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Comment by griomnib | Hacker News Reader

This is so clearly a complete lie - in what universe is some top government official in the United States telling corporations to a) fall behind competing nations in advanced technology, b) set back our technological edge in the military, c) degrade the USA ability to spy on and control information access/controls in other countries, or d) do anything other than fish for an insider trading opportunity.

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AI promises a lot of creative destruction. There are a plethora of historical examples where elites have restricted technological development because they thought it was a threat to the status quo and therefore their ability to extract wealth from that status quo.

For example: Queen Elizabeth refusing to grant a patent for the first knitting machine, the Qing dynasty forbidding large-scale ship building, or the Ottoman Empire outlawing the printing press.

I'm not sure that this is what is happening here, but it's occurrence is not impossible.

The CEOs and investor class are the elites. Politicians answer to them, not the other way around.

I think you misunderstood me to be talking about just the politicians. Mark is claiming the gov is going to limit new entrants and give an effective monopoly to the large, established entities with political power.

When the US applied arms export restrictions on cryptography mathematics during the cold war, they gave exceptions to companies like IBM.

You don’t even need to dip into the historical record. The government set back atomic energy research for decades out of fears of that technology being shared among the people of the world. And what do you know, the fossil fuel industry just happened to reap heavy benefit from that decision.

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