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We went through a cycle like this once before in U.S. history, and the amount of violence it took to correct the overreach of organized money was not 0.
A little disturbing to be quite honest, though I suppose this is what happens when a generation takes “eat the rich” not as a LARPy political slogan but as a real call to action.
Demonstrations are a start, though they seem to be more useful for networking inside a group and forcing the press to pay attention to some matter. Decision makers can easily ignore them.
What's less easy to ignore are strikes, especially general strikes, as e.g. port workers in Italy threatened during the total blockade in the Gaza war.
Also: disinvestment, boycotts, public shunning, adverse publicity, picketing, blockades.
Start small, increase the pressure over time, be clear about what you're doing and why.
There is growing anger and discontentment in a large part of the population, driven by inequality of wealth and power. Hopelessness and a lack of control over the future.
Are the nodes of power willing to spread wealth and control more widely to stabilize the country? What are they willing to do to consolidate their power? The vast majority of violence is perpetrated by those nodes, to either consolidate power, or gain more of it.
Other people in this thread have already suggested more actionable responses: organize, unionize, understand class dynamics, and vote accordingly.
So, yes RLHF is available right now, for people with specific backgrounds. That RLHF work is temporary and it's going to make hundreds of thousands of people redundant. The RLHF work is actually job-negative, it is work which will later deprive others of a way to make a living.
Once that training work dries up, what happens to the people who were doing the job which AI now does? How do they pay rent? How do they feed and clothe themselves? What answers do any AI proponant actually have for this, or is the intention that every person shuts the critical thinking part of their brain off and trusts the computer will come up with something?
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/10/ar...
That title reeks of the paper equivalent of clickbait. The paper is about subjective well-being and mental health in the psychological sense. Broader well-being includes material conditions like income, housing, health care, safety, and social connections. So a null result on subjective well-being is not necessarily a null result on material welfare, and the problems that leads to. The paper’s own abstract also talks about context effects rather than a simple universal null.
> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/10/ar...
Unions are not perfect, but they have been an important check on exploitation. Organized labor helped win the 40-hour workweek. If you demand perfect solutions, you end up doing nothing. And given that you're up against people with nearly unlimited resources, you can't afford to be picky.
By sending bombs to people Ted Kaczynski made the "should we really do this" discussion of technology off limits for decades.
I'm just waiting for dang, et. al to fix our thread voting system as it's a little too Reddity around here these last days.
A little wild to me that so many of the replies don't understand that.
FL crafted a law to help safeguard someone who gets sued for running over a protestor. I think this illustrates how a law can protect problems rather than solving them.
The people saying it doesn’t work are the same people who can’t must the effort to even contact their representative.
I had a professor in college who was big on entrepreneurship. So he formed an organization, got others involved, went to Washington to lobby his rep. His rep said “let’s do it”, and sat him down with her staff to write a bill. That bill was brought to the floor for a vote and passed.
Until you’ve done that, dont complain the system doesn’t work.
The issue with politics today is the level of engagement of the average voter. Few people ever get involved, so the vacuum gets filled with whichever power-hungry mediocre person who puts some effort in.
This is a sign of the system not working. A well connected professor, with plenty of free time to form an organization and go to Washington to talk to his rep
Might as well be an industry lobbyist.
Could a worker from Walmart do the same thing? In theory sure. In practice unlikely, for any number of reasons. Not least because people are unlikely to take a Wal Mart worker seriously enough to join their organization.
California has a referendum system. Get signatures for a policy and put it to the voters.
> I don't think I've ever seen a thread this bad on Hacker News. The number of commenters justifying violence, or saying they "don't condone violence" and then doing exactly that, is sickening and makes me want to find something else to do with my life—something as far away from this as I can get. I feel ashamed of this community.
> Edit: for anyone wondering (or hoping), no I'm not leaving. That was a momentary expression of dismay.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47728106
Perhaps something to think about in a scenario like this. Personally I think it's interesting that some people are so quick to condone aggressive attacks on powerful people, yet have no comment on those powerful people committing lower levels of violence against the masses. It's all social context.
[1] https://youtu.be/GRYcSuyLiJk?si=HhnAUKelmR7igO9x
How is a person from a nation that the US President has threatened to annex or invade supposed to feel about seeing domestic violence in the United States? From their perspective a divided United States is less of a personal threat to them.
All this talk about how 'we can't have this in a democracy!' forgets that many of us don't live in that particular democracy, and that particular democracy is threatening other democracies.
What should my response be if a North Korean General is executed? Or if a Russian oligarch 'falls out a window'? Or a corrupt Mexican politician is beheaded by a rival cartel?
These American oligarchs aren't my countrymen, They don't have my best interests in mind, they fund the people who threaten my country, and now they provide the American military with technology that it can use to attack my country.
Their lobbying and campaign contributes have resulted in a Mad King waging an unwinnable war that has severely damaged the global economy and has made my life demonstrably worse. I have never done anything to these people and yet they callously did this to all of us for personal profit well beyond what any human being could never need in a thousand life times.
At the end of the day the less cohesive the American tribe is the better off my tribe is. I wish our incentives were aligned but they just aren't and I am not in any way responsible for that.
All of those arguments will be vile, as they have to be given the context.
I'm not criticizing you, and I guess I'm glad someone wrote this comment quickly. You're right. But I would caution people against reading too much into the countervailing sentiment here. It's not trolling, but it is something adjacent to it.
Like 1812 when the Brits weren't busy with the French they easily came in and burnt the US capital as punishment for burning the Canadian one. It's not that the British army suddenly got a lot stronger; they just weren't busy fighting on two continents.
That said, civil disobedience is largely pointless. We're in a capitalistic society so money is the name of the game. Rosa Parks did shit-all; it was the boycott of the bus system for 9 months that made the buses cave.
Did you ever think that maybe people do in fact believe what they say they believe?
In general, violence can certainly solve problems, especially when the problems are not being caused by almost-inevitable technological revolutions. One of the issues to keep in mind, though, is that it often also creates new ones, often surprising ones. For example, the assassination that led to World War One. For another example, if Trump had been assassinated last year, that would have solved many problems for people who dislike Trump. However, that doesn't necessarily mean it would have made the world overall a better place - that is almost impossible to predict. Hence the sci-fi sort of scenario of "you go back in time and kill Hitler, but when you return to your own time it turns out that Hitler dying just let mega-Hitler take power".
Sure, but keep in mind that Hitler is already pretty bad. So while yes, killing him might open the door to someone worse stepping in, it may also open the door to someone more level headed.
You know. In theory.
The people who are doing this stuff are unhinged but why? Perhaps they do not trust law and order. Perhaps they feel helpless and have been led to believe its over for the labour class due to the overhyped marketing and so on.
A serious frank conversation needs to be had and the hyping needs to stop.
Or, if you truly believed AI was a threat and represented material harm and managed to get standing to bring a suit, you are looking at years and years and years of litigation.
Here's your canary.
This information of course might be false, so take the words below with a grain of salt. I might be completely wrong.
When an influential group in the Valley that has ties to many tech companies spends years speading rhetoric about “bombing data centers” or the title of the book above, I fear this kind of psychosis is inevitable. People in this thread are focusing on labour and AI issues as the motivation but I am afraid the problem might be closer to home.
Disclaimer: I am not American, just an outside observer.
Some random people with a gun and a Molotov aren't even the same (metaphorical) book.
* likely still better than me though, even on this specific measure. But even being the ten thousandth best speaker on the planet, out of 8 billion, leaves you at a huge disadvantage compared to the best.
> bombing data centers
At the risk of demonstrating the exact mistake I've just accused Yudkowsky and Altman of:
With B-52s, not as a DIY job with home-made Molotovs.
If you start with the claim "AI has the potential to cause as much harm as nuclear weapons", and "the USA already uses B-52s to enforce the non-proliferation treaty", this follows naturally.
If you're not willing to call on your representative to sign a binding international treaty to stop data centres that forcefully, talking about "stopping AI" or "pausing AI" seems hollow, because even if your government agrees to not build data centres near you as a result of low-grade domestic terrorism, in the absence of a credible threat to use a B-52 on someone else's sovereign territory there's nothing that you and your flaming rag in a bottle of petroleum distillate can do about them being built outside your country, in exactly the same way and for exactly the same reasons that German public opposition to nuclear weapons completely failed to influence North Korea.
The last thing I want is for someone, in 2029, to say "but LLMs just weren't given a fair chance last time, we would have definitely reached AGI with more funding if it wasn't for [targeted attack]"
Didn't work for a german political party some centuries ago, don't work for this.
But violence is false.
Full stop, no "but". That's all that needs to be said on this thread.
Here in Sweden, back in the 1400eds etc. the farmers often made war on the government whenever it did anything they didn't like. This had the long term consequence, that by the end of this era, self-owning farmers owned 50% of the land in Sweden, whereas in Denmark, which did not have this kind of violence, it was only 10%.
It's incredibly important to be feared and to engage in violence, so that you are in practice and can threaten your political opponents, and this remains true in a democracy.
It's important that powerful people know they can't trust that they will truly be protected by the laws if they do something which harms others-- that the veneer of civilization is thin and the masses dangerous. Otherwise you end up with very dangerous situations where people can get away with anything that's legal.
The long gone history of a country is not a something that should be allowed to determine its modern narratives. You shouldn't forget your history, but there are limits you shouldn't cross. When I hear arguments going back for centuries, it is a red flag for me. It is most likely a propaganda.
Psychologists talk about two common failing of their clients. People often fixate over the past or they fixate over the future, while forgetting about the present. The healthy approach is to keep a good balance between the past, the future, and the present, with a strong accent on the present. The history determinism reminds me a lot of the over-fixation on the past, and propaganda actively tries to unsettle balances in people's minds and fixate them on anything but the present.
Back to the argument that historical determinism is flawed…
I think it’s very reasonable to say that it happened in the past, therefore it probably will happen in the future. That’s the basis for pretty much any kind of prediction.
If you want to argue against historical determinism, you have to make the specific argument for why the current state is different enough that we can’t use the past to predict the future.
That’s just an example of American propaganda
No. My logic applied here would imply that environtal unconsciousness can produce results becuase we got here by being environmentally unconscious. And that is true, burning coal for energy, while unsustainable, does produce results. Youll get energy, on demand, in a controlled manner.
Now, we should be careful doing it, but if you go to an amazonian tribesperson and yell at them for burning wood for a fire, becaise solar panels exist, then thats doesnt make complete sense
you can disagree that this was necessary, which I'd agree with.
You can't call yourself a democracy just because we can change the colour of the same bus every 3 to 4 years
Yes, violence shouldn't be the first resort, and when violence is unleashed innocent suffer as well, but there is a great difference between choosing not to use violence due to whatever consideration, and being so toothless and tamed that a sight of dog that finally bites when being constantly beaten sickens you.
We're not on first resort anymore, people are dying because they cannot afford living.
1. Violent attacks against AI CEOs, researchers, and engineers is going to begin. This is due to widespread negative press that AI receives and as well as a pervasive feeling of economic uncertainty and doom in the population. Some of this being caused by the current administration's leadership, but much of it attributed to AI taking jobs and destroying opportunity.
2. Violent acts taken against non-tech CEOs will increase hand-in-hand.
3. If AI continues to demonstrate impressive new capabilities for automation, this rate will increase substantially.
4. The government may come down hard on these individuals, which will further inflame the situation.
5. Data centers will come under attack / sabotage.
6. This will all wind up further inflamed by prediction markets.
I have a colleague at Anthropic that refuses to put it on his LinkedIn. We all now know why.
The pro-Palestinian activists set their cause back a year by overplaying their hands in Columbia at the start of the war. If we want to ensure zero AI legislation for the next 2 years, I couldn’t think of a better way to ensure that than to start potting randos in the streets.
I doubt it. It would further polarize your population and what you really want is to unite them. You could make a video documentation that contrasts all the known, massive corruption cases in your administration (and SV personae) with the equally massive decay in your infrastructure from roads to bridges to the closure of maternity wings in hospitals because they are no longer profitable. Make as little dialogue/narration as possible and quote dollar numbers as often as possible. Spread posts contrasting corruption/decay to every outlet/social media.
Most people don't understand technology and/or its second order effects. They do understand when they are being stolen from.
I think the general population is much more likely to feel joy about it than want a police crackdown.
If we're talking about attacks against average software engineers and obscure founders, fewer people would be happy about it, but a great number still would be. There is a lot of envy toward software engineers and founders.
Most of the population will be for the violent attacks. Techbros went way too far in gleefully describing how they would destroy most people's careers while enriching themselves. Never bothered to think whether they should just because they could. Now the rooster is coming home to roost.
The best way for the attacks on AI executives to stop is to pass meaningful legislation that limits the use and scope of AI.
But even if the DA prosecutes, the jury can nullify the charges, which is a risk. What happens when a jury finds the accused not guilty?
The masses will only tolerate so much before the elite start dying. See all of human history.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36497537
I have seen anti-AI sentiments from people known all over the spectrum.
- OpenAI made a deal with the Pentagon (fair)
- OpenAI changed their business model from non-profit to for-profit (fair?)
- Sexual assault allegations by his sister. Sam Altman denies this and it's currently before a court.
- Overpromised AI to investors (everyone does this)
- Lobbying against regulations (I support)
- Some vague accusations of "being a liar" and a "sociopath" by his competitors Ilya Sutskever and Dario Amodei.
- He doesn't know how to code (lol)
Is there anything that I'm missing? Does he put ketchup on his pizza?
That's it, I don't think much of the rest has any weight outside internet forums like this one.
*I've seen people using copilot and calling it "chatgpt".
It'd be one thing if he was just promising more than he could actually deliver, but he went further, making promises of buying up unrealistically large chunks of the global RAM supply, causing everyone else to suffer, with no remorse.
There's also WorldCoin. I don't think a decent person would continue to push such an awful, untrustworthy system. This is a supposedly privacy-focused project that several countries are investigating for privacy violations and has been found to be in violation of privacy laws in some of them.
It's almost as if he goes out of his way to do as much harm to the world as he thinks he can get away with while maintaining the facade of just doing business. I don't think he's the antichrist, I think Peter Thiel is the closest to deserving that description.
one US mindset I can't wrap my mind around
- Barely gave 1% of compute (on oldest chips) to safety team after promise of 20%
- Worked behind the scenes to try to land federal deal that gives mil no guardrails control and ability for mass surveillance
- Lied about China AI 'Marshall Plan' to get federal funding
- Tried to get MBS money ever after Jamal Kashoggi
While long, I'd recommend just reading the New Yorker article
It is not just a question of morality. A sociopath with that amount of power can be a danger.
The threat to AI far exceeds any benefits I can see.
If 95% of jobs go away, the destabilization leads to violent conflicts, and power and wealth become more centralized does it really matter if we have better healthcare or automated cars? Will people have purpose in their lives? Will this be a better world for most?
I agree this is a symptom of large systemic issues.
Long gone are the days a bumbling fool could get a well paying job at the local power plant and provide a good life for a wife and three children, with a large home, decent insurance and two cars.
I don't know if they are right, neither in world view nor conclusion. But it seems this is the world we currently lived in. This is one of the cases where for once i wish there was a manifesto to read, because i badly want to understand why
Violence can solve problems. This kind of violence is stupid, counterproductive and immoral.
Strategically deploying violence takes time, resources and discipline. Wanking off with a gun does not.
What us cushy engineers haven't realized yet is that the gradient for who are well off are sliding more and more towards one end. Sooner or later engineers will be on the wrong side of that gradient.
Finally someone who said it. There was this quote I saw in the movie "Air"(about michael Jordan) about how people with true wealth only ever part with it not out of charity but out of greed. It takes someone or something truly special to force them to part with that money.
This whole era that we've lived through, where software engineers have amazing working conditions compared to blue collar workers and manage to pull ahead in society, helping to form a white collar elite class, is an aberration caused by the miracle of the microprocessor and Moore's Law. The elites saw the opportunity to obtain so much wealth from the lower classes(in the form of automating labor with computers) that they were forced to part with a bit of it, allowing some special people: software engineers like you and me to achieve what we consider a middle class life.
But sooner or later those same people will want that wealth back. They will continue to fight and find ways to take that wealth back: whether through H‑1B visas, "learn to code" initiatives to increase supply, or now AI. AI could very well crash and burn tomorrow but they will be back, and it will be an ongoing battle for the rest of our lives.
The elites after the French Revolution were not only mostly the same as before, they escaped with so much money and wealth that it’s actually debated if they increased their wealth share through the chaos [1].
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/650023
The comment refers to an article specifically discussing only one aspect of a major historical event.
The French revolution is considered one of the most important events in the history of Europe, because of the great impact it had on the (among others) politics, economy and the quality of life of common people.
Downplaying its importance by trying to water its impact down to "but rich still rich, no?" is a sign, that the comment might have been made in bad faith or without proper understanding of the source material.
By the same token, the normal populace was also way better off after the French Revolution, since using the money and wealth of the dead elites to improve everyone's lives made a substantial impact on the French civilization that they are still benefiting from today.
In other words...the French Revolution is exactly the wrong type of example you want to be using when talking about whether violence against tech elites is acceptable.
also, if the worst case scenario does happen and most of the population finds itself without money. there are other ways to live with very little money.
This is even more hideous than expressions of approval for individual violence. This is a dystopian acquiescence.
If I knew someone was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars building a big laser pointed at my house, I would not wait for "quantified evidence" of its effect to take some sort of action. The only real debate is what kind of action.
> also, if the worst case scenario does happen and most of the population finds itself without money. there are other ways to live with very little money.
If you have so little attachment to your money, why hold on to it at all? Do not be upset that other people are operating on a slightly larger time horizon than you are, and are interested in their livelihood not just today, but three or five years from now.
Well, I tried to warn my family and friends and they're looking at me like I'm crazy. So yes, I think most people will just treat all their layoffs like it's just a regular recession. Until, at least half your friends are laid off, most people won't be any more alarmed than if in a recession.
>> If you have so little attachment to your money, why hold on to it at all?
You'll need whatever you have left. The barter economy won't take the place of the primary economy, rather it will supplement it with transactions between members who have no currency. but, there will always be some things that you want to get from the primary economy, if you can.
The same thing happened with Kirk. Everyone standing up to "mourn" a neo-nazi, fake tears, rolling with the grift. Rolling with the white supremacist grindbox.
It's gross.
You get comments like "violence is bad but we would not have $x if not for violence" and then you get to justify violence for any pet cause they have.
I expect to see more of this until it dies down because of how ridiculous the premise is.
Violence never solves anything. You will never make anything in this world better by becoming a worse person than your enemies.