Sam Altman's home targeted in second attack
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The people who are doing this stuff are unhinged but why? Perhaps they do not trust law and order. Perhaps they feel helpless and have been led to believe its over for the labour class due to the overhyped marketing and so on.
A serious frank conversation needs to be had and the hyping needs to stop.
Totally agree. I’m speaking to cases in America. If you’re in a rich country broadly at peace with competitive elections to any degree, and you’re choosing violence, you should vacation to e.g. Burma or Sudan or Libya or Ethiopia and see the cost of the violence you’re glorifying.
There's a reason the founding fathers all had slaves; they weren't the common folk.
Ah, yes. All Slaveholders. I once toured John Adam's former plantation. It's expansive. Really puts Monticello to shame.
(the joke here being that John Adams was a practicing lawyer in state that didn't even have slavery).
Since your point seems to be that not all the founding fathers parent was referring to were actually slave owners do you have a claim for a rough ratio? I think that would be interesting and would be a more informative thing regardless of where on the scale it lands from "everybody but Adams" all the way up to "only a big names like Washington, Jefferson".
Do you have an example of such a country?
Here's your canary.
People who shoot someone or throw bombs at someone even though that someone never did something against them, should be marginalized. In prison.
I think the point is that there's going to be an increasingly large percentage of the populace who think that the AI bosses / billionaire class did indeed do something against them.
But they didn't ask the rest of us if we're ok for them to murder someone on our behalf.
Personally I hope that AI will be a step change for the positive. I think it is inevitable that it will progress form here, in the darwinian sense, that someone else on this thread mentioned.
With that in mind, we should all be pushing for it to be used to our benefit, rather than detriment. And like almost all technological advances in the past, I think this can happen.
So if people are saying violence against Sam Altman is expected, then they're also saying violence against me is expected, because I am hopeful and vaguely supportive of the technology. That's quite scary.
Many tech billionaires openly, publicly and loudly said something among the lines: "I/we/my company/tech-bros are building torment nexus - it will take your job and/or kill people and/or shut up political opponents. You are powerless to stop this."
There are some of those billionaires willing to put their name and face in front of billions of people in the world. You will have no trouble finding people that will think that X or Y tech bro is personally responsible for some poor persons problems.
Especially when there's a bunch of news like "layoffs due to AI", "record investments due to AI", etc.
I am not supporting violence, never done it and never considered it. Though not surprising when talking heads of political/economical extremes can get threats from people that have nothing to lose.
Or, if you truly believed AI was a threat and represented material harm and managed to get standing to bring a suit, you are looking at years and years and years of litigation.
California has a referendum system. Get signatures for a policy and put it to the voters.
This is a long way to say you don’t have the votes. Airwaves affect turnout. They don’t flip people on positions.
They absolutely do. On September 12, 2001, ~nobody in the United States was interested in starting a war with Iraq.
Two years of propaganda later, and all of a sudden, half the population had acquired keen geopolitical insights which necessitated an invasion and occupation of a country that had exactly fuck-all to do with 9/11.
A decade later, all of a sudden, nobody wanted to fess up to wanting anything to do with that mess.
Public wants aren't discovered in some interference-free democratic vacuum. The people who own the press put a millstone on their side of the scales.
There was desire for vengeance on 12 September. Reporting and politicians channeled it. That’s very different from driving consensus against something people would otherwise support.
It works the same way in other countries too. Look at any country that you believe to believe in insane shit - most of those beliefs aren't organic.
Neither are the insane things you believe in. It's just that you can't even see that they aren't the product of your own reasoning. Fish don't have a word for water.
See also Covid-19. Same shit only waaaaaaay more batshit insane and waaaaaaaay more crazy 24-7 fear mongering.
The people saying it doesn’t work are the same people who can’t must the effort to even contact their representative.
I had a professor in college who was big on entrepreneurship. So he formed an organization, got others involved, went to Washington to lobby his rep. His rep said “let’s do it”, and sat him down with her staff to write a bill. That bill was brought to the floor for a vote and passed.
Until you’ve done that, dont complain the system doesn’t work.
The issue with politics today is the level of engagement of the average voter. Few people ever get involved, so the vacuum gets filled with whichever power-hungry mediocre person who puts some effort in.
This is a sign of the system not working. A well connected professor, with plenty of free time to form an organization and go to Washington to talk to his rep
Might as well be an industry lobbyist.
Could a worker from Walmart do the same thing? In theory sure. In practice unlikely, for any number of reasons. Not least because people are unlikely to take a Wal Mart worker seriously enough to join their organization.
And not only that but one who was "big on entrepreneurship!" Guy wasn't really rocking the boat, was he?
Nope. She had been working on entrepreneurship for a while so had met her reps years ago. No money involved. Hell, not even from a very big state.
Nothing stops the average citizen from organizing and getting similar access to representatives.
Instead we get people who don’t even know who their representative is claiming they’re sure the whole system is rigged.
It’s not that different than people who claim there are no jobs when they haven’t even applied to any.
I disagree pretty strongly. There are tons of soft power social levers and bureaucratic structures designed exactly to prevent your average Joe from getting access to representatives
Even a comparatively powerful person like a wealthy CEO of a big company often experiences friction trying to get access to public servants. That's why they hire lobbyists whose job it is to get past the friction
Of course the groups that represent larger voting blocks get easier access - that makes perfect sense.
But like the example I gave - the access is possible. Most people who complain about a lack of access never tried.
But that’s the intent of the system? Represent what most people want.
Fixed.
People don't vote for their own gains but rather the gains of the few and to be honest, one can argue that within America this is a both-party problem and sometimes you are just picking for the less wrong politician and then you have these biases which blind them.
if this is the case, I have seen American people online say that "But, people know that the American govt and american people are different"
It is almost as if people are saying whatever is convenient at the time. This can only be one or the other.
If the average American's intent is of the system which is current administration, then forget about the trust within the system. I find your position with a bit of irony.
The system isn't working and that's a fact. You can say that people are to be blamed for that, sure, but then the people will be blamed entirely.
To be honest, The americans I sometimes talk online to don't share this ideal of the govt. and are fighting against it in some way or another but they are tired and hopeless, for the most part. I really take a deeper offense to your statement as that makes all the problems persist longer and thus to many people who have nothing to lose, violence feels like the only option which might be what GP might be referring to.
Either America needs to fix itself or violence will keep on happening. To be honest, I am not that much hopeful that America can fix itself though in the sense that the corporate influence is so immense with the two party system and the trust is still lost in some ways in America and times in future are gonna be even more harder yet America is completely polarized. These problems are also existing in other countries to be honest but America is at another magnitude and at these levels of inequality, violence to many people feel like the only way to share their voice which has been suppressed by the system for far too long. From my time reading history, this is a very repeating phenomenon and in a sense, history is messy but when people got really pissed at the system failing, mass scale revolt and violence was always picked as the last resort and we are in those times now.
I feel like we can either condemn or do anything as a society but if people (and humans just like you and me actually) get so frustrated within the system that violence seems like an good choice, then that is upon the fault of the system and I feel like the condemnation of act just does nothing in the long grand scheme of things.
TLDR: People should really act together to solve these things peacefully but its very far from happening in reality and reality is messy and always has been in some regards, we just read it from the line of statistics and history.
- 32% of the citizen voting age population
- 44% of eligible voters
- 49% and some change of the people who actually voted
“America as a whole” did not vote for Trump
In a similar fashion, my point is, I actually agree with you sir @mbgerring and your original comment. you tried your best to raise awareness and there are people who do the same and there are many who reach the support of millions but still no change is enacted because of the way system is enacted.
Yet the system can make someone like trump with maybe even sometimes far fewer people supporting it and billionaire's capital flowing into propaganda etc. too thus the people saying "we didn't vote for this"
My point was that the system is ultimately rigged by some people at the top against the average person and @refurb saying to you that oh this is then what the people must want, is a factually wrong statement.
I think you yourself have put it right: "We need to seriously face this problem and fix it, or things are just going to keep getting worse."
And I also agree with your overall statement that if the system continues on being as hopeless as it is, then for some people violence would become the only option for their voices as their voices get shutted from every peaceful way.
I think we are in agreement sir. Have a nice day.
It’s hardly a representative sample of the country, and in many instances isn’t even an American citizen.
Thankfully, there is a paper on this that you can read, so that we don’t need to argue about this.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
It would be great if the media channels that manufacture wants weren't co-opted by the very people who are the problem.
Reminder that even in the scenario that constituents 100% support or 100% reject a policy, their opinions hold almost no statistical sway to their elected representative. It's actually worse than a coin flip.
It's only when you restrict your constituent demographic to just those in the top 10% of wealth (...like a professor in college for example...) that suddenly their voting decisions align to constituent opinions.
Look up "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens", this has been known for some time.
The honest truth? They're supposed to do nothing and take their licks with a smile. If that's not good enough for them, they are allowed to occupy themselves with ineffectual political activities, preferably on issues that are exhausting and do not disturb the power of the elite (e.g. abortion, transgenderism, etc.).
All of those arguments will be vile, as they have to be given the context.
I'm not criticizing you, and I guess I'm glad someone wrote this comment quickly. You're right. But I would caution people against reading too much into the countervailing sentiment here. It's not trolling, but it is something adjacent to it.
Like 1812 when the Brits weren't busy with the French they easily came in and burnt the US capital as punishment for burning the Canadian one. It's not that the British army suddenly got a lot stronger; they just weren't busy fighting on two continents.
That said, civil disobedience is largely pointless. We're in a capitalistic society so money is the name of the game. Rosa Parks did shit-all; it was the boycott of the bus system for 9 months that made the buses cave.
I went to high school in Pennsylvania.
Did you ever think that maybe people do in fact believe what they say they believe?
Civil violence is the backstop of literally every societal system. While it would be better if the systems work, civil violence is what happens if they don't and tends to increase until they do.
Hilarious joke, Mr. Fukuyama. You have masked goons running around, detaining and even killing people without probable cause. If the results of the 2026 midterms are not to the liking of the current POTUS, it isn't unthinkable that he would try to overturn them, even by force. Would you be hand-wringing on HN about how violence is always bad, then?
But I digress. Firebombing Sam Altman is very bad; there is a multitude of good points against it, from the moral to the pragmatic. "Violence is fundamentally evil" is just a lazy and evidently false argument that does you a disservice.
Also the official opposition is actually not really interested in representing many discontented people. It sticks to loser issues at are alienating to many except activist base (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/16/opinion/democrats-senate-...), and seems totally fine with not being competitive in many elections. And it continues to be that way in the dire political environment you describe.
I'd love your thoughts on the violence people committed during the following civil uprising: BLM riots, Minneapolis ICE (there are many more instances through history but Ive selected the most recent ones for simplicity).
Where you condemning the actions of people in those threads, encouraging them to have more civil "discussion" or do you think it was the duty of people to take arms against injustice?
If so, how do you corroborate the justification of violence with your current stance?
Thank you.
The idea that people think that the BLM riots are somehow a mic drop argument for the effectiveness of civil violence is just further illustration of how far apart our premises are.
FL crafted a law to help safeguard someone who gets sued for running over a protestor. I think this illustrates how a law can protect problems rather than solving them.
A little wild to me that so many of the replies don't understand that.
There is growing anger and discontentment in a large part of the population, driven by inequality of wealth and power. Hopelessness and a lack of control over the future.
Are the nodes of power willing to spread wealth and control more widely to stabilize the country? What are they willing to do to consolidate their power? The vast majority of violence is perpetrated by those nodes, to either consolidate power, or gain more of it.
Other people in this thread have already suggested more actionable responses: organize, unionize, understand class dynamics, and vote accordingly.
That title reeks of the paper equivalent of clickbait. The paper is about subjective well-being and mental health in the psychological sense. Broader well-being includes material conditions like income, housing, health care, safety, and social connections. So a null result on subjective well-being is not necessarily a null result on material welfare, and the problems that leads to. The paper’s own abstract also talks about context effects rather than a simple universal null.
> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/10/ar...
Unions are not perfect, but they have been an important check on exploitation. Organized labor helped win the 40-hour workweek. If you demand perfect solutions, you end up doing nothing. And given that you're up against people with nearly unlimited resources, you can't afford to be picky.
So, yes RLHF is available right now, for people with specific backgrounds. That RLHF work is temporary and it's going to make hundreds of thousands of people redundant. The RLHF work is actually job-negative, it is work which will later deprive others of a way to make a living.
Once that training work dries up, what happens to the people who were doing the job which AI now does? How do they pay rent? How do they feed and clothe themselves? What answers do any AI proponant actually have for this, or is the intention that every person shuts the critical thinking part of their brain off and trusts the computer will come up with something?
If you knew this for fact you'd have something to corroborate, is this just vibes? Job loss numbers are published, at the very lowest end the estimates are 50k across 2025 in the US alone. I don't see any evidence RLHF is creating livelihoods at the rate AI is destroying them.
Huh? The jobs aren't going away because a few people can get temp work as traitors to automate away the jobs of their fellows? I suppose that's technically correct (e.g. the there-exists counterexample to a for-all statement), but it totally misses the point.
> The masses, without the right understanding, will just become a lynch mob and start burning everything in sight, as they tend to in most circumstances.
BTW, totally fine. If you like nice things and have political or economic power, it's totally on you to prevent things from getting bad enough that people want to do that. That's something libertarians would do well to remember. Propaganda only gets you so far.
> I don't care for "humanity," I care about power
Yes, I know. I suppose at least you've read your Alinsky.
We went through a cycle like this once before in U.S. history, and the amount of violence it took to correct the overreach of organized money was not 0.
I live in Switzerland, which has a highly functional democracy.
Shareholder accountability > societal accountability. Accountability falling on a made up corporation > accountability falling to the humans that made the choices.
You can only get away with this structure up to a certain level of morally bankrupt behavior. But there can be a point where people refuse to defer to it as being legitimate.
I think the Sacklers and the opioid epidemic was the beginning of the end of legitimacy for this 'indulgences' system where the government wiped away/waves away horrific immoral behavior just because it was done under the government's papal indulgences system. You can literally ruin millions of lives, push thousands to hundreds of thousands of young girls/boys into prostitution, cause death and community destruction, and the consequences are mostly waived away because the Sacklers were protected by their papal indulgences.
Demonstrations are a start, though they seem to be more useful for networking inside a group and forcing the press to pay attention to some matter. Decision makers can easily ignore them.
What's less easy to ignore are strikes, especially general strikes, as e.g. port workers in Italy threatened during the total blockade in the Gaza war.
Also: disinvestment, boycotts, public shunning, adverse publicity, picketing, blockades.
Start small, increase the pressure over time, be clear about what you're doing and why.
The disinvestment, boycotts, public shunning, adverse publicity, picketing, blockades, I can see those working. Certainly seems to have an impact in the video game news I see.
Even then I don’t they they get a lot of choice as far as results go.
In general, violence can certainly solve problems, especially when the problems are not being caused by almost-inevitable technological revolutions. One of the issues to keep in mind, though, is that it often also creates new ones, often surprising ones. For example, the assassination that led to World War One. For another example, if Trump had been assassinated last year, that would have solved many problems for people who dislike Trump. However, that doesn't necessarily mean it would have made the world overall a better place - that is almost impossible to predict. Hence the sci-fi sort of scenario of "you go back in time and kill Hitler, but when you return to your own time it turns out that Hitler dying just let mega-Hitler take power".
Sure, but keep in mind that Hitler is already pretty bad. So while yes, killing him might open the door to someone worse stepping in, it may also open the door to someone more level headed.
You know. In theory.
Your analysis seems to assume that people will remain more afraid of being "outcompeted" than of being murdered, even after a campaign of terrorism that would make 9/11 look minor.
>it often also creates new [problems], often surprising ones
Let's reframe this to remove the negative bias: murder has the obvious direct first-order effect of removing the target from existence, but also a host of non-obvious higher-order effects resulting from people's response to that violence. These can be counterproductive to the goals of the murderer, but they can also work in favor of it. That is why "terrorism" is a real thing - the higher-order effects are essentially a force multiplier, and if you have nothing to lose then the calculus of causing a major disruption begins to look favorable; any disruption, because regression to the mean is good if you're at the shitty end of the bell curve.
AI is such an important technology that in the face of such a campaign of terrorism, governments would bring the development of the technology directly under the protection of the state security forces, largely outside the reach of terrorists. If not in the US, then in China or other places. At that point the terrorists would have to attain a level of power where they could feasibly overthrow the government in order to stop the development of the technology. Now, some scientists would be uncomfortable in such conditions and would stop working on the technology, but enough would remain that the technology would continue to progress, albeit more slowly.
>and if you have nothing to lose then the calculus of causing a major disruption begins to look favorable; any disruption, because regression to the mean is good if you're at the shitty end of the bell curve.
Very true, if the status quo feels shitty enough one becomes extremely willing to just roll the dice.
I'm just waiting for dang, et. al to fix our thread voting system as it's a little too Reddity around here these last days.
> I don't think I've ever seen a thread this bad on Hacker News. The number of commenters justifying violence, or saying they "don't condone violence" and then doing exactly that, is sickening and makes me want to find something else to do with my life—something as far away from this as I can get. I feel ashamed of this community.
> Edit: for anyone wondering (or hoping), no I'm not leaving. That was a momentary expression of dismay.
Perhaps something to think about in a scenario like this. Personally I think it's interesting that some people are so quick to condone aggressive attacks on powerful people, yet have no comment on those powerful people committing lower levels of violence against the masses. It's all social context.
How is a person from a nation that the US President has threatened to annex or invade supposed to feel about seeing domestic violence in the United States? From their perspective a divided United States is less of a personal threat to them.
All this talk about how 'we can't have this in a democracy!' forgets that many of us don't live in that particular democracy, and that particular democracy is threatening other democracies.
What should my response be if a North Korean General is executed? Or if a Russian oligarch 'falls out a window'? Or a corrupt Mexican politician is beheaded by a rival cartel?
These American oligarchs aren't my countrymen, They don't have my best interests in mind, they fund the people who threaten my country, and now they provide the American military with technology that it can use to attack my country.
Their lobbying and campaign contributes have resulted in a Mad King waging an unwinnable war that has severely damaged the global economy and has made my life demonstrably worse. I have never done anything to these people and yet they callously did this to all of us for personal profit well beyond what any human being could never need in a thousand life times.
At the end of the day the less cohesive the American tribe is the better off my tribe is. I wish our incentives were aligned but they just aren't and I am not in any way responsible for that.
Can I just say that out of all of this discourse happening, this might be the most insightful yet succint position to explain my stance on all of this especially the "its all social context." line.
I feel like many of us here might share an answer publicly but I have always believed that if I am in the shoes of someone else, I might act the way they do so in a sense I understand the human part of it. A human did the violence and why. I understand that. Now we can call this violence inhuman, sure, but this action is still done by human and for many reasons. And I also understand why people condemn these actions, we wish to live in a clean and structural world and then we see the messiness of the world.
I just feel like just condemning an action would do nothing unless we change the ground conditions but that isn't in the hands of even many of us Hackernews users and this is basically a class aspect to it.
I personally feel like there are some similarities to this incident to the Trolley problem actually. Vsauce did a video about it worth watching[0]
Thank you for writing this comment.
Not people advocating for hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths from covid. Not people advocating for bombing campaigns blowing children to smithereens. Not people advocating for mass cuts to programs treating people with tuberculosis. Not people advocating for mass cuts to programs feeding the starving. Not people defending ICE in murdering people either via gunshot or medical neglect in their disgusting prisons.
In fact, a lot discussion critical of that stuff just gets [flagged].
None of that counts as violence to dang. But threaten a billionaire? Oh that's a bridge too far.
I'm not arguing any points how these conflicts will ever be solved, but it shows that violence hasn't solved anything until now, for decades over decades.
By sending bombs to people Ted Kaczynski made the "should we really do this" discussion of technology off limits for decades.
The specific stigma against physical violence (and not against other types, even for cumulatively worse actions) strikes me as very self-serving, an instance of "the law forbids both rich and poor to sleep under a bridge." It's increasingly the only remedy available to everyday people, and the mad acceleration of government capture by elites in the last decade is making murder and rioting inevitable, at least as long as ordinary people still feel they should have some power.
Any sort of violence is bad, singling out physical violence as uniquely bad gives misbehaving elites impunity.
I often can't help but see the "all violence is bad" narrative as another tool of oppression by the ruling class. Even if that isn't its intent, it certainly seems to serve their purposes.
1. Violent attacks against AI CEOs, researchers, and engineers is going to begin. This is due to widespread negative press that AI receives and as well as a pervasive feeling of economic uncertainty and doom in the population. Some of this being caused by the current administration's leadership, but much of it attributed to AI taking jobs and destroying opportunity.
2. Violent acts taken against non-tech CEOs will increase hand-in-hand.
3. If AI continues to demonstrate impressive new capabilities for automation, this rate will increase substantially.
4. The government may come down hard on these individuals, which will further inflame the situation.
5. Data centers will come under attack / sabotage.
6. This will all wind up further inflamed by prediction markets.
I have a colleague at Anthropic that refuses to put it on his LinkedIn. We all now know why.
The pro-Palestinian activists set their cause back a year by overplaying their hands in Columbia at the start of the war. If we want to ensure zero AI legislation for the next 2 years, I couldn’t think of a better way to ensure that than to start potting randos in the streets.
I think the general population is much more likely to feel joy about it than want a police crackdown.
If we're talking about attacks against average software engineers and obscure founders, fewer people would be happy about it, but a great number still would be. There is a lot of envy toward software engineers and founders.
Someone blindly shooting at Altman’s house is going to kill a neighbour or the housekeeper. Not Sam Altman. Probably not even his family.
The internet may be happy. But the locals will get scared. This happens every time these lone-wolf escalations occur.
But even if the DA prosecutes, the jury can nullify the charges, which is a risk. What happens when a jury finds the accused not guilty?
The masses will only tolerate so much before the elite start dying. See all of human history.
Most of the population will be for the violent attacks. Techbros went way too far in gleefully describing how they would destroy most people's careers while enriching themselves. Never bothered to think whether they should just because they could. Now the rooster is coming home to roost.
The best way for the attacks on AI executives to stop is to pass meaningful legislation that limits the use and scope of AI.
I doubt it. It would further polarize your population and what you really want is to unite them. You could make a video documentation that contrasts all the known, massive corruption cases in your administration (and SV personae) with the equally massive decay in your infrastructure from roads to bridges to the closure of maternity wings in hospitals because they are no longer profitable. Make as little dialogue/narration as possible and quote dollar numbers as often as possible. Spread posts contrasting corruption/decay to every outlet/social media.
Most people don't understand technology and/or its second order effects. They do understand when they are being stolen from.
Doesn't complaining about protestors at Columbia just make it clear that these complaints aren't actually about violence but are instead about rabble-rousers?
I was in New York during that time. They turned an entire swath of the city into a police zone. The dominant narrative was sympathy for the cause increasingly giving way to frustration to the destruction.
Potato potato. It’s a predictable, even necessary, response to occupying a building. Same as increasing police present if vigilante violence ramps up somewhere.
People who don’t understand that will keep trashing the causes they purport to represent.
It seems so clear that this is not about violence but instead about people who don't know their place.
Full stop, no "but". That's all that needs to be said on this thread.
You can't call yourself a democracy just because we can change the colour of the same bus every 3 to 4 years
Not playing at all makes you easier to beat still. Anyone pining for civil war should vacation in a war zone first. It’s difficult to encapsulate the privilege of peace until it’s been lost.
I completely agree. But political violence increasingly polarises the outcomes to those two. (The elites can buy gunmen faster than you or I can.)
California has a referendum system. Get an AI measure on the ballot. Companies that are doing the things Anthropic got fired for refusing to provide are banned from doing business in the State of California. (Or with the State. Find a balance that gets the votes.)
Keep pushing your state investigators. Work to flip the House. And keep protesting and disrupting the browncoats.
Alex Pretti did more to stop ICE than anyone e.g. killing an individual ICE agent would do.
Good grief, I wonder if it's held up. Oh, early Whedon, it's sure to have that "creepier than Tarantino" vibe at times, but maybe it'd be an interesting rewatch. Seeing a young Nathan Fillion is its own reward, certainly.
The long gone history of a country is not a something that should be allowed to determine its modern narratives. You shouldn't forget your history, but there are limits you shouldn't cross. When I hear arguments going back for centuries, it is a red flag for me. It is most likely a propaganda.
Psychologists talk about two common failing of their clients. People often fixate over the past or they fixate over the future, while forgetting about the present. The healthy approach is to keep a good balance between the past, the future, and the present, with a strong accent on the present. The history determinism reminds me a lot of the over-fixation on the past, and propaganda actively tries to unsettle balances in people's minds and fixate them on anything but the present.
Back to the argument that historical determinism is flawed…
I think it’s very reasonable to say that it happened in the past, therefore it probably will happen in the future. That’s the basis for pretty much any kind of prediction.
If you want to argue against historical determinism, you have to make the specific argument for why the current state is different enough that we can’t use the past to predict the future.
That’s just an example of American propaganda
No. My logic applied here would imply that environtal unconsciousness can produce results becuase we got here by being environmentally unconscious. And that is true, burning coal for energy, while unsustainable, does produce results. Youll get energy, on demand, in a controlled manner.
Now, we should be careful doing it, but if you go to an amazonian tribesperson and yell at them for burning wood for a fire, becaise solar panels exist, then thats doesnt make complete sense
you can disagree that this was necessary, which I'd agree with.
When a State becomes undemocratic, it can more easily wield that violence against its own people. Part of the founding ideals of the US is the hope that the people would oust such a State, explicitly through the threat and application of violence if necessary, thus the second amendment.
Here in Sweden, back in the 1400eds etc. the farmers often made war on the government whenever it did anything they didn't like. This had the long term consequence, that by the end of this era, self-owning farmers owned 50% of the land in Sweden, whereas in Denmark, which did not have this kind of violence, it was only 10%.
It's incredibly important to be feared and to engage in violence, so that you are in practice and can threaten your political opponents, and this remains true in a democracy.
It's important that powerful people know they can't trust that they will truly be protected by the laws if they do something which harms others-- that the veneer of civilization is thin and the masses dangerous. Otherwise you end up with very dangerous situations where people can get away with anything that's legal.
Something is fundamentally broken when the sitting president of the United States pardoned thousands convicted in a court of law of attempting to use violence to achieve political ends.
No wonder people are increasingly recognizing that democracy is now broken.
This information of course might be false, so take the words below with a grain of salt. I might be completely wrong.
When an influential group in the Valley that has ties to many tech companies spends years speading rhetoric about “bombing data centers” or the title of the book above, I fear this kind of psychosis is inevitable. People in this thread are focusing on labour and AI issues as the motivation but I am afraid the problem might be closer to home.
Disclaimer: I am not American, just an outside observer.
Some random people with a gun and a Molotov aren't even the same (metaphorical) book.
* likely still better than me though, even on this specific measure. But even being the ten thousandth best speaker on the planet, out of 8 billion, leaves you at a huge disadvantage compared to the best.
> bombing data centers
At the risk of demonstrating the exact mistake I've just accused Yudkowsky and Altman of:
With B-52s, not as a DIY job with home-made Molotovs.
If you start with the claim "AI has the potential to cause as much harm as nuclear weapons", and "the USA already uses B-52s to enforce the non-proliferation treaty", this follows naturally.
If you're not willing to call on your representative to sign a binding international treaty to stop data centres that forcefully, talking about "stopping AI" or "pausing AI" seems hollow, because even if your government agrees to not build data centres near you as a result of low-grade domestic terrorism, in the absence of a credible threat to use a B-52 on someone else's sovereign territory there's nothing that you and your flaming rag in a bottle of petroleum distillate can do about them being built outside your country, in exactly the same way and for exactly the same reasons that German public opposition to nuclear weapons completely failed to influence North Korea.
How many people believe continued AI "progress" would be so dangerous that it should be prohibited? 136,513 people signed a statement to that effect:
https://superintelligence-statement.org/
The name of the man that threw the Molotov cocktail is Daniel Alejandro Moreno-Gama, and "Daniel Moreno" is one of the signatures on the statement. I concede that his motivation almost certainly was to try to slow down AI "progress".
- OpenAI made a deal with the Pentagon (fair)
- OpenAI changed their business model from non-profit to for-profit (fair?)
- Sexual assault allegations by his sister. Sam Altman denies this and it's currently before a court.
- Overpromised AI to investors (everyone does this)
- Lobbying against regulations (I support)
- Some vague accusations of "being a liar" and a "sociopath" by his competitors Ilya Sutskever and Dario Amodei.
- He doesn't know how to code (lol)
Is there anything that I'm missing? Does he put ketchup on his pizza?
It'd be one thing if he was just promising more than he could actually deliver, but he went further, making promises of buying up unrealistically large chunks of the global RAM supply, causing everyone else to suffer, with no remorse.
There's also WorldCoin. I don't think a decent person would continue to push such an awful, untrustworthy system. This is a supposedly privacy-focused project that several countries are investigating for privacy violations and has been found to be in violation of privacy laws in some of them.
It's almost as if he goes out of his way to do as much harm to the world as he thinks he can get away with while maintaining the facade of just doing business. I don't think he's the antichrist, I think Peter Thiel is the closest to deserving that description.
- Barely gave 1% of compute (on oldest chips) to safety team after promise of 20%
- Worked behind the scenes to try to land federal deal that gives mil no guardrails control and ability for mass surveillance
- Lied about China AI 'Marshall Plan' to get federal funding
- Tried to get MBS money ever after Jamal Kashoggi
While long, I'd recommend just reading the New Yorker article
> Callous disregard of lost jobs, disinformation, mental health issues / deaths, IP theft, environmental cost, skill atrophy
ChatGPT is a tool that changed people's lives. OpenAI released something that wasn't perfect, for free, and forced all their competitors to release these products publicly.
You can't stop technological progress to protect old jobs, or because you are afraid people are gonna misuse it. I'm fascinated how many grown adults want to be treated like children their whole lives, but more nefariously, they want to impose this on others who want more freedom and agency.
As for IP "theft", all I'm gonna say is: fuck intellectual property as a concept and the whole parasitic industry that grew around it. The only contribution of IP has been to stifle innovation and set our civilization back by decades. Making IP obsolete and unenforceable has been one of the best things to come out of LLMs and one of the great catalysts of the scientific, technological, and creative advancements that are coming in the near future. For that alone, Sam Altman deserves a statue, no matter what his other flaws are.
IP can hurt or help depending on the industry - how do you enable R&D-heavy industries like pharma to recoup costs over time without something like this? I don't see how you incentivize innovation without the concept but I'm open to reforms like not resetting patent timelines for minor tweaks, etc.
That's it, I don't think much of the rest has any weight outside internet forums like this one.
*I've seen people using copilot and calling it "chatgpt".
It is not just a question of morality. A sociopath with that amount of power can be a danger.
You probably think that "sociopathy" is an incurable disease which would make him some sort of vampire. This is pure bs. The way these "personality disorders" are diagnosed is the same as taking a buzzfeed personality quiz. This is not very rigorous stuff, I would even classify it as pseudoscience. As a tangent, I really despise how they are using greek and latin roots to prompt into our brains that what their models are describing is in any way similar to actual pathologies.
So yeah, maybe Sam Altman is generally a dishonest person if we believe what Ilya Sutskever, Dario Amodei, and others are saying. If that's the case (I have no reason to doubt it), he should stop lying and manipulating people, there are more satisfying ways to achieve one's objectives.
But the "sociopath" label is pure bs, along with the rest of those "personality disorders". That shit is more dangerous and harmful than a million lying Sam Altmans.
one US mindset I can't wrap my mind around
> compare salaries
Let's not even begin this trope prevalet on HN, those taxes are funding a working healthcare and public infrastructure in EU.
That certainly helps. You could also add talent concentration due to excellent universities and top-tier companies already being here. But the truth is that you can incorporate a business in less than a week here, employment is at-will, there are no unions or other such bullshit, taxes are low, the general way you deal with regulator is ask for forgiveness instead of ask for permission, etc.
Say I'm currently working on a project in the crypto or AI space. If I wanted to make it into a commercial product, do you think I'm gonna go to France or Germany? It might take me a few weeks just to get past the first layers of red-tape to get a business licence there. If I hire someone who turns out to be incompetent, I'm probably stuck with them until I gather enough evidence to justify firing. And I have to live in constant fear of the state deciding my business is illegal.
> funding a working healthcare
Btw the US healthcare system is the best in the world if you can afford it. Health insurance is usually provided through the employer. I can have an appointment with a doctor within days, emergency room wait time is on the order of minutes. Never had a problem with the quality of care.
> talent concentration, excellent universities and top-tier companies
This is all just a consequence of above. And note that talent in US historically was mostly gen 1-2-3 immigrants.
> incorporate a business in less than a week
This is one is important. EU strives for it, but I think the reasons lie in the different worldview, see below.
> no unions or other such bullshit > taxes are low > if I hire someone who turns out to be incompetent > best healthcare
See, you purely view this topic as someone wanting to minmax gains, profit, effort. Yes, this is easier to do in the US right now.
What kind of world do you build with all this? What does it all lead to? I envision something like futuristic Mexico where a few lucky get in the top ~30% who can afford healthcare and education, and live in gated apartment communities, businesses are owned by the top 2%. The rest of the population works in gig jobs and farms (and are a nuisance, until automation makes them unneeded).
How much of the US popultion has realistic access to that "best healthcare"? Children, elderly, disabled?
If it were up to "free markets", there would be no 5 day workweek, if you were born with one arm you'd die in a ditch, and cartelling businesses would be free to exploit the population, their privacy, time and assets at their will (just click agree on our T&C).
Do you care about these issues? You must not, you're a businessman and want to do business. But the state certainly should. And I wouldn't live in a state which doesn't. This is what everyone in the EU gets with your taxes. It's far from great, varies per member country, but this is the general idea. And this is something that US tech industry people have a hard time to get, who just look at comp levels think money and enough hustle can solve anything for anyone.
I recommend you to travel and see other types of societies. But even the US itself will undergo a massive change in the next decade with how its old powers, influx of people and world economy grasp evaporates.
I actually travel pretty often to Europe and have lived there for extended periods of time. I have family and hold the passport of an EU member state.
I'm going to try to be 100% fair: people in Europe are generally poor and they don't realize it. Salaries are very low, but the cost of living is almost equivalent. I am currently enjoying a quality of life that I don't think I could have built anywhere else in the world within a single generation. If I wasn't grinding constantly, I could afford to go on vacation pretty much anywhere on earth for a few weeks without thinking about how much I would be spending. If I stopped working tomorrow, I could coast on my savings for years without cutting any expense. I will be able to pay tutors and private schools for my children without hesitating. And I'm not saying this to brag, because it is frankly not that special. I'm nowhere near the private jet class. This is "middle class" here. Almost everyone who worked in this industry (Bay Area or NYC) for a few years could tell you something similar. Tesla and BMWs are not luxury cars, the parking lot of my building is filled with them. Everyone hates tipping culture, but we tip 20-25% because it's just a rounding error and it makes the servers happy so might as well. I'm not sure if "free healthcare" can really make up for this.
It is also great to be surrounded by people who are ambitious and really value performance. The US is one of the only places in the world where high performance is rewarded to this extent. For me, this is a huge factor, and I don't think I would have learned as much as I did in the last few years if I was anywhere else.
But sure, there are tradeoffs. When my wife gave birth, she got 3 months of paid maternity leave. 3 months is considered generous here and it is a benefit provided by her company. Not everyone gets even 3 months.
And I can't deny that every time I land in Europe I go through the "this is so beautiful, I should really move here" phase. It's nice to be able to walk around or take public transit and not need a car. It's nice to hang around in a nice park instead of a shopping mall.
If Europe is more your kind of vibe, I don't judge you. But don't judge me either for valuing other things.
> See, you purely view this topic as someone wanting to minmax gains, profit, effort
My position is more nuanced, but in general, I believe that technological progress is what increases the standard of living for everyone. Competitive free market capitalism, with all its flaws, is currently the best system we have to continue moving forward.
I personally object from him trying to divert trillions in investment from potential helping the hungry type stuff which is popular to sticking slop in everything which many don't want.
The last thing I want is for someone, in 2029, to say "but LLMs just weren't given a fair chance last time, we would have definitely reached AGI with more funding if it wasn't for [targeted attack]"
Didn't work for a german political party some centuries ago, don't work for this.
But violence is false.
Yes, violence shouldn't be the first resort, and when violence is unleashed innocent suffer as well, but there is a great difference between choosing not to use violence due to whatever consideration, and being so toothless and tamed that a sight of dog that finally bites when being constantly beaten sickens you.
We're not on first resort anymore, people are dying because they cannot afford living.
The threat to AI far exceeds any benefits I can see.
So are we seeing a massive lobbying effort by Altman and OpenAI to make this happen? Or is this another "maybe we can build a dyson sphere?"
OpenAI was a nonprofit and then it was restructured to be a for-profit corporation. That seems like the opposite of what he claims to advocate for if we look at his actual actions.
If 95% of jobs go away, the destabilization leads to violent conflicts, and power and wealth become more centralized does it really matter if we have better healthcare or automated cars? Will people have purpose in their lives? Will this be a better world for most?
What I instead see is a massive system of rents that will be affordable only by other businesses who replace their workers and leave tons of people out in the cold with no income and minimal access to these tools.
Violence can solve problems. This kind of violence is stupid, counterproductive and immoral.
Strategically deploying violence takes time, resources and discipline. Wanking off with a gun does not.
Right before we see drone body guards and protest monitors gun down innocent bystanders.
What us cushy engineers haven't realized yet is that the gradient for who are well off are sliding more and more towards one end. Sooner or later engineers will be on the wrong side of that gradient.
Finally someone who said it. There was this quote I saw in the movie "Air"(about michael Jordan) about how people with true wealth only ever part with it not out of charity but out of greed. It takes someone or something truly special to force them to part with that money.
This whole era that we've lived through, where software engineers have amazing working conditions compared to blue collar workers and manage to pull ahead in society, helping to form a white collar elite class, is an aberration caused by the miracle of the microprocessor and Moore's Law. The elites saw the opportunity to obtain so much wealth from the lower classes(in the form of automating labor with computers) that they were forced to part with a bit of it, allowing some special people: software engineers like you and me to achieve what we consider a middle class life.
But sooner or later those same people will want that wealth back. They will continue to fight and find ways to take that wealth back: whether through H‑1B visas, "learn to code" initiatives to increase supply, or now AI. AI could very well crash and burn tomorrow but they will be back, and it will be an ongoing battle for the rest of our lives.
The elites after the French Revolution were not only mostly the same as before, they escaped with so much money and wealth that it’s actually debated if they increased their wealth share through the chaos [1].
What the British did. Tale of Two Cities. Land and electoral reform.
One of them stayed geopolitically relevant for another century. One of them became Germany’s sock puppet.
The comment refers to an article specifically discussing only one aspect of a major historical event.
The French revolution is considered one of the most important events in the history of Europe, because of the great impact it had on the (among others) politics, economy and the quality of life of common people.
Downplaying its importance by trying to water its impact down to "but rich still rich, no?" is a sign, that the comment might have been made in bad faith or without proper understanding of the source material.
Mostly by conquest. Not revolution, certainly not the popular kind.
By the same token, the normal populace was also way better off after the French Revolution, since using the money and wealth of the dead elites to improve everyone's lives made a substantial impact on the French civilization that they are still benefiting from today.
In other words...the French Revolution is exactly the wrong type of example you want to be using when talking about whether violence against tech elites is acceptable.
Ish. Most survived. And they didn’t have jets. Revolutions today are broadly accretive for elites.
All the jets in the world won't stop the violence once that bridge is crossed. Because the mob also has access to jets, and boats, and (at that point) an emotional reason to pursue their targets to the ends of the earth.
Ish. Most survived. And they didn’t have jets.
You have a very VC/tech-bro/Theranosesque definition of "most survived". More than 2/3rds of the French aristocracy was killed in the French Revolution. Even the low bound using just the official numbers puts almost half of the aristocrats having been executed or died in prison during the French Revolution.
Revolutions today are broadly accretive for elites.
They aren't, unless you're referring to the weapons dealers, warlords, or the complicit. Revolutions tend to have outsized impacts on reducing the wealth of elites. The only exceptions are where the elites were part of the security apparatus on the side that won the conflict and gained their wealth by murdering the people who had what they wanted. The inevitable result though is that when they lose that power, they tend to lose their lives (see e.g., Syria and South Africa).
…why? Most of Silicon Valley’s elites are itching for violence in politics. To the degree they’re putting thumbs on the scale, on the net, it’s for more violence.
> the mob also has access to jets
No. It doesn’t. In zero civil breakdowns in the last half century did the mob get the jets during breakdown. The closest one can get is the Taliban seizing U.S. materiel.
> More than 2/3rds of the French aristocracy was killed in the French Revolution
Source? The majority of those killed were commoners.
> They aren't, unless you're referring to the weapons dealers, warlords, or the complicit
Complicit. A breakdown in violence would give the authoritarians a bona fide Reichstag fire.
> inevitable result though is that when they lose that power, they tend to lose their lives (see e.g., Syria and South Africa)
The former president of Syria is in Russia. Much of the South African elite is complaining about white genocides in the U.S.
SV elites don't understand what true violence is. You all talk a big game and assume your money will buy you safety and forget how many rich people have been killed byt their own guards.
I’ve never argued some upward mobility wasn’t permitted by the revolution. I’m just pushing back on the notion that elites should fear an American revolution. They don’t, because historically, they shouldn’t. Nine times out of ten they’ll consolidate power among themselves, which means more wealth flowing upwards. Nine times out of the rest of the time, they’ll escape with most of their money.
And for the average Frenchman, the revolutions were terrible. Some folks win. But they were seldom powerless before. Just wealthy. Compare that to the British case, where land and electoral reform permitted the emergence of a broad middle class, one that continued accruing power for another century.
I agree this is a symptom of large systemic issues.
Long gone are the days a bumbling fool could get a well paying job at the local power plant and provide a good life for a wife and three children, with a large home, decent insurance and two cars.
also, if the worst case scenario does happen and most of the population finds itself without money. there are other ways to live with very little money.
This is even more hideous than expressions of approval for individual violence. This is a dystopian acquiescence.
In the worst-case world, there is still more than enough wealth and work done to provide the bare minimum quality of life to everyone. The automation of most occupations would lower the bar of creating the simplest food supplies and homes even more. But, in that horrific world, the elite class would say "lol no" and use that wealth to live in paradise, away from everyone else, while the rest are left with almost nothing. The parent is saying that your immediate reaction is depressing, because instead of anger or even disapproval, your instinct is to put your head down and reason that you and all the future generations should just live like a monkey, forever.
If I knew someone was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars building a big laser pointed at my house, I would not wait for "quantified evidence" of its effect to take some sort of action. The only real debate is what kind of action.
> also, if the worst case scenario does happen and most of the population finds itself without money. there are other ways to live with very little money.
If you have so little attachment to your money, why hold on to it at all? Do not be upset that other people are operating on a slightly larger time horizon than you are, and are interested in their livelihood not just today, but three or five years from now.
Well, I tried to warn my family and friends and they're looking at me like I'm crazy. So yes, I think most people will just treat all their layoffs like it's just a regular recession. Until, at least half your friends are laid off, most people won't be any more alarmed than if in a recession.
>> If you have so little attachment to your money, why hold on to it at all?
You'll need whatever you have left. The barter economy won't take the place of the primary economy, rather it will supplement it with transactions between members who have no currency. but, there will always be some things that you want to get from the primary economy, if you can.
The same thing happened with Kirk. Everyone standing up to "mourn" a neo-nazi, fake tears, rolling with the grift. Rolling with the white supremacist grindbox.
It's gross.
I don't know if they are right, neither in world view nor conclusion. But it seems this is the world we currently lived in. This is one of the cases where for once i wish there was a manifesto to read, because i badly want to understand why
You get comments like "violence is bad but we would not have $x if not for violence" and then you get to justify violence for any pet cause they have.
I expect to see more of this until it dies down because of how ridiculous the premise is.
Violence never solves anything. You will never make anything in this world better by becoming a worse person than your enemies.
I have seen anti-AI sentiments from people known all over the spectrum.