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The technologists who create it believe they should control it, the people who use it are starting to believe they should control it and the governments who write the laws believe they should control it. And now the priests believe they should also play role.
So is the next phase of "Democracy" electing who controls technology?
I think there's an interesting phenomenon where it is _not_ the people who control it, but instead a kind of international finance man cum-captain of industry (perhaps best embodied by Sam Altman) who does not create the technology and yet has ended up wielding the levers.
What the hell is a “cum-captain”? Search isn’t helping.
I.e. finance man as well as captain of industry
Meanwhile, 500 years later Uber could disrupt the livery industry with VC cash that rendered a NY cab's owner/operator 6-figure financed medalion license worthless, and somehow that wasn't Uber's problem.
Now AI (set loose in the wild at the AI industry's strategic choice so as to be irreversible) seems poised to disrupt and render a very significant part of the labor force disrupted on an unprecedented societal scale and it appears to be a foregone conclusion that collateral damages won't be the causal industry's expense. Nevermind that its also poised to easily afford those social costs, and don't even consider that maybe society should be considering this obvious cause and effect. For me at least the feudal suppression of this otherwise obvious and necessary discussion is perhaps more spectacular than the causal technological breakthrough itself.
Now *that's* control.
You can be both a victim and a bully, it's not mutually exclusive. A scam artist can get mugged or burglarised, and so on. In general, in civilised countries, being a horrible person does not prevent someone from being recognised as a victim.
Same for Uber/Lyft, but they really tried to earn a good review while still providing a pretty unpleasant experience.
Uber/Taxi discussion is so transparently centered around New York City, it makes all discussions irrelevant to most of the US.
In fact, I still use a taxi to go to the airport with my family instead of taking an Uber. Uber is for being mid-run in city limits trails and running out of energy in the heat and the water fountains have stopped working due to low water pressure. Uber gets me to safety, and I tip big because I just sweated all over their car.
The first example is clear. And it has pretty much carried on, as the "right to property" and "the responsibility to cover damage to other's rights".
The second example, even though you wrote it as Uber vs. the cab driver, is more about Uber vs. the municipality. By the fact that almost all over the world people wanted Uber (or the other brands) over the imposed limitation of their municipalities, shows that the deal was wrong. In places where it was artificially limited, people have showed to prefer the alternatives. It has little to do with Bob the driver, and more to do with Alice the mayor who decided unilaterally that a taxi cab should require a 100k/yr medallion. That's what's changed, and society accepted it.
The third example is weirder still. Again you pose it as AI provider vs. average Joe, but here I struggle to even see what rights / who's rights are being infringed upon. I don't see any. While we generally have a right to work, there is absolutely no right to work in a certain industry, if the industry doesn't have demand. If someone else doesn't need your output, your right to work in that particular field has absolutely no basis in reality.
Unless you want to go back to the places and regimes that decided who works where, modern society has no place for such thinking. A right to work protects you from employers choosing not to hire you because of things that you are (race, age, gender, etc.) It absolutely doesn't protect you at all against "people don't need elevator operators anymore". And I say this as someone who's worked in this industry 20+ years. If tomorrow people don't need software done by hand anymore, tough luck for me. But it's absolutely not the problem of rights. I don't have a right to demand people wanting my services. That's not the social contract at all.
This was really just a few cities in the US. There's no artificial taxi scarcity in Houston or London or Tokyo.
You might reflexively say London has strict regulations, but it regulates safety not imposing an artificial cap. That's a NY/Boston/Chicago/Philly thing.
Uber won because:
1. on-demand app
2. VCs subsidized rides to destroy taxi companies by driving the customer cost to well below provider cost.
Ok.
> Meanwhile, 500 years later Uber could disrupt the livery industry with VC cash that rendered a NY cab's owner/operator 6-figure financed medalion license worthless, and somehow that wasn't Uber's problem.
And how does this paragraph connect to the previous one? The streets of New York isn't taxi drivers' private property. No one trampled their garden any more than me opening a coffee shop tramples the garden of the Starbucks down the street. Should we forbid any new entry into a market just because it upsets the incumbents who invested big money into their business?
I learn that boiling the stream water makes it safe and tell people about it.
What do I owe you?
Uber and AI are certainly more complicated than that, but you are pretty close to arguing that the constructed rights of some people inhibit the rights of other people.
Why is this Uber's problem? Do you realize how ridiculously dumb, inefficient, and corrupt a 6 figure taxi license is? It is not Uber's job to compensate for that ridiculousness.
They provided a better and more cash efficient solution for passengers. That is enough.
If you required every technological venture to cover the cost for every person it "disrupts," you would halt progress entirely.
They burned half a billion dollars a month of VC money at their peak to undercut taxis across the world; in quainter times this used to be called "dumping", now it's just the standard way of doing business. All the while basically flaunting the law with their whole "we're just a platform connecting people who happen to drive a car with people who happen to want to go some place, it's totally not a taxi guys". No regulations, no expensive licenses or professional certifications, no need even for a minimum wage or basic social security or insurance or any kind of protection. Amazing!
Essentially the same in spirit as Airbnb, only this latter had far more destructive consequences than screwing over taxi drivers.
Setting aside your implicit assumption that what nigh-unregulated AI is set to do to humanity is "progress," having a sound argument is pretty pointless if it leads to tremendous human suffering.
Reminds me of the paradox of intolerance, where bad faith actors say "it's intolerant to be intolerant of intolerance" (i.e., argue for zero exceptions to a maxim) when it's much more preferable to say "you should be tolerant, except in the case where tolerance leads to tremendous suffering [as in the case of allowing the rise of fascism because you have to be tolerant of it]."
See also libertarianism, where simple rules are preferable to good outcomes.
Doesn't it strike you that if licenses for a banal service like taxi are that expensive, that this likely indicates political corruption?
Good riddance to this sort of rent-seeking. I wonder if the NYC taxi service was provided by the mob.
In Central Europe, I don't have to wonder. Prior to Uber, the local taxi services were operated by the mob, and the taxi drivers basically robbed naive tourists through exorbitant, illegal prices. Stories of rape or abuse of intoxicated women abound. Some of the drivers were so sketchy and creepy that people refused to board their cars. Scammy Prague taxi service was legendary, but by far the worst sort of tracksuit-and-gun wearing mobsters behind the wheel I ever encountered was in late 1990s Bratislava.
This ugly rotten web was swept clean by Uber, where people have a reputation to maintain. Thanks god. My wife is no longer afraid to take a cab at night. Hooray.
Not necessarily. It indicates a profession that can be very easily abused to harm the general public and that requires some level of trust.
I think it goes deeper than this when you listen to them talk. They truly think society will be re-ordered by this technology... and they should be in control of that re-ordering rather than democratically elected governments.
We even had one out tariffs on steel, thinkinf this would be good for jobs here. If there was 0.1 seconds of thought they'd realize any manufacturing job you make from a steel tariff cuts 2 more well paid trade jobs
A technocracy can build high speed rail in a decade but it can also institute multi decade one child policy, multi year zero-covid, barricade people into their own homes and ban entire industries at the whim of a single leader. There is less course correction.
They knew that was the case. They don't care. The maga crowd isn't acting in good faith. Nobody other than the cult members and people who aren't paying attention thought that would actually bring manufacturing back to the US. The point of the tariffs is to devalue USD (something Trump wants to do since circa the 80s) and to strengthen Trump power/influence. He wants everybody in the world to be forced to come and negotiate directly with him so he can see them bend their knees. The whole thing is a power play
This needs to be shouted from the rooftops!
All the Web3 edgelords talk about how democracy is inefficient and how their magic blockchains will fix things but don't actually back up their claims with anything.
Sure, it could be applied and might work, but the only thing blockchain brings is a distributed immutable ledger -- but all the trust actions happen outside that ledger. And that's not what slows us down, it's the people, ideas, power and process that makes it inefficient.
Money is a hell of a drug.
This is starting to be true for AI and security bugs. Writing secure Internet-facing software will depend on AI security review. Anthropic can hold Mythos back for a while to buy some time, but the competition isn’t going to stop.
It’s also not always true that technologists think they should control AI. Some companies support legislation. But there’s not a lot of progress, so they end up making their own decisions in the meantime.
It should be put in the hands of the most trustworthy, transparent institution that can validate it works for all of us, not just the few.
I don't think private companies or specific leaders want the best for the common good, so it would make the most sense to give control to a supra-nation entity like the UN - at least that would be the most democratic as we all have the chance to influence it (via voting from national to international level).
This is a very naive and idealistic imagining of what international NGOs such as the UN are actually like and how they operate. I can't think of anything worse.
The median country is a corrupt authoritarian state.
But I also feel that it has been a particularly toothless organization. If a member state decides it is in their interest to flout some safeguard they were to mandate, that state will do so, and the U.N. won’t do anything about it unless there’s broad agreement between the US, China, and probably Russia. And the chances are that whoever is in need of enforcement is one of those, or a closely allied country of one.
Look at the state of discussion just in this thread. I minimized my contribution for this reason.
In Russian, there's a saying: He who feeds a girl is the one to dance her.
In this case, the food is the money printed out of thin air.
Political power has always about who controls economic production, and the tools of economic production.
Isn't that just an instance of the political problem for all ages: who controls what, who gets to rule and who obeys, the fundamental power struggle apparent in all human history.
Extend the definition of technology to the broadest sense, from the material that allow us control over the physical reality: steam, computing; to the organizational, that enable collective human action: states, factories and assembly lines; and the ideological, that legitimize certain power arrangements: religion, nationalism, democracy, human rights etc.
A feudal lord's power rested on land (material), the manorial system (organizational), and the divine right of kings or religious sanction (ideological). Even if peasant revolts happen from time to time, the arrangement is stable because the peasantry accept it as legitimate and have no economic alternative; so even when revolting they cannot imagine a different political order. Technological (broad) leaps like the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution change the political possibility space so arrangements like feudalism are no longer stable, but others like capitalism, liberal democracy etc. become possible.
Political actors observe these technological shifts and struggle for control, relevance and power. The old elites are contested by the new kids on the block, wielding the new technologies: the aristocrat by the bourgeois, pastoralist tribes by agricultural states, autocrats stuck with traditional propaganda by the kids with smartphones and social media.
The present struggle around AI is therefore to be expected; what's more interesting is the type of political possibility space it opens up: is it one where having the bulk of society educated and productive, capable of running the machines is the key factor pushing the country forward in the international technological competition, like we've see post-war, forcing the national elites to cater to their needs, invest in their populations and broadly share the economic output and the political power? Or is it more likely one where the key competitive factor is the size of your datacenters and automated defense factories, where the bulk of people are irrelevant for the architecture of power?
Because if it's the latter, the entire idea that democracy will somehow manage to survive and influence who gets what becomes problematic. In the new technological-historical space, democracy becomes structurally unfavorable and thus, unlikely to persist long term.
Yes. But modern technology, especially software doesn't have the high barrier to entry like being a feudal lord, but successful software can be just as impactful, tie in economies of scale and network effects and it can be even more powerful, which has allowed the producers of such software to wield significant power and as a result bypass democracy. And this ties in with your point:
> The present struggle around AI is therefore to be expected; what's more interesting is the type of political possibility space it opens up: is it one where having the bulk of society educated and productive, capable of running the machines is the key factor pushing the country forward in the international technological competition, like we've see post-war, forcing the national elites to cater to their needs, invest in their populations and broadly share the economic output and the political power? Or is it more likely one where the key competitive factor is the size of your datacenters and automated defense factories, where the bulk of people are irrelevant for the architecture of power?
It remains to be seen if this era of LLMs and datacenters raises or reduces the barrier to entry for software production and in general technological innovation. The marketplace is always hungry for innovation and those that can deliver and control it will be in a position of power.
Dark times ahead...
But it's a perennial question, really, and it won't go away any time soon.
Mitigating seemingly has devolved to trade wars and protectionism.
The genie is out the bottle with AI though. So perhaps decentralisation of it puts us all on a new level playing field.
> Thiel: [...] There’s a risk of nuclear war, there’s a risk of environmental disaster. Maybe something specific, like climate change, although there are lots of other ones we’ve come up with. There’s a risk of bioweapons. You have all the different sci-fi scenarios. Obviously, there are certain types of risks with A.I.
> But I always think that if we’re going to have this frame of talking about existential risks, perhaps we should also talk about the risk of another type of a bad singularity, which I would describe as the one-world totalitarian state. Because I would say the default political solution people have for all these existential risks is one-world governance.
> [...]
> The atheist philosophical framing is “One World or None.” That was a short film that was put out by the Federation of American Scientists in the late ’40s. It starts with the nuclear bomb blowing up the world, and obviously, you need a one-world government to stop it — one world or none. And the Christian framing, which in some ways is the same question, is: Antichrist or Armageddon? You have the one-world state of the Antichrist, or we’re sleepwalking toward Armageddon. “One world or none,” “Antichrist or Armageddon,” on one level, are the same question.
> [...]
> Thiel: [...] The way the Antichrist would take over the world is you talk about Armageddon nonstop. You talk about existential risk nonstop, and this is what you need to regulate. It’s the opposite of the picture of Baconian science from the 17th, 18th century, where the Antichrist is like some evil tech genius, evil scientist who invents this machine to take over the world. People are way too scared for that.
> In our world, the thing that has political resonance is the opposite. The thing that has political resonance is: We need to stop science, we need to just say “stop” to this. And this is where, in the 17th century, I can imagine a Dr. Strangelove, Edward Teller-type person taking over the world. In our world, it’s far more likely to be Greta Thunberg.
> [...]
> Douthat: [...] You’re an investor in A.I. You’re deeply invested in Palantir, in military technology, in technologies of surveillance and technologies of warfare and so on. And it just seems to me that when you tell me a story about the Antichrist coming to power and using the fear of technological change to impose order on the world, I feel like that Antichrist would maybe be using the tools that you are building. Like, wouldn’t the Antichrist be like: Great, we’re not going to have any more technological progress, but I really like what Palantir has done so far. Isn’t that a concern? Wouldn’t that be the irony of history, that the man publicly worrying about the Antichrist accidentally hastens his or her arrival?
> Thiel: Look, there are all these different scenarios. I obviously don’t think that that’s what I’m doing.
---
We live in crazy times. The Pope is pleading for multilateralism and responsible regulation of technology. On the other side, Thiel says fear of technological progress could lead us to a one-world totalitarian government (which he relates to the antichrist, and to me seems like a straw man of multilateralism), while at the same time (arguably) building the technological infrastructure such a totalitarian government would need.
I don't know, I think I'm siding with the Pope on all future antichrist related issues.
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/opinion/peter-thiel-antic...
According to the Economist at least, he doesn't seem to know what he wants. The encyclical sounds like a grabbag of every progressive meme and worry out there, whether they contradict each other or not.
You can't have both multilateralism and AI regulation (however that's defined). If you have genuine multilateralism then there will always be some jurisdictions that say they don't want to regulate and gain a competitive advantage by doing so. Because AI is symbolic and accessed over networks, in a truly multilateral world there is no such thing as AI regulation, really. Model development and serving will slowly migrate to jurisdictions that don't pin it down too much.
The only way to stop this is for every jurisdiction in the world to agree on the same set of rules. Which is the One World Government solution, normally in the 21st century approximated with economic pressure e.g. threatening to sanction or blacklist your country if you don't comply with some new rules. The anti-money laundering system is an example of that. And if you become familiar with the stories of its abuse, then AML can sound pretty darn Antichristy. So Thiel isn't far off.
As far as the church is concerned, AI as an issue will come and go, but the ordering and prioritization of human relationships is timeless, and is the important issue. The subtext of the whole thing is that if you get the principles right, the tech policy will fall into place.
You can argue with those principles, but at that point you really are just arguing with Catholicism itself, which is fine, but is besides the point.
(I'm not engaging with or disputing your takes on policy, only with your comment as a critique of the encyclical itself.)
This whole section is clearly about AI and social policy. It makes occasional Biblical references but if you strip those out it sounds like any Democrat podcast. If random people were given these quotes stripped of context, how many would guess it was the Pope?
For example: > What is needed is a more active political involvement that is capable of slowing things down when everything is accelerating
That's a demand for AI regulation.
Then take the paragraph that starts with:
> In many cases within the digital context, control over platforms, infrastructure, data and computing power does not rest with States, but with major economic and technological actors [snip]
The whole paragraph has nothing to do with Catholicism. It could have been written by the EU Commission and you'd never know. In it he appears to argue for the nationalization of AI labs, using standard progressivist claims.
Later the Pope argues once again for the nationalization of not just AI labs but all intellectual property held by the computing industry, using an argument I'm not afraid to condemn as theologically specious. In "The principle of the universal destination of goods" he says first that things like earth and water are given by God and thus everyone has a "right" to use them as they wish. From a theological perspective this is reasonable, albeit not from an economic perspective. But then he argues that patents, algorithms, datacenters and digital platforms are exactly the same as soil and water, and thus everyone should have them for free. That's nonsense. The religious justification for the first is that God made planet Earth, but He obviously didn't invent the transformer algorithm so why would the same logic apply?
All this is just standard left wing politics. The only theological justification I could find in the first part of this chapter is that some other recent Pope agrees with him.
I don't have any problem with Catholics or Catholicism. In fact I've written a whole essay arguing that AI raises issues only religion can deal with:
https://blog.plan99.net/the-looming-ai-consciousness-train-w...
Religion has something to contribute when it comes to pondering questions like, what is AI? Does it deserve compassion and feelings, does it have consciousness and free will, or is it just a machine? Does the creation of it make us challengers to God or would He have approved of us making creatures in our own image? But the Pope doesn't engage with those topics. Instead we get advocacy for government power. The world has enough of such politics already.
For those of you playing at home, you can definitely have multi-lateral agreements without creating a one world government. We’ve had a chemical weapons ban for decades over which many of the multi-lateral parties were in hot and cold wars with each other. The nations are not going to magically combine over the presence of a treaty. Not how power works.
Of course you can have multilateralism and regulations. And no, AML is not an antichrist.
And Thiel with his plan yo create totalitatian fascist word is one of the greater danger to most of us. Way greater then AML regulations.
Now consider the unlucky German-Turkish journalist Hüseyin Dogru, who was recently placed under trade sanctions by the EU Commission due to his reporting. But they did it while he was living in Europe. The sanctions force everyone - including his neighbours and supermarkets - to refuse to sell him anything.
Then they realized, what if his wife buys him food? So they sanctioned his wife too.
Then they realized, what if his parents buy him food? So they sanctioned his parents as well.
Literally the entire family has been put to economic death. The state will imprison anyone who helps them and confiscate the entire net worth of anyone who conceivably might help them. All appeals have been denied.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%BCseyin_Do%C4%9Fru#EU-San...
They are now completely screwed and reduced to living on a subsidence budget of ~500 EUR/month from the government, calculated to be just enough that his family don't literally die of starvation.
https://x.com/hussedogru/status/2037859218326180064
https://diariosocialista.net/2026/05/28/alemania-recrudece-l...
This is possible because of the systems-level implementation of the AML/sanctions system and its existence outside any kind of justice system. It's the kind of thing that Thiel meant by a totalitarian antichrist. The Bible warned of the "mark of the beast" on people's hands that would prevent people buying and selling if the antichrist doesn't approve of him. Well, a revoked EMV contactless credit card is basically that. If Jesus were alive today he would presumably have harsh criticisms of this kind of thing.
The world is barreling toward conditions that haven't existed for a century. God help us.
Sincerely,
Guy Who Talks About Armageddon Nonstop
One world government was achieved with the petrodollar and english becoming lingua franca of earth. International agreements and trade further centralize this one world government we’ve created. Just squint and you can see it plainly already. The public aren’t told about it because they will feel disenfranchised. But it already exists.
A studied person once admonished me "avoid the word IS when comparing systems in the abstract"
And baby sisters’ walkin’ on her knees
Now did the Lord say that machines ought to take place of livin’?
And what’s a substitute for bread and beans? I ain’t seen it!
Do engines get rewarded for their steam?”
- “John Henry” sung by Johnny Cash
(downloaded the full PDF and looking forward to read it on my eReader)
(No, I have not read it, nor do I intend to read 42,000 words, thank you)
"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
And when the dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites now down to 10 seconds or less, lowest-common-denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance."
- Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (with Ann Druyan)
My personal view is that biological intelligence is fundamentally an unstable state. We should enjoy every moment of it, like you enjoy the brief flowering of a desert cactus. It's basically the same thing.
https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad
Enjoy Argentina bros.
Catholic social teaching, which this encyclical is grounded on, has it's roots in Rerum novarum (1891) by Leo XIII (the Pope's namesake) and it dealt with the changing conditions of people due to the industrial revolution. We are potentially in the midst of another revolution (I suspect it will be less significant the the IR), so it is prudent of the church to develop a house view.
The analogy would be like if, since the world cup of soccer is going on, FIFA had a meeting and decided every goal was worth 3 points instead of 1 point. Some people might accept that this is "true soccer" and some "legitimate change to the game". Others would denounce the organization and set up their own leagues to preserve "traditional soccer", and declare the FIFA leadership has no "true authority", and that the meeting deciding on 3 goals has no "binding authority" on "true soccer fans". Something like that has happened.
Section 20 of the new "encyclical" reads:
> The Second Vatican Council expressed this principle with particular precision in the Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, whose sixtieth anniversary we remembered and celebrated with gratitude on 7 December 2025: “If by the autonomy of earthly affairs is meant that created things and societies themselves enjoy their own laws and values… then the demand for autonomy is perfectly in order.” [10]
I don't believe this is the former Catholic teaching on "autonomy"; man is not "autonomous" but subject to God's laws. Autonomy would be a "license to sin": you could set your own "law" that it is ok to do this or that thing contrary to Catholic teaching. This is therefore the wrong understanding of "autonomy", and they are ambiguous about what they mean by "true autonomy" (which would be a "freedom within limits"; much like in Genesis, Adam and Eve had total liberty to eat from whatever tree, except for that of the tree which yielded "forbidden fruit").
I believe the document contains more errors like this, continuing this heretical movement of modernism.
"enjoy their own laws and values" is affirming that the natural world has an objective structure that can be studied on its own terms. Denying that autonomy is occasionalism, which is a heretical view that created things have no real power or nature of their own.
Genisis supports the statement about autonomy. Adam is given the task to subdue the earth, name the animals. To name them means to understand their specific natures. God did not dictate the names, he left that to Adam's human intellect. That's exactly what Gaudium et Spec refers to. Humans utilize their reason to discover the laws of creation and organize human society. We have genuine liberty within the overreaching metaphysical boundries.
The pope is against tech companies getting power but is happy for the Catholic Church to gather power and abuse it when it’s for his causes. No thanks. Tech companies are far less evil than Catholicism.
I wouldn't even bother reading whatever they wrote.
Because of the nuance involved in explaining theological concepts there's a long, long history of reviewing and approving books that explain doctrine. LLM outputs can be reviewed by a competent authority and approved for publication but releasing an AI to explain the theology to the general public in any sort of official way is impossible.