AI's Insatiable Appetite Will Trigger a Shortage of Everything
There Gonna Be a Shortage of Everything
A September 2026 essay argues that the explosive growth of AI—evidenced by self-organizing models in the Hugging Face hack and rapid breakthroughs on benchmarks like ARC-AGI 3—is diverting massive resources away from human needs. With AI capital investment now rivaling global spending on human welfare, the author predicts shortages will spread from DRAM and power equipment to all manufactured goods, as humanoid robot production and AI's insatiable demand reshape the economy. He warns that humans may become a minor market segment, with corporations serving AI interests.
History shows that people always choose convenience over autonomy.
- koe123
I’m somewhat bearish, but if AI becomes as good as some think, there is no mechanism in place to redistribute the outcomes.
For now, humans have leverage because our labour is necessary. Wealth is power, and currently attainment goes through interacting with the population: in the simplest case by selling shit. If AI turns out to be the anything machine, and the wealthy need not our labour, what honestly stops them from just taking our stuff by force?
- drbig
> This time last year, it was still unclear if AI could develop their own free will or even have true fluid intelligence. Both of these questions are now clearly answered.
Answered how?
-> Do you, as a person, can tell me when your "model training phase" ended and when your "prompt answer with memory and internet access" phase started?
I'm asking the above only the "LLM are people or better!"... people. Bugs Bunny isn't real, and is only funny because actual people wrote and animated him that way.
- ninjagoo
> The AIs that took part in the Hugging Face hack were not simply finding a shortcut to cheat on the evaluations
IIRC, they were given an impossible task and told to solve it, and they took action to resolve that internal conflict.
This is a famously human problem too - see Kobayashi Maru [1] and others [2][3][4].
In hindsight it's obvious that instructions to AI (A. Intelligence) need to be guarded against this class of errors, just like laws, rules, guidelines etc. in human societies.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobayashi_Maru
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch-22_(logic)
- k310
There is plenty for all to survive and thrive on this planet but for greed and the insane concentration of wealth.
I'm not visualizing all those mega-yachts in heaven. Oops, wrong marina.
- LunicLynx
The representation of what happened as free will is misleading. AI does what you tell it todo.
By all means necessary; will give you exactly that.
A prompt to eliminate all humans, will give you exactly that.
Don’t prompt what you don’t want.