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

#571

Post by runarberg » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 6:17 PM UTC

card_zero wrote: post #565

runarberg wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I am a fan of logistical taxation, where the mean income (including capital gains) pays 50% in tax and every standard deviation σ above (or below) pays extra (or less) according to 1 / (1 + e^-σ). What will happen with this taxation is that if everybody makes the same income, then everybody pays 50% in tax. If some rich dude is making a lot more money then everybody else, they will lower the tax for everyb…

Suppose it's 1999, and I'm planning to expand my online bookstore into a worldwide network of distribution centers and logistics, that can deliver anything at all to anybody, very quickly, though a unified web interface. How can I carry out this major business enterprise without getting very poor? I guess the board would have to vote to keep my income at the optimum level, or just below, to prevent me from jumping sh…

One can only dream.

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

#572

Post by jacquesm » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 6:17 PM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #553

jacquesm wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given enough people enough guns and school shootings are inevitable. Allow a handful of people that grab the economy and all means of production and violence will be the result. At this point in time it is simply cause and effect, the surprising thing to me is how long it is holding together. But at the rate the economy is being wrecked I fail to see how it will do so for much longer. Effectively the French elites st…

Crime isn't a simple cause and effect relationship just because you say it is. For example, in the US, bomb threats were very common in the early 70's and then they stopped and nobody really knows why.

These two things don't have a whole lot to do with each other.

Sure, crime isn't 'simple cause and effect'. But it is still as simple as 'means, motive, opportunity' and if means are plentiful that reduces the friction on the way to crime.

As for the bomb threats, I have no idea, but I also don't see them as the kind of crime that we are discussion here (violence, in particular). Bomb threats are a denial of service attack, actually killing or wounding people is on another level (at least, it is for me).

One suggestion: the widespread use of ANI + mobile phones and the disappearance of pay-phones + cameras on every street corner make it a lot harder to call in a bomb threat without getting caught.

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

#573

Post by scudsworth » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 6:20 PM UTC

glerk wrote: post #298

phpnode wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 intelli…

lol, lot of words for a No True Scotsman. clearly there are intelligent and evil people in the world, however you refuse to engage with a basic question like this

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

#574

Post by ijk » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 6:21 PM UTC

raincole wrote: post #33

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #9

The worst part is that AI's first casualties are jobs that no one really asked to kill. AI is killing writing, music, art, and coding. I've done all of these voluntarily because I simply enjoyed them Meanwhile the parts of my existence that I actually hate - dealing with customer support, handling government forms, dealing with taxes - is far from being automated by AI Look at Suno. Fantastic tool, but where was the…

> dealing with customer support This is one of the first parts LLMs tried to automate. They were literally released in a form of chatbot. Whether it succeeded is another question. > Did the world really wake up one day and concluded that, "wait, we're spending too much on musicians"? I'm not sure about musicians specifically, but in the whole past decade studios have been complaining how costly it is to make AAA game…

Having worked in games, the AAA costs coming down by automating art isn't going to make them cheaper to make, though they will probably get more content. AAA is partially about the spectacle, the vast investment smaller games can't match, so the spend will continue to grow despite cost savings. As long as the current paradigm continues, anyway.

Or we may see a realignment of interests, with the current AAA paradigm replaced by something else. Maybe something free to play or gacha based, such as Genshin Impact, Fortnight, Roblox...though Epic just laid a lot of developers off, so it may transform into something stranger still.

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

#575

Post by Lerc » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 6:24 PM UTC

UncleMeat wrote: post #563

TeMPOraL wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that people have a million stories to explain the observed actions, most of those stories are bullshit, and people repeating them know fuck all about the decision-space in which these actions were chosen and taken.

Hm. I guess we can't possibly judge the guy who threw the molotov cocktail. He could have been clearing a wasps nest.

This is a accidentally good example, we don't know what motivated him, while your ridiculous reason is unsound because it would be also a bad thing to do if he were clearing a wasps nest on someone else's property in the middle of the night.

I suspect that they are not a bad person but someone radicalised by the media they consume.

Firebombing someone's house is a bad thing to do. It doesn't mean they are necessarily a bad person. Anger and confusion can make good people do bad things.

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

#576

Post by ijk » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 6:25 PM UTC

aerhardt wrote: post #50

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #9

The worst part is that AI's first casualties are jobs that no one really asked to kill. AI is killing writing, music, art, and coding. I've done all of these voluntarily because I simply enjoyed them Meanwhile the parts of my existence that I actually hate - dealing with customer support, handling government forms, dealing with taxes - is far from being automated by AI Look at Suno. Fantastic tool, but where was the…

AI cannot write for shit, it’s not even a fraction of a millimeter of the way there compared to the production of Thomas Mann or Dostoevski or Cervantes. The fact that people are using it to flood the world with slop is a hyperscaled continuation of the overabundance and discovery problems we already had, but that doesn’t mean that writing is dead or dying. The technology simply doesn’t have the capabilities right no…

One concern is that people in general might not have enough personal taste to care if something is slop. I have high standards and am familiar enough with LLM output to find that yet another repetitive pattern painful to read, but clearly that isn't universal.

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

#577

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 6:27 PM UTC

nearbuy wrote: post #519

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.

Lobbying is "directly advocating for or against particular legislation or regulations." Writing your representative is lobbying. Fighting bad legislation is lobbying. Any good faith attempt to argue a position on a government policy is lobbying. Giving money to politicians or their campaigns is not lobbying, and it is already illegal for lobbyists to do so. What could and should be made illegal is allowing unlimited…

[deleted]

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

#578

Post by zdragnar » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 6:27 PM UTC

jfengel wrote: post #500

azinman2 wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand why welfare is the answer. To me it seems we’ve super failed if that’s the case — just brings everyone down except a few ultra rich people.

UBI is not welfare. It is just a livable minimum wage, for everyone who works. For those who cannot work, it replaces welfare, but that is not it's primary purpose. As a welfare replacement, it is much more efficient, since there is no effort spent determining who qualifies. People can spent their money however they want, rather than the patchwork of separate programs we have now. It doesn't need to bring anyone down…

The annual minimum wage (at the federal level, not counting states with higher) is around $15k. There are about 267 million adults in the US.

That is double current federal and state welfare spending.

I'm dead tired right now so I'm sure I'm missing something, but considering that is far below the poverty threshold in any big city, I dont think we'll be solving anything by eliminating welfare in favor of UBI.

UBI is basically of no benefit to the upper middle class or wealthy, and it won't be enough for the poor who cannot work enough. It really only benefits the upper lower class and lower middle class the most.

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

#579

Post by wswope » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 6:27 PM UTC

booleandilemma wrote: post #554

NoGravitas wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get in contact with the Party for Socialism and Liberation.

Thanks

Obligatory warning that PSL is led by full-blown tankies, and e.g., have an explicit pro-North Korea party line.

That said, the membership base is pointedly heterogeneous in belief and they’re the most active alt-left element in DC.

Make of this whatever you will; just offering you this as background for an informed decision.

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

#580

Post by jimmyjazz14 » Sun, Apr 12, 2026, 6:30 PM UTC

cyclopeanutopia wrote: post #535

jimmyjazz14 wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a choice a human made. Imagine if someone proposed sending the outputs of a random number generator to a space laser and had it fire at will, would we blame the number generator for the destruction it causes? You may say that LLMs are not random number generators, and I would somewhat agree, but at least in their current state and level of understanding we have about how they derive their output they might as…

So, imagine that some humans make this choice and then AI autonomously takes over and humans can't stop it anymore. Is that enough to treat AI in such a situation as a magical alien something that can threaten your or my survival? One thing that the whole AI debate has shown to me is how many people completely lack any sort of imagation.

My point is that wild imaginations about the current state of LLMs is the problem, we wouldn't even consider connecting a random number generator or a statistical model to a weapons system but if we start thinking of it as an intelligence some actually would be tempted to do so.