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Comment by 0x696C6961 | Hacker News Reader

Humans are still in direct control of the training/alignment.

A handful of billionaires are in direct control of the West’s training/alignment. Then there are some sheiks in the Middle East and the communist party in China…

This is a tangent but i personally dream of the EU doing a university led effort to make a benign AI. Because it is the last crumbling bastion of liberal democracy.

Not sure that benign or alignment is that easy. I mean, as frequent authors have pointed out - I have a very much benign attitude towards ants. I don’t step on them if I can help it and I don’t maliciously go out to pour boiling water on them. But if I’m building a house or working in my garden I’m likely gonna kill tens of thousands of them. Same applies to AGI. If we’re just ants, we’re gonna get squashed.

If an AI can live-learn (so like we do at night, fine tuning our neural net weights etc), which we need to get anywhere from here (just no-one knows how yet), there is nothing currently that can make that alignment stick; humans drop out of alignment all the time for self preservation or just 'everyone does it, so...'.

At the moment, the US looks much more democratic and liberal than the EU.

From the outside the US has shifted to a oligarchy where money buys elections. Europe's democracies are certainly straining. Primarily from its news companies being minimized by Google and Facebook (and now TikTok) which have extracted most ad revenues on which news depended.

> From the outside the US has shifted to a oligarchy where money buys elections.

The data simply doesn't support that narrative.

Looking at the last 4 presidential elections:

2024: Trump won, Harris outspent him ($1.9B vs $1.6B)

2020: Biden won, Biden outspent Trump ($1.06B vs $785M)

2016: Trump won, Clinton outspent him ($614M vs $368M)

2012: Obama won, Obama outspent Romney (~$1.1B vs ~$1B, essentially tied)

The higher spender won twice and lost twice. 2016 is particularly striking - Clinton outspent Trump by roughly $200-450 million depending on how you count it, yet lost.

Why are Democrat candidates consistently outspending Republican candidates? I thought the Republicans were the party for rich? And thus should be getting more money from the rich.

> I thought the Republicans were the party for rich?

Isn't it the other way around? I mean, in the Internet, it's the democratic side that's constantly complaining about how stupid, uneducated rednecks elected dictator Trump.

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