Month: June 2026

I’m pretty sure the Singularity won’t happen, but it’s still better odds than winning the lottery

PNRJ financial advice, futurism, inequality , , , , , ,

Jun 28 JDN 2461220

What do you suppose are the chances that, within the next 10 years, AGI is invented and ushers in a new era of abundance in which hardly anyone has to work and we all live in prosperity?

A lot of people seem to think that this is actually pretty likely, for some reason. They seem to have bought into some ridiculous hype by AI corporations. Yes, computing power grows exponentially; but just having enough computing power isn’t enough to actually create artificial general intelligence. You have to actually understand cognition, and we absolutely do not, not even a little bit. Basically at this point we’re just hoping we can throw enough computing power at the problem that we don’t need to understand anything. (And, to be fair, that has worked much better for LLMs than I would have expected.)

But okay, it’s not impossible. I am certainly not going to call it my retirement strategy, but I will allow that there is some chance that this could happen. Let’s go with… 0.1%. I am 99.9% sure it will not happen.

This got me thinking about other extremely remote possibilities, like winning the lottery jackpot. How do those two events compare? Would it be more or less crazy to bank my retirement on the Singularity than to bank my retirement on winning the lottery?

Amazingly, it would in fact be less crazy. By quite a lot.

That’s how bad your odds of winning the lottery are.

The odds of winning either the Mega Millions or the Powerball jackpots (don’t ask me why we have two) are about 1 in 300 million. This works out so that if literally everyone in America played, someone would probably win each time; and it also works out so that with the large number of people who do play, somebody wins every month or two.

But as far as your individual odds of winning, it means that, for all practical intents and purposes, you will not win.

I have long tried to get this into people’s heads, but I think the Singularity comparison helps a great deal. I have said that I think there is a 0.1% chance the Singularity will happen in the next 10 years. That is pretty much not going to happen, right? I’m just being generous and saying it’s possible. A probability of 0.1% is still pretty much negligible.

And yet, to have a 0.1% chance of winning the lottery, you would need to play 300,000 times.

At $2 per ticket, this would cost you $600,000. To do it within 10 years, you would need to spend $60,000 per year on nothing but lottery tickets.

And that’s to get a chance that we just agreed is basically still negligible.

If you spend a “reasonable” amount on lottery tickets, say buying two tickets each week, you only spend $200 a year on it, which for most people is not really a big deal. But your odds of winning within 10 years in this scenario are now 1 in 300,000—that’s 300 times smaller than the odds of not needing to win because the Singularity has happened by then.

Don’t play the lottery. Save that $200 and put it in stocks. $200 a year won’t make you rich, but neither will the lottery—and at least you’ll have something to show for it later.

Welcome to Cyberpunk.

PNRJ core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, current events, futurism, inequality, personal , , , , , , , , , ,

Jun 21 JDN 2461213

I’m calling it now: We officially live in the dystopian cyberpunk future. We’re not headed that way; it’s not on the horizon. It is here, now. The United States is a cyberpunk dystopia, exactly as we were warned it would become. Maybe there is still hope for the rest of the world.

After all, it’s 2026, and the narcissistic owner of a corporation that is involved in space travel, social media, and artificial intelligence just became a literal trillionaire.(Not to mention that this man was given unprecedented, clearly unconstitutional, control over our government’s finances and used it to sentence millions of children to death.)

I haven’t been writing blog posts as often for the last few weeks, mainly because the future feels so bleak that I can no longer tell the difference between the reality of this cyberpunk dystopia and my own crushing depression. I don’t want to add any more bleakness to the world than it already has, and I don’t even know if anything I write (or anything I do) even really matters anymore. The Fourth of July this year doesn’t feel like a birthday; it feels like a funeral.

But I couldn’t let this one go, so here we are: This man now owns 1 TRILLION DOLLARS in assets.

I want you to understand just how insane an amount of money that is. I want you to understand that no just society could ever remotely allow something like this to happen as long as there is a single child unfed or unhoused. I want you to understand that the time to reverse course on our society’s inequality was five orders of magnitude ago.

How much is 1 trillion dollars?

If you made a comfortable salary of $110,000 per year (more than most American families make), and you saved it all, spending nothing (or, equivalently, spent only the interest on your savings), it would take you nine million years to save up $1 trillion. Humans have not existed for that long. Even australopithecines hadn’t evolved yet. Nine million years ago, our ancestors were chimpanzees.

If you made $1 per second—that’s $86,500, more than most individual Americans make in a year, every single day—and likewise only spent the interest, you’d take 31,000 years to save up $1 trillion—longer than human civilization has existed. You could have started saving when the Great Pyramid was a twinkle in its architect’s eye, and you’d only have saved up 15% of the total.

If he wanted to, Elon Musk could personally end world hunger. And don’t tell me he couldn’t really do that because his wealth is tied up in stocks: UNICEF happily accepts donations in stock.

(As I understand it, SEC rules prevent Musk from selling or giving away his shares for a year after the IPO, so he couldn’t technically give away a trillion dollars today. But he could do it a year from now—and how likely do you think it is that he will?)

Did he earn this wealth?

HE COULDN’T POSSIBLY HAVE.

That is my point. No human being, no matter how great their contribution to the world, could ever possibly have earned this much wealth—and Elon Musk isn’t even on my top-100 list of greatest contributions by human beings; mostly they’d be scientists and humanitarians, but even quite a few science fiction authors and comedians should be ranked well above Elon Musk. In fact, his net contribution to humanity is pretty clearly negative. He is not the worst human to have ever lived (there’s a lot of competition for that spot, unfortunately; Stalin, maybe? Or some ancient mass murderer most people haven’t heard of?), but he is on that list, actually—or did you forget about those millions of children he sentenced to death?

He does not work a million times harder than you. He is not a million times smarter than you. He has not contributed to the world a million times more than you have. But I’m willing to bet he has a million times as much wealth as you do—because if he doesn’t, you’d have to be a millionaire, and I doubt most of my readers are millionaires.

This is the world we live in now. The dystopia is here.


Welcome to Cyberpunk.