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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

#391

Post by School-Cotton »

glerk wrote: post #102
roschdal wrote: post #17

Yes. AI is evil.

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.

Utter nonsense. There are plenty of good stupid people and smart evil people.

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

#392

Post by runarberg »

grafmax wrote: post #268
integralid wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>consider how much lobbying money is coming from CEOs and companies Make lobbying illegal, I don't understand why it's normalized.

Who is going to lobby to make it illegal? Our system is broken and won’t fix itself. Inequality is going to continue to increase until society collapses. If we want a better world we need to prepare for this eventuality by building avenues of popular action to return power to the people. Once the oligarchs have fucked up enough people’s lives, popular action becomes a realistic way out of this mess.

Legislators elected for that policy, I suppose.

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

#393

Post by dasil003 »

stego-tech wrote: post #365

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: > You…

I like Tristan Harris' take on the situation, which is both more nuanced and more actionable. The idea being that the system and incentives are set up to select amoral technologists who will make money for shareholders, so inevitably the ones that come into power will be the ones don't see a problem with replacing all of human labor (because that's the only outcome that can justify the investment made). Reading Cory Doctorow's article from yesterday (https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/11/obvious-terrible-ideas/) was a poignant example of how the incentives are stacked against anyone with a conscience. The only solution, is political action, because the interests of the 99.9% are aligned here. And I say this as someone who loves technology and sees lots of value in AI, but it needs governance, and while in the past I was wary of government regulation in technology, in this case it's way broader and more existential to our civilization than one category of labor being disrupted.

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

#394

Post by keernan »

Ray20 wrote: post #304
rayiner wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much actual money do you think the “people with billions of dollars” have in comparison to the needs of the population as a whole? I think you’re very confused about where the actual income in the economy goes.

Generalize "people with billions of dollars" to all Americans - and then this logic will start to work fully. "Until people with salaries of many dollars per hour behind them do something with that money to offset the financial hardship that they're knowingly - and gleefully - bringing to others 90% of the world that live on less than 2 dollars per day... The distinction has no practical use." Moreover, these people…

>>Until people with salaries

Salary (income) is a horrible choice to serve as the marker to determine a person's (family's) fair share contribution to the burden of paying the costs to operate a society. Not everyone is so poor that working for a living is a matter of survival.

I can think of only one universal marker that would assure every citizen shares the burden of paying for society's costs equally: wealth.

Adjusted in a manner that the financial impact of one thousand dollars to a full-time MacDonald's counter worker is transformed into a dollar amount that causes the same relative financial impact to everyone, all the way up to the wealthiest family in America.

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

#395

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

Throaway199999 wrote: post #170
andai wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have, as a civilization, two paths before us: a) Decouple the value of human life from labour. b) Watch as the value of human life rapidly approaches zero. --- Though I'd expand this by adding "technically alive" is not a very good standard to aim for. Ostensibly we're already heading for something like poverty level UBI + living in pod + eating the proverbial bugs. We need a level above that! A great exploration…

When the value of human labour reaches zero the economy will collapse so that will be interesting.

I don't see that as a guaranteed outcome if there's something like UBI to sustain demand, and automation to sustain supply.

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

#396

Post by drzaiusx11 »

estimator7292 wrote: post #301
rayiner wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then who pays for it?

Everyone . That includes the small number of people hoarding a majority of the wealth. Everyone needs to contribute to the wellbeing of society as a whole and nobody is exempt.

I'd like to emphasize that the above should be immediately obvious. The fact that it's not does not bode well for humanity's future.

Billionaires simply _should not exist_. The fact that the power to shape societies is concentrated in so few can account for many of the existential threats we face today. AI is not "the problem", it's merely the latest symptom of our broken system and the prioritization of the wrong goals and outcomes.

EDIT: grammar

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

#397

Post by caconym_ »

Lerc wrote: post #196
tedivm wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How can you hope for anything better if you consider it an us versus them situation? When they say "We don't want to increase inequality" and the response is "We don't believe you". Where do you go from there? It seems like a lot of people want a revolution so that they can rotate who will be able to take advantage of the vulnerable. What are the suggestions for something better? I don't see a lot. I'd like to see mo…

> When they say "We don't want to increase inequality" and the response is "We don't believe you". Where do you go from there?

The response is "we don't believe you" because their actions show that they are hellbent on accelerating inequality using AI and they have offered absolutely no concrete plan or halfway convincing explanation of how, if their own predictions of AI's future capabilities are correct, we're supposed to go from here and now to a future that isn't extremely dark for the vast majority of humans on Earth (to the extent that said humans continue to exist).

The work they have done in this direction so far is not serious, so it's not taken seriously. They obviously care much more about enriching themselves than slowing or reversing current trends.

If they want to be taken seriously, maybe they should start acting like they're serious about anything besides their own wealth and power. And I do mean acting---they need to show us through their actions that they are serious.

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

#398

Post by mrob »

Analemma_ wrote: post #388
mrob wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI progress can potentially be extremely non-linear because of feedback effects. The first to build an AI smart enough to accelerate building even smarter AIs wins (or loses along with everybody else if it's more successful than they expected).

People have said this, but so far if anything the opposite has been empirically true. OpenAI had a huge lead and it just didn't matter, Anthropic and Google both caught them and now they're neck and neck. It seems like compute overhang forecloses the possibility of runaway progress which eliminates all your competitors.

Any feedback process has a hard threshold for instability. The PA system doesn't howl until the microphone is close enough to the loudspeaker. The atomic bomb doesn't explode until the fissile material reaches critical mass. If you don't know where the threshold is you can't extrapolate.

Compute is a limiting factor now, but there have already been huge improvements in compute efficiency, e.g. mixture of experts. It seems extraordinarily unlikely that there are no more to be found. And compute capacity continues to increase too.

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

#399

Post by classified »

scotty79 wrote: post #305
rayiner wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then who pays for it?

At societal level money is not a resource. Money is just a way of keeping track to how high of a fraction of the future output of the civilization any one person or entity is entitled to. This is by consent. With AI all is subject to change.

> With AI all is subject to change.

Nope. AI is an accelerant that makes the divide between rich and poor grow even faster.

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

#400

Post by smallmancontrov »

Ray20 wrote: post #304
rayiner wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much actual money do you think the “people with billions of dollars” have in comparison to the needs of the population as a whole? I think you’re very confused about where the actual income in the economy goes.

Generalize "people with billions of dollars" to all Americans - and then this logic will start to work fully. "Until people with salaries of many dollars per hour behind them do something with that money to offset the financial hardship that they're knowingly - and gleefully - bringing to others 90% of the world that live on less than 2 dollars per day... The distinction has no practical use." Moreover, these people…

Ownership of the economy is split roughly 30/30/30 between the top 10%/1%/.1% with the bottom 90% of people making an entrance as the rounding error. If you picture "the owners" by drawing a representative sample of 10 people:

    1 Normal person
    3 Doctors / Lawyers / Engineers ($1M+ net worth)
    3 Successful Entrepreneurs ($10M+ net worth)
    3 Ultrawealthy ($50M+ net worth)
It's worth putting these through the fundamental theorem of capitalism (rich people get paid for being rich in proportion to how rich they are) to solve for passive income from asset appreciation. Plugging in the crude figure of 10%/yr (feel free to bring your own rate):

    1 Normal person 
    3 Professional ($100k+/yr passive)
    3 Successful   ($1M+/yr passive)
    3 Wealthy      ($5M+/yr passive)
You get your incentives where you get your money. Most people get most of their money from working, but the wealthy get most of their money and incentives from the assets they own. In between it's in between.

Are the in-betweeners part of the problem? Sure, but we have a foot on either side of the problem. We could get hype for many of the plausible solutions to aggregate labor oversupply (e.g. shorter workweeks) even if it meant our stocks went down. Not so for 6/10 people in that sample. The core problem is still that the economy is mostly inhabited by people who work for a living but mostly owned by people who own things for a living and all of the good solutions to the problem require rolling that back a little against a backdrop that, absent intervention, stands to accelerate it a lot.

EDIT: one more thing, but it's a big one: the higher ends of the wealth ladder have the enormous privilege of being able to engage in politics for profit rather than charity/obligation. A 10% chance of lobbying into place a policy that changes asset values by 10% is worth $1k to a "Professional", $50k to a "Wealthy", but $8B to Elon Musk. The fact that at increasing net worths politics becomes net profitable and then so net profitable as to allow hiring organizations of people to pursue means the upper edge of the distribution punches above its already-outsized weight in terms of political influence. It goes without saying that their brand of politics is all about pumping assets.

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