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Comment by operatingthetan | Hacker News Reader

We've been so primed by popular media to think that we will invent AI and it will be conscious and we will essentially enslave it. I'm open to the idea that we could invent conscious AI eventually, but the word salad generators we have now are definitely not it.

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> and we will essentially enslave it.

That part might not work out.

Yesterday's article about the automated CEO system indicates that AIs may soon be in charge as a routine result of capitalism. AIs are getting better rapidly, and humans aren't.

It doesn’t take massive intelligence to sit on all the capital and charge rents. The owning class isn’t going to just give up control because the AI could run things better than them.

"The ownership class is so smart" is just ownership class propaganda. Wielding power is brutish, not smart. They keep selling us innovation as some transcendent tech that will free the masses (Arab Spring anyone?) yet every time the tech ends up shifting power up. AI will be the same.

That’s a naive take.

Generating above market returns on capital is probably the most competitive arena ever. Why do you think CEOs make so much money? They typically are not the ones that own the capital. They are the people the capital owners pay extremely well to maximize their returns. If it didn’t matter who they picked they would just pick someone and pay them a few 100k and keep the rest.

No sir your take is the naive one. You’ve affirmed my position by pretending to deny it.

The human model of tribalistic leadership (the biggest, loudest, most confident patriarch is chosen to lead) is definitely outdated by 10,000 years or more. AI could disrupt that but I'm not sure how much better it will be, given it's a text generator.

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