5 ms·

If they had AGI, why would they need consumers anymore? Just use your drone army to secure all natural resources and produce whatever you need for yourself. Oth

If they had AGI, why would they need consumers anymore? Just use your drone army to secure all natural resources and produce whatever you need for yourself. Other humans are just pets.

a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
And this is why we need to escape the permanent underclass.
- vrganj 2mo ago
  How about we don't create one instead?
  - a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
    It's not a choice we have, unless you want to figure out a global AI ban treaty. AI will make human thought economically useless. In the new economy, the one economically useful thing we will be able to do is legal property ownership.
    - vrganj 2mo ago
      > The one economically useful thing we will be able to do is legal property ownership. This is correct. But we don't need to ban AI to avoid the permanent underclass nightmare. It's time for the means of production to be owned communally. It's either a cybersocialist utopia or a neofeudalist dystopia. Rosa Luxemburg formulated it pretty well more than a hundred years ago: Socialism or Barbarism!.
      - a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
        What kind of political leverage do the useless have? This isn't a realistically sustainable outcome. Today, people have leverage because removing them has real economic consequences. With AI, we need to be on the useful side of the divide to have any leverage. And then we'd better hope AI has respect for property rights.
        jacquesm 2mo ago
        Property rights might be the least of your problems.
        EMIRELADERO 2mo ago
        Apathetic mass-murder is unjustifiable, and the ultrarich would need to justify it to their families, who would then need to justify it to other people they know, and so on. And remember that we're talking about the majority of the global population, an event like that couldn't be hand-waved away like one would do for a minority group.
        dgellow 2mo ago
        I consider DOGE actions to be pretty much exactly what you describe, with their sudden destruction of USAID and defunding of climate science
        jacquesm 2mo ago
        That all makes a lot more sense in light of the current hunger for power for data centers.
        dgellow 2mo ago
        Yep :(
        a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
        Iran just mass murdered their protesters earlier this year, and they needed to convince humans to pull the trigger. It didn't seem to be that hard for them to justify. It's probably a lot easier to convince the military AIs we're building to do it. I don't particularly like the situation, but I plan to do what I can to be on the winning side. The world is going to be what we're all in on building, and for people on the winning side it may be a utopia. Either way, I know which side of the gun I want to be standing behind. Also note that an AI well aligned with the people who initially trained it wouldn't need to actually kill anyone that didn't take action against the owners, it would just need to outcompete people for resources, and let them fend for themselves in extreme poverty. There's no need to act one way or the other beyond that.
      - andsoitis 2mo ago
        > It's time for the means of production to be owned communally. What does this mean in practice? That an individual cannot own a machine (which is a means of production)?
        vrganj 2mo ago
        I think we'll have to figure out the details, of course. As a first intuition, I feel like its mostly server farms and data centers that are the concern, large scale means of production. It feels right that those would be communally owned, be that via democratic government or maybe some sort of worker owned coop?
        andsoitis 1mo ago
        But those won't get built by companies in the first place, because you want to constrain what companies can own. Nothing prevents the government or coops today from building these things.
        vrganj 1mo ago
        Budget does. Budget that you can extract by taxing hyperscalers aggressively.
    - watwut 2mo ago
      No. AI as a tech is not an issue. The wealth and power accumulation in the hands of Amodei, Altman, Thiel, Musk, Karp and the rest of CEO is the issue. Permanent underclass is ideological goal of the above people. AI is an impersonal technology with no goals or wishes.
      - a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
        I'm not sure how that changes anything -- sure, if you blocked people from using AI, it wouldn't have any effects on society, but once people have access, what they do with it matters. There's an inevitable effect that it has, and the only lever you have as an individual is being on the right side of that.
        philipkglass 2mo ago
        Copy the technology and give people access without trying to financially profit from it. Even if the US federal government refuses to act, smaller government entities can deploy their own compute clusters running strong open-weights models like Kimi K3, and provide their own citizens with free access to strong AI models. There may come a time when even Chinese providers no longer release strong model weights, but then the previous generation of strong open-weights models can be used to accelerate the development of data pipelines and training setups to build the next generation. California or Australia (or many others) could fund university-led R&D efforts to build completely open models. Despite the angry noises that leading providers make about their model outputs being used to train competing models, that's not illegal. States can use Common Crawl, Anna's Archive, Books3, commercial model outputs, and whatever other data sources that are useful for building models. States have sovereign immunity to ignore copyright complaints, if they decide to pursue model development. The big AI companies don't have much of a moat. Let the big companies spend a fortune figuring out what works best, then openly build imitations having 95% of the capability at 5% of the cost.
        a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
        The first one to AGI with enough compute to run the AI wins it all. Humans will not be able to compete.
TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago
If AGI had a drone army, why would it need them? Can't help wondering if they've really thought this through.
- datsci_est_2015 2mo ago
  I'm reminded of the scene in Independence Day with the people on top of the tower welcoming the alien spaceships. Except instead of celebratory fanatics holding poster boards saying "Welcome", it's all the singularity AI thoughtleaders holding hands in a circle chanting about Roko's basilisk like some new-age spirituality retreat.
- eloisius 2mo ago
  I have seen that current AI models are capable of doing a sloppy job at many tasks when directed to do so, but I have never seen an example of a machine having its own volition.
alexashka 2mo ago
> why would they need consumers anymore? That was the exact line of thought, coupled with resources are limited (marketed as climate change), that led to the 1 child policy in China and many other decisions that shall not be spoken of.

If they had AGI, why would they need consumers anymore? Just use your drone army to secure all natural resources and produce whatever you need for yourself. Other humans are just pets.

a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago

And this is why we need to escape the permanent underclass.

vrganj 2mo ago
How about we don't create one instead?
- a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
  It's not a choice we have, unless you want to figure out a global AI ban treaty. AI will make human thought economically useless. In the new economy, the one economically useful thing we will be able to do is legal property ownership.
  - vrganj 2mo ago
    > The one economically useful thing we will be able to do is legal property ownership. This is correct. But we don't need to ban AI to avoid the permanent underclass nightmare. It's time for the means of production to be owned communally. It's either a cybersocialist utopia or a neofeudalist dystopia. Rosa Luxemburg formulated it pretty well more than a hundred years ago: Socialism or Barbarism!.
    - a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
      What kind of political leverage do the useless have? This isn't a realistically sustainable outcome. Today, people have leverage because removing them has real economic consequences. With AI, we need to be on the useful side of the divide to have any leverage. And then we'd better hope AI has respect for property rights.
      - jacquesm 2mo ago
        Property rights might be the least of your problems.
      - EMIRELADERO 2mo ago
        Apathetic mass-murder is unjustifiable, and the ultrarich would need to justify it to their families, who would then need to justify it to other people they know, and so on. And remember that we're talking about the majority of the global population, an event like that couldn't be hand-waved away like one would do for a minority group.
        dgellow 2mo ago
        I consider DOGE actions to be pretty much exactly what you describe, with their sudden destruction of USAID and defunding of climate science
        jacquesm 2mo ago
        That all makes a lot more sense in light of the current hunger for power for data centers.
        dgellow 2mo ago
        Yep :(
        a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
        Iran just mass murdered their protesters earlier this year, and they needed to convince humans to pull the trigger. It didn't seem to be that hard for them to justify. It's probably a lot easier to convince the military AIs we're building to do it. I don't particularly like the situation, but I plan to do what I can to be on the winning side. The world is going to be what we're all in on building, and for people on the winning side it may be a utopia. Either way, I know which side of the gun I want to be standing behind. Also note that an AI well aligned with the people who initially trained it wouldn't need to actually kill anyone that didn't take action against the owners, it would just need to outcompete people for resources, and let them fend for themselves in extreme poverty. There's no need to act one way or the other beyond that.
    - andsoitis 2mo ago
      > It's time for the means of production to be owned communally. What does this mean in practice? That an individual cannot own a machine (which is a means of production)?
      - vrganj 2mo ago
        I think we'll have to figure out the details, of course. As a first intuition, I feel like its mostly server farms and data centers that are the concern, large scale means of production. It feels right that those would be communally owned, be that via democratic government or maybe some sort of worker owned coop?
        andsoitis 1mo ago
        But those won't get built by companies in the first place, because you want to constrain what companies can own. Nothing prevents the government or coops today from building these things.
        vrganj 1mo ago
        Budget does. Budget that you can extract by taxing hyperscalers aggressively.
  - watwut 2mo ago
    No. AI as a tech is not an issue. The wealth and power accumulation in the hands of Amodei, Altman, Thiel, Musk, Karp and the rest of CEO is the issue. Permanent underclass is ideological goal of the above people. AI is an impersonal technology with no goals or wishes.
    - a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
      I'm not sure how that changes anything -- sure, if you blocked people from using AI, it wouldn't have any effects on society, but once people have access, what they do with it matters. There's an inevitable effect that it has, and the only lever you have as an individual is being on the right side of that.
      - philipkglass 2mo ago
        Copy the technology and give people access without trying to financially profit from it. Even if the US federal government refuses to act, smaller government entities can deploy their own compute clusters running strong open-weights models like Kimi K3, and provide their own citizens with free access to strong AI models. There may come a time when even Chinese providers no longer release strong model weights, but then the previous generation of strong open-weights models can be used to accelerate the development of data pipelines and training setups to build the next generation. California or Australia (or many others) could fund university-led R&D efforts to build completely open models. Despite the angry noises that leading providers make about their model outputs being used to train competing models, that's not illegal. States can use Common Crawl, Anna's Archive, Books3, commercial model outputs, and whatever other data sources that are useful for building models. States have sovereign immunity to ignore copyright complaints, if they decide to pursue model development. The big AI companies don't have much of a moat. Let the big companies spend a fortune figuring out what works best, then openly build imitations having 95% of the capability at 5% of the cost.
        a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
        The first one to AGI with enough compute to run the AI wins it all. Humans will not be able to compete.

TheOtherHobbes 2mo ago

If AGI had a drone army, why would it need them? Can't help wondering if they've really thought this through.

datsci_est_2015 2mo ago
I'm reminded of the scene in Independence Day with the people on top of the tower welcoming the alien spaceships. Except instead of celebratory fanatics holding poster boards saying "Welcome", it's all the singularity AI thoughtleaders holding hands in a circle chanting about Roko's basilisk like some new-age spirituality retreat.
eloisius 2mo ago
I have seen that current AI models are capable of doing a sloppy job at many tasks when directed to do so, but I have never seen an example of a machine having its own volition.

alexashka 2mo ago

> why would they need consumers anymore? That was the exact line of thought, coupled with resources are limited (marketed as climate change), that led to the 1 child policy in China and many other decisions that shall not be spoken of.