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Comment by atleastoptimal | Hacker News Reader

Silicon valley tech execs aren't the perfect people to control the future of AI, but imo they're the least bad option among all the people realistically powerful enough in the world today to wield that kind of power.

Also this article is cope about India's stance on the world stage: attempting to equate SOTA AI advancements with a lunar landing, the latter of which was done 60 years ago. There's a reason all of India's smartest go to the US.

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Largely agree, but it's not clear at this point who will control the AI future. SV elites today are like NYC/NJ/Philly elites of the 1960s. They have the momentum and the capital but the cost of doing business, red tape, and wages are too high. It's not clear they will control the next tech revolution.

> SV elites today are like NYC/NJ/Philly elites of the 1960s.

As someone not from US, I understand NYC, but what was it about NJ and Philly in the 60s?

Philadelphia is a large port city and is still one of the biggest cities in the US. NJ sits between two major metropolitan areas that are a two hour drive from one another.

As a result, Philly and NJ had a lot more factory industry back then. Towns like Camden and Paterson, that lost to decay and crime now, used to be prosperous factory cities. A lot of NJ’s industry still benefits from its proximity to New York. A lot people that used to live in NYC but now want a yard for their family move to NJ. Large companies tied to NY also do things like put their R&D parks in NJ because it’s close to NYC but has the space they need.

Bell Labs, GE, IBM, Philco, RCA, and other bigtime tech labs were spread across the [upstate] NY to Philadelphia region. These areas were expensive, unionized and had issues with racial integration. SV until the early 1960s was not run by union bosses, was cheap, less regulated, and still had exceptionally racist white enclaves with solely single family housing, so there was less worry about integration problems.

You're touching on the separation between the people who can and the people who cannot but wish to control. You get a lot of people bleating about AI, unabashedly with their own ideology behind it, but they tend not to be in the crew who can make whatever we are calling AI these days.

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