.

You never know when it's going to arrive. You never know when it's going to go away. And it pits different workers against each other because the people who claim the work fastest are the ones that actually get the opportunity. What exactly are these PhDs doing? Companies will tell you that their models are going to arrive at PhD level intelligence. They hire PhD level workers to try and teach this knowledge to the models so that they have the trappings of PhD level intelligence. 

But the data work is so poorly organized that the AI models are actually not very effectively capturing their expertise. For example, a PhD in philosophy would be overseeing other PhDs in math, chemistry, biology etc. None of them would be actually evaluating tasks within their domain of expertise. So actually, AI is not taking on the boring jobs as had been claimed. It's taking on the interesting jobs like design and people are stuck with the drudgery of bureaucracy. 

Why would anyone then pay tons of money to get training in college, in a PhD program when this is what is awaiting them on the other side? It's a very naive and pretentious thing from a few people to believe that 99% of the people have no desire in life, that nobody else (other than them) has a desire to to do things that are beautiful and smart. If it's true that such machines are going to change the workplace in a way that's going to put a lot of people out of work, even if we give them money for free, they're not going to be happy.

MIT Institute Professor Darren Asimoglu, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2024, said that if Silicon Valley gets what it wants and successfully uberizes most knowledge work, then the kind of inequality that we would experience is something that we would have never seen before, where most workers are sidelined for meaningful work and only a few companies actually employ most workers as well. 

No wonder several speeches praising AI at commencement ceremonies across the US were booed by the students. Recent graduates at the University of Central Florida and the University of Arizona booed speakers who compared the advent of AI to the Industrial Revolution and the development of the laptop and smartphone. They have revealed a disconnect between the executives championing AI and students.  

A national survey conducted for NBC News earlier this year polled 1,000 registered voters in the US and found only 26% view AI positively and 46% view it negatively. AI scored worse than US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Donald Trump and Kamala Harris on the same poll, but better than the Democratic party and Iran. Anger against AI is growing  – from communities protesting against data centers powering the AI boom, to workers disputing their CEOs’ claims that AI can, effectively, replace them.

The Intelligence Curse - I of III

In recent years, the concept of universal basic income (UBI) has gained significant attention, not from grassroots community organizations but from some of the most powerful figures in the technology sector. Prominent advocates like Elon Musk and Sam Altman argue that UBI is necessary to address the economic disruptions caused by artificial intelligence (AI) and automation. They present UBI as a way to ensure that the benefits of AI are distributed across society, not just concentrated in the hands of a

The Intelligence Curse by Luke Drago and Rudolf Laine is an AI-focused article about how advanced artificial intelligence could change economic incentives in ways that reduce the importance of ordinary humans in society. The article is not about individuals becoming too smart, but about intelligence becoming a fully substitutable economic resource. Once AI systems can perform most or all economically valuable tasks better and cheaper than humans, the importance of human labor begins to disappear.

Today, governments and corporations depend on people. States need citizens for tax revenue, economic productivity, and political legitimacy; companies need workers and consumers to generate profits. Because of this dependence, institutions have to invest in people by various means — through education, infrastructure, wages, and welfare. This mutual dependence gives ordinary individuals bargaining power and drives both democracy and capitalism.

The "intelligence curse" emerges when this dependence breaks down. With sufficiently advanced AI, powerful actors — states, corporations, and AI labs — can generate wealth directly from artificial intelligence rather than human labor. As a result, people cease to be economically necessary. This has several cascading consequences: 

1. Mass automation progressively eliminates jobs, not just for routine workers but eventually for highly skilled professionals as well. This process, described as “pyramid replacement,” hollows out organizations from the bottom up until even elite talent is displaced.
2. Economic power shifts away from labor toward capital and control over AI systems. Ownership of compute, data, infrastructure, and AI models becomes far more important than human effort. Those who already possess capital gain a permanent advantage, while social mobility declines sharply.
3. Institutions lose their incentive to invest in people. If humans no longer contribute meaningfully to production or revenue, funding education, public goods, or welfare ceases to have a clear return on investment. 

This mirrors the “resource curse” in economics, where states rich in natural resources neglect their populations because they no longer rely on taxation. The illustrative case is Congo whose economic history is one of lucky breaks leading to great misery. There is no other country in the world as fortunate as Congo in terms of its natural wealth. But not a drop of the fabulous profits trickled down to the larger part of the population. Rather, they have often served as a slave labor force for the extraction of those resources at minimum cost and maximum suffering. 

The "intelligence curse "is a more extreme version: AI replaces almost all of labor. The result is a potential breakdown of the modern social contract: Democracies and market economies historically align the interests of powerful actors with the well-being of citizens, because human productivity drives growth. But in a post-AI - world, this alignment disappears. Power could concentrate in the hands of those controlling AI, leading to entrenched inequality, reduced freedom, and the marginalization of most people.

The article warns that if intelligence becomes independent of humans, society may no longer be organized around human flourishing. To quote economist Erik Brynjolfsson, who runs the digital economy lab at Stanford University: In this world, most of us “would depend precariously on the decisions of those in control of the technology.” Society would risk “being trapped in an equilibrium where those without power have no way to improve their outcomes”.

Technophile hallucinations - III of III

A new class of tech billionaires hopes that cryptocurrency will upend the global financial system, replace democracy and even reshape nation-states. Justin Sun is a Chinese crypto-billionaire. He is worth eight and a half billion dollars. He's perhaps most known for eating a six and a half million dollar banana. Sun shelled out $6.2 million for Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian, the notorious artwork that consists of a banana duct-taped to a wall, at Sotheby’s.  He then ate the banana at a high-profile press conference.

He made his wealth through the crypto platform Tron, which is one of the biggest crypto platforms in the world. He's also a 'politician'. Justin Sun believes, like many other tech billionaires believe, that democracy is outdated and can be replaced with the blockchain, the technology that underwrites cryptocurrency. So laws, voting, governance, could all be transactions that are automatically undertaken via the computer code that makes up the blockchain. 

That is how Justin Sun was elected the prime minister of a small libertarian micronation called Liberland, which exists on a disputed spit of land between Serbia and Croatia in the middle of the Danube River. Liberland is tiny (2.7 sq. Miles) unrecognized by any country, but it has about 200 companies registered. The president, Vít Jedliča, founded it because he's a tech libertarian. He said that it was the first decentralized autonomous government and also the freest country in the world. There are no taxes in Liberland

There are a few permanent settlers on that spit of land, but the main 'citizens' of Liberland struggle to visit it because there are conditions for visiting Liberland from the Croatian side. In fact, the Croatian police have often gone in and destroyed their encampment a few times. This is the problem with starting a tiny new country, you sometimes have to contend with proper bigger countries with police and military.

But Liberland exists more on the blockchain than it does in the physical world. That spit of land is what's called a physical node. A lot of these tech billionaires think that we will all live in digital countries in the future. But how was Justin Sun elected on the blockchain? He was elected through a crypto token called Liberland Merits. The elections are held every three months, they take place on blockchain, and the person is elected with Merits. 

People who have more Merits are able to have more say in who is going to be in the leadership of the country. What that means is that the more Liberland Merits you buy, the more voting power you have i.e. the wealthier you are, the more influence you have on how your home is governed (which is arguably the case already in many democracies). It's just that in this case, it's literally written into the constitution and the computer code of this country. So it's not one person, one vote. It's one million dollars, one million votes.

The idea that technology could basically replace all of government, laws, the banking system, is one that everyone seems very excited about in Silicon Valley. They see themselves as the ones with the real power defining the future. And they would like to replace what they see as inefficient, bureaucratic, human-led systems of government with a technology based one in which the individual's freedom is paramount. And no institution, bank or government can take your money or your rights from you. 

There is a guy called Curtis Yarvin who is an American far-right political blogger and software developer known for founding the anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic philosophical movement known as the Dark Enlightenment or neo-reactionary movement (NRx),  The amount of money that he has is not actually very high. He is someone who has garnered the respect of Peter Thiel, one of the richest people in the world. 

He thinks that democracy is outdated and that we should replace it with something more akin to a corporate monarchy where the tech bros are actually our kings. It centers around the notion that democracy has failed, it's inefficient and therefore, what we really need is more like an enlightened monarch or as he calls it, a kind of CEO king. And that society in the future should be run as a patchwork of almost city states where each one of them is actually more like a corporation than a country. It has customers rather than citizens. 

They compete for citizens like a company would compete for customers. You could switch countries like you might switch club memberships if one offers something more than the other one. These companies would be run by hereditary monarchs who are held accountable by a kind of shareholder aristocracy who has shares in the country. Yarvin believes this would be a better way to run society because corporations are more successful than governments. He wants to replace current elites with another group of elites who conveniently enough for tech billionaires are tech billionaires.

But what does that mean for the rank and file people like you and me who are not tech billionaires in Curtis Yarvin's society? He would say that the masses often do not know what they want or what they want isn't enacted by democracy. Someone who might know what you want better than you is an enlightened CEO monarch. Someone who's smarter than you. Someone like a tech billionaire.

Two of J. D. Vance's big backers, Thiel and Yavin, are people who  don't really believe in politics. They want to get rid of politicians. Their view is that they are the geniuses of the world and they  should be allowed to run things as they please; that a country needs a startup guy, a visionary leader like Napoleon or Lenin, who should have absolute power, dismantle the old regime and build something new. Thiel doesn't see Trump as the monarch, he sees Vance as the monarch. Yavin wants one politician to run the country.

The ideas that you find often lead to wealth and power flowing directly into the hands of the people who are already the wealthiest and who control the technology. Their idea is that money will be replaced by crypto, your job will be replaced by AI, and you'll essentially live on some form of universal basic income. Reading about such people gives you an idea of how far removed from reality the wealthiest, and in some ways, smartest people are. They really do believe that their brains are superior, and that they should and could run the world better. They believe that they really are accomplishing the most incredible thing in history. 

Technophile hallucinations - II of III

Elon Musk has been tweeting for years about the importance of going to Mars and beyond to save humanity. “The true battle is: Extinctionists who want a holocaust for all of humanity, versus Expansionists who want to reach the stars and understand the Universe,” he wrote. “Elon’s concept that SpaceX is on this mission to go to Mars as fast as possible and save humanity permeates every part of the company,” says Tom Moline, a former SpaceX engineer. “The company justifies casting aside anything that could stand in the way of accomplishing that goal, including worker safety.”

Ray Kurzweil is an American computer scientist involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis and speech recognition technology. In December 2012, Google hired Kurzweil in a full-time position to "work on new projects involving machine learning and language processing". Beginning in 2025, he has served as Chief AI Officer for Beyond Imagination, a humanoid robotics company he co-founded in 2013. 

By 2045, he says, “we will multiply our effective intelligence a billion fold by merging with the.  intelligence we have created” — an event Kurzweil and others call “the Singularity.” He claims that  we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like 20,000 years of progress. He feels that by 2029, we will have reversed the aging process so that you will actually go backwards in time [i.e., get younger as time passes].

He feels that if he dies by 2029, it “would be a setback,”  but something can still be done. He says that he’d just leave instructions for the post-Singularity robots to sort through his belongings and scan his frozen corpse and bring a version of himself back to life. To this end, Kurzweil has joined the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a cryonics company. After his death, he has a plan to have cryoprotectants, vitrified in liquid nitrogen, passed through his veins and stored at an Alcor facility till future medical science can revive him. 

Probably the most influential tech centered ideology that few of you have ever heard about is longtermism. They assert that there could be so many digital people living in vast computer simulations millions or billions of years in the future that one of our most important moral obligations today is to take actions that ensure as many of these digital people come into existence as possible.

They believe that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) presents an incalculably greater threat than even climate change. Many of them that the greatest long-term human benefit is to invest more heavily in AGI risk and AI safety research. Yet it is not the safety of living humans today, or even the next generation, that drives longtermists. Their argument is that AGI in the far future could theoretically kill even more of the digital people than the people who are alive on the planet now. Preventing future AGI from doing this is a more rational use of resources than funding clean energy tech, food security, or public health today. 

Related claims made by some longtermists include the idea that saving the future requires directing even more of today’s resources toward the wealthy in the Global North, rather than sending aid to the most impoverished countries in the Global South, since wealthy people in already disproportionately wealthy regions are better positioned to use their resources to fight these 'existential' risks from AGI. 

If you think these are fringe ideas of a few lunatics, think again. Longtermists have directly influenced reports from the secretary-general of the United Nations; a longtermist is currently running the RAND Corporation; they have the ears of billionaires like Musk.  He has explicitly said that longtermism “is a close match for my philosophy”. (Now you can guess why he destroyed USAID.) It has a huge following in the tech sector. It is the language of moral thought spoken in a growing number of the wealthiest and most powerful political and industrial circles. Billionaires like Jaan Tallinn (an Estonian computer programmer and investor who helped in the development of Skype) and Peter Thiel have been described as avid supporters. 

A longtermist and Senior Research Fellow at the now defunct Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) Toby Ord notes in his bio that he has advised “the World Health Organization, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, the US National Intelligence Council, the UK Prime Minister’s Office, Cabinet Office, and Government Office for Science.” Ord was quoted to the UN General Assembly in a 2021 speech on climate by former British PM Boris Johnson.

These billionaires think the utopias that they dream about will be good for everyone. They also claim it’s based on sound science and they seem to earnestly believe in such a future. It allows them to portray the growth of their businesses as a moral imperative and to justify nearly any action they might want to take. Today’s harms like the carbon footprint of Amazon’s shipping network are irrelevant since a future AGI will solve it easily. Their visions of the future are news.

I was astonished when I recently came across a prescient comment by Gandhi: "The chief characteristic of [the modern] malaise is the obsolescence of man himself. In fact, it is worse than obsolescence. In the years and decades to come, man will be looked upon as something undesirable, as a burden on both society and nature, straining the management capacities of the former and the life­sustaining resources of the latter."

Technophile hallucinations - I of III

Many of the wealthiest and most influential people in the tech industry have visions straight out of science fiction: people’s minds uploaded into computers, a relentlessly expanding empire spanning the stars, all needs satisfied, all desires satisfied through the power of unimaginably advanced technology. The tech billionaires regard this as the only good option aside from extinction. They claim that this is just the future as revealed by a close study of technology and its development.

The technology wizards that many seem to admire seem to have spooky views like transhumanism and posthumanism which seek to use technology to transcend the limits of the human condition. Transhumanists think of using biomedicine, body engineering, devices and algorithms to improve performance and capabilities. Posthumanists dream of a hybridization of human beings, machines and the environment, and imagine a time when humanity surpasses itself in a new evolutionary stage. 

Eliezer Yudkowsky is the cofounder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), a controversial artificial intelligence think tank. He’s an AI alarmist but envisages a “glorious transhumanist future” if we can avoid extinction by superhuman AI. He believes that we can and should use advanced technology to transform ourselves, transcending humanity and becoming something more. That includes ending illness, aging, death and increasing intelligence and other mental capacities. 

He says, “If you imagine something that’s worse than mansions with robotic servants for everyone, you are not being ambitious enough”. The one thing that could bring this glorious future is the advent of artificial general intelligence (AGI): machines that can outperform humans at any task. He thinks such a machine may not be far off. “My sense is that we are zero to two breakthroughs” away from AGI, he says.

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, agrees with Yudkowsky that AGI is inevitable and could be coming soon but he sees a radically different future. In an essay on his website, Moore’s Law for Everything, he says, “The technological progress we make in the next 100 years will be far larger than all we’ve made since we first controlled fire and invented the wheel." In More Everything Forever, Adam Becker writes about the scale of ambitions he seems to indicate in the essay: 

Altman apparently wants to make the United States into one enormous company town, with shares in OpenAI replacing the dollar. The US government would become, in effect if not in law, a division of the company, responsible for disbursing company dollars to us, the public. This would, Altman hopes, encourage us to think of OpenAI’s success as America’s success and as our own — Altman explicitly makes this identification in his essay. 

All products would come from OpenAI in his proposed future, because in that future AI does literally everything, meaning that the company dollars can only be spent at the company store... Thus, Altman’s promise of goods halving in price every two years would depend solely on his goodwill, because things will cost whatever Altman and the OpenAI board want them to cost. This is a proposal for total capture of the national economy, making Altman functionally the king of the United States and possibly the world.

Marc Andreessen has been one of the central figures in the tech industry for more than thirty years. In early 1993, he suggested a new feature in a software project out of CERN that was only about two years old at the time, known then as the “WorldWideWeb". Andreessen's innovation launched the modern Web. In October 2023, he posted a Techno-Optimist Manifesto pushing the idea that technology could cure essentially all the world’s ills.

He claims that slowing down progress on AI is “a form of murder,” because he thinks an advanced AGI would inevitably save lives. He claims that an intelligence explosion is coming. “Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential,” Andreessen wrote in 2023. He seems to think that the mildest regulations of technology is a sort of terror campaign against the likes of him. 

He thinks that more people in existence is always good, saying, “Our planet is dramatically underpopulated,” contending that Earth could easily” support more than fifty billion of us, and that humanity’s numbers will surge far beyond that as we take to the stars. “Not growing is stagnation, which leads to zero-sum thinking, internal fighting, degradation, collapse, and ultimately death.” For any objections to this assertion, his retort is “shut up and multiply”. This principle has been repeatedly defended by Yudkowsky on his blog LessWrong.

Jeff Bezos has repeatedly said that he wants a trillion people living in space to enable a future of perpetual growth, lest we “stagnate” here on Earth. “I have won this lottery, it’s a gigantic lottery, and it’s called Amazon.com. And I’m using my lottery winnings to push us a little further into space,” Jeff Bezos said in 2017. “We need to build reusable rockets, and that is what Blue Origin is dedicated to… taking my Amazon lottery winnings and dedicating [them] to [that].… It’s a passion, but it’s also important."