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

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Yes, absolutely. But the billionaires will spend a fraction of their billions to stop that from happening so that's a lopsided fight already. The problem is the ratchet effect. Money is like gravity: have a little bit of it and you are attracted to the larger piles and become part of them. Have a lot of it and you start attracting more of it, even if you're not working. So once the balance is disturbed that ratchet effect makes it hard to lose money faster than you are making it.

Breaking that cycle will take some extraordinary effort and I suspect that the article gets at least that portion of it correctly. This isn't going to go away without a fight of some sort, whether a physical or a legal one is not all that important but since the billionaires have stacked the deck against the rest of us using their money in all ways except for the physical one that seems to be one of the few avenues still open.

And for how long it remains open is a question, there is a fair chance that AI will not only enable stable dictatorships but will also enable wealth extraction at a level that we have not seen before.

For instance: we are allowed to have this conversation by some billionaires. If they should decide you and I can no longer converse then that will be that and it is going to take a lot of effort to circumvent any blocks.

There are some 10 or so billionaires that can ruin my existence overnight, take away my means of living and that of those around me. And there wouldn't be much that I could do about it.

People have been radicalized over much less than this.

Maybe it’s my own lived experience coloring my perspective, but man the author feels like a centrist sitting upon an imagined moral high ground. “Violence is bad but inevitable” is the kind of milquetoast non-committal position one takes when they have nothing else to contribute to the discussion at hand.

My own take goes that one step further, as I said in a prior comment rebutting Altman’s whinging blog post:

> Your staunch refusal to heed the critiques of those you harm means that these outcomes were inevitable; not acceptable, not justifiable, but inevitable nonetheless. In a society where two full-time working adults still cannot afford a home, or children, or healthcare, or education, your insistence upon robbing them of their ability to survive at all is tantamount to a direct threat of violence against them. Your insistence that the pain is necessary, that others must clean up the messes that you and your peers are willfully creating, is the sort of behavior expected from toddlers rather than statesmen.

The problem does not lie with technological innovation itself, so much as the powerful humans behind it leveraging it for selfish ends without the consent of the governed. Violence becomes inevitable when people see no alternative, and necessary when the stakes are kill or be killed, as AI is currently steered towards. That’s not to condone the actions of the alleged perpetrators so much as it’s highlighting the litany of historical examples around such transformations and the effects violence has in forcing a peaceful compromise in most (but not all) cases. The New Deal couldn’t have happened without the decades of preceding strikes, protests, and government-sanctioned violence against workers; the violence made it impossible to ignore or delay any further, and the result was outing corporate entities who had been stockpiling chemical weapons and machine guns, so fierce was their opposition to sharing the products of labor with the workforce. AI already has the weapons, it has the surveillance apparatus, the government backing; violence is presently the sole recourse left to a growing number of people, because they know they’re an obstacle to the powers that be - and will be destroyed, lest they strike first.

That’s the real story, here, and those who haven’t lived in the gutters of society cannot possibly understand the desperation of those victimized by it in the name of greed.

> The really big fuckup we are committing as a society in the US (may or may not apply to each person's country individually) isn't just this looming threat of massive labor displacement due to AI, it is that instead of planning for any sort of soft landing we are continually slashing what few social safety nets already exist.

Think of the alternative, though: If we planned for a soft landing and implemented safety nets and started transitioning ourselves to a society where people didn't have to work to survive, then a few trillion dollar companies would make slightly less profit every year. We simply cannot allow that. Won't someone think of those trillion dollar companies for a minute?

The top 5% of the country have around 60% of its wealth. It is logical to bring that number down.