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I find it far more ironic that they are called Reclaim the Internet. I am dating myself, but I remember the Internet. It’s rather ironic too that the actual In

I find it far more ironic that they are called Reclaim the Internet. I am dating myself, but I remember the Internet. It’s rather ironic too that the actual Internet, literal and figuratively free internet, was always doomed from the start, just like AI is effectively doomed in terms of it being some kind of productivity tool or amazing thing you can use to build your own thing, because the logical conclusion is very bad for most people, including the technorati types here that think themselves above it and immune. If you’re shocked and surprised by the way there Internet was maneuvered into the surveillance prison Flock made itself the poster child of at the hands of Mr Langley, take that trajectory and lay it over AI, but only at exponential rates. You don’t have to believe me, it won’t matter either way, it’s happening, short of the Soviet style implosion of the “American” empire. Maybe once the planet has been made uninhabitable to biological life there will be an AI robot cybernetic splinter group trying to “reclaim humanity”.

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altmanaltman 12d ago
How would a soviet style implosion of the US work in real life? A civil war is far more likely and we already have historical precedence for that. And your AI robot cybernetic splinter group thing sounds a lot like the biblical story of Noah than anything that's based on science or you know facts.
- DANmode 12d ago
  Chaotic coincidences, because the empire is too large to control all of its interests. Could have been avoided - too much money to be made in the various stages of it not being avoided.
- tedggh 12d ago
  The US and particularly its armed forces don’t look at all like the 1800s, so another civil war of that nature is not possible. Sabotage, terrorism and political violence could be a new form of civil unrest, but full out civil war without a divided military with entire divisions defecting, is very unlikely.
  - altmanaltman 12d ago
    Yes, we are unlikely to get to a point of an 1800s civil war, of course. But I mean, if things do get that bad, we cannot rule out a divided military as well. How that would work in practice, I'm not sure, since, as you mentioned, armed forces work these days differently as well, and defection like that might not even be feasible, I guess. Overall I would say civil war is more likely (even given how unlikely it is) than just a robotic uprising that will root out all humanity and make the world unfit for biological beings as the original comment implied.
    - DANmode 12d ago
      To your point: it takes 1-3% of a population to upend things…based on historical reference.
      - a96 11d ago
        So, 3-10 million people or so for US.
    - tedggh 12d ago
      Nuclear war is a civilization-ending tool that AI could realistically exploit. It would only need to hack a weaker nuclear nation to send a ICBM our way, sabotage communications and let our draconian nuclear war strategy do the rest. There’s a book by Annie Jacobsen that explains from a plausible military perspective how this could rapidly unfold. It was poorly plagiarized by Netflix and turned into a mini series but the book is much more better at scaring the s out of you.
      - simonh 11d ago
        It would also end the AI. Not to say it couldn’t happen though, if it thought an apocalypse could somehow instrumentally help it fill its monthly paperclip quota.
  - MiroslavPokorny 11d ago
    A war wont happen because Americans are too lazy. Just look how the cities are built, the vast majority simply refuses to walk. To control the population one only has to deny them fuel, and everything else freezes. In older times, everyone was a really hard worker, look at the American civil war, millions in both armies walked thousands of kms. Theres no way a fraction of Americans could or would do that.
visarga 12d ago
You can't host the internet on your machine, or download a "Google" or "Meta" but you can download a local model. So I don't think AI will lead to more centralization. Besides local models, the interface itself - prompt based steering - is eminently more open ended that apps or websites ever were. Cloud or local, you get more control now as a user.
- tedggh 12d ago
  It is possible that models are only the byproduct of what frontier labs are doing. In other words, what you call AI is just a log, a trace of what the real AI, for which only frontier labs have access to, did.
- spacebanana7 12d ago
  It’s already fairly realistic to get 2022 era frontier models running on prosumer hardware, which is pretty good for freedom.
- latexr 12d ago
  > You can't host the internet on your machine, or download a "Google" or "Meta" but you can download a local model. You can very much host websites on your machine (not the whole internet, but then again you can’t host the most powerful models either) and you can very much download a Wikipedia or Internet Archive. But most people never will. This idea that everyone will soon be using local models while frolicking happily in the fields is a pipe dream. Besides, local or not, these models can already be harmful in ways the internet took decades to approach.
  - armchairhacker 12d ago
    A local model has more data than Wikipedia and the Internet Archive is way too large to download on a consumer machine. A local model works even if the Internet is perfectly firewalled or straight-up down. However, you still need electricity and eventually replacement parts, so in an apocalypse may not work either.
  - armchairhacker 12d ago
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cgio 12d ago
In a zoo humanity lays protected. These beings used to roam earth as the apex predators and destroyers of their ecosystem and their species too.
FearNotDaniel 11d ago
I love the way people romanticise this hippie utopian idea of “The Internet” like it wasn’t originally built by, and for, the US Military
- dividedbyzero 11d ago
  The tech and some of the infrastructure was, but the cultural phenomenon that people are nostalgic for was not, that sprang up organically.
- qlte 11d ago
  ARPAnet definitely wasn't built "by" the military. "For" the military is close enough, although "defense research" would probably be more accurate than "military" given that initial users were centered around large universities. From the start the DoD had issues with the free and open culture from the userbase that skewed towards academic types, later splitting off into a restricted MILNET after a few years.
abc123abc123 11d ago
Maybe not from the start, but definitely since the EU sunk its teeth into it. We can look forward to ID-controls for everything online, and monitoring of what we write. Should anyone deviate from the EU leftist narrative they will be fined, disconnected, imprisoned or all three. The result is of course that the internet will split in two. The day-job internet, centered on earning money, and not on expressing thoughts. Then we have the darknet where ideas can be discussed freely, without the government monitoring you. Sadly this internet will never be accessible to the common man, who in time, will be taught never to discuss politics and ideas in public. We will get the kitchen table culture of the soviet union, all thanks to the EU now building out a massive surveillance machine with ID-verification, and chat control (which will eventually pass, be it under that name, or any other). At least we now know that the EU and China are closer in terms of ideology and control than we first thought. It is sad, but such is life.
- Tanjreeve 11d ago
  > Should anyone deviate from the EU leftist narrative they will be fined, disconnected, imprisoned or all three. If there's one thing that distinguishes leftist regimes it corporate friendly property law policies to enable free markets. > The result is of course that the internet will split in two. The day-job internet, centered on earning money, and not on expressing thoughts. Then we have the darknet where ideas can be discussed freely, without the government monitoring you. Sadly this internet will never be accessible to the common man, who in time, will be taught never to discuss politics and ideas in public. We will get the kitchen table culture of the soviet union, all thanks to the EU now building out a massive surveillance machine with ID-verification, and chat control (which will eventually pass, be it under that name, or any other). That sounds better to me? Civil society spaces shouldn't be for making money and vice versa. Surely we can't look at what's happened to twitter where you basically get corporate sponsorship for rage baiting on the internet and think that's an improvement? The most effective political action recently has been hyperlocal neighbourhood groups getting mad and turning up to data centre meetings en-masse and letting local representatives know that they are all know where they live. Spouting off on the internet has been weaponised to force people into inaction and is easily corralled as there are so few of these mega platforms and they're easy to buy and manipulate centrally.
crabbone 11d ago
Sigh. Web. Not Internet. Why is this distinction so hard to make on a WEB site dedicated to technology? The reason I keep repeating this whenever I see this is because I've seen idiotic mislabeling and mischaracterization materialize as idiotic legislature or idiotic activism based on the former. Someone invented the term "AI datacenter", and now there's a swiping movement of idiots fighting... datacenters. Same as with 5G before it. Please. Please. Don't blame the Internet for something it has absolutely nothing to do with. Your misattributed criticism is going to be amplified by thousands of automatic and semi-automatic morons and, who knows, maybe people will start cutting cables or attack ISP crew as a result.
- mitxela 10d ago
  The same thing would happen on any platform. Social media diverged from the web a while ago - accessing it through web is like accessing Usenet through Google Groups. Its native environment is the corresponding non-web phone apps.
rpdillon 10d ago
> I find it far more ironic that they are called Reclaim the Internet. That's the name of the site covering the block.
KellyCriterion 10d ago
> you can use to build your own thing AI helped me and thousandas of other people already to actually build their thing! :-)
thesuitonym 10d ago
I should hope you remember the Internet, it's still there. It may come as a surprise to you, but the whole reason the WWW works is because of the Internet, that's how you're able to see this web site!

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altmanaltman 12d ago

How would a soviet style implosion of the US work in real life? A civil war is far more likely and we already have historical precedence for that. And your AI robot cybernetic splinter group thing sounds a lot like the biblical story of Noah than anything that's based on science or you know facts.

DANmode 12d ago
Chaotic coincidences, because the empire is too large to control all of its interests. Could have been avoided - too much money to be made in the various stages of it not being avoided.
tedggh 12d ago
The US and particularly its armed forces don’t look at all like the 1800s, so another civil war of that nature is not possible. Sabotage, terrorism and political violence could be a new form of civil unrest, but full out civil war without a divided military with entire divisions defecting, is very unlikely.
- altmanaltman 12d ago
  Yes, we are unlikely to get to a point of an 1800s civil war, of course. But I mean, if things do get that bad, we cannot rule out a divided military as well. How that would work in practice, I'm not sure, since, as you mentioned, armed forces work these days differently as well, and defection like that might not even be feasible, I guess. Overall I would say civil war is more likely (even given how unlikely it is) than just a robotic uprising that will root out all humanity and make the world unfit for biological beings as the original comment implied.
  - DANmode 12d ago
    To your point: it takes 1-3% of a population to upend things…based on historical reference.
    - a96 11d ago
      So, 3-10 million people or so for US.
  - tedggh 12d ago
    Nuclear war is a civilization-ending tool that AI could realistically exploit. It would only need to hack a weaker nuclear nation to send a ICBM our way, sabotage communications and let our draconian nuclear war strategy do the rest. There’s a book by Annie Jacobsen that explains from a plausible military perspective how this could rapidly unfold. It was poorly plagiarized by Netflix and turned into a mini series but the book is much more better at scaring the s out of you.
    - simonh 11d ago
      It would also end the AI. Not to say it couldn’t happen though, if it thought an apocalypse could somehow instrumentally help it fill its monthly paperclip quota.
- MiroslavPokorny 11d ago
  A war wont happen because Americans are too lazy. Just look how the cities are built, the vast majority simply refuses to walk. To control the population one only has to deny them fuel, and everything else freezes. In older times, everyone was a really hard worker, look at the American civil war, millions in both armies walked thousands of kms. Theres no way a fraction of Americans could or would do that.

visarga 12d ago

You can't host the internet on your machine, or download a "Google" or "Meta" but you can download a local model. So I don't think AI will lead to more centralization. Besides local models, the interface itself - prompt based steering - is eminently more open ended that apps or websites ever were. Cloud or local, you get more control now as a user.

tedggh 12d ago
It is possible that models are only the byproduct of what frontier labs are doing. In other words, what you call AI is just a log, a trace of what the real AI, for which only frontier labs have access to, did.
spacebanana7 12d ago
It’s already fairly realistic to get 2022 era frontier models running on prosumer hardware, which is pretty good for freedom.
latexr 12d ago
> You can't host the internet on your machine, or download a "Google" or "Meta" but you can download a local model. You can very much host websites on your machine (not the whole internet, but then again you can’t host the most powerful models either) and you can very much download a Wikipedia or Internet Archive. But most people never will. This idea that everyone will soon be using local models while frolicking happily in the fields is a pipe dream. Besides, local or not, these models can already be harmful in ways the internet took decades to approach.
- armchairhacker 12d ago
  A local model has more data than Wikipedia and the Internet Archive is way too large to download on a consumer machine. A local model works even if the Internet is perfectly firewalled or straight-up down. However, you still need electricity and eventually replacement parts, so in an apocalypse may not work either.
- armchairhacker 12d ago

deleted 12d ago

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cgio 12d ago

In a zoo humanity lays protected. These beings used to roam earth as the apex predators and destroyers of their ecosystem and their species too.

FearNotDaniel 11d ago

I love the way people romanticise this hippie utopian idea of “The Internet” like it wasn’t originally built by, and for, the US Military

dividedbyzero 11d ago
The tech and some of the infrastructure was, but the cultural phenomenon that people are nostalgic for was not, that sprang up organically.
qlte 11d ago
ARPAnet definitely wasn't built "by" the military. "For" the military is close enough, although "defense research" would probably be more accurate than "military" given that initial users were centered around large universities. From the start the DoD had issues with the free and open culture from the userbase that skewed towards academic types, later splitting off into a restricted MILNET after a few years.

abc123abc123 11d ago

Maybe not from the start, but definitely since the EU sunk its teeth into it. We can look forward to ID-controls for everything online, and monitoring of what we write. Should anyone deviate from the EU leftist narrative they will be fined, disconnected, imprisoned or all three. The result is of course that the internet will split in two. The day-job internet, centered on earning money, and not on expressing thoughts. Then we have the darknet where ideas can be discussed freely, without the government monitoring you. Sadly this internet will never be accessible to the common man, who in time, will be taught never to discuss politics and ideas in public. We will get the kitchen table culture of the soviet union, all thanks to the EU now building out a massive surveillance machine with ID-verification, and chat control (which will eventually pass, be it under that name, or any other). At least we now know that the EU and China are closer in terms of ideology and control than we first thought. It is sad, but such is life.

Tanjreeve 11d ago
> Should anyone deviate from the EU leftist narrative they will be fined, disconnected, imprisoned or all three. If there's one thing that distinguishes leftist regimes it corporate friendly property law policies to enable free markets. > The result is of course that the internet will split in two. The day-job internet, centered on earning money, and not on expressing thoughts. Then we have the darknet where ideas can be discussed freely, without the government monitoring you. Sadly this internet will never be accessible to the common man, who in time, will be taught never to discuss politics and ideas in public. We will get the kitchen table culture of the soviet union, all thanks to the EU now building out a massive surveillance machine with ID-verification, and chat control (which will eventually pass, be it under that name, or any other). That sounds better to me? Civil society spaces shouldn't be for making money and vice versa. Surely we can't look at what's happened to twitter where you basically get corporate sponsorship for rage baiting on the internet and think that's an improvement? The most effective political action recently has been hyperlocal neighbourhood groups getting mad and turning up to data centre meetings en-masse and letting local representatives know that they are all know where they live. Spouting off on the internet has been weaponised to force people into inaction and is easily corralled as there are so few of these mega platforms and they're easy to buy and manipulate centrally.

crabbone 11d ago

Sigh. Web. Not Internet. Why is this distinction so hard to make on a WEB site dedicated to technology? The reason I keep repeating this whenever I see this is because I've seen idiotic mislabeling and mischaracterization materialize as idiotic legislature or idiotic activism based on the former. Someone invented the term "AI datacenter", and now there's a swiping movement of idiots fighting... datacenters. Same as with 5G before it. Please. Please. Don't blame the Internet for something it has absolutely nothing to do with. Your misattributed criticism is going to be amplified by thousands of automatic and semi-automatic morons and, who knows, maybe people will start cutting cables or attack ISP crew as a result.

mitxela 10d ago
The same thing would happen on any platform. Social media diverged from the web a while ago - accessing it through web is like accessing Usenet through Google Groups. Its native environment is the corresponding non-web phone apps.

rpdillon 10d ago

> I find it far more ironic that they are called Reclaim the Internet. That's the name of the site covering the block.

KellyCriterion 10d ago

> you can use to build your own thing AI helped me and thousandas of other people already to actually build their thing! :-)

thesuitonym 10d ago

I should hope you remember the Internet, it's still there. It may come as a surprise to you, but the whole reason the WWW works is because of the Internet, that's how you're able to see this web site!