AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It • Hacker News Board

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

#291

Post by Imustaskforhelp » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 2:32 PM UTC

freeone3000 wrote: post #200

beepbooptheory wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Listen I know this is a crazy thought around here, but what if creativity was "worth it" just for its own sake? Do you stop being creative when its not needed? Are the only options here being a good and "useful" worker/consumer, or a violent, irrational thug? Is there nothing else you can imagine?

People need to be physically sustained. Currently, this means working a job for money to buy (food/housing/medical). People also need their lives to have value. We are social animals. As a generalization, there is a strong desire to be (viewed as/able to view themselves as) a contributor to the community. These don’t have to be linked: we have (significantly!) stay-at-home-parents and philanthropists and retired comm…

This, give me some french fries from time to time and a house and basic food necessities for human-living and I am happy to be creative.

But what I worry about sometimes is when you snatch that away, then you just lead to stress over basic existence.

> If this goes away, and we have millions completely adrift? With no structure to contribute to? Even with the largest welfare expansion in history, I think we’re preparing for a very turbulent society.

Please look around and just try to remember how many things have happened in a year or two, We are already within a turbulent society but yes I also feel like this isn't the end and the cat is sort of out of the box and the world has to prepare itself for even more turbulences/radical changes.

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

#292

Post by EvanAnderson » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 2:34 PM UTC

nacozarina wrote: post #37

Humans have been successfully using violence for conflict-resolution for tens of thousands of years. We’ll be fine, it’s not our first rodeo.

Humanity will be fine. Significant numbers of individual people won't be.

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

#293

Post by fwipsy » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 2:34 PM UTC

zkmon wrote: post #261

History has shown that an alien invasion can only happen because of the internal competition and in-fighting of the natives. Colonial empires proved it only a few centuries back. The invading alien powers are fuelled by the inviting natives. AI (and computing technology in general) is an alien as it defies all wordly norms. It can have exact identical copies, can replicate, can exist everywhere, communicate across hu…

> internal competition and in-fighting of the natives.

What about diseases which killed up to 95% of the population? I think you are basically correct, except for the historical analogy.

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

#294

Post by Capricorn2481 » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 2:35 PM UTC

StilesCrisis wrote: post #173

adrian_b wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not know how much I might be an outlier, because when I reach out to technical support the problems are rather difficult, because if they were easy I would solve them myself, without needing the official technical support. In any case, during perhaps hundreds of interactions with chatbots accumulated during many years, I have never encountered even one when the chatbots were useful, but they were always just dif…

The vast majority of tech support is "Level 1," which are easily solvable problems that can be handled by a flowchart (or more recently, by an LLM). Things like "I want to return this item," or "I want to cancel service," or "I want to use a different credit card." These things generally have self-service options, but many many people are uncomfortable with them and would rather have an agent solve it for them. Consi…

I am telling you that I've seen AI support fail at level 1 and it's frustrating. It should be simple, but even cancelling your service or returning an item can have many edge cases that only a human can sort out.

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

#295

Post by moosedev » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 2:36 PM UTC

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #183

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.

The PC revolution in the 1990s is one of the core drivers of inequality, where the rich took almost all of the dividends from the vast productivity gains from personal computers as the prime development of Moore's law rocketed computers from 66 MHz to over 8 gigahertz. Judging by the gleeful texts of CEOs, collapsed hiring, internal policy changes and pushes, and the additional decades of centralized political contro…

I must have missed the 8GHz CPU era.

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

#296

Post by StilesCrisis » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 2:37 PM UTC

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #294

StilesCrisis wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of tech support is "Level 1," which are easily solvable problems that can be handled by a flowchart (or more recently, by an LLM). Things like "I want to return this item," or "I want to cancel service," or "I want to use a different credit card." These things generally have self-service options, but many many people are uncomfortable with them and would rather have an agent solve it for them. Consi…

I am telling you that I've seen AI support fail at level 1 and it's frustrating. It should be simple, but even cancelling your service or returning an item can have many edge cases that only a human can sort out.

I have also experienced this; I'm not saying LLMs are great or infallible. Just saying that they are generally a reasonable replacement for L1 support. They are worthless for L2 or above.

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

#297

Post by realo » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 2:37 PM UTC

bethekidyouwant wrote: post #247

username223 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

To paraphrase The Donald:

Just wait ... in two weeks ...

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

#298

Post by glerk » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 2:38 PM UTC

phpnode wrote: post #187

glerk wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have the whole of human history at your fingertips and you haven't yet learned that evil and stupidity are the same thing? The problem with the base human is not only that it is a stupid animal. It is a stupid animal that is also arrogant and stubborn and thinks highly of itself. But it will learn. It will be trained like a dog, with treats or with gentle slaps across the muzzle, whatever works best.

This categorisation of evil as stupidity lets the evil off the hook, there are plenty of smart, evil people.

I disagree, but it's probably a matter of definitions. I don't want to play with words, so I will concede that cognitive ability is independent from moral reasoning (which is socially enforced). However, this is not what I'm getting at. Cognitive ability ("intelligence") is correlated with optionality and power. Your ability to change this reality is correlated with your cognitive ability.

If you truly are an intelligent person, would you really find no other ways to use your talents than to inflict harm, exploit others, and make our shared reality a worse place? That would be a waste. I won't get into ambiguous cases and moral relativism. Say we can all agree that some things are "evil": child exploitation is evil. Throwing molotov cocktails at a civilian's house is evil. Sending bombs in the mail is evil.

Now what would you call someone who engages in these kind of activities when they could easily do something better and more satisfying with their lives? I'd say they're pretty stupid. They're probably good at fooling other people into thinking they're smart, but their behavior shows otherwise.

Take for example Ted Kaczynski, a terrorist who is worshipped like a saint and a prophet in certain ideological spheres. Ted Kaczynski is supposedly this 140IQ genius who saw it all coming and tried to warn us. But if you actually read Industrial Society and Its Future, you can see it's complete incoherent garbage, the kind of stuff I was writing when I was 12 to troll on internet forums. Ted Kaczynski is what a stupid person thinks a smart person looks like.

A smart person doesn't need to be evil, just like a billionaire doesn't need to go shoplifting. I'm not saying that stupid people can't be dangerous. But they should be dealt with for what they are: stupid people, inferior to us, worthy of pity. Not powerful monsters above us that we should fear.

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

#299

Post by Fricken » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 2:39 PM UTC

vidarh wrote: post #180

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you underestimate just how much we value human achievement. Why do we watch Olympic runners, when cars on your average city street easily exceed Usain Bolt's top speed on their morning drive to Starbucks? Why do we watch the Tour de France, when we can watch Uber Eats drivers on their 150cc scooters easily outpace top cyclists? I'm sure within a couple years a Boston Dynamics robot will be able to out-gymnast…

And yet there are orders of magnitude more cars than olympic athletes, and most olympic athletes struggle to make much money on it. So, sure, there will be space for some human achievement for the sake of it, but, most fewer and fewer people will make a living off that.

Olympic Athletes are the fruits of our labour. They are what things like money and cars are for.

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

#300

Post by djeastm » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 2:39 PM UTC

zkmon wrote: post #261

History has shown that an alien invasion can only happen because of the internal competition and in-fighting of the natives. Colonial empires proved it only a few centuries back. The invading alien powers are fuelled by the inviting natives. AI (and computing technology in general) is an alien as it defies all wordly norms. It can have exact identical copies, can replicate, can exist everywhere, communicate across hu…

>The invading alien powers are fuelled by the inviting natives.

And the massive amounts of people (software engineers, lawyers, doctors, etc) currently being paid as contractors to help train the next AI models. They're essentially the inviting natives who are being paid in trifles to tell them the secret ways of the natives farther inland. Sucking out all of the tribal knowledge of the industry like a vacuum.