Recent posts

#1

Off the Record / Re: The AI dooooooom thread

Last post by Syt - Today at 05:23:04 AM

I'm sure that - as always in history - increased productivity will mean more free time and shorter work hours for all.

#2

Off the Record / Re: The AI dooooooom thread

Last post by garbon - Today at 05:21:18 AM

Biological employees 

[Germany pushes new military cooperation deal with Japan]

#3

Off the Record / Re: The EU thread

Last post by Syt - Today at 05:19:46 AM

https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-pushes-new-military-cooperation-deal-with-japan/

Germany pushes new military cooperation deal with Japan

German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius is proposing a new agreement to make it easier for troops from both countries to operate on each other's territory.

YOKOSUKA, Japan — Germany is seeking to deepen defense ties with Japan, with Defense Minister Boris Pistorius proposing a new agreement to make it easier for troops from both countries to operate on each other's territory.

Speaking at Japan's Yokosuka naval base after talks with Japanese Defense Minister Shinjirō Koizumi on Sunday, Pistorius said Berlin had floated a so-called Reciprocal Access Agreement — a framework designed to "ease the exchange of soldiers in each other's countries and significantly reduce bureaucratic hurdles."

Such agreements allow partner countries to deploy troops on each other's soil more easily for training, exercises or operations by streamlining legal and administrative procedures. Japan has signed similar deals with countries like the United Kingdom and Australia as it deepens its own security ties amid rising regional tensions.

The proposal marks a step beyond Germany's recent Indo-Pacific engagements, which have largely focused on joint exercises and short-term deployments. It signals a shift toward more structured military cooperation with Berlin's partners in the region.

Pistorius framed the move as part of a broader response to growing global instability. "How close our partnership is has become clear in light of the current developments in Iran and the Middle East," he said, pointing to Japan's heavy reliance on energy imports through the Strait of Hormuz. "The freedom of sea routes must be guaranteed and protected."

Germany and Japan share an interest in securing global trade routes, he added, stressing that both countries remain committed to the rules-based international order. "We are united by the conviction that the strength of the law must prevail," Pistorius said.

The initiative also reflects a broader strategic shift in Berlin and Tokyo. As both governments face rising pressure from authoritarian powers — from Russia's war in Ukraine to China and North Korea in East Asia — they are increasingly treating their security challenges as interconnected, translating those shared concerns into closer bilateral defense cooperation.

[Nvidia's Huang pitches AI tokens on top of salary as agents reshape how humans work]

#4

Off the Record / Re: The AI dooooooom thread

Last post by Syt - Today at 05:17:14 AM

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/20/nvidia-ai-agents-tokens-human-workers-engineer-jobs-unemployment-jensen-huang.html

Nvidia's Huang pitches AI tokens on top of salary as agents reshape how humans work

The perks of working in Silicon Valley have long included high salaries. Now, some engineers may be offered a new incentive: artificial intelligence tokens.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Monday floated a novel compensation model that would give engineers a token budget on top of their base salary, effectively paying them to deploy AI agents as productivity multipliers.

Tokens, or units of data used by AI systems, can be spent to run tools and automate tasks and are becoming "one of the recruiting tools in Silicon Valley," Huang said.

″[Engineers] are going to make a few hundred thousand dollars a year, their base pay," Huang said at the chipmaker's annual GPU Technology Conference.

"I'm going to give them probably half of that on top of [their base pay] as tokens ... because every engineer that has access to tokens will be more productive."

The pitch signaled Huang's broader vision of the workplace, in which engineers oversee a fleet of AI agents capable of completing complex, multi-step tasks autonomously with minimal user input.

It is a vision that Huang has been building toward publicly. Last month, he told CNBC that Nvidia's employees would one day work alongside hundreds of thousands of AI agents.

"I have 42,000 biological employees, and I'm going to have hundreds of thousands of digital employees," he said.

The comments come as concerns grow that AI agents — software systems capable of independently executing complex, multi-step tasks — will hollow out white-collar work.

In a memo to investors, Howard Marks, founder of Oaktree Capital Management, warned of "an incredible leap ahead in AI's capabilities" that now allows it to "act autonomously" — a distinguishing point that determines its ability to substitute human labor.

"That difference is what separates a $50 billion market from a multi trillion dollar one," the veteran investor said.

Goldman Sachs estimates AI could potentially automate tasks accounting for 25% of all work hours in the U.S., enough to fuel fears of what some have grimly dubbed a "job apocalypse."

The bank sees a 15% productivity boost from AI, which could lead to 6% to 7% of jobs displaced over the adoption period.

"Risks are skewed toward greater displacement if AI proves more labor-displacing than prior technologies," said Joseph Briggs, Goldman's senior global economist.

Some 60% of today's workers are employed in occupations that didn't exist in 1940, Briggs said, citing a study by economist David Autor, suggesting that AI will render some roles obsolete while creating others that don't yet exist.

AI agents drive software demand

Huang has taken an optimistic view of the impact of AI agents on the software industry, describing it as "counterintuitive." Rather than reducing demand for software, AI agents will become its most voracious customers.

His logic goes: more AI agents mean more demand for the underlying software infrastructure they run on — the programs, tools, and computing resources that power them.

"The number of C-compilers that we use, the number of Python programs that we have, the number of instances, are growing very, very fast — because the number of agents we have that use these tools are going up," he said.

Bruno Guicardi, president and founder of the information technology company CI&T, described the change as nothing short of a paradigm shift. "A new layer of abstraction is being created through agents," he said.

"Now software engineers can 'tell' what computers should do, not in a programming language but in plain English. Work that used to take months to be done now takes a couple of days. And we see it only accelerating from here."

'Talent paradox'

The AI-fueled anxiety over labor displacement has been hard to contain, even as companies struggle to find skilled workers.

The job market is currently experiencing a "talent paradox" where 98% of C-suite executives expect AI to lead to headcount reductions over the next two years, while 54% cite talent scarcity as their top macro challenge, said Lewis Garrad, career practice leader at consultancy Mercer Asia.

Around 65% of executives expect 11% to 30% of their workforce to be redeployed or reskilled due to AI by 2026, Garrad estimated.

Entry-level jobs face the greatest risk as AI eliminates the "stepping-stone" tasks historically used to train new workers, further widening the skills gap at a time when demand for AI-literate workers is accelerating, Garrad added.

Roles involving data analysis, document processing, information comparison, and drafting initial reports are at risk of being "first in line" for displacement, said Andreas Welsch, founder of consultancy Intelligence Briefing and author of The Human Agentic AI Edge.

Goldman's Briggs also acknowledged the transition won't be frictionless, even under the most optimistic scenario, anticipating a peak gross jobless rate that will increase by around half a percentage point as the job market transitions into a new era.

But new jobs will emerge, Briggs said, stressing that technological change has always been a main driver of job growth in the long-run through the creation of new occupations.

Tens of millions of people are now employed in sectors such as computing, the gig economy, e-commerce, content creation and video games — industries that were science fiction a generation ago.

That said, integrating AI capabilities into existing corporate workflows may ultimately prove harder than the technology itself. Roughly 80% to 85% of AI projects have failed since 2018 — a sobering statistic for an industry awash in enthusiasm, noted Intelligence Briefing's Welsch.

"It would be undesired to have hundreds of thousands of agents that create more problems than they solve," he said.

#5

Off the Record / Re: US - Greenland Crisis Thre...

Last post by Richard Hakluyt - Today at 04:41:36 AM

The Franks resident in Outremer often tried to get on with their Muslim and Jewish populations and neighbours. A new crusade with fanatical bumpkins incoming from the West was often a facepalm moment for them.

#6

Off the Record / Re: Iran War?

Last post by HVC - Today at 12:45:27 AM

He could just pull out anyway and say that the US produces their own oil and doesn't need the Middle East, not understanding commodity pricing, couldn't he?

#7

Off the Record / Re: Iran War?

Last post by Tonitrus - Today at 12:29:01 AM

Why are we assuming that that it's all down to Trump as to how the war with Iran will end?  Iran found some balls to squeeze, they may not relax the grip as soon as Trump decides he doesn't want to keep pummeling Iran.

Indeed...one of the demands one could easily predict Iran will make is that they won't allow any Gulf state hosting US forces to transit their resources/ships via the SoH until they evict the US.  Then those states will face the choice to either agree to those demands, or we go back to getting involved.

#8

Off the Record / Re: Iran War?

Last post by Syt - March 22, 2026, 11:47:58 PM

Why are we assuming that that it's all down to Trump as to how the war with Iran will end?  Iran found some balls to squeeze, they may not relax the grip as soon as Trump decides he doesn't want to keep pummeling Iran.

Besides, Israel seems far from being done, regardless of what the US does.

#9

Off the Record / Re: Iran War?

Last post by Valmy - March 22, 2026, 11:41:14 PM

Israel invading Lebanon complicates things. Iran probably won't stop while that is happening.

#10

Off the Record / Re: Iran War?

Last post by Jacob - March 22, 2026, 10:32:50 PM

Why are we assuming that that it's all down to Trump as to how the war with Iran will end?  Iran found some balls to squeeze, they may not relax the grip as soon as Trump decides he doesn't want to keep pummeling Iran.

Exactly.

Trump may declare victory and go home.

What if Iran declares you need to pay $X to transit Hormuz safely, to recoup the costs from US and Israeli attacks? Is the US going to go right back in, or eat the humiliation?

... or maybe Iran will say they're keeping the Straits closed until they get reparations directly from the US.

... or something else.

But just because the US goes home and stops attacking Iran doesn't mean Iran will do the convenient thing.

Which, IMO, makes it less likely that Trump will declare victory and go home.