My take on wealth taxes is they won't work well at the local or state level, because you're targeting the people with the greatest means and motivation to just pick up and move somewhere, and they won't work well at the national level, because they'd almost certainly require a constitutional amendment, just as federal income taxes did (the 16th Amendment), so in both cases you're creating a levy that is basically designed to disappear.

New pod: 'YOU'RE NOT AGI-PILLED ENOUGH' I asked @emollick to tell me what I'm getting wrong about AI. We also talked about: - why so many experts keep underrating the rate of progress for model capabilities - why so many experts keep *overrating* how rapidly powerful AI will change the macroeconomy - why the answer to the previous question starts with "O-rings and garbage cans" - the sociology of AI swarms - the paradoxes of AI use (or: 'every technological augmentation is also an amputation,' per McLuhan) - the end of prompting (or: what happens if personal AI agents get so good at anticipating our needs that humans, once the prompter, become the prompted) - 2027 predictions and ... his excellent new book CO-EXISTENCE

I’d love economists to take a crack at this theory that the US is experiencing a mini-Dutch Disease effect from AI. My big-picture thesis about AI economics right now is that while the discussion about AI safety and existential risk is important, AI’s construction is changing the world faster than its capabilities.

New pod: THE BITTER RIVALRY BEHIND THE AI ARMS RACE I talked to @kevinroose about his illuminating and delightfully gossipy new book THE AGI CHRONICLES about the people building AGI and why they're doing what they're doing Incl: - the three-man race to build AGI Sam Altman vs. Dario Amodei vs. Demis Hassabis—why, in many ways, they're so different and how, in some ways, they're the same - the books, stories, frameworks, experiences and philosophies that have motivated them - how two 2017 papers—one very famous (Google's Attention Is All You Need) and the other obscure (Amodei's internal memo Big Blob of Compute)—shaped the AI boom - some salacious gossip about why OpenAI fired Sam, why Dario quit, and why Google fell behind

New newsletter: WHY AMERICANS HATE AI AI might be the most instantly unpopular emerging technology in modern history. Off the top of my head, I blame the rise of tech pessimism, the emergence of anti-billionaire politics, the fallout from disappointments of the social media age, the demonization (sometimes fair, sometimes unfair) of data centers, growing distrust of corporations in general, or the fact that people don’t appreciate being told that a new product is going to disemploy their children and destroy the world, while its architects become billionaires. But there’s another reason that these explanations overlook: AI's prophets promised a world of cheap abundance. But the AI buildout has created the exact opposite reality, in which basically everything AI touches is getting more expensive. We're seeing higher prices for everything in the AI buildout—electronics, electricity, construction labor, even credit. The Fed now believes that the growth from AI is pushing up overall inflation, which means AI is also a contributor to higher interest rates. We get so wrapped up in talking about what AI will do in the near future that we sometimes forget to look closely at what it's doing right now: a project broadly predicted to reduce prices and create post-material abundance is instead raising prices and showing everybody just how materially finite some parts of the economy are.

New newsletter: THE DEATH OF THE AMERICAN HOST The share of Americans who say they host friends or family at their home at least monthly has declined by 70 percent in the last 50 years.

New pod: THE SINGLE SMARTEST CASE AGAINST THE AI SAFETY/X-RISK/DOOM ARGUMENT My feed has become filled with people making the case for AI misalignment, the existential risk of RSI/ASI, and the case for doom. I take those arguments very seriously. But once these views reached saturation point on my feed, I wanted to find the best critic of that position—someone fair and brilliant, who wasn't commercially self-interested or blindly ideological about AI being worthless. That's today's show: It's a long interview with the authors of "AI as a Normal Technology," Arvind Narayanan (@random_walker) and Sayash Kapoor (@sayashk). "Normal Technology" is really intelligent and comprehensive framework for seeing AI as a powerful general purpose technology that is more like electricity than a machine god--meaning, it's going to change the world but slowly, and it's unlikely to escape human control, or develop true superintelligence, or lead to catastrophic outcomes up to and including the end of the human race. These guys really, really brought their A game. I learned a lot.

Briefly, on why I pay attention to the EA/rationalists: Imagine you have an extremely nerdy friend who, in the mid-2000s, would not shut up about how Donald Trump was going to become president and reshape American politics. "Stop saying weird shit," you say. "He's a joke. He's a clown. The Apprentice isn't even good this season." But this guy won't stop. He's obsessive. Read McLuhan, he says. Read Postman, read Meyrowitz, read Ong, this is where everything is headed. God, he can be so incredibly annoying ... and then, ten years later, Trump becomes president and reshapes American politics. This is the most relatable frame I can think of to explain my experience with EA/rationalist people in the AI space. I became friends with EA folks after my mom died and I found really profound meaning in donating to Against Malaria and GiveDirectly, which struck me as a way to honor a life by saving a life. Then, these peple started talking about AI. And talking, and talking. Constantly. They said AI would solve impossible math problems; that it would mimic PhD-level achievement in a variety of fields; that it would change parts of life like education in ways we couldn't imagine; that it would become the dominant sector in the economy; that it might teach itself to code itself and escape test environments; that it would, in a decade, be the only thing many people talked about in the news. My response then: Stop saying weird shit! You sound deranged. Go back to talking about malaria nets and direct cash aid to poor families. And then, so much of what they said would happen actually happened. And, even crazier, they made it happen. Many of the ppl who contributed to, or were influenced by, all that EA/rationalist stuff ten years ago literally built the damn thing in the labs. Like every group, the EA/rationalist world seems uniform to outsiders, but it has a ton of internal divisions. I still think some of their predictions are nuts. I don't think AI will kill us all. I don't foresee Dyson Spheres in the 2030s or millions of robots making millions of robots in the next few years. These are crazy predictions, and I hope most of them are wrong. But when I see people shitting on the EA/Rationalist worldview, all I can think of is me, 10 years ago, thinking a lot of these folks were crazy for predicting that AI would by the mid-2020s be the center of the the news cycle, the engine of the economy, the hinge-point of geopolitics. That was an insane call. They got many of the details wrong. But they got the big picture right. They said: Pay attention. And they were right about that. The EA/Rationalists deserve skepticism, criticism, and doubt, like any other ideology. But I think it's wise to pay attention to the people who have been saying to pay attention.

New Census study: Yeah, AI is starting to have an impact on college grads 1. "The most AI-exposed decile of college majors saw their likelihood of initial employment decline by 5% points, while initial earnings declined by 13% ..." 2. "Negative changes to these patterns are concentrated in the top decile of majors, which are composed largely of computer science, information systems, and other degree fields closely related to software development."

An exceptional point here: Organizational competence is a hugely underrated piece of AI safety. There's a growing consensus at the frontier that we have to "pace," "go slow," or even pause. But there's no point in going slow just to go slow, or in pausing just to pause. If a company's RL still encourages misalignment, or if its sandboxes are poorly constructed, it doesn't matter that you're going 90mph or 60mph. Operational incompetency is unsafe at any speed. So, we need some way to smartly design, safely experiment with, share honestly, and maybe eventually mandate certain security protocols for advanced AI.

I would like a recognition on the part of the frontier haters that there are no innocents here. - Nvidia partisans want to chipmax, bc ofc they do. - VCs want their non-frontier AI bets to grow and thus root for a path to trillions that doesn’t flow thru OAI/Ant token bills. - Republicans don’t like or trust Anthropic’s evident antipathy toward the admin. - many antitrust folks distrust and dislike any firm with higher productivity/revenue than a corner grocery store Etc The sooner we can get beyond ITS A PSYOP and arrive at “this is a debate among partisans who have both sticky ideologies and naked self-interest” the better

i've tried and failed to make this point as clearly as i want to, but: AI is weird, in that ppl who are optimistic about the technology's growth are often doomy about its implications; while ppl who are extremely skeptical about AI's capabilities are by default optimistic about it being a "normal" technology that won't change much in the world. so you have this weird situation where a lot of AI skeptics who haven't been following AI news for the last few years (bc they wrote the whole thing off as NFTs 2.0) have no idea that there exists an enormous contingent of AI ppl who have for 10+ years said that very fast AI progress could be really bad for the world, and therefore they suspect that a conspiracy was concocted in the last two weeks to invent the case for AI safety

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills with how many smart people I read and respect are saying stuff like this. The idea that the AI labs are suddenly, only now, just in September of 2026, advocating for AI safety, and that they just came around to this position bc of sudden financial precarity, is just completely, utterly, conclusively, 100% wrong. Here's Dario Amodei telling Ross Douthat in February that he agrees with the case for slowing down; that he's in favor of "collaborating" internationally to organize a slowdown; that "I would be all for" a global slowdown. This was 7 months ago, when Anthropic's annualized recurring revenue was rising faster than any company in modern history. He's been saying stuff like this for years, when Anthropic was worth millions of dollars and when Anthropic was projected to IPO for trillions.

I think this a compelling argument that lots of smart people make and believe and I think it is just flatly wrong. 1. Anthropic — an AI lab that broke away from OpenAI bc of AI safety concerns many years ago — did suddenly not decide that AI safety was important, like, three days ago. 2. Rather than see the commercial viability of the open weight models causing the fears of RSI, I think one should consider that a third variable — AI progress — is leading to BOTH better open weight models AND greater AI automation/autonomy without alignment, and it’s freaking some people out. There is a kind of UChicago/Wharton Brain approach to this story, which sees any effort to increase safety as a regulatory capture strategy. But at least consider the possibility that rising evidence of AI abilities and RSI might actually be scary to the people closest to the fire.

Something I've learned about being too online in the last few years is that some people really truly cannot believe that other people might come to opinions about the world that are different from their own in a way that is natural and fair. Everything has to be an op. There are all sorts of people—mostly conservative but even tech critics like McNamee—who insist that this AI safety moment is a psyop. Have people's feelings about AI safety been shaped by a complex set of factors such as longstanding AI fears, worsening data center politics, the Hugging Face attack and its fallout, and now the Coxon resignation? No, no, no. They're victims of a psyop. It reminds me that I've had a distressingly high number of conversations with leftists who believe that the only reason America isn't a socialist paradise is that Fox News and other conservative media do something special and evil and conspiratorial to brainwash half the country. Look, I do not like Fox News. But I think Fox News is successful because it says what many people have already been thinking. It shapes public opinion at the margins, but mostly it reflects biases back to viewers rather than invent them out of whole cloth. There is a powerful, powerful urge to believe that the only reason the world doesn't agree with you about literally every little thing is that small handful of media-adjacent elites are constantly doing "ops" on the undiscerning public. I don't know, man. People's attitudes are different from yours and mine, because ... their lives are different. They accumulate different biases, different expectations, different values, different frameworks. Difference is normal, not an op.

This is a good breakdown from @DKThomp in @TheArgumentMag, and also points to why so much of the most popular content on TikTok is about e.g. "mental health". People are looking to content on the internet to do what friends are best equipped to do.