E.g., suppose that 1,000,000 persons believe that a corporation's evil acts destroyed their happiness [0]. I would have guessed that at least 1 person in that crowd would be so unhinged by the experience that they'd make a viable attempt at vengeance.

But I'm just not hearing of that happening, at least not nearly to the extent I would have guessed. I'm curious where my thinking is wrong.

[0] E.g., big tobacco, the Sacklers with Oxycontin, insurance companies delaying lifesaving treatment, or the Bhopal disaster.

> I don’t want to trivialize the grievances of the people who fear for their futures. I don’t want to defend Altman’s decisions. But this is not the way. This is how things devolve into chaos.

If I had a cent every time a lesswrong link was posted alongside a profoundly obtuse comment...

> Nothing that Altman could say justifies violence against him. This is an undeniable truth. But unfortunately, violence might still ensue. I hope not, but I guess we are seeing what appears to be the first cases.

We are somewhat violent species, so I agree that almost every significant economic and societal development has the potential to trigger some violence. That said, the jobs that are potentially threatened by AI are nowadays usually done by fairly sedentary people, so I wouldn't expect any large-scale violence, an occasional Ted Kaczynski notwithstanding. Programmers, translators and painters just aren't used to destroying things in the real world.

It would have been different if AI started to replace drug dealers or the mob.

With the exception of rappers, most musicians who die early die from overdoses, suicides, and such (the "27 club" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/27_Club>), as opposed to being murdered.

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 games. And the cost mostly came from art asset side.

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 now, and even if it develops them, what will be put to the test is whether literature is about the artifact or the connection between the author and other humans.

Customer support is kind of something you can use AI for; most companies will foist you off to some system of exchanging written messages, which is annoying, but then you can use an AI to write your side of the conversation. It’s ill-mannered to do this when you’re interacting with actual people, but customer support is another story.

> Look at Suno. Fantastic tool, but where was the capital need to make music generation so cheap that no musician could ever compete with it? Did the world really wake up one day and concluded that, "wait, we're spending too much on musicians"?

People didn’t know what LLMs would be capable of until after they were invented. Cheap music generation turned out to be easy once we had cheap text generation, and cheap text generation turned out to be a tractable problem.

At least today, LLMs make bad creative writing, music, and art. They’re automating sweatshop work that, in an alternative timeline, goes to Fiverr-esque contractors who accept the lowest wages and sacrifice quality for efficiency in every way.

LLMs make developers more efficient but can’t fully replace them. This reduces jobs, but so did better IDEs, open-source libraries, and other developer improvements.

> 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

LLMs can at least theoretically do these things. I’ve heard people use them to mass-apply to apartments and jobs, and send written customer complaints then handle responses.

> Look at Suno. Fantastic tool, but where was the capital need to make music generation so cheap that no musician could ever compete with it?

There’s no “capital need”, but a benefit of Suno is that it lets individuals, who otherwise don’t have the skill, to make catchy songs with silly lyrics or try out interesting genres. And the vast majority of top artists are still human, although most streaming revenue has already gone to a few celebrities who seem to rely on looks and connections more than music talent.

Cryptocurrency is an interesting technology with some niche use cases, but it was pitched as replacing the entire money system. LLMs are extremely useful for certain types of work, but are pitched as AGI ending all work. Etc.

If we thought of all of this as 'stochastic data systems' then our heads would be in the right place as we thought about it just as 'powerful software' that can be used for good or bad purposes, and the negative externalizes will be derived from our use of it, not some inherent property.

Labour displacement leads to an erosion of standards of living and in a world that ties purpose to work is an existential threat on a very practical level.

It was always going to be met with violence once it became more than a curiosity for tinkerers.

Soviet Union lost due to an inferior societal model, but this too is too much along what once was a relatively sustainable path. The American dream is now a parody of itself, as it takes more to end up with the rest of them, I could go on about the irony of wanting to escape the pit but not wanting to acknowledge the pit is the 99% of the U.S. -- Not Altmans, Bezos'es, Musks or Trumps or their hordes of peripheral elites.

Point being, the model doesn't work _today_ with its cancerous appetite and correspondingly absurd neglect of the human, _any_ human. We can't have humanism and the kind of AI we're about to "enjoy".

The acceleration of wealth disparity may prove to be nearly geometrical, as the common man is further stripped of any capacity to inflict change on the "system". I hope I am wrong, but for all their crimes, anarchy and in a twist of irony -- inhumane treatment of opponent -- the October revolutionaries in Russia, yes bolsheviks, were merely a natural response to a similar atmosphere in Russia at the turn of the previous century. It's just that they didn't have mass surveillance used against them in the same capacity our gadgets allow the "governments" today, nor were they aided by AI which is _also_ something that can be used against an entire slice of populace (a perfect application of general principles put in action). So although the situation may become similar, we're increasingly in no position to change it. The difference may be counted in _generations_, as in it will take multiple generations to dismantle the power structures we allow be put in place now, with Altmans etc. These people may not be evil, but history proves they only have to be short-sighted enough for evil to take root and thrive.

Sorry for the wall of text, but I do agree with the point of the blog post in a way -- demanding people become civilised and refrain from throwing eggs (or Molotovs) on celebrities that are about to swing _entire governments_, is not seeing the forest for the trees.

There's also no precedent in a way -- our historical cataclysms we have created ourselves, have been on a smaller scale, so we're spiraling outwards and not all of the tools we think we have, are going to have the effect required in order to enact the change we want. In the worst case, of course.

On my side the biggest concern is the lake of transparency of ecological impact. This is not strictly related to LLMs though, data centers are not new, and all the concerns about people keeping a leverageable level of control through distributed power is not new.

In my view that line of argument is pro-AI hype. It's the Big Tech CEOs themselves who often share their predictions of the end of the world as we know it caused by AI. It's FUD that makes the technology sound more powerful and important than it is.

So yeah _we_ will be fine, but some of us definitely won't, and with the growth in our numbers on Earth, the proportion of martyrs may be growing. Quantifying personal suffering is not possible, especially if the prospect is death.

Because World War I was fine, World War II finer....

Plus the labs themselves, of course.