“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 f ...