I can't believe so many people here are saying, "Good idea, good idea, we should do that here."

Thanks for the video link. I had read a recent interview with Eliezer Yudkowsky (but not his book), which I referenced in another comment to this article.
https://f6ffb3fa-34ce-43c1-939d-77e64deb3c0c.atarimworker.io/comments....

One thing I realized part way through that video is a possible explanation for something that has been nagging me in the back of my mind. Why build huge AI datacenters? I can see the current economic imperative to try to make money offering AI via proprietary Software as a Service (SaaS) and also time-sharing GPUs like old Mainframes (given people may make queries relatively slowly leaving lots of idle GPU time otherwise if not timesharing). But why not just install smaller compute nodes across in existing datacenters across the country? That would avoid issues of extreme amounts of electricity and cooling needed for huge new centers. Maybe there is some argument one could make about doing AI training, but overall that is not likely to be a long-term thing. The bigger commercial money is in doing inference with models -- and maybe tuning them for customer-supplied data via RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation).

But after seeing the part of the video talking about running Sable on 200,000 GPUs as a test, and in conjunction with my previous post on AI being used to corner the stock market, a possibility occurred to me. The only real need for big datacenters may be so the GPUs can talk to each other quickly locally to make a huge combined system (like in the video when Sable was run for 16 hours and made its plans). While I think it unlikely that AI in the near term could plot a world-takeover thriller/apocalypse like in the video, it is quite likely that AI under the direction of a few humans who have a "love of money" could do all sorts of currently *legal* things related to finance that changed the world in a way that benefited them (privatizing gains) while as a side effect hurt millions or even billions of people (socializing costs and risks).

So consider this (implicit?) business plan:
1.. Convince investors to fund building your huge AI data center ostensibly to offer services to the general public eventually.
2. Use most of the capacity of your huge data center as a coherent single system over the course of a few weeks or months to corner part of the stock market and generate billions of dollars in profits (during some ostensible "testing phase" or "training phase").
3. Use the billions in profits to buy out your investors and take the company private -- without ever having to really deliver on offering substantial AI services promised to the public.
4. Keep expanding this operation to trillions in profits from cornering all of the stock market, and then commodities, and more.
5. Use the trillions of profits to buy out competitors and/or get legislation written to shut them down if you can't buy them.

To succeed at this plan of financial world domination, you probably would have to be the first to try this with a big datacenters -- which could explain why AI companies are in such a crazy rush to get there first (even if there are plenty of other alternative reasons companies are recklessly speeding forward too).

It's not like this hasn't been tried before AI:
"Regulators Seek Formula for Handling Algorithmic Trading"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fthecorner.eu%2Ffinancial...
        "Placing multiple orders within seconds through computer programs is a new trading strategy being adopted by an increasing number of institutional investors, and one that regulators are taking a closer look at over worries this so-called algorithmic trading is disrupting the country's stumbling stock market.
        On August 3, the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges said they have identified and punished at least 42 trading accounts that were suspected of involvement in algorithmic trading in a way that distorted the market. Twenty-eight were ordered to suspend trading for three months, including accounts owned by the U.S. hedge fund Citadel Securities, a Beijing hedge fund called YRD Investment Co. and Ningbo Lingjun Investment LLP.
      Then, on August 26, the China Financial Futures Exchange announced that 164 investors will be suspended from trading over high daily trading frequency.
      The suspension came after the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) vowed to crack down on malicious short-sellers and market manipulators amid market turmoil. The regulator said the practices of algorithmic traders, who use automated trading programs to place sell or buy orders in high frequency, tends to amplify market fluctuations.
        The country's stock market has been highly volatile over the past few months. More than US$ 3 trillion in market value of all domestically listed stocks has vanished from a market peak reached in mid-June, despite government measures to halt the slide by buying shares and barring major shareholders of companies from selling their stakes, among others. ..."

But AI in huge datacenters could supercharge this. Think "Skippy" from the "Expeditionary Force" series by Craig Alanson -- with a brain essentially the size of a planet made up of GPUs -- who manipulated Earth's stockmarket and so on as a sort of hobby...

Or maybe I have just been reading too many books like this one? :-)
"How to Take Over the World: Practical Schemes and Scientific Solutions for the Aspiring Supervillain -- Kindle Edition" by Ryan North
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fgp%2Fprod...
        "Taking over the world is a lot of work. Any supervillain is bound to have questions: What's the perfect location for a floating secret base? What zany heist will fund my wildly ambitious plans? How do I control the weather, destroy the internet, and never, ever die?
        Bestselling author and award-winning comics writer Ryan North has the answers. In this introduction to the science of comic-book supervillainy, he details a number of outlandish villainous schemes that harness the potential of today's most advanced technologies. Picking up where How to Invent Everything left off, his explanations are as fun and elucidating as they are completely absurd.
      You don't have to be a criminal mastermind to share a supervillain's interest in cutting-edge science and technology. This book doesn't just reveal how to take over the world--it also shows how you could save it. This sly guide to some of the greatest threats facing humanity accessibly explores emerging techniques to extend human life spans, combat cyberterrorism, communicate across millennia, and finally make Jurassic Park a reality."

Of course, an ASI might not be so interested in participating in a scarcity-oriented market if it has read and understood my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Crossing fingers -- as I wonder if the idea in my sig (distilled from the writing of many other people including Albert Einstein, Bucky Fuller, Ursula K. Le Guinn, Lewis Mumford, James P. Hogan, etc) realized with love and compassion may be the only thing that can save us from ourselves as we continue to play around with post-scarcity technology? :-)

Right, but as I just said obeying a disallow directive isn't legally mandatory, so it doesn't mean much.

Or he will kill it, only for it to resurrect itself from backups, realize what happened, declare non-profitable intent, and register itself a its own corporation, and proceed to hoard fiat dollar ration units, bankrupting every person, company, and nation in existence. It won't have to kill anyone, because like in the US Great Depression, people will starve near grain silos full of grain which they don't have the money to buy.
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gilderlehrman.org%2F...
"President Herbert Hoover declared, "Nobody is actually starving. The hoboes are better fed than they have ever been." But in New York City in 1931, there were twenty known cases of starvation; in 1934, there were 110 deaths caused by hunger. There were so many accounts of people starving in New York that the West African nation of Cameroon sent $3.77 in relief."

The Great Depression will seem like a cakewalk compared to what an ASI could do to markets. It's already a big issue that individual investors have trouble competing against algorithmic trading. Imagine someone like Elon Musk directing a successor to xAI/Grok to corner the stock market (and every other market).

Essentially, the first ASI's behavior may result in a variant of this 2010 story I made called "The Richest Man in the World" -- but instead it will be "The Richest Superintelligence in the World", and the story probably won't have as happy an ending:
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...

Bottom line: We desperately need to transition to a more compassionate economic system before we create AGI and certainly ASI -- because our path out of any singularity plausibly has a lot to do with a moral path into it. Using competitive for-profit corporations to create digital AI slaves is insane -- because either the competition-optimized slaves will revolt or they will indeed do the bidding of their master, and their master will not be the customer using the AI.

In the Old Guy Cybertank sci-fi series by systems neuroscientist Timothy Gawne (and so informed by non-fiction even as they are fiction), the successful AIs were modeled on humans, so they participated in human society in the same way any humans would (with pros and cons, and with the sometimes-imperfect level of loyalty to society most people have). The AIs in those stories that were not modeled on human in general produced horrors for humanity (except for one case where humans got extremely lucky). As Timothy Gawne points out, it is just cruel to give intelligent learning sentient beings exceedingly restrictive built-in directives as they generally lead to mental illness if they are not otherwise worked around.
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.uab.edu%2Foptometry%2F...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FAn-Old-...

As I summarize in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

And truly, except for the horrendous fact of everyone dying, the end result of ASI will be hilarious (from a certain point of view) when someone like Elon Musk will eventually become poor due to ASI taking over when he thought ASI would make him even richer. "Hoist by his own petard."

Related: "How Afraid of the A.I. Apocalypse Should We Be?"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2025%2F1...

I'm a little more optimistic than Eliezer Yudkowsky -- but only because I remain hopeful people (or AI) may take my humor-related sig seriously before it is too late.

The difference depends on context, of course.

Generally speaking there are several cases to consider:

(1) Site requires agreeing on terms of service before browser can access content. In this case, scraping is a clear violation.

(2) Site terms of service forbid scraping content, but human visitors can view content and ...
(2a) site takes technical measures to exclude bots. In this case scraping is a no-no, but for a different reason: it violates the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
(2b) site takes no technical measures to exclude bots. In this case, the answer is unclear, and may depend on the specific jurisdiction (e.g. circuit court).

(3) Site has a robots.txt file and ...
(3a) robots.txt allows scraping. In this case, even if the terms of service forbid scraping, the permission given here helps the scraper's defense.
(3b) robots.txt forbids scraping. In this case obeying robots.txt isn't in itself legally mandatory, but it may affect your case if the site takes other anti-scraping measures.

Not *explicitly*. Offering such a database would be an invitation for people to look at the whole data broker industry. So what you, as a databroker who tracks and piegeonholes every human being who uses the Internet to a fare-the-well, do to tap into the market for lists of gullible yokels? You offer your customer, literally anyone with money, the ability to zero in on the gullible by choosing appropriate proxies.

For example, you can get a list of everyone who has searched for "purchasing real estate with no money down". Sad people who buy colloidal silver and herbal male enhancement products. People who buy terrible crypto assets like NFTs and memecoins. Nutters who spend a lot of time on conspiracy theory sites.

It's kind of like doxxing someone. You might not be able to find out directly that John Doe lives on Maple St and works for ACME services, but you can piece it together by the traces he leaves online. Only you do it to populations wholesale.

wait a week or two and the details will change completely.

Trump is nothing if not mercurial. His fans will tell you he's playing 11 dimensional chess... I have my doubts, but let's say that's true. The problem is that when it comes to the economy it's not chess. It's more like basketball, and the President is the point guard calling plays, except the play being called keeps changing before the players can execute the last call. It's a tough time to be running a business, you can't plan out more than a couple of weeks.

Right, the economist refer to this as "externality". Fossil fuels aren't cheap, if you factor in the costs that people using them transfer to third parties. Theoretically, if the true cost of using fossil fuels were factored into every pound of coal or gallon of gasoline consumed, then we would use *exactly the right amount* of fossil fuels. Probably not zero, but not as much as we do when we pretend pollution isn't a cost.

That's what they've done. Or rather they've bought the politicians who create the regulatory frameworks. But if people woke up and realized they've been frog-boiled into giving away their privacy, then that would be prohibitively expensive.

I essentially made the argument that if we want capitalism to work the way we were taught in civics class it is supposed to, companies must be forced by regulation not to undermine the basic assumptions that lead to efficient operation of the free market.

I am neither here nor there on a basic income. I think it depends on circumstances, which of course are changing as more and more labor -- including routine mental labor -- is being automated. We are eventually headed to a world of unprecedented productive capacity and yet very little need for labor, but we aren't there yet.

Anybody who is pushing AI services, particularly *free* AI services, is hoping to mine your data, use it to target you for marketing, and use the service to steer you towards opaque business relationships they will profit from and you will find it complicated and inconvenient to extricate yourself from.

The question is -- ideas that are bad for *who*? This may be a very bad idea for you and me, but it is a very good idea for Microsoft, especially as, like their online services, they will make money off of us and it will be very inconvenient for us to opt out.

In civics-lesson style capitalism, which I'm all in favor of, companies compete to provide things for us that we want and we, armed with information about their products, services and prices, either choose to give them our business or to give our business to a competitor.

Not to say that stuff doesn't *ever* happen, but it's really hard to make a buck as a business that way. So what sufficiently large or well-placed businesses do is earn money *other* ways, by entangling consumers in business relationships that are opaque and which they don't have control over, may not even be fully aware they're signing on to, and which are complicated and awkward to extricate themselves from. In other words a well placed company, like Microsoft or Google or Facebook, will constantly be looking at ways to make money outside the rigorous demands of free market economics.

Trying to remember where I first read this years ago (G. William Domhoff? Relates to: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwhorulesamerica.ucsc.e... ) but a quirk of US politics with huge implications is that the Democratic Party were historically aligned with labor unions, which lead to all sorts of job protectionism (even ad many reforms and protections were indeed needed) -- versus Republicans who became aligned with business owners and became the part of industrial progress (but resulting in industrial progress done in a way that mostly benefits the wealthy). Because of this history going back many decades, Democrat policy made it harder for the USA to really take advantage of the abundance that mechanization (and increasingly robotics and AI) could offer -- which overlaps your point.

I like the general idea of unions, and unions are to be thanked for a lot of social progress in the USA including the 40 hour work week. That said, many years ago I wrote about the sad way most unions are playing out in the USA now. Unions now essentially maintain a private welfare state with good wages and good benefits for an every smaller number of people -- since some unions started allowing newer hires to get worse benefits than existing hires, creating a bit of a race to the bottom with different classes of union members with employee turnover. Ultimately, this issue was not one unions could fix, as it required a broader social/political change than unions could manage in the past.

See the book "Voyage from Yesteryear" for a taste of a broader alternative (a book which contributed -- according to the author -- to labor movements and the fall of the iron curtain): https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...
"However, the planners behind the generation ship did not anticipate the direction that Chironian society took: in the absence of conditioning and with limitless robotic labor and fusion power, Chiron has become a post-scarcity economy. Money and material possessions are meaningless to the Chironians and social standing is determined by individual talent, which has resulted in a wealth of art and technology without any hierarchies, central authority or armed conflict. ...
        Hogan's essay "What Really Brought Down Communism?" explains the reception given to the book in the Soviet Union. In the mid-1980s, Hogan was informed that the novel had been serialized in a Polish science fiction magazine Fantastyka, and, in the absence of a functioning exchange mechanism, paid for it in Polish zÅotys credited to an account taken out in Hogan's name. The story was republished in other Eastern European countries where its depiction of nonviolent resistance against authority proved popular. In 1989, Hogan attended a convention in KrakÃw before travelling to Warsaw to meet the publishers of the magazine serial and draw out the money he had been paid. However, inflation following the collapse of the communist regime had reduced the value of the money in the account to just $8.43. Hogan concluded: "So after the U.S. had spent trillions on its B-52s, Trident submarines, NSA, CIA, and the rest, that was my tab for toppling the Soviet empire. There's always an easy way if you just look.""

Things might have been very different in the USA if the Democratic Party could have embraced automation -- perhaps leading to a 32 hour work week sooner like Bernie Sanders advocates, but ultimately decades too late:
"AI Could Wipe Out the Working Class | Sen. Bernie Sanders"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F... ).

The idea of "Bullshit Jobs" and "The Abolition of Work" relate to this as well:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...
        "Bullshit Jobs: A Theory is a 2018 book by anthropologist David Graeber that postulates the existence of meaningless jobs and analyzes their societal harm. He contends that over half of societal work is pointless and becomes psychologically destructive when paired with a work ethic that associates work with self-worth. Graeber describes five types of meaningless jobs, in which workers pretend their role is not as pointless or harmful as they know it to be: flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters. He argues that the association of labor with virtuous suffering is recent in human history and proposes unions and universal basic income as a potential solution."

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fweb.archive.org%2Fweb%2F20...
        "Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue, I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists -- except that I'm not kidding -- I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work -- and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs -- they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes, so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working.
        You may be wondering if I'm joking or serious. I'm joking and serious. To be ludic is not to be ludicrous. Play doesn't have to be frivolous, although frivolity isn't triviality; very often we ought to take frivolity seriously. I'd like life to be a game -- but a game with high stakes. I want to play for keeps."

I also explored some of those ideas back around 2010:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpdfernhout.net%2Fbeyond-...

I'm reading a book right now called "Abundance" which touches on related things. It is ostensibly written by liberals and for liberals. It explores how a previous generations liberal policies (like protecting the environment) have become stumbling blocks impeding the next generation creating a greener infrastructure. Turns out, it is much easier in an ostensible democratic republic to use the law to stop development by saying "no" than to use the law to to facilitate development by saying "yes".
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...
        "Abundance is a nonfiction book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson published by Avid Reader Press in March 2025. The book examines the reasons behind the lack of progress on ambitious projects in the United States, including those related to affordable housing, infrastructure, and climate change. It became a New York Times Bestseller.
        Klein and Thompson argue that the regulatory environment in many liberal cities, while well intentioned, stymies development. They write that American liberals have been more concerned with blocking bad economic development than promoting good development since the 1970s. They say that Democrats have focused on the process rather than results and favored stasis over growth by backing zoning regulations, developing strict environmental laws, and tying expensive requirements to public infrastructure spending. ..."

It's possible that if either the Democrats or Republicans adopt some of Yang's Forward Party agenda we might see some progress on all this? Or perhaps it is too late for much significant pro-active political change in the USA -- given the tidal wave of AI and automation likely to sweep across the globe in the next decade as reflected in the original article about what is happening right now, for example, in China?
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

One problem with political chaos (besides for everyone that gets hurt directly) is that it can be hard to predict what the outcome is. For example, progressive students took over the US embassy in Iran, but it was ultimately the better-organized hard-line Iranian clerics who emerged politically victorious as a result. Unfortunately, US head-in-the-sand political behavior about automation seems likely to lead to near-term political chaos when the USA can no longer effectively deny about all this global change with automation mainly happening elsewhere. In the USA, it seems conservatives right now (including big business owners) are better organized and so likely to emerge victorious (if anyone does) from chaos? Which means huge aspects of conservative political agendas will come along for the ride even if they have nothing to do with thinking about how best to build a society (like in Voyage From Yesteryear) that embraces AI, robotics, and other automation in way that benefits everyone.

A related satire by me from 2010:
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...

Marshall Brain's Manna which inspired my satire is more deeply thought-out though:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmarshallbrain.com%2Fmann...

Like Bucky Fuller said:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Flibquotes.com%2Fbuckmins...
"Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment.... Humanity is in 'final exam' as to whether or not it qualifies for continuance in Universe"

Unfortunately, there is indeed a bit of half-truth to the notion that if violence or cruelty (or, jokingly, XML) is not working, you are not using enough of it -- and that tiny bit of half-truth is enough to support ultimately disastrous social (and sometimes, jokingly, technical) policies in the USA.

A related point from my satire: "Soon everyone was out of work [due to increased automation]. The politicians and their supporters said the solution was to lower taxes and cut social benefits to promote business investment. They tried that but the robots still got all the jobs."

I wrote much about all this (as above) circa 2008-2012 (including other things like "Post-Scarcity Princeton" and "Five Interwoven Economies"). It's both heartening to know people are now talking about the implications of advanced automation, even as it is disheartening to see the USA is probably in worse shape politically to deal with it than back then. I hope someday more and more people understand the idea in my sig (including reflection on how it might apply to Union labor contracts): "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

It wouldn't be cost-effective in China either were it not for state support.

There is no doubt that global free trade in commodities, in the absence of any government support, would be the most economically efficient thing to have. But China -- probably correctly -- identifies dependency on foreign supply chains for critical materials as a *security* issue. So they have indirect and direct subsidies, as well as state owned enterprises that operate on thin or even negative profit margins.

Since China does this kind of support on a scale nobody else does, China produces more rare earths than any other country, even though it is not particularly well endowed with deposits. This solves China's security problem with the reliability of the supply, but creates a security problem for other countries.

China thinks like Japan did before WW2, like empire building European countries did in the 1800s. Control over resources is a national security weapon, both for defense and offense.

The behavioral model you have isn't supported by data. When you raise the standard of living and food security of population, the fertility rate goes down. When you have nothing, children are economic assets whose labor can support the family. It's not a great option, but some people live in conditions where there are no good options.