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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

#401

Post by softwaredoug »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #384
softwaredoug wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They thought that too in the industrial revolution. You can look back and see the jobs that came out of it. But at the time, it wasn't obvious to the people effected that there would be jobs again. We may have hindsight bias in evaluating something that happened, but to the people that it happened to it was terrifying.

MIT's motto is mens et manus : mind and hand. These are, basically, the two primary attributes of human labor. They're the reason almost anyone gets hired to do anything. Our brains and our opposable thumbs are what set us ahead of the animal kingdom. The industrial revolution first attempted to replace our hands. But the labor that was displaced had places to go: into smaller-scale manual work, where mass-production…

Again, this betrays a strong hindsight bias.

Nobody had any idea what was coming with the industrial revolution. There wasn't obviously other work for people. And for long periods of time nobody had an answer to that question for large percentage of the population.

In hindsight, we know the answers NOW, but then they did not know what was going to happen. We also don't know what's going to happen, it could go as you hypothesize. Or the Jevon's paradox people might be right and there's way more work to do.

The uncertainty is the historical lesson, not that "it'll all work out"

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

#402

Post by runarberg »

speff wrote: post #328
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.

I suggest you keep going with that math. I'll use the numbers from here [0]. 924 billionaires with an overall wealth of 7.5 trillion. Split among 300 million people, that's about $25k for everyone. Here are some points of consideration: 1. They don't have $7.5T in liquid. The average american won't be able to use that $25k to pay a hospital bill or eat. Also note that one-time wealth transfer won't even pay in full f…

The power and influence (and damage caused) does not scale linearly with net worth. And you don’t need to have money on hand to be able to use it to harm others, you can e.g. use it as a collateral for loans and funding to build your child crushing machine.

Personally I wager society would be better if the excess wealth of billionaires was simply deleted, or burned. It would be better yet if that wealth was used in our shared funds to build common infrastructure and services. Leaving such wealth in such few hands is really the worst you could possibly do for society.

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

#403

Post by erikerikson »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #220
adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that's my thought too. People, especially Americans (I am one) have this weird belief that violence never has any place, ever, at any time. I'd argue that the unwillingness to commit violence in certain situations is actually a character flaw. If someone threatens my child with physical violence, an unwillingness to commit violence on my child's behalf isn't better morality; it's cowardice. All this to say, I ag…

> [E]specially Americans (I am one) have this weird belief that violence never has any place, ever, at any time. So why isn't there a huge opposition in the USA against the wars that the USA started (currently: Iran; before: Libya, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, ...). The only famous exception of cultural impact I am aware of where there was a huge opposition against war in the USA was the Vietnam war.

There is?

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2026/03/25/americans-br...

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

#404

Post by thunky »

mibsl wrote: post #375
thunky wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're describing is using it to do something you already can do at an expert level, and you already know exactly what you want the result to look like amd won't accept anything that deviates from what's already in your head. So like a code autocomplete. You don't really want the "intelligence" part, you want a mule. That's fine, and useful, but you're really putting a ceiling on it's potential. Try using it for…

AFAIU antirez is mostly writing in C, a verbose language where "create a hashtable of x->y" turns into a wall of boilerplate. In high level languages the length diffrence between a precise specification and the actual code is much smaller.

He also mentions using it for Python which is minimal boilerplate.

And he didn't limit his take to just C code. He said: state of the art LLMs are able to complete large subtasks or medium size projects alone, almost unassisted, given a good set of hints about what the end result should be.

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

#405

Post by api »

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 feel like the entire discourse is a proxy for what should be direct discourse about inequality and the regressive (rob from the poor, give to the rich) nature of our system.

Eliminate the AI variable entirely and the problem remains, therefore AI is not the problem.

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

#407

Post by patrick451 »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #163
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…

> We have, as a civilization, two paths before us You forgot C: Butlerian Jihad. mass outlaw AI research, AI usage, AI building, AI infrastructure, on penalty of death It may not be a good option but it's there

Exactly. At the very least, we should be treating AI like nuclear weapons. It can exist but it should be locked away and never used.

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

#408

Post by card_zero »

Teever wrote: post #271
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.

If I understand what you're saying it's that as rich as they are, the amount of money the ultra-wealthy own just doesn't add up to nearly enough to give everyone a quality of life that they deserve / once had? Perhaps what's happening is that in their attempts to reach a personal all-time high in their bank accounts the ultra-wealthy are destroying value and economic systems en mass with little regard to the efficien…

What is a stumbling block? Who are they made for?

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/stumbling_block

Turns out it's a fictional object created in the translation of the Koine Greek for "obstacle".

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

#409

Post by falcor84 »

tedivm wrote: post #321
falcor84 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gener…

I'm well aware of this: I bought a pretty beefy (consumer grade beefy) GPU machine and run all sorts of open weight models. I do think there is potential. But are you expecting 360m Americans to start their own businesses? That is a solution that doesn't scale. Consumer grade GPUs aren't going to scale all that much either, and the cost of the models are going up rather than down as vendors start seeking profits. We…

> But are you expecting 360m Americans to start their own businesses?

I do not. I grew up on post-scarcity utopias like Star Trek, coupled with social capitalism, and believe that when there is a market need, people with the interest to tackle it will do so, even in the face of personal financial risk, but I absolutely don't think that it should be the default for everyone. Where there's no strong economic benefit for others to work, I would hope that we could offer everyone UBI, so that a comfortable basic level of life is available for everyone, without having to invent bullshit jobs that aren't needed.

I know I sound naive, but I truly believe that we can move into a future where human value is decoupled from their job, without going into communism.

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

#410

Post by ethin »

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.

This distinction is good in academic circles and similar (like on here). But the public (and ordinary people who aren't people who regularly visit Hacker News -- or even know that Hacker News exists) don't care. To them, AI == inequality and inequality accelerants, because it is funded and run by the richest, most powerful people on Earth. And those very people are making everything worse for all but them, not better. Nobody is going to care about academic distinctions in such circumstances.
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