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Comment by Lerc | Hacker News Reader

I have found that, for many of the statements about what AI should do, I would actally be happier if the letters "AI" were replaced with "companies"

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That's because it's a meaningless, populist trope. There is zero helpful information, solution or context which depends on the specific issue at hand.

>>I have found that, for many of the statements about what AI should do, I would actally be happier if the letters "AI" were replaced with "companies"

Perhaps, but at the moment AI is at the forefront of the pre-regulation land grab.

If one considers a firm to be a non-human entity that exhibits cognition, then yes. Various religions also exhibit those characteristics, which would fortify the Roman pope’s position with irony.

See Joscha Bach’s claim about religions not publishing their A|B testing at 51:47:

https://youtu.be/7bqdPHLIY8w

And while your comment has validity, in the US the phrase uttered by Presidential candidate Mitt Romney adds a layer of complexity:

“Corporations are people, my friend.”

Same thing though. AI is largely a service provided by companies

Yes yes I know, open source models exist, yadda yadda

I think it's safe to say the overwhelming amount of AI usage in the world today is gates by corporations though. The vast majority of people will barely configure their own OS nevermind managing their own locally hosted open source AI instance

Not at all the same thing. AI is a subset of what companies can do, and many if the issues people have with AI are not intrinsic to AI but rather their use in the hands of companies utilizing then for their own benefit.

Open source models don't exist. Open-weight ones do, which are more equivalent to freeware than free software.

Fair enough, thank you for the correction

I don't think anyone actually has an issue with AI. I think people are finally fed up with late-stage capitalism and lashing out.

I think if there were any solution to the lack of jobs due to AI implementation then people would be fine. There isn’t any solution from either party in the US so people are naturally attacking the thing that is causing the problem.

It’s really hard to get people excited about not having jobs when you design a whole society around the idea of having a job and make life exceedingly miserable for anyone who doesn’t

You can’t push both “If you dont work, you dont eat” and “Nobody needs to work anymore” propaganda at the same time. Gotta choose

The solution to the lack of jobs should be a strong social safety net, but Americans don't want this because socialism, so what can you do? You can't really halt progress, and taxing the rich (or corporations) is very unpalatable there, so everyone is kind of stuck.

Things will continue to get worse until people get too desperate and extreme things happen. Then some politician will realize this can rise to power on this, delivering only a few small promises which will lightly alleviate the pressure and then we continue the cycle again.

You need more than just a strong social safety net. If people are losing well-paying jobs, even if the safety net covers their basic needs, their quality of living goes down, and they are potentially also losing something that gives them purpose and something to do with their time, not to mention losing a sense of independence.

Let's suppose that we did get UBI, and AI replaced most jobs. Then we'll basically just have the wealthy elite who control the resources and the AIs, and everyone else who live off of the basic income, with no real way to increase their wealth. That still sounds dystopian to me.

And to be clear, I am not at all opposed to a better safety net, but it should be a safety net, not a replacement for employment for most of the population.

Also, I don't think it is very likely that AI will replace everyone's job. But I am worried that it will result in shrinking the middle class, and increasing wealth disparity.

Switzerland pays you your previous salary for two years if you're laid off. "Covers your basic needs" isn't a ceiling for a social safety net.

And what happens after those two years if there just aren't enough jobs to be had?

"Stuff". What does it matter? I'm saying that the ceiling doesn't have to be "covers your basic needs". The fact that I haven't presented a full plan doesn't mean my point is invalid.

People were fed up at "Occupy Wallstreet", but the media and craven political situation absorbed those movements back into the fold. Forget "fed up". When do we start seeing actions that don't feed directly back into the oligarchy's capture?

...you could also swap out with "rich people" or "all people," "governments."

In fact, reading these sentences with ad-lib on the subject tends to give these sentences interestingly different connotations.

Well, as Nick Land said, "Capitalism and Artificial Intelligence are the same thing"

And he meant it as a good thing. Something to be embraced.

Exactly. The source of that quote should be this interview from 2017 [0].

For those interested in exploring Land's main thesis (capitalism is AI), I have a research project on the topic [1].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGxgGQpyBYM

[1] https://retrochronic.com

Yes! I've felt exactly the same. Everything people have taken issue with - "plagiarism," concentration of wealth and power, termination of jobs, environmental harm to feed data centers, land being wasted on new datacenters, resources being distributed terribly so as to feed the AI monster, slopcode being shit out as fast as possible to stay ahead of the market, software quality dropping for the same reason, engineers phoning it in at work to hit LLM KPIs, it's all just capitalism in its most raw, inevitable, end game form.

Edit: Someone replied to this with a question. I'm rate-limited here for getting into a flamewar with a PRC citizen that was gloating to me about my country being possibly invaded soon (which, fair, flamewars are bad), so I'll need to put my reply below:

There's no exact road map, but generally speaking, in our capitalist countries today, wealth started out more distributed, and governments had more power, in the beginning of their liberalization. States often competed in markets or simply nationalized things like power, healthcare, education. Ongoing examples of that are lots of places in Europe.

With the advent of neoliberalism (Thatcher, Reagan), concentrated capital converts more easily to political power in an exponential manner - more money, more ability to buy government, leads to more money, more ability to buy government.

Corporations are profit generation algorithms. They want the profit to always go up, and when they run against the barriers of laws (restricting their environmental impact, ability to underpay their workers, create cheap and dangerous working environments, do international trade in some way), naturally the next investment step is to remove those barriers.

So, early capitalism is strong regulation, socialized services and infrastructure, government competition, some nationalization, and private ownership of the means of production.

Late stage capitalism is weak/no regulation, no services, privatized infrastructure, no government competition, no nationalization, sectors tending towards monopolization, and wealth concentration.

"Raw capitalism" is where the commodification of everything is complete.

"it's all just capitalism in its most raw, inevitable, end game form."

Can you explain, what would be early capitalism and what is the difference to "end game capitalism" to you?

so maybe we'll get to the right place by accident when all companies are effectively replaced by ai ha ha. (not putting a high %age likelihood on that one, obviously, just being cheeky)

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