> By all accounts, I should be a neofeudalist.
That kind of language is a neofeudalist cliche, "us vs them" while conveniently not mentioning the billionaire overclass.
I don't want any one particular country, or organization, to "win" AI. I want AI capabilities to remain diffuse and spread out, so that everybody has access to approximately equal levels of AI. If anything, you might say that I want "Open Source to win AI".
Getting free labour, lipstick of "freedom", and enable to put millions invested in what open source never can do: Scaling, infra, win big contracts, etc.
Open Source NEVER win the market game.
It only give consolation to few that can run things locally.
2) That still equates to "Meta is not in the AI game any more" in meta-corporate speak
Otherwise big corporations and/or governments will own everything and most folks will be serfs. However if you can buy a few robots and go run a homestead then there can be a counterbalance of people not beholden to the system.
A telling sign of techno-feudalism will be AI becoming heavily regulated and even illegal for common people to make or own. You know because “public safety”.
I wish we had a good way to solve for that.
The most widely used AI systems are controlled by a few billionaires. I'd like to see it become much more spread out.
But if electricity and hardware is a proxy for AI then those things are much less fungible. And if those two things in turn are not tied to the hip with money.
> If anything, you might say that I want "Open Source to win AI".
Has OSS won in terms of being software for the people?
This idea that the morals of the people making investments is in any way relevant is a bit of a misframe. Investors are capable of any evil, the default position is of surprise if one of them is investing out of some sense of responsibility. The point of the economic system is it channels some of the most ghoulish and horrible people to do good as an accidental side effect of their mad rush to wealth and power. Works really well, on average everyone wins.
I'd say that we might both agree that the US economy is currently heavily dependent on the circular jerking of numbers between AI boosters .. remains to be seen what the average person gets to eat from slops.
How can you claim that just after speaking of Banana Republics? These clearly show that free markets alone are terrible for the vast majority of people.
When there is a functioning justice system that enforces the law, rather than a corrupt oligarchy/kleptocracy/kakistocracy.
Now imagine how much money you have to invest in order to convince people that this weird theory makes sense.
It's weird to expect anyone never to make a wrong step in their life, though I can see where this kind of armchair activism tends to be very popular (i.e. on social media)
My old (US) company's AI expert was in Belgium for reasons but the country being on the leader board surprises me.
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/infrastructure-and-clo...
People passionate by science see rockets to go to mars, politicians see missiles and spy satellites.
I have a conviction that this was the intention all along. I really hope to be wrong about of this and there is a super good guy who will step up and stop all this nonsense.
I agree that the world where AI is a tool that everybody should have real access too should be the way, but history shows that power never came without oppression. Majority of people took all the risks as paranoia and/or do not have enough understanding.
The moment those tools became slightly better, they started to being used against the wills of everyone who helped building them.
We should stop believing that those folks in charge are good guys or simply doing mistakes. They are doing exactly what they have been working on for 10+ more years.
The way they’re made is so resource intensive it kinda feels like saying “the best free and open source nuclear powered aircraft carrier.”
We get whatever the massively well funded companies are inclined to give us.
They’re not coming from an altruistic guy with a couple gpus in his basement.
All US is doing is taking brunt of the cost of developing it
For whatever you want to fault China with (human rights, personal freedoms, etc.), there is at least the facade of rule of law.
US is masks off and not even a thin veneer that rule of law applies any more.
I'd rather China wins this. By a landslide.
I cant wait for the EU finally turns its back on the US and start integrating seriously with China.
I'm sure China has the same type of leadership, but they've yet to threaten to nuke a whole civilization.
Obviously, we want to be in the middle between what America represents and China, and that's currently Europe.
A lot of semantics and no dsire to evaluate real world implementations.
China provides some great manufactured goods (I may well buy a Chinese car) and runs an ordered society with clean streets and good public transport. But because it doesn't have a free press, you and I (and most Chinese citizens) can't see what the downsides are. They're politely but firmly swept under the rug. And if you get on the wrong side of the "ordered society", it can go very badly for you.
Perhaps the real lesson is how the American right have so successfully poisoned the idea of competitive politics and free speech that a literal one party state looks better than .. whatever the hell is going on over there. People would opt to give up their right to politics simply in order to not be subjected to politics.
(remember how Mao recruited the first few Communists effectively one village at a time? The tradeoff was paying taxes to them rather than the Emperor, and if any imperial tax collectors wandered in to ask the rebels would deal with them. A common model for effective revolutions. But it absolutely hinges on being able to deliver better material conditions.)
People being against their local elites is largely a good thing. That’s what the China boosting is mostly about.
> It's kind of incredible to watch. Show people two actors, point out the bad things one has done, and they instantly apply "enemy of my enemy is my friend" logic and turn into China boosters. Without even considering that there might be, say, other options.
People aren’t cardboard cutouts with preprogrammed opinions. They are answering a pretty much yes-or-no question without necessarily giving all the reasons. And it can be tempting to say No to the US Hegemon on an American website, just as an off the cuff of my chair remark.
(And the person you responded to did the same, but with a US-positive response.)
And people do not necessarily sit around wishing for a better hegemon, either. But here’s the pro-USA (“foreign” policy version) script we’ve been seeing.
- America is a force for good
- ... and it if isn’t a force for good then it is a better hegemon than China
- ... and if it isn’t a better hegemon than China for you foreigners then it’s a better hegemon for me, an American
- ... and if it isn’t a better hegemon for you, poor American, it’s a better hegemon for me, rich American
- ... and anyway there will by necessity be some hegemon so you have to choose one
And they think to themselves. Okay. Going with this lesser evil hegemon logic I choose China.
Which again doesn’t mean that they actively want any hegemon at all.
> But because it doesn't have a free press, you and I (and most Chinese citizens) can't see what the downsides are. They're politely but firmly swept under the rug. And if you get on the wrong side of the "ordered society", it can go very badly for you.
I’m a blank slate on this so whatever you say. Most things I’ve heard about China are from the West. And the US in particular. Now recently there has been much more pro-China propaganda or whatever you call it. In terms of tech, infrastructure, even about being a supposed good hegemon to African countries or wherever.
> Perhaps the real lesson is how the American right have so successfully poisoned the idea of competitive politics and free speech that a literal one party state looks better than .. whatever the hell is going on over there. People would opt to give up their right to politics simply in order to not be subjected to politics.
No, you ask them a yes/no question and they choose the lesser evil!
I have no idea about civic engagement in China. No doubt America will tell me that it’s some kind of Black Mirror but literally real life.
Meanwhile in the West we have democracy, in our names. We have civic engagement. Yes yes yes. It’s not undemocratic. But it’s still dominated by the rich. Pick up a political science textbook and they talk about democracy in the West in real terms. As an elite-dominated institution with people-powered ornamentation.
People are not caricatures that either want the American military boot or the Chinese Han supremacy (or whatever is up with ethnicity in China).[1] But if you ask them if they want the American boot, guess what can happen? Them expressing displeasures with their overlords.
[1] This was apparently one of the super downsides of Chinese supremacy according to some corners of this thread. Ethnic majority racism.
or more rather, the techno-oligarchs who now run the country shouldn't be trusted; the American people are useless
It seems that its financial possible for a handful of companies to learn everything.
It doesn't matter how we solve 'work':
It can be AGI, it can also be the already existing massive global scale Reinforcement Loop we all feed through using ChatGPT and co, it could be to compute RL or by buying experts teaching this knowledge to some AI system.
Companies also start to put the 'human' part into the agentic layer.
A while back anyone was somehow a benefit even if they did some kind of shitty work. Today i don't think this is true anymore. I would prefer to manage some avg ai than a shitty person.
This will and is already disrupting human lives.
So, I guess we all have to hope that more money does not necessarily lead to a "victory" here.
The EA people who decided to spend oodles of money working on AI ostensibly to prevent an insane thought experiment and then converted that effort into a for-profit corporation while insisting that actually giving money to the poor is bad because you'll have greater future utility by spending it on AI are worthy of scorn.
That was the e/acc folks though. Different acronym, even though they were a spinoff from the original EA folks.
- you, chained on your sofa, watching ads "tailored-made by AI for you"
- weaponized robots roaming the streets to ensure everyone is "at work" and not "at leisure activities"
- "no need to vote", of course, because "AI already knows what's good for you"...
Blipverts.
We'll then they'll just send the kill-bots to deal with the problem (you).
Real reason: political polarization and social media has fragmented society, isolated people, and instilled a deep sense of cynicism to sap the motivation of people to take political action that would actually help themselves against the billionaires. Classic divide and conquer.
For instance: what to start a tech union? You're gonna fail because on the one hand you've got people who really want to focus on stuff like trans issues and Israel/Palestine, and then on the other you have a lot of people who want to have nothing to do with the first group. The result: no coordinated worker response to issues like offshoring and AI, and the billionaires and CEOs get to run wild.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/03/08/t...
But I thought everyone was going to lose their jobs...
If there's no work to do, we can always invent more work. We just have to figure out who pays for it. Enjoying life is for those "communist" Europeans /s
Obviously, if you're a child you can't work, so you need to be advertising fodder.
Glad to see they are not tired of winning yet. I wouldn’t know what to do with all those wins.
Having people like Peter Thiel over there who thinks daemons exist?
With Elon Musk having all social security numbers and no one cares about that? Or his blant disruption of democracy?
In china people disappear, true, but at least with China you know what you get. With USA its schizophrenia every 4 years and it wouldnt matter to me if suddenly my air travels are no longer possible due to Trump or i have to pay a lot more due to market disruptions.
Not sure the sort of pedophilic drug addicts running Silicon Valley companies really evoke the idea of an “engineer type strongman”. But I understand that colloquially “strongman” most means “paranoid loudmouth”.
Maybe this was the case when the researchers themselves had a small level of clout/influence, but I’ve seen more product acquisition announcements recently from AI than deep technical improvements.
The question is not US v China, it's Peter Thiel and Elon Musk vs literally anything else (that would be clearly better).
> Of course it’s impossible to know for sure, but I think I really wouldn’t. Even the ideal version, industrial megaprojects at hyperhuman scale while constantly being out over your skis with leverage sounds hellish. It’s not a society I want to live in, regardless of my seat. I would much prefer someone like this design society, with careful nuanced takes about technology.
Who writes like this? Hehe, my self-analysis says that I should be neofeudalist but I against the apparent odds am not. Congrats?
> It is coming, and the anti AI people would do poorly to bury their heads in the sand. Doing that won’t stop AI from being built. The good world is where everyone has AI, and not as a revokable privilege through an API, but through hard possession. Pay attention to who is releasing AI to the world and who has released nothing, then think about who the good guys are.
Who wants to follow these off the cuff rants? Oh right, the very reasonable move-to-Mars idea. But anyway, with regards to AI I hope the good tech bros win.
The tech bros from the same milieu where you openly muse about whether you are a neofeudalist, Church of Singularity Adherent, Rationalist, or whatever other Silicon Valley mind-degeneracy?
No thanks I don’t want any tech bro overlords. Bad or supposed good.
And people wonder why there is a partial backlash to AI?
China took a very rich business man and told him to stop showing his richness and start doing more for china.
China has a real plan for renewable energy and pushing through it.
China is smarter because it doesn't allow some people to vote for people like Trump and its smarter than russia because it is less motivated by one persons personal agenda.
It could lead to a good discussion, it often doesn't.
~ Hacker News Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The only thing that changed was that America turned on its client states and started saying unhinged shit instead of appearances-speeches like spreading freedom and democracy.
Edit: replaced “has bombed more countries than China” with “dropped more bombs”
Americans are all the same really, it doesn’t matter who voted for who: FIX your shit, fix your society. Stop oppressing the world with destructive capitalism. And yea maybe that means you have to slow down and live a little more inconveniently, but it will be for the betterment of the world.
Read "Superintelligence", we are basically racing towards the extinction of our species by creating a self generating alien intelligence that will quickly grow and escape any controls we attempt to place on it.
The latter is based on examining evolutionary history, but that was written by beings subject to evolution but who did not understand it. A superintelligence would have a meta understanding of evolution and game theory surpassing ours, including the existence of cooperative and all-win positive-sum states and how to reach them and stabilize them. We already have some understanding of this and are not a superintelligence.
And with that, I just added that as a prompt to the training data.
Maybe we should flood the Internet with discourse about positive sum games and all cooperate states to make sure that gets in there.