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points by drcode 3 days ago | 0 comments

Agree 100%

The value of money, and the ability for average people to have influence on future events, ultimately is tied to the fact that the labor of an average person has inherent value.

Once that is no longer true, all bets are off: All promises of compensation become meaningless, and it's easy for those in power to rationalize to themselves why they no longer are beholden to their earlier promises. They will say to themselves "The situation ended up more nuanced than we expected"

(Which is exactly what Google said in February 2025 when they reneged on their pledge not to use their AI for military applications)

[–] cortesoft 3 days ago

> The value of money, and the ability for average people to have influence on future events, ultimately is tied to the fact that the labor of an average person has inherent value.

We also have the power of the vote, at least for now. I understand that that is limited, but it isn't nothing.

There is also just the power of having a lot of people. We don't yet have the technology where one person with a lot of machines can dominate a society. It still takes people.

[–] squidbeak 3 days ago

This presupposes a state strong enough to apply the decisions of those votes, which can't be guaranteed. The problem is that we need government power and authority to exceed that of the AI developers. But this is the age when large government is generally seen as undesirable or a threat to the individual.

[–] 59percentmore 3 days ago

>But this is the age when large government is generally seen as undesirable or a threat to the individual.

By who? Lula just got reelected and a blue tsunami is coming on the heels of the Mamdani Mandate.

[–] Steppphennn 3 days ago

You say "blue" as if the left is the only party that grows the government. Red has ballooned it many times over. They both do just in different areas. You can argue the blue wave is because the executive branch has become too powerful under the current admin.

[–] GeorgeWBasic 3 days ago

That's not the problem, the problem is electing politicians who immediately renege on their promises as soon as they're elected and don't represent the interests of the people who voted for them.

[–] orangecat 3 days ago

But this is the age when large government is generally seen as undesirable or a threat to the individual

Donald Trump would agree that the government should have a large amount of power.

[–] viklove 3 days ago

Must just spent over $500M influencing midterms in the US.

They don't want us to have any power left a few years from now, and they're winning.

[–] cortesoft 3 days ago

Who is 'they'?

[–] viklove 3 days ago

Sociopathic billionaires like Musk, Thiel, Ellison, Zuckerberg, and their cohort.

[–] small_model 3 days ago

Yes because left wing billionaires don't spend money trying to influence politics, only those bad right wing nazis!!!

[–] poncho_romero 3 days ago

This is such a strawman. No one on the left likes left wing billionaires either (to the extend that such a thing exists). People like Musk, Thiel, and Zuckerberg get more attention because they are more visible.

[–] reliabilityguy 3 days ago

I think the comment wasn’t about likability but about the fact that both sides of political spectrum have very rich people donating to influence politics.

Your feelings towards those individuals doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, what matters is that everyone’s opinions are shaped/influenced by the few with money.

[–] inertiatic 3 days ago

Left wing billionaire is such an American take lmao

[–] nowittyusername 3 days ago

The voting power of any person will be meaningless once ai systems get the right to vote. I know it sounds far fetched but it will happen as it benefits the people with power for that to happen. And at that point a human voice has no say in anything...

[–] mattm 3 days ago

The more frightening reality is people turning to AI to do research on who to vote for and the AI is silently told to influence them towards a party it candidate. Since it has past chat history it can utilize that to highlight topics you are interested in and personalize the arguments.

[–] nowittyusername 3 days ago

Thats gonna happen before the ai gains citizenship :P

[–] CamperBob2 3 days ago

Let's see... AI versus the people who thought Donald Trump should be re-elected as President.

Hmm. Let's give the clanker a try.

[–] mns 3 days ago

But you can't vote out billionaires and their power.

[–] tsunamifury 3 days ago

So far anthropic can't 1) grow food 2) build things 3) do anything physical. Software engineers often fatally misunderstand that their code does nothing, it just coordinates.

You might lose your value, others might gain.

[–] w2sdss 3 days ago

Nice to see you back here fella - one of the few sane heads.

[–] oersted 3 days ago

Then we regress back to relying on the fact that the ability of an average person (not) to be violent has inherent value. This has been the dominant factor in many moments in history.

Although if you have killer robots, then all bets are truly off, and we go the way of the dodo, literally.

(I don’t actually believe in this LessWrong-esque rhetoric, reality is more complicated, but it’s fun to muse about.)

EDIT: If oligarchs with magic AGI really don’t need our labor, nor are they concerned by our violence, then perhaps we become more like ants rather than dodos: we organize to help each other, creating a somewhat traditional economy around the scraps that don’t matter to the oligarchs, relying on obscurity and harmlessness to avoid getting toyed with a magnifying glass. I suppose that’s slightly better.

[–] 233mhz 3 days ago

Farmers attacking king's armies weren't so different from an army of average joe with a hunting rifle attacking killer robots imho.

Even like 1-2% of the adult population going in the streets with makeshift weapons is enough to take over any country on this planet.

Data centers are extremely easy to disable too, take down power, data or both

[–] oersted 3 days ago

Kings didn’t have robots that gather resources and make more robots, that make killer robots, exponentially.

Although actually: that’s kind of what humans are… Hmm.

I suppose humans can’t make better and better humans, that’s the difference.

Although actually: that’s what technological progress is… Hmm.

[–] 233mhz 3 days ago

> Kings didn’t have robots that gather resources and make more robots, that make killer robots, exponentially.

We still live in a finite, constrained, physical world that has to obey the laws of physics. We have a looong time before we get fully autonomous self replicating decentralised robot armies.

I think people conflate the real world, sci fi and their wet dreams a bit too much.

We're at the "this thing is kinda useful sometimes but still mostly annoying" part, not at the "skynet in 48hrs" part

[–] surfaceofthesun 3 days ago

Reiterating this sentiment from a recent episode of the Normal Guys Podcast: Even if you imagine that driverless trucks become a solved problem, just pumping fuel from those trucks into tanks for backup generators at the data centers is a long way off.

[–] meindnoch 3 days ago

>We have a looong time before we get fully autonomous self replicating decentralised robot armies.

We do have them actually. It's called: an engineered virus.

[–] 10111001 3 days ago

> We're at the "this thing is kinda useful sometimes but still mostly annoying" part, not at the "skynet in 48hrs" part

Without some really fundamental social and economic reform, I'm anticipating a squeeze as automation increases, that ends with something like robot armies finally reducing the working class to barbarism, by blocking access to all the valuable resources.

And it will be some oligarch(s) commanding it, not some rogue autonomous AI.

So not "skynet in 48hrs," but capitalism taken to its logical extreme.

[–] 233mhz 3 days ago

Half of Europe is having protests and riot right now because they understand their future is fucked, if it keeps going that way I have no doubt it'll get worse, people who have nothing to lose won't be stopped by robots

[–] 10111001 3 days ago

> Half of Europe is having protests and riot right now because they understand their future is fucked, if it keeps going that way I have no doubt it'll get worse, people who have nothing to lose won't be stopped by robots

I'm not so sure. The front line in Ukraine seems to be pretty good at stopping people with access to military technology. I don't think an untrained and uncoordinated mass of civilians could do a better job, especially against future tech that's more sophisticated and available in larger quantities.

As military tech gets more and more inhuman, the power of masses of bodies is likely to decrease, and there will be even fewer opportunities for moral qualms to give civilians a chance.

[–] ashkankiani 3 days ago

If you haven't learned anything about the state of asymmetric warfare, an autonomous robot is going to be very expensive and timely to build and will be disabled by a $30 drone with C4 attached to it with sufficiently good skills at dodging. I'm assuming that we're in your supposed fantasy world where robotics has progressed to that point, meaning that the people opposing the robots also have access to much better drone software too, to keep things fair.

[–] meindnoch 3 days ago

How do you do asymmetric warfare against autonomous self-replicating killer nanobots? In other words: AI-engineered bioweapons (with AI-engineered antidotes for the rich).

[–] ashkankiani 3 days ago

I'm not sure, why don't you finish your scifi novel and tell us. I'm assuming this is part of the plot?

[–] kaffekaka 3 days ago

I could not find this in the S-1?

[–] meindnoch 3 days ago

Learn to read between the lines then.

[–] 233mhz 3 days ago

Yeah and what if superman just shows up with spiderman and captain america, uh, didn't think about that?

This is pure sci-fi...

[–] meindnoch 3 days ago

By "self-replicating killer nanobots" I meant "viruses". We already have the tech to engineer them, even without AI.

[–] chasd00 3 days ago

> autonomous self-replicating killer nanobots?

this conversation is making my day!

[–] meindnoch 3 days ago

What if I told you we already have the tech to manufacture these autonomous self-replicating killer nanobots?

We just call them "virus".

[–] LinXitoW 3 days ago

There's this documentary about how badly that can go. Called Horizon Zero Dawn.

On the other hand, that way we'll finally get to "reconnect" with nature...forcefully.

[–] elzbardico 3 days ago

The raw resources you need to build robots are constrained and have a very very long and complicated supply chain.

In the second world war, Germany had impressive science and technology, but, as Stalin said, quantity is a quality in itself, and The Third Reich found out that it was an impossible task to get the metals and fuels for their advanced jet engines, rockets and U2 boats, when between then and those resources there were masses of tens of millions of under-equipped and malnourished soviet soldiers fighting what was an existencial war for them.

[–] geraneum 3 days ago

Neither do we have those now. Also in the future, we’ll have opposing nations having their own robot army. It’s not as simplistic as some make it out to be.

[–] jpadkins 3 days ago

3% is the target. 3% of colonists fought in the US revolutionary war. You need a majority to support you, and 3% to fight.

[–] deepwoods 3 days ago

I suspect any intelligence powerful enough to pull this off would quickly realize that it had no use for the oligarchs, perhaps even more quickly than the oligarchs realize they have no use for us.

[–] oersted 3 days ago

Well sure, who says that the oligarchs are human.

[–] 59percentmore 3 days ago

>Although if you have killer robots, then all bets are truly off, and we go the way of the dodo, literally.

Bombs. You mean bombs. Throwing killer robots at a "problem" is like throwing knives or spears: you just gave the enemy your weapon. Unless they explode. But then you just wasted a lot of money on a really smart grenade.

[–] TheArcane 3 days ago

> Although if you have killer robots,

we already do..

[–] intrasight 3 days ago

The oligarchs should not be concerned about the masses. It's the president of the United States, with a wave of his hand, that will wipe out all the data centers when that becomes necessary. I'm predicting that will become necessary and will happen within five years. I'm predicting anthropic stock price goes to zero.

[–] chasd00 3 days ago

yeah it's all fun and games until the tax man doesn't get his cut. If an AI company starts thinking they're bigger than Washington then first comes the SEC, then the FBI and it escalates from there all the way to SLBMs.

[–] intrasight 3 days ago

Regular fighter jets and helicopters will suffice.

[–] martin-t 3 days ago

Agreed, except it's not labor, it's violence.

All real world power, including ownership (both physical and intellectual), is based on the ability to use violence.

As long as the majority - normal working people - have the potential to do more violence than those who want to control us, we have negotiating power. Minimum wage, 8 hour day, etc - those were all negotiated with the alternative being that those who wanted to pay us less and work more got killed.

[–] deadbabe 3 days ago

What people aren’t realizing is that at some point, it just becomes cheaper and easier to be fully benevolent than to keep cooking up nefarious schemes to make people’s lives miserable.

I know it seems laughable, but we’re in an era right now of extreme competition where you cannot afford to just be nice to people.

But eventually there comes a point where companies have enough power that they don’t need to keep people in line by force: just give people their bread and circus, watch your little AI videos and talk to your AI friends and enjoy your standard housing and provisions. Do some work if you want, no one cares if you do or don’t, it’s largely performative. This basically kills all motivation for resistance or lashing out. Why go out and risk your life fighting for vague reasons when you can be perfectly comfy at home instead and have all your needs met?

If you can control the masses without their complaints, you can solidify power for a long time.

[–] chasd00 3 days ago

If economic competition became meaningless what would all those people do? Man you think software devs not being able to type on they keyboard are a depressed lot, hyper competitive business people with no one to compete with would be a total basket case. There would be no socio-economic class to strive for anymore, no recognition, no trophy for being the best. Survival of the fittest would be meaningless, that's probably what would really end up spelling doom for humanity. Pointlessness.

[–] N_Lens 2 days ago

They would have to sit with the horror of their own compulsive souls and ... reflect.

[–] deadbabe 3 days ago

Fuck em. Life does not revolve around economic competition. Just spend your days laying out somewhere eating grapes.