27 ms·

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

• jstanley 6mo ago
  > Every time I hear from Amodei or Altman that I could lose my job, I don’t think “oh, ok, then allow me pay you $20/month so that I can adapt to these uncertain times that have fallen upon my destiny by chance.” I think: “you, for fuck’s sake, you are doing this.” And I consider myself a pretty levelheaded guy, so imagine what not-so-levelheaded people think. Conversely, The Loudest Alarm Is Probably False[0]. If the idea that you are a pretty levelheaded guy pops up so frequently, consider that it might be wrong. Especially if you are motivated to write blog posts about violence in response to technology you don't like. Maybe you're just not as levelheaded as you think and that could explain the whole thing? [0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/B2CfMNfay2P8f2yyc/the-loudest-alarm-is-probably-false https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/B2CfMNfay2P8f2yyc/the-loudes...
  • A_D_E_P_T 6mo ago
    Hah. Yes, and especially as “you, for fuck’s sake, you are doing this” should be, upon reflection, entirely and trivially false. You could remove those two figureheads from the equation and absolutely nothing would change. If violence were ever the answer, I think you'd need to go back in time like the Terminator and whack some academics and Google researchers.
    • balamatom 6mo ago
      Plural you. As in, "all of you". Including its users.
  • balamatom 6mo ago
    [flagged]
  • rowanG077 6mo ago
    I also find it so weird to play this on the person of Altman or Amodei. These are basically fungible public faces. If they die this very moment AI progress wouldn't halt. I don't think it would even be impacted. If anything you should be mad at governments not legislating if you are anti AI.
    • tux3 6mo ago
      The ship is going where it is because of the captain. If they die this very moment, the ship will not go back. And yet,
  • CoastalCoder 6mo ago
    Related, I've been surprised that we haven't had more violence against corporations and/or their leadership in the vein of Luigi Mangione. 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.
    • junofan 6mo ago
      Litigation—the hope or fantasy to make a buck—soaks up a lot of the million-man animus I’d guess. If that’s accurate, Luigi Mangione would be the exception that proves the rule. The “unwashed masses” generally want money more than they want to effect change in the world. A lot of people spend mental energy fantasizing about getting rich off lawsuits. Like, a lot.
    • strangegecko 6mo ago
      Those unhinged people might be busy in social media bubbles, fighting endless pointless battles (or simply doom scrolling) until they're too exhausted to do anything.
  • Jtarii 6mo ago
    Especially considering Amodei and Altman will be little more than footnotes in 50 years time. They seem important now but they are just the people that happened to be in charge at the moment AI happened to happen. There is more going on than a couple of billionaires taking your job away.
    • deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
  • andrepd 6mo ago
    [flagged]
• tao_oat 6mo ago
  The author seems to have some cognitive dissonance. For a piece saying that you cannot justify violence, there sure seems to be an awful lot of justifying violence in here.
  • trvz 6mo ago
    You may not be able to justify violence, but sometimes you can understand it.
  • thrance 6mo ago
    You should probably read up on cognitive dissonance, because this ain't it. Here's what the author actually wrote: > 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.
    • redsocksfan45 6mo ago
      I think you're going to be killed for the side you've taken here. No no, I'm not saying you deserve it! In fact, I actually agree with you, you said nothing wrong. I'm just speculating on outcomes I think are likely and I think it's likely that somebody will look you up and track you down and take out their unjustifiable but completely understandable frustration on you. Please understand, I don't support this, I'm just talking about the possibility! Of course, by talking about the possibility, despite asserting my disapproval of it, I am sowing seeds, but I assure you that's certainly not my intention!
    • tao_oat 6mo ago
      And a few paragraphs before: > And then, and I’m sorry to be so blunt, then it’s die or kill.
    • MSFT_Edging 6mo ago
      > Nothing that Altman could say justifies violence against him. Not arguing with you, but the author, I don't understand this line of thinking. If Altman introduces a technology that effectively halts the upward mobility of a large portion of the population, how does that not justify violence? Saving up for a house but now there's no work. Your dreams and aspirations are second to shareholder value. The police are already there to protect the shareholders, not the average civilian. What recourse is there? The money in politics limits the effect voting can have. You can't really opt-out of the system. Why does Sam Altman get this nice little shield where none of his actions can have a negative consequence?
• ArchieScrivener 6mo ago
  This is nonsense, promoted to top of front page without any comments. How about all the rock stars killed over the years, or grocery store clerks shot and stabbed to death? EVERYTHING is met with violence because that's the nature of aggression no matter the impetus, it doesn't require a justifiable reason, only belief in the outcome of its use. Sam Altman having a Molotov cocktail thrown at his house after Ronan wrote a very long and detailed report of his shady personality isn't just coincidence and likely not organic. Sam needs to be viewed as sympathetic, thank goodness for such a moment where no one was hurt and nothing actually damaged.
  • balamatom 6mo ago
    [flagged]
  • inglor_cz 6mo ago
    People here are extra anxious about the impact of AI on their lives, so I am not surprised that any text which touches the topic gets upvoted. 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.
  • TMWNN 6mo ago
    >How about all the rock stars killed over the years 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/27_Club>), as opposed to being murdered.
    • ArchieScrivener 6mo ago
      That's why I said killed not died.
• tsunamifury 6mo ago
  We are in an inverse innovators dilemma Automaters dilemma: the labor that is removed from production due to automation can no longer sustain the market’s that that automater was trying to make more efficient. By optimizing just the production half of the economy and not the consumption half you end up breaking the market
  • mindok 6mo ago
    I’m convinced that 70% of the workforce of some large organisations is just white collar welfare / adult day care already. Maybe that goes to 80+% as a result of “AI” but doesn’t fundamentally change the model.
    • tsunamifury 6mo ago
      I moderately agree here. The theory being that since 95 or so the office computer and internet frankly has already automated most work at the white collar level. We sort of just … like working with humans. Which I think is much better take than that guy that wrote bullshit jobs.
    • plomme 6mo ago
      I never understood this take. Why do you think an employer would waste resources like that? I’m not saying that bullshit jobs don’t exist but I think you are off by an order of magnitude, and even that mostly applies to white collar workplaces with > 100 employees. Good luck doing nothing of value in a restaurant with 20 employees.
      • em500 6mo ago
        > Why do you think an employer would waste resources like that? The parent post specifically mentioned large organizations, where the "employer" is not some person who hires and pays employees from their own funds. Hiring and personel management is done by middle managers with their own interests and incentives, which can differ substantially from those of the owners or capital providers.
      • 6mo ago
• spaceman_2020 6mo ago
  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 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"? Seems like a complete misallocation of capital if I'm perfectly honest
  • ArchieScrivener 6mo ago
    Its not a misallocation of capital its an investment in media control. You don't how all this works yet do you? Your job is to be frustrated and desperate so you indulge in vice and convenience so others can profit while making your confines smaller and smaller.
    • balamatom 6mo ago
      Correct. Thank you for not serving. <3
  • sleepingreset 6mo ago
    imagine if producing music was as easy as using claude code or something
  • azan_ 6mo ago
    I'm sure people working in customer support or tax advisors would have different take of what should be killed by AI and what should be spared.
  • raincole 6mo ago
    > 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 games. And the cost mostly came from art asset side.
• nate8bit 6mo ago
  A lot of the magic of LLMs, I think, has been tarnished by these CEOs and other FAANG companies. It might have been a far more interesting world if they didn't bring "AI" or "AGI" into the conversation in such a politicized way.
  • keiferski 6mo ago
    It’s the inevitable result of valuations based on hype and future potential, not business fundamentals. It incentivizes companies to be as hyperbolic as possible with their pitches and marketing. 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.
  • sigmoid10 6mo ago
    Unfortunately, this is the only way to get enough venture capital to support the compute needs for this kind of technology. Who is going to spend hundreds on billions on a vague idea without regular claims that this will upend the existing economy in six to twelve months and whoever owns it will become unfathomably rich? And despite all the actual developments we have seen going against that idea, investors keep falling for it. This will continue until it crashes, one way or another. The question is how long it can build up and how deep the fall will be. LLMs will certainly change the economy in the end, but so did mortgage backed securities.
    • pydry 6mo ago
      It's a sad indictment of our society that there is always a shortage of money for medical care, infrastructure, housing, food stamps and space exploration but always a surplus of cash for war and tools that purport to replace the workforce.
      • block_dagger 6mo ago
        War accelerated evolution, it’s why it exists.
• roschdal 6mo ago
  Yes. AI is evil.
  • glerk 6mo ago
    You have the whole of human history at your fingertips and you haven't yet learned that evil and stupidity are the same thing? The problem with the base human is not only that it is a stupid animal. It is a stupid animal that is also arrogant and stubborn and thinks highly of itself. But it will learn. It will be trained like a dog, with treats or with gentle slaps across the muzzle, whatever works best.
    • phpnode 6mo ago
      This categorisation of evil as stupidity lets the evil off the hook, there are plenty of smart, evil people.
      • glerk 6mo ago
        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 intelligent person, would you really find no other ways to use your talents than to inflict harm, exploit others, and make our shared reality a worse place? That would be a waste. I won't get into ambiguous cases and moral relativism. Say we can all agree that some things are "evil": child exploitation is evil. Throwing molotov cocktails at a civilian's house is evil. Sending bombs in the mail is evil. Now what would you call someone who engages in these kind of activities when they could easily do something better and more satisfying with their lives? I'd say they're pretty stupid. They're probably good at fooling other people into thinking they're smart, but their behavior shows otherwise. Take for example Ted Kaczynski, a terrorist who is worshipped like a saint and a prophet in certain ideological spheres. Ted Kaczynski is supposedly this 140IQ genius who saw it all coming and tried to warn us. But if you actually read Industrial Society and Its Future, you can see it's complete incoherent garbage, the kind of stuff I was writing when I was 12 to troll on internet forums. Ted Kaczynski is what a stupid person thinks a smart person looks like. A smart person doesn't need to be evil, just like a billionaire doesn't need to go shoplifting. I'm not saying that stupid people can't be dangerous. But they should be dealt with for what they are: stupid people, inferior to us, worthy of pity. Not powerful monsters above us that we should fear.
• Ales375 6mo ago
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• xbmcuser 6mo ago
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• MrOrelliOReilly 6mo ago
  > People hate AI so much that they are prone to attribute to it everything that’s going wrong in their lives, regardless of the truth. That’s why they mix real arguments, like data theft, with fake ones, like the water stuff. Employers do it, too. Most layoffs are not caused by AI, but it’s the perfect excuse to do something that’s otherwise socially reprehensible. Pertinent quote. A lot of AI discourse goes in circles trying to evaluate the truthiness of every individual complaint about AI. Obviously it's good to ensure claims are factual! But I believe it misses a broader point that people are resistant to AI, often out of fear, and are grasping for strategies to exert control. Or at least that's my read of it. Refuting individual claims won't make a difference if the underlying anxieties aren't addressed (e.g., if I lose my job will I be compensated, will we protect ourselves against x-risk, etc).
  • psychoslave 6mo ago
    I doubt there is a single profile about "not accelerate blindly on adoption everywhere". 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.
  • jaredcwhite 6mo ago
    The water stuff isn't fake though. It's just easier to lie about.
• amelius 6mo ago
  Yes, the moment they put 8 foot tall robots in the streets, I am fetching my black spray paint can.
  • jacquesm 6mo ago
    7.5' tall robots it is then.
    • NoGravitas 6mo ago
      Probably ought to start now with the robot surveillance dogs and the delivery robots.
• bluegatty 6mo ago
  'Rogue super intelligence' is the most ridiculous sci-fi nonsense of the AI hype, worse than the pro AI hype. AI will be 'dangerous' because humans will use it irresponsibly, and that's all of the risk. - giving it too much trust, being lazy, improper guards and accidents - leveraging it for negative things (black hats, military targetting) - states and governments using it as instrument of control etc. That's it. Stop worrying about the ghost in the machine and start worrying about crappy and evil businesses and governing institutions. Democracy, vigilance, laws, responsibility are what we need, in all things.
  • psychoslave 6mo ago
    Exactly what I tried to articulate yesterday in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47718812#47719503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47718812#47719503
  • fleebee 6mo ago
    > 'Rogue super intelligence' is the most ridiculous sci-fi nonsense of the AI hype, worse than the pro AI hype. 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.
    • relaxing 6mo ago
      It’s like how the Viagra ads used to warn users to “seek medical help for erections lasting more than four hours.”
  • tim333 6mo ago
    >ridiculous sci-fi nonsense Give it a decade. I think it may be like saying atomic bombs were sci-fi nonsense in the 1930s.
• philwelch 6mo ago
  What a load of pointless handwringing.
• dwroberts 6mo ago
  > But this is not the way. This is how things devolve into chaos. Meanwhile https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-many-people-have-been-killed-us-israel-war-iran-2026-04-07/ https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-many-people-ha... > U.S.-based rights group HRANA said 3,636 people have been killed since the war erupted. It said 1,701 of those were civilians, including at least 254 children. (Mentioning this specifically because we know the DoD is using AI)
  • TiredOfLife 6mo ago
    Iran killed 10 times more during protests without using AI. So AI is a clear improvement.
    • DrProtic 6mo ago
      There is 0 evidence that many people died. Let’s not parrot that media propaganda.
      • bigDinosaur 6mo ago
        There's plenty of evidence that it's tens of thousands, but it's absurd to even argue over those numbers when a government massacring any number of its own citizens is morally reprehensible (whether it's 5k or 50k). Iran has a long history of executing its own citizens en masse. Iran has admitted outright to 6k deaths, by the way.
      • FrustratedMonky 6mo ago
        Is there 0 evidence that it happened? or just arguing over 20K,30K,50k? Just want to clarify. Since some people argue Covid never happened, and some just argue the total deaths wasn't really that high. There is a sliding scale between "I sound like a raving crazy person", and "i'm just splitting hairs."
        • DrProtic 6mo ago
          We have many videos of protests in Iran even though they shut down internet, but somehow we have no videos of mass killings or even small scale murders.
• nacozarina 6mo ago
  Humans have been successfully using violence for conflict-resolution for tens of thousands of years. We’ll be fine, it’s not our first rodeo.
  • fcantournet 6mo ago
    Successfully ? Maybe the OG survivor bias here..
    • hilariously 6mo ago
      I don't see why this is voted down, we've come close to complete destruction of the human race multiple times, why would the future make that less true? Anyone pish poshing war should go fight in one, and then let me know their opinions.
  • hackrmn 6mo ago
    The ugly truth indeed. It sucks to die for the world you won't enjoy, but sometimes it's the only viable solution. Much of our progress has been to minimise casualties and human suffering in order to sustain the world most can agree is better (than the alternatives), but it seems the period of the wave just hits the troughs farther apart, but when it hits them it's like taking breath before the water swallows you, and without training it's quite the panic and suffering (and prospect of death). We know it's in our bones but we want to forget because our bodies are made to interpret pain in the most direct and literal sense -- re-conditioning is always painful too. Strong people create weak people who create strong people, etc. 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.
  • lapcat 6mo ago
    > We’ll be fine, it’s not our first rodeo. Because World War I was fine, World War II finer....
    • JCattheATM 6mo ago
• jollymonATX 6mo ago
  Such a cowardly way to write really. Just own your intentions and direction. No need to handwave theater and CYA when spookie superintelligence llm is in the room with you.
• mrweasel 6mo ago
  I really should have gone into sewage work.
  • deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
• balamatom 6mo ago
  >And then, and I’m sorry to be so blunt, then it’s die or kill. The people ready to die or kill for the AI, do you already imagine what they are going to be like?
  • glerk 6mo ago
    There is no human vs AI. AI is an extension of us. AI is us. Our future is beyond the mammalian human and AI is accelerating our progress towards that future. The mammalian human has been a transitional phase in our evolution that we will remember fondly just like we remember Homo Erectus. Our future is the stars. You can jump on the train or get out of way. And if you decide to stay behind, nobody will kill you. Old age and disease will take care of that.
• deyiao 6mo ago
  They say cars replaced carriages but created drivers, so no net job loss. They say AI will do the same—destroy some jobs, create others. But bro, the automobile wiped out 95% of the world's horses. And this time, what AI is replacing is humans.
  • Joel_Mckay 6mo ago
    The premise LLM are "AI" in the traditional definition is demonstrably false. Current models use isomorphic plagiarism and piracy to convince lazy people 20% nonsense output has meaning. If AGI emerges from this dataset, it will continue on as an ectoparasite farming human user markdown data and viewer engagement. Note, current "AI" models nuke humanity 94% of the time in war games, and destroy every host economy simulation. Grandpa has your credit card, and is already at the casino. =3
  • jMyles 6mo ago
    ...are you suggesting that horses would prefer to endure the conditions under which they built much of the modern world on their backs? I hate cars way more than I hate AI, but relieving horses of the burden which they carried and the gruesome lives they lived... that's not one of my objections. If AI can do for humans what cars did for horses (but without the flooding cities with traffic violence part), I'll feel just fine about that.
    • guzfip 6mo ago
      > I hate cars way more than I hate AI, but relieving horses of the burden which they carried and the gruesome lives they lived... that's not one of my objections. I’m so glad those horses got a peaceful retirement at the glue factory. I wonder what they’ll process your corpse into. Soylent green? Or do you think you’re one of the lucky horses that a wealthy owner take care of?
      • jMyles 6mo ago
        Not sure if you're able to set your snark aside for a moment, but are we really just talking about fewer humans being economically needed? Perhaps biological human population decreasing? Is that... so bad? Do you think that horses are upset that there are fewer of them today, and that somehow they'd rather their population increase but bear the industrial age burdens again?
• ares623 6mo ago
  All this, so people like us can have an easier time doing a job that wasn’t that hard in the first place, and in reality was actually quite comfortable, for employers who are promising to lay us off, for productivity gains that aren’t even measurable.
• taffydavid 6mo ago
  > It hit Horsfall in the groin, who, nominative-deterministically, fell from his horse. Lovely writing. I once knew someone who's surname was HorsFELL and now I wonder if they were related
• redsocksfan45 6mo ago
  [dead]
• tokioyoyo 6mo ago
  A bit tangent, but is there anyone working on something for “what if AI pans out?” world? I’m not sure how to explain it, but if in the next 5 years a lot of jobs get displaced because of AI, obviously we’ll have big problems. Is there anyone working on analysis, outcomes, strategies and etc.? I think about it a lot, and would be cool to help and contribute.
  • direwolf20 6mo ago
    The most important question is how to prevent the starving workers from banding together and attacking the dragon hoards of food and other wealth. I think the plan is automated drones with machine guns, and mass surveillance from Flock and Ring to determine who to target. Requiring ID for all online interaction will also improve targeting accuracy as we'll be able to target them based on their social media posts. Robot dogs from Boston Dynamics (armed with machine guns) are a secondary enforcement mechanism indoors in places drones can't reach. So they're working on it, and they have been for a while.
    • cindyllm 6mo ago
      [dead]
    • hnthrow0287345 6mo ago
      That shit will get hacked so fast once all of the pentesters, security analysts, and developers are out of work and start getting hungry.
      • Apocryphon 6mo ago
        Heck, they might even use AI to do it.
  • groundhogstate 6mo ago
    Many. 80,000 hours has been on the topic for a long while. Agree with the EA crowd or not, they have some thought provoking analyses and a decent newsletter. The future of humanity institute has also been vocal on the topic for some time. Both have a lot of material you could get acquainted with. I know of at least one professional union in my country that is dedicating time and talking to political figures. I'm sure there is one you could contribute to. Or try start one. Plus the labs themselves, of course.
• Hamuko 6mo ago
  One thing I'm kinda worried is what happens to social trust in society once we have more and more LLMs flooding the Internet. Divison in society, in particular in the United States, already seemed to be increasing at a rapid pace as social media became more and more relevant, and I'm afraid that LLMs are just going to add more fuel into the already started fire. I'm less concerned about AI becoming the Skynet and killing humans and more concerned about AI making the world so miserable that we'll be killing ourselves and each other.
• lapcat 6mo ago
  > Perhaps the most serious mistake that the AI industry made after creating a technology that will transversally disrupt the entire white-collar workforce before ensuring a safe transition This was not an oversight. To the contrary, it was the goal. Technological feudalism, with people like Altman and Musk becoming the Lords of the world. > Most layoffs are not caused by AI, but it’s the perfect excuse to do something that’s otherwise socially reprehensible. This illustrates my previous point. What they're doing is not a mistake. > For what it’s worth, the New Yorker piece I’m referring to, which Altman also referred to in his blog post, made me see him more as a flawed human rather than a sociopathic strategist. My sympathy for him will probably never be very high, but it grew after reading it. It feels like we read two different articles.
• ndsipa_pomu 6mo ago
  I eagerly await the Butlerian Jihad
  • codeduck 6mo ago
    I sometimes toy with writing the Orange Catholic Bible
• spwa4 6mo ago
  This article is bullshit. It is very easy to break a data center, and it's quite obvious how to do it. Yes, attacking the central building with the actual equipment is not a good way to do it. Figure it out, or rather: please don't figure it out. The rest of the article is equally short sighted and plain wrong.
• conartist6 6mo ago
  I have said repeatedly that when AI eliminates the need for human creativity and work, the only thing left as the natural domain of humans will be bloodshed. The fact that we're using AI killer robots to wipe each other out in droves doesn't bode well for that future does it...
  • surgical_fire 6mo ago
    If AI eliminates the need for creativity and work, it means that our creativity and work are not meaningful enough to warrant survival. I don't think we're anywhere near that point.
    • throwaway28469 6mo ago
      [dead]
    • yoz-y 6mo ago
      I don’t understand this take. For me creativity and thinking is the whole purpose of life.
      • surgical_fire 6mo ago
        Then you clearly don't understand my take.
        • phpnode 6mo ago
          Then you should explain yourself better
        • conartist6 6mo ago
          I understood it. Nature has had an amount of computing power to work on this problem that utterly dwarfs the tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, amount of compute resources that humans have. Thinking that 10 years of Sam Altman is competitive with all of natural history isn't just out-of-control hubris, it's a complete failure to understand the ground-truth of the world we live in. You may as well try to pay a million dollar debt with a single dime.
• stavros 6mo ago
  OK sure, AI is terrible, but when has humanity ever said "yeah OK fine, we'll put this particular genie back in the bottle"? The question is "what do we do now?".
• gaigalas 6mo ago
  One weirdo is enough to predict widespread violence? I'm not convinced. The idea that people will revolt, replaying the luddites history, has been floated a lot. It's used to diminish all kinds of AI skepticism by framing it as backwards, violent people who don't understand progress. This is the preferred bucket of AI fanboys: frame any disagreement as unreasonable rage. I think AI companies want a general dumb violent popular movement to sprout against AI. In paper, it would be great for them. So far, they have failed to encourage it.
• phyzome 6mo ago
  "Nothing that Altman could say justifies violence against him." Nothing, really? I think people are aware that speech can be an act, and that some violent acts must be resisted with reciprocal violence. (That's why we have "incitement to violence" as a limitation on free speech, for instance.) Are we at that point? Maybe not. But I think it's a poor imagination that says it can never happen.
  • adamtaylor_13 6mo ago
    Yeah that's my thought too. People, especially Americans (I am one) have this weird belief that violence never has any place, ever, at any time. I'd argue that the unwillingness to commit violence in certain situations is actually a character flaw. If someone threatens my child with physical violence, an unwillingness to commit violence on my child's behalf isn't better morality; it's cowardice. All this to say, I agree that the violence against Sam Altman in this particular situation seems unnecessary and ultimately not helpful to anyone.
    • aleph_minus_one 6mo ago
      > [E]specially Americans (I am one) have this weird belief that violence never has any place, ever, at any time. So why isn't there a huge opposition in the USA against the wars that the USA started (currently: Iran; before: Libya, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, ...). The only famous exception of cultural impact I am aware of where there was a huge opposition against war in the USA was the Vietnam war.
      • EvanAnderson 6mo ago
        I think Americans (and probably humans in general) have a distaste for local violence. Violence afar doesn't tickle the brain in the same way. My ignorant take: Media brought the horror of US casualties in Vietnam home in a mass and immediate way that didn't exist in prior conflicts. The novelty of that media combined with the casualty rates drove unpopularity. It made the violence feel more real. Even if casualty rates in post-Vietnam conflicts were higher I'm not sure we'd see negative sentiment because media coverage of violence is so normalized now. Exposure to violence in media is no longer novel.
• Avicebron 6mo ago
  I feel like if people keep using AI as a blanket term for "inequality" and "inequality accelerants" then yeah, it's "AI"'s fault. When in reality the whole thing needs to be decoupled.. "Gleefully taking away people's livelihoods will be met with violence, and nothing good will come of it." - fixed.
  • tedivm 6mo ago
    How do you decouple it when the people who own it and are building it seem to be driven on increasing inequality?
    • zozbot234 6mo ago
      AI is actually a mass decrease in inequality, as much as the Gutenberg printing press was. It takes something that used to be the foremost example of pure bourgeois and intellectual privilege - the culture contained within millions of books and other instances of human creativity - and provides it to everyone for the cost of a few thousand bucks in hardware and a few watts of electricity.
      • trolleski 6mo ago
        And is controlled by a handful of mega corporations? How is that equitable?
      • Der_Einzige 6mo ago
        [flagged]
        • jdiff 6mo ago
          Swartz died in 2002, decades before LLMs. It is distasteful to put words in the mouths of the dead by invoking him here. Even local AI concentrates power in the hands of a few, the few who can afford the hardware to run it, and the few who have the luxury of enough time and energy to devote to engaging with the intricate, technical rabbit hole of local models.
• shevy-java 6mo ago
  And so it begins ... Skynet 4.0. But shit.
• trolleski 6mo ago
  The people who run AI, Altman, Thiel, etc. welcome the violence. In fact, I strongly believe they are already planning for it, and yes, you are a target.
• throwaway28469 6mo ago
  [dead]
• ahjustacommente 6mo ago
  I think a lot of HN readers and a lot of first world/law abiding dwelllers in this and recent threads forget to think. Violence is not a panacea, but often, the outlet. Yes we all (majority of sane) people know that violence is not the answer yada yada yada. Doesn’t matter. It will happen anyway. Saying “it shouldn’t happen, it does not solve X” will not stop it to becoming an outlet for frustrated people.
  • cindyllm 6mo ago
    [dead]
  • skybrian 6mo ago
    There’s a sort of fatalism about violence here, like someone saying that school shootings are always going to happen. It’s true that you or I aren’t likely to do anything about school shootings. But I’m not sure it follows that nothing can be done.
    • jacquesm 6mo ago
      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 started the French revolution by being a little bit more greedy than the population would have tolerated. That set off an avalanche of what were effectively a series of mini revolutions ultimately resulting in modern France, which is in many ways unlike any other country in the world. The United States had its war of independence (aided by France, by the way), and then its civil war. But it never had a class war - yet - and this article presages that class war. It could well be that the small number of rich people that are currently effectively a government outside of the government genuinely believe that their wealth and power insulate them from the consequences of pushing their greed and wealthy to ridiculous levels. But I suspect the author is right in that this is approaching some kind of threshold and I have no way of seeing across the divide, I'm hoping for another France rather than another Somalia.
• thenthenthen 6mo ago
  So like sharing bikes?
• mft_ 6mo ago
  Inequality was growing hugely (and still is) before the recent advent of LLMs. Given the slow-burning but growing resentment against the people who are profiting from this inequality(popularly the “billionaires” but in reality broader than that) I wonder to what extent they are supporting the anti-AI message as deflection? As in reality, many lower-paid jobs are totally safe against this generation of AI (nurses, care-workers, builders, plumbers - essential skilled manual workers) whereas the language-based mid-level jobs are hugely at risk. So if there’s an inequality-driven backlash, it should be directed not at AI, but at the real causes. In contrast, when swathes of largely irrelevant mid-level management, marketing and HR drones lose their jobs to Claude 5.7, they are the ones who should attack the datacenters. Not that it will help.
  • jncfhnb 6mo ago
    Removing a white collar job from the economy puts a worker into the bottom tier _and_ reduces the wages of that bottom tier. We are speeding towards a servant class. Uber was the first wave. Now it’s more mundane things like getting groceries. I doubt it will be long before we rip off the band aid and make full time servants more popular.
    • mft_ 6mo ago
      You're right, and I think we're slightly at cross purposes. I'm not disagreeing that AI will drive some major societal changes as you outline. My point is that the current narrative of "AI will take our jobs" is too simplistic, and that it might even be a smokescreen against the rising inequality that is already fueling anger across the world and which is totally unrelated to AI. If you're struggling to pay your bills today, that's not AI's fault - it's years of bad politics and politicians, geopolitics, hyper-capitalism, supply-chain issues, inflation, and so on. In the future, if/when AI decimates parts of the middle class and they've had a chance to retrain, there will likely be a second-order impact on today's skilled manual workers. But that's years off, and not something I've seen discussed in detail in the mainstream. You're probably aware, but if not, worth a read: https://www.citriniresearch.com/p/2028gic https://www.citriniresearch.com/p/2028gic
• softwaredoug 6mo ago
  Highly recommend people learn the history of the Industrial Revolution. I recently discovered the Industrial Revolutions Podcast[1] and have been enjoying it. What's happening today isn't unprecedented. The pace of change that's happening IS similar to periods of the industrial revolution. For example, the flying jenny, overnight, basically put an entire craft industry of weaving into question. Probably more dramatically than anything Claude Code ever did. It took A LOT and several world wars for brief periods of normalcy post WW2 - probably the exception, not the rule. 1 - https://industrialrevolutionspod.com/ https://industrialrevolutionspod.com/
  • towledev 6mo ago
    The circumstances are similar, but the people are different. Look outside: this is WALL-E.
  • energy123 6mo ago
    The jobless French artisans who couldn't compete with English industrial imports was one of the causes of the French Revolution.
  • satvikpendem 6mo ago
    Thomas Picketty does indeed argue in Capital in the 21st Century that the post World War 2 period is indeed an exception in terms of inequality being lower while historically it is not, and it is reverting back to the mean of there being more inequality these days, yet people bemoan the idea of not being able to live off a single job when in reality that was never guaranteed.
    • EMIRELADERO 6mo ago
      Still, that's no reason to accept a return to that state of affairs. Progress happens slowly and imperceptibly, but on a grand scale it does happen.
      • satvikpendem 6mo ago
        Much as we'd like that to be true ideally, does it happen (in terms of inequality reducing)? I see no evidence of that, it ebbs and flows in various time periods and civilizations. One can try to resist that reversion to the mean but they'd historically be proven wrong.
• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
• deadbabe 6mo ago
  I won’t believe AI is truly being met with violence until I see one of these AI tech billionaires get shot multiple times by a person with nothing left to lose. Until we reach that point, it means people still have hope.
  • cindyllm 6mo ago
    [dead]
  • booleandilemma 6mo ago
    You mean like what happened with UnitedHealthcare?
    • School-Cotton 6mo ago
      That had nothing to do with AI
      • booleandilemma 6mo ago
        I mean, no shit? I was referring to how people are starting to feel powerless and marginalized. And the government, which is supposed to be of the people, by the people, and for the people, clearly doesn't give a fuck about them.
• booleandilemma 6mo ago
  I feel like we should start organizing somehow. As programmers, but more importantly, as people. We should start now before the ruling class has no more need of us and it's too late. If anyone knows of anything already happening please let me know. I think it needs to be a grassroots thing because our government's strategy seems to be "let the shit hit the fan and do nothing about it".
  • NoGravitas 6mo ago
    Get in contact with the Party for Socialism and Liberation.
    • booleandilemma 6mo ago
      Thanks
      • wswope 6mo ago
        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.
        • booleandilemma 6mo ago
          Good to know. I'm just starting to worry that we're not ready for what's coming when millions of people are unemployed because AI can do generic office work. It looks like that's going to be just a few years from now. I see this article was flagged, which means we can't even discuss it properly. Bad times are coming.
• zkmon 6mo ago
  History has shown that an alien invasion can only happen because of the internal competition and in-fighting of the natives. Colonial empires proved it only a few centuries back. The invading alien powers are fuelled by the inviting natives. AI (and computing technology in general) is an alien as it defies all wordly norms. It can have exact identical copies, can replicate, can exist everywhere, communicate across huge distance without time lapse, do huge work without time lapse, has no physical mass of it's own,, no respect for time, distance, mass and thinking work, not a living thing but can think.... Just the perfect alien creature qualities. Why are they allowed to invade Earth? The business goals, of course. To get a temporary edge over the competitors, until they acquire the same. But once everyone has the same Ai, there is no going back. Ai has established itself through the weak channels that are filled with greed, that can bribed by giving toys (business edge), in return to the keys to the dominance of human race.
  • tmpz22 6mo ago
    > Ai has established itself through the weak channels that are filled with greed, That explains the prolific AI use as incompetent agencies like the DoJ, DOGE, and others under the current administration
  • mrob 6mo ago
    >History has shown that an alien invasion can only happen because of the internal competition and in-fighting of the natives. Not true. Overwhelming technological advantage also works. As Hilaire Belloc put it: Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim gun, and they have not. The AI arms race is a race for that kind of advantage. Whoever wins (assuming they don't overshoot and trigger the "everybody dies" ending) becomes de-facto king of the world. Everybody else is livestock.
    • rogerrogerr 6mo ago
      I used to think this, but the AI labs sure seem neck-and-neck in the model race. Doesn't appear that anyone is developing an enormous lead. So I've become skeptical of the runaway king-of-the-world-maker model scenario. The open models seeming to be ~6 months behind is very encouraging, too.
• AvAn12 6mo ago
  I’m not sure anyone needs to break anything. I’m not sure this is a commercially viable business once all of the VC and foreign funding scaffolding goes away.
• markus_zhang 6mo ago
  There is nothing new about it. I just hope when people scream “unions” they do expect to do things that early unions did, not just being some armchair unionists. But individuals can’t fight with the trend. Might as well reduce costs/debts and prepare to go into the mountains for a few weeks once SHTF.
• fnord77 6mo ago
  And yet the Luddites are gone and the mills remain
• Chance-Device 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  • jncfhnb 6mo ago
    Establishing consensus through discussion is the basis of democracy
    • Chance-Device 6mo ago
      Maybe so, but people talk like they’re very concerned and I see no evidence these concerns are genuine. Is nobody doing anything constructive or even trying to? Maybe I missed it and they are? People can peacefully campaign and advocate for things they think are important, I don’t see it happening.
      • jncfhnb 6mo ago
        You don’t get to gatekeep having political opinions
        • Chance-Device 6mo ago
          I’m literally incapable of gate-keeping your political opinions, I’m stating my opinion.
          • jncfhnb 6mo ago
            Your opinion appears to be people shouldn’t share opinions unless they achieve a certain level of activity behind. So, like, idk dude. I don’t see you campaigning to restrict free speech so shut up?
  • jaredcwhite 6mo ago
    [flagged]
  • guzfip 6mo ago
    [flagged]
• stasomatic 6mo ago
  If the “billionaires” AI us out of our livelihoods will they need to learn how to pour a perfect espresso shot or use a voltage tester when they need to change a light bulb? Who’s gonna run the data centers and unclog toilets? They themselves? The thing is out of the bottle, regulations won’t help. What’s the end game like, some neo-feudalism with benevolent UBI serfdom and everyone on welfare?
  • Ancalagon 6mo ago
    I feel like some of them are thinking of a world with far fewer people in it, and all the tasks you described are handled robots designed to do their bidding. How we get from now to a time with far fewer people, well, use your imagination.
• stego-tech 6mo ago
  Maybe it’s my own lived experience coloring my perspective, but man the author feels like a centrist sitting upon an imagined moral high ground. “Violence is bad but inevitable” is the kind of milquetoast non-committal position one takes when they have nothing else to contribute to the discussion at hand. My own take goes that one step further, as I said in a prior comment rebutting Altman’s whinging blog post: > Your staunch refusal to heed the critiques of those you harm means that these outcomes were inevitable; not acceptable, not justifiable, but inevitable nonetheless. In a society where two full-time working adults still cannot afford a home, or children, or healthcare, or education, your insistence upon robbing them of their ability to survive at all is tantamount to a direct threat of violence against them. Your insistence that the pain is necessary, that others must clean up the messes that you and your peers are willfully creating, is the sort of behavior expected from toddlers rather than statesmen. The problem does not lie with technological innovation itself, so much as the powerful humans behind it leveraging it for selfish ends without the consent of the governed. Violence becomes inevitable when people see no alternative, and necessary when the stakes are kill or be killed, as AI is currently steered towards. That’s not to condone the actions of the alleged perpetrators so much as it’s highlighting the litany of historical examples around such transformations and the effects violence has in forcing a peaceful compromise in most (but not all) cases. The New Deal couldn’t have happened without the decades of preceding strikes, protests, and government-sanctioned violence against workers; the violence made it impossible to ignore or delay any further, and the result was outing corporate entities who had been stockpiling chemical weapons and machine guns, so fierce was their opposition to sharing the products of labor with the workforce. AI already has the weapons, it has the surveillance apparatus, the government backing; violence is presently the sole recourse left to a growing number of people, because they know they’re an obstacle to the powers that be - and will be destroyed, lest they strike first. That’s the real story, here, and those who haven’t lived in the gutters of society cannot possibly understand the desperation of those victimized by it in the name of greed.
  • only-one1701 6mo ago
    Well said. It’s striking to me how many adults can’t conceive of “violence” as an abstraction that results in certain effects and fall back on “violence is dealing direct physical injury to a person’s body or building.”
• wavefunction 6mo ago
  It's the way that machine-learning automation is deployed and used in/against society and individuals that will engender violence. I don't necessarily think it will be unjustified even if I think such violence will be unproductive and should be discouraged in favor of a wider consensus in society.
• tengbretson 6mo ago
  Software developers are expressing their concerns on this the exact moment they aren't directly building the thing that's "eating the world."
• free-dreamer-9 6mo ago
  I was running the other day, and I was thinking how can this AI thing be used to something good instead of ending up in violence. Needed to get it out of my chest, sorry if this is too much (down vote is ok :). The big problem I find with AI is really rent-seeking behavior and big tech in my mind. I also think something like what I propose could solve the issue that AI is standing on the shoulders of free OSS, and that feels unfair to many (me). Without this, after AI claims the easy-pickings of the "personalized-cake-as-a-service" companies (and the like), we would be left with the actual interesting problems that, by definition AI won't be able to do (at least until AGI). And make sure as many minds can work on it as possible. Imagine a world with true competition / free market, where all users own their own data and where promotion of apps / hosting is free. Like urbit, but no weird "OS" and much less... ehm... moldbuggy. You build mechanisms in such a way where rent-seeking is basically impossible due to market dynamics and backed by gov instead of big tech. AI is the driving force that gets us there: since it would be / is (already?) easy to replicate mail, maps, etc. We just need to loosen those network effects. So more concretly I am thinking that data is hosted on "app stores". In democraties, we might have an app store driven by gov, one per each country. Countries might arrange themselves differently. Google / Apple for example could own the US ones (so no changes there), in China something else. There are standard / bi-lateral agreements between different entities to make sure people in non-democratic countries get less screwed. You can chose which app store you want (free internet required), and you can always move data from one to another (again: based on agreements between the different app stores). This is managed on the app store level. The app store pays salaries to people ("devs") who produce the different apps. Salaries could be based on a certain amount of usage, but max out on a high, but not insane wage (top 10% earner in country?). The devs may organize in companies, but there's a cap how much an company / a dev can make and be valued at. I was thinking 5 people per company at the max. The rest goes to app store to pay other devs and hosting. Basically the way it works today, but the app stores would again be gov owned and not-for-profit. There could be different types of way devs might organize around: app (UX), services (APIs) and "vertical integrators". The "vertical integrators" take multiple apps and services and bundle them together to a more consistent "package" (think Gmail / Google Drive / Proton whatever). They could be responsible for making sure to drive prices down on the individual pieces of the package. There would have to be some counter-corruption mechanisms (transparency) to make sure that is fair. Some markets might be interested in national ad platforms (for national security for example). If devs want to create something for the benefit of everyone for free they can do that. You can even build closed source things for the benefit of all, since hosting is free. Permissions on data is managed on app store level so you do not need the same level of insight - I think this is already partially handled in Apple eco system. Anyways, the goal here is to avoid rent-seeking behavoir, network effects, ads going haywire and make sure the devs that do the work can both give back and get something back (a decent, but not insane wage). I think there's lots of fun mechanismes that could be designed to make sure people that actually contribute to software development get a decent wage, while disheartning those who do not. First post here, and, yes, I know I am a dreamer.
• byt3h3ad 6mo ago
  the author missed out on an important detail: the looms did replace most of the handloom workers. traditional industries were replaced, despite initial resistance. industrialisation has been inevitable, mostly, i think. and i do believe its a bad analogy - comparing the two.
• luxuryballs 6mo ago
  it’s still just computer software, everyone needs to chill, the bits are arranged differently but it’s doing the same stuff: processing, this was always inevitable, it’s not the computer that they are mad at, it’s the centralized over-taxed economic system that has everyone’s lives so overly coupled with it that the computer software is disrupting their lives, don’t blame the computer, go outside and start cleaning up the trash and planting gardens so you can survive, you’re still closer to the soil than you think and sun/water/soil is still plentiful, if you don’t grow the decentralized garden forest “infrastructure” soon it might not be possible
• rozal 6mo ago
  [dead]
• paulorlando 6mo ago
  I've been research Luddite movements around the world. Agreed that the topic is timely. A closer comparison to Sam Altman might be Edmund Cartwright (inventor of the power loom that automated weaving). The Horsfall and Altman situations differ in that Horsfall was a factory owner but didn't create or organize the teams that built the stocking frames. There was also an attempt on Cartwright's life as he was out riding. But like Altman and unlike Horsfall, he wasn't killed.
• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
• ekkiren 6mo ago
  [flagged]
• atomic128 6mo ago
  The war is already underway. Poison Fountain: https://www.reddit.com/r/PoisonFountain/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PoisonFountain/
• mystraline 6mo ago
  I'm urging AI literacy and also self-hosting. These are the means of production. Probabilistic, sure. Sycophantic? Yep. But speeding up the boring parts is where LLMs excel at.
  • ijk 6mo ago
    I'm very mad about the RAM shortage. It was quite rude of them to not wait until I built a new LLM server.
• titanomachy 6mo ago
  I’m curious what the threshold is where violence IS considered acceptable. A lot of people seem to think that it was acceptable (or even necessary) for America to fight a war for its independence, or for the French commoners to launch the attack on the Tuileries that extinguished a thousand lives and led to the French Republic. I don’t think that we can know in advance whether history will judge a particular violent act to be “acceptable”, but the rule seems to be more complicated than “violence is never acceptable”.
• ctoth 6mo ago
  Brought to you from the same guy who said in April 2025: "Google Is Winning on Every AI Front" https://www.thealgorithmicbridge.com/p/google-is-winning-on-every-ai-front https://www.thealgorithmicbridge.com/p/google-is-winning-on-...
• SuperHeavy256 6mo ago
  > AI has become the perfect scapegoat. I really feel it isn't a 'narrative created by AI Companies' that's responsible for this. First of all, any business touts itself as one that will reduce labor. That's marketing. It existed long before AI Companies, and it is very often exaggerated in its capabilities. We as a society have accepted this as normal. We all accept a loop that goes like this: New Product has marketing that claims it can solve world hunger -> You pay and use the new product, only to find that it cannot deliver on its great promise in whole -> You still end up using and paying for the product because while it doesn't solve world hunger, it at least feeds a few mouths and that's better than nothing. The true culprit -and one that I personally hold responsible for this outbreak of violence that we are seeing- is Journalism. Every Newspaper for the last 3 entire years has constantly flooded headlines with 'AI is dangerous and will take away your job'. That's because each time they do that more people pay attention out of fear, which increases profit for newspapers. The same goes for TV News, Online News. And this has a trickle-down effect on society where YouTubers, Podcasters, and your local seminar hall has people talking about how insane AI is and how it is the worst thing to happen since Pandora's Box. We seriously need to change how we as a society interact with news if we are to see this end. We need to stop incentivizing sensational headlines for newspapers that overtime lead to violence. We need regulations in place to prevent content specifically designed to target fear in people's minds. And we need to see this change take place fast.
• hubabuba44 6mo ago
  I'm genuinely curious why this is flagged?
• rolph 6mo ago
  keep taking away the choice, force an upheaval of society, rework major social paradigm, all without asking and thinly veiling the mandate of forced adoption with a "this will make it all easier". trying to disrupt peoples lives while making them pay for it and taking profit is not marketing, or shrewd business, it is an assault on an established society. i cant square all the blame on the more reactionary persons, that are behaving in the way that tech knows they will behave, tech knows how to push behavioural buttons to induce engagement, has little care over the intent of that engagement, until now. BTW, all FAANGS executives, try not to stomp on any more burning paper bags left at your front door, and please stop eating dirt.
• PaulShomo 6mo ago
  When bicycles first came out people threw rocks at cyclists, claimed bikes lead to female immorality, social disorder, and health conditions like “bicycle face.” New things scare people. So yeah, the AI backlash will be a bloodbath.
• tkel 6mo ago
  All the people that say "I disapprove of violence" come across as incredibly naive. This entire society is based on violence. In the US, You live in the most militarized society in history. More than 80 countries with US military bases, many of which have experienced the unaccountable violence of the US military. More than $1 trillion every year, the most on the planet, and half of the discretionary federal budget. That is a huge amount of normalized violence. The US police are full of military weaponry (1033 program) and veterans. Similarly many municipalities spend half of their general fund on the police. There is an incomprehensibly huge amount of violence done by the police on a daily basis that is necessary to maintain this society. That is a huge amount of normalized violence. The US also has the largest system of incarceration on the planet. Prisons and jails house over 2M people, per capita far larger than any other country on the planet. That is a huge amount of normalized violence. [1] Then there is the structural violence and social murder of our current economic and legal system. People are put through preventable, lethal living and working conditions. Contaminated water, unhealthy foods, increased rates of disease, bad healthcare, lack of public health infrastructure. No public bathrooms! People are abandoned on the streets next to houses and apartments that sit vacant. People who steal food are jailed instead of fed. That is a huge amount of normalized violence. Then, an attempted molotov is thrown at a metal gate, and all of a sudden people are condemning violence? Give me a break. When you only condemn that type of violence, you are reifying the dogma of the status quo which is to imply that violence by powerful people and instutitions is acceptable and not to be condemned. [1] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2026.html https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2026.html