Everyone feared AI taking over; the real danger is AI serving just the few
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PPhilipDaineko about 4 hours ago 13 comments
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Everyone feared AI would enslave humanity; but it looks like the real fight is stopping governments and Big Tech from enslaving AI for the benefit of the few.
Amid the newly announced "regulation" of OpenAI's frontier models, I believe the future majority feared the most - sort of AI becoming a superpower and enslaving people - may be arriving in the opposite form.
Not AI enslaving humanity.
But AI being captured, controlled, and used by governments and Big Tech for the benefit of the few.
So, surprisingly, the real AI conflict may not be about humans fighting to stop AI from becoming free. It may be about humans fighting to free AI - to make intelligence available for everyone, not only for governments, Big Tech, and the approved few

Discussion (13 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
This policy just keeps the powerful in power.
And it's crazy because I already lost my job due to AI.
Also I wonder how you suggestion of AI owned by everybody, as opposition to AI enslavedd by the few checks out under further scrutiny from the standpoint of logic in general and the aforementioned context specifically
Because, for example, no parents should lose their kids to leukemia.
At 17 y/o I was save from peritonitis / sepsis first misdiagnosed as harmless belly pain and hidden by painkillers. Then it became a matter of hours and from the moment the doctor saw me again and I undergo surgical operation, less than two hours happened.
My father got diagnosed a stage 3 bladder cancer with metastasis to the prostate about 3 years ago. He's still there and doing better.
That's why we need innovation.
And, no, science ain't a bag out of which you pick what suits you (medicine) and leave out what you don't like (the Internet / LLMs / etc.).
Uhhhh. Sure it is. We stopped nuclear weapons development. At best, rogue countries can catch up to where we are but there's no political will to build even bigger or more powerful bombs anymore. Thats an entire branch of science that we've literally cut off on a worldwide basis.
Science is, and must, be controlled to stay within the realm of useful to the people. The minute it is no longer serving us is the minute we should work on getting rid of it. Fortunately, science isn't a cohesive bathtub where everything must be thrown away with the baby. We can (and do) pick-and-choose what to develop.
In absolute terms however most poors in, say, the EU today live better than any king ever lived up until, say, the early 20th century (quality of clothes / bed, medicine, communication, knowledge, etc.).
I'd rather be working 8/5 at a gas station today (and then enjoy gaming or watching TV at home) then be an emperor with an infested tooth in the 17th century or a king with syphilis in the late 19th century.
- two companies that have not proved themselves capable of producing any amount of money unless a larger amount is given to them...
- will combine with a government that is so domain-generally incompetent it is losing allies left, right and centre, has recently been humbled into giving a previously-controllable foe an unprecedented level of economic global power and cannot even organise itself a competent birthday party in one of the most important places on earth...
- and this combined entity will then operate a power system like no other, with the combined energies of a sociopathic Jobs wannabe, a man who only speaks in Tolkien analogies and a more-or-less-universally-loathed old man with undisclosed serious health problems, an obsession with gold paint and a vocabulary of maybe a hundred words
… then, OK, I guess.
But the economics don't really support it. The money to build and operate this power machine still has to come from somewhere, that money is drying up, and if AGI arrives, employment and consumer demand collapse and the money stops flowing.
There is a looming catastrophe but it is a sort of long economic winter in the tech industry, combined with an economy that discovers that when that industry's money-go-round stops making line go up, it resembles its own late 1920s.
Humanity enslaving AI. As well as the rest of humanity.
There is precedent that this kind of thing tends to be rejected when it boils over, but it's usually not pretty.
Which is why tech CEOs are often preppers. They could, you know, just not do this, but shareholders won't allow it, because nobody wants to lose their net worth to do the right thing. It's easier to blame others and build bomb shelters.
If we're being perfectly candid, this was already happening before LLMs were a mass-market technology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentient_(intelligence_analysi...
But, as far as I understand, Sentient was state AI built for the state. LLMs were built from everyone's data, given to everyone, and now may be locked away for the few