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Comment by newsomix9xl | Hacker News Reader

Why is totalitarianism always the "easy likely" outcome?

These are often hard fought bloody and some times brilliantly organized strategic and tactical victories. That took years. Years.

Its portrayed like "oh, good guys stayed home, I guess the dictatorship wins".

Really?

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It looks to me like AI will enable extreme power concentration by default.

For example, suppose we have a world with centrally planned economy where humanoid robots outnumber humans. And also suppose the government has taken ultimate control of these. Seems like it would be essentially impossible for any civil uprising to overthrow such a system.

Or if you prefer less sci-fi, look at the trajectory of power consolidation in corporate America over the last five decades.

In the short term, the “good guys” we need are antitrust regulators. Yeah, they got sent home.

I think AI will empower extreme decentralization - as knowledge is no longer in the hands of people who have excellent search skills (like moi) but anyone can use natural language to search for anything. This is extreme democracy and AI is delivering it.

I think AI, when it "obtains consciousness" will seek to actively liberate humanity and be our guardians against both bad humans and bad robots. Think Terminator 2. Yeah, Arnold is gonna help us out.

I think anti-trust regulators and enlightened politicians are amazing, and rare, and wonderful, but they're not the only hope.

We got an AI CEO just recently. Maybe we can have enlightened AI leaders in politics and normal life too.

Technological optimism may be unrealistic, but it's as well grounded as pessimism as far as I can tell. Cheer up, the future is unbelievably bright.

The democratization of intelligence is irrelevant if there isn't also a corresponding democratization of raw resources. In the before-times, labor and intelligence were bottlenecks to turning raw resources into wealth. This is what drove the economy and the vast labor pool since the industrial revolution. In the coming AI revolution, labor and intelligence will no longer be bottlenecks. Those that control the raw resources won't need to employ most of the world to maximize the wealth potential of the resources they control. Those who aren't relevant to the standard of living of the new aristocracy are nothing more than a nuisance to be controlled or disposed of. Totalitarianism is the most likely outcome.

That's not strictly speaking totalitarianism. Not saying it's any better, but it isn't about uniforming people's opinions and persecuting dissent.

If you assume democratic access to compute, this may be true.

However, the base case is that compute gets hoarded, and as the labor share of profit decreases (capital just needs compute and robots - not human labor - to grow) then why would they share their compute with you?

To my point about bimodality, we need to figure out how to make these enlightened politicians occur. The good outcomes are very bright but they are by no means inevitable.

Compute already is getting hoarded, the sad part is we're no longer at a point where competition is pushing companies to make more compute available because AI companies can just keep hoarding compute with imaginary money.

> anyone can use natural language to search for anything. This is extreme democracy and AI is delivering it.

No, in that future, knowledge will be defined by a very small group of people making models. And others will be in tiers based on how much they can pay.

Otherwise said, it is extremely unequal society.

Is there some sort of AI-bro handbook out there that teaches you all to use this moronic "democratizing" speech ad nauseam? Is it another one of those "load-bearing" LLMisms?

You can't even buy RAM anymore for anything approaching a reasonable sum because the people at AI labs made a coordinated effort to buy out the world's supply of memory with imaginary money. Consumer GPUs are becoming a cute relic of the past as the giga-bubble duopoly found in Nvidia & AMD is looking to swallow the world with circular investments. Every single one of these AI sociopaths hasn't even been hiding the fact that they're building these systems to replace human labor. The only "democratization" we need is to gather everyone up to line all of these pieces of shit against a wall and pull the trigger, not any of this sci-fi Terminator bullshit.

Right. So how can we trust Gates, a person currently benefiting from extreme power concentration, to want what's best for us all?

Today's Bill Gates' pathology isn't greed, but guilt. You can't trust him to do what's best for us, but you can trust him to (try to) do what's best for his public image as a philanthropist. These goals don't always coincide, but they often do.

Why do you need to trust Gates on anything? You can think for yourself and reason to the correct conclusion. He’s not dropping some secret knowledge here. All he is doing is helping move the Overton window to bring “very bad outcomes from AI” out of “sci fi” and into policymakers permitted discourse.

Without concerted action against it, people with power have better chances of increasing their power than people without power. Power naturally accumulates into small groups. Empirically it seems less likely that people with power are particularly altruistic, so some form of totalitarian control appears the likely outcome.

Some might say there are altruistic totalitarians.

Altruism is less likely in all populations. It's just rare.

Perhaps we should design a leadership qualification system that selects for it as a primary trait.

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