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Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

There's been a very recent step change in "AI"

We would do to remember thw world before. The abuse of digital technology for surveillance, fraud, impersonation, spamming, hacking, tracking, behavioural prediction and influence..... an entire world of shit, was already doing just great.

It would be a shame to fixate on "AI" as a Hollywood villain, which would be to miss the real problem. For the past 40 years digital technology has been on a trajectory to dehumanise and dominate. Let's think about why, and who is doing the deeds.

   "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves"

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Your kind of arguing against yourself. You start with "Human nature is to use technology to dominate others" (agreed) but then conclude "don't worry about this massive step up in ability to surveil and control populations, rather let's focus on the elites being nicer"

The paragraph starting with "it would be a shame..." has their entire point laid out in simple, unambiguous terms. There's no mention of human nature or calls to not worry.

But that is the point. It only emphasizes the concern. It is where I draw upon the insight to foresee where this technology will lead us.

AI is simply a power upgrade for all the institutions who wish to control thought and social engineer society to their liking.

which is why open-source AI, and affordable access to hardware, is so important. groups with access to powerful AI systems will crush those without. if competing institutions can build out equally powerful, competing AIs, it prevents any single actor from gaining too much advantage.

I remember hearing a lot about "democratizing" AI a few years ago, but now I just hear about "alignment," which is sort of the opposite. competing institutions, by definition, aren't aligned in their goals, so how could their AIs be?

I agree it is important, but open source has not sufficiently challenged the institutions in the area of information dissemination and social connection so far.

In other words, google, still owns search, instead of like presearch, and rest of big tech own social media. The alts represent still an insignificant portion of users.

I hope open source AI can have greater success, but the users are motivated by convenience and not freedom or privacy.

Yes, alignment has so many obvious problems that are simply hand waved away currently. One of the best simple quotes on the subject "Demonstrably unfriendly natural intelligence seeks to create provably friendly artificial intelligence."

> I hope open source AI can have greater success, but the users are motivated by convenience and not freedom or privacy.

Agreed, but that's actually helped open-source AI too! Stable Diffusion beat DALL-E 2 because you could actually run it, you didn't have to be a vetted influencer or whatever OpenAI required at the time. And it's hung on because you can fine-tune it to make porn, or celebrities, or even just anime. The least convenient model is the one you don't have access to (or that can't/won't do what you're asking of it.)

That's a great quote on alignment.

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