OK sure, AI is terrible, but when has humanity ever said "yeah OK fine, we'll put this particular genie back in the bottle"?

The question is "what do we do now?".

> Perhaps the most serious mistake that the AI industry made after creating a technology that will transversally disrupt the entire white-collar workforce before ensuring a safe transition

This was not an oversight. To the contrary, it was the goal. Technological feudalism, with people like Altman and Musk becoming the Lords of the world.

> Most layoffs are not caused by AI, but it’s the perfect excuse to do something that’s otherwise socially reprehensible.

This illustrates my previous point. What they're doing is not a mistake.

> For what it’s worth, the New Yorker piece I’m referring to, which Altman also referred to in his blog post, made me see him more as a flawed human rather than a sociopathic strategist. My sympathy for him will probably never be very high, but it grew after reading it.

It feels like we read two different articles.

This article is bullshit. It is very easy to break a data center, and it's quite obvious how to do it. Yes, attacking the central building with the actual equipment is not a good way to do it. Figure it out, or rather: please don't figure it out.

The rest of the article is equally short sighted and plain wrong.

What a load of pointless handwringing.

And so it begins ...

Skynet 4.0.

But shit.

Yes. AI is evil.

This is nonsense, promoted to top of front page without any comments. How about all the rock stars killed over the years, or grocery store clerks shot and stabbed to death? EVERYTHING is met with violence because that's the nature of aggression no matter the impetus, it doesn't require a justifiable reason, only belief in the outcome of its use.

Sam Altman having a Molotov cocktail thrown at his house after Ronan wrote a very long and detailed report of his shady personality isn't just coincidence and likely not organic. Sam needs to be viewed as sympathetic, thank goodness for such a moment where no one was hurt and nothing actually damaged.

keep taking away the choice, force an upheaval of society, rework major social paradigm, all without asking and thinly veiling the mandate of forced adoption with a "this will make it all easier".

trying to disrupt peoples lives while making them pay for it and taking profit is not marketing, or shrewd business, it is an assault on an established society.

i cant square all the blame on the more reactionary persons, that are behaving in the way that tech knows they will behave, tech knows how to push behavioural buttons to induce engagement, has little care over the intent of that engagement, until now.

BTW, all FAANGS executives, try not to stomp on any more burning paper bags left at your front door, and please stop eating dirt.

It's the way that machine-learning automation is deployed and used in/against society and individuals that will engender violence. I don't necessarily think it will be unjustified even if I think such violence will be unproductive and should be discouraged in favor of a wider consensus in society.

Such a cowardly way to write really. Just own your intentions and direction. No need to handwave theater and CYA when spookie superintelligence llm is in the room with you.

There are stupid people who are harmless (think Forrest Gump). Whether they have the capacity to be "good", I'll leave that up to you.

I stand by if evil then stupid (and thus if not stupid then not evil) with reasoning above, retract the implication that the reverse holds (if stupid then evil). I could use more precise terms than "evil" and "stupid" or qualify more, but I choose to be provocative, so it makes it a bit easier for you to attempt to prove me wrong.

Then your point doesn't make sense. As I said, musicians who die early (again, excepting rappers) usually die from self-inflicted causes, not violence from others. What is the connection between this and violent attacks on AI and/or AI people?

I disagree, but it's probably a matter of definitions. I don't want to play with words, so I will concede that cognitive ability is independent from moral reasoning (which is socially enforced). However, this is not what I'm getting at. Cognitive ability ("intelligence") is correlated with optionality and power. Your ability to change this reality is correlated with your cognitive ability.

If you truly are an intelligent person, would you really find no other ways to use your talents than to inflict harm, exploit others, and make our shared reality a worse place? That would be a waste. I won't get into ambiguous cases and moral relativism. Say we can all agree that some things are "evil": child exploitation is evil. Throwing molotov cocktails at a civilian's house is evil. Sending bombs in the mail is evil.

Now what would you call someone who engages in these kind of activities when they could easily do something better and more satisfying with their lives? I'd say they're pretty stupid. They're probably good at fooling other people into thinking they're smart, but their behavior shows otherwise.

Take for example Ted Kaczynski, a terrorist who is worshipped like a saint and a prophet in certain ideological spheres. Ted Kaczynski is supposedly this 140IQ genius who saw it all coming and tried to warn us. But if you actually read Industrial Society and Its Future, you can see it's complete incoherent garbage, the kind of stuff I was writing when I was 12 to troll on internet forums. Ted Kaczynski is what a stupid person thinks a smart person looks like.

A smart person doesn't need to be evil, just like a billionaire doesn't need to go shoplifting. I'm not saying that stupid people can't be dangerous. But they should be dealt with for what they are: stupid people, inferior to us, worthy of pity. Not powerful monsters above us that we should fear.

All the people that say "I disapprove of violence" come across as incredibly naive. This entire society is based on violence.

In the US, You live in the most militarized society in history. More than 80 countries with US military bases, many of which have experienced the unaccountable violence of the US military. More than $1 trillion every year, the most on the planet, and half of the discretionary federal budget. That is a huge amount of normalized violence.

The US police are full of military weaponry (1033 program) and veterans. Similarly many municipalities spend half of their general fund on the police. There is an incomprehensibly huge amount of violence done by the police on a daily basis that is necessary to maintain this society. That is a huge amount of normalized violence.

The US also has the largest system of incarceration on the planet. Prisons and jails house over 2M people, per capita far larger than any other country on the planet. That is a huge amount of normalized violence. [1]

Then there is the structural violence and social murder of our current economic and legal system. People are put through preventable, lethal living and working conditions. Contaminated water, unhealthy foods, increased rates of disease, bad healthcare, lack of public health infrastructure. No public bathrooms! People are abandoned on the streets next to houses and apartments that sit vacant. People who steal food are jailed instead of fed. That is a huge amount of normalized violence.

Then, an attempted molotov is thrown at a metal gate, and all of a sudden people are condemning violence? Give me a break.

When you only condemn that type of violence, you are reifying the dogma of the status quo which is to imply that violence by powerful people and instutitions is acceptable and not to be condemned.

[1] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2026.html

I'm genuinely curious why this is flagged?

Brought to you from the same guy who said in April 2025: "Google Is Winning on Every AI Front" https://www.thealgorithmicbridge.com/p/google-is-winning-on-...

Inequality was growing hugely (and still is) before the recent advent of LLMs.

Given the slow-burning but growing resentment against the people who are profiting from this inequality(popularly the “billionaires” but in reality broader than that) I wonder to what extent they are supporting the anti-AI message as deflection?

As in reality, many lower-paid jobs are totally safe against this generation of AI (nurses, care-workers, builders, plumbers - essential skilled manual workers) whereas the language-based mid-level jobs are hugely at risk.

So if there’s an inequality-driven backlash, it should be directed not at AI, but at the real causes. In contrast, when swathes of largely irrelevant mid-level management, marketing and HR drones lose their jobs to Claude 5.7, they are the ones who should attack the datacenters. Not that it will help.

I eagerly await the Butlerian Jihad

it’s still just computer software, everyone needs to chill, the bits are arranged differently but it’s doing the same stuff: processing, this was always inevitable, it’s not the computer that they are mad at, it’s the centralized over-taxed economic system that has everyone’s lives so overly coupled with it that the computer software is disrupting their lives, don’t blame the computer, go outside and start cleaning up the trash and planting gardens so you can survive, you’re still closer to the soil than you think and sun/water/soil is still plentiful, if you don’t grow the decentralized garden forest “infrastructure” soon it might not be possible

I won’t believe AI is truly being met with violence until I see one of these AI tech billionaires get shot multiple times by a person with nothing left to lose. Until we reach that point, it means people still have hope.

One weirdo is enough to predict widespread violence?

I'm not convinced.

The idea that people will revolt, replaying the luddites history, has been floated a lot. It's used to diminish all kinds of AI skepticism by framing it as backwards, violent people who don't understand progress. This is the preferred bucket of AI fanboys: frame any disagreement as unreasonable rage.

I think AI companies want a general dumb violent popular movement to sprout against AI. In paper, it would be great for them. So far, they have failed to encourage it.

The war is already underway.

Poison Fountain: https://www.reddit.com/r/PoisonFountain/

"Nothing that Altman could say justifies violence against him."

Nothing, really?

I think people are aware that speech can be an act, and that some violent acts must be resisted with reciprocal violence. (That's why we have "incitement to violence" as a limitation on free speech, for instance.)

Are we at that point? Maybe not. But I think it's a poor imagination that says it can never happen.

the author missed out on an important detail: the looms did replace most of the handloom workers. traditional industries were replaced, despite initial resistance. industrialisation has been inevitable, mostly, i think.

and i do believe its a bad analogy - comparing the two.

I was running the other day, and I was thinking how can this AI thing be used to something good instead of ending up in violence. Needed to get it out of my chest, sorry if this is too much (down vote is ok :). The big problem I find with AI is really rent-seeking behavior and big tech in my mind. I also think something like what I propose could solve the issue that AI is standing on the shoulders of free OSS, and that feels unfair to many (me). Without this, after AI claims the easy-pickings of the "personalized-cake-as-a-service" companies (and the like), we would be left with the actual interesting problems that, by definition AI won't be able to do (at least until AGI). And make sure as many minds can work on it as possible.

Imagine a world with true competition / free market, where all users own their own data and where promotion of apps / hosting is free. Like urbit, but no weird "OS" and much less... ehm... moldbuggy. You build mechanisms in such a way where rent-seeking is basically impossible due to market dynamics and backed by gov instead of big tech. AI is the driving force that gets us there: since it would be / is (already?) easy to replicate mail, maps, etc. We just need to loosen those network effects.

So more concretly I am thinking that data is hosted on "app stores". In democraties, we might have an app store driven by gov, one per each country. Countries might arrange themselves differently. Google / Apple for example could own the US ones (so no changes there), in China something else. There are standard / bi-lateral agreements between different entities to make sure people in non-democratic countries get less screwed. You can chose which app store you want (free internet required), and you can always move data from one to another (again: based on agreements between the different app stores). This is managed on the app store level.

The app store pays salaries to people ("devs") who produce the different apps. Salaries could be based on a certain amount of usage, but max out on a high, but not insane wage (top 10% earner in country?). The devs may organize in companies, but there's a cap how much an company / a dev can make and be valued at. I was thinking 5 people per company at the max. The rest goes to app store to pay other devs and hosting. Basically the way it works today, but the app stores would again be gov owned and not-for-profit. There could be different types of way devs might organize around: app (UX), services (APIs) and "vertical integrators". The "vertical integrators" take multiple apps and services and bundle them together to a more consistent "package" (think Gmail / Google Drive / Proton whatever). They could be responsible for making sure to drive prices down on the individual pieces of the package. There would have to be some counter-corruption mechanisms (transparency) to make sure that is fair. Some markets might be interested in national ad platforms (for national security for example).

If devs want to create something for the benefit of everyone for free they can do that. You can even build closed source things for the benefit of all, since hosting is free. Permissions on data is managed on app store level so you do not need the same level of insight - I think this is already partially handled in Apple eco system.

Anyways, the goal here is to avoid rent-seeking behavoir, network effects, ads going haywire and make sure the devs that do the work can both give back and get something back (a decent, but not insane wage). I think there's lots of fun mechanismes that could be designed to make sure people that actually contribute to software development get a decent wage, while disheartning those who do not. First post here, and, yes, I know I am a dreamer.

If the “billionaires” AI us out of our livelihoods will they need to learn how to pour a perfect espresso shot or use a voltage tester when they need to change a light bulb? Who’s gonna run the data centers and unclog toilets? They themselves? The thing is out of the bottle, regulations won’t help. What’s the end game like, some neo-feudalism with benevolent UBI serfdom and everyone on welfare?

The author seems to have some cognitive dissonance. For a piece saying that you cannot justify violence, there sure seems to be an awful lot of justifying violence in here.

>And then, and I’m sorry to be so blunt, then it’s die or kill.

The people ready to die or kill for the AI, do you already imagine what they are going to be like?

Software developers are expressing their concerns on this the exact moment they aren't directly building the thing that's "eating the world."

The people who run AI, Altman, Thiel, etc. welcome the violence. In fact, I strongly believe they are already planning for it, and yes, you are a target.

Yes, the moment they put 8 foot tall robots in the streets, I am fetching my black spray paint can.

I feel like we should start organizing somehow. As programmers, but more importantly, as people. We should start now before the ruling class has no more need of us and it's too late.

If anyone knows of anything already happening please let me know.

I think it needs to be a grassroots thing because our government's strategy seems to be "let the shit hit the fan and do nothing about it".

And yet the Luddites are gone and the mills remain

So like sharing bikes?

> AI has become the perfect scapegoat.

I really feel it isn't a 'narrative created by AI Companies' that's responsible for this. First of all, any business touts itself as one that will reduce labor. That's marketing. It existed long before AI Companies, and it is very often exaggerated in its capabilities. We as a society have accepted this as normal. We all accept a loop that goes like this: New Product has marketing that claims it can solve world hunger -> You pay and use the new product, only to find that it cannot deliver on its great promise in whole -> You still end up using and paying for the product because while it doesn't solve world hunger, it at least feeds a few mouths and that's better than nothing.

The true culprit -and one that I personally hold responsible for this outbreak of violence that we are seeing- is Journalism. Every Newspaper for the last 3 entire years has constantly flooded headlines with 'AI is dangerous and will take away your job'. That's because each time they do that more people pay attention out of fear, which increases profit for newspapers. The same goes for TV News, Online News. And this has a trickle-down effect on society where YouTubers, Podcasters, and your local seminar hall has people talking about how insane AI is and how it is the worst thing to happen since Pandora's Box.

We seriously need to change how we as a society interact with news if we are to see this end. We need to stop incentivizing sensational headlines for newspapers that overtime lead to violence. We need regulations in place to prevent content specifically designed to target fear in people's minds. And we need to see this change take place fast.

> Every time I hear from Amodei or Altman that I could lose my job, I don’t think “oh, ok, then allow me pay you $20/month so that I can adapt to these uncertain times that have fallen upon my destiny by chance.” I think: “you, for fuck’s sake, you are doing this.” And I consider myself a pretty levelheaded guy, so imagine what not-so-levelheaded people think.

Conversely, The Loudest Alarm Is Probably False[0]. If the idea that you are a pretty levelheaded guy pops up so frequently, consider that it might be wrong. Especially if you are motivated to write blog posts about violence in response to technology you don't like. Maybe you're just not as levelheaded as you think and that could explain the whole thing?

[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/B2CfMNfay2P8f2yyc/the-loudes...

I mean, no shit? I was referring to how people are starting to feel powerless and marginalized. And the government, which is supposed to be of the people, by the people, and for the people, clearly doesn't give a fuck about them.

There is?

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2026/03/25/americans-br...

I think Americans (and probably humans in general) have a distaste for local violence. Violence afar doesn't tickle the brain in the same way.

My ignorant take:

Media brought the horror of US casualties in Vietnam home in a mass and immediate way that didn't exist in prior conflicts. The novelty of that media combined with the casualty rates drove unpopularity. It made the violence feel more real.

Even if casualty rates in post-Vietnam conflicts were higher I'm not sure we'd see negative sentiment because media coverage of violence is so normalized now. Exposure to violence in media is no longer novel.

I guess I just feel like your appeal to skilled manual workers is pointless. They’re not really the focal point. It’s the large masses of people being relegated to the bin labeled “effectively unskilled”.

Maybe the author believes in the fact that violence is never justified, and thus the things you mentioned can only be used to explain violence, never justify it? Either way, it's a weird way to think indeed.

Obligatory warning that PSL is led by full-blown tankies, and e.g., have an explicit pro-North Korea party line.

That said, the membership base is pointedly heterogeneous in belief and they’re the most active alt-left element in DC.

Make of this whatever you will; just offering you this as background for an informed decision.

America routinely ranks fairly low on the "happiest countries" rankings. Currently #24 behind most of Europe, with the Scandinavian countries typically at the top.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-...

Clearly other countries are doing something to keep their citizens happy that the US is not copying.

Given that US politics and policy is driven by lobbyists and tribal infighting, would you really expect anything different?

Yes, our tech leaders would rather send america into fascism that have any impediments put in the way of their business plans. It is disgusting, and sad.

Yes a slop arms race between the disenfranchised and the inordinatly wealthy will solve things /s.

If this was actually a threat to entrenched inequity, we simply would lose access to the necessary memory, GPUs and matching fields of server fleets. Oh wait

We can’t even deliver on universal healthcare. UBI is an even bigger pipe dream for american politics.

UBI, at best, will only fix one aspect of disruption. Income is not the only reason why people want to be employed.

UBI requires a wealthy elite class to tax from that also does not capture the government and reduce or eliminate the UBI. The status quo shows us that if a wealthy class exists they will capture the government and eliminate benefits for the masses. Thats why minimum wage does not rise and as another commenter said we do not have universal healthcare.

Does economics or political theory focus on centralization, practically speaking? Not as a normative claim. What the actual effects are like. It just feels like we're at a centralization of power of unprecedented scale, to the point where no previous theories or models could really apply (in order to make analytical progress - I mean sure feudalism is honestly becoming a scarier and scarier analogy but still, there are significant differences)

I'm pretty much only thinking about these kinds of problems at my job at this point, so this is important to me in that regard

Sounds promising honestly. One of the scariest parts of the big AI labs is all of the exclusive training data they get through their UIs. (It’s unclear whether distillation is a feasible way to close the gap).

If there were another party involved, that would (hopefully) diversify power that (potentially) comes with those streams of data.

It’s a bit ironic that the USA has mostly abandoned interoperability after being one of the pioneers with the American manufacturing method. [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_system_of_manufacturi...

industrialization gave us cheaper goods, and new types of goods (the automobile). What new consumer features has ai delivered? So far, I've seen mostly slop.

It was supposed to be "a" gigahertz, Google transcription fail.

That's fair. Yes they are all individuals with their own unique perspective and approaches, and we should definitely hold them accountable for their impacts. I'm not saying the systemic incentives absolve them of responsibility, I'm just saying that we can not depend on CEOs of corporations to do the right thing. This is the role of government, but even moreso, elected representatives are people too, so actually it depends on a more fundamental movement of the people en masse to make it known to our representatives that this is way bigger than partisan politics.

If I had a dime for every “good guy founder regrets selling out to Evil Corp, despite making billions in the process”, I’d be a billionaire myself

Not quite 1000 on Codex as of last day or two!

"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." - Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, Dune

> The really big fuckup we are committing as a society in the US (may or may not apply to each person's country individually) isn't just this looming threat of massive labor displacement due to AI, it is that instead of planning for any sort of soft landing we are continually slashing what few social safety nets already exist.

Think of the alternative, though: If we planned for a soft landing and implemented safety nets and started transitioning ourselves to a society where people didn't have to work to survive, then a few trillion dollar companies would make slightly less profit every year. We simply cannot allow that. Won't someone think of those trillion dollar companies for a minute?

^^^^

making a copy is not stealing, but presenting / selling someone else's work as your own is. especially when it's done on that scale by big corps and in an automated way

Well, unless political candidates and the general public suddenly gain 30 IQ points and become more collaborative than at any point in history, it's the best we have.

The fact that we don't already measure/enforce outcomes for legislative actions should tell you everything you need to know.

That's fair, but I would expect the bullwhip that followed the supply chain issues would have reversed a lot of the price increases, but inflation continued well into 2023 and even today is elevated above pre-COVID.

Effective Altruism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism

“Effective altruism”. (Recommended to be researched with a healthy dose of skepticism.)

I believe they meant Effective Altruism, pieces from lesswrong and etc.

Heck, they might even use AI to do it.

> the German word for "entertainment" is "Unterhaltung"; thus it can be argued that the purpose of entertainment/Unterhaltung is "unten halten"

No, that would be "Untenhaltung", which isn't an actual German word, but could be.

"unterhalten" in German can both mean to entertain (however, not as in "entertaining a notion") having a conversation, as well as "to maintain". It has several meanings, all of them positive.

To be fair, most robot turnaments are still very much about human intellectual and engineering achievements. The robots are just a vessel

> Chess is a good example.

Chess is an unusually poor example. When computers took over Chess, we didn't have something stupid like 30% of employment relying on playing Chess to eat and pay rent.

The analogy only makes sense if you're already convinced that we won't lose the majority of white-collar work to computers.

To those who are not convinced that we are looking at making 50% of the workforce redundant, Chess is an analogy that makes no sense.

It only makes sense if you're already a true believer.

I respectfully disagree with this statement in the sense that if the whole world ends up becoming like a chess tournament. It would become insanely more harder for us to live our lives peacefully. The life of a chess player is filled with stress.

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47587863) A comment I had written sometime ago. Aside from a very few at the top, I have seen some chess players regret in a very nostalgic way.

The chess industry continues to allege against each other and we lost a star (Rest in peace, Daniel Naroditsky) because of it. The current world champion himself is struggling from all the pressure put on a 19 year old boy.

We enjoy playing against each other but man it is competitive if you wish to feed families.

Most of us play chess out of leisure. I am unsure how a world where everyone does something akin to chess competitively (ie. for money, as we wish to feed our children and ourselves) would look like.

One can say something similar to UBI might be needed and then we all play chess in leisure, but I don't think that is what most people propose when they mention the example of chess.

I'm not really into either F1 or Nascar, but my impression from the outside is that those sports are still primarily about the drivers

F1 is somewhat about which company can build a better car. But any real improvements seem to invariably lead to a rule change that bans that improvement in future seasons. So you are back to drivers being the most visible differentiator

The point is that the same thing is likely to occur with the arts

A lot of the inequality is a political choice that could be changed if people vote to do so.

This, give me some french fries from time to time and a house and basic food necessities for human-living and I am happy to be creative.

But what I worry about sometimes is when you snatch that away, then you just lead to stress over basic existence.

> If this goes away, and we have millions completely adrift? With no structure to contribute to? Even with the largest welfare expansion in history, I think we’re preparing for a very turbulent society.

Please look around and just try to remember how many things have happened in a year or two, We are already within a turbulent society but yes I also feel like this isn't the end and the cat is sort of out of the box and the world has to prepare itself for even more turbulences/radical changes.

I don't see why you need to armchair philosophize about what people are or what they need "in general." How could we know such things? What we know is we find ourselves in certain historical circumstances, and we navigate. Right now we are, with exceptions like you mention, free only to be a worker or to be, essentialy, a homeless criminal.

This whole prescriptive thing this response and others have where its like "ah surely it is up to us to find some meaning for the masses of plebs in our brave new world" is, IMO, presumptuous at best.

Like literally just give people an actual chance to find their own meaning, and I promise you they will find it. If it seems hard to you or "full of turmoil", that suggests a poverty of inspiration on your end, not everyone elses. Meaning is not intrinsic to our particular mode of production at the moment, in fact, individuals find meaning despite this mode!

Support jobs are very definitely not "bullshit jobs".

When the knowledge to do things like create novel pathogens, or "mirror life," becomes widespread, and the tools cheaper, we need to have violence as a problem solving tool in the past. That's a big challenge.

Also, I am trying to predict the future, so I am likely way off.

This is interesting to see since on another HN post everyone is bemoaning how expensive it’s getting to use frontier models because Anthropic is massively throttling Pro Max Claude plans. That’s certainly not going to become more accessible to us normal folk through taxation.

This might be a solution if there wasn’t staggering wealth inequality prior to AI.

>It will be violence from the rich towards the poor, because democratic AI is not acceptable for them.

Unless the rich somehow manage to completely stifle the progress of consumer-level computing advancement (all chip manufacturers would just collude to quit selling to consumers?) and exert an iron-fisted control over the dissemination of software (when has this ever worked?), I'm not sure how they could control the democratization of AI.

> It will be violence from the rich towards the poor, because democratic AI is not acceptable for them.

There's been ongoing class warfare happening for centuries, but only the rich side is firing the bullets. The rest of us are just standing in the front lines getting shot. AI is just another type of gun for their army.

Any people or combatants?

What about the other side? Do you expect the ratio to be different in the last 25 years?

About 38 million have died as a result of US wars in the middle east this millenium.

Way more than AI did. Another point to AI.

Not sure if you're able to set your snark aside for a moment, but are we really just talking about fewer humans being economically needed? Perhaps biological human population decreasing?

Is that... so bad?

Do you think that horses are upset that there are fewer of them today, and that somehow they'd rather their population increase but bear the industrial age burdens again?

How they were created doesn't change what they are, or how humans choose to use them.

Right. I am not saying diseases were a factor in every conquest. Just refuting parent saying that conquest is "only possible" through infighting. It's not - overwhelming technological advantage or disease are also sufficient even against a united culture.

People need more than just rent, and arguably landlords shouldn't be able to profit to the extent they do.

Olympic Athletes are the fruits of our labour. They are what things like money and cars are for.

The more money I've made in tech, the less I've worked. Granted, I have learned a lot and am far more efficient than in the 90s, but the amount of work has decreased substantially.

2011 Tigerlogic in Irvine, CA and 2018 JPMC in Seattle, WA, I would do NOTHING for days while collecting rather nice paychecks by today's standards. The fact I then chose to QUIT these jobs for a rather unknown working situation (and slightly more pay) astounded my friends.

At my current position, I make a great living and do very little. Maybe once every two weeks I work all day. Most of the time it's gaming metrics by picking (or creating) issues that are unknown, such that I'm writing the docs and specializing in code corners nobody else wants to. Numbers of developers are tight, so we don't see the redundancy from previous years. That's great for me.

Because they are unaware of the scale of the problem. Especially at the top, managers think being in meetings all day is "work" even if nothing actually gets done in those meetings. Consider people like this [0] automating their jobs and not telling anyone, no one would know otherwise.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/AutoHotkey/comments/1p7xrro/have_yo...

> Why do you think an employer would waste resources like that?

The parent post specifically mentioned large organizations, where the "employer" is not some person who hires and pays employees from their own funds. Hiring and personel management is done by middle managers with their own interests and incentives, which can differ substantially from those of the owners or capital providers.

Much as we'd like that to be true ideally, does it happen (in terms of inequality reducing)? I see no evidence of that, it ebbs and flows in various time periods and civilizations. One can try to resist that reversion to the mean but they'd historically be proven wrong.

They thought that too in the industrial revolution. You can look back and see the jobs that came out of it. But at the time, it wasn't obvious to the people effected that there would be jobs again.

We may have hindsight bias in evaluating something that happened, but to the people that it happened to it was terrifying.

Lobbying is "directly advocating for or against particular legislation or regulations." Writing your representative is lobbying. Fighting bad legislation is lobbying. Any good faith attempt to argue a position on a government policy is lobbying.

Giving money to politicians or their campaigns is not lobbying, and it is already illegal for lobbyists to do so.

What could and should be made illegal is allowing unlimited political campaign donations via Super PACs. Political donations aren't lobbying.

It's worth being clear about what you actually want to make illegal because you probably don't want to ban anyone from arguing a political position.

isn't it an attempt to give structure to something that surely would have existed illegally otherwise? banning something doesn't automatically stop it.

Who is going to lobby to make it illegal? Our system is broken and won’t fix itself.

Inequality is going to continue to increase until society collapses. If we want a better world we need to prepare for this eventuality by building avenues of popular action to return power to the people. Once the oligarchs have fucked up enough people’s lives, popular action becomes a realistic way out of this mess.

The US was founded upon corruption and continued that tradition throughout history. It's so normalized that almost nobody recognizes it.

I broadly agree with a 3-20 year timeline for a majority of office work. But some important qualifying statements I would add:

- some jobs will stay with humans even when AI would be better at it. We already see a lot of this with even with pre-AI automatisation. Neither markets nor companies are perfectly efficient

- at the point where AI is better than the average human, half of all humans are still better than AI. For companies or departments built around employing lots of average people the cutover point will be a lot earlier than for shops that aim to employ the best of the best. Social change is inevitable long before the best are out of work

- the actual benchmark for " replacement" is not human vs machine, but human plus machine vs machine alone. But the difference doesn't matter much because efficiency increases still displace workers

- I don't think robots will advance enough to meet this timeline. This is not just a software issue. Humans have an amazing suite of sensors and actuators. Just replicating a human hand is insanely complex. Walking, jumping robots are crude automatons in comparison. We can cover a lot with specialized robots, but we won't replace humans in physical jobs in 20 years

> Personally, I would surprised if we are less than 3 years or more than 20 years from humans being obsolete.

I think we are as far from it as we were 10 years ago. Or 100 years ago. I think LLM is a deadend technology. Useful, but that won't get anywhere beyond what it is.

But that's the thing, "personally", "I think", etc. Not much of a debate to be had there.

AI making humans obsolete is not really something that causes me any anxiety.

This is only true if productivity gains tied to general well being, but instead it's being concentrated in the hands of a few.

And is controlled by a handful of mega corporations? How is that equitable?

> AI is actually a mass decrease in inequality, as much as the Gutenberg printing press was. It takes something that used to be the foremost example of pure bourgeois and intellectual privilege - the culture contained within millions of books and other instances of human creativity[.]

I would rather claim that this is a proper description of shadow libraries [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_library

AI is already contributing substantially to its own development: https://novaknown.com/2026/03/12/ai-builds-ai-claude/

No.

Because success is individual, inequality is statistical.

It ia true that AI gives ordinary people a lot more chance to be successful.

But do not forget that success depends on lots of factors that are not in one’s control: knowing the right people, time being right for what you are doing, and lots of others. So while the mechanics of success is a lot different to lottery, it does not work much differently: 1 in 1M attempts are successful.

Yes, AI gives everyone more lottery tickets, but it gives rich people a lot more tickets.

That's a truism. But it ignores The Iron Law of Oligarchy, Pareto Principle, and dozens more that remind us that power tends towards centralization. It's currently fashionable to call out the billionaires, but if you removed them, they'd just be replaced by corrupt government officials, or something else.

That's not to say we should just throw up our hands and accept every social injustice. But IMHO we shouldn't go around simplistically implying that all social ills will be solved by neutering the billionaire class.

Humans will give a slop machine control of a lab full of CRISPR machines because they think it might make them a dollar? It wouldn’t take Supreme Super Intelligence for that to go badly.

AI progress can potentially be extremely non-linear because of feedback effects. The first to build an AI smart enough to accelerate building even smarter AIs wins (or loses along with everybody else if it's more successful than they expected).

Crime isn't a simple cause and effect relationship just because you say it is.

For example, in the US, bomb threats were very common in the early 70's and then they stopped and nobody really knows why.

> Will require a large increase in taxation.

To billionaires and corps, as should be the case anyway.

> Will likely cause some form of inflation.

Based on what?

> Will not provide enough money for a majority of people to survive on.

Depends on how much is provided - the simple fix is to provide enough.

> Has no significant political support in the US.

This is the biggest hurdle, and it's because so many on the right have been brainwashed by outlets like Fox News. It is indeed a hard thing to overcome. Eventually as the older folks die out, it will come about naturally.

The vast majority of tech support is "Level 1," which are easily solvable problems that can be handled by a flowchart (or more recently, by an LLM). Things like "I want to return this item," or "I want to cancel service," or "I want to use a different credit card."

These things generally have self-service options, but many many people are uncomfortable with them and would rather have an agent solve it for them.

Consider that a lot of users nowadays only have a cell phone, no PC. It seems like an edge case consideration but it's really not.

That is a choice a human made. Imagine if someone proposed sending the outputs of a random number generator to a space laser and had it fire at will, would we blame the number generator for the destruction it causes? You may say that LLMs are not random number generators, and I would somewhat agree, but at least in their current state and level of understanding we have about how they derive their output they might as well be.

There will always be a shortage of money for medical care. The dirty secret of social medicine is that a small percentage of the population are essentially unhappy utility monsters [1] who gain little or no benefit no matter how many resources are poured into treating them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster

There isn’t really a shortage of money for those things, just rampant levels of fraud, corruption, and incompetence in the government to make those things artificially expensive. California spends so much money on high speed rail and gets 0 feet of track because they’re not paying for track; the whole thing is a scam where the politicians give taxpayer money to their political supporters in exchange for political support. Defense isn’t immune to this either; Boeing, which builds a shitty heavy lift rocket out of Space Shuttle spare parts and delivers it late and over budget, pulls the exact same bullshit with their defense contracts, and there’s always some shitty Senator siding with them against the American people whenever anyone gets upset.

The opportunity cost to society of performative model training is stunning - 400M for a grok training run to dominate the charts for 2 weeks

The current British government should be a shining beacon for you! Its welfare bill actually outstrips national income by far. Britain's pathetic defense capabilities cannot even see off Russian warships that intimidate by deliberately hanging around British waters assessing our vital undersea cabling. The UK government has now asked France if it can help deter these ships. Tangentially - I should add that even with their massive expenditure on the National Health System (NHS) it's not enough and too many people feel that they have to go abroad to get life-saving operations and procedures. If they can afford it of course. But sure, that is another matter. As far as I can tell, there seems to be pretty much an apolitical consensus on both areas.

> It's a sad indictment of our society that there is always a shortage of money for medical care...

It has nothing to do with society; there is infinite demand for medical care. The upper limit is whatever it takes to live until the universe's heat death in good health. That takes a lot of resources.

However much society spends on medical care, there is always more that could be spent. The modern era has the best, most affordable medical care in history and people are showing no signs of being satisfied at all.

While war spending generally just causes pain for no gain it doesn't change the fact that there will never be enough available to satisfy people's demand for medical care. Every single time people get what they want they just come up with a new aspirational minimum standard.

War accelerated evolution, it’s why it exists.

Well, yes, the number of entrepreneurs in America (~30M) is a different "few" than the number of frontier labs (~3).

You say this literally minutes after Hungarians elected them selves out of a dictatorship.

I know many democracies around the world are in critical failure modes at the moment (particularly in the USA). But there is still hope. With enough pressure democracy can be reformed.

Also: A handful more of already well-off people going into business for themselves is not going to move the needle on inequality. When people say "It's never been a better time to start your own business" they still mean "the people who already have their needs met and have the capital to live off for a while while their business becomes viable: In other words, the people who have always started businesses: Already-Rich people.

It's never been a worse time for the poor or middle class to think about starting their own business. Prices on everything are rising, it's getting to be a struggle for even the middle class to continue to afford their homes. Healthcare is even more fraught than ever before, and if you're lucky enough to have a decent plan from your employer, aint no way you're going to give it up to go start a business.

> But are you expecting 360m Americans to start their own businesses?

I do not. I grew up on post-scarcity utopias like Star Trek, coupled with social capitalism, and believe that when there is a market need, people with the interest to tackle it will do so, even in the face of personal financial risk, but I absolutely don't think that it should be the default for everyone. Where there's no strong economic benefit for others to work, I would hope that we could offer everyone UBI, so that a comfortable basic level of life is available for everyone, without having to invent bullshit jobs that aren't needed.

I know I sound naive, but I truly believe that we can move into a future where human value is decoupled from their job, without going into communism.

Concrete examples please

I suggest you keep going with that math. I'll use the numbers from here [0]. 924 billionaires with an overall wealth of 7.5 trillion. Split among 300 million people, that's about $25k for everyone.

Here are some points of consideration:

1. They don't have $7.5T in liquid. The average american won't be able to use that $25k to pay a hospital bill or eat. Also note that one-time wealth transfer won't even pay in full for one major surgery.

2. You've wiped away the incentive for getting-big mentality which drove some of the billionaires to innovate which advances society to this point. Think - discouraging a future Jobs from making another iPhone-like device.

3. After the one-time transfer, it turns out we need more money for the common folks. "Why is the line at $1B? Isn't $900m enough? The line should be $100m." And so on and so forth.

[0]: https://fortune.com/2025/12/08/how-many-billionaires-does-am...

Actually this is another good counterexample! As I recall, Incas lost battles against the Spaniards where they had something like 100x the numbers. It's true that they were initially divided, but they quickly united against the Spanish--and it didn't really help. The technological advantage was insurmountable.

Then you clearly don't understand my take.

The Industrial Revolution increased labor hours by two or three times, depending on circumstances. In the sense that they reduced the time for life (leisure) versus the time spent being a cog in the wheel of an industrial system (labor), it certainly eroded living standards.

For a very specific example: the cotton gin likely increased the demand for slave labor in the American South, leading to harsher conditions for slaves, increased acrimony between slaveholders and abolitionists, and eventually the Civil War (the decimation of the Southern economy, the pivot of Northern society to a war footing w/ associated disruptions, and 600,000 Americans dead).

The agricultural and industrial revolutions "weren't labor displacement", they were technological and social changes that happened unevenly and gradually in time and space and which resulted in labor displacement, but they were not the only cause, and they didn't happen BECAUSE of labor displacement. I would argue the subsequent labor displacement caused a minor part of the social gains to be later distributed and realized through class struggle, but that's beside the point. Most wars cause mass labor displacement and military technological advancements that later translate into society as a whole. Are you prepared to argue for wars? If you are American, you are experiencing firsthand the effects of what once was a major part of your industrial labor being absorbed by China. It has led to massive inequality and erosion of standards of living in the US. Not so much for the Chinese working class, which has increasingly improved their standards of living. Are you going to argue for it? I think if we only look at things from a limited perspective, and in this instance a technocratic and teleologic view of history, as in history has a designed finality and this finality will be achieved through unrestrained development of production forces, you are bound to quietly take part in the destruction of society and nature, now viewed as externalities, and accept the worst of atrocities in the name of "advancement", while most of any gains are captured in the short term by a minority.

> Can you think of a mass labor displacement that resulted in an overall erosion of living standards? I cannot.

The mass evictions of the Scottish Highlands [1] in which peasants were driven at the point of bayonets to the lowland city slums to make way for the British government to transform Scotland into a mass sheep/wool production monoculture economy.

The use of kidnapped Africans as slaves in the Americas was also an example of a labor displacement - by introducing a source of mass human labor with absolutely no human rights - to scale the agricultural commodity economy (cotton, tobacco, sugar), which resulted in horrendous living standards for the enslaved, and an erosion for the poor paid peasants whose labor they replaced. Slavery was a very "efficient" way to use labor.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Clearances

AI is different. It promises to be able to do everything humans can, but better and more cheaply. When AIs can do every human job cheaper than the subsistence cost of employing a human, humans will be economically obsolete and worthless.

Then there's the minor issue of AI deciding to just wipe us out because we're in the way.

Taking everything together, AI more powerful than that which currently exists must not be created. This needs to be enforced with an international treaty, nuking data centers in non-compliant states if need be.

the loom hurt English weavers (flat wages for 50 years) and decimated India's textile trade. also, Rust Belt deindustrialization.

> We have, as a civilization, two paths before us

You forgot C: Butlerian Jihad. mass outlaw AI research, AI usage, AI building, AI infrastructure, on penalty of death

It may not be a good option but it's there

When the value of human labour reaches zero the economy will collapse so that will be interesting.

Here is a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income_pilots

Probably not the scale you imagine but there have been plenty of tests.

The minute you institute UBI, everyone working a shit, low paying job such as trash collection is gone. You're going to have big problems if those jobs are not immediately supplanted by AI

> It is very much so complicated though. The conversations about UBI in the internet has been around since I’ve been online.

Polarizing doesn't mean complicated. There's people against it due to ignorance, greed of both, it's certainly not more complicated than that.

> And since then, there hasn’t been a single large scale test of the system to see if it can be compatible with the current version of capitalism that’s ran in the most of the world.

Because people keep fighting against it, because it's scary scary sOcIaLiSm.

> Even if I support UBI morally

As you should, there are no moral arguments against it.

> there isn’t even local appetite for it, yet alone global one.

I would think the majority of the population struggling to pay for groceries would disagree.

> And you’ll run into quick questions about inflations, every chart from UBI-lite era of COVID, and so on.

No reason to think UBI would cause inflation at all, actually.

In any case, this really is the answer. You're worried about disruption due to AI taking jobs, but the only reason there is a problem is because AI will drastically increase inequality by letting rich people and corps become even richer. You want to solve the issue, you solve the disparity by making them give back their fair share. Like I said, simple.

"no large scale test" seems false -- there have been several?

"Compatible with current version of captialism" -- the whole point of UBI is to create a new form of capitalism

You don't need a job, if you can maintain purchasing power without selling your labor. I didn't forget that, I just didn't take such an outcome for granted.

In other comments I have expressed support for UBI, as well as for paying parents to stay home and spend time with their children. I think the more automated our society gets, the less people should need to work to earn a living. But I look around and I just don't see anyone implementing such policies.

Your comment betrays a lazy survivorship bias.

You don’t have to penetrate the armor with such a manpower advantage. Just throw four or ten people on each spaniard and rip them limb for limb. Don’t need to penetrate any armor. Can just take it off or stab sticks in between the plates. Conquistadors were not fully armored either.

Well "most" devs is doing a lot of work here.

I'm not sure about other devs, or even their number, but AI can most definitely NOT produce better code than I can.

I use it after I have done the hard architectural work: defining complex types and interfaces, figuring out code organization, solving thorny issues. When these are done, it's now time to hand over to the agent to apply stuff everywhere following my patterns. And even there SOTA model like Opus make silly mistakes, you need to watch them carefully. Sometimes it loses track of the big picture.

I also use them to check my code and to write bash scripts. They are useful for all these.

    const sort = sortKey ? { field: "name", order: "ascending" } as const : undefined

    const sortKey: "name-asc" | "name-desc" | "recently-accessed" | "least-recently-accessed" | undefined

    queryX: <Ent extends EntityNamePlural, Col extends StrKeyOf<Dto<Ent>>>(args
        : {
            entity: Ent
            query: QueryArgs<Dto<Ent>, Col, fOperators>
            auditInfo?: AuditSpec
        }
    ) => Promise<Result<Pick<Dto<Ent>, Col>[]>>

    export type QueryArgs<Rec extends StdRecord = StdRecord, Fld extends StrKeyOf<Rec> = StrKeyOf<Rec>, FltrOp extends FilterOpsAll = FilterOpsAll> = {
        /** Fields to include in results (defaults to all) */
        fields?: Fld[],

        /** Filters to apply */
        filter?: RecordFilter<Rec, FltrOp>,

        /** Sorting to apply */
        sort?: {
            field: Fld
            order: SortOrder
        },

        /** Pagination to apply */
        page?: {
            maxCount?: number | undefined
            startFrom?: {
                sortFieldKey: any,
                idKey: ID
            } | undefined
        }
    }

    const sort = sortKey ? { field: "name", order: "ascending" } as const : undefined
    const xx = storage.queryX({ entity: "cabinets", query: { filter, sort, page: page ? { startFrom: page } : undefined } })

    export type QueryArgs<Rec extends StdRecord = StdRecord, Fld extends StrKeyOf<Rec> = StrKeyOf<Rec>, FltrOp extends FilterOpsAll = FilterOpsAll, Srt extends Fld = Fld> = {
        /** Fields to include in results (defaults to all) */
        fields?: Fld[],

        /** Filters to apply */
        filter?: RecordFilter<Rec, FltrOp>,

        /** Sorting to apply */
        sort?: {
            field: Srt// StrKeyOf<Rec>
            order: SortOrder
        },

        /** Pagination to apply */
        page?: {
            maxCount?: number | undefined
            startFrom?: { sortFieldKey: any, idKey: ID } | undefined
        }
    }

    queryX: <Ent extends EntityNamePlural, Col extends StrKeyOf<Dto<Ent>>, Srt extends Col = Col>(args
        : { 
            entity: Ent, 
            query: QueryArgs<Dto<Ent>, Col, fOperators, Srt>, 
            auditInfo?: AuditSpec 
        }
    ) => Promise<Result<Pick<Dto<Ent>, Col | Srt>[]>>

You’re equating two things that aren’t the same. I’m not still manually writing code, but it’s not at all because Claude can produce better code than me. It’s worse at CRUD apps and a lot worse at domain specific bits. But it’s more parallelizable, so if I drive it well I can focus my skill on the small subset of problems that actually require it and achieve increased throughput.

It can produce better code than most devs in the hands of a good dev. The bullshit code I see coming from juniors using AI..

> Why not just force them to to build the common infrastructure and services, and in exchange they get to keep the money?

Because it is undemocratic, ripe for corruption and abuse, will never work in practice (as the rich will inevitably find ways to game the system). What you are describing is basically just aristocracy, where the rich get to decide what is best for the rest of us.

Hm, wouldn't it be better to just have proper labour laws so that people are not worked to exhaustion in Amazon warehouses, for miserable pay?

Similarly properly regulate the gig economy.

And actually pay servers properly so that they don't have to rely on tips?

The today's life is enshittified by thousand cuts ... why not fix them?

All that is required is a legislative body that is not bought by big $$$.

Ah yes. Let's trust civic engineering to a man who ran a company that had front-line workers using piss bottles to keep up with quotas. This cannot possibly end badly.

I'm sorry, but do you realize it's 2026, not 1980s anymore? Whatever you call intelligence, if LLMs don't pass your "intelligence test", there is a lot of people who won't pass it either.

And I'm pretty sure that there is plenty of countries who would make soldiers out of those people and give them weapons.

It's funny that us curmudgeons are the ones they can't quite beat all the hope out of :'D

CEOs have been saying the exact same thing for the entire history of automation. Take computing, for example, an industry that's always been unusually amenable to automation:

— in the 1960/1970s, when compilers came out. "We don't need so many programmers hand-writing assembly anymore." Remember, COBOL (COmmon Business-Oriented Language) and FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator) were marketed as human-readable languages that would let business professionals/scientists no longer be reliant on dedicated specialist programmers.

— in the 1980s/1990s, when higher-level languages came out. "C++ and Java mean we don't need an army of low-level C developers spending most of their effort manually managing memory, and rich standard libraries mean they don't have to continuously reimplement common data structures from scratch."

— in the 1990s/2000s, when frameworks came out. "These things are basically plug-and-play, now one full-stack developer can replace a dedicated sysadmin, backend engineer, database engineer, and frontend engineer."

While all of these statements are superficially true, the result was that the world produced more software (and developer jobs) than ever, as each level of abstraction freed developers from having to worry about lower-level problems and instead focus on higher-level solutions. Mel's intellect was freed from having to optimize the position of the memory drum [0] to allow him to focus on optimizing the higher-level logic/algorithms of the problem he's solving. As a result, software has become both more complex but also much more capable, and thus much more common.

While this time with AI may truly be different, I'm not holding my breath.

[0] http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

> depends on the infrastructure around you

Yeah, and who is creating those infrastructure? Jesus? This is the same part of goods and services.

> When that's all run by AIs for AIs, humans won't be able to compete.

So what? The ability to produce goods and services (and therefore general well-being) will not decrease because of that.

> It turns out it's more economically efficient to pave it over with data centers etc

By the way, a good argument against your position. Agricultural land is very cheap, but the vast majority of people who believe AI will put people out of work and worsen overall well-being are for some reason reluctant to buy this asset, which would see a catastrophic increase in value under such a scenario. So these people are either incapable of analyzing the economic processes, and their predictions are worthless, or they don’t really believe in such a scenario.

> will favour AIs over humans

Let me repeat: it does not reduce the ability to create goods and services. Under capitalism, this is the only characteristic that determines people's well-being.

> ...to the AI-run companies!

I think this is a fairly unlikely scenario. But even in this very unlikely case, people's well-being will not be reduced. Simply because of the mechanisms of creating well-being.

> Without UBI most people (or maybe everyone) would starve.

Economic theory (and 20th-century economic practice) demonstrates the exact opposite. In every country that attempted to effectively implement UBI, it led to a sharp decline in production and mass starvation. Literally every single time.

There's plenty of evidence that it's tens of thousands, but it's absurd to even argue over those numbers when a government massacring any number of its own citizens is morally reprehensible (whether it's 5k or 50k). Iran has a long history of executing its own citizens en masse.

Iran has admitted outright to 6k deaths, by the way.

I was thinking about this, if the deaths were actually at the scale of 10's of thousands, would that not be visible from space?

The US must have several dozen spy satellites pointed at Iran. We get various imagery to show us successful strikes. Where are the images of the mass slaughter in the street?

The number I keep seeing is 30k killed. That's not an easy endeavor over the course of a week without big logistical hurdles. The trucks, the digging equipment, the furnaces to burn the bodies, all should have some visible trace that the US gov could point to as proof.

Yet all we got is a "trust me bro".

Is there 0 evidence that it happened?

or just arguing over 20K,30K,50k?

Just want to clarify. Since some people argue Covid never happened, and some just argue the total deaths wasn't really that high.

There is a sliding scale between "I sound like a raving crazy person", and "i'm just splitting hairs."

> When they say "We don't want to increase inequality" and the response is "We don't believe you". Where do you go from there?

The response is "we don't believe you" because their actions show that they are hellbent on accelerating inequality using AI and they have offered absolutely no concrete plan or halfway convincing explanation of how, if their own predictions of AI's future capabilities are correct, we're supposed to go from here and now to a future that isn't extremely dark for the vast majority of humans on Earth (to the extent that said humans continue to exist).

The work they have done in this direction so far is not serious, so it's not taken seriously. They obviously care much more about enriching themselves than slowing or reversing current trends.

If they want to be taken seriously, maybe they should start acting like they're serious about anything besides their own wealth and power. And I do mean acting---they need to show us through their actions that they are serious.

We can look at their actions, in particular their efforts to influence public policy.

>How can you hope for anything better if you consider it an us versus them situation?

Because it IS an us vs them situation.

They're awfully good at turning it into an us vs us situation whether it's blaming our parents' (boomers), blaming immigrants, blaming muslims or (their favorite), blaming the unstoppable forward march of technological progress (e.g. AI).

The media organizations they own are constantly telling these stories because it protects them.

>The Government could legislate that any increase in profits that are attributable to the use of AI are taxed

Nothing a billionaire loves more than misdirection and a good scapegoat. This is why Bill Gates made the exact suggestion you just did.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-wants-tax-robots-2...

When THEY are the problem they love a bit of misdirection, especially when the "problem" is a genie that cant be put back in its bottle.

They're terrified that we might latch on to the solutions that actually work (i.e. tax them to within an inch of their life) and drive a populist politician to power which might actually enact them.

The billionaires could start to earn trust by lobbying for laws and programs that help the poor and displaced. Put money in to retraining programs to help people who lose their jobs. So far they seem to be doing the opposite, CEOs are publicly declaring ‘fuck you, got mine’ and leaving it at that.

He also mentions using it for Python which is minimal boilerplate.

And he didn't limit his take to just C code. He said: state of the art LLMs are able to complete large subtasks or medium size projects alone, almost unassisted, given a good set of hints about what the end result should be.

Idk, food and shelter?

"Vibe coding a house" will increase housing supply, (and automation at every step of supply chain too), but the costs will still be nonzero.

Please consider your biases. Musk could not have “changed” the government if the DNC didn’t hand it to Trump on a platter. Republicans took over because serious people had had enough with the DNC’s full-throated embrace of two things: race-based selection (with the unpopular Harris’s undemocratic coronation as the flagship example), and the relentless focus on trans ideology (to the point anyone not endorsing the fullest embrace of that idea has been declared equivalent to the worst racist). Without that, Democrats would have remained a powerful and relevant party and Musk would have gotten nothing he wanted.

Personally I am a fan of logistical taxation, where the mean income (including capital gains) pays 50% in tax and every standard deviation σ above (or below) pays extra (or less) according to 1 / (1 + e^-σ).

What will happen with this taxation is that if everybody makes the same income, then everybody pays 50% in tax. If some rich dude is making a lot more money then everybody else, they will lower the tax for everybody else while paying a lot more them selves. At some point (say 3 standard deviations above the mean) you end up getting less after taxes then had your income been lower (say 2 SD above), in other words, the limit is 100% tax for extremely high incomes (and 0% for extremely low incomes). That is, I favor a system that has maximum income, and you are actively punished for making more.

So, are you guys saying, that the mass killings of protestors, did NOT happen?

This is all just made up?

Tough, I'm gonna do it anyway, but through some kind of non-profit org. Because my vision is beautiful!

If I understand what you're saying it's that as rich as they are, the amount of money the ultra-wealthy own just doesn't add up to nearly enough to give everyone a quality of life that they deserve / once had?

Perhaps what's happening is that in their attempts to reach a personal all-time high in their bank accounts the ultra-wealthy are destroying value and economic systems en mass with little regard to the efficiency of their money siphoning process?

It's kind of like a drug dealer selling brain burning addictive substances to a few people on a street. Sure they're going to extract a person's life savings to date and whatever money that person can steal once they're addicted but that value pales in comparison to what that person could have made over their career, what it could have made if properly invested, the cost of law enforcement to deal with these addicts, the cost of the stuff that they destroy in their quest to get money to buy drugs, the opportunity cost of them not raising their kids to be productive members of society... like it all just snow balls all so some asshole can make a few bucks...

The ultra-wealthy are doing that shit where people burn acres of pristine forests to get some biochar -- but to the entire world.

  Isn’t it strange
  That princes and kings,
  And clowns that caper
  In sawdust rings,
  And common people
  Like you and me
  Are builders for eternity?

  Each is given a bag of tools,
  A shapeless mass,
  A book of rules;
  And each must make-
  Ere life is flown-
  A stumbling block
  Or a stepping stone.

I am not at all proposing that "people with billions of dollars" somehow directly pay for "the needs of the population as a whole".

I'm considering "actual power", rather than "actual income".

Generalize "people with billions of dollars" to all Americans - and then this logic will start to work fully.

"Until people with salaries of many dollars per hour behind them do something with that money to offset the financial hardship that they're knowingly - and gleefully - bringing to others 90% of the world that live on less than 2 dollars per day... The distinction has no practical use."

Moreover, these people do not simply lobby the government, but directly elect it, and actually have many times more money at their disposal than the rest of the world.

Bloomberg Billionaires Index publishes daily net worth for the top 500 globally. As of end of 2025, the top 500 totaled $11.9 trillion, with $2.2 trillion added in 2025.

Forbes Real-Time Billionaires covers the full ~3,000-person list. The 2025 annual snapshot: 3,028 billionaires with combined net worth of $16.1 trillion

Forbes 400 (US only): 2025 cutoff was $3.8 billion to make the list. Forbes publishes the aggregate annually and recent years the total net worth was over $5.4T for the 400.

The question is not how much they have, but how much they will have once all the replaceable jobs are replaced.

Well, the top 10% richest people control 67% of the wealth, and top 1% richest have 30% of the wealth in the US. The top half has > 97% of the wealth.

It appears you are the one very confused about wealth distribution in the US. Maybe you are confusing "income" with "wealth hoarding". The hoarding is happening to a gross amount, and this is why there should be a 1% tax on fortune portions over 100 million and 2% on portions over 1 billion. That and going back to the 70% tax over incomes in the top bracket (eg > 10million / yr)

Those taxes are coming. Trumpty Dumpty and the oligarchs brought it on themselves. Maga grifters are getting f'd in the midterms. Maybe maga should have picked a few dear leaders with some integrity instead of greedy frauds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...

Edit: downpout all you want, doesn't change the facts.

Well it's not just the money they've also stolen our democracy and have complete control on society, media and now the public lands as a whole.

They've also stolen a good economy. The economy in this country worked best when corporate profits were taxed at a much higher rate and companies were incentivized to grow business and we could create more jobs for people. Through their grip on society they have stolen that wealth and good economic output.

We have plenty of evidence that tax cuts do not fuel economic growth look out our industry right now there are massive layoffs everywhere and it's not because of dogshit LLMs

https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policycast/olig...

Billionaires have no right to exist, at all.

Really? Because GDP vs household income graphed over the last 40 years paints a rather clear picture.

The wealthiest group in the US is the 70-95%, they have over double the wealth of "the billionaires".

But we can't talk about this because it includes a large tract of the white collar everyday man workforce.

This is why the focus is so heavy on billionaires, so heavy on increasing minimum wage, so heavy on protecting immigrants. Those are all virtuous values that also bolster the value of the 70-95%, while piling all the blame (and responsibility) on the 1%.

The wealthiest group in America is doing an excellent job at protecting (and growing) their wealth.

(for those wondering, the "back breaker" of this class is zoning laws and new housing, everyone is aware how intense NIMBYism is in the middle/upper middle class hives).

The problem is that people have a million stories to explain the observed actions, most of those stories are bullshit, and people repeating them know fuck all about the decision-space in which these actions were chosen and taken.

Judge their actions, consider what they say as given in good faith and praise or criticize.

To judge the people is to pretend you know why they did or said something.

We get a view of this taken to its logical extreme in the final Resident Evil film featuring Milla Jovovich.

The entire Earth's population dead, with evil corporate board members holding votes underground as to who gets to be the CEO of the company.

We gotta end citizens united, corporations and weapons manufacturers are incentivized to lobby congress and enable wars and starvation abroad. Billionaires need to be taxed out of existence so we can stop spending our collective wealth on dumb shit contracts for palantir and elon musks dogshit companies.

> With AI all is subject to change.

Nope. AI is an accelerant that makes the divide between rich and poor grow even faster.

We have not been shown any evidence that shows anything approaching this scale of people dead, we have not been told on what basis that specific number of deaths was determined and we have not been told why that supposed evidence can not be made public. 30 thousand killed in the span of two days would make this one of the bloodiest massacres in history. I don't see how that would not result in at least a single photo or satellite image of a street lined with dead bodies, of mass executions, of mass graves or simply just the logistics operation required to dispose of this many bodies. The only thing to back up this number is trusting the probably least trustworthy US administration in history.

I don't care if Altman is secretly a good person. I care very deeply that he is taking actions to harm the world in grievous ways and is not doing any visible thing to mitigate the extreme damage he will do.

"Altman is secretly a good guy" doesn't pay people's mortgages.

I don’t understand why welfare is the answer. To me it seems we’ve super failed if that’s the case — just brings everyone down except a few ultra rich people.

well inflation is equivalent to a flat wealth tax that doesn't consider insoluble assets, and is entirely in the hands of the government that imposes the UBI.

"cause increased prices for consumer/essential goods" is what you meant (since buying power is moved to people who are reliant on buying them), but this is a one-time transition to a new equilibrium (so is mitigable by increasing the UBI to account for it), not a constant ever-looming devaluator.

There is currently more than enough total production for people to live quite well.

If AIs simply replace people, the same total work gets done. It's just a matter of who gets the profits from it.

It won't be that simple, to be sure. Nonetheless we already produce far more than subsistence, and there's no reason why a UBI would change that. If it increases the price of some commodities because now everyone can buy them, I'm ok with that. It already horrifies me that some go hungry in the fattest nation in history.

That sounds right. But I think that's a reasonable goal.

It doesn't benefit the wealthy at all. They come off worse for it. (There are revenue-neutral versions but I don't think they suffice.) But I believe that they can afford it, and will find the result a healthier America that they won't want to abandon.

I'd like to emphasize that the above should be immediately obvious. The fact that it's not does not bode well for humanity's future.

Billionaires simply _should not exist_. The fact that the power to shape societies is concentrated in so few can account for many of the existential threats we face today. AI is not "the problem", it's merely the latest symptom of our broken system and the prioritization of the wrong goals and outcomes.

EDIT: grammar

A quote that stuck with me: "We are all crew on Spaceship Earth. There are no passengers." And anyone that thinks they are the captain, is wrong.

Good luck taking away the detached single family homes, pickup trucks, SUVs, commercial flights, out of season fruits/vegetables, and imported manufactured goods. The people that expect those things are the “ small number of people hoarding a majority of the wealth”, and there are quite a few of them (probably 1B+ worldwide).

We are about to crank the budget by a half trillion just for the Department of War. Nobody seems to think that's a threat.

I have no idea what you are trying to say. Forbes Real-Time Billionaires covers the full ~3,000-person list. The 2025 annual snapshot: 3,028 billionaires with combined net worth of $16.1 trillion