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AI promises a lot of creative destruction. There are a plethora of historical examples where elites have restricted technological development because they thoug
by chrisfosterelli 2y ago
AI promises a lot of creative destruction. There are a plethora of historical examples where elites have restricted technological development because they thought it was a threat to the status quo and therefore their ability to extract wealth from that status quo.
For example: Queen Elizabeth refusing to grant a patent for the first knitting machine, the Qing dynasty forbidding large-scale ship building, or the Ottoman Empire outlawing the printing press.
I'm not sure that this is what is happening here, but it's occurrence is not impossible.
- griomnib 2y agoThe CEOs and investor class are the elites. Politicians answer to them, not the other way around.
- chrisfosterelli 2y agoI think you misunderstood me to be talking about just the politicians. Mark is claiming the gov is going to limit new entrants and give an effective monopoly to the large, established entities with political power. When the US applied arms export restrictions on cryptography mathematics during the cold war, they gave exceptions to companies like IBM.
- kjkjadksj 2y agoYou don’t even need to dip into the historical record. The government set back atomic energy research for decades out of fears of that technology being shared among the people of the world. And what do you know, the fossil fuel industry just happened to reap heavy benefit from that decision.