Comment by a2ff6eeb0
24 days ago
It's not a choice we have, unless you want to figure out a global AI ban treaty.
AI will make human thought economically useless. In the new economy, the one economically useful thing we will be able to do is legal property ownership.
No. AI as a tech is not an issue. The wealth and power accumulation in the hands of Amodei, Altman, Thiel, Musk, Karp and the rest of CEO is the issue.
Permanent underclass is ideological goal of the above people. AI is an impersonal technology with no goals or wishes.
I'm not sure how that changes anything -- sure, if you blocked people from using AI, it wouldn't have any effects on society, but once people have access, what they do with it matters.
There's an inevitable effect that it has, and the only lever you have as an individual is being on the right side of that.
Copy the technology and give people access without trying to financially profit from it.
Even if the US federal government refuses to act, smaller government entities can deploy their own compute clusters running strong open-weights models like Kimi K3, and provide their own citizens with free access to strong AI models. There may come a time when even Chinese providers no longer release strong model weights, but then the previous generation of strong open-weights models can be used to accelerate the development of data pipelines and training setups to build the next generation. California or Australia (or many others) could fund university-led R&D efforts to build completely open models.
Despite the angry noises that leading providers make about their model outputs being used to train competing models, that's not illegal. States can use Common Crawl, Anna's Archive, Books3, commercial model outputs, and whatever other data sources that are useful for building models. States have sovereign immunity to ignore copyright complaints, if they decide to pursue model development.
The big AI companies don't have much of a moat. Let the big companies spend a fortune figuring out what works best, then openly build imitations having 95% of the capability at 5% of the cost.
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The problem is not access to AI. The problem is the lack of antitrust, the lack of white collar crime enforcement, the tax system that allows them to accumulate wealth while avoiding payments. The problem is legal regime with winner takes all monopoly creation support.
AI is the least of the problem.
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> The one economically useful thing we will be able to do is legal property ownership.
This is correct. But we don't need to ban AI to avoid the permanent underclass nightmare.
It's time for the means of production to be owned communally.
It's either a cybersocialist utopia or a neofeudalist dystopia.
Rosa Luxemburg formulated it pretty well more than a hundred years ago: Socialism or Barbarism!.
> It's time for the means of production to be owned communally.
What does this mean in practice? That an individual cannot own a machine (which is a means of production)?
I think we'll have to figure out the details, of course.
As a first intuition, I feel like its mostly server farms and data centers that are the concern, large scale means of production.
It feels right that those would be communally owned, be that via democratic government or maybe some sort of worker owned coop?
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What kind of political leverage do the useless have? This isn't a realistically sustainable outcome.
Today, people have leverage because removing them has real economic consequences. With AI, we need to be on the useful side of the divide to have any leverage.
And then we'd better hope AI has respect for property rights.
Apathetic mass-murder is unjustifiable, and the ultrarich would need to justify it to their families, who would then need to justify it to other people they know, and so on. And remember that we're talking about the majority of the global population, an event like that couldn't be hand-waved away like one would do for a minority group.
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What kind of political leverage did a French peasant have in the 1780s?
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Property rights might be the least of your problems.