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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah thanks but no thanks. Society does not have to accept "bad things". Society can pass laws to prohibit bad things.

And society will pass laws. Europe has already begun doing so, and the US will once this goddamn corrupt administration is gone. People are already protesting against AI, especially against datacenters and surveillance like Flock. It's only a matter of time until individual actors end up in the focus of protests.

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You are correct. I appreciate your willingness to say it's societal and therefore by construction political. And, the idea that "we accept the bad things" is so prevalent in this community that it's baffling. I have been more vocal (and emotionally representing, to admit) about how this community is willing to condemn the abuse of privacy, but then share excitement about agents and LLM work from Facebook and the like. The reasoning is usual, "yeah well someone is going to do it," or, "well it's hard or impossible to make people not use it, so what's your solution?" I've been finding that mentality is both a blockade to progress, and maddening to boot. If those same minds instead did something about it by sharing the difficulty with others, proselytizing the importance of sharing your opinion about what the bad thing is, and then standing by it whether it's hard or not - that would actually help things be not so bad.

I was with you up to the last sentence.

Think of society as a pressure cooker and Sam Altman, OpenAI etc. as the oven's fire.

There's now just three possible futures:

- the fire is extinguished, aka the AI actors go bust. Nothing bad happens. Well, a bunch of rich people will be less rich, but society as a whole will be somewhat all right.

- the relief valve (society passing laws) is activated, pressure escapes.

- there is no pressure relief. Eventually, the pressure cooker bursts, aka revolution.

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