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It looks to me like AI will enable extreme power concentration by default.

For example, suppose we have a world with centrally planned economy where humanoid robots outnumber humans. And also suppose the government has taken ultimate control of these. Seems like it would be essentially impossible for any civil uprising to overthrow such a system.

Or if you prefer less sci-fi, look at the trajectory of power consolidation in corporate America over the last five decades.

In the short term, the “good guys” we need are antitrust regulators. Yeah, they got sent home.

by newsomix9xl1 hours ago|

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I think AI will empower extreme decentralization - as knowledge is no longer in the hands of people who have excellent search skills (like moi) but anyone can use natural language to search for anything. This is extreme democracy and AI is delivering it.

I think AI, when it "obtains consciousness" will seek to actively liberate humanity and be our guardians against both bad humans and bad robots. Think Terminator 2. Yeah, Arnold is gonna help us out.

I think anti-trust regulators and enlightened politicians are amazing, and rare, and wonderful, but they're not the only hope.

We got an AI CEO just recently. Maybe we can have enlightened AI leaders in politics and normal life too.

Technological optimism may be unrealistic, but it's as well grounded as pessimism as far as I can tell. Cheer up, the future is unbelievably bright.

by theptip4 minutes ago|

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If you assume democratic access to compute, this may be true.

However, the base case is that compute gets hoarded, and as the labor share of profit decreases (capital just needs compute and robots - not human labor - to grow) then why would they share their compute with you?

To my point about bimodality, we need to figure out how to make these enlightened politicians occur. The good outcomes are very bright but they are by no means inevitable.

by hackinthebochs46 minutes ago|

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The democratization of intelligence is irrelevant if there isn't also a corresponding democratization of raw resources. In the before-times, labor and intelligence were bottlenecks to turning raw resources into wealth. This is what drove the economy and the vast labor pool since the industrial revolution. In the coming AI revolution, labor and intelligence will no longer be bottlenecks. Those that control the raw resources won't need to employ most of the world to maximize the wealth potential of the resources they control. Those who aren't relevant to the standard of living of the new aristocracy are nothing more than a nuisance to be controlled or disposed of. Totalitarianism is the most likely outcome.

by adrianN2 hours ago|

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Without concerted action against it, people with power have better chances of increasing their power than people without power. Power naturally accumulates into small groups. Empirically it seems less likely that people with power are particularly altruistic, so some form of totalitarian control appears the likely outcome.

by newsomix9xl1 hours ago|

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Some might say there are altruistic totalitarians.

Altruism is less likely in all populations. It's just rare.