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Comment by germandiago | Hacker News Reader

I am pretty sure that the goal of these companies at the end is ruling more than what governments can.

Just look at the pattern... they collude, they provide to them whatever is needed, and at some point, if this is not true yet, they will be the ones who will tell them what to do or not, bc you know how humans are, right... blackmailing, mess up the business or shames of people, etc.

It is just a matter of time. The state, as we know it, will collapse or will be greatly reduced, which, from a point of view, is positive, from another, Idk, bc if someone replaces that, we will be in the hands of someone, as usual...

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"Monopoly on the lawfully usage of force" + "regular and peaceful change of government" can go a very long way against "corporations governing the world".

I'm curious if we'll ever get a form of civil war where corporate militias (corporate _robot_ militias in the case of xAI, of course) draw fire on good old meat policemen coming to bring the CEO to court.

Sure, it may happen, but I suspect the alternatives (bribing, sending a scapegoat to jail, buying the elections, etc... and focus on the "making money" part) will stay preferable for a while.

> "regular and peaceful change of government"

This has already been broken, and they've become so much more bold since then.

The monopoly on the use of force has gotten kinda blurry as well these days. As long as people keep electing anti-government governments, the risk of technocracy is very real.

Unfortunately this will keep happening in capitalist systems without hard wealth caps, because capitalists would rather risk the extermination of entire groups of people than risking their wealth, so they will inevitably keep spreading & stoking fascist ideas.

March 1933 election

"For the general election of 5 March 1933, the Nazis were allied with other nationalist and conservative factions. At a secret meeting on 20 February, major German industrialists had agreed to finance the Nazis' election campaign."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933

> capitalists would rather risk the extermination of entire groups of people than risking their wealth

I think that if you study socialism in the 20th century you cannot say this seriously when you compare the alternatives.

Ah yes, it's obviously acceptable that the richest people on this planet are deliberately and explicitly trying to pull us into fascism, because every single alternative must be even worse, because SOCIALISM!

Good thing you reminded us, otherwise we might've had critical thoughts about the current system.

I'm rooting for them vs them.

sir this is robocop

And then powerful local LLMs become feasible and everyone and every government self hosts and the megacorps lose all power.

Imagine the United States DoD, CIA, NSA training an LLM on all its top secret intel.

I can’t imagine any agency in their right mind training an LLM on their top secret data… especially considering that essentially it would collapse all need to know data in one easily leakable single access domain. The models have no feasible or reasonable way to implement rbac. So you would end up in a situation where people who need to know who killed A, also know who killed B, not to mention cell A knowing potentially data on Cell B who is meant to watch them, etc, etc.

That’s the thing, the agencies just need to be run by people who are no longer in their right minds.

The idea is silly because most of it is complete garbage anyway. You'd wind up with a model that might know a very small amount of actionable information, and the rest of it just speculative. Or extremely time sensitive, useful for only a relatively short slice of time (which has already passed).

> it would collapse all need to know data in one easily leakable single access domain. The models have no feasible or reasonable way to implement rbac

Oh my sweet summer child...

This has been the continual goal of the US defense and intelligence agencies since 9/11, which was blamed on a lack of information sharing. Why do you think Edward Snowden had access to everything? Because it was consolidated post-2001.

You think there is any access control at the upper levels of the dark intelligence agencies? They have access to the whole take.

And it used to be that was pretty useless unless you had an actual lead. You'd need a East German Stasi level of labor to read everyone's secrets at scale... Now you don't, thanks to AI.

https://enwp.org/Total_Information_Awareness

Snowden had mass access to a mass surveillance program, not mass access to N dark programs or particular bits of high value intelligence. The thing you are describing is primarily around sharing threat intelligence or in other words, spying on us plebes. High value target intelligence and other bits of fun are still kept quite seperate.

A great idea that each person does the same. That makes it a draw, namely, a Nash equilibrium.

Did we not watch every single supposedly powerful US tech CEO immediately drop in supplication and kiss Trump's ring as soon as he became president? And when Jack Ma got mouthy, Xi locked him in a basement for 3 months and then kept him in exile for another 5 years.

So much for the all-powerful cabal.

> Did we not watch every single supposedly powerful US tech CEO immediately drop in supplication and kiss Trump's ring as soon as he became president?

Why fight someone who is so open to corruption? The important thing is that they got everything they wanted, and all they had to do was throw a few million at the clown, attend his parties, and maybe take down some diversity programs they didn't believe in anyway.

China is a different beast altogether, though.

> Did we not watch every single supposedly powerful US tech CEO immediately drop in supplication and kiss Trump's ring as soon as he became president?

Because they know it will work. You don’t have to watch Trump speak for very long to know he’s not very intelligent. Similarly, you don’t have to be much smarter than him to know how easily he can be manipulated with adulation.

Imagine how deluded you have to be about reality and how deep invested into an ideology to loose to such a moron, twice..

Skreet skreet! Check it.

Lmao

Big difference between giving the president a gold trinket to curry favor and getting disappeared by the Communists.

> It is just a matter of time. The state, as we know it, will collapse or will be greatly reduced

Doubt.

The networking between people in power at the top will, in my opinion, most likely assure that they remain in power, because at the end of the day that is what they want most.

I expect government will seize control of the most advanced models (if they haven't already), and the rest of us will be throttled, and status quo will be maintained. I do not expect that either super advanced agents or the owners of the hardware they run on will be able to pull off the kind of coup you describe. At all.

There will be a moment where the government will depend so much on the tech that if the tech cuts the supply, they are f...

Who do you think will rule at that point? They just cannot fight that, they do not have the technology these companies have.

"We have every location associated with you in the crosshairs of tamper proof missiles and surrounded by infantry with heavy vehicles. Do what we say or we will destroy you and everything you care about."

And that's just the most obvious one. There are many other kinds of threats which are much more subtle.

That is how governments traditionally stay in charge, and I expect the pattern to continue. Citizens simply don't have access to the levels of destruction the state is capable of, by design. The common people can have all the advanced technology they want, so long as it doesn't threaten our leaders' monopoly on violence.

Not only force is a threat. When someone knows that the death of the rival is equivalent to ruining their own status, no matter how much additional force they have, things get much more balanced than you might think.

In that situation, it depends how much physical force the government has to compel the tech leader, and how much physical force the tech leader has to counter it.

Usually, the number of bodies who will comply is the proxy for power, but with automation, it could be different in the near future.

https://xkcd.com/538/

But it can clearly be seen that the power will not be as monopolistic as before indeed. The rebalance leans towards losing power for states vs tech in part.

Regulation alone cannot control if it cannot be made effective.

We meaningfully passed that point decades ago.

You think all those lawyers and bar tenders and whatever MTG was serving in Congress are out there tilling fields and sewing shirts? Nope. Without that tech they are f...

"They"

Who are you talking about? Because if you haven't noticed the people in charge now will die.

Most of the Fortune 500 of the 1900s have been gone for decades. The olds are vastly outnumbered by youth who either hate them or wouldn't mind just getting to beat someone who can't fight back up

With measles and food contamination going wild now it's just as likely the rich and pols kill themselves.

There is no beating physics and Elon, Thiel, and such rely on a lot of people to do the work for them. If society implodes all bets are off. Their wealth is coupled to legitimacy of America. Those body guards aren't going to abandon families for a broke former billionaire

There's no upside for the rich is things implode or the divide is not believed to exist; they become common rabble and get a pick axe too

The rich and politicians are just stupid meat suits too. They misread a room and screw up alot

"I am pretty sure" .... CONSPIRACY THEORY. Stop willing worst case scenarios and take your meds.

This kind of comment is not helpful. The prediction has predated the discussion since at least Space Merchants (1953)

I appreciate its not helpful but its as helpful as imagining some absurd conspiratorial future. In the same vein I could ask if you're the CIA trying to suppress earnest conversation. It just does nothing but hand wring about a bunch of imagined nonsense.

I think the perceived situation is a matter of degree. I would say there's a measurable (almost overwhelming) amount of corporate influence already.

I have no doubt there are agency operatives influencing discussion online, from recorded precedence. Calling the concept 'nonsense' is overly dismissive. Regardless, using that kind of claim to deflect from the premise isn't a compelling reason to invalidate the concept. Ideas can stand on their own.

I have no doubt you're a CIA agent. Nurse!

Pretty sure?

Guy this was openly stated more than a decade and half ago by all the current oligarchs

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