The grand course of history — one of the first grand jobs are basically warriors and priests. Warriors, starting with the ancient Greeks and the creation of jobs like the Archon, displaced priests as the rulers of society. But then warriors themselves got displaced. And they viewed merchants before that, but kind of like rats.
Even in ancient Rome — Caesar’s era, all these great people competing. How often do you think of Rome? I think about it maybe a normalish amount for a guy, like twice a week. That’s probably an underestimate.
As the Empire was rising and the Republic was falling, an era much like this one in a lot of ways, you had truly exceptional people, and there were a lot more than — Caesar was not the only one. Gaius Marius alone was his opponent, but there was also the other two of the triumvirate, Mark Antony, and Crassus. Crassus is the one I’m thinking of. He was the merchant and they viewed him almost like a rat riding a unicycle. They weren’t even mad that he was so rich, they were just very confused — how’s this even possible?
He could be almost as wealthy as the whole Roman treasury, 200 million sesterces. But he got no honor. Crassus died in the pursuit of honor because he tried to pursue a military campaign in Parthia, the Persian Empire. He might have had some skills, but he was no Caesar. Caesar himself was actually planning to go to Parthia as well, using avenging Crassus as the excuse to justify it.
Then as merchants themselves have gotten replaced — sort of replaced by, let’s say, engineers broadly speaking. But then engineers themselves are being replaced by the meta-programming engineers, just software engineers. It’s the software eating the world thing taken across a big arc of history.
The software community is already three months ahead of the math community in AI adoption. Three months is already a giant period. For the math community, five years from now seems like impossibly far away. Can you imagine what a system will look like in five? Where am I today is different than where I was six months ago.
Every skill is learnable. That’s the whole thing about AI — it breaks that meta because it goes straight for that intuition. Every skill is learnable and that’s what AI is doing or trying. On a large scale that’s not interesting. It’s only on a small scale it’s interesting.
Software has its own artistic side. Math kind of is only an artistic side in practice. But software, the relative fraction is much smaller — here it might not matter what the relative fraction is, but the absolute number. There are people more like us who do software just for fun. Sure as hell aren’t getting paid for Lean.
That’s the artistic thing — that’s not replaceable. I’m guessing nobody will pay to see ballet danced by machines for a while, for a long while. They’ll be the last thing.
The mistaken idea of the past as being more egalitarian — not true at all. Big tensions between these classes and different motivations. The Catholic church broke the family ties in Europe by banning marrying your cousin — it’s really a power dynamic versus the centralized church. It’s called WEIRD. That’s the book.
This era might be a return to the bronze age. In the bronze age was maybe the first time in history that any individual could acquire way more than they could consume. Look at the earliest building projects — tombs for kings where they put people to work throughout the non-harvest season and make them build it. The reason they can make them do it is by having a much more complete monopoly on force. One of the first industries was mining. There’s this mine in Siberian Kargaly that’s 6,000 years old, where they dug 33,000 holes, about 3,000 of which they enlarged more using just wood and bone and children.
Smaller hole to dig with a kid.
They know the miners went in because when they dug some of them up, they found a ladder cut into the side, or just notches cut in. That’s still there. They estimated they mined out 150,000 tons of copper — that’s way more than either of us can conceptualize, that’s beyond intuition.
In this era, you have this combination of massive inequality but then also absolute domination — the ladder being pulled up under you. If the AI CEOs control the AI and they control the world, they control the robots, control the moon, control the galaxy, so on and so on. In a way that people cannot easily contest.
Transcribed by AI from a conversation with a friend.