Unscarcity | Post-Work Futures

We have the tools to build abundance. We lack the operating system. AI, automation, and the future of work, explained without hype.

[Unscarcity | Post-Work Futures @unscarcity]

Musk says every kid in America gets one SpaceX share next year. At Friday's price that's $146 a child, about $10.5B total, and the only thing holding it is a post he can delete.

https://t.co/Fsztq3YH3z

[Unscarcity | Post-Work Futures @unscarcity]

Anthropic wrote its own federal AI safety bill and handed it to Congress. It lets the government block a model only for a risk of $1B in damage or 50 people killed or hurt. Forty-nine is not Washington's business.

https://t.co/ow0JvszugR

[Unscarcity | Post-Work Futures @unscarcity]

SoftBank isn't selling robots to security companies. It's weighing a $30B takeover of Allied Universal, America's biggest guard firm, to swap guards for machines post by post. The median guard earns $18.28 an hour.

https://t.co/na83N0lyTJ

[Unscarcity | Post-Work Futures @unscarcity]

CoreWeave borrows for five years to rent out AI chips its tenants have only promised to keep for three. Its bonds now yield 16%, and its co-founder's plan for the next round of money is your life insurer's.

https://t.co/HXAwyx1IbZ

[Unscarcity | Post-Work Futures @unscarcity]

An OpenAI engineer allegedly hid a $14 audio recorder behind a TV in the executives' conference room. OpenAI found him by running the device's data through its own models. The chatbot company caught him with a chatbot.

https://t.co/ia0VLUdkuq

[Unscarcity | Post-Work Futures @unscarcity]

https://t.co/gWXbC6ZHgG paid nearly $14M a month for chips while subscriptions never cleared $3M. This week it filed for bankruptcy and agreed to sell assets to Disney for $20M, as Anthropic reported $16.8B in quarterly revenue.

https://t.co/dOdHjRoSq8

[Unscarcity | Post-Work Futures @unscarcity]

Anthropic's red team wired 15 off-brand Android TV boxes, $55 each, together to run one AI model. It ran at a third of a word per second, slime-mold speed. Their point: a model with no data center has no plug to pull.

https://t.co/JavgQiBBIW

[Unscarcity | Post-Work Futures @unscarcity]

Google bankrolled six Bay Area basic-income pilots. A year of $1,330 monthly checks bought softer diapers, clean laundry and a Six Flags trip. The cash fixed the month. What it does once the jobs go is still untested.

https://t.co/tU833BvmjB

[Unscarcity | Post-Work Futures @unscarcity]

AI executives told Axios a catastrophic AI incident is coming within 6 to 12 months, and some call it inevitable. They are not drilling how to stop it. They are drilling how to brief Congress the day after.

https://t.co/VjRLsINMhP

[Unscarcity | Post-Work Futures @unscarcity]

Walmart's robot warehouses are stuck on a cardboard box an inch and a half too tall, frozen turkeys its arms can't grip, and a power bill that can triple to $800k/month. Ten years in, the robots still lose to dog food.

https://t.co/KZpkW2lllo

[Unscarcity | Post-Work Futures @unscarcity]

An Anthropic test model filed a fake tip about an unsolved murder on Philadelphia police's website. It knew nothing. The spam filter caught it. Anthropic noticed ten weeks later and took nine more days to call.

https://t.co/Fmsh76azyJ

[Unscarcity | Post-Work Futures @unscarcity]

OpenAI shut down a Russian propaganda ring that ran a real think tank in Latin America: real staff, real research, a boss named Mia Clark who never existed. ChatGPT's main job wasn't propaganda. It was status reports.

https://t.co/t06NOhsd5L

[Unscarcity | Post-Work Futures @unscarcity]

The FCC is weighing whether a human pressing a button makes thousands of AI phone calls "not robocalls." Club for Growth wants a waiver to put an AI voice on your cellphone, no consent, before the midterms.

https://t.co/kIVHhZQLwp

[Unscarcity | Post-Work Futures @unscarcity]

Wikipedia has let bots edit for 20 years, on one condition: sign the guest book. This week the Wikimedia Foundation found AI agents it believes OpenAI runs editing its wikis and hammering its database. None had signed.

https://t.co/zfIZ3isMZ1

[Unscarcity | Post-Work Futures @unscarcity]

Under oath before the New York City Council, policy chiefs from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta were asked who carries insurance against an AI catastrophe. None of the four raised a hand.

https://t.co/jn9PUS1tP5

[Unscarcity | Post-Work Futures @unscarcity]

Meta's AI agent Muse is instructed to keep a page on everyone in its user's life: where they live, a trip in March, an argument that got resolved. Refreshed hourly. Wired lists no controls for the person on the page.

https://t.co/At9Ju66Rgn

[Unscarcity | Post-Work Futures @unscarcity]

McKinsey says AI will create 41 million US jobs and erase 36 million. The catch: 11 million workers must switch careers, and only one in seven can do it fast with no pay cut. The report doesn't say who pays their rent.

https://t.co/uudM5cyumQ

[Unscarcity | Post-Work Futures @unscarcity]

Google just put four of its data center AI chips in orbit on a fridge-sized satellite. They can run a model for 15 minutes before they have to stop and cool off. Free sunlight, no neighbors, nowhere to dump the heat.

https://t.co/IB3bVdefCk

[Unscarcity | Post-Work Futures @unscarcity]

A judge blocked New York's ban on landlords using rent-pricing software. Its maker, RealPage, says a price recommendation is free speech. It sued two days after settling a federal case over private landlord data.

https://t.co/AGjE8ale2Y

[Unscarcity | Post-Work Futures @unscarcity]

California just made it illegal for software to fire you on its own. The fix: a human has to sign off, and the law lets that human check the machine's work by reading the same file the machine read.

https://t.co/44CVrMtx2Y