AGI Escapes Containment; Trump Admin: "Hold My Beer" — Tariff Terathread

so I previously predicted the AI bubble would pop on Trump's watch and crash the stock market. Never did I envision Trump doing it to himself, in a manner so stupid I'm not sure anyone anticipated it.

I'm wondering what this does to the AI bubble. I think the bubble is led by trillions of dollars desperate for lottery-sized returns. There's so much family, pension and sovereign wealth money that can't get returns on sane investments that they're left only with insane ones.

This is not about tech at all. If they thought they could do a tech bubble with ELIZA chatbots, we'd have number power plants being restarted to power hyperscale data centres running billions of copies of ELIZA.

What would it take for this crash to affect the AI bubble materially?

Dowhammer 40k is real!

Brian Merchant's given his thoughts on the situation, focusing mainly on the situation as a case of Trump's administration falling for the AGI hype.

You want my off-the-cuff thoughts on these tariffs, I'm putting them down as another nail in the coffin for AI as a concept, and a possible blow to "AI doom" narratives as a whole.

For AI as a concept, this entire debacle is a very public and very high-profile example of AI failing to live up to the "AGI/Superintelligence" hype that OpenAI and pals have been cranking out - and failing in a manner which suggests their AI systems (rightfully so, IMO) to be worse than useless.

For "AI Doom" narratives, whilst this economic clusterfuck is an example of AI dealing a nasty blow to humanity, said blow was dealt through a combo of unambiguous incompetence on the AI's part, and the Trump administration overestimating the AI's own competence. No diamonoid bacteria, no Skynet-style Terminator apocalypse, just sheer unfiltered stupidity on a government-wide level.

seen a thesis/opinion that the tariffs as positioned is a covert solicitation for bribes, a test to see who’ll line up to kiss the ring and ask for exceptions

holds some water but I don’t really see how it’s expected to scale internationally? “hope the CEOs beg their national economic leadership”?

the whole damn thing is ofc stupid but (as I’ve said in other cases) shrugging the whole off because of that is dangerous - worth interrogating even despite the stupid, because they still have impact

Not even a thank you

United Healthcare of all things is green though.

To be fair their calculation also involves multiplying by the carefully chosen factors of 4 and 0.25. It's a macroeconomics thing you probably wouldn't understand. https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations

The recent experience with U.S. tariffs on China has demonstrated that tariff passthrough to retail prices was low (Cavallo et al, 2021).

This "Cavallo" reference isn't actually listed in their citations (gee I wonder why) but appears to be Tariff Pass-Through at the Border and at the Store: Evidence from US Trade Policy (link).

Meanwhile Cavallo et al 2021:

Chinese exporters did not lower their dollar prices by much, despite the recent appreciation of the dollar. By contrast, US exporters significantly lowered prices affected by foreign retaliatory tariffs. In US stores, the price impact is more limited, suggesting that retail margins have fallen. [...] Our results imply that, so far, the tariffs’ incidence has fallen in large part on US firms.

Amazing. The government's official position is that tariffs are OK because both US exporters and importers get less money.

Can we get this thread pinned? I guess that this thread will keep on giving 🍿

I know this is going to hurt millions of regular people in and outside the US, many of them through no fault of their own. Despite that I can't help myself.

Financial Times agrees with this analysis

https://archive.is/6JGEI