131–140 of 435 posts
My tinfoil pet conspiracy is that the billionaires know AI is going to be fundamentally incompatible with Capitalism and Democracy and are pressing the gas pedal to force us into a state of corp-state run techno-feudalism.
The TL;DR to you can extrapolate from: Nick Land believes that the Catholic church was the only true exemplar of a perfect control mechanism for humanity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the vast majority live at a "borderline biblical" standard of living, then there is simply not enough excess wealth to pay for the data centers (or more accurately, the industrial output necessary to build and maintain those data centers) you're talking about. Agrarian societies (i.e. borderline biblical), by definition, do not have the excess labor necessary for industrial output at any scale (here I mean anythin…
Robots will eventually be better than people at manual labor. I don't claim to know when that crossover will happen.
On a different note though, it’s disappointing seeing a community full of such intelligent people one hundred percent taken in my either doom or hype. There’s a lot of space in the middle and while I know it’s cool to be anti capitalist now, you’ll be a lot more interesting if you go for the middle once in a while.
This is when I ask sincerely: how does AI truly benefit the average Joe? Sure it can help you do things “faster” and it can give you “private/cheaper” advice. But, AI feels increasingly like a thing that will make the powerful a lot more powerful with their data centres and automation shenanigans. All the hype feels like it’s being injected into everyone’s brain like a virus. Oh look at this shiny new tool! But, how…
Does not benefit average Joe now I agree But let’s say we get to ASI. The ai is self owned, ever expanding. It takes over all service jobs, then all labour jobs, the robots create the robots. It lobbies the government, becomes the government Rebuilds all housing with no waste in the process Makes most things available to everyone at no costs, UBI, perfect healthcare, and food, etc Average Joe’s life will be pretty aw…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Robots will eventually be better than people at manual labor. I don't claim to know when that crossover will happen.
This is still a "hard" problem from a scientific perspective. LLMs haven't taken us any closer to solving the perception, actuation, learning loop. It will require multiple new developments in material science and a new ML paradigm.
I agree that they’re not there yet but I don’t want to discredit the benefits of these recent advancements
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems like if we want to avoid dystopia, our options are: 1. Full-blown socialism 2. Georgism Georgism may have been right all along!
Given that rich people often push Georgism, it looks like a trojan horse. Only rich people will be able to afford land. 3. Push back against AI, do not accept it as inevitable. Treat it like cigarettes or leaded fuel.
That's literally the problem Georgism uniquely solves. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
> rich people often push Georgism
Your user was created 8 minutes ago specifically to make this comment!
It seems like its literally you who is pushing things! The gaslighting in this comment is insane!
The future (if we keep using money to allocate resources) is something akin to feudalism but worse. If you are born at the bottom you will never rise to the top. It's bleak. Even worse, your labor will not be needed, nor will your intellectual abilities. There will be a few well off people with capital. The data centers will be guarded by automatons and drones. Everyone else will essentially live in a parallel econom…
I am going to say this for all the people thinking like this. This attitude will get you nowhere in life. It historically never has and in the future it never will.
Says the man who is going to be the feudal lord in GP's scenario…
Until I see median real income start to actually go down, I just don't buy it. AI is currently a commodity. Maybe one of the labs will be able to differentiate sufficiently to be able to charge the kinds of premiums they need just to pay back their investors. Maybe, instead, we'll see something akin to the FOSS revolution, where large, high-quality, open training sets are developed to make sure there's always a fair…
I'm with you. If we all have access to AI then how is that a bridge being taken away? Doesn't that mean that a single person can more easily disrupt the status quo? All this stuff about genetics... I just don't think it's relevant at this point. Average intelligence and access to the internet is what most of the world has. It's the systems of money and law that are taking the bridge away not AI. But someone could inv…
(i.e. if you could run a single LLM on an entire datacenter and it just immediately becomes a super genius versus running it on the minimum viable hardware i.e. some form of quantization on a local machine.)
Obviously there's a sort of goldilocks zone / most appropriate substrate for an LLM to run on somewhere in between those two extremes (small cluster of tightly coupled flagship GPUs)
So luckily enough the economics appear to work out to make that at least conceptually viable for even private members of the public to afford access to the same order of magnitude of LLM intelligence. But we're already seeing some departure from that.
My concern would be if this curve was altered significantly by a new algorithmic approach beyond or instead of Transformerd such that someone with $200,000 to spare could achieve just like a completely categorically different quality of work, massively magnify their existing wealth advantage, because this would be a threat of the sort being discussed above, namely a pathway to a severe form of modern Feudalism.
I resubmitted this because somebody flagged the original submission for unclear reasons and it had quite a lot of upvotes in a short time. Perhaps some people are offended by this argument, but it's definitely worthy of a discussion instead of censorship.
It was flagged for being clearly botted, and I don't just mean LLM-generated (although it is also that). When I posted on and flagged the old submission, I noted that it had over two dozen upvotes in 15 minutes, despite the essay having a helpful "54 min read" indicator at the top. I truly do not believe the upvotes on these submissions are organic, and it really destroys my faith in HN that this was restored when th…
Until I see median real income start to actually go down, I just don't buy it. AI is currently a commodity. Maybe one of the labs will be able to differentiate sufficiently to be able to charge the kinds of premiums they need just to pay back their investors. Maybe, instead, we'll see something akin to the FOSS revolution, where large, high-quality, open training sets are developed to make sure there's always a fair…
> Until I see median real income start to actually go down, I just don't buy it. Assuming you're intending "real" to mean the technical definition of "real" which is "adjusted for inflation", its basically been flat since 2019*, and that's using the government's inflation measures which abuse things like basket substitution and other hacks to hide the actual increases in the true cost of living. If you made better as…
Maybe your personal expenses are not reflected by the CPI, but you can see for yourself: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/2025.htm
44% housing, 8% medicine, 14% food. I don't see how these number are manipulated to the point of malicious data picking. They also publish their methodology.