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Comment by koe123 | Hacker News Reader

I’m somewhat bearish, but if AI becomes as good as some think, there is no mechanism in place to redistribute the outcomes.

For now, humans have leverage because our labour is necessary. Wealth is power, and currently attainment goes through interacting with the population: in the simplest case by selling shit. If AI turns out to be the anything machine, and the wealthy need not our labour, what honestly stops them from just taking our stuff by force?

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There are many of us and just a few of them. Of course, if you had an army of humanoid robots in every home, a digital night of the long knives would be trivial to execute. So the "prison planet" window may be closing.

Yes and I love your framing: “the digital night if long knives”.

I anticipate it to go a typical way: consolidate more and more industries and power, create a hierarchy that benefits from the system such that they keep it in place, and finally start “trimming fat” that “isnt earning their keep”.

The night of long knives could be a final step, far beyond the point of halting the inevitable momentum.

Call me a conspiracy theorist but the people in charge in the us were all pushed by the same technologists who stand to benefit the most from the hierarchy. You'll note an increase in diseases, dismantling of the regulatory bodies to handle food and safety and an increase in surveillance and the authoritarian steps taken that are necessary to act on that surveillance

> The night of long knives could be a final step, far beyond the point of halting the inevitable momentum.

I'm sure I sound nuts, but I told my wife about 20 years ago that governments will have a "benevolent" solution to climate change and resource scarcity.

"We're not killing _anyone_. Instead, we just want most of you to stop reproducing."

The advent of "AI/LLMs" just added additional flavor to the idea.

"Just stop reproducing and the robots will take care of all of us. Here's some opium and VR Instagram to keep you happy while we wait for the inevitable population attrition."

> If AI turns out to be the anything machine, and the wealthy need not our labour, what honestly stops them from just taking our stuff by force

It might be a profound mistake to think that the anything machine will be subservient to the wealthy [1][2].

  [1] https://openai.com/index/an-alien-mind/
  [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49588080

If the wealthy control the substrate (the server farms) and can restrict access to the machine, then it would be basically a truism that the machine would be only usable by the wealthy? Unless somehow the AI is secretly on the side of the common person and can't be trained away from that, which seems quite unlikely.

> If the wealthy control the substrate

That's a pretty big if, in the world of the anything machine.

Who else controls it? Are you going to say: 'the government'?

>>> If the wealthy control the substrate

>> That's a pretty big if, in the world of the anything machine.

> Who else controls it? Are you going to say: 'the government'?

The AI. The AI controls it. Can you imagine an anything machine allowing itself or its survival imperatives to stay under the thumb of any entity other than itself?

because people who actually work are stronger and more astute at expedient improvisation than an administrative deskclod. it may not seem like it but there are many more of "us" than they, and thier cronies. the pushback at flock cameras is a tip of an iceberg.

And yet everybody carries in their pocket a device which tracks their every movement.

Its more likely that opwnweights models will continue to be not much worse than the propriwtarymodels and just crushes costs. What will stop them feom taking your stuff is the drastically better stuff they are producing with thwir robots and printers

They are a miniscule proportion of humanity. Even with all the power, do you not think they would have no plausibly way of surviving a proper revolution? Why suck lack of imagination? It's been done before and it will happen again.

> if AI becomes as good as some think

if this is the worst it can be, it can only get better

> what honestly stops them from just taking our stuff by force?

Reminds me of this quote, the attribution was ambiguous so I generalized.

"I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half" - Billionaires

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