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Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to point out that this article seems to focus on minutiae like how much energy a human brain takes to solve a problem, when the obvious question is: Which is more worthwhile to us as a species - even assuming the same inputs and energy and planetary damage? Spending that energy on fostering humans who can solve problems? Or on machines which render humans superfluous?

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The issue is who is making the decision on where energy resources are spent - on people or machines. And it turns out efficiency or even humanity play a very small role in that decision matrix. Control, on the other hand, is important. Rich and powerful people tend to want to control things, and machines are better at that than people.

This is the conspiratorial mindset. It's not much better than the mindset of people who seek power.

It's wrong, because it assumes that everything is about control.

For example, if I told you that a certain rich and powerful person was spending resources on sending vaccines to poor countries, you might think that was because they wanted to control things. If I said that someone sent books and teachers to a poor country, you might say they were trying to control people.

There's no way to have the conversation, in a conspiratorial mindset, about whether it's better or worse for humans or AI to do this stuff - because no matter what, the conspiratorial mindset will conclude that it's only about power for the humans involved, and always assume the worst. AND YET - there are things people can do which might be for their own self-gratification, but are definitely NOT as bad as some other things they could do. They hold back from doing the worst things.

That's why, I know this lens of looking at the world seems like it's the only smart way to understand things, but looking at the whole world through that lens prevents you from making the important distinction between OK, BAD and REALLY FUCKING BAD.

If you told me an individual powerful person did a good thing, then I could believe it. But I'm speaking about the characteristics of groups of people and a very long history of human civilization teaches us that, as a group (individual exceptions exist both in people and in actions), that the rich and powerful do things primarily for the purpose of increasing their own power, wealth, status, and control. No conspiracy is required. Its just people in a position to gain power use that power to get more power. The people who do that the most and are the best at it are disproportionately the ones with the most power. So, as a group, the rich and powerful are much more likely to do things in self serving interest (even at the cost of wider spread harm and suffering) than a random group a people. The proportion of sociopaths in CEOs is many times that of the regular population.

Not to sound incredibly pessimistic, but I spend a lot of time in bars, and I can tell you that most of the people I meet who haven't got two cents to rub together are as capable if not more so of being dishonest, greedy and malicious as anyone with a billion dollars. A random group of people in your opinion contains less sociopaths than a group of people who powered their way or lucked into some money... I guess you're the optimist. I don't think the CEOs are any worse or better than the rest, and I think you kinda nailed it about individuals. We're all individuals. Faced with individual situations, some of us refuse to do harm, some try to do good, some of the time. That's all. That's what I mean by there being no conspiratorial way to frame the world. It's just chaos and a bunch of assholes making bad decisions, occasionally doing something alright.

I find it amusing that you are denigrating people as "conspiratorial" in year 2026 when the we are all finding out about how there really was a global elite child rape cabal operating in plain sight :)

Leave that self comforting lie in yesteryear. The world is only getting weirder.

> the obvious question is: Which [of having babies vs. building datacenters] is more worthwhile to us as a species

Uh... no, it's not. You're making an argument in the opposite direction as Altman, but recapitulating the same moral flaw.

The point is that viewing human procreation as "worthwhile" or having "value" or being "expensive" is the logic of slavery. People are people, not assets. We don't have babies to make our lives better, we have babies to make THEIR lives better.

Altman’s moral flaw stems partly from an identity failure: he does not see himself as human. He sees himself as The Chosen One. He is transhuman. He can sympathize with humans but never empathize.

It's calling him out on his BS. That might work for mindless investors who want number go up. But he's actively making the world worse for people.

Nevermind hoarding 40% of the worlds silicone 'just because'.

It's like Musk's lofty and outright BS claims. "Well I'm rich so I can do and say what I like, give me your money".

When did bald face lies become the norm in business ?

Edit.. Im keeping silicone in there.

Maybe starting with WorldCom?

The banking sector committed fraud along the way, and early after Lehman collapsed, observers wondered aloud about the moral hazard of bailing out everyone without making an example of someone.

Worldcom had a different ending. Enron had a different ending. But Wells Fargo left 2008 with attitudes that tolerated widespread fraud.

But... what are they going to do with all that silicone?

silicon*

It was 40% more fun the first way you wrote it ;)

>> When did bald face lies become the norm in business ?

When capital has nowhere to go, and the middle class become gamblers and speculators, and people who work become 'superfluous', lots of bad things start to happen. At least, that was my takeaway from "Origins of Totalitarianism".

[edit] To be more specific: Lying (and foreign wars, too) become viable business models when the moneyed class has so much to invest that they no longer know what to do with it, and lack any new markets to pry open, or the education or creativity to produce anything new of value that isn't extractive, and even the extractive methods of generating wealth have begun to dry up locally. Call it a bubble, call it fascism; fascism is basically just a way of keeping a bubble from collapsing indefinitely by pirating neighboring peoples' wealth and cannibalizing one's own society. So there's not a great difference between that and the stated vision of the major AI companies ATM.

Yeah, my semi-informed WAG for the core cause of many of the ills of our current situation is that we're wildly over-capitalized. The "trickle down" focus to put more of the "pie" on the investment side (setting aside whether the "trickle down" effect itself was meaningfully real, not relevant to this "take") was probably barely justified at the time, if at all, and we've just kept shoveling more fuel into that fire in the decades since.

You can't have demand without spreading buying power around. If you just keep shifting toward investment, that capital gets up to some really stupid shit because there's not enough demand to provide anything useful for it to do. Build a factory? Why would I do that, the returns are terrible. No, I'll "invest" in bitcoin... or do an NFT startup... or reserve way more memory capacity than I'll plausibly need just to fuck with my competition, in ways and in an environment that's so bubbly that this activity likely won't provoke capacity build-out to compensate...

We really, really needed some capital (by which I just mean investor-money, not real productive assets) destruction in the '08 crisis, and we didn't get it.

Ehhhh, you have some elementary points, but the market, is in theory, self adjusting right? So the 'idea' of trickle down is a real thing.

It's not as dramatic or loud as something like OpenAI. But consider it as access to loans to fund a new business, the idea is you'll fund a company and gain some sales and employment, money moves around so happy. Basic stuff.

You've shot too far and considered everything black and white. You build a factory if demand is high and it can increase supply while making profit..

> We really, really needed some capital (by which I just mean investor-money, not real productive assets) destruction in the '08 crisis, and we didn't get it.

No, but that wasn't where the majority of money was locked up in poop, so maybe you might get at best a 90's dotcom bust. I'm old and I remember it was apocolyptic. But Maybe it's due.

When you’re a psychopath, the choice is clear.

Because we can't foster good humans, the latter is inevitable.

What do you mean by "we"?

Humanity.

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