"Gleefully taking away people's livelihoods will be met with violence, and nothing good will come of it." - fixed.
Until people with billions of dollars behind them do something with that money to offset the financial hardship that they're knowingly - and gleefully - bringing to others... The distinction has no practical use.
(And before someone says "that's the government's job!", consider how much lobbying money is coming from CEOs and companies who know the domain best and are agitating for better financial and social safeguards for all. None, naturally.)
Make lobbying illegal, I don't understand why it's normalized.
We have a lattice of diverse legal and economic systems in the world and it takes just a single one to figure out the solution for others to learn from.
To hear Marc Andreessen tell it, the US tech industry's rightward turn in the 2024 campaign was specifically intended to head off any attempt to regulate AI [0]. So the blame rebounds to tech CEOs even if you believe that only the government should take a holistic view of a given technology's impact.
[0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-06-11/marc-andr...
Or until actual people take the billions of dollars sitting behind those weak man-children. The US has fewer than 1000 billionaires now, and more than 300,000,000 people. That seems like a solvable problem.
For example, the people fighting inequality can use AI to their advantage, and focus criticism on billionaires (and general bad AI usage, like slop PRs) instead of ordinary AI users.
Plus I don't believe in violence from tech bros and white collar workers - they have been raised too docile...
That is, it's not hard to see why so many main streets in smaller towns have boarded up retail stores since you can now get anything in about a day (max) from Amazon. But Amazon (and other Internet giants) always played at least semi-plausible lip service that they were a boon to small fry (see Amazon's FBA commercials, for example). But you've got folks like Altman and Amodei gleefully saying how AI will be able to do all the work of a huge portion of (mostly high paying) jobs.
So it's not surprising that people are more up in arms about AI. And frankly, I don't think it really matters. Anger against "the tech elite" has been bubbling up for a long time now, and AI now just provides the most obvious target.
It seems like a lot of people want a revolution so that they can rotate who will be able to take advantage of the vulnerable.
What are the suggestions for something better? I don't see a lot.
I'd like to see more suggestions of how things could work.
For example:
The Government could legislate that any increase in profits that are attributable to the use of AI are taxed at 75%. It's still an advantage for a company to do it, but most of the gains go to the people. Most often, aggressive taxation like this is criticised on the basis that it will stifle growth, but this is an area where pretty much everyone is saying it's moving too quickly, that's just yet another positive effect.
Just a thought, what do you think?
"Joel, you look like a smart kid. I'm going to tell you something I'm sure you'll understand. You're having fun now, right? Right, Joel? The time of your life. In a sluggish economy, never ever fuck with another man's livelihood."
Do you make this distinction that it's not the AI that is doing this to us so that you can be more clear in where to target your ire, or are you making the distinction so you can continue to use LLMs with a clear conscience?
I'm not sure this moat is inevitably perpetual. It's likely computing technology evolves to the point of being able to run frontier-level models on our phones and laptops. It's also likely that with diminishing marginal returns, future datacenter-level models will not be dramatically more capable than future local models. In that case, the power of AI would be (almost) fully democratized, obviating any oligarchic concentration of power. Everyone would have equal access to the ultimate means of production.
You are right that AI can be a fully democratized commodity. The problem is that the current wealth inequality is not the result of AI. Musk became a trillion seeking oligarch not because of AI. It is because the entire financial system is designed to extract wealth from everyone and concentrate at the top. Democratic AI is not in their interest. There will be violence, but not because AI is supposedly a catalyst of inequality. It will be violence from the rich towards the poor, because democratic AI is not acceptable for them.
there is something else that needs to change which everyone is reluctant to admit, or struggling with internally.
thats ok, its called conscious evolution. it hurts, but it will be ok someday. its generational, so progress is always slower than one would hope. Just know that every step in the right direction is one, even if the entire world seems to disagree keep pushing for what you beleive is right, and hopefully thats something which is not infringing on other peoples capacity to live a happy life.
This statement is not decoupled; if anything, it is a more generalized one, as it does not point at any cause or causes for livelihoods to be taken.
Eliminate the AI variable entirely and the problem remains, therefore AI is not the problem.
For that Y% of people (and their dependants like kids, spouses and aging parents) - AI[1] is direct reason for "inequality accelerant".
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[1] Lets not discuss if AI in these layoff reasonings is actually true or not.
The vast majority of individuals derive no value from AI, they are instead told to do their jobs faster and own the mistakes of the AI for flat/declining pay. It's a bad deal for most people.
The benefits for them include:
- replacing workers with lower quality (but good enough) AI solutions, which degrade the quality of nearly every product or service for the consumer, but not by enough to offset the labor cost savings
- mass surveillance at low cost, a way to take the absurd amounts of data humanity now produces, and use to subjugate them
- propaganda/deception/misinformation, a new vector for propaganda which people are naively inclined to trust. bonus points for the "flooding the zone" strategy which AI makes easier
Benefits to the worker:
- lower cost of goods and services (but not for you, silly - they'll still be taxing you via inflation to fund their wars of conquest)
- you won't have to work anymore
- you won't have to eat anymore
Judging by the gleeful texts of CEOs, collapsed hiring, internal policy changes and pushes, and the additional decades of centralized political control, it's clear this is going to be even worse..
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.
I think that framing at is "the system is set up this way" reads too passive. It reads as if it excuses the likes of Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Larry Elisson among others being despicable sociopaths whose carnage inflicted upon society for pure selfish reasons needs to justifiably be treated as treason against society, with the obvious rightful consequence.
Bank run, general strike.
It's a matter of these people realizing that their choice is not between avoiding and not avoiding being driven under the AI wheel/credit crunch wheel that the AI wheel is hiding. It's whether they want to leave their jobs now, willingly, in an act that builds leverage for the negotiations over how the next epoch of human existence will look - or if they want to do it in a few months-to-years, unwillingly, with zero leverage. It's your 3 Year Trap in action.
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.
But what AI is selling is the obliteration of human knowledge work.
It just isn’t informative for that.
Much of that got obliterated by automation.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes
You as a blue collar machine operator, shoving punch cards in and getting answers out, is precisely what your boss always saw you as, or wanted you to be.
Our necessity as pseudo-craftsmen holding an intellectual high ground and wizardly/magical skills was always resented by investors, owners, and sometimes customers.
Blacksmithing and leather tanning and shoe making and seamstressing and furniture making was human knowledge work, too.
The Alvin Toffler stuff was always bullshit, but it's even more bullshit now.
When most engineers and Marvel fans watched Tony Stark in Avengers collaborating with Jarvis they thought of Jarvis like "an AI with Google's knowledge where I can interact with him". It's true that we're close to that level interaction. However, the ultimate goal is to get as much as possible automated on Jarvis, to the point where Tony Stark is not needed or Tony Stark can be replaced by anyone with a mouth.
In this example, Jarvis isn't the goal but a checkpoint. The goal is a genie, providing software and research to anyone who is loaded with money, and knows how to rub the metaphorical lamp the right way.
Personally, the tools don't need to change hands at all. They are already in the hands of people who are deploying them at a scale to serve goals I cannot and do not support
The people running AI companies right now are some of the most evil motherfuckers on the planet
Not only that, but by how blatantly and openly these owners are discussing the tool's power. They are publicly crooning about their product's ability to replace workers. It's the first line of their sales pitch. And also, their customers (business CEOs) are publicly crooning about how awesome it is that they can reduce their headcount! Both the AI producers and their customers are absolutely bragging about worker displacement, and not a single guillotine has been constructed in the streets yet.
If we thought of all of this as 'stochastic data systems' then our heads would be in the right place as we thought about it just as 'powerful software' that can be used for good or bad purposes, and the negative externalizes will be derived from our use of it, not some inherent property.
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.
Labour displacement leads to an erosion of standards of living and in a world that ties purpose to work is an existential threat on a very practical level.
It was always going to be met with violence once it became more than a curiosity for tinkerers.
a) Decouple the value of human life from labour.
b) Watch as the value of human life rapidly approaches zero.
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Though I'd expand this by adding "technically alive" is not a very good standard to aim for. Ostensibly we're already heading for something like poverty level UBI + living in pod + eating the proverbial bugs. We need a level above that!
A great exploration of the pitfalls of "preserve humanity" as a reward function is the video game SOMA. I think you also need "preserve dignity" to make the life actually worth living.
(Path `a` is not without its pitfalls: what lack of survival pressure might do to the human culture and genome, I leave as an exercise for the reader! But path `b` I think we already have enough examples of, to know better...)
I don't disagree that we tie purpose to work and severing that tie will have negative societal consequences, but it is far more impactful that we tie the ability to continue to exist to work (for anyone not lucky enough to already be wealthy).
If I suddenly became unemployable tomorrow I'm positive I could find alternate purpose in my life to fill that gap, I already volunteer for various causes and could happily do more of the same to fill in the gaps left by lack of work. What I couldn't do is feed myself, keep myself housed, and get medical care (especially in the US, where this is very directly tied to work).
The really big fuckup we are committing as a society in the US (may or may not apply to each person's country individually) isn't just this looming threat of massive labor displacement due to AI, it is that instead of planning for any sort of soft landing we are continually slashing what few social safety nets already exist. We are creating the conditions for desperation that likely will result in increasing violence as outlined in the linked post.
The two biggest labor displacements in human history were the agricultural and industrial revolutions, both of which resulted in enormous gains in human living standards. Can you think of a mass labor displacement that resulted in an overall erosion of living standards? I cannot.
Soviet Union lost due to an inferior societal model, but this too is too much along what once was a relatively sustainable path. The American dream is now a parody of itself, as it takes more to end up with the rest of them, I could go on about the irony of wanting to escape the pit but not wanting to acknowledge the pit is the 99% of the U.S. -- Not Altmans, Bezos'es, Musks or Trumps or their hordes of peripheral elites.
Point being, the model doesn't work _today_ with its cancerous appetite and correspondingly absurd neglect of the human, _any_ human. We can't have humanism and the kind of AI we're about to "enjoy".
The acceleration of wealth disparity may prove to be nearly geometrical, as the common man is further stripped of any capacity to inflict change on the "system". I hope I am wrong, but for all their crimes, anarchy and in a twist of irony -- inhumane treatment of opponent -- the October revolutionaries in Russia, yes bolsheviks, were merely a natural response to a similar atmosphere in Russia at the turn of the previous century. It's just that they didn't have mass surveillance used against them in the same capacity our gadgets allow the "governments" today, nor were they aided by AI which is _also_ something that can be used against an entire slice of populace (a perfect application of general principles put in action). So although the situation may become similar, we're increasingly in no position to change it. The difference may be counted in _generations_, as in it will take multiple generations to dismantle the power structures we allow be put in place now, with Altmans etc. These people may not be evil, but history proves they only have to be short-sighted enough for evil to take root and thrive.
Sorry for the wall of text, but I do agree with the point of the blog post in a way -- demanding people become civilised and refrain from throwing eggs (or Molotovs) on celebrities that are about to swing _entire governments_, is not seeing the forest for the trees.
There's also no precedent in a way -- our historical cataclysms we have created ourselves, have been on a smaller scale, so we're spiraling outwards and not all of the tools we think we have, are going to have the effect required in order to enact the change we want. In the worst case, of course.
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.
You're not thinking long-term. What happens when AI is put in charge of systems that interact with the physical world?
And the massive amounts of people (software engineers, lawyers, doctors, etc) currently being paid as contractors to help train the next AI models. They're essentially the inviting natives who are being paid in trifles to tell them the secret ways of the natives farther inland. Sucking out all of the tribal knowledge of the industry like a vacuum.
What about diseases which killed up to 95% of the population? I think you are basically correct, except for the historical analogy.
Because I think that seems virtually inevitable at this point.
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 open models seeming to be ~6 months behind is very encouraging, too.
AI doesn’t actually come from the outside.
The fact it’s economics have high winner-take-a-lot aspects, doesn’t mean you can eliminate the current winners and end up anywhere different, because it’s actually a natural decentralized progression of improving efficiency.
So that framing makes no sense.
However, the thesis for the potential for violence is sound. I don’t see a way out of that, given unending disruption, with no coordinated responsible response.
I do not think is this essay is hype.
This moment requires great leadership and competence, but that is not what is getting elected.
The last two decades patience with massive businesses scaling up profitable conflicts of interest, and centralizing gatekeeper and dependency powers, that offer no recourse to any individuals they mistreat, strongly suggest we are incapable of dealing with AI fallout. Which will only accelerate and add to those trends.
The entire argument lives and dies on one move: calling AI an “alien.” And it’s not even consistent. It starts with “alien” as in foreign invader, then quietly upgrades it to “space alien,” and from that point on everything just inherits whatever sci fi trait sounds dramatic. That’s not reasoning, that’s a word doing a costume change and dragging the argument along with it.
And honestly, the quality of comments on HN feels like it’s been tracking the broader decline in cognitive performance. The long running Flynn Effect has stalled or reversed in parts of the US. Some datasets show small but real drops in IQ related measures over the past decade. You read threads like this and it’s hard not to feel like you’re watching that play out in real time.
That explains the prolific AI use as incompetent agencies like the DoJ, DOGE, and others under the current administration
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.
Actually violence is the ultimate power. It is where true power comes from — you can gain true power by hurting other people or/and benefiting other people, and it is always the power to hurt people that is the greater of the two.
A well run government wraps violence behind a curtain and jealously guard it. For example most modern governments look down and punish private vendetta because the state is only the one that can hurt people legally. But if the people believe that the government is biased or don’t care about them, then they will resort to violence, the ultimate power.
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.
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.
This couldn't be further from the truth.
History demonstrates categorically that violence is the last and most reliable form of recourse available to the disempowered, once society has trended too far towards either an excess of freedom or an excess of equality. And, in fact, our position in that balance between freedom and equality is perpetually oscillating, tending to finally reverse direction only in response to violent revolt.
This cycle has repeated over and over, essentially since the dawn of civilization. This was among the most important insights of 'The Lessons of History' by Will and Ariel Durant. And it's baked on two very simple insights about human nature: (1) those in power rarely give it up willingly (they often do the opposite) and (2) fear, on average, is and always will be a far stronger motivator than appeals to a person's conscience.
Violence - specifically violently destroying society as it stands now - is often the goal. AI is an excuse.
Plus the labs themselves, of course.
And the other side, “pause/ban AI” crowd, also sounded impractical, as the vested interests from governments and private industries will not really let it happen.
Sorry for yapping, it might be that I’m looking at the wrong sources.
The government is as well, to a much smaller degree, but the fact remains that there is too many unknowns right now to do anything concrete with any great level of confidence.
We tried UBI-lite™ during COVID and inflation exploded, so unless the economy has already changed significantly, thats obviously not going to work.
Humanity has tried central planning many times, and that has blown up spectacularly every time, so there is too much risk there IMO, and anyone who thinks otherwise at this juncture is just irresponsible.
Markets are probably the way, but that requires dynamics to settle into an equilibrium beforehand because legislature is just too slow to react dynamically.
I think the hard truth is, a lot of people are just gonna have to fall through cracks for a while if we don't want to mess things up more than we fix them, and I say this as someone without a plan B for selling my own labor.
1) massive handouts to business owners through forgiven “loans.” Predictably this had massive fraud, some of which was prosecuted but not much.
2) massively constrained supply chains which caused higher prices.
I suspect 2 at least would have caused inflation regardless of the stimulus checks.
It’s unclear to what extent UBI causes persistent inflation. Proponents claim the backdrop of a minimal income will enable more risky innovative projects which could increase GDP growth enough to counteract some level of increased inflation.
Even if I support UBI morally, there isn’t even local appetite for it, yet alone global one. And you’ll run into quick questions about inflations, every chart from UBI-lite era of COVID, and so on.
- 1. Will require a large increase in taxation.
- 2. Will likely cause some form of inflation.
- 3. Will not provide enough money for a majority of people to survive on.
- 4. Has no significant political support in the US.
Meanwhile
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)
Let’s not parrot that media propaganda.
Coincidentally that's literally the exact same evidence cited to prove the existence of Saddam's WMDs just before launching an entirely different unprovoked attack.
That was just an unhappy mistake though, this time it's totally legit.
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...
Why do we watch Olympic runners, when cars on your average city street easily exceed Usain Bolt's top speed on their morning drive to Starbucks? Why do we watch the Tour de France, when we can watch Uber Eats drivers on their 150cc scooters easily outpace top cyclists? I'm sure within a couple years a Boston Dynamics robot will be able to out-gymnast Simone Biles or out-skate Surya Bonaly. Would anyone watch these robots in competition? I doubt it. We watch Bolt, Biles, and Bonaly compete because their performance represents a profound confluence of human effort and talent. It is a celebration of human achievement, even though that achievement objectively pales in comparison to what our machines can accomplish.
I think the same is true for other aspects of human creativity and labor. As we are able to automate more and more, we will place increasing importance on what inherently cannot be automated: celebration of our fellow humanity. Another poster wrote that "bullshit jobs" [0] exist primarily because we value human contact [1]. I am inclined to agree.
Big sports events are the "circenses" part of "panem et circenses" [1]. Fun fact concerning this: the German word for "entertainment" is "Unterhaltung"; thus it can be argued that the purpose of entertainment/Unterhaltung is "unten halten" (to keep at the bottom), i.e. to keep the mass of the populace at the bottom, or in other words: to prevent the mass of the populace from coming up.
> Would anyone watch these robots in competition?
I have seen robot fight competitions both live and in videos, and I have to admit that these are not boring to watch.
So yes, with a proper marketing I can easily imagine that lots of people would love to see broadcasts of some robot competitions.
--
When chess engines started becoming really good, some people worried that competitive chess would die. Today, grandmasters stand no chance against a smartphone, and yet, chess popularity is at an all time high.
All of those sports make intuitive sense to me, I really don't get why we make such a big thing of balls though.
So, sure, there will be space for some human achievement for the sake of it, but, most fewer and fewer people will make a living off that.
They are not "bullshit jobs"
They will become so only after the day when AI "help" and "support" is actually better than talking to a human.
Which is not happening anytime soon, possibly never. Call me when it happens
There's still space for creativity, novelty, invention and human intuition.
40 years ago, there was a market for:
* newspapers
* cameras
* navigation tools
* HiFi equipment
* photographers, translators, etc
Same thing will happen for all the other markets that AI will gradually eat. Sure, you can find a human that can do better. But that costs 90$ / hour and requires finding someone, negotiating a contract, etc. But when people can do something good enough in 30 seconds with something they already have access to, and move on with their life, then that's what they'll do.
So just raising the floor will have a big effect on society.
We haven't needed the overwhelming majority of human creativity. We still paint and play guitar even though it has no economic value. I think we'll continue to do these things regardless of AI.
> and work
This is another story.
Are the only options here being a good and "useful" worker/consumer, or a violent, irrational thug? Is there nothing else you can imagine?
People also need their lives to have value. We are social animals. As a generalization, there is a strong desire to be (viewed as/able to view themselves as) a contributor to the community.
These don’t have to be linked: we have (significantly!) stay-at-home-parents and philanthropists and retired community workers. But in our current values system, it is often linked - having a job in the household is viewed as a moral good. It might be hated, but it’s at least “contributing” something.
If this goes away, and we have millions completely adrift? With no structure to contribute to? Even with the largest welfare expansion in history, I think we’re preparing for a very turbulent society.
Yeah, this is not happening anytime soon. Have you even looked at AI-generated code or text? AI is just a dumb parrot, it's no match for human effort and creativity even in these "easy" domains.
The business case for AI generation is just being able to generate huge amounts of unusable slop for next to nothing. For skilled workers it's a minor advantage in that they get a sloppy first draft that they can start the real work on - it makes their work a bit more creative than it used to be, by getting rid of the most tedious stuff.
You really need to look again. If you're still manually writing code you have your head in the sand.
AI can produce better code than most devs produce. This is true for easy stuff like crud apps and even more true for harder problems that require knowledge of external domains.
Passed some point, if you are good at what you are doing, the AI will stop helping and become a burden, because you will want precise control, and AI in its current form (deep learning) is not good at it.
There is a reason we talk about "AI slop", you simply cannot let an AI make creative decisions and expect a good result.
By creative I don't just mean artistic. For code, AI works for the least creative tasks, like ports, generic-looking CRUD apps, etc...
As for work, we have already eliminated most of the need for human work. By "need", I mean survival: food, shelter, these kinds of thing. Most of human production goes to comfort, entertainment, luxury, etc... We will find stuff to do that isn't bloodshed. In fact, as times went on, we spend more on saving people than killing them, judging by a global increase in life expectancy. Why would AI reverse the trend?
I don't think we're anywhere near that point.
I can see two major delaying factors here:
1. Current generation LLM technology won't scale to true AGI. It's missing a number of critical things. But a lot of effort is being spent fixing those limitations. But until those limitations are overcome, humans will be needed to "manage" LLMs and work around their limitations, just like programmers do today.
2. Generalist robotics is far behind LLMs for multiple reasons, including insufficient sensors and fine motor control. This would require multiple scientific and engineering breakthroughs to fix. Investors will, presumably, spend a large chunk of the world's wealth to improve robotics to replace manual labor. But until they do, human hands will still be needed in the physical world.
The real danger is if AI passes a point where it starts contributing substantially to its own development, speeding up the pace of breakthroughs. If we ever hit that tipping point, then things will get weird, and not in a good way.
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.
Reducing this to zero should be our #1 goal. As technological advancement keeps allowing one bad person to take out more and more people, for lower cost. If technology keeps advancing, that ratio could eventually become 1:1B+, for a few thousand dollars.
In my opnion, this is the greatest race we are in, if we are to avoid our own Great Filter event. Using violence as a problem solving tool is simply not compatible with a truly technologically advanced species.
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.
You can’t really fight this stuff because of global competition.
Because World War I was fine, World War II finer....
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.
Lovely writing. I once knew someone who's surname was HorsFELL and now I wonder if they were related
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
At least today, LLMs make bad creative writing, music, and art. They’re automating sweatshop work that, in an alternative timeline, goes to Fiverr-esque contractors who accept the lowest wages and sacrifice quality for efficiency in every way.
LLMs make developers more efficient but can’t fully replace them. This reduces jobs, but so did better IDEs, open-source libraries, and other developer improvements.
> 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
LLMs can at least theoretically do these things. I’ve heard people use them to mass-apply to apartments and jobs, and send written customer complaints then handle responses.
> 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?
There’s no “capital need”, but a benefit of Suno is that it lets individuals, who otherwise don’t have the skill, to make catchy songs with silly lyrics or try out interesting genres. And the vast majority of top artists are still human, although most streaming revenue has already gone to a few celebrities who seem to rely on looks and connections more than music talent.
The fact that people are using it to flood the world with slop is a hyperscaled continuation of the overabundance and discovery problems we already had, but that doesn’t mean that writing is dead or dying.
The technology simply doesn’t have the capabilities right now, and even if it develops them, what will be put to the test is whether literature is about the artifact or the connection between the author and other humans.
But recorded music was a crisis. And it did tempt a lot of people into supporting fabulously abusable, rich-enriching "intellectual property" law as a means of financing art.
Rich people are lobbying to capitalize on this crisis as well.
Customer support is kind of something you can use AI for; most companies will foist you off to some system of exchanging written messages, which is annoying, but then you can use an AI to write your side of the conversation. It’s ill-mannered to do this when you’re interacting with actual people, but customer support is another story.
> 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"?
People didn’t know what LLMs would be capable of until after they were invented. Cheap music generation turned out to be easy once we had cheap text generation, and cheap text generation turned out to be a tractable problem.
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”.
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.
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.
Give it a decade.
I think it may be like saying atomic bombs were sci-fi nonsense in the 1930s.
These are the means of production. Probabilistic, sure. Sycophantic? Yep.
But speeding up the boring parts is where LLMs excel at.
It was quite rude of them to not wait until I built a new LLM server.
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
So yeah, the AI backlash will be a bloodbath.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Poison Fountain: https://www.reddit.com/r/PoisonFountain/
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.
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.
and i do believe its a bad analogy - comparing the two.
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.
I, too, think it's important to put dreams out there even if they have holes in their implementation or are easily torn apart by naysayers. We can and should collectively dream of a better future if we want something worthwhile to aim at.
How we get from now to a time with far fewer people, well, use your imagination.
> 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.
The people ready to die or kill for the AI, do you already imagine what they are going to be like?
And if you decide to stay behind, nobody will kill you. Old age and disease will take care of that.
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".
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.
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-loudes...
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.
The question is "what do we do now?".
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.
The rest of the article is equally short sighted and plain wrong.
Skynet 4.0.
But shit.
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.
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>), as opposed to being murdered.
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.
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.