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Comment by rubyfan | Hacker News Reader

Is it me or does this seem like naked corruption at its worst? These tech CEOs hang out at the White House and donate to superfluous causes and suddenly the executive is protecting their interests. This does nothing to protect working US citizens from AI alien (agents) coming to take their jobs and displace their incomes.

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> This does nothing to protect working US citizens from AI alien (agents) coming to take their jobs and displace their incomes.

Where did you get the idea that banning new technology that could eliminate jobs is even remotely an American value?

Going back to the Industrial Revolution the United States has been 100% gas pedal all the time on innovation and disruption, which has in turn created millions of jobs that didn't exist before and led to the US running the world's largest economy.

The patent system. I know someone will respond detailing why the patent system is pro-business, but it is objectively government regulation that puts restrictions on new technology, so it's proof that regulation of that sort is at least an American tradition if not fully an "American value".

Patents and trademarks are the only ways to create legal monopolies. They are/were intended to reward innovation but despite good intentions are abused.

Not exactly. For example, Major League Baseball has been granted an anti-trust exemption by the US Supreme Court, because they said it was not a business. In some cases in which firms have been found guilty of violating the anti-trust laws, they were fined amounts minuscule in relation to the profits they gained by operating the monopoly. Various governments in the US outsource public services to private monopolies, and the results have sometimes amounted to a serious restraint of trade. The chicanery goes back a long way. For the first decade or so after the passage of the Sherman Act, it was not used against the corporate monopolies that it was written to limit; it was invoked only against labor unions trying to find a way to get a better deal out of the firms operating company stores and company towns etc, etc. Then Teddy Roosevelt, the so-called trust-buster, invoked it under the assumption that he could tell the difference between good and bad monopolies and that he had the power to leave the good monopolies alone. 120 years later, we are in the same sorry situation.

Intellectual property restrictions cause harm even when used as intended. They are an extreme rest restriction on market activity and I believe they cause more harm than good.

Patents, trademarks, copyright, deeds and other similar concepts are part of what makes capitalism what it is, without them capitalism will not work because they are the mechanisms that enforce private property.

Good luck with that. When 3/4 of the world laughs at your patent what is the point of patents? IP only works when everyone agrees to it. When they don't it's just a handicap on the ones who do that benefits nobody.

Maybe it should be. The system here in the US has produced some great innovations at the cost of great misery among the non-wealthy. At a time when technology promises an easier life, it only seems to benefit the wealthy, while trying to discard everyone else. The light at the end of the tunnel is a 1%-er about to laughingly crush you beneath their wheels.

I don't think this is the strongest argument. Every technological revolution so far has initially benefited the wealthy and taken a generation or two for its effects to lift the masses out of previous levels of poverty, but ultimately each one has.

To me the stronger argument about AI is that this revolution won't. And that's because this one is not really about productivity or even about capital investment in things that people nominally would want (faster transport, cheaper cotton, home computers). This one is about ending revolution once and for all; it's not about increeasing the wealth of the wealthy, it's about being the first to arrive at AGI and thus cementing that wealth disparity for all perpetuity. It's the endgame.

I don't know if that's true, but that's to me the argument as to why this one is exceptional and why the capitalist argument for American prosperity is inapplicable in this case.

I don't know about for all perpetuity. If history has shown, anyone that reaches the pinnacle eventually becomes complacent, technology improves by becoming faster/cheaper/smaller. That just means it is prime to always be susceptible to a new something coming along that stands on the shoulders of what came before without having to pay for it. They start where the current leader fought to achieve.

The idea behind self improving AGI is that it will "get" every "new something coming along" before everyone else.

Self-improving AI is a rhetorical sleight of hand to make you think that.

Just because it can self improve doesn't mean it improves better than everything else or without substantial costs to develop improvement.

I personally believe magical unicorns are going to save us

We have had the capacity to have zero poverty for many decades, maybe over a century. China eliminated extreme poverty.

So has America. But the definition of poverty is not absolute positioned, to borrow a CSS analogy. Poverty gets defined relative to wealth. Overall, this is a good thing. But knowing that your poverty is rich compared to the poverty of two generations ago doesn't satisfy humans who gauge their relative social position and are unhappy with it.

I routinely see homeless people what are you going on about

Have you ever seen one who was starving? Do they lack access to clean drinking water? Are there malnourished children, without access to schools, begging in America?

Have you ever been to a country where there was extreme poverty?

When people talk about China eliminating extreme poverty, that has a specific international definition. From Wikipedia:

Extreme poverty is the most severe type of poverty, defined by the United Nations (UN) as "a condition characterized by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information. It depends not only on income but also on access to services". Historically, other definitions have been proposed within the United Nations.

Extreme poverty mainly refers to an income below the international poverty line of $1.90 per day in 2018 ($2.66 in 2024 dollars), set by the World Bank.[0]

The average homeless person in America spends several times that amount on drugs, and all of the above services are available to them. Homelessness in America is a societal failure, but it does not meet the definition of extreme poverty.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty

I don’t know about that. The poor from just about every other country in the world seem desperate to live in America. While American capitalism has many faults, oppressing the bottom quintile is not one of them. The US median income is consistently top ten globally.

This is completely wrong. Even “the poor” in most parts of the world has a pretty good life weight where they are.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w&pp=ygUMSGFucyByb3N...

>The poor from just about every other country in the world seem desperate to live in America

Immigration to the USA, both illegal and legal, has cratered.

Median income doesn't tell much if you don't factor in the cost of living. My salary sucks compared to what I would earn in America, but when I factor in things like free healthcare, daycare and higher level education, I'm better off here.

What countries offer free daycare? I know there are a few in Europe. It's not super common, so I'm curious to know where

I believe Sweden is one: https://www.sdg16.plus/policies/universal-childcare-model-sw...

That doesn't look free. Subsidized, yes. Lots of countries subsidize childcare. Including every US state

Sure, but extremely cheap collared with the us.

Here's a UNICEF report comparing childcare policy amongst rich countries: https://www.unicef.org/innocenti/reports/where-do-rich-count...

Sweden ranks third in the comparison metric (what good is free childcare if it is very bad or inaccessible?), and the us ranks 40th out of 41.

The US does a good job of selling the idea of living here and getting rich, though it does a better job of selling it to people who aren't already embedded in daily life in the US. While we have, perhaps, much lower numbers of extreme poverty compared to a lot of countries, as one of the richest countries, and growing richer by the day, we should have zero extreme poverty. The people with the will to fix our poverty lack the money and very few with money have no real desire to help the less fortunate.

> Where did you get the idea that banning new technology that could eliminate jobs is even remotely an American value?

Copyright law is another counter-example to your argument. But somehow? that’s no longer a concern if you have enough money. I guess the trick is to steal from literally everyone so that no one entity can claim any measurable portion of the output as damages.

I’ve always thought Copyright should be way shorter than it is, but it’s suspect that we’re having a coming to Jesus moment about IP with all the AI grifting going on.

There are things you can do with technology that are banned as a result of copyright protections, but the underlying technologies are not banned, only the particular use of them is.

I’m saying if the law was respected at all this technology would be banned. I don’t know that I prefer that outcome, but it is the truth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause

I think your take is historically accurate. Although one does wonder how long we'll be able to get away with keeping the pedal to the metal. It might be worth taking a moment to install a steering wheel. Rumor has it there are hazards about.

We regulate medicine, nuclear technology, television, movies, monopolies, energy, financial services, etc. because these things can be harmful if left solely to the market. Americans value honest work, dignity, prosperity and equal opportunity. Innovation is useful in so far as it enables our values - regulation is not counter to Americans interests, it protects them.

> We regulate medicine, nuclear technology, television, movies, monopolies, energy, financial services, etc.

Many of those regulations at the federal level, yes?

Sure. And this is not that. This says: before we begin to think about our policy let's make sure to remove any barriers for Mr. Altman and friends so that they don't get sucked down with their Oracle branded boat anchor.

If this had any whiff of actually shedding light on these needed regulations the root OP wouldn't have said what they did. But for now I'm going to head over to Polymarket and see if there are any bets I can place on Trump's kids being appointed to the OpenAI board.

>Many of those regulations at the federal level, yes?

In addition to ones at state level, yes.

I feel like anyone making this argument hasn't studied how those regulations happened.

They ALL happened AFTER people got hurt. That's how we do things here. We always have.

It's kind of messed up, but the alternative is a bunch of rules on things that wouldn't be a real problem.

The latter is called the EU.

Why?

Because that's what the people who made all of those rules decided to call themselves.

Who got hurt before the US banned the export of cryptography?

The CIA, probably.

Cracking Enigma was a big deal in WW2. Germany got hurt real bad.

That wasn't in the list above. We were talking primarily about consumer/market protections.

Rubyfan mentioned nuclear technology, which like cryptography, has a broad scope and military applications so isn’t something that was just left to the market to decide the best fit.

I don’t think I’ve left the scope of this discussion.

I was more talking about the consumer radiation side. Radium water to drink, women licking and painting radium watch dials. Toy physics kits for kids with uranium in it. Uranium glass also isn't great.

I mean the radium fad just by itself was pretty crazy, people used radium suppositories and radium makeup.

Ah I see. Thats definitely a case of regulations written in blood. I do think it strengthens the argument that we shouldn’t wait for wide spread adoption to cause problems, but rather study the issue and limit exposure until safety is at last vaguely known.

With AI, I don’t think there will be a lot of needed regulation until it gets to AI controlling physical machines like self driving cars. But in that respect, we already began regulating before problems appeared.

It’s a lot harder to put the genie back in the bottle once out.

AI is already hurting people. We need regulation to hold it and its benefactors accountable. The federal government is preempting states from doing so.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgerwp7rdlvo

https://apnews.com/article/chatbot-ai-lawsuit-suicide-teen-a...

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a-teen-confided-in-an-ai-c...

https://www.pcmag.com/news/openai-sued-by-7-families-for-all...

https://www.firstpost.com/explainers/chatgpt-murder-suicide-...

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/tens-thousand...

https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/17/tech/electricity-bill-price-i...

I don't think you realize the level of damage it generally takes to get bipartisan support for creation of an oversight body.

It was popularized that an estimated 8,000 infant deaths attributed to swill milk occured every year in NYC in the 1850s (take with a grain of salt).

Even more recently much of the banking regulation only occured after severe market issues that broadly impacted the economy.

On a related note: "Layoffs" are going to be a hard practical harm point to rally around. Unless we fundamentally change the nature of our economy (Which doesn't tend to happen until the previous system collapses.), effeciency is king. Tha market isn't rational, but effeciency is a competitive advantage that compounds over time. So you have a prisoners dilemma here. If you want to restrict a technology that boosts efficiency, you either have to close your market and then put up rules that constrain efficiency or you bleed your prosperity.

The question isn’t the jobs created but how have workers benefited from increased productivity? They haven’t materially since late 1970s. That’s when the American labor movement began its decline. Innovation isn’t what helps workers. The gains from innovation have to be wrenched from the hands of the ruling class through organized resistance.

> Going back to the Industrial Revolution the United States has been 100% gas pedal all the time on innovation and disruption, which has in turn created millions of jobs that didn't exist before and led to the US running the world's largest economy.

Where did you get the idea that this was the cause that created millions of jobs and lead to the US running the world's largest economy, and not say - the knock-on effects of the US joining WW2 relatively late and unscathed, making it the only major world power left with a functioning enough industrial complex to export to war-ravaged Europe?

I see your point, but that is definitely not the only cause of American economic dominance. The U.S. has been the largest economy by GDP since ca 1900 – i.e. before the wars.

There is more to history than ww2.

There is more to a discussion than strawmen.

The case against this EO is not “banning new technology”. It’s not allowing the federal government to ban any state regulation. And states having the power to make their own rules is maybe the most American value.

It's not even that, as this isn't Federal Law.

It's Federal Blackmail.

Not true that US is 100% gas pedal constantly on innovation. You’re forgetting labor reform movements and the service switch away from industry in the last few decades. Also the de-science-ing of the current admin has vastly reduced our innovative capacity, as well as the virtual decapitation of brain drain. Those next generation of brightest immigrants certainly aren’t coming here to deal with ICE, and that’s been the source of half the great minds in our country throughout its history, gone because of racism.

I kind of doubt American scientists will leave en masse to go elsewhere. Their options are only Europe, the UK, or China. Most will not be willing to give up the salaries or the resources available to scientists in the USA, even with the current administration, to go live in strongly hierarchical academic systems that they don’t know how to navigate. Especially not for a 30% salary reduction (or more if they go someplace like France or Italy).

Reread what the previous poster said. They were talking about folks coming to the US. Around 50% of doctorate level scientists and graduate students in STEM come from outside the US.

Canada? Australia? 30% (or more) salary cut certainly applies but academic systems are similar and resources are in the same ballpark at top research universities.

They don't have to go anywhere if they just don't come here. American science works on the back of underpaid foreign born graduate students. If they aren't there, neither is American science. It's already started. And that's not even considering the other 'reforms' currently deliberately crushing academia. The first thing a new fascist regime needs to crush is the immigrants, and the second is academia. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/students/graduate-studen...

> Going back to the Industrial Revolution the United States has been 100% gas pedal all the time on innovation and disruption

Until that "innovation and disruption" threatens any established player, at which point they run crying to the government to grease some palms. China is innovating and disrupting the entire energy sector via renewables and battery storage while the US is cowering in the corner trying to flaccidly resuscitate the corpse of the coal industry.

What ISNT an American value is Executive Orders trying to trump State powers without actual legislation.

> Going back to the Industrial Revolution the United States has been 100% gas pedal all the time on innovation and disruption

Arguably true, but it's also been way ahead of the pack (people tend to forget this) on protection for organized labor, social safety net entitlements, and regulation of harmful industrial safety and environmental externalities.

This statement is awfully one-sided.

I am not sure you can call it being 'ahead of the pack' when we are currently furiously disassembling those forward thinking ideas.

Is it you? I mean, the guy started his term by launching a scam coin along with his wife. He hates the United States and sees it as just something to exploit for financial gain and power. That's it. That's literally all there is to all of his actions.

It is definitely naked corruption. Lobbying was always around, but I would say that with this administration things are a lot more transactional and a lot more in the open. Companies like Palantir and Anduril and others are being gifted contracts all over the place - that’s money we taxpayers are losing.

> Companies like . . . Anduril are being gifted contracts all over the place - that’s money we taxpayers are losing.

Can you point to a concrete example of this?

It's hard to say what they're actually qualified to do but they went from receiving 1 or 2 contracts per year in the early 2020s for a few 10s of millions and I think one larger $200M one to this since Trump was reelected;

$200M - https://sam.gov/workspace/contract/opp/1527a7adaff14a5280fc7...

$140M - https://sam.gov/workspace/contract/opp/c0203e75ec2949e78966f...

$31M - https://sam.gov/workspace/contract/opp/8b0b944955064864942fc...

$1M - https://sam.gov/workspace/contract/opp/86d997fbd8a74d0cb298c...

$642M over 10 years - https://sam.gov/workspace/contract/opp/c9878b113f5143cba7edb...

$3.1M - https://sam.gov/opp/f15d4b63ebc846cd9f4870cfa0772fff/view

$160M - https://www.anduril.com/news/anduril-awarded-contract-to-red...

$86M - https://www.anduril.com/news/special-operations-command-sele...

$100M - https://www.anduril.com/news/anduril-awarded-usd99-6m-for-u-...

tbh there's nothing weird about those.

The Marine Corps I-CsUAS award is explicitly described as an IDIQ with a maximum dollar value of $642M over 10 years -- though it could be much less -- and reporting indicates it was competitively procured with 10 offerors. It wasn't "gifted"/"no-bid"

Also: $642M spread over 10 years is roughly $64M/year at the ceiling, and ceilings are often not fully used. That scale is not remotely unusual for a program-of-record counter-UAS capability if the government believes the threat is persistent. (Which it does.)

The rest are similarly mundane and justifiable.

Here's what would be weird: Repeated sole-source awards where a competitive approach is feasible, implausible technical scope relative to deliverables, unjustified pricing, or political intervention affecting downselects. I don't see any of that here. (But, okay, let's not talk about Palantir, lol.)

It is well known in Defense circles that much of what Anduril does comes in on no-bid black budget contracts. Often short duration or low volume.

Imagine Silicon Valley CEOs pumped full of VC dollars and embedded with units that Don't Exist in places We Were Never At.

That's lobbying simplified, no need to pay lobbyist.

This is a tribute system, way past lobbying. Lobbying is cheap, Senators can be bought off for 5-figure sums. CEOs pay lobbyists so they don't have to meet with them personally. What's happening now involves CEOs appearing at political events and lobbying the president personally, to the tune of millions of dollars in declared "donations" for "ballroom construction", in exchange for security guarantees for their business empires.

Lobbying is tightly regulated, and the FEC really does keep a close eye.

This is just flat out bribery, using the thinnest of legal fig leaves. Which would not possibly pass muster if he hadn't also packed the court with supporters.

> does keep a close eye

"kept", I think.

I'm in agreement because what is there to say about AI policy?

This govt clearly isn't going to regulate against harms like perpetuating systems of racism. This government adores to perpetuate systems of racism.

So fuck it. Let's race to the bottom like the companies want to so badly.

> protect working US citizens from AI alien (agents) coming to take their jobs and displace their incomes

So where is this coalition that’s organized to actually make this real?

Software engineers are allergic to unionization (despite the recent id win) and 100% of capital owners (this is NOT business owner and operators I’m talking about LPs and Fund Managers) are in support of labor automation as a priority, the same people also run every government and overwhelmingly select the politicians available to vote for, so who will fund and lead your advocacy?

Game developers are subject to much more abuse than the average software engineering job, for less pay. It's a different environment.

I'm open to the idea of guilds, but personally I do not want others negotiating for me with the type of work I do, I'd prefer it to be a contract between me, my employer and nothing else. Unions aren't always a net benefit for every industry.

Of course, with AI going the way it is, collective bargaining might become more attractive in our field. But institutions can be slow to catch up and not everyone always agrees with the outcome. Personally, if I worked in Hollywood, I'd be upset about the kind of anti-AI scaremongering and regulation taking place in the WGA and SAG-AFTRA.

For this brief moment in time, crime is legal.

Whats wrong if US population has voted for this? There was no surprises this time - everyone can expect what is going to happen.

Didn’t the majority of people vote to “drain the swamp” and “bring down the cost of living”?

People had nearly a decade of experience with Donald Trump as a known political entity and decades of receipts and lawsuits prior to 2016 to speak to his amoral and corrupt nature. If they didn't know exactly what they were buying into they were idiots. He isn't exactly a master manipulator.

Also, The first time Trump was elected, the majority of voters went for Hillary Clinton. Second time, it was still 49% versus 48% for Kamala Harris. The majority of Americans have never voted for Donald Trump nor ever supported him.

I actually don't want to suffer just because my neighbor is racist.

I'm not saying I support either. I am just looking at US politics from outside. But this is how your democracy system works.

You asked, "Whats wrong if US population has voted for this?" in response to someone complaining that the system is not working, and so I explained it: the rest of us are not represented. I'm unsure what point you're getting at.

My point is: presidents are not delivered to your country by president delivery alien space ship. A lot of people voted for him and this is a fact. You cant just blame everyone of them for being dumb or racist. If you dont like their choice that means you should starting to do something about it.

Authorithorianism also not just happen - it take years to build and destroy institutions. It took 20 years to build fascist regime in my country.

Sorry for not making it clear enough.

The US was founded on crime. We are a colonial imperial country with a penchant for using racism and religion in order to maintain a certain lifestyle for white supremacists.

Slavery was really not that long ago, we are still actively invading countries and murdering people for oil, and we help bankroll straight up genocide in regions such as Darfur and Palestine.

This is business as usual.

We still do slavery and it's even kept in the 13th amendment as a punishment.

You don’t seem to appreciate: they paid for the ballroom. They have a right to set policy. That’s how an oligarchy works

That’s how campaign contributions have worked for a long time. Now it’s just a touch more blatant.

The rest of the world has always called it corruption.

Just another step towards Russian style naked oligarchy.

Par for the course with this administration.

You aren't missing anything. This is oligarchic capture of the government.

This is the most pro-tech admin in decades, and that terrifies me.

did you not see who was standing next to him. All of the top tech bros of silicon valley in their search for the fountain of youth.

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