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You may not owe people who you feel are spoiled rich kids better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
* this is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Which I think I'm entitled to convey as these are two CEOs attempting to try a case in public while playing fast and loose with the truth to bolster their cases. You may feel that I, as a simple anonymous commentor, "owe this community better," but do you spare none of these same sentiments for the author himself?
This isn't a borderline call; if you were under the impression that a comment like that is ok on HN, it would be good to review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and recalibrate.
Edit: it looks like you've been breaking the site guidelines badly in other places too, such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42393698. We eventually have to ban accounts that do that repeatedly, so please don't.
There are so many conflicting definitions of what "AGI" means. Not even OpenAI or Microsoft even knows what it means.
"AGI" is a scam.
At that point remote / office work is 100% over.
There might be a day where billionaires employ zero humans and themselves merge with the AGI in a way that makes them not quite human any more.
The amount of data being collected about everyone and what machine learning can already do with it is frightening.
I'm afraid the reaction to AI when it actually becomes a threat is going to look like more of a peasant revolt than a skynet situation.
And the same conditions of material wealth that dictate traditional warfare will not be changed by the ChatGPT for Warlords subscription. This entire conversation is silly and predicated on beliefs that cannot be substantiated or delineated logically. You (and the rest of the AI preppers) are no different than the pious wasting their lives in fear awaiting the promised rapture.
Life goes on. One day I might have to fistfight that super-dolphin from Johnny Mnemonic but I don't spend much time worrying about it in a relative sense.
War will be the same, but the rich are preparing to unleash a "new arsenal of democracy" against us in an AI takeover. We must be prepared.
You do not understand how war is fought if you sincerely believe this. Battles aren't won with price tags and marketing videos, they're won with strategic planning and tactical effect. The reason why the US is such a powerful military is not because we field so much materiel, but because each materiel is so effective. Many standoff-range weapons are automated and precise within feet or even inches of the target; failure rates are lower than 98% in most cases. These are weapons that won't get replaced by drones, and it's why Anduril also produces cruise-missiles and glide bombs in recognition that their drones aren't enough.
Serious analysts aren't taking drones seriously, it's a consensus among everyone that isn't Elon Musk. Drones in Ukraine are used in extreme short-range combat (often less than 5km in range from each other), and often require expending several units before landing a good hit. These are improvised munitions of last resort, not a serious replacement for antitank guided weaponry. It's a fallacy on the level of comparing an IED to a shaped-charge landmine.
> but the rich are preparing to unleash a "new arsenal of democracy" against us in an AI takeover
The rich have already taken over with the IMF. You don't need AI to rule the world if you can get them addicted to a dollar standard and then make them indebted to your infinite private capital. China does it, Russia does it... the playbook hasn't changed. Even if you make a super-AI as powerful as a nuke, you suffer from the same problem that capitalism is a more devastating weapon.
Those weapons are drones. They're just rockets instead of quadcopters. They're also several orders of magnitude more expensive, but they really could get driven by the same off-the-shelf kind of technology if someone bothered to make it.
And they will get replaced. Location based targeting is in many cases less interesting than targeting something which can move and could be recognized by the weapon in flight. Load up a profile of a tank, a license place, images of a person, etc. to be recognized and targeted independently in flight.
>Battles aren't won with price tags and marketing videos, they're won with strategic planning and tactical effect.
Big wars tend to get won by resources more than tactics. Japan and Germany couldn't keep up with US industrial output. Germany couldn't keep up with USSR manpower.
Replacing soldiers with drones means it's more of a contest of output than strategy.
Civilization is going through a birth rate collapse. The labor shortage will become more endemic in the coming years, first in lower skill and wage jobs, and then everywhere else.
Humanoid robots change the economics of war. No longer does the military or the police need humans. Morale will no longer be an issue. The infantry will become materiel.
That's a weekend project for a lot of people around here.
You don't need AGI for a lot of these things.
We are not far away from an entire AI corporation.
They arguably already exist in the form of very large corporations. Their lingering dependency on low-level human logic units is an implementation detail.
On that note, is there a term for, er... Negative hype? Inverse hype? I'm talking about where folks clutch their pearls and say: "Oh no, our product/industry might be too awesome and doom mankind with its strength and guaranteed growth and profitability!"
These days it's hard to tell what portion is cynical marketing ploy versus falling for their own propaganda.