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Comment by LogicFailsMe | Hacker News Reader

Actually, some sorts do assert humanity will be wiped off the planet by AI. I don't share that view either. I think it's ludicrous. We've lived through much worse without any sort of technology beyond fire and a big stick.

But the end of scarcity and disease is a fantastic thing if it happens. If our lizard brains do not bridge that transition and instead attempt to maintain the billionaire status quo, I agree, we're going to go through some things once people start starving, two meals from a revolution and all that. But as much as I think people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are unhinged lunatics, I also think they're smart enough to keep people fed and entertained for pennies on their accumulating dollars. Bread and Circuses kept Rome alive for 500 years if you need an example.

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>We've lived through much worse without any sort of technology beyond fire and a big stick.

No 'we' didn't. A whole shitload of much smaller isolated communities did. The world added 7+ billion more people since then. Imagine chlorine doesn't show up tomorrow? How many people die in two weeks? How far do you travel when no gas comes out of the pumps. How much will you stand out at night if you're the only ones with power? How fast do working antibiotics run out?

The billionaires you're talking about are mostly ignorant fucking idiots with a god complex. The moment any complex system starts falling apart they are saying as dumb of shit as everyone else (during covid for example).

Most of the pasts anti-fragility is gone. We survive by means of very complex systems and if you lose too many key points in those systems they can totally collapse.

The unprepared bonobos in the west will absolutely go through some things. But we have a national guard and once people aren't commuting to work daily, we have plenty of fuel in reserve (or we will again if we ever conclude the stupid war with Iran). People are a lot nicer to each other in my experience once the lights go out and social and corporate media stop ragebaiting them to hate each other.

1B+ individuals worldwide currently live in squalor. They will barely notice. The real crime is that in the midst of the west's carbon footprint buffet, we won't bother to uplift their lifestyles with the most basic conveniences. And while I am no fan of the billionaires, they absolutely have public and private personas or their business ventures would implode. They absolutely have god complexes, but don't mistake that for genuine idiocy.

Musk did a 180 degree turn around. Killing USAID etc. i don't think he sees normal humans which do not help him or are not aligned to him as humans anymore.

And Zuckerberg bought so much land and bunkers, he is prepared for shit hitting the fan. After all he doesn't care what his platform did to humanity anyway.

And we have a planet full of general contractors who know their way around welding and pouring concrete down ventilation shafts. Many of whom these sorts wanted deported. If they want to build a Per Stenson terrarium and flee into it, by all means do so. And then let's seal them inside, problem solved.

> We've lived through much worse without any sort of technology beyond fire and a big stick.

Lack of technology alone will not wipe out the entirety of humanity, I agree. But we're not talking about just a lack of something. We're rapidly sprinting to give the fewest people the most power over the planet ever. I think it's likely to happen in the 21st century. What happens when the worst case scenario isn't just being left with nothing, but facing an entity that is so rich and powerful that it can use active measures to kill as many as possible? This is more power than any warlord or emperor could've dreamed of in the past.

> But as much as I think people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are unhinged lunatics, I also think they're smart enough to keep people fed and entertained for pennies on their accumulating dollars.

So far, every time the billionaire class has been asked about how much money should go to them in society, their answer has always been a resounding "ALL OF IT". You don't get to that level of wealth while retaining a state of mind that allows you to toss a penny to the beggar. Reality is what's holding them back right now, but what would happen if their dreams of total automation eventually come true? How long from then until one of them snaps and decides to use state of the art automated military technology and weapons of mass destruction to wage war against the peasants (armed with sticks and stones) to solve the 'problem' once and for all?

To be clear, I'm not saying any of this is imminent or remotely likely to happen soon. But our society is moving in a direction where something like this could eventually be possible. Giving a human truly absolute power over the entire world has never been tried before.

Other than the tech fascists, does anyone love billionaires right now? Reality is indeed holding them back. And their dreams of total domination are materials science and resource-limited - no self reproducing robots anytime soon.

So with that, we can rule out extinction at the hands of the machines 100% leaving only machines somehow accessories to near ELEs humans could trigger today and could have triggered for decades. And at that point, Scary Potter and his friends need to STFU.

So scaling down to an AI takeover in the next decade, paradoxically, the idiotic pronouncements by Sam Altman and Dario Amodei that AI is coming for your jobs and that they are afraid of their own creations is not the sort of thing that leads to an AI takeover, it leads to regulations and bans. What would would make such an AI takeover viable in the next decade would be a magnificent seemingly benevolent AGI that raised living standards and spread happiness as it enchanted and delighted its way to everyone happily ceding control to the greatest thing ever. Does that remotely sound like the near future to you?

In the words of Ted Chiang "most fears about AI are best understood as fears about capitalism" and that aligns with what's going on right now. So let's skip the intermediary surrogate and attack the worst bits of late stage capitalism, mmkay?

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