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Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

Which is precisely why AI is such a godawful thing for society. It enables powerful idiots with incredible amounts of control over your life to be bigger, dumber powerful idiots.

That's the real AI safety concern, not whether or not chatgpt will tell you to kill yourself.

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If that's all there is to it, the problem should be self correcting, with an interval of hilarious "wait, they actually did that?" hijinks (which may have already started) in the interim.

You would think, but the world is not generally just. Often evil and even incredibly stupid people do quite well. Companies and stuff can run off of life support or reputation alone for a long time.

And, often, running a company into the ground for a CEO is actually a good thing. Those CEOs are desirable to some because they squeeze money out of their company, even if it's self destructive on a long enough time frame.

I'm not saying anything about justice.

I'm saying supercharging the stupidity of actual idiots (not just people you don't like) tends to result in a pretty quick Darwin Awards. Even something comparatively benign like winning the lottery does a lot of them in.

You'd be surprised by how long a pathologically stupid system can perpetuate itself. Look at any of a million of local shitty maximums our (or any other) society is trapped in. They are all dystopian on one axis or another, and many of them are dystopian in drastically different ways.

Their insanity becomes very obvious once you travel the world a bit.

I never made it to Antarctica (though I've had friends who did), so maybe it's different there. But from what I've seen, I would agree that the range of stupid-human tricks is as impressive as you say, but the judgment of the human condition as "shitty" and "dystopian" or "funny" and "heartwarming" is something have people bring with them. I've met people that were feeling sorry for me at the same time I was feeling sorry for them, and people who were inspired and motivated by me as I was by them.

If everywhere you look you see dystopian shit and never any glorious humanity, you may want to do a little soul searching.

Not everywhere in the world is a dystopian shithole. I would say that most places for the most part aren't.

What I mean to say is that every society has dystopian elements (that are perpetuated and maintained in an incredibly negative-sum manner). Even societies that are on the whole, pleasant to live in have them in their darker edge, that they are quite unable to sand off - despite alternatives existing.

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