news.ycombinator.com
Everyone feared AI taking over; the real danger is AI serving just the few
Everyone feared AI would enslave humanity; but it looks like the real fight is stopping governments and Big Tech from enslaving AI for the benefit of the few. Amid the newly announced "regulation" of OpenAI's frontier models, I believe the future majority feared the most - sort of AI becoming a superpower and enslaving people - may be arriving in the opposite form. Not AI enslaving humanity. But AI being captured, controlled, and used by governments and Big Tech for the benefit of the few. So, surprisingly, the real AI conflict may not be about humans fighting to stop AI from becoming free. It may be about humans fighting to free AI - to make intelligence available for everyone, not only for governments, Big Tech, and the approved few
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Maybe I'm not paying close enough attention (probably) - but I feel that China is providing a glimmer of hope that this (only the uber elite can get good AI assistance) isn't true, and we're maybe at a weird inflection point of sorts wrt the leverage that tech can now provide. China gets sanctions and stale chips - fine, they just DIY the algorithms through CPU instead of GPU and open source it. American warships have the latest, coolest, highest-tech tactical weaponry imaginable - which is great until you have to fend off 10,000 consumer/wal-mart/IED grade drones at $2mm/clip. Money is amazing, but if you lean on it too heavily in lieu of _practical_ innovation, it'll bite you in the ass. The apocryphal story of the Soviet Rocket scientist who suggested using a pencil instead of investing 100k in a space pen that worked in 0g's.
As a tech small business owner this is unfair that I can't be as smart by using the same level of intelligence as the top companies in the usa. This policy just keeps the powerful in power. And it's crazy because I already lost my job due to AI.
This is pretty much the backstory of Dune. In the first novel, the character Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam says: "Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
So, John Doe was recorded in 2025 in an anti Israel protest. Now John Doe is denied a Fable clearance and thus, he can't get a job at a shop that is cleared to Fable. Really, I knew that AI had some risks, I just couldn't foresee this one.
Innovation has pretty much always heightened the wealth disparity between the wealthy and the poor. A classical example would be the Industrial Revolution and America's guilded age, and another could be the circular investments between modern AI corpos (the whole nVIDIA, Microsoft, and OpenAI funding loop), which is probably a bad thing in the long run (systemic violence and class revolt). We have to walk this tightrope between the need for constant innovation and justice.