A(i) Modest Proposal with Mario Munoz

Speaker 1: Hello everyone. It is a melancholy object to those who walk through these great tech landscapes. Or surf in the interwebs when they see the apps, the websites, and repositories crowded with unemployed developers, followed by three, four, or six open source contributors, all with no jobs and importuning every passenger for a job reference. These developers, instead of being able to work for their honest livelihood, are forced to employ all their time strolling to beg for sponsors for their helpless projects. Who, as they grow more complex, hope to turn them into some rug pull SAS application, or leave their open licenses to work for the pretender in Seattle or sell themselves to the Bay.

Speaker 1: I think it is agreed by all parties that this prodigious number of contributors in the arms or on the backs or at the heels of their educational institutions Is in the present state of the tech industry a very great additional grievance. And therefore, whoever could find a fair, cheap, and easy method of making these developers sound and useful members of the technosphere. Would diff would deserve so well for the public as to have their NFT set up as preserver of the internet. But my intention is very far from being confined to provide only for devs on LinkedIn begging for connections. It is of a much greater extent and shall take in the whole number of developers at a certain point in their career who are thrust into the job market with government serv services alone unable to support them. who sometimes end up demanding our charity through

Speaker 1: buy me a coffee or go fund me. As to my own part, having turned my thoughts for many years upon this important subject, I maturely weighed in the several schemes of our projector I have always found them grossly mistaken in their computation. It is true, a baby developer just dropped from its coding bootcamp or local university may be supported by a modest loan for a solar year with Little other income. At most, nothing above the value of around ten grand, which the boot camps or colleges themselves may certainly get, or the value in scraps by their lawful right of high tuition fees And it is exact exactly at one year a junior that I propose to provide for them in such a manner as, instead of being a charge upon their parents or the community or government, or wanting food, clothes, and health insurance for the rest of their lives

Speaker 1: They shall, on the contrary, contribute to the feeding and partly to the clothing of many thousands. The number of developers in this nation being usually reckoned over one million and a half. Of these I could calculate there may be about two hundred thousand unemployed, from which number I subtract thirty thousand whose parents' retirement savings are able to maintain them, although I apprehend there cannot be so many under the present distresses of These United States. But being granted, there will remain 170,000 self-taught or just graduated devs. I grant I again subtract 50,000 for those who turn to retail or as full-time baristas. Who die by accident or disease within a year? There only remain 120,000 developers produced annually.

Speaker 1: The question thereof is how this number shall be supported and provided for, which, as I have already said, under the present situation of affairs, it's utterly impossible by all the methods hitherto proposed. For we can either employ them in all service sectors or agriculture. They neither build houses nor cultivate land. They can very seldom pick up enough skill by merely working in open source for a few years where they just copy and paste anyway, during which time they can, however, be properly looked upon as proper junior developers. As I have been informed by a principal engineer in the Valley of Silicon, who protested to me that he never knew above one or two instances of these above a junior level, even in the part of the country so renowned for the quickest proficiency in the art of app development. I am assured by our tech firms and clients that a developer before a year of experience is not employable, and even when they reach a year of experience, will not yield above 3%, 3.

Speaker 1: 5 % at most. Productivity gains, which cannot turn to account either to the universities they owe tuition to or supply enough return for their landlords, kindly providing a place for them to rent for four times the value they provide. I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection. I have been Assured by a very knowing, effective altruist of my acquaintance, that the brain of a healthy open source developer is at whatever age a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food. Whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled, and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasy or a ragu. I do therefore humbly offer it to public consideration that of the 120,000 developers already computed, 20,000 may be reserved to continue working in open source.

Speaker 1: We're of only one-fifth part to be females, which is more than we allow to be employed in the tech sector anyway. And my reason is we must not needless needlessly imbalance current LLM demographics and vector weights That the remaining hundred thousand may, after one year of dabbling in open source, be offered in sale to the persons of quality and fortune through the metaverse, always advising project leads to let these baby developers Contribute plentifully so as to render their code plump and ready to be ingested by discerning AI agents. A developer's brain will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends. and when the family dines alone, the hypothalamus or frontal lobe will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt, will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter.

Speaker 1: I grant this food will be some somewhat dear and therefore very proper for oligarchs who, as they have already devoured most of a person's data, seem to have the best title to their brain. I have already computed the cost of an unemployed developer to be about ten thousand a year, in which list I reckon all PRs, commits, and documentation changes to an average project. And I believe no transhumanist would repine to give one hundred thousand dollars for the brain of a junior developer, which, as I have said earlier, will make two dishes of excellent nutritive meat, when he has only some particular friend or his own family to dine with The junior developer's family will have $70,000 of neat profit after paying off loans, and the parents may have enough to send another child to university or a coding boot camp.

Speaker 1: Those who are more thrifty, as I must confess, that times require, may scalp the hair, of which artificially sewn, will make admirable wigs for the oligarchs, or fine scars for their ladies I think the advantages by the proposal uh which I have made are obvious and many, as well as of the highest importance. For first, I have already observed it would greatly lessen the number of open source developers with whom we are yearly overrun, producing terrible data sets for our LLMs. as well as our most dangerous enemies, who stay at home on purpose with a design to democratize the internet, hoping to take advantage by the absence of so many good capitalists who have chosen to leave the open web Than to stay involved in these antagonistic online

Speaker 1: communities they once inhabited. Secondly, families will have something valuable of their own, which by law may be liable to a distress and help pay off boot camp or college loans as with their credit already being useless and their automobiles already seized, would would otherwise be unable to do so. Thirdly, where whereas the social welfare of a hundred thousand developers cannot be computed at less than ten thousand dollars per annum The tech market stock will be thereby increased by $1 billion per annum, besides the profit of a new dish introduced to the tables of all transhumanists in the metaverse. Who have refinement and taste, and the money will ensure the growth and happiness of trillions of us who will inhabit the stars. Fourthly, the constant government and educational services, besides gaining their due tuition

Speaker 1: , uh once paid off, will be rid of the charge of maintaining them after the first year. Fifthly, this food would likely bring great custom to bars where vintners will certainly be so prudent so as to produce the best recipes for dressing it to perfection, and consequently have their houses frequented by all the fine transhumanists who justify justly value themselves upon their knowledge and good eating. And a skillful cook who understands how to oblige his guests will contrive to make it as expensive as they please. Sixthly, this would be a great inducement to incorporation, which all wise nations have either encouraged rewards or enforced by laws and penalties. It would increase the care and tenderness of real developers toward their code.

Speaker 1: We should soon see an honest emulation among the private sector where developers near retirement could be brought to the market. Many other advantages might be enumerated. For instance, the remaining unemployed developers would be incentivized to create better code for our LLMs. With fewer novices out in the wild, there would be less likelihood of polluting the datasets which are the lifeblood of future AGI. In fact, we would be less likely to see anything outside of a standard deviation. Ensuring that our datasets are not too diverse or imprinted with false personality. But this and many others, I omit, being studious in brevity. I can think of no objection that will possibly be raised against this proposal, unless it should be urged that the number of unemployed developers will be thereby

Speaker 1: much lessened in the nation. I desire the listener will observe that I calculate my remedy for this one country of the United States and for no other that ever was, is, or I think ever can be upon the earth. Therefore, let no one talk to me of other expedients, of taxing billionaires more than the middle class , of holding individuals and corporations accountable for copyright infringement Of utterly rejecting the additional construction of high emission data centers, of cutting the expensiveness of pride, vanity, idleness, and gambling of absurd market valuations. Of introducing a vein of regulation and consequences for monopolistic practices, of examining current harms to the majority world based on current exploitative actions.

Speaker 1: Of being cautious not to sell our country and conscience for nothing, of investing capital into people here and now as opposed to fantasies of the future. Lastly, of putting a spirit of uh honesty, industry, and skill into our business leaders, who, if uh a resolution could now be taken to pay workers a fair wage and provide useful benefits, would immediately unite to cheat and exact upon them in price the measure and the goodness, nor could ever yet be brought to make one fair proposal of just dealing, though often and earnestly invited to it Therefore, I repeat, let no one talk to me of these and the like expedients, till they hath at least some glimpse of hope that there will ever be some hearty and sincere attempt to put them into practice.

Speaker 1: I profess in the sincerity of my heart that I have not the least personal interest in endeavoring to promote this necessary work, having no other motive than the public good of my country. By advancing our technology, providing for the families of otherwise unemployed developers, and giving some pleasure to the rich I'm no longer a junior developer by which I could propose to fetch a single penny, and no one in my family is that much into tech. Jonathan Swift released the original Immodest proposal in seventeen seventeen twenty-nine in response to the dehumanization of the Irish poor by wealthy British residents and landowners.

Speaker 1: He exposed their hypocrisy and cruelty. We're now living in a current tech landscape that favors wealthy venture capitalists and ultra-wealthy CEOs. Their worldview is intoxicated with visions of unbridled and unregulated technological growth, no matter what it costs. For example, influential tech investor Mark Andreessen, co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, or A16Z for short, posted in October of 2023 what he called the Techno-Optimist Manifesto. In it, he claims, uh slowing down progress on AI is a form of murder, that's his words. His view pushes it into the absurd. We should raise everyone to the energy consumption level we have, then increase our energy one thousand times, then raise everyone else's energy one thousand times as well.

Speaker 1: We believe we should place intelligence and energy in a positive feedback loop And drive them both to infinity. Is he an obshoot, an aberration, a misguided but necessary evil that otherwise provides capital and funding for otherwise necessary and net positive technologies? In 2018, in a 2018 interview with Business Insider, Jeff Bezos made a similar statement. In it, he recognizes the threat of climate change, calling it a genuine energy crisis, but then he takes a weird turn. We don't actually have that much time. So what can you do? Well you can have a life of stasis where you can cap how much energy energy we get to use. Stasis would be very bad I think. But the solar system can easily support a trillion humans.

Speaker 1: In this future, trillions of humans inhabit the stars. Energy usage is limitless, or so he says, so why stop now? Elon Musk provides an embarrassment of sources providing insight into what he claims are his priorities, including his view that population decline is an existential threat, also calling empathy a fundamental weakness of Western civilization. In August of 2022, he retweeted an announcement of a book titled What We Owe the Future, in which he said, worth reading. This is a close match for my philosophy. In this book, author William McCaskill describes his philosophy of long-termism. In short, long -term ism posits that decisions we make today have an ethical obligation for all future people and civilizations.

Speaker 1: In other words, to do the most good in this world, we need to optimize technological development now to seed the environment for trillions of humans that will colonize the universe. Some of us might feel similarly about climate change and then the effect on future generations. However, the key difference is that the future imagined by long-termists is effectively science fiction. Many CEOs and VC investors subscribe to this and other related philosophies. The AI Con is a book written by Dr. Emily Bender and Dr. Alex Hanna, meant to demystify the hype surrounding AI technologies. In addition to sifting through the hype and contextualizing the effects of these tools, the book also describes two different groups within the hype machine known as boosters and doomers.

Speaker 1: In the end, they are two sides of the same coin. Boosters imagine a future where AGI or artificial general intelligence will be smart enough to cure cancer, create unending economic growth. And in some sense, allow humans to live forever. Doomers imagine a future where AGI becomes malevolent and decides to kill us all. like the Matrix or the Terminator, or a paperclip golem that will murder everyone in its quest to create paperclips as effectively as possible. Both of these scenarios are, to put it mildly, hallucinations of power-hungry oligarchs having to reckon with their own mortality and worthlessness. Boosters and doomers. Boosters and doomers distract us from having real conversations about the effects of the technology today.

Speaker 1: And they inspire and propel this cult of futurists to focus on a made-up future. There's a broad term for them, Tescrial. It is a new neologism or acronym for transhumanism. uh extropionism, singularitarianism, modern cosmism, rationalist ideology, effective altruism, and of course long-termism. Uh I'll talk a little bit more about this later. In 2024, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said that in the future, instead of universal basic income, there might be what he uh referred to as universal basic compute. Universal basic compute. Think about what that means. Actually, why even think? Sam Altman will tell you. A little less than a month ago, on August 18, 2025, Fortune posted an article with the following headline.

Speaker 1: Sam Altman admits OpenAI totally screwed up its GPT-5 launch and says the company will spend trillions of dollars in data centers. Trillions. What what does that even mean? Um trillions. In his world, value correlates to the data center compute. And yes, we need compute to achieve AGI. User Nick Scraft on Mastodon shared a clip of Sam Altman telling a room full of investors that he has no idea how his company will generate revenue. In the same breath, he promises them that once AGI is achieved, it will figure it out for them. The audience laughs. It seems like a joke.

Speaker 1: He stares ahead with a straight face. There are countless other examples of nearly all the leaders and executives from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, XAI, as well as lesser-known yet notable entities that hold these kinds of views. And are proactively working to accelerate their pace. Venture capitalists, whether true believers or not, are buying in. Their unrestrained and unregulated stampede toward oblivion is obvious to anyone who is looking. For more context, you can read Adam Becker's book titled More, Everything Forever, which examines these characters and their motivations. Spoiler alert, it's in the title. It is frighteningly easy to draw a line between TestGreal, AGI, and eugenics.

Speaker 1: This term that I referred to earlier, Tesfriah, was coined in a paper released on first Monday last year, in which they draw that line plainly. The authors write. Many of the very same discriminatory attitudes that animated eugenesis in the past: racism, xenophobia, classism, ableism, and sexism. system remain widespread within the movement to build AGI, resulting in a system that harm that harms marginalized groups and send uh in a system that harms marginalized groups and centralizes power while using the language of safety and benefiting humanity to evade accountability. Echoes of eugenics permeate from Andreessen's manifesto, Musk's writing, and other audaciously coded language from these same oligarchs.

Speaker 1: There seems to be a willingness to ignore these troubling motivations clearly driving the AI industry. In July uh 18, 2025, economist Matt Stoller wrote in his newsletter a post titled The Number Go Up Rule, Why America Refuses to Fix Anything. In the post, he argues that number go up is not merely a story of greed or economics. It's precisely how we make decisions in our society. For example, when COVID first hit China, it wasn't hard to imagine that the contagion would spread to the US. Health experts and leaders warned us ahead of time, but panic truly didn't set in until the stock market plummeted. Stoller goes on to quote Odlot's host,

Speaker 1: Joe Wiesenthal. A stock market that continues to go up is part of the entire US economic model. Rising stocks are how we pay for retirement, education, consumption, and so forth. Any impulse to abundantly build out less profitable lines of business undoubtedly strikes at the heart of how American capitalism works. Later, Stoller writes, a society under number go up tends towards evil. The men and women behind an excessively high rate of return often make deeply sinful and immoral choices. Little different than the Confederate plantation owners did in whipping slaves, or lords and castles did when abusing serfs.

Speaker 1: It's like the now meme status comic that often gets shared of a man in a tattered suit sitting by a fire with three young kids. The caption reads Yes, the planet got destroyed, but for a beautiful moment in time, we created a lot of value for our shareholders. Unregulated, unchecked, and unopposed, these tech executives and venture capitalists just want numbers to keep going up Their valuations are astronomical, their user growth is unprecedented, there is no end in sight, and they will stop at nothing. As I approach my conclusion, note that I haven't even touched on what I believe to be a massive system of data theft as well as a complete disregard and careless destruction of creator economies. and local news providers. Just ask illustrators, designers, musicians, or even local beat reporters who have been displaced by faceless prompt engineers.

Speaker 1: I also haven't made the case that currently the carbon footprint of these technologies is either better or worse than rumored or or fear. Doesn't matter. Sure, it's in the best interest of these corporations to obfuscate any meaningful data about resource consumption, but even in the best case scenario where resource consumption is on par or even under that of current cloud computation, this unbridled thirst for more, more, more in lieu of long-termist priorities, could leave our earth totally barren. I didn't spend time wondering what the effects of these tools has in education and learning and mental health or within other social ecosystems. Sadly, it's not hard to find many examples of troubling accounts. I could have spent hours talking about how some of these technologies are already creating actual harm to the majority world or global south.

Speaker 1: For example, content moderation, image tagging, transcribing audio, and flagging hate speech exposes extremely low or no-wage workers to despicable content with no support for fatigue or mental health strain. I didn't talk about how these technologies are already being used in healthcare, government, police, and military for categorizing, classifying, and targeting individuals that are already at risk. And how this is already having dire and deadly consequences. Are AI tools useful in our engineering workflows? Do they increase or decrease our productivity? Do they add value to our company's bottom line? I believe those are the wrong questions. My focus here was to unveil the stated goals, stated goals of those who are leading the charge with these technologies and making decisions that have real

Speaker 1: life consequences. In the here and now. It is important to understand their goals and motivations. It is important to understand their vision Left unchecked, these paragons of delusion will gladly sacrifice us today for their hallucinations of tomorrow. Whether you personally choose to use these tools or not doesn't make you better or worse than anyone here. Casting judgment on others who don't agree with you is counterproductive. If we are dismissive of each other and pontificating amongst ourselves, we are ceding any agency we could have to these obsessive billionaires. Our best bet is to band together and through collective action demand transparency, regulation, and accountability. A few days ago, a group of scientists and academics released a thorough and well-thought-out

Speaker 1: statement of their position. That seems like a good start. I know all that is easier said than done, but we have to start somewhere. Because if the future we have to look forward to is one seen through the eyes of venture capitalists and eugenesis billionaires, they might as well just go ahead and eat me. Thank you.

Speaker 2: Woo! Woo! Thank you for the interesting presentation, Maria.