The Last Enclosure
Season 1
AI: industrial reorganization; not industrial revolution
by Mike & Nick
“We were sold this vision of capital-as-labor. We'll be able to sub one human for one machine, and it will be transformative. It's not true.” Mike and Nick move from the mythology of AI to the mechanics of the current bubble. Instead of building smarter machines, tech is “sanding off the edges” for polished demos. Scaling Plateau: “Scale is All You Need” is a pitch for data centers, not a roadmap to autonomous AI. Industrial Reorganization: 1 unit of capital = 1 human is a lie used for leverage. High-skill work is being degraded into “scaffolding” to shape LLM outputs, turning humans into “reverse centaurs.” Interface Enclosure: While the Transformer architecture is open source, big tech is attempting modern enclosure by making chatbots the only viable interface for machine learning. Weaponized Utopianism: The promise of full automation used as a tool to intimidate workers into acting against their interests. Double Movement: Every technological move by capital eventually triggers a necessary counter-movement to preserve social relations. Timestamps 0:00 Intro 1:42 Scaling Myth 3:05 Experts “sick of” transformers 7:20 Capital as Labor 8:51 Industrial reorganization 12:34 Techno-utopianism 18:18 Double Movement 34:10 Scoped LLMs 43:44 Dark patterns 51:07 Outro Deeper learning Mike on the Grandpa Shelby theory of LLMs: https://misaligned.markets/understanding-large-language-models Mike on capital-as-labor/the AI bubble: https://misaligned.markets/what-to-expect-ai-bubble/ Gary Marcus on scale is all you need is dead: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/breaking-news-scale-is-all-you-need Llion Jones “absolutely sick” of Transformers: https://venturebeat.com/ai/sakana-ais-cto-says-hes-absolutely-sick-of-transformers-the-tech-that-powers Computer scientist Cal Newport on current AI (LLMs) capabilities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GezB1XyiQo Meta employees turned into scaffolding: https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-meta-employee-meeting-interrupt-ai Nikolai Fyodorov, Russian Cosmism, and Silicon Valley Transhumanism: https://newlinesmag.com/essays/the-russian-ascetic-who-reached-for-immortality AI as normal technology: https://www.normaltech.ai/p/ai-as-normal-technology Reach out Site: https://rss.com/podcasts/the-last-enclosure Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/lastenclosure.bsky.social
“I'm trying to implement a rule for myself and those around me. Stop using the phrase AI because these are different technologies." In this inaugural episode, Mike and Nick dissect the current AI debate and who benefits from its current framing: The Vocab Trap - Why using the term "AI" is a victory for the tech villainaires. Beyond "Spicy Autocomplete" - While often dismissed as mere autocomplete, LLMs are more accurately described as modeling the shape of language usage. They're a mirror to our collective cognition. Human Scaffolding - From remote drivers in the Philippines for Waymo to the engineers mapping every pothole, the perceived intelligence of these systems relies on a massive, invisible supply chain of human labor. Digital Dementia (Grandpa Shelby Theory) - LLMs operate with a form of anterograde amnesia; they cannot learn in real-time after training. Also, their outputs are often fuzzy associations rather than factual recall. Humans are being made to fill the gaps. Timestamps 0:07 Intro 4:16 AI's Roots 7:15 How Transformers Work 10:23 Models Without Understanding 15:12 Language Hides Reasoning 19:19 Words by Their Company 21:46 Doomers and Superintelligence 33:27 Data, Limits, and Humps 36:03 Kurzweil and the Singularity 38:22 Humans as Scaffolding 40:24 Grandpa, Lost References Brief history of AI (from Mike's Misaligned Markets) "Grandpa Shelby" and how Language Models work (Misaligned Markets) Self-driving cars would be nowhere without HD maps Talkie LM (1930s open source model) Michael Woolridge on this is not the AI we were promised John Rupert Firth and distributional semantics in context of machine learning A timeline of the origins of AI doomerism Sam Altman: AI will end world but create great companies Elon Musk and Open AI's origins Musk's connections to Nick Bostrom John von Neumman, the singularity, and AI doom Ted Chang on chatbots as blury jpegs