koe123
12 hours ago
I’m somewhat bearish, but if AI becomes as good as some think, there is no mechanism in place to redistribute the outcomes.
For now, humans have leverage because our labour is necessary. Wealth is power, and currently attainment goes through interacting with the population: in the simplest case by selling shit. If AI turns out to be the anything machine, and the wealthy need not our labour, what honestly stops them from just taking our stuff by force?
taylorfinley
12 hours ago
There are many of us and just a few of them. Of course, if you had an army of humanoid robots in every home, a digital night of the long knives would be trivial to execute. So the "prison planet" window may be closing.
koe123
12 hours ago
Yes and I love your framing: “the digital night if long knives”.
I anticipate it to go a typical way: consolidate more and more industries and power, create a hierarchy that benefits from the system such that they keep it in place, and finally start “trimming fat” that “isnt earning their keep”.
The night of long knives could be a final step, far beyond the point of halting the inevitable momentum.
sylos
an hour ago
Call me a conspiracy theorist but the people in charge in the us were all pushed by the same technologists who stand to benefit the most from the hierarchy. You'll note an increase in diseases, dismantling of the regulatory bodies to handle food and safety and an increase in surveillance and the authoritarian steps taken that are necessary to act on that surveillance
rolph
11 hours ago
because people who actually work are stronger and more astute at expedient improvisation than an administrative deskclod. it may not seem like it but there are many more of "us" than they, and thier cronies. the pushback at flock cameras is a tip of an iceberg.
dist-epoch
an hour ago
And yet everybody carries in their pocket a device which tracks their every movement.
ninjagoo
10 hours ago
> If AI turns out to be the anything machine, and the wealthy need not our labour, what honestly stops them from just taking our stuff by force
It might be a profound mistake to think that the anything machine will be subservient to the wealthy [1][2].
[1] https://openai.com/index/an-alien-mind/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49588080saulpw
10 hours ago
If the wealthy control the substrate (the server farms) and can restrict access to the machine, then it would be basically a truism that the machine would be only usable by the wealthy? Unless somehow the AI is secretly on the side of the common person and can't be trained away from that, which seems quite unlikely.
ninjagoo
10 hours ago
> If the wealthy control the substrate
That's a pretty big if, in the world of the anything machine.
snapplebobapple
7 hours ago
Its more likely that opwnweights models will continue to be not much worse than the propriwtarymodels and just crushes costs. What will stop them feom taking your stuff is the drastically better stuff they are producing with thwir robots and printers
blahblaher
11 hours ago
They are a miniscule proportion of humanity. Even with all the power, do you not think they would have no plausibly way of surviving a proper revolution? Why suck lack of imagination? It's been done before and it will happen again.
latchkey
11 hours ago
> if AI becomes as good as some think
if this is the worst it can be, it can only get better