Sam Altman’s Lamplighter
2nd October 2024
Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug) is back.
Sometimes Sam Altman, the new young Jupiter of AI, makes it easy to see why—to borrow the title of an essay I wrote ten years ago—he is a blithering idiot.
This is of interest not because Sam Altman is a blithering idiot—in fact, I hear he’s done rather well for himself—but because this miniscule, yet profoundly crippling, logical lesion in so finely-tuned a lipid-based thinking machine is probably not confined to Sam Altman’s brain.
No—whatever the germ (could it be Elon Musk’s “Woke Mind Virus?”) that causes this lesion, it has infected others. In fact, it has infected everyone. It had infected me. (I took my own noötropic tablets, and was cured. Click here to buy.)
Let me explain this simple fallacy using Altman’s own words, posted the other day.
Yarvin makes a point of mentioning evil ideas (according to the Narrative), and doing so in an engaging way.
After all, every time a company refuses to hire someone, it declares them ZMP from the perspective of its own employee pool. A true ZMP adult is unemployable in any firm or by any private individual.
ZMP stands for ‘zero marginal product’, a term apparently coined by economist Tyler Cowen to designate somebody that just plain nobody wants to employ because they just have nothing to offer an employer. In the Good Old Days, such people would (a) starve to death or (b) piss somebody off who would terminate them with extreme prejudice. Nowadays they live off of Government Assistance and use recreational drugs to avoid causing other people problems (although the first two alternatives remain just in case we need them). From an evolutionary standpoint, we are pissing in our own soup. Some people are willing to do that; others think that it’s a Bad Thing.
Not every workplace is Google or OpenAI, but every workplace has a ZMP threshold. Generally that threshold is lower than Google’s. What AI will do—what Sam Altman will do—is to vastly increase the ZMP threshold in almost every workplace.
You will have heard (and read) that we have a population crash problem, that Western woman aren’t having enough babies, that the civilized world aren’t having sufficient youngsters to replace themselves. Yarvin is suggesting that this is a feature, not a bug; anything we can do to avoid having overcrowding by ZMP people (number increasing as automation increases) is probably a Good Thing.
In the end, 20th-century employment as we know it will reduce itself to ten engineers, who write the code that writes the code that writes the code. They will all work for Sam Altman and drive ludicrously amazing flying cars. And what of everyone else?
We (I am anything but an AI engineer—good luck with those matrices, kids) will just have fun, right? Life will just be fun?
No, actually, we will probably all have our throats cut. Here’s why.