Comment by vrganj
24 days ago
> 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?
But those won't get built by companies in the first place, because you want to constrain what companies can own.
Nothing prevents the government or coops today from building these things.
1 reply →
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.
Iran just mass murdered their protesters earlier this year, and they needed to convince humans to pull the trigger. It didn't seem to be that hard for them to justify.
It's probably a lot easier to convince the military AIs we're building to do it.
I don't particularly like the situation, but I plan to do what I can to be on the winning side. The world is going to be what we're all in on building, and for people on the winning side it may be a utopia. Either way, I know which side of the gun I want to be standing behind.
Also note that an AI well aligned with the people who initially trained it wouldn't need to actually kill anyone that didn't take action against the owners, it would just need to outcompete people for resources, and let them fend for themselves in extreme poverty. There's no need to act one way or the other beyond that.
5 replies →
I consider DOGE actions to be pretty much exactly what you describe, with their sudden destruction of USAID and defunding of climate science
2 replies →
What kind of political leverage did a French peasant have in the 1780s?
Well, the gap in armament between them all the French military was relatively small.
Why did you think there's a massive uptick in surveillance and policing technology and automation? It's to make the French solution unfeasible.
Property rights might be the least of your problems.