There was a recent talk from CCC that got a bit deeper into Peter Thiel's "Antichrist" ideology and where it comes from.

The bottom line of that talk seemed even worse: That for some tech leaders, the general wellbeing of the population or "classical" arguments for progress such as improving living conditions and advancing mutual understanding aren't even orthogonal to their goals but are explicit anti-goals: Because a world with too much wellbeing and too little conflict would ostensibly lead to stagnation, loss of freedom and innovation and the state of what Thiel termed the "Antichrist".

Too much conflict is bad as well because it carries the risk of complete destruction, so they'd aim for some kind of ideal level of conflict and suffering in the world, like some sort of twisted inflation target.

I'd also be excited about this technology if it had come before everything we've seen in the last 25 years. It's irresponsibly naive not to understand by now that technological advances are being used more against us than for us.

It’s been really disgusting watching some people I used to look up to somewhat devolve into.

> If the gains from AI were shared even a little with the regular people, they might not have the deep sense of unease and sometimes open hostility that we are seeing now.

Additionally the AIs are trained on creations by many of those same regular people. They're not just seeing the profits funnelled upwards, some of those profits are being generated through their own works!

And before someone tries to argue "that's just how art etc. work" - sure, but the difference is quantity. If I get inspired by another artist, I can generate output at the speed of one artist. With current AI models, it's like a big company is training millions of artists on your style to pump out new pieces as fast as possible.

It's also worth noting that computers have been largely an equalizing force, since you don't need much capital at all to produce software, just a PC and know-how that's freely available online. You can generally build software cheaper alone or in a small group than as a large company.

AI is taking away and monopolizing the means of production, and making what few white collar workers remain rent their productivity. This is a completely different dynamic.

>Like when CEOs openly salivate at the prospect of firing all workers and replacing them with AI.

I saw a series of ads in a train station the other day for some company claiming to offer "AI employees" that had slogans like "our employees never complain about overtime", "our employees don't ask about vacations", etc. and was just shocked at the brazenness of it.

> Like when CEOs openly salivate at the prospect of firing all workers and replacing them with AI.

CEOs aren't stupid.

Some CEOs claim they are laying off people because AI has increased productivity and they don't need those people. But that's a lie. Not a straight lie, because lying to investors constitutes security fraud, but their language is carefully chosen so that the overall message is a lie, but they have plausible deniability.

Here's an example: Amazon fired 30000 workers, supposedly because of AI. And here's an excerpt from Nate Jones (prolific AI commentator, who worked for 5 years at Amazon) video [1]:

  > Amazon fired 30,000 people because they needed the money today in order to buy GPUs to desperately try to secure a place in the future of AI cloud. That is the actual story. Now, that story does not sound as nice for Amazon as a future forward story about how we're automating with AI.

Well said. It’s like human assembly lines being replaced with robots. Humans did those jobs for a really long time. Then they were replaced by automation.

We’re on a slippery slope, because what happens when AI gets even better over the next 5 years? Robots took time to fully replace one person on an assembly line; it didn’t happen overnight.

Basic income seems more like a reality soon. Or you’re going to have slums and the wealthy.

Wow this is bubble talk. Who are you talking to?! I regularly engage with people who are totally ambivalent towards genAI at best and horrifed by genAI at worst. The only people "immediately seeing the value" seem to be marketing grifters on LinkedIn.

"The regular people" …what??

I think its another example of the Gell-mann amnesia effect, if your'e an expert in something then the AI is often wrong and you're confused why people are saying its great, if you're less skilled then it can be impressive.