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I find it far more ironic that they are called Reclaim the Internet.

I am dating myself, but I remember the Internet. It’s rather ironic too that the actual Internet, literal and figuratively free internet, was always doomed from the start, just like AI is effectively doomed in terms of it being some kind of productivity tool or amazing thing you can use to build your own thing, because the logical conclusion is very bad for most people, including the technorati types here that think themselves above it and immune.

If you’re shocked and surprised by the way there Internet was maneuvered into the surveillance prison Flock made itself the poster child of at the hands of Mr Langley, take that trajectory and lay it over AI, but only at exponential rates. You don’t have to believe me, it won’t matter either way, it’s happening, short of the Soviet style implosion of the “American” empire.

Maybe once the planet has been made uninhabitable to biological life there will be an AI robot cybernetic splinter group trying to “reclaim humanity”.

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In a zoo humanity lays protected. These beings used to roam earth as the apex predators and destroyers of their ecosystem and their species too.
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You can't host the internet on your machine, or download a "Google" or "Meta" but you can download a local model. So I don't think AI will lead to more centralization. Besides local models, the interface itself - prompt based steering - is eminently more open ended that apps or websites ever were. Cloud or local, you get more control now as a user.
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But you cannot train an open weight model by yourself, and maybe there could some distributed training net ran by thousand of volunteers around the world in the future, but until we get there we will still be tied to BigCo (American, Chinese or wherever in the world) decisions.
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You would need institutions to do this? What do we have besides global megacorps with the resources for this? Universities perhaps training models for their local catchment?
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This is exactly why I believe LLMs are fundamentally divergent from the trajectory of internet service path we have been on. It allows us to create space and disconnection from an otherwise tethered experience.
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It is possible that models are only the byproduct of what frontier labs are doing. In other words, what you call AI is just a log, a trace of what the real AI, for which only frontier labs have access to, did.
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> You can't host the internet on your machine, or download a "Google" or "Meta" but you can download a local model.

You can very much host websites on your machine (not the whole internet, but then again you can’t host the most powerful models either) and you can very much download a Wikipedia or Internet Archive.

But most people never will. This idea that everyone will soon be using local models while frolicking happily in the fields is a pipe dream. Besides, local or not, these models can already be harmful in ways the internet took decades to approach.

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A local model has more data than Wikipedia and the Internet Archive is way too large to download on a consumer machine.

A local model works even if the Internet is perfectly firewalled or straight-up down. However, you still need electricity and eventually replacement parts, so in an apocalypse may not work either.

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A local model has more data than Wikipedia and the Internet Archive is way too large to download on a consumer machine.

A local model works even if the Internet is perfectly firewalled or straight-up down. However, you still need electricity and eventually replacement parts, so in an apocalypse may not work either.

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It’s already fairly realistic to get 2022 era frontier models running on prosumer hardware, which is pretty good for freedom.
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How would a soviet style implosion of the US work in real life? A civil war is far more likely and we already have historical precedence for that.

And your AI robot cybernetic splinter group thing sounds a lot like the biblical story of Noah than anything that's based on science or you know facts.

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The US and particularly its armed forces don’t look at all like the 1800s, so another civil war of that nature is not possible. Sabotage, terrorism and political violence could be a new form of civil unrest, but full out civil war without a divided military with entire divisions defecting, is very unlikely.
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Yes, we are unlikely to get to a point of an 1800s civil war, of course. But I mean, if things do get that bad, we cannot rule out a divided military as well. How that would work in practice, I'm not sure, since, as you mentioned, armed forces work these days differently as well, and defection like that might not even be feasible, I guess.

Overall I would say civil war is more likely (even given how unlikely it is) than just a robotic uprising that will root out all humanity and make the world unfit for biological beings as the original comment implied.

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Nuclear war is a civilization-ending tool that AI could realistically exploit. It would only need to hack a weaker nuclear nation to send a ICBM our way, sabotage communications and let our draconian nuclear war strategy do the rest. There’s a book by Annie Jacobsen that explains from a plausible military perspective how this could rapidly unfold. It was poorly plagiarized by Netflix and turned into a mini series but the book is much more better at scaring the s out of you.
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To your point: it takes 1-3% of a population to upend things…based on historical reference.
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Chaotic coincidences,

because the empire is too large to control all of its interests.

Could have been avoided - too much money to be made in the various stages of it not being avoided.

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Let me add a few more layers just for some fun and profit :-D

Here[0] is an archive.org page which archives an archive.is page which archives the original article about internet censorship of an archive site that might require an archive of an archive site to read (given that people of spain cant now view archive.is in the first place or might have some difficulties doing so)

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20260920074416/https://serjaimel...

(If someone is perhaps interested and wants to see me talk more about what this is, then please read the blogpost that I had made for more info: https://smileplease.mataroa.blog/blog/htmlpipe-and-how-we-ca...)

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