Raphael Poss

Half the Industry Believes; the Other Half Is Quietly Slowing Down

· Raphael Poss · reading notes, ai commentary, economics, ethics, management

A few thoughts inspired by the stuff I read last month:

Thought: complexity in humans systems increases by an order of magnitude at each layer of delegation. Simultaneously, velocity at every layer is largely bottlenecked on messy human interactions across organization boundaries. Most of the “AI industry” is currently working to trim the bottom layer and internal bottlenecks. It doesn't really address velocity bottlenecks “at the edge” so we can't reasonably expect more than a limited impact on velocity (and thus global economic output) at a high level. Amdahl's law applies.

Corroborating:

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Thought: “While one woman produces a baby in nine months, you can't ask nine women to produce nine babies in one month.” That's how I taught that IPC (Instructions per Cycle, a measure of throughput) and CPI (Cycles per Instruction, a measure of latency) are not simply the inverse of each other. Incompressible latencies and inter-dependencies between operations are throughput killers even in the face of massive parallelism. Likewise, we cannot expect that the reported decreases in project duration (latency) from LLMs will necessarily translate to a higher overall rate of successful projects. This is related to the point above.

Corroborating:

  • Thoughts on slowing the fuck down by Mario Zechner. The author is warning up of hidden piles of unhandled complexity, which is likely to slow us down even more later.
  • Some Things Just Take Time by Armin Ronacher. The author reminds us that business success also depends critically on relationship building with customers. Salient quote: “Nobody is going to mass-produce a 50-year-old oak. And nobody is going to conjure trust, or quality, or community out of a weekend sprint.”

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Thought: we are currently witnessing a great tension (ideological war?) between people who fear LLMs will rip their work off and kill all the jobs, and people who are optimistic LLMs will make societies better by reducing rent-seeking and proprietary divides. This tension is happening at a similar societal level as the right/left divide in politics, but it's a different divide.

Corroborating:

  • So where are all the AI apps? by Alexis Gallagher & Rens Dimmendaal; in a nutshell, we're not seeing all the presumed LLM-enabled work being published in the open.

  • The Cognitive Dark Forest by an author whose first name is “Janko” - creates a parallel between the Dark forest hypothesis and the dynamics inside the software industry: people hide their work because they might believe there's a risk of economic annihilation if they are open about it.

  • AI Agents Could Make Free Software Matter Again by George London. The thesis here is that LLMs will transfer economic power from an elite of technology makers towards the general public.

  • Filesystems are having a moment by Daniel Madalitso Phiri. I strongly agree with the technical argument. Salient quote:

    “Filesystems can redefine what personal computing means in the age of AI. [...] In the sense that your data, your context, your preferences, your skills, your memory — lives in a format you own, that any agent can read, that isn't locked inside a specific application. [..] This is what personal computing was supposed to be before everything moved into walled-garden SaaS apps and proprietary databases. Files are the original open protocol.”

  • The Last Gasps of the Rent Seeking Class by George Hotz. This is a bit more of a poorly-argued hot take, but the reading between the lines aligns with my own: that the big players (OpenAI, Anthropic etc) will have a hard time keeping their moat, a lot of players in the SaaS industry too, and maybe that's a good thing.

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Thought: the time is coming to collectively develop a social etiquette around LLM usage.

Corroborating:

I feel that all these three pieces complement each other. I also believe strongly that the best time was yesterday for us to systematically set up this type of document as shared cultural expectation when leading communities and organizations.

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Thought: the narrow focused people who were using their role in the tech industry as a mechanism to translate their special interest into a minimum amount of social respect without investing in social skills or an otherwise balanced life are currently hurting deeply and will need help to transition.

Corroborating: You Are Not Your Job by Jacob Young.

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Moving on to miscellaneous recent world news with potential great impact. This still deserves the previous format.

  • Good(ish) news: Silicon Valley's "Pronatalists" Killed Remote Work. Then the Strait of Hormuz Brought It Back by Dave Deek. The overall argument is articulated like this:
    1. remote work helps increasing birth rates. (evidence-based)
    2. we collectively should want higher birth rates worldwide, so remote work is desirable. (ethical thesis)
    3. there's an alleged elitist cabal who doesn't want everyone to reproduce equally, so they “killed” remote work to prevent that (that part, I'm not sure I agree with!)
    4. regardless of #3, Asian countries are now introducing remote work in reaction to the war, so maybe we'll get higher birth rates after all.
  • Good news: Germany Mandates ODF for Public Administration in Sovereign Digital Stack reported by Bobby Borisov. For context, there is currently a buzz throughout the EU regarding perceived excessive dependence on US tech. Many people are taking action, but the changes will become visible more slowly. This is a part of that.
  • Intriguing news (good or bad? Yet to be determined.): The Treasury just declared the U.S. insolvent. The media missed it by Steve H. Hanke and David M. Walker. This is a bit of insider baseball, but in a nutshell by modern accounting standards if the US was an organization this year is when we could start considering it unable to pay its debts.
  • Intriguing news, likely very good: Iran war energy shock sparks global push to reduce fossil fuel dependence, reported by Anna Hirtenstein and Kate Abnett. Anecdotically, I am seeing this all around me. It's going to be painful, but possibly less than waiting for a global climate catastrophe.

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Some lighter weight fun to finish: Kagi has published this tool to translate between plain language and LinkedIn jargon. It works both ways and it is delightful.

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References:

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