> Democracy came about because it was optimal for a power seeking government, not out of the kindness of their heart
replyIt's not clear in this context what you actually mean by "government." You are assigning agency to something in a way that seems like a reification. While a bureaucracy can seem to have a life of its own, isn't it generally people who seek power?
This is a just so story. The main issue today is the lack of democracy in the country and the use of technology to surveil and govern a restive population as the government has less and less legitimacy. The narrative you are telling is the heroic tale of computing and the internet c. 1990-2010.
replyYasha Levine wrote about how this narrative was preceded by a forgotten one where MIT students protested because the computers were going to be linked to government databases and share data on anti-Vietnam war activists. Despite protestations, activists were correct and this happened, and now it happens at huge scale.
Yes, and RMS was correct in his Right to Read and so many other things - we're seeing the slow death of the never-enshrined-in-law right to compute. Luckily open-source is big enough to slow this down; we should all be pretty amazed and appreciative that there even are open-weights models at all, out there, because it is a profoundly democratizing thing.
reply> appreciative that there even are open-weights models at all
replythank, mr 习
I don't think parent commenter means tech in the modern sense. Seems like they're describing a transition to democracy which started centuries ago, not decades.
reply> shifted the material dynamics to better align the incentives of governments with the people
reply... recently, as in the last 10 years?