1,927 karma · joined February 7, 2026
The video Robin's daughter referenced in her tweet is being circulated as a "private video" of him. In other words, people are claiming it's a real video, or being led to believe it's a real video. It's not and therefore this isn't some misguided AI-generated act of love. It's deception, almost certainly to garner and possibly monetize "attention".
> The companion narrative to technological determinism is something I’d call adult saviorism. Adult saviorism is rooted in the belief that teens are, again, passive victims but who need to be rescued by adults. In this narrative, teens lack the media literacy or judgment to save themselves. The conclusion to this line of thinking, when it comes to regulation, is that teens need not be involved, since they themselves are compromised.
This totally devalues the long-accepted wisdom that adults are responsible for raising children and sometimes have to make decisions that children don't like but that are necessary and beneficial for their well-being.
In the author's narrative, teens who have no meaningful context in which to understand how their brains are being manipulated by multi-billion dollar companies for profit are somehow supposed to participate in proposing regulations that protect them from said companies.
> While adult saviorism is, in many ways, well-intentioned, often coming from a place of concern about child safety, it fails to recognize teens’ expertise and creativity in using technology. Most teens are skeptical that their parents and policymakers know better than they do about the good and bad of the online world, and for good reason. Consider the U.S. congressional hearing held in 2021, in which Facebook’s then global head of safety was asked by Senator Richard Blumenthal, “Will you commit to ending Finsta?” Needless to say, such embarrassing lines of questioning — which neither began nor ended with Blumenthal — should inspire very little confidence.
Teens think they know more than their elders?!? What an astonishing revelation!
This is such a straw man argument. Arguing that some geezer in Congress saying "Finsta" is evidence that adults are incapable of making sensible decisions about protections for children is a bad look for anyone associated with an institution of higher learning.
I'm really surprised anyone thinks these companies care.
I'd argue it's different today. Social media in particular has convinced a whole generation of people that if you don't have a garage full of supercars by the age of 23, you're a loser, and that there's almost no activity too shameful to engage in publicly in pursuit of wealth.
> We are entering a digital dark age...
It's interesting (and a bit disheartening) that it took modern AI for so many technologists to wake up to the fact that technology does not always help society.
Yes, the internet has brought many benefits, but "transformed the world in a mostly positive and empowering way"?
What about all the harms we know are associated with social media, especially among young people, including anxiety and depression, bullying, body image issues, sleep disturbances, social media, dopamine loops, the rapid spread of disinformation to manipulate elections, etc.? What about the effects of porn? Sex trafficking? The hundreds of billions of dollars that are lost every year to internet-based fraud? The loss of personal privacy and wholesale theft and sale of people's personal data? The tech oligopoly that now has its hands in politics? The "better to ask for forgiveness than permission" startups that have pushed legitimate businesses to the brink, turned neighborhoods into clusters of illegal hotels, etc.? The countless people who have been pushed into gig work? And so on.
The internet has been mostly positive and empowering to the people who profited in some way from the above, and many of them are now only upset because the latest technological "advancement" is coming to eat them. For a ton of people, the "digital dark age" started two decades ago.
Lots of especially younger people see unbridled ambition and rule-breaking as a virtue. Everything is about making money and if you're not the one getting it, or worse, you're the person being victimized, you're dumb and weak.
You missed the obvious one: it creates a path for people with insider knowledge to monetize it at the expense of employers, institutions, etc.
The guy using his access to classified information to make a few hundred thousand bucks in a day is not interested in "sharing the truth" for the benefit of society.
> This risk functions as a guarantee.
Except it doesn't, particularly as far as lawyers are concerned. There are almost a million and a half active attorneys in the US. Just 500-600 are disbarred every year, and almost always for money-related violations, not bad advice. Public discipline is also relatively uncommon (about a quarter of 1% of attorneys every year) and usually related to issues like financial impropriety, neglect, undisclosed conflicts of interest and failure to communicate, not disagreement over the quality of advice.
If a lawyer drafts an agreement that causes a loss, a bar complaint will not help you recover your money. You'd need to sue for malpractice. This costs a lot of money and takes a lot of time. Because you're going up against a lawyer, expect the defense to be vigorous, especially, ironically, if you hired an attorney at a good firm. The full weight of the firm will back the attorney and you might find it difficult to find an attorney, as many won't want to be involved in suing a fellow professional in their market.
I don't disagree with your fundamental premise about the value of human responsibility, but these professions have been structured to protect their members and the ABA in particular basically functions like a cartel today.
Do you know how difficult and costly it is to sue an attorney for malpractice?
I detect Claude.
And what about for the rest of the world? What do you do with all the people in middle income countries that don't have an economic and tax structure like the US?
The best part of technology: the people who brought you the "disruption" are the ones who promise you they have the solution to all the problems it caused.
Don't give these AI trillionaires any ideas for Burning Man: Mars.
And yet countless millions of people basically say nothing about how the food they eat is produced.
At this point, in the US at least, the laws give the corrupt elite the ability to deter competition and to target the people who try to get in their way.
In other words, it's protection for the potentate and his sycophants, not the plebs.
> If we passed a law that said the CEO of any company that deploys an LLM that commits a crime gets punished as if they personally did the crime (so, basically instant life sentence if it's even a simple crime times a million instances), I guarantee you the first email the CEO sends to the company is a "pause every LLM project we have - we gotta think about this".
Why do no such laws exist in practice? Why are corporate crimes almost always settled by payment, not individual punishment?
If you answer these questions, you'll know why the law you envision has a lower chance of being enacted than AI destroying humanity.
But this guy looks...
You seem to be missing the point.
A small group of people created AI tech that they now say could be the end of humanity. They still want their companies to go public, but they also want the government to allow them to form a cartel so that they can, in their infinite wisdom, manage the risks so that they can try to prevent their tech from killing us all. And somehow they magically think that other nation-states developing similar tech (namely the Chinese) will go along with their plans.
As for how powerful Dario, Sam, et. al. really are: Trump says Dario is "pretending to be a perfect little angel" and claims there's a "sick conspiracy" against AI.
Having billions of dollars and being the head of a world-changing company doesn't buy the type of power you think it does. At best, it allows you to buy influence and pay your way out of liability for the harms your products cause.
The AI researcher in Mountain View making $2 million/year at Google has no more say in what's going to happen with AI than a plumber in Kalamazoo. The HNer working on a startup, in the final analysis, will in 50 years' time have left about as big a mark on the planet as a greeter at Walmart.
There is no level of outrage that is going to stop the frontier AI labs, and the US government isn't going to step in to protect humanity. The Chinese are going to do what they're going to do. And so on.
So sit back, make some popcorn and enjoy the show.
The legal system today does not serve the purpose you're wanting it to.
The SV crowd was certainly more celebratory but in my experience, indifference and silence wasn't just limited to the "SV startup types."
The problem is that the potential liabilities arguably vastly exceed what these companies can absorb. It would be interesting to see if any major insurer wanted to step up and insure them.
On the plus side, in the worst case scenarios, we won't have to worry about damages because nobody will be left to pursue them.
That might be too imprecise for the HN set but it's realistic for laypeople.
And none of the AI people talking about the risk are running into rooms full of people telling them Claude has gone mad and yelling at them to disconnect from the internet and turn off their devices immediately.
I agree that the guarantees are where the risk is.
First, under US GAAP accounting rules (ASC 606), these are absolutely not repurchase agreements. The customer takes title to the asset (the chips) and Nvidia does not have a contingent obligation to repurchase the asset. Providing a contingent guarantee to purchase services is not a repurchase under the accounting rules, but of course you can have legal accounting and still have a problem.
As I've made public market investments in and traded in this space, I've done some math on the guarantees and what came out was this: relative to Nvidia's current earnings, the guarantees amount to approximately a quarter of a year's revenue at the guarantee cap.
That's my own analysis and I'd encourage anyone who cares to run the numbers themselves. It's easy enough as Nvidia is publicly traded.
The thing that differentiates Nvidia from previous vendor financing examples like Lucent in the 1990s/early 2000s is that its margins are huge. So what I see, based on the current numbers, is that in the really ugly scenario, Nvidia has to live with depressed earnings, no stock buybacks and a weaker (but still comparatively strong) balance sheet for a number of years. This is a stock problem, not a solvency issue.
The wildcard is if Nvidia keeps extending big guarantees, or starts using debt to do so, to the point where the commitments are expanding faster than its cash flow. At that point, the risk obviously compounds accordingly.
What he's asking for isn't possible in the form he's asking for it.
AI experts can't even agree on what AI is, what it's capable of and what the limits of its development are. If the experts can't even agree on what's happening "inside of" these LLMs, how can they give laypeople an assessment of the risk?
If you, at least for the sake of argument, accept the possibility that AI is a new form of intelligence that we don't fully understand, is it really a stretch to look at some of its capabilities and behaviors and discuss how they might have existential implications? And stopping short of extinction, shouldn't we discuss the ways that this technology could "end" civilization as we know it?
Also, the author wrote:
> AI executes on physical systems that have been engineered with human accountability and control. Intelligence does not exempt a system from the realities of the physical world!
For someone making a point about responsibility, this is ridiculously irresponsible. Any honest technologist knows that systems created by humans are not perfect and therefore cannot be assumed to be infinitely accountable to and controllable by humans.
Thanks to the digitization of almost everything, including infrastructure, there are a myriad number of scenarios well short of extinction in which a rogue AI could cause immense damage to property and life before humans are able to "shut it down".