I am optimistic about the economy. It has been nothing but up for centuries. AI could be a bubble like real estate in 2008 or dot com in 2000 or tulips in 1637. But downturns are temporary. We still have real estate and Internet and tulips. I think AI is here to stay long term.
The doomers were wrong. Vernor Vinge was spot on in his 1993 prediction that AI would surpass human intelligence in 30 years, but wrong that this would be our last invention before the singularity. The threshold to create AI is civilization level intelligence, which is 8 billion times higher. Bostrom and Omohundro were wrong about instrumental goals dooming us into turning the planet into computronium. AI is not a goal directed optimization process. That (AIXI) is not computable. AI has two parts, a model that predicts human behavior and an agent that we program to do something with those predictions. Only the first part is smarter than us. We control the second part. Yudkowsky was wrong that we are doomed because we aren't smart enough to tell the AI exactly what we want. LLMs model all human emotions without having to specify them ourselves. Hinton was wrong that AI would take our jobs. That's not how the economy works. AI makes our jobs easier and more productive for higher pay. It makes stuff cheaper so we have more to spend on other stuff. That spending creates new jobs. Maltheus was wrong that population growth would lead to mass starvation. After 1800 the economy started growing faster than the population and food got cheaper. Agriculture went from 80% of the global economy to 6%. Ehrlich was wrong about the population bomb. People started voluntarily having fewer children after the collapse of traditional family values when women were no longer forced to marry and have children and we invented birth control. Maybe I'm wrong. The Jetsons brings 1960's culture to a future with robots and flying cars but no internet or phones. What else did we get wrong? -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] On Tue, Oct 13, 2026, 8:02 AM John Rose via AGI <[email protected]> wrote: > On Monday, October 12, 2026, at 8:40 PM, Matt Mahoney wrote: > > In the stock market, prices converge to the level where half of the market > thinks the price will go up and half think it will go down. This means the > current price is the best predictor of the future price. Regardless of your > betting strategy, your expected winnings are to break even, minus trading > and management fees. > > > This market is not the same as it was a few decades ago or a normal > market. It’s the gift that keeps on giving. An active trader could be > clueless and make a ton of money and a very rational trader could loose > everything. The average bet for most people is build up the 401K and IRA’s > managed in funds, don’t touch it and there are good gains. “Experts” say a > crash is always coming but never happens. Why? M2’s around the world are > increasing faster. There’s an AI/Everything bubble, interest rates are > getting dangerous and a capital rotation into commodities has started. So > what are they going to do about it? They can’t let it crash because then > there’s mad max. Debt has to be created faster so fire up some wars and > pandemics. Then, release the stablecoins! Transfer the debt into that > structure and create a new bubble that makes the existing bubble look like > peanuts. Bitcoin was pre-planned. Some call it Epsteincoin with NSAtoken. > Will they succeed? It’ll certainly get rough and inflationary. Gotta have > the diesel. > > *Artificial General Intelligence List <https://agi.topicbox.com/latest>* > / AGI / see discussions <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi> + > participants <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/members> + > delivery options <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription> > Permalink > <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T2784bbfe524b0b93-M134accac594ca4f02a3d72c3> > ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T2784bbfe524b0b93-M13cd6527f706592a1fe525cd Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
