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Comment by courseofaction | Hacker News Reader

We need new political arrangements to distribute the gains of AI or things are going to get very bad very quickly.

Back when computers were first going mainstream, there was discussion about taxing them so as to provide for the folks whose jobs would be lost to them --- never went anywhere, but this is a discussion which we need to circle back to.

We are fucked. I have no hope in humanity managing this technology responsibly and no hope in my future. The months since ChatGPT's release have been some of the worst in my life, mental-health-wise.

Dude let me share my plan: go build something for yourself, a modest bootstrapped business. If you want to keep being an employee, you'll see your job and other people jobs getting more and more replaced by AIs. Bosses hyped to put AI in the coffee machine. Clients asking to add ChatGPT to their wordpress site.

Either you go build something you want, an island where code doesn't talk back, or leave tech altogether.

I am saddened that I don't even recognise this place anymore. It's not Hacker News anymore, it's AI news. It's starry eyed engineers jumping over each other ready to sell their metaphorical soul. Even I, the Luddite, can't seem to talk about anything else than this bloody thing.

My current plan is to build a small business and retire in the middle of the woods somewhere. Do some Lisp coding while the rest of the world is dancing around their new idol.

/rant, send me an email if you wanna rant about it as well, and discuss your concerns.

Such as the political arrangements to distribute the gains of high yield farmer equipment, fully automatized factories, high frequency trading bots? It is not going to happen.

What is going to happen are private robotic armies making sure private owners remain private owners.

And then, we will go back to times where people were not citizens by default and had fewer rights.

What gains? When everyone is out of a job eventually, who's going to pay the AI companies?

AI isn’t the problem, capitalism is.

I’m not worried about rogue AI taking over the nukes. I’m worried the same people who think it’s a great idea to charge so much for insulin that people start dying are the ones who will be using AI to hurt people.

Hell, give me a slightly evil AI run amok over any pharma CEO doing their job.

So China/Russia/Wherever-stan is going to use AI more responsibly?

Human greed is the problem. Authoritarianism and capitalism are just subcategories of the greed problem.

What we don't have an answer for yet, is will AGI be greedy?

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