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Comment by xvector | Hacker News Reader

Citizens are dumb though, the stupidity of the public killed nuclear. Not every decision needs to be democratic. Certainly not core infrastructure decisions.

It's also so easy to astroturf to manipulate public opinion. If I were China, I'd post so much anti-datacenter content everywhere in the West to gain a leg up in the race to superintelligence, because we are dumb enough to let our citizenry influence these decisions.

Imagine if we did the same thing for the nuclear race. ASI is winner-take-all, the first one to ASI can just lock everyone else out.

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How definitive. I wish I had your certainty about literally anything.

There is no certainty, only probability.

The recent growth of LLMs is a black swan. Any future prediction you attempt to make has massive error bars.

Europe is in a very precarious position. If LLMs actually play out and lead to economic booms (I'm not saying for individuals, note that), the EU as a whole will get absolutely trounced economically and likely experience a shrinking economy for the next 20+ years along with a shrinking population in most of the member countries. They are so far behind on power and compute of the US and China there is not any current path to catching up.

The US itself is in a precarious position with the amount of debt it has accrued, it could be right that LLMs are what leads to future economic booms, but be so far in the hole it takes decades to recover.

China is really in the best place at the moment. Trying to build up power and compute as fast as it can, copying American innovation at the cheap, and having a mountain of US and EU money to spend on it.

Well, it doesn’t seem to be a time for dilly-dallying. IMO the danger and promise of AGI is through the roof, and the urgency is up there with them.

It’s time to decide your stand. But if you want to make an informed decision, you probably want to:

- Read up on the possible dangers until you get it,

- Learn about the advantages and breakthroughs already happening, and,

- Do some extensive work on a real project with at least an Opus-level LLM, so you really understand what an astounding new thing it is in our world.

> Not every decision needs to be democratic.

So our technoverlords should decide for us? All these arguments to go back to the middle ages and feudal systems are based on the idea that we should be oppressed and our opinion should not count. That thinking destroys enlighten societies and bring inequality and poverty.

It would be a mistake to blindly assume that democracy can survive the technical future. The rise of democracy went hand in hand with the importance of skilled labor. If the need for labor dies, at least in my eyes, democracy dies with it.

The Manhattan Project was not democratically confirmed. There are just some things you don't leave to the normies.

If I was a American oligarch who became president due to my ties to social media platforms and influence I would also advocate european governments use American AI services.

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