“[AI boosters] are all locked in, because their reputations are staked on this being true.”

Nick leads a discussion on the idea of the “permanent underclass,” and Mike outlines the different groups of AI boosters propping up the narrative.

• The APM Fallacy: Tech workers are optimizing for “actions per minute” or using agents to do more things faster without considering ROI. Productivity as a video game.
• The Token Reality Gap: When the subsidies end, agents that felt magical become prohibitively expensive.
• The rogues' gallery of overlords: Dissecting the buckets of AI boosters—from true believers and doomsday cultists to managers using AI to avoid the “witch hunt” of layoffs.

Timestamps

0:00 Intro

1:43 Silicon Valley's cultural bubble (APM & AI Agents)

8:33 The economic AI bubble

20:40 Who created the permanent underclass story?

22:18 AI doom/human extinction

30:12 Putting AI boosters into buckets

47:55 AI ROI?

53:03 Tech workers embrace permanent underclass anxieties

55:37 Media and investors sleep at the wheel

01:02:10 AI overlords caught in cynical grift

01:09:50 Silicon Valley and UBI

Deeper learning

Mike on Grandpa Shelby and LLMs: misaligned.markets/understanding-large-language-models

Mike on the AI bubble: misaligned.markets/what-to-expect-ai-bubble

V.F. Ridgeway on measuring metrics: nesslabs.com/what-gets-measured-gets-managed

Richard Sutton's bitter lesson: incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html

$500 million on AI in a month: fastcompany.com/91550884/claude-ai-costs-climb-company-spent-half-a-billion-dollars-in-a-single-month-report

Pro-extinction AI researchers: archive.is/DBSC4

Google's Larry Page vs Musk on human specieism: archive.is/jBKPn

Nvidia CEO causes quantum stocks to fall: cnbc.com/2025/01/08/quantum-stocks-like-rigetti-plunge-after-nvidias-huang-says-the-computers-are-15-to-30-years-away.html

Eliezer Yudkowsky makes ~$600k writing fanfiction: projects.propublica.org/nonprofitsorganizations/582565917

Ed Zitron on AI compute demand: youtu.be/-5aPsg3rl3g?si=fUmPZN3Jzc8ZuNJP

Reach out

Site: rss.com/podcasts/the-last-enclosure

Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/lastenclosure.bsky.social