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Comment by rqtwteye | Hacker News Reader

AI will just be another accelerator for the trend that society is not run for the benefit of all people but for the benefit of a few people who are making lots of money. At some point we'll have to make a decision whether this trend of more and more power accumulating at the top can continue or whether we make rules that allow everybody to benefit from technological progress.

Judging from history it's unlikely that the wealthy and powerful will give up anything voluntarily.

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Exactly, it's mostly that I don't trust any invention in the hands of 2020s era capitalism. In another time and place, I could be excited about AI.

Incredibly dumb argument. Technological advancements like the Internet, Google Search, YouTube, Social Media, Smartphones have benefitted the masses -- the poorest person in Bangladesh have the same access to these technologies as the President of US or a Billionaire.

ChatGPT is literally available to everyone, but yet it takes an incredible amount of brainwashing to claim these technologies are not to the benefit of the people. These are also claims made by highly privileged, highly paid, entitled coastal elites.

Go talk to a poor bangladeshi farmer and they will have a different story to tell

> Incredibly dumb argument.

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The Internet was made by the United States state sector and then handed over to commercial interests in the 90’s or so. Exactly what GP said.

Your argument doesn’t prove GP’s wrong. It’s like saying that the king’s feast benefits the peasants because there was plenty of food that was thrown away that they could get their hands on.

personally I wish my kids were growing up in the early 90s before any of that was invented (or at least mass market)

library books, playing outside, maybe a bit of nintendo, pogs

over literally an endless source vomit from a screen with social media, youtube, instagram, reddit, facebook and twitter, now with the added benefit of being infested with AI slop

I'd take the 90s any day

Gotta love it ... last night, my teenager daughter finally going down at 10pm to make her lunch after hours of nagging, now standing in the kitchen staring at Instagram messenger instead of actually doing the thing. Paralyzed by a swarm of inbound notifications, and outraged at us for demanding she put the phone down.

The 90s had problems too (I was a teen in the early 90s) tho. Just different kinds.

The Bangladeshi farmer is still poor, or not? And he can't raise his prices because the people at the top don't want to lose even the smallest bit of their profits. He has access to ChatGPT but not as someone who benefits from it economically.

Their standard of living has improved dramatically precisely because of access to technology

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