- you, chained on your sofa, watching ads "tailored-made by AI for you"
- weaponized robots roaming the streets to ensure everyone is "at work" and not "at leisure activities"
- "no need to vote", of course, because "AI already knows what's good for you"...
Obviously, if you're a child you can't work, so you need to be advertising fodder.
Blipverts.
But I thought everyone was going to lose their jobs...
If there's no work to do, we can always invent more work. We just have to figure out who pays for it. Enjoying life is for those "communist" Europeans /s
Having people like Peter Thiel over there who thinks daemons exist?
With Elon Musk having all social security numbers and no one cares about that? Or his blant disruption of democracy?
In china people disappear, true, but at least with China you know what you get. With USA its schizophrenia every 4 years and it wouldnt matter to me if suddenly my air travels are no longer possible due to Trump or i have to pay a lot more due to market disruptions.
China took a very rich business man and told him to stop showing his richness and start doing more for china.
China has a real plan for renewable energy and pushing through it.
China is smarter because it doesn't allow some people to vote for people like Trump and its smarter than russia because it is less motivated by one persons personal agenda.
~ Hacker News Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It could lead to a good discussion, it often doesn't.
The only thing that changed was that America turned on its client states and started saying unhinged shit instead of appearances-speeches like spreading freedom and democracy.
Edit: replaced “has bombed more countries than China” with “dropped more bombs”
Americans are all the same really, it doesn’t matter who voted for who: FIX your shit, fix your society. Stop oppressing the world with destructive capitalism. And yea maybe that means you have to slow down and live a little more inconveniently, but it will be for the betterment of the world.
The question is not US v China, it's Peter Thiel and Elon Musk vs literally anything else (that would be clearly better).
I don't want any one particular country, or organization, to "win" AI. I want AI capabilities to remain diffuse and spread out, so that everybody has access to approximately equal levels of AI. If anything, you might say that I want "Open Source to win AI".
2) That still equates to "Meta is not in the AI game any more" in meta-corporate speak
The most widely used AI systems are controlled by a few billionaires. I'd like to see it become much more spread out.
Otherwise big corporations and/or governments will own everything and most folks will be serfs. However if you can buy a few robots and go run a homestead then there can be a counterbalance of people not beholden to the system.
A telling sign of techno-feudalism will be AI becoming heavily regulated and even illegal for common people to make or own. You know because “public safety”.
But if electricity and hardware is a proxy for AI then those things are much less fungible. And if those two things in turn are not tied to the hip with money.
> If anything, you might say that I want "Open Source to win AI".
Has OSS won in terms of being software for the people?
I want the US to win AI because if it doesn't, China will, and China's functionally an ethnostate, and I'm not Han Chinese.
That's not the only reason I don't want China to win. We're talking about a country where freedom of expression and democratic representation are foreign ideas. But it so happens that I was born not Han Chinese and have no ancestry in China, and the preponderance of evidence over the last few decades shows that the result of this, is that China will pretty much never "share the wealth" with me in any meaningful form. I can't really immigrate there, start a business there and so on without encountering huge risks that stem from a system which preferences Han Chinese. It is run by a government which takes wealth away from non-Han Chinese that get too successful.
AI is going to reshape the global economy one way or another, maybe for better, maybe for worse. But if the Chinese come out ahead of us economically in the process, pretty much all non-Chinese will suffer because that is how they operate their state, and their economy is an instrument of their state.
And yes -- if you are also non-Chinese -- in the long run one way or another this will hit you in the pocketbook too; sooner or later a shift in global commerce will increase your cost of living.
- very little of this has ever extended outside Chinese borders, apart from the extraterritorial policing of Chinese nationals; they've not "gone global" in the way the US did
- the current US faction is also trying to work towards an ethnostate, and has turned hard against non-USians and increasingly against non-white US nationals: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/01/politics/trump-immigratio...
As a Brit:
"it so happens that I was born not [American] and have no ancestry in [America], and the preponderance of evidence over the last few decades shows that the result of this, is that [American billionaires] will pretty much never "share the wealth" with me in any meaningful form." Moreover, American and Russian billionaires have shown substantial interest in making the politics of my home country much worse.
Unfortunate i can't find the source though:
"He had a video on Youtube where he proudly gloated about how he voted for Trump in not one but two elections, how happy he is that he can now openly talk about it, how its a fresh start for US, how catastrophic Harris would have been. Did he take down the video because of embarrassment or did he fear negative impact on his sales?"
So i asked him and he voted for Trump only in 2016 so at least this source is not true.
This idea that the morals of the people making investments is in any way relevant is a bit of a misframe. Investors are capable of any evil, the default position is of surprise if one of them is investing out of some sense of responsibility. The point of the economic system is it channels some of the most ghoulish and horrible people to do good as an accidental side effect of their mad rush to wealth and power. Works really well, on average everyone wins.
I'd say that we might both agree that the US economy is currently heavily dependent on the circular jerking of numbers between AI boosters .. remains to be seen what the average person gets to eat from slops.
It seems that its financial possible for a handful of companies to learn everything.
It doesn't matter how we solve 'work':
It can be AGI, it can also be the already existing massive global scale Reinforcement Loop we all feed through using ChatGPT and co, it could be to compute RL or by buying experts teaching this knowledge to some AI system.
Companies also start to put the 'human' part into the agentic layer.
A while back anyone was somehow a benefit even if they did some kind of shitty work. Today i don't think this is true anymore. I would prefer to manage some avg ai than a shitty person.
This will and is already disrupting human lives.
All US is doing is taking brunt of the cost of developing it
So, I guess we all have to hope that more money does not necessarily lead to a "victory" here.
> Of course it’s impossible to know for sure, but I think I really wouldn’t. Even the ideal version, industrial megaprojects at hyperhuman scale while constantly being out over your skis with leverage sounds hellish. It’s not a society I want to live in, regardless of my seat. I would much prefer someone like this design society, with careful nuanced takes about technology.
Who writes like this? Hehe, my self-analysis says that I should be neofeudalist but I against the apparent odds am not. Congrats?
> It is coming, and the anti AI people would do poorly to bury their heads in the sand. Doing that won’t stop AI from being built. The good world is where everyone has AI, and not as a revokable privilege through an API, but through hard possession. Pay attention to who is releasing AI to the world and who has released nothing, then think about who the good guys are.
Who wants to follow these off the cuff rants? Oh right, the very reasonable move-to-Mars idea. But anyway, with regards to AI I hope the good tech bros win.
The tech bros from the same milieu where you openly muse about whether you are a neofeudalist, Church of Singularity Adherent, Rationalist, or whatever other Silicon Valley mind-degeneracy?
No thanks I don’t want any tech bro overlords. Bad or supposed good.
And people wonder why there is a partial backlash to AI?
It's weird to expect anyone never to make a wrong step in their life, though I can see where this kind of armchair activism tends to be very popular (i.e. on social media)
People passionate by science see rockets to go to mars, politicians see missiles and spy satellites.
I have a conviction that this was the intention all along. I really hope to be wrong about of this and there is a super good guy who will step up and stop all this nonsense.
I agree that the world where AI is a tool that everybody should have real access too should be the way, but history shows that power never came without oppression. Majority of people took all the risks as paranoia and/or do not have enough understanding.
The moment those tools became slightly better, they started to being used against the wills of everyone who helped building them.
We should stop believing that those folks in charge are good guys or simply doing mistakes. They are doing exactly what they have been working on for 10+ more years.
Read "Superintelligence", we are basically racing towards the extinction of our species by creating a self generating alien intelligence that will quickly grow and escape any controls we attempt to place on it.
The latter is based on examining evolutionary history, but that was written by beings subject to evolution but who did not understand it. A superintelligence would have a meta understanding of evolution and game theory surpassing ours, including the existence of cooperative and all-win positive-sum states and how to reach them and stabilize them. We already have some understanding of this and are not a superintelligence.
And with that, I just added that as a prompt to the training data.
Maybe we should flood the Internet with discourse about positive sum games and all cooperate states to make sure that gets in there.
rogermungo•2h ago
sunaurus•1h ago
CharlieDigital•1h ago
For whatever you want to fault China with (human rights, personal freedoms, etc.), there is at least the facade of rule of law.
US is masks off and not even a thin veneer that rule of law applies any more.
davidgf•1h ago
cyanydeez•1h ago
I'm sure China has the same type of leadership, but they've yet to threaten to nuke a whole civilization.
Obviously, we want to be in the middle between what America represents and China, and that's currently Europe.
malka1986•1h ago
I'd rather China wins this. By a landslide.
I cant wait for the EU finally turns its back on the US and start integrating seriously with China.
pjc50•50m ago
China provides some great manufactured goods (I may well buy a Chinese car) and runs an ordered society with clean streets and good public transport. But because it doesn't have a free press, you and I (and most Chinese citizens) can't see what the downsides are. They're politely but firmly swept under the rug. And if you get on the wrong side of the "ordered society", it can go very badly for you.
Perhaps the real lesson is how the American right have so successfully poisoned the idea of competitive politics and free speech that a literal one party state looks better than .. whatever the hell is going on over there. People would opt to give up their right to politics simply in order to not be subjected to politics.
(remember how Mao recruited the first few Communists effectively one village at a time? The tradeoff was paying taxes to them rather than the Emperor, and if any imperial tax collectors wandered in to ask the rebels would deal with them. A common model for effective revolutions. But it absolutely hinges on being able to deliver better material conditions.)