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

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