Comment by SlinkyOnStairs
2 days ago
> It had the vibe of “These people need to hear the Truth”.
Schmidt anticipated the response, but does not understand it.
He falls flat on his face here precisely because "needing to hear the truth" is a self-contradiction. The very fact that he has to go around saying 'AI is inevitable, suck it up you live in our world now', proves that it's not true. Nothing that is actually inevitable is declared as such. Nobody goes to say "The sun will rise tomorrow!"
And this failure is pretty serious. The kids (and wider public) instinctively understand this dynamic even if Schmidt doesn't.
No matter how it's phrased, the only thing these kids will hear is "We are ruining your life", "We are taking everything from you".
It's all but inevitable than worryingly soon, some of them will go "Nothing to lose? Bet." and we will see far worse violence than the failed property damage against Sam Altman's house.
> he very fact that he has to go around saying 'AI is inevitable, suck it up you live in our world now', proves that it's not true.
If somebody visits a flat earther conference and says "you all need to accept the fact that the earth is not flat!" ... then this certainly doesn't prove that the earth is flat. I think you trip over your choice of words. If s/b in general has to go around saying that then your reasoning makes some sense. But if s/b in particular (like Schmidt) has to go around saying sth then this only proves that this particular person has some personal intention or feeling s/he wants to express. I couldn't care less why someone like Schmidt feels like that but I have my ideas. Maybe he just identifies with AI financially and ideologically and likes to provoke.
It's not literally him as an individual saying it this once, it's the large amount of it in total.
There's people who go around bothering flat earthers, but despite flat earthers claiming the contrary, they're quite small in number. No mass media effort, no corporate propaganda, no CEOs mentioning all the time.
The largest it ever got were things like the netflix shows. These are pretty illustrative; All of the big attention is not so much on "these people must be convinced of the roundedness of the planet" and more on the dissection of why these people refuse to accept something that is quite easy to prove across a wide variety of otherwise unconnected experiments.
You’re right that it doesn’t prove anything.
However, the amount of money and energy spent on trying to convince people that “AI will take jobs”, by parties who would benefit from it, implies that these parties maybe don’t fully believe it, or believe that it needs to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If I am certain that I am winning, I sure don’t need to yell it from mountain tops. Unless my winning depends on everyone believing it.
I understood the intention of the statement and actually agree with it mostly. My point was just about the line of reasoning. But then again I also mostly agree that "AI" will make many jobs superfluous. People like Schmidt don't just try to announce that into reality; their point is about speeding up the process as they are invested in it and benefit from it happening earlier than if things would just progress naturally.
AI is inevitable in the sense that if a country rejects the development of AI, it'll eventually end up subjugated military by the robots of a country that did invest in AI.
> AI is inevitable in the sense that if a country rejects the development of AI, [AI inevitabilism premise]
"But the commies will do it" is just an old hat version of what I just described.
And in the specifics of military, it's all nonsense anyway. Reagan pulled it with his dumb space lasers and we ain't got those up there anymore.
The only time it was kind of true was with nuclear weapons between the US and USSR. Both countries very rapidly obtained enough weapons to destroy the other utterly, and were just wasting their money afterwards.
For the smaller states, nuclear weapons have universally been not worth it. The only two "losers" right now are Ukraine and Iran, neither of which would be in the position to use their nuclear weapons had they retained/obtained them.
Anyone who's paid attention to these recent wars has seen the actual military development be lower tech weapons. Cheap drones rather than million dollar missiles.
With regard to "AI weaponry": First, AI weapons are broadly a dumb idea. Second: As mentioned, nuclear weapons exist. AI isn't going to magically stop [insert western country] from obliterating China if China were to send their army of wunderwaffe robots.
You are not up to date about AI weapons.
March 30, 2026: https://thedefender.media/en/2026/03/fedorov-shared-info-abo...
> At the same time, the team is developing simulation and modelling environments for testing solutions, AI infrastructure for rapid system deployment, and tools that can be immediately integrated into military units.
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You don't think an attacker will think twice if the prey also has nuclear weapons?
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Actually, it’s possible other countries don’t have our counterproductively-murderous instincts. You’re looking in a mirror and you fear yourself.
You're looking in a mirror and seeing somebody who never read a history book. Every single powerful nation that exists today was built upon war and invasion of some groups by other groups.