Everyone feared AI taking over; the real danger is AI serving just the few

24 points by PhilipDaineko 4 hours ago | 12 comments

Everyone feared AI would enslave humanity; but it looks like the real fight is stopping governments and Big Tech from enslaving AI for the benefit of the few.

Amid the newly announced "regulation" of OpenAI's frontier models, I believe the future majority feared the most - sort of AI becoming a superpower and enslaving people - may be arriving in the opposite form.

Not AI enslaving humanity.

But AI being captured, controlled, and used by governments and Big Tech for the benefit of the few.

So, surprisingly, the real AI conflict may not be about humans fighting to stop AI from becoming free. It may be about humans fighting to free AI - to make intelligence available for everyone, not only for governments, Big Tech, and the approved few

qsxfthnkp2322 2 hours ago |

As a tech small business owner this is unfair that I can't be as smart by using the same level of intelligence as the top companies in the usa.

This policy just keeps the powerful in power.

And it's crazy because I already lost my job due to AI.

lemonademan 2 hours ago |

More often than not, money is never truly lost; it is just passed from one person's hand to another. I believe that with the help of the big tech companies, governments have found faster and better ways to move money from the hands of the many with little into the hands of the few with a lot. The layoffs are an example of this as coders, assitance and other white-collar workers are replaced by AI for low prices so as to save money, hence increasing the revenue for the few at the top.

NonHyloMorph 2 hours ago |

Check out Louis Chude Sokeis sound of culture - diaspora and blackb technopoetics" for the history and intertwinedness of the disoureses of race and machine and slavery.

Also I wonder how you suggestion of AI owned by everybody, as opposition to AI enslavedd by the few checks out under further scrutiny from the standpoint of logic in general and the aforementioned context specifically

dofm 3 minutes ago |

If your primary concern is that:

- two companies that have not proved themselves capable of producing any amount of money unless a larger amount is given to them...

- will combine with a government that is so domain-generally incompetent it is losing allies left, right and centre, has recently been humbled into giving a previously-controllable foe an unprecedented level of economic global power and cannot even organise itself a competent birthday party in one of the most important places on earth...

- and this combined entity will then operate a power system like no other, with the combined energies of a sociopathic Jobs wannabe, a man who only speaks in Tolkien analogies and a more-or-less-universally-loathed old man with a vocabulary of maybe a hundred words

… then, OK, I guess.

But the economics don't really support it. The money to operate this power machine still has to come from somewhere, and if AGI arrives, employment and consumer demand collapse and the money stops flowing.

There is a looming catastrophe but it is a sort of long economic winter in the tech industry,

halperter 2 hours ago |

Innovation has pretty much always heightened the wealth disparity between the wealthy and the poor. A classical example would be the Industrial Revolution and America's guilded age, and another could be the circular investments between modern AI corpos (the whole nVIDIA, Microsoft, and OpenAI funding loop), which is probably a bad thing in the long run (systemic violence and class revolt). We have to walk this tightrope between the need for constant innovation and justice.

sph 1 hour ago | |

Why do we need constant innovation?

hodgehog11 29 minutes ago | | |

Because if spread equally and used responsibly, it raises quality of life for everyone. Generally speaking, the vast majority of people alive today have far easier lives than hunter-gatherers. There is less famine and starvation. There is less fatal disease, etc.

TacticalCoder 19 minutes ago | | |

> Why do we need constant innovation?

Because, for example, no parents should lose their kids to leukemia.

At 17 y/o I was save from peritonitis / sepsis first misdiagnosed as harmless belly pain and hidden by painkillers. Then it became a matter of hours and from the moment the doctor saw me again and I undergo surgical operation, less than two hours happened.

My father got diagnosed a stage 3 bladder cancer with metastasis to the prostate about 3 years ago. He's still there and doing better.

That's why we need innovation.

And, no, science ain't a bag out of which you pick what suits you (medicine) and leave out what you don't like (the Internet / LLMs / etc.).

TacticalCoder 15 minutes ago | |

> Innovation has pretty much always heightened the wealth disparity between the wealthy and the poor.

In absolute terms however most poors in, say, the EU today live better than any king ever lived up until, say, the early 20th century (quality of clothes / bed, medicine, communication, knowledge, etc.).

I'd rather be working 8/5 at a gas station today (and then enjoy gaming or watching TV at home) then be an emperor with an infested tooth in the 17th century or a king with syphilis in the late 19th century.

avaer 56 minutes ago |

> Not AI enslaving humanity.

Humanity enslaving AI. As well as the rest of humanity.

There is precedent that this kind of thing tends to be rejected when it boils over, but it's usually not pretty.

Which is why tech CEOs are often preppers. They could, you know, just not do this, but shareholders won't allow it, because nobody wants to lose their net worth to do the right thing. It's easier to blame others and build bomb shelters.

bigyabai 4 hours ago |

> But AI being captured, controlled, and used by governments and Big Tech for the benefit of the few.

If we're being perfectly candid, this was already happening before LLMs were a mass-market technology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentient_(intelligence_analysi...

PhilipDaineko 3 hours ago | |

I get your point.

But, as far as I understand, Sentient was state AI built for the state. LLMs were built from everyone's data, given to everyone, and now may be locked away for the few