AI CEO Emad Mostaque Predicts ~1,000 Day Tipping Point

20 thoughts on “AI CEO Emad Mostaque Predicts ~1,000 Day Tipping Point”

1. AI is wonderful and will greatly enhance our future productivity, if employed sensibly.
   I can see AI being used as a “hand held calculator is currently used”, as a productivity enhancer.

   AI can not be able to create new works, it only copies existing meatbag stuff off the Internet. HR managers would be far better focused on avoiding “woke” graduates from the “Ivy League Colleges” and employing naturally talented meatbags who can enhance their creativity with the aid of AI tools, IMHO.

   Personally, I consider government imposed income taxes as “organised theft to feed their fat bureaucrats to create yet more unwanted and intrusive red tape”. Some form of trade tariff makes more sense, tax only AFTER profit has been made and invested, and even then, only on wanted government services used!

   HR managers eagerly sacking their staff in order to employ “cheaper” AI replacements to enhance short term profit are committing industrial suicide, IMHO, they have no place working at our company! 🙂

2. He isn’t wrong about what needs to happen. But HOW we keep things free and fair for ALL is a big question. It’s something we can solve, but it’s going to take a lot of work and circumventing corporations.

3. Right now AI pays my rent, grocery bill & luxury hotel stays, electronic gizmos, female company. ALL paid for by AI.

   I kind of work if lying in bed on a laptop is work. If I didnt work I would still get paid. Thanks to AI.

   So if this is a foretaste of the AI apocalypse – Please bring it on.

4. No really, the more I look into it, the more it seems this person is retarded.

5. Not going to happen. Here’s why:
   AI has been getting tremendous freebies so far and that’s ending soon if not already, due to private credit collapsing. The firehouse of money without ROI is ending.
   And just as that spigot is being turned off, new costs are springing up: Data Centers are not one-and-done. In fact, they may turn out to be wasted assets, except for the shell of the building, one of the least expensive parts. Nvidea is facing competition and every time a potential competitor – Tesla, Google, Deepseek on the software side, obviating the Deep Need for hugely expensive chips – comes along, the stock loses 4-8% of its value. It doesn’t come back so easily anymore either. What happens to the closed loop intratech buying when Nvidea doesn’t have money to burn? What happens when AI is so commoditized that AI companies can’t raise prices – even on their best customers to pay for the vast majority now getting AI for free – because those customers have no one left to lay off to pay for elusive profits to pay for the AI replacing all that labor?
   Another thing: there are at least a dozen major copyright lawsuits winding their way slowly through the courts now, brought by major media and other human owners of IP that are giving it away for free…against their will. I’d hate to be a judge in those cases, not wanting to throttle the Next Big Future Thing, but also aware that owners have a right to be paid for their IP and labor, going back to patent rights under the Constitution. What’s old is new again. IP theft can’t continue, especially when people are being laid off because theft is being allowed. Look what’s happened to Characters.ai, which can’t use Disney characters anymore, and others with copyrights too. This is going to set precedent, then it’s off to the races with 100s of court cases quickly decided. Where’s the future profits from OpenAI then?
   And energy is not free either; it’s being covered by unrelated customers using the same power centers. New power centers aren’t being built fast enough to counter that and even if they are, the resources deplete the same pool used by power centers for other uses. Last I heard, people don’t want to freeze in the winter, nor paid high prices to charge their EVs. Sure, cheaper, more efficient chips will cuts power needs, but their goes Nvidea’s profits too (see above).
   Environmental harms: Trump has negative caring about the environment, where he actually see positive value in negative externalities: i.e. pollution. He’s gleeful over “beautiful, clean coal” but that’s just the lashing out of vengeful, dangerous man who knows he’s dying (when’s AI going to fix that? It’s not happening so far…). Absent AI/cyborg super-powers outside the MCU, real people want clean air & water, and they’re voting for it lately too, among other mundane things, like the cost of rent & food. The AI enabling Republicans & some Democrats, are being voted out in favor of human needs providing candidates. That doesn’t mean Bernie Sanders or Zohran Mamdani everywhere, but it sure isn’t MAGA for oligarchs anymore either.
   This screed is already too long, but the AI bubble will pop & it’ll surprise people how little things have changed afterwards.

6. Seems like putin will have easy warfare in the future, just bomb the datacenters and everything fails. .

7. The only “good” news is that the mass unemployment will explode before before the robot armies are sufficiently large enough. Starship won’t be ready to start a Mars colony before us useless peasants show up with the proverbial pitchforks.

   I’ve been worrying about this problem for the past 15 years and my plan has always been to purchase as much of these companies as I could afford before I became redundant. So I’m full up on Tesla, Palantir, Google etc. Fingers crossed but I’m not sure my plan will work.

   My shares are property rights that require a society in which everyone has a stake in protecting them and a government that is committed to the rule of law to do the protecting.. I worked on legal reform in Russia and other former communist nations after the fall of communism. All the brilliant business advisors thought they could have their property and contract rights protected with a corrupt leader curtailing political and due process rights. Big mistake. That has never worked anywhere. (No it doesn’t work in China. No one has property rights there. Just ask Jack Ma.) And it won’t work here.

8. Okay y’all, starting now, take a shot of your favorite drink every time I use “dystopia” and “public” and maybe you’ll have fun:

   I see this as a situation that the majority of the public needs to get ahold of quickly in order to prevent itself from falling into deep despair and suffering for decades, more than is the case already. Things will inevitably turn in a positive direction for the masses, whether the elites want that or not (I know that’s less exciting because it’s less pessimistic, but it’s still inevitable). If we do something about it ahead of time we can avoid that dark period. What we do, I’m not sure. Whatever it is, it must be peaceful (again, less exciting, but whatever).

   Personally, what I think must be done is to ensure that a technocratic dystopia is not allowed to develop, period. That would mean the public en masse getting up to speed on what billionaires are doing quietly as opposed to what they say publicly; not falling for slight of hand. I’m not sure how to tackle that.

   And I’m well aware that asking this is sort of throwing a tantrum, but: how does the public prevent dystopia that is falsely and/or disingenuously marketed to them as “abundance for all”? Because what I see is the people who consolidate power wanting to keep everyone else in little boxes so that the vast majority cannot experience true freedom and privacy. Such a dystopia would grow out of a false sense of fear amongst “elites”, but also narcissistic personality disorder on the part of some of them (I don’t care if that seems rude; I’m just calling it like it is). They neurologically cannot handle *not* being in control of everyone else. That’s a personal problem and the public cannot allow itself to be affected.

   More open-sourcing of A.I. technology and mass education about how to use it will be required. The public requires closed systems that don’t aggregate personal data, location, shopping habits, etc, so that such data can never be used against them in some future system of controls. Because, even though such systems will inevitably fail, we shouldn’t have to go through such a period in the first place; it’s unnecessary and, pardon my millennial language, dumb af.

   There is zero reason that we can’t advance as a civilization and species with the assistance of A.I. *without* dystopia and further stratification. Pegging advancement to dystopia will always fail, no matter what.

   Hope you enjoyed your twelve shots! If it was espresso, I’m so sorry.

   • It was, indeed, espresso. But I’m not sorry, keep the fire coming! It needs to be heard.

9. Tokens are not dropping by 100x in cost per year, though. More like 2x.

10. UBI based on taxes and income transfers cannot work, wouldn’t be stable anyway. The model assumes most wealth and power held by a tiny elite that must continually consent to taxes to support everyone else.

    UBW is necessary. Everyone has to own an equal and inalienable share of Basic Wealth in Usufruct. The returns from Basic Wealth used in the free market generate an income stream to everyone without taxes or transfers. The Basic Wealth that’s owned equally was classically called “Land” but it’s mostly IP. The IP that is AI software and the IP that they produce. There is nothing that is more obviously the common heritage and equal property of everyone than the collective knowledge that’s the basis of AI and its fruits. In this economy Labor ceases to be important and Capital remains private property. UBW would also include all Land and resources not currently private property – ie all Land and resources off of the earth or in the existing commons like the atmosphere, the oceans, Antarctica etc. This is enough for robust free markets, sustainable abundance and universal affluence.

    • I’m not seeing any difference there, unless you’re talking about taking the actual productive infrastructure and physically distributing it to everybody. Otherwise it’s just taxing the people running it, and calling it ‘ownership’.

11. I would appreciate it if somebody could explain to me how this business model can work.
    AI makes a vast profit by putting millions out of work, so most of the population with no income.
    Some have floated the idea of UBI but where is the money going to come from?
    The billionaires and their big tech companies do not want to pay tax.
    It is virtually impossible to tax multinational entities and even if they do pay in the USA they are fighting against efforts to tax them in Europe and other places and the US president is threatening anybody that tries to pass such laws with tariffs.
    In any case the big tech companies with the money need the money to keep upgrading their data centres. So no money for UBI.
    So again, how can this work?
    Maybe, as some fear, we will all become peasants to our feudal overlords.

    • It doesn’t work. The economy collapses from insufficient demand if the majority of the population has no income to spend. We won’t be peasants to feudal overlords because peasants have an important function in that society – their labor produces the food that’s the foundation of the economy. In this AI economy, most humans have no function at all. The people with all the wealth and power have no need of them. They have robots and AI as slaves and don’t need humans as wage workers or slaves at all. The antebellum Southern slave economy was like this in places with a high proportion of slaves. The masters had no use for free workers. They tried to chase them off. They served no useful purpose to the slaveholders and were an irritation corrupting their slaves.

    • The fundamental thing here is that, when the development is complete, if you own a share of the AI/automation system, you’re good to go, you don’t NEED the general population. While feudal lords actually needed the serfs for labor.

      Essentially the only thing the general population have in the way of negotiating power once this transition is done, is threats of violence. Which is what taxation rests on, after all.

      I think what you’re going to see is the tech lords migrating off planet, out of the reach of the teaming but economically irrelevant masses. That’s the good scenario. The bad scenario involves robot soldiers.

      Then exponential growth in space renders Earth, where most people live, economically irrelevant. Except maybe as a tourist destination.

      Tourist destinations don’t produce anything that’s actually needed, but people spend money on them anyway.

      • Energy problems need to be solved first and going living in space wouldn’t be really convenient

        • That’s primarily an issue of infrastructure. It takes a lot more infrastructure to live in space, because you don’t have gravity and a breathable atmosphere provided for free.

          But with self-replication, the amount of infrastructure you can build per person keeps increasing exponentially, for a long while. (Eventually you hit energy and heat dissipation limits, but you’d be looking at the entire world economy per person before that point was reached.)

          So it becomes affordable to build O’Neill colonies that can be just as comfortable as Earth, potentially even more comfortable. Giant centrifuges on low gravity bodies. Much of Mars could be put under a pressurized greenhouse, floating cities in Venus’ atmosphere.

          But, yes, until they have self-replication, getting enough energy seems to be a limiting factor. Current AI models are absurdly energy expensive to run.

      • You don’t need the general population? Who is buying your product/service? How are you making income? How does this business model work?

        rob

12. One probably should read a wiki article (brief though it is) on Mostaque before jumping to any conclusions. A shadier background has probably only Epstein. But at least at some point he was earnest:
    In July 2023, he declared that generative artificial intelligence “is a $1 trillion investment opportunity but will be ‘biggest bubble of all time'”

13. This is true that will happen soon but I use IA for chemistry but unfortunately this is not yet there , we still need to guide steps by steps even for quite basics things. Universal revenue will be not easy to put in place

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