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Comment by tikkun | Hacker News Reader

> We need to act wisely but with conviction.

Reminds me of these quotes from Sam on this podcast episode (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfuVSg-VJxE)

* "Prudence without fear" (Sam referencing another quote)

* "if you create the descendants of humanity from a place of, deep fear and panic and anxiety, that seems to me you're likely to make some very bad choices or certainly not reflect the best of humanity."

* "the ability to sort of like, stay calm and centered during hard and stressful moments, and to make decisions that are where you're not too reactive"

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Easy for him to say: AI is almost guaranteed to hand a massive W to capital and L to labor. He is holding a title to rule over hell in one hand and promising to lead us to heaven with the other.

Actually not sure about this, with the leverage of AI, its easier than ever to start a company

Sam Altman has a guarantee. Most people on HN have a chance. Most people have neither.

Who's going to work at all these companies then? Unless every single profession suddenly only requires 1 person to do the entire thing with no management, coordination or hierarchies, a lot of people will be labor not capital.

Maybe companies as we think of them are a temporary phenomenon in human history

There is no evidence that it has made it easier to end up with a successful company, however.

Yes, so there will be all sorts of attempts, and the productive forces will compete with each other, while landowners and owners of harder to disrupt industries will have the power to choose among them, deciding who will be allowed to be successful and who will fail.

There isn't a single ordinary person at the table, no labour unions, no political parties or anything democratic. It's Microsoft, it's Google, it's some venture-capital owned French firm, some venture-capital owned German firm, etc. Maybe if Schmidhuber's stuff is good as he hopes it is maybe there'll be an Austrian firm, etc., but mostly, it'll be a capital intensive business controlled by people with capital.

> * "if you create the descendants of humanity from a place of, deep fear and panic and anxiety, that seems to me you're likely to make some very bad choices or certainly not reflect the best of humanity."

This line of reasoning doesn't hold for me, as you could apply it to any technology, including ones actually very likely to destroy human civilization.

Sometimes, not building a given thing at all is better than building it with even the best intentions.

I'm personally not sure on which side AI falls, but denying that such things exist at all seems intellectually dishonest.

Indeed. It sounds like the kind of thing the OceanGate Titan sub's CEO would have said. Except all of humanity is on board Sam Altman's submarine.

There's a good reason we get pessimists to design safety-critical systems!

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