The Real Danger to Civilization Isn't AI. It's Runaway Capitalism

Gates is doing this because in a few short years he went from America's darling super rich success story, to the monopolistic Satan most of us tech people remember. He was not prepared for being vilified so quickly and completely during the anti-trust years.

Same thing as Andrew Carnegie: After the violent putting down of steel worker strikes, Carnegie was seen as the devil himself. He was so upset that this would be his legacy, Carnegie went about doing charitable work to change his image. You probably have a library he built within 50 miles of you, no matter where you live in the US.

Gates is doing the same thing. He does not want his legacy to be that of a businessman, but rather, that of a philanthropist.

Historically speaking, the US has survived robber barons, but Venezuela qua Venezuela has not survived its party vanguard.

Likewise, I have a hard time taking anyone seriously advocating for socialism who is unwilling to grapple with the fact that, yes, Venezuela is a valid data point, as are the hundreds millions of deaths socialism is directly responsible for, and spending at least a few moments contemplating whether or not they'd be one of them if they did manage to get socialism going in their local polity. If you care enough about people to want to gift them with socialism, you ought to care enough about people to spend some time considering the possible dangers it carries with it.

The party faithful do well in socialism. The almost-just-barely-not-quite-faithful, the ever-so-slightly-not-quite-in-step, the ones who agree with their leadership in principle but differ ever so slightly on matters of how to implement or who should implement... their death rate is pretty rough. Guaranteeing you're in the first group is harder than it may first appear.

If an AI subscribes to the tribalism of its creators, then it could be the AI vs. everyone. That sounds (potentially) dangerous to me.

I think if you were on the receiving end of one of the Gates Foundation projects you would feel very different.

"Preventing technological progress" -- so because of M$ shenanigangs perhaps rich kids got their toys a year or two later? (Big perhaps.) Still think the world as a whole was better off with Bill Gates in it.

You have to be rich to give the same moral weight to providing tech toys and providing medicines.

Capitalism is danger for civilization? Writes who? A buzzfeed. A very, very leftist media site.

How we end up in situation when huge portion (if not majority) of hacker community turned out to be die hard socialists? (nowadays they call themselves social-democrats)

I remember when I lived in Uzbekistan and I didn't have access to internet, I got floppy disk with saved copies of Eric Raymond articles. Once I've read "How To Become A Hacker", it influenced me a lot. I would say it was the most influential article I've ever read in my life.

I imagined "a hacker", an individualist person, who likes to find non-standard solutions to problems, who thinks out of box, who don't blindly follow authority, who likes decentralisation as opposed to centralisation. "A hacker" is a person who almost by definition right-libertarian.

Latter I found this article of Eric Raymond:

http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/libgates.html

Years later, I found articles of Paul Graham. It was amazing to read him. And he also turned out to be on free-market side:

http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

I like his quote:

> This is why so many of the best programmers are libertarians.

Now, what I've see is disappointing, I don't like this and it shouldn't be like this at least on Hacker News. We have more than enough people in the world who wants more government, more authority, more religion.