Separately; Sam's belief that "AI has to be democratized; power cannot be too concentrated." rings incredibly hollow. OpenAI has abandoned its open source roots. It is concentrating wealth - and thus power - into fewer hands. Not more.
When the job losses hit in earnest and the vague handwaving about making it right all inevitably turns out to be hollow, those on top will be exceedingly comfortable using violence to keep the underclass in line. It has happened before and it will happen again.
There are people in control who don’t make 1, 5, or 10 year plans; they make 20, 50, 100, and 500 year plans; and they know human nature quite well, which allows them to of not predict, have an anxious understanding for what their plans will cause and what needs to be prepared for in advance.
The concentration of wealth is at an all time peak. The top 1% own more stocks than the other 99%. Nobody thinks about that hard enough. The callousness by which people’s livelihoods dignity and safety are threatened is tremendous
I am not sure who exactly is that one person ? Is it Altman, who is according to many people not that knowledgeable in AI in the first place; the scientist who found a breakthrough (who is it ?); is it the president of the United States who is greenlighting the strikes; the general who is choosing the target (based on AI suggestions); the missile designer; the manufacturer; the pilot who flew the plane ?
I get the point of concentrating power in fewer hands, but the whole "all the problems of this world are caused by an extremely narrow set of individuals" always irks me. Going as far as saying there is just one is even mor ludicrous.
I will give you a helpful rule of thumb: when in doubt the guy with a bank account larger than the total lifetime income of hundreds of thousands of people is probably the one to blame.
You can establish responsibilities just by counting the number of zeroes in a bank account. On top of this, it works for everything: the same dude is responsible for wars, the climate, world hunger, child cancer and your bathroom mirror being fogged this morning.
What do you find difficult to understand about that?
There is a real difference between giving a democratic government the tools to kill people vs attempting to kill people yourself. If you don’t believe this then you don’t believe in democracy.
I also won't particularly care about the distinction when AI is inevitably used to enact violence on the US population.
A better example is the Civil War. The southern states refused to accept the free and fair election of Lincoln and decided to secede, which was not allowed by the Constitution.
Are you arguing that the Confederates were right to violate the law just because they believed they were right?
Have you not heard of the labor movement? Or abolitionists? Or the founding of this country? Or people fighting against Nazi control of their country?
All of those worked outside "legal" means. The law is quite often irrelevant to what's right or moral, and dying on the hill of breaking the law ensures no change can ever occur when a system or person in power inevitably wrongs people.
But throwing Molotov cocktails is terrorism. And I don't believe (please correct me) that a terrorist has ever gotten new laws passed by using terror.
... Isn't that rather against the spirit of the US' constitution? I can see it being a thought with other nations, but not this particular one.
> A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Which kinda follows the spirit of English Common Law:
> The ... last auxiliary right of the subject ... is that of having arms for their defence, suitable to their condition and degree, and such as are allowed by law. Which is ... declared by ... statute, and is indeed a public allowance, under due restrictions, of the natural right of resistance and self-preservation, when the sanctions of society and laws are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression. - Sir William Blackstone
A "monopoly on violence" is exactly the thing our laws are supposed to protect us against. Because if a state has that, then they have a monopoly against all rights, because they alone can employ violence to curb those who do not subscribe to the state's ideology.
I'm pretty much a pacifist. I _like_ Australia's gun laws. But, a government's purpose is to protect their people. They are to be representative - or to be replaced. If they leave no other choice for that, then violence is the only answer left.
The key issue is that government (via courts) is the one that decides whether violence is justified or not.
You're right that a government that no longer represents its people must be replaced. But that's not the case in America. The conflict in America is between two different groups of people with different ideas about what the right thing to do is. So far, these two groups have used democracy to get their way. As long as that continues, there is no problem.
But when people use violence outside government law, just because they don't agree with the decisions of the government, then that's not justice--that's just terrorism.
It is the right of a person, rather than the government, under the way the US constitution is structured.
I should have been clearer that I don't mean only the government is allowed to use violence legitimately. Sometimes citizens can use violence legitimately.
But that doesn't mean an individual gets the final word on whether something is self-defense vs. murder. If I kill someone in an argument, I can't just say "it's my inalienable right to wield violence, so buzz off!". I will be put on trial and the justice system will decide whether I'm a murderer or not.
That's what I mean by "monopoly". The government+constitution+laws are the sole deciders on when it is appropriate to use violence, not individuals who think they are dispensing justice. The latter are either vigilantes or terrorists.
Oh is that what January 6th was?
But I will concede that some people on Jan 6th were attempting to change a result by violence. I support sending those people to jail.
Is this what we just saw with America attacking Iran?
It may have been a stupid order, but it was not unconstitutional.
You can't just decide on your own that violence is justified.
Yes, military power is evil, but it’s a necessary evil. A society that decides to stop making weapons is going to be subjugated by one that continues to make them. Full stop.
You're saying the above is bait, when your own comment is nothing but it.
My comment here is about the ethics of military weapons vs assassinations of private individuals. I have no idea what you’re talking about.
> Sam eagerly pursued DoD contracts to weaponize AI. And then lobbied for legislation to ensure OpenAI cannot be held accountable if people are killed due to their systems.".
Your comment can't both A. be relevant as a reply to the above B. yet have "no idea what I'm talking about", as if it is not relevant. Either both of us are saying something relevant, or neither of us are. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Questionable and violent US foreign policy is much much older than the current Trump administration.
It's not the bait on HN that you need to be worried about but the propaganda from your own government.
So should we really applaud selling shiny new toys that will enable more baseless cruelty? Probably not. Just like we shouldn't support political terrorism.
Throwing a petrol bomb at a building with children inside is about as evil as murdering 150 students at an all-girls school. I'm obviously not defending that.
Really? I don’t know how many were in his house but at most it’s attempted murder of a few versus killing 150.
I see a difference.
US law sees a difference too. The person that threw the firebomb will get the full weight of the law if they are caught, and spent an awfully long time in prison.
Those that killed the school girls will never face punishment.
But the idea that the US cares is laughable.
We should call it what it really is: oligapolization of intellectual work. The capital barrier to enter this market is too high and there can be no credible open source option to prevent a handful of companies from controlling a monster share of intellectual work in the short and medium term. Yet our profession just keeps rushing head first into this one-way door.
The question is what are they doing about "getting safety right" and are they doing enough. To me it seems like all the focus is on hyper growth, maximum adaptation and safety is just afterthought. I understand its competitive market, and everyone is doing it, but its just hollow words. Industries that cares about safety often tend to slow down.
Without missing a beat, she said " If humans loss was that complete, there would be no historians.
I responded that I never said they were human historians.
Yes, because no one listened to me. It was early-mid 2024, and here as well as on other places, people kept saying "oh well the cat's out of the bag now, nothing can be done, it can't be stopped". I pointed out that only 4 or so planes being made to collide with TSMC, NVIDIA and ASML would be enough to give at least a decade of breathing room while we try to figure out how to keep this technology safe. I'm almost certain there were people who read it on here as well as elsewhere who could have made it happen.
_Now_ it is indeed too late.
Technology that can be used to kill innocent people is all around us. Would it be moral to attack knife manufacturers? Attacking one won't make the technology disappear. It has been invented, so we have to live with it.
Also, it's a stretch to say that "AI" "kills innocent people". In the hands of malicious people it can certainly do harm, but even in extreme cases, "AI" can currently only be used very indirectly to actually kill someone.
Technology itself is inert. What humans do with technology should be regulated.
IMO the fabricated concern around this tech is just part of the hype cycle. There's nothing inherently dangerous about a probabilistic pattern generator. We haven't actually invented artificial intelligence, despite of how it's marketed. What we do need to focus on is educating people to better understand this tech and use it safely, on restricting access to it so that we can mitigate abuse and avoid flooding our communication channels with garbage, and on better detection and mitigation technology to flag and filter it when it is abused. Everything else is marketing hype and isn't worth paying attention to.
if they're selling the knives knowingly to a knife-murderer, it might be worth discussing.
Sam Altman is not, although he portrays himself that way, some geeky guy without power who just builds products, he's the guy who makes the decision to supply this tech directly to the US government who is on the record about using it for military operations. And you're right on the last point. Sure the 20 year old guy who threw a molotov cocktail at Sam's house is, I'm going to assume for now given the topic Sam chose for the piece, an anti-tech guy.
But assume for a second you had your family wiped out in a bombing run because Pete Hegseth attempted to prompt himself to victory with the statistical lottery machine. If the CEO knew this and enabled it to add another zero to his bank account, not so sure about the ethics of that one.
Apply this to guns.
Then look how this works in the US. You could, but then a law was made to protect gun manufacturers, The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.
AI will get this treatment I’m sure.
I also vigorously dislike the industry, but your stance 'I'm on the skeptic side of "AI"' is something you need to address - saying this in the friendliest way possible, you are wrong.
AI needs to be opposed, because the billionaires are going to use it to turn the world into shit, but if the best the AI opposition can muster is "AI isn't useful", we are fucked. It's extremely powerful and can do bizzaro things when you rig it up with tools - the kinds of things we need to prevent companies like Google from doing with it, no one is paying attention to.
[1] double-tapped: a phrase referring to the practice of firing a second missile after the first to kill any rescuers or surviving schoolgirls
So you can also be outraged at weapon manufacturers, which is one step closer. Or, you can skip the indirection, and be outraged specifically at people in charge of using this technology, which is my point.
I'm disgusted by this industry as much as you are, believe me. But blaming the companies that produce "AI" for people dying is misplaced. They're certainly part of the problem, but not the root cause.
> AI needs to be opposed
AI doesn't exist. It is a marketing term used by grifters to sell their snake oil.
But even if it did, it's silly to claim that any technology needs to be opposed. This one is potentially more problematic than others because it raises some difficult existential and social questions which we might not be ready to answer, but it's still ultimately on us to control how it's used. We've somehow been able to do this for nuclear weapons which can literally obliterate civilization at the press of a button, so a probabilistic pattern generator seems trivial in comparison. It's going to be bumpy, but I think we'll manage.
They've claimed the term, this is not a useful objection to make at this point. And everyone was fine with calling our shitty little computer vision handwriting parsers "AI algorithms" before LLMs.
> We've somehow been able to do this for nuclear weapons which can literally obliterate civilization at the press of a button
Knowing what you know about nuclear weapons, if you ran into the Manhattan Project scientists, would you still be cheering them on? "Thanks guys, our democracies are so stable these will literally never be used for a nuclear holocaust, and they might have useful mining applications!"
Can you not think of any exceptionally nasty things the US government could do with the "machines that act as if they can think for most practical purposes"? Do you think maybe it might be a good idea to develop that technology after you have made sure that the government serves the peoples interest?
Sure it is. Someone saying that the sky is purple will never be true, no matter how many times they say it. Pushing against this is how we avoid the fabricated mystique around this tech, precisely so that people don't see it as a threat.
> Knowing what you know about nuclear weapons, if you ran into the Manhattan Project scientists, would you still be cheering them on?
You're twisting my words. I never said that I support what "AI" companies are doing. I said that your claim that "AI is killing people" is hyperbolic, and that you're barking up the wrong tree.
Besides, the scientific research invested in nuclear technology has produced far more benefits for humanity than drawbacks. It's very likely that the conversation we're having now wouldn't have been possible without this research. There's an argument to be made that even nuclear weapons and their deployment in WW2 had a more positive outcome than any alternative would've had.
Similarly, the same can be said about the current generation of "AI". For all its potential dangers and harms, whether direct or indirect, it has and will continue to have many positive use cases, some of which we haven't discovered yet. Ignoring this and opposing the tech altogether is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
The solution isn't banning the tech. It's strongly regulating it, as we've done with many others. Unfortunately, governments move at glacial speeds, and some are deeply entrenched with corporations, so there's conflicts of interest galore, but that's still the most sensible approach to manage it safely.
> Can you not think of any exceptionally nasty things the US government could do with the "machines that act as if they can think for most practical purposes"?
Sure I can. Any government, organization, or individual can abuse any technology. But you haven't made the case why opposing technology itself would prevent that, versus holding those individuals accountable directly. Until then your comments come across as misplaced fear mongering.
> Do you think maybe it might be a good idea to develop that technology after you have made sure that the government serves the peoples interest?
So what do you suggest? We stop all tech R&D because governments can't be trusted? That's pure fantasy. No single government would even agree to it since technology is universal. If the US doesn't invent it, another country will. Advancing within this messy geopolitical framework is the only path forward, for better or worse.
I think we should hold the individuals accountable directly. But we can't. The system is skewing further and further from the point where we could. Look at the Epstein files - everyone on the planet knows that there is a mountain of evidence condemning someone rich and powerful, and nothing will be done about it.
In the meantime, I want to stop handing weapons to the powerful people that we can't hold to account. I don't think we should stop all R&D - but I think "machines that act as if they can think for most practical purposes" are uniquely dangerous. I also used to think the "AI" companies were full of shit, until my work handed me a bottomless anthropic API key to use for claude code. They can successfully navigate novel situations using tools to interact with the world. Tasks like "find me 20 puritanical whitehouse staffers who are cheating on their spouses, using credit card / location history" are now costly only in terms of api tokens. Going the other direction - "Find the organizers of this protest. Using all the information collected by big tech, find an unrelated criminal offence they have committed".
One of those humans is Sam Altman, which makes him a valid military target.
He's not somebody that released a product and doesn't know what it's being used for. He's selling it specifically to be used as part of killing people.
Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds?
If you want to hold the leader of a contemporary tech giant responsible for causing excess deaths then Meta and Zuckerberg would be a lot higher up the list - maybe even at the very top.
Now I despise Mark Zuckerberg, but I don’t want to firebomb his house: I want his company neutered and/or broken up, I want him stripped of his ill-gotten wealth, and ideally I want him to face criminal prosecution and incarceration.
But the point is this: whoever firebombed Sam Altman’s house didn’t do it out of a principled stance - in fact I suspect they barely expended any thought on the matter - because if they were really acting out of principle they’d have chosen a different target, they’d have done some research into who is trying to expose and bring down that target, and they’d have figured out how they could help rather than just randomly engage in violence. Whereas this was just a dangerous stunt.
My point is, we've seen this movie and killing Sam Altman is uncomfortable but justified.
Well Zuck has that big scary hedge, and I’m sure people have been going after him for ages.
> I despise Mark Zuckerberg, but I don’t want to firebomb his house: I want his company neutered and/or broken up, I want him stripped of his ill-gotten wealth, and ideally I want him to face criminal prosecution and incarceration.
Great! Is the plan to wait until after the billionaires have their AI controlled military drone swarms to have this revolution? Because they already control your government - I don’t think you will achieve anything like this through legal means
Whose government?
Trump bombing hundreds of people or someone throwing a bomb at Trump because he keeps bombing hundreds of people?
If you said "yes" to all of the above, I'd love to know your reasoning.
Not my personal view.
* I care about my family more than I care about a stranger.
* I care about people who don't kill people unprovoked more than I care about people who kill people unprovoked.
* My family are more than one person, versus the one killer.
That's why I answer no to that one.
If you want a molotov cocktail thrown so badly, throw it yourself. Don't put it on other people to do it for you.
Are calls for violence against Hitler during WW2 bad? How about the Japanese imperial navy?
How about calls for violence against Putin during his war of aggression?
This isn’t rhetoric; I’m just pointing out that it isn’t as black and white as people seem to make it. (It is black and white for me, as I’m with Asimov on the matter, but it isn’t for most humans.)
If you can think of one, then you shouldn't be proposing introduction of guidelines that are blatantly false. Or would you like a "1+1 is not 2" guideline to accompany it?
Theft is a nice analogy here. The default model of theft is property crime but the largest type of theft is wage theft.
If we fret about violence done against individuals but not violence against groups our attention is going to end up steered in a narrow direction.
Like when you poop on the clock?
As a defense contractor Altman is a legitimate target for a country that the US has attacked like Iran.
The US is engaging in military action against many countries and has threatened to annex or invade allies.
In that context Altman is 100% a legitimate target to those whose sovereignty is threatened and whose people are being killed.
It's like that old joke:
A man offers a young woman $1,000,000 to sleep with him for one night.
“For a million dollars? Sure, I’ll sleep with you.”
He smiles at her, “How about $50, then?”
“How dare you! I’m not a whore!”
“Look, lady, we’ve already agreed what you are, now we’re just negotiating the price.”
Similarly in this case, you can't make up absolutes and assert the're true, while ignoring that the real world is more complicated. And once you do realize the world is complicated, you realize there aren't absolutes: everyone is a prostitute, terrorist, or whatever other bad label you want to throw at them ... it's just a matter of degree.
So no, it's not always wrong to physically attack someone like this. You can debate specifically whether Altman has committed enough violence himself to justify violence against him: that's something two people can reasonably disagree on. But you can't just say "violence bad" like its some great pearl of wisdom, while ignoring that violence has in fact been good many times throughout history.
It is useful to have some degree of mastery in this discipline. Sometimes it is the only language that can deliver the important message to an unwilling listener.
It was only a matter of time. The font on the dollar sign kept increasing, eventually selfish humans will always crack. Keeping it open had to be instilled with it becoming a public utility. Private companies don't do altruistic things unless they benefit.
Michelle Obama's, "When they go low, we go high", is some of the stupidest political advice and a generation has lost so much because of it. (The generation before got West Winged into believing the same thing.)
When you look to the right, you have a stolen election in 2000, a stolen supreme court seat, an attempted coup, and relentless winning despite it.
But it seems a distant hope at best.
I think the breakdown here is that conversation seems to have no power. To only be a bit hyperbolic, the only language with power is money -- or violence. To the extent that ordinary people cannot make change with "conversation" (which I interpret here to mean dialog within society, including with lawmakers), they feel compelled to use violence instead.
A non-rhetorical question: What recourse to non-billionaires have when conversation has less and less power, while money has more and more, and those with money are making much more money?
I agree. The French Revolution was really, really mean.
"If we don't put the brakes on this car it's going to go off the cliff!"
"Historically, cars falling off cliffs was horrible for all the passengers involved."
This is our only chance to transition to a post-scarcity society. We won't have another. Allowing them to monopolize access to AI is a fatal mistake.
I feel heard from this statement, thanks!
> I wouldn't be surprised if there's a backlash among them
The backlash is more than what people might imagine. We are a generation that most of us would have nothing to gain and thus nothing to lose as colleges are diluted more and more and job security becomes a question as we are still connected more than ever seeing all the darkness taking place live time while our consciousness has just sprung out in this chaotic unpredecented world.
Thinking about it, We as a generation are more lonely than ever, more hopeless than ever, more angry than ever. I feel like my generation might be watching phones not out of enjoyment but out of desperation for the day to end if meaning of life can't be derived from a normal place.
I broadly agree. But… there are some who have lived who made the world a worse place. Who gets to decide? Trump has done a bit of this Sort of deciding and it hasn’t gone great so far and there is no sign that it’s actually helped.
The fact of the matter is these AI CEOs are actively trying to economically disenfranchise 99% of the human race. The ultimate corollary of capitalism is that people who aren't economically productive need not be kept alive any longer. Unproductive people are nothing but cost, better to just let them die. A future where the richest classes can turn the underclasses into soylent is now very much within the realm of possibility.
If this doesn't radicalize people into actual violence, I simply have no idea what will. "Attacking someone is wrong" is a completely meaningless statement to make to someone who believes society as we know it today is going to be destroyed. Honestly, I can't even blame them.
That sounds like something someone says when he understands his weak position, especially someone as ruthless, dishonest, and narcissistic as Altman.
Just saying.
It's easy to say we need to be willing to accept short term pains when it's someone else who has to bear the brunt of them.
Please avoid swipes like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
whether this way or in slow motion mass attacks on people.
an attack on a society that lasts years is still an attack and i wish the collective we would realize this.
“it’s ok if millions suffer now for me to realize my dream” is just wrong.
i’ll never understand how these guys fail to realize: they actively push for people not to care about the destruction they cause. that’s obviously going to bite them in the ass whenever they’re on the receiving end.