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Comment by benenrjdnz | Hacker News Reader

Probably for the best. Humanity had a good run, but this is no longer our civilization.

Your best course of action is to start ripping the copper out of the walls.

Why the doomerism? In general humanity is living its best life compared to nearly every other step in time.

So far. With AI concentrating power and intelligence at the hands of handful frontier labs who are allowed to get away with IP infringement or literally hacking other companies or spamming wiki sites... Then the future is doomerism.

People are losing jobs left and right due to AI and as models get intelligent it'll get tougher (even for AI devouts. Because if AI can do 10 ppls job then jobs will be decimated)

This is a risk yes, however there can be something done against it. From my point of view, both of what you are describing are a regulatory problems. For the first, hold the AI companies accountable. In this second they either prevent their agents from going rogue or go bankrupt, because the claims of damages are too high. The IP infringement thing is the same, do we want to protect IP, if yes pass a law that they have to pay as everyone else.

Similar for the jobs ... if no one, or nearly no one is left for having a job. Who do you think will consume? Yeah, luxus companies can always sell products like megayachts or super expensive handbags, but these companies are not the backbone of the economy. Economy will simply collapse if no one is buying all the products. So this is a problem that will sort it self out.

Yes and there is no govt doing any regulation

Because regulation is slow, FCKW took 16 years to ban, Lead in Petrol was introduced 1922 and banned 2002 in Australia, Asbestos is in many countries banned after 20-30 years of use.

There will be regulation, it probably will take time, but calling out the AI destroying humanity is just hysterical.

BTW EU regulations are already on their way, so there are govs that impose regulations.

Regulations are slow. Maybe EU will help in regulating it. What about the rest of the world? Apple didn't adopt usb c until EU forced them to. But that was a hardware change so it was better for then to use usbc

Even if AI is regulated in EU I suspect it'll stay unregulated outside EU as they can just add a enforcement later on top of LLMs

People outside the EU should stand up and, where possible, vote for governments that work for the people, not against them. I am not sure what kind of answer you expect from me, there is no magical solution.

> vote for governments that work for the people, not against them

Ironically enough, this is tough in the age of AI slopaganda

To me personally, that always sounds a bit paternalistic. Don't get me wrong. Yes, there is manipulation by some countries, such as Russia in Germany and AI is helping them. But I think a lot of people see right through that.

> But I think a lot of people see right through that.

The majority doesn't really. Even pre AI you have the example of brexit.

> People are losing jobs left and right due to AI

There is 0 actual data supporting thus.

I personally struggle to see ways my life has meaningfully improved since 2019 or so, and I feel like many people share this view. I have been an unquestionable fanatic of tech startups back then, which I consider perhaps the "golden age".

These days I view tech startups with suspicion, I question what is the ulterior motive. Somehow when upstart companies were like "Pebble", this wasn't a thing.

The original comment refereed to humanity in general, so my point was more like: Humanity's average life improved over the last few thousand years, and many people having the best life compared to everyone else in this timeline.

If you are living in a western country in most of the cases you have access to regular food, water, shelter, amusement. So all the basic needs and the possibility and freedom to pursue what you want to do. Even in developing countries the number of people that suffer from serious illness and hunger declined very much. On a macro perspective we all having a better life.

From a personal perspective, yeah there might be set backs, but this has nothing to do with humanity in general I would argue.

Also regarding the "golden age" of tech startups ... was it really like this or was it only nostalgia and something you saw in the companies that was never there in the first place? OpenAI was once also a very OPEN company ... they published their research, open sourced stuff and then they needed money.

I think that a company never should be idolized that much, in the end they are caring for money and keeping their operations running, not something else.

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