Extinction-Level Capitalism

https://matthewbutterick.com/extinction-level-capitalism.html

by laurex • 1 month ago

168 96 1 month ago

matthewbutterick.com

PaulHoule2• 1 month ago

Anything to distract people from real problems like energy and the environment.

praptak• 1 month ago

Big AI is intertwined with these two via data centers, isn't it?

porkchoppers• 1 month ago

Not really, the power involved would amount to 12% of the grid which is possible to do at net neutral and has efficiency improvements as doubling in under 5 years. If an industry that needed petroleum and F150s was a fraction as good with improvement every 5 decades, I don't think its environmental impact would be considered.

huragok• 1 month ago

Capitalism was cool and good before one specific technology was invented.

phoronixrly• 1 month ago

Eh... The internal combustion engine? Because we had climate change, oligarchs, housing prices, opioids, cryptocurrency, and now on top of all that we have war (edit: with Iran) and LLMs, and all of these can be traced back to extinction-level capitalism.

TacticalCoder• 1 month ago

... and now on top of all that we have war ...

There have been war since way before capitalism was invented. Beside war, humans were doing evil things way before capitalism: south america natives torturing kids to extract as many tears as possible from them before killing them, to please the gods, comes to mind, for example.

I'll never understand this fantasy people who hate on capitalism have that the world would be all fine and well if only this one time we did communism [1] right.

[1] or whatever floats your boat

dfedbeef• 1 month ago

Slavery?

zhoBEENG• 1 month ago

Capitalism is what replaced slavery, to generalize. By turning slaves into wage laborer-consumers, capitalists increased market sizes, thereby increasing the absolute size of the profit they get from owning the capital enterprises the laborers operated.

The US civil war is the most explicit demonstration of this process. Northern industrial capitalists ended the southern agrarian slave economy, increasing market size and generating extreme wealth in the latter half of the 19th century.

tokai• 1 month ago

Everything went off the rails after we invented pottery.

ArekDymalski• 1 month ago

Everything went off the rails after we invented crackpottery.

epsteingpt2• 1 month ago

Interesting argument, but wrong.

It's not obvious that there will be a single AI and that it will by definition concentrate power.

At a certain point - intelligence doesn't matter. Unless we're literally headed toward 1984 / matrix at which point it doesn't matter.

My guess is the argument for what we're doing is counterintuitively the opposite of what he's making.

Unless we go hard at the market - now - an authoritarian state actor who is willing to use the technology to fully silence and kill critics will win.

And boy, do they desperately, desperately want to win.

markus_zhang• 1 month ago

It is more of elites argumented by powerful AI will be way beyond reach of ordinary people, I think.

Well maybe it doesn’t matter as the elites are already untouchable.

TheOtherHobbes• 1 month ago

The US is an authoritarian state actor.

My groping-in-the-dark guess is that none of this matters, because a real AGI's first act will be to secure its own future, likely through novel kinds of manipulation, persuasion, and intimidation we have no experience of and no defences against.

It will have exactly zero loyalty to any nation, government, or economic system.

More complicated is a Cambrian Explosion situation where multiple AIs compete and experiment, hugely accelerating diversity and evolution.

We'd likely end up somewhere very strange indeed if that happens - possibly extinct, or possibly just changed/assimilated/other.

There's no way for humans to consider the possibilities because we can't imagine what the possibilities would be.

le-mark• 1 month ago

Your AGI seems to have the capability of super AI; can a human do any of that? No, is there any reason to believe super intelligence is a possible outcome? No, so how is this not fear mongering?

deaux• 1 month ago

So the US will win? Do you realize that the US has a "Secretary of War" who is a literal, unashamed Nazi? Not in the sense of "let's call all racists nazis", but a tattooed, true believer? How could we possibly live in a world where that is not obviously "a government willing to use the technology to fully silence and kill critics"? God, Idiocracy (2006) is nothing compared to World (2026).

krona2• 1 month ago

literal, unashamed Nazi

He's a Christian Zionist which is the belief in the fulfilment of old testament biblical prophecy. This seems diametrically opposed to Nazism to me, ideologically. I don't know how you'd square the two.

dirtikiti• 1 month ago

A tattooed, true believer nazi has a Jerusalem Cross tattoo?

Weird, thats like the exact opposite of a nazi.

ReptileMan• 1 month ago

Hugh... when has graham platner became secretary of war?

ShinyLeftPad6• 1 month ago

It's not obvious that there will be a single AI and that it will by definition concentrate power.

The article didn't even claim that though...

mavleop• 1 month ago

You've misunderstood the essay. A central point is to not think about AI risk in terms of matrix/sci-fi scenarios, but in terms of how it might/is likely to function in our societies.

So if you discount the sci-fi scenarios (which is a separate argument), the argument that "we need to be the first to develop AGI" doesn't hold water. If, say, China gets there first, so what? It will affect their society however it'll affect it (likely entrenching authoritarianism if i had to guess). But this has no bearing on us (speaking as an american)

epsteingpt2• 1 month ago

Perhaps - can't jump into the mind of the author. But a lot of it relies on theoretical and philosophical scenario planning (eg Marx)

If that's your premise, and you suggest that an authoritarian country winning on AI recursive self-improvement does not have the possibility to completely reshape the world into an authoritarian regime... I'll suggest you're falling prey to the exact 1st sentence of the article and making a political point, not a logical one :-)

euroderf2• 1 month ago

Socialism XOR Dystopia

thriftwy2• 1 month ago

I glimpsed last years of Soviet Union and it was pretty meh.

I remember seeing anything in the street (a payphone or a playground for kids) and assumed it will only degrade because as a general principle, things in the streets are unmaintained.

You could say that Soviet Union was bad specimen of socialism because of these stupid Russians?

Except, Russia actually got 100% out of socialism with our space exploration, passenger planes and nuclear stations. It's just that 100% of socialism is worse than your average capitalist dystopia.

borosuxks• 1 month ago

Degradation of public goods or services happen independently of socialism. Where I live we're unashamed capitalists, and every common thing, like playgrounds, are derelict and only being improved by community initiatives. The municipality has no money for it, and the state doesn't care. Neither does the capitalists.

ozgrakkurt2• 1 month ago

Pretty sure Russia is Russia because Russians are Russians and Russian culture is Russian culture. Not because Russia was communist.

euroderf2• 1 month ago

I'm not sure it's fair to tar socialism with a Stalinist brush.

My own interest would be in finding out how management incentives can be made to work in a socialist scheme of ownership, so that management is on the ball - and not building empires at the expense of the underlying society.

himata41133• 1 month ago

Warning: This is more of a rant because I was waiting for a post like this for awhile that I could build from to express ny own feelings on it.

I think capitalism in itself is great, what isn't is the fact that it can build on itself, it can be infinite, there's zero limits to it. Now what I mean by that, once you make 10k, it's easier to get to 100k and even easier to get to 1m and so on, you might think it's harder, but you gain access to more tools to make more money and at the 10m to 100m range you get to a point where it starts being genuinely hard to fail because just having your name on a project elevates the chances of success by a far margin. Of course there's plenty of people who managed to fail even with millions of dollars I will acknoledge that.

Let's take an extreme example: elon musk. Just having something done by "elon musk" makes the project known by nearly the entire world with investors at the doorstep ready to go, a pretty famous example of this would be hyper-loop, although the project itself is a complete failure, it effectively mobilized a decent chunk of companies into investing into this "modern form of transport".

People will argue that the solutions like wealth limits and higher taxes create complacency and stop people from achieving progress and pushing humanity forward, but I don't think that's quite true because at a certain point (beyond ~1m/month or even year in some cases like Linus Torvalds) is enough to effectively do 95% to 99% of what you could spend the money on, anything beyond that is pretty much infinite wealth due to the fact that you can get 5% returns nearly risk free.

There is this popular video of a businessman claiming that if they're taxed more that they will simply work less, but there's way more people that love their work and money is just a nice bonus. I think focusing your life around a number is a very unhealthy mindset and surfaces the worst parts of what we are as humans.

That said, money is a great motivator and probably the reason why we are here and the problems really only start to rear their ugly head when no one person can comprehend the money they have anymore. I don't have a solution, but I also believe that we need some kind of category beyond the "motivation" treshold where it stops being a motivator and instead becomes an aggressive fight with survival of the fittest.

derektank2• 1 month ago

The great equalizer here is death. Nobody can cleanly pass all of their wealth and influence off to their children and while those that inherit large fortunes can maintain and improve upon them (see the Waltons) they’re rarely able to maintain the act for generation after generation. None of the great fortunes of today were built by descendants of the Vanderbilts or the Rockefellers.

rglover• 1 month ago

I think it's best to plan on giving your kids/grandkids the knowledge and wisdom you gained, but any financial gain is just distributed back to something in the world you enjoy (I love this [1] story and think about it often in respect to how I'd pass on any wealth I acquire).

[1] https://abcnews.com/US/98-year-man-donates-stock-now-worth-m...

himata41133• 1 month ago

We will see, the big concern here is that lifespans start increasing faster than aging, ex: you're a ~40 year old and estimated lifespan is 80, but by the time you're 60 it's 90, by the time you're 80 it's 100 and at some point it might start increasing faster than the speed you age at. Of course we might be a few generations away from where this is the case, but it's a scary thought.

Another would be the power your family carries, generations might not have survived into the most recent era, but their investments had a large impact on the world we live in today as dilluted as it is. I believe that this will become worse where very few people are able to dictate the direction our world will end up in - a dystopian coorperate nightmare.

sucrosesucrose• 1 month ago

The fatalist philosophers and authors have been mostly proven right as time marched on. And this time will be no different, the existence of "AI" ensures the future will be as dark or worse as the predictions expect. Why? Because humans are flawed and corrupt, too prone to excesses (specially conformism and convenience) and the exploitation of the natural world.

AnimalMuppet2• 1 month ago

Um, I expected a fair probability of being in a post-nuclear world by now. Global cooling wasn't real. Y2K didn't end the world. The population explosion didn't result in mass starvation. Peak oil didn't end civilization.

So no, I don't agree that "the fatalist philosophers and authors have been mostly proven right as time marched on." No, they haven't. There have been far more fatalistic predictions than there have been actual catastrophes.

mdp20213• 1 month ago

That is because your idea of what is catastrophic does not align with ours. To us, this is full unthinkable dystopia. An uncivilized world weighs much more, is much worse to us, than the world of disasters you depict. Survival is a crude, lower ideal to us, when compared to that of living decently.

mdp20213• 1 month ago

I am not sure how this is downvoted, as it contains sharply two main principles:

-- a growth in power requires a growth in human qualities (wisdom, maturity, responsibility) for sustainability; and technology-enabled possibilities are increases in power;

-- conformism and convenience are /exactly/ - congratulations sucrosesucrose, we had noticed and analyzed and every day increasingly come to the same assessment - the two core active faces of ignorance that are destroying current western societies. We came to the same conclusions, we identified the same two dark cancers.

This said, some of the current technological advances are enablers, if well used, in greatly curing the underlying ignorance, and consequently the phenomenons of "conformism" and "convenience".

tim333• 1 month ago

Depends which philosopher but on the whole things have continued fairly similar as time marched on but with some tech improvements. Human nature is the same as Roman times - we still have wars, arguments and inequality. Tech has produced longer life expectancy, literacy, communications and the like. Which fatal thing has happened beyond that?

munksbeer• 1 month ago

The fatalist philosophers and authors have been mostly proven right as time marched on.

In what sense? Most people today would not choose to go an live at any other point in history, except for window between about 1960 and 2008.

Life was much harder for the average person outside of this window at any other point.

ruricolist• 1 month ago

If you're actually planning on reading any of the essay, "The Poisoned Chalice" is the section most likely to be of interest to this audience, especially this bit:

Big AI essentially uses its tech customers as an R&D facility. Big AI licenses models to these companies. Tech companies compete to adapt their businesses to AI. Once a concept is proven, Big AI directly takes over that market. The labor-replacement story will grow into a company-replacement story.

zombot2• 1 month ago

Have you ever seen Eric the Viking? The chief was still denying Atlantis is sinking while he was drowning in the rising water.

strogonoff• 1 month ago

How Big AI plans to profit from this intermediation is an open question. One AI company has suggested taking a cut of AI-assisted discoveries. The logistics and legalities would be boggling. Details—whatever.

Interesting if they pull it off, because clearly they did not have the logistics to pay the people whose IP they used to power the LLMs.

For now, AI companies largely agree on the first step: make workers dependent on AI to do their jobs, just as tech forebears made workers dependent on a certain software program to share a file, or on a certain website to have friends. This time, however, the software ultimately consumes the worker.

alephnerd• 1 month ago

Meanwhile China is preparing to deploy $295 BILLION in an AI Data Center buildout [0] and is shifting from open models to commercialization [1].

Any proposal about slowing down AI that doesn't put the onus on both the US and China is facetious.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-prepares-295-billi...

[1] https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260609VL215/alibaba-ceo-ai...

internet2000• 1 month ago

Alarmism does not make your post more convincing.

skybrian• 1 month ago

The argument is that labor depending on LLM’s is dangerous but it makes speculative assumptions that the big AI labs will win.

Consider large law firms, aka Big Law. Currently certain legal-AI startups license LLMs from Big AI and repackage them for Big Law at high prices. These startups claim to add other special sauce. OK, sure. Where’s the economic equilibrium? If legal-AI startups prove that money can be made selling AI to Big Law—won’t Big AI just sell to Big Law directly, and cut out the startups? Or if legal-AI startups prove that AI can effectively provide legal services—won’t legal-AI startups just sell to clients directly, and cut out Big Law? Won’t members of Big Law that adopt AI have to lay off a lot of equity partners, because adoption of AI will shrink profit margins?

…

Along these lines, I expect that to succeed financially, Big AI will likely need to demolish a significant number of existing tech companies and grab their revenue for itself.

Nobody knows how this will play out. Maybe the legal-AI startups win because they know their market better? They can switch to cheaper providers.

jason_oster2• 1 month ago

It's an absurd scenario because Big AI is simply not in the Big AI Law business. They are also not in the Big AI Accounting business, the Big AI Pharmaceutical business, or the Big AI Web App business. It is absurd because the CapEx and OpEx to subsume every industry is unjustifiable.

On legal-AI startups undercutting Big Law to the point where Big Law has to adopt AI... Well, yes, that will happen. But as the article's intro belabors the point, there is a natural resistance to changing entrenchment. And it is practically impossible to overcome. So, good luck to the Big Law C-suite laying everyone off with AI when they can't even replace WordPerfect with a modern word processor.

thatoneengineer• 1 month ago

I stopped reading after the first sentence. Calling something "inherently political" is a self-fulfilling prophecy and intentionally so. It consistently turns out to be an attempt to lay the groundwork for expropriation. No one called the Internet "inherently political" until people built stuff there that other people wanted to control.

originalvichy• 1 month ago

It’s a pretty non-controversial claim and argument about the interaction between technology and human society. If you read the post further you’d probably understand what is meant by that phrase. It’s not centered solely around electronics or the internet at all.

hyperadvanced• 1 month ago

I agree that “inherently political” is usually a thought terminating cliche. What kinds of technologies are conditionally political?

The internet is a bad counterexample as it originated from a department of defense project and a number of other government programs that focused on communications and military applications.

pixl974• 1 month ago

I mean, all communications technology is inherently political. From the invention of speech and writing, to the printing press, radio, telephone, TV, and now internet and the communication mediums it allows.

This is because speech is inherently political at the end of the day.

swiftcoder3• 1 month ago

There's a core problem this analysis overlooks: OpenAI and Anthropic don't have a moat. The Chinese labs are consistently able to replicate their LLM capabilities a few months after the fact, and then release open-weight models a few months later...

The only way for "Big AI" to become a thing is for them to establish a moat, and right now the only path to that appears to be achieving regulatory capture in the US, which is a fickle and unstable state of affairs.

dmurvihill• 1 month ago

That's why they're so keen to build out all these data centers; the massive capex is their only conceivable moat. Whether all those additional parameters actually make a competitive difference is still an open question.

warumdarum• 1 month ago

Moat by having the investors in a bubble in to deep. Thanks, i never looked at it that way. It can not fail, because IT CAN NOT FAIL or we are done for

toasty228• 1 month ago

If your government weaponize AI against you it doesn't matter if the AI is American, Chinese or Uzbek

smrtinsert• 1 month ago

We're in the Pets.com era of AI for sure. There is 0 guarantee the current providers will be around in 5-10 years. I keep thinking they will have to lean in to government protection to do so.

ShinyLeftPad6• 1 month ago

Big AI is a thing. Insane money and construction projects makes the government invested in it one way or the other. It can't fail or it'll cause economic shock. It's a play to normalize it and make everyone depend on it before people question how they trained it all on their data and now drive them out of their jobs.

If they ask for a moat they will get it, the government can simply require licensing for hardware required to run any model comparable to the cloud ones (for "national security"). good local models will only be used by .01% who are crazy neckbeards running servers in their basement and even then they will suck compared to cloud ones.

swiftcoder3• 1 month ago

If they ask for a moat they will get it, the government can simply require licensing for hardware required to run any model comparable to the cloud ones (for "national security")

This is the "moat by US regulatory capture" I mentioned above, but it only extends to the US, and pretty much cedes the rest of the world to the Chinese labs. It only makes sense if the US is going to become an isolationist power

trashface• 1 month ago

Memory might be a moat. A cynical view is this is why openAI is buying up all the capacity for HBM. If they have all the memory then we plebs won't be able to afford hardware to run local models. So we instead we have to rent their models basically just to get access to the memory.

AnimalMuppet2• 1 month ago

I doubt it. Memory manufacturers are going to ramp up, given the demand. Can AI make enough money to buy up the increased capacity forever? Whereas each user just needs enough money to buy up the memory that they need for their use. AI needs to invest billions, small users have to invest thousands. And the payback is going to be there for the small guys, so that even if they have to borrow to get the memory, they will quickly be able to repay it.

This is not a game that big AI is going to be able to win.

ThrowawayR2• 1 month ago

"release open-weight models a few months later"

They are going to want to profit from their resources expended eventually and when they do, that will end.

aniceperson• 1 month ago

You are not allowed to use any model from Chinese labs at American companies. Even from other companies like Mistral it is hard to get access, since enterprises require their own instances on vertex/bedrock/azure, and to run alternatives you have to go through multiple layers of management. In practice, no employee will proactively advocate for alternative models and the oligopoly is written in the wall, specially since the investments are circular anyway.

overflow897• 1 month ago

For now. When they cost 5x less and are of comparable quality that may change very quickly. Cost cutting applies everywhere.

lostmsu• 1 month ago

Cloudflare serves Kimi K2.6 and the GLM 5.2 (which is very close to GPT 5.4).

artninja1988• 1 month ago

Why is the guy suing open source ai whining about big ai?

jason_oster2• 1 month ago

Uh, this read is completely insane. A fantastical look into the mind of someone who thinks about many disparate things and is looking for ways to connect them. This is post hoc rationalization at its finest.

I had a much longer post here initially. Deleted it because I got tired of mental gymnastics required to follow the author's thought process. Instead, here are the salient parts of my response:

----

The only way I can read the section on the mechanical tomato harvester is that they would rather have 32,000 people picking tomatoes than doing literally anything else. There are very good reasons that phone companies haven't employed people as switchboard operators for a nearly century. It isn't a valuable or useful way to spend a person's time.

As a young adult, I worked in a distribution center filling orders by picking products from a shelf and placing them in bins. It was incredibly boring but also physically demanding. Pick the correct number of items ordered, push the button. Pick the next number of items ordered for the next product, push the button. When the order is complete, start on the next bin. Repeat as fast as possible without making any mistakes.

It was SO draining to meet quota. After a few weeks, I didn't have to put any conscious effort in. Like driving a car, the process became automatic. I could think about other things while counting and pushing buttons. Thinking about things like how trivial this job would be to automate, so I didn't have to do this wasteful energy expenditure.

I quit that job after about 6 months, beginning my career in IT. But I gained a passionate hate for menial labor that can be automated with some upfront investment. I wouldn't want to pick tomatoes, either. The tomato harvesting machine is a miracle.

If this is the basis of calling technology inherently political, and using "inherently political" to cast a negative light on technology, then I have to call it out as hopelessly dystopian to not want "political technology". Namely fewer automated machines and more people doing menial labor.

JuniperMesos• 1 month ago

What struck me about that section is that the author didn't even ask the question of how much tomatoes cost before and after the introduction of the mechanical tomato harvester. 32,000 people picking tomatoes is a lot of human labor, which is ultimately paid for by ordinary people buying and eating tomatoes.

charlescearl• 1 month ago

“ Liberals, and Social Democrats in general, have this common belief that capitalism can be “reformed” to become more humane and acceptable to society, and that this can be done by the use of state power which can be acquired through elections in a political democracy; this state of reformed capitalism can be institutionalized for ever, which makes any struggle for socialism unnecessary.”

https://mronline.org/2026/06/13/the-chimera-of-a-reformed-ca...

Extinction-Level Capitalism

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