The Rage of the Billionaires Is Coming
thebignewsletter.com
thebignewsletter.com
This is the sound of people who know they’re safe high up on the economic totem pole, safely out of physical harm’s way, and don’t need to care a shred about what the public thinks.
AI can build guillotines better, faster, cheaper - did you miss Karp's quote?
While people waste their time in pleasant hallucinations about what people would do, they'd find themselves in the Soylent Green factory with no way out.
It sounds like the public is only booing. Barely anything of note yet.
I think right now the public is slightly annoyed, but not quite annoyed enough to make real changes to our society. The question to me is when do people actually get angry and start changing the world in a way that improves the situation they are in?
I think this is being misunderstood. I read it as a final bit of civility. It's a warning.
Crowds either do, or do not. If crowds start throwing tomatoes then you know they're actually angry. Or rioting, or... Stuff.
Booing? Kinda nothing in the great scheme of what crowds do.
Different problems are different. The problem of wealth concentration is not novel and it's been addressed many time.
Usually in ways the end poorly for those who believe themselves untouchable.
More generally, sure I can express this anger. I can say "People hate AI" or even "I hate AI". Watch this post not get censored.
I can say that people are afraid. I can say that they are afraid of losing their jobs, and their middle-class life, and their hope of a better future. And I can say that if it starts to happen (not just to 100,000 tech workers, but to 100,000,000 middle class workers of every stripe), then there's going to be real anger and real, physical expressions of that anger.
Reminds me of the Occupy Wall Street protests. Media: “they’re protesting, but gosh if we could only figure out why!” Protestors: “We’re protesting for economic justice and against inequality!” Media: “Huh… did you hear anything? I didn’t! We still have no idea what they’re protesting against, but they’re really mad looking!” Protestors: “We are against billionaires.” Media: “Well, I guess we’ll never know what they are so upset about!”
These wars are documented in history. Perhaps the story around them has been changed or morphed by the victors. They are WW1, WW2, and probably other global wars through human history can be looked at from this lens of tricking the majority of people. I see this as being a viable perspective as throughout history most people have been too busy struggling: insufficient food and diet, they are sick, struggling or otherwise weak and unable to understand the bigger picture of whats happening in the leadership structure around them. Most people are thus conditioned to be weak gullible and naive unable to tell they are being tricked as a way to avoid accountability.
When people were angry about gun violence a decade ago, we got "This is America", and other songs representing our disgust at the gun situation. Maybe the laws haven't changed but at a minimum I expect consolidation and comradery.
Where is the graffiti? Where are the songs? Like we got a few books from a crowd but we haven't even seen a cohesive counter-movement come up over AI yet.
No songs, no punk rock lyrics, no raps yet. Let along solid political action (which often comes later after ideas are coalesced with songs / or other communication).
Booing Eric Schmidt, for a point in a graduation speech about AI? That shouldn’t be happening. Those tend to be positive, happy press articles.
Nor is it the only data point, theres been multiple articles shared on HN alone about consumer sentiment and AI.
The light was green and is now blinking yellow. I wouldn’t be surprised when it turns red.
Eric Schmidt even had a canned response ready because this event was 100% predictable and he prepared for it.
Look, there's like, actual protesters going on right now. No Kings, or the Target boycott (etc. etc). Real political action that seems to have teeth.
Excuse me for pointing out that kids booing at one line (that the speaker was already prepared for) is kid gloves. It's a drop in the bucket and within today's expectations. The actual protesters and actual political action is elsewhere.
> Wherever one looks at the origins of the police (and prisons), one finds they “develop hand in hand with social inequality and hierarchy”, as Robert Reiner, the UK’s leading scholar of police, explains. The police is, he writes, a “means for the emergence and protection of more centralised and dominant class and state systems”.