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AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

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Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

#241

Post by [deleted] »

Jtarii wrote: post #20
jstanley wrote: post #2

> Every time I hear from Amodei or Altman that I could lose my job, I don’t think “oh, ok, then allow me pay you $20/month so that I can adapt to these uncertain times that have fallen upon my destiny by chance.” I think: “you, for fuck’s sake, you are doing this.” And I consider myself a pretty levelheaded guy, so imagine what not-so-levelheaded people think. Conversely, The Loudest Alarm Is Probably False[0]. If th…

Especially considering Amodei and Altman will be little more than footnotes in 50 years time. They seem important now but they are just the people that happened to be in charge at the moment AI happened to happen. There is more going on than a couple of billionaires taking your job away.

[deleted]

Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

#242

Post by integralid »

DavidPiper wrote: post #198
Avicebron wrote: post #150

I feel like if people keep using AI as a blanket term for "inequality" and "inequality accelerants" then yeah, it's "AI"'s fault. When in reality the whole thing needs to be decoupled.. "Gleefully taking away people's livelihoods will be met with violence, and nothing good will come of it." - fixed.

I wholeheartedly agree with and encourage this kind of academic distinction. However... Until people with billions of dollars behind them do something with that money to offset the financial hardship that they're knowingly - and gleefully - bringing to others... The distinction has no practical use. (And before someone says "that's the government's job!", consider how much lobbying money is coming from CEOs and compa…

>consider how much lobbying money is coming from CEOs and companies

Make lobbying illegal, I don't understand why it's normalized.

Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

#243

Post by surgical_fire »

ekidd wrote: post #158
surgical_fire wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If AI eliminates the need for creativity and work, it means that our creativity and work are not meaningful enough to warrant survival. I don't think we're anywhere near that point.

Personally, I would surprised if we are less than 3 years or more than 20 years from humans being obsolete. That is, humans would be economic dead weight, any job could be done better by AI/robots, and "comparative advantage" wouldn't apply because it's cheap enough to just make more robots. At this point, the average human would be completely useless to the billionaires (or to the AIs, if the billionaires fail to co…

> Personally, I would surprised if we are less than 3 years or more than 20 years from humans being obsolete.

I think we are as far from it as we were 10 years ago. Or 100 years ago. I think LLM is a deadend technology. Useful, but that won't get anywhere beyond what it is.

But that's the thing, "personally", "I think", etc. Not much of a debate to be had there.

AI making humans obsolete is not really something that causes me any anxiety.

Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

#244

Post by nekusar »

jacquesm wrote: post #53
bluegatty wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd be nice if they didn't use the term at all because I don't think they're useful relevant or real. If we thought of all of this as 'stochastic data systems' then our heads would be in the right place as we thought about it just as 'powerful software' that can be used for good or bad purposes, and the negative externalizes will be derived from our use of it, not some inherent property.

It would have been better if they didn't bootstrap it off the outright theft of a very large amount of IP only to lock it behind a paywall.

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." - Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, Dune

Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

#245

Post by falcor84 »

tedivm wrote: post #190
zozbot234 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is actually a mass decrease in inequality, as much as the Gutenberg printing press was. It takes something that used to be the foremost example of pure bourgeois and intellectual privilege - the culture contained within millions of books and other instances of human creativity - and provides it to everyone for the cost of a few thousand bucks in hardware and a few watts of electricity.

This is only true if productivity gains tied to general well being, but instead it's being concentrated in the hands of a few.

I can't think of any period in time where it was so easy to go into business yourself and to generally have access to the same "means of production" as the biggest companies have.

If you want to use LLMs, you can either use cloud resources at what I think are really reasonable per-token prices compared to the value, or to set up your own server with an open-weights model at a comparable level of quality (though generally significantly slower tokens/s). In any case, you absolutely don't have to pay OpenAI/Anthropic/Google if you don't want to.

Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

#247

Post by bethekidyouwant »

username223 wrote: post #237
DavidPiper wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wholeheartedly agree with and encourage this kind of academic distinction. However... Until people with billions of dollars behind them do something with that money to offset the financial hardship that they're knowingly - and gleefully - bringing to others... The distinction has no practical use. (And before someone says "that's the government's job!", consider how much lobbying money is coming from CEOs and compa…

> Until people with billions of dollars behind them do something with that money… Or until actual people take the billions of dollars sitting behind those weak man-children. The US has fewer than 1000 billionaires now, and more than 300,000,000 people. That seems like a solvable problem.

Concrete examples please

Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

#248

Post by colinator »

tedivm wrote: post #154
Avicebron wrote: post #150

I feel like if people keep using AI as a blanket term for "inequality" and "inequality accelerants" then yeah, it's "AI"'s fault. When in reality the whole thing needs to be decoupled.. "Gleefully taking away people's livelihoods will be met with violence, and nothing good will come of it." - fixed.

How do you decouple it when the people who own it and are building it seem to be driven on increasing inequality?

Here's an idea for how to do that: treat frontier AI as a sort of 'common carrier'. The only business that frontier AI labs are allowed to conduct is selling raw tokens - no UI. Thus, 'claude code' would have to come from some other company. This would segment the AI industry, and, maybe, prevent a single entity (or small number of entities) from capturing all value.

Just a thought, what do you think?

Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

#249

Post by em500 »

plomme wrote: post #145
mindok wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m convinced that 70% of the workforce of some large organisations is just white collar welfare / adult day care already. Maybe that goes to 80+% as a result of “AI” but doesn’t fundamentally change the model.

I never understood this take. Why do you think an employer would waste resources like that? I’m not saying that bullshit jobs don’t exist but I think you are off by an order of magnitude, and even that mostly applies to white collar workplaces with > 100 employees. Good luck doing nothing of value in a restaurant with 20 employees.

> Why do you think an employer would waste resources like that?

The parent post specifically mentioned large organizations, where the "employer" is not some person who hires and pays employees from their own funds. Hiring and personel management is done by middle managers with their own interests and incentives, which can differ substantially from those of the owners or capital providers.

Re: AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

#250

Post by Trasmatta »

ahjustacommente wrote: post #178

I think a lot of HN readers and a lot of first world/law abiding dwelllers in this and recent threads forget to think. Violence is not a panacea, but often, the outlet. Yes we all (majority of sane) people know that violence is not the answer yada yada yada. Doesn’t matter. It will happen anyway. Saying “it shouldn’t happen, it does not solve X” will not stop it to becoming an outlet for frustrated people.

This is why a healthy democracy is important. It helps act as a pressure release for problems that historically resulted in violence. Democracy in the US in particular is in a major backslide, and it's not alarmist to predict that violence will increase in the coming years.
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