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Comment by insane_dreamer | Hacker News Reader

> The direction that AI takes is not written into the technology itself. It depends on our choices, on the institutions that host and underpin that choosing, and on our ability to manage innovation responsibly to serve the common good.

This is such a key point -- the problem is that the $T that are being poured into AI are doing so for one purpose alone: ROI

The choice has already been made, and it's the wrong one.

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This is the same position of Yuval Noah Harari in his recent Economist interview: The ones in power (Musk etc.) try to frame the bad AI future as inevitable, instead of shouldering responsibility. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNZhxTtOL-I

The whole interview is well worth your time.

It's the correct choice according to the fundamental principles of capitalism, as set down by Milton Friedman.[1] and Lewis Powell.[2] Friedman set down the theory:

In an ideal free market resting on private property, no individual can coerce any other, all cooperation is voluntary, all parties to such cooperation benefit or they need not participate. There are no “social” values, no “social” responsibilities in any sense other than the shared values and responsibilities of individuals. Society is a collection of individuals and of the various groups they voluntarily form. ...

(But) the doctrine of “social responsibility” taken seriously would extend the scope of the political mechanism to every human activity. It does not differ in philosophy from the most explicitly collectivist doctrine. It differs only by professing to believe that collectivist ends can be attained without collectivist means. That is why, in my book “Capitalism and Freedom,” I have called it a “fundamentally subversive doctrine” in a free society, and have said that in such a society, “there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”

Then Powell (the Powell who became a Supreme Court Justice) and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce set out to change the rules of the game. The 1971 "Powell memo" was written when the values of the 1960s had permeated society. The objective of the memo was to turn that around. It's a battle plan to use corporate power to change government. When it was written, few companies had lobbyists. Now, corporate lobbying is huge, and effective.

The extent to which this well-funded project worked doesn't have to be described today. What's worth realizing is that it wasn't always that way.

The U.S. Government of the Lyndon Johnson era ("Great Society", "War on Poverty") was organized to deal with something like the impact of AI on employment. The current government is not. It is permeated with people who think it the government shouldn't do anything about it.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...

[2] https://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis/

It ain't capitalism if we have the FOMC chop off the invisible hand with 20 years of LIRP/ZIRP

> It's the correct choice according to the fundamental principles of capitalism

sure, it aligns with the principles of capitalism

that doesn't make it the right choice

I agree with your summary. Greed has won out over everything else.

Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.

Greed is "good" for a few, clearly.

We must be greedy for justice, greedy for kindness, greedy for people taking responsibility for their actions...

There is no such thing as an evolutionary spirit.

You're quoting Wall Street (1987), but it's not clear whether you're in support of the sentiment or not. Plenty of people around here weren't born when that film came out.

Greed is good for the Greedy, but disasterous for anyone you'd ever want live with. Greed simplifies and creates clarity by destroying and debasing acts of humanity that are actually worthy to something that can exist as a row in a ledger. A society cannot thrive on greed alone. A society based only on greed abandons every moral check against corruption and manipulation imaginable. There is nothing more frightening to a crook than a world full of decent people that can't empathize with greed, and will actually talk amongst themselves about it, and react. Without greed, people can't be easily greased or goaded. They can't be controlled or cajoled or moved with mere trickery. You are forced to appeal in the one thing the crook doesn't have in abundance. Virtue, and rightness.

Ha, if only! I'd like to live in that utopia!

If eg Putin had been more greedy instead of power hungry, we wouldn't have had his war against Ukraine. Same for many other wars and conflicts, including the US war on Iran, or even WW2 if you want to go back in time.

I'd say that the outcome mostly depends on whether something resembling AGI is achieved since that would more or less inevitably end up leading to something resembling ASI ('super-intelligence') which in turn makes it questionable whether the resulting entity can be counted upon to 'serve the common good' - whatever that may be. The quest for ROI has at most a temporary influence on the direction if this path is followed unless it actually keeps AGI (and thus ASI) from being achieved.

I am afraid that anything created by humans will be, inherently, influenced in its ultimate development by human nature.

Therefore, whatever AGI looks like will be selfish, violent, and short sighted...

But our current crop of chatbots are not it. They're just parrots that happen to be pretty bad for the climate.

That's the thing about modern chatbots--they are nothing new technologically. They're just taking the same old neural networks and brute-forcing everything with ridiculous computing power and energy consumption. Autonomous agents just feed everything back into a loop that's even more wasteful.

Its certainly the wrong choice if by all indications the R is apparently missing in your ROI.

Yeah. And the quality of AI will only get worse from here unless we can commoditize open weight models.

If Google and Anthropic and such are able to own access, they will enshittify it horribly. Because they are powerless to do anything but, in the name of profit.

I think it's just as likely that these companies will choose different strategies and go after different markets. Though there are some similarities, Apple didn't do the same thing as Microsoft. And although they do copy features, Android isn't the same as iPhone.

In particular, Google depends a lot more on advertising than Anthropic does, so their incentives are different.

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