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"Class privilege" doesn't go far enough. If the class war is a war then AI may be its Manhattan project: a weapon that destroys the value of, and the ruling eli
by caconym_ 8mo ago
"Class privilege" doesn't go far enough. If the class war is a war then AI may be its Manhattan project: a weapon that destroys the value of, and the ruling elite's need for, labor.
I continue to be shocked by the way people (with platforms) talk up to the (speculative) line where AI replaces most or all jobs, and then lamely suggest that this will be bad for the people who've lost their jobs because they will be poor, or something. No. What actually happens in that scenario is that money ceases to have value, at least in the way we currently understand it to. That scenario will produce a handful of monsters—sociopathic trillionaire brains encysted in layers of automation and automated production—that will crave more resources, more land, more power, and they will fight each other by various means for those things, and the rest of us will be at best in the way.
This scenario is not a given, because it's not obvious that AI can become this capable in the near term where the stage is set for such a profoundly lopsided outcome, but you can bet these people are thinking about it now, if not talking about it, if not materially preparing for it. And they are, indeed, the only people with reason to feel optimistic about it.
- elzbardico 8mo agoOnce money loses value, sociopathic trillionaire brains become immeditally obsolete and power migrates to the men with guns and a very thin technocratic class.
- caconym_ 8mo ago> sociopathic trillionaire brains > men with guns and a very thin technocratic class Bold of you to assume these are disjoint. In the US we're spiraling toward oligarchy with a billionaire president whose primary goal in office is evidently to enrich himself and his family, and his regime is (with the $encouragement of AI titans) aggressively pushing integration of AI in various government and military applications. If I was somebody like Sam Altman and I had indeed been thinking about this, I'm not sure things could be going much better for me wrt. that scenario.
- elzbardico 8mo agoAnd if money loses value why would the guys with guns and the guys who run the AI still take orders from the oligarchs?
- caconym_ 8mo agoI'm going to assume this is meant as a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47043601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47043601 but my answer is the same: why (in this hypothetical scenario) are you assuming the AI owners aren't members of all three of these classes?
- elzbardico 8mo agoThe guys who run the AI are the scientists and the programmers, not Sam Altman, neither Dario.
- caconym_ 8mo agoSo what? I haven't named any names. You can imagine whoever you like having control of it. If you think that control will be wrestled from the execs in some kind of internal power struggle, that just puts new people in the position to make the same decisions.