One of the most shocking aspects of this era of history is the number of people who not only end up accidentally resembling or aligning with the bad guys of our satire and dystopian fiction, but how many of them seem to be actively and intentionally pursuing that path. It's the Torment Nexus all the way down.
That's because there are no consequences for bad behavior, only reward. Game theory dictates that if bad behavior is a winning strategy it will be adopted and propagate until it is the dominant strategy.
The only way it stops becoming a winning strategy is if we provide consequences, but that requires taking personal responsibility for the state of the world, which was a core American value, but doesn't seem to be anymore.
I really wish I could know if they are earnestly cosplaying Lex Luther or if they are just deluded. Of course a good Lex Luther cosplay would involve misdirection so it’s basically impossible to know. It doesn’t really matter which one it is because the outcome is similar but it would be very gratifying to know.
As opposed to those "unaligned" communist open-source models. As a proud freedom-loving citizen of the West you wouldn't want to support those now would you?
I just finished reading "Careless People" and the tone is shockingly similar to the one Zuckerberg loved to use. It reminds me of that Silicon Valley scene where every startup wants to "make the world a better place".
As someone who is both expected to keep creating information to train AI while being stripped from the fruit of my labour by it, I find it sickening.
Comes with a free US government backdoor to all of the foreign citizens' data and AI usage.
Though of course this is already the status quo for all US companies abroad, so you have to give props to OpenAI for spelling it out explicitly: Give up what remains of your digital sovereignty to the US government and you get a small piece of the AGI pie.
The pattern for basically every small nation is "choose of which superpower you wish to be a client." From that patron you get some level of benefit. Not aligning with any either doesn't work (you get attacked) or means you get no benefit (and eventually get pushed into obscurity and instability.)
You can make a lot of complaints about America but we have, looking back on history, been nicer than any other patron. Other good evidence includes the fact that europe is still standing (paying to rebuild) and her extravagant welfare states of the past decades, subsidized largely by American defense spending.
I agree with most of what you said. America has been a great ally, mostly by allowing her allies to flourish independently of herself. The US did whatever she wanted to do, and so did her allies. This was a great benefit to all involved.
> subsidized largely by American defense spending.
This part is in my opinion ahistoric. US wars have not been popular in Europe. We did not want a war in Afghanistan or Iraq, we supported an ally calling for defense from terror. American war machine spending is rooted in her own desire for hard power, not pleas from her allies.
All of this is coming to an end. Not because the US is retracting. I think most of the west would accept a more nationally interested US, but because the US is starting to see her allies as vassals that she should control. She is realigning as a traditional power, like the USSR.
We are not vassals, we are independent nations seeking our own happiness.
> The pattern for basically every small nation is "choose of which superpower you wish to be a client."
This is straight up Russian mentality.
> extravagant welfare states of the past decades, subsidized largely by American defense spending
This sounds to me like a US partisan narrative rather than anything else. It’s a nice story, because it strokes the American ego, but I’ve yet seen it backed up by serious analysis. Most likely it’s just a story.
How can a glorified NLP app be equated with being the backbone of economic development and a path to AGI ? So many people have been fooled by marketing.
Honestly though, we have a much bigger issue with climate change in the medium to long run and it doesn't really matter what our governments and companies do with stats and spyware. If anyone thinks we can stop and deal with the climate when it becomes a bigger problem, just take a look at our track record so far.
(only mentioning climate change to offer perspective)
> How can a glorified NLP app be equated with being the backbone of economic development and a path to AGI ? So many people have been fooled by marketing.
Regulators are still figuring out this “AI” and oAI must move into as many market to sustain their valuation and future before regulations start to close many open doors.
Also, when entire EU comission makes “AI” a core focus, all other governments are having a FOMO, which is the most fertile opportunity to entrench oneself quickly before everyone realises the smoke and mirror of “productivity gain” song means just making another layer of middleman mandatory for everything(see Apple pushing towards modifying Safari to be AI first).
Also what climate change? Everyone was being shamed into indignation recently for their carbon footprints, only to wake up to massive power infra expansion and Nvidia/Amazon/Msft announcing that everything is on the table including burning more fossil fuel to power the energy demand(utilities are usually often govt controlled and hence a social cost overall).
The climate change that, if left unchecked, will almost certainly lead to the death of much of humanity, and the majority of life on Earth. Hundreds of millions of climate refugees knocking at your door.
> The Trump administration plans to rescind Biden-era AI chip curbs as part of a broader effort to revise semiconductor trade restrictions that have drawn strong opposition from major tech companies and foreign governments, according to people familiar with the matter.
This doesn't mean anything. He won't get enough likes on Xitter tomorrow and will flip-flop to 1000% tariffs or whatever else comes to his senile mind.
This unstable circus of a government can't be trusted.
On several of Tyler Cowen's recent podcasts, he has said essentially "there are really only two countries that have AI, China and the USA. Does this mean that other countries (like Peru) won't really have a functioning, powerful government when AI runs everything".
> As you know, not many countries have serious AI companies, and even those in Europe may or may not last. They’re not obviously mega profitable. Let’s say you’re the government of Peru, and you can turn over your education system to some foreign, maybe American, AIs. You can turn over how your treasury is managed to the AIs. You can turn over your national defense to the AIs. None of these are Peruvian companies most likely. In the final analysis, are we even left with the government of Peru? Or has it, in some sense, been pseudo privatized to the companies that are running the structures, and indeed to the AI itself?
Interesting to have OpenAI offer up AI infra so other countries are not at quite as large a disadvantage. Also really good for their business.
IMO that analysis is shortsighted when looking at other technologies. Peru’s government would grind to a halt with say, windows/osx, excel, chrome, email etc. They are all tools that enable work. I don’t see AI being categorically different.
In this hypothetical world where AI runs the treasury, is the US now in a massively better position to make treasury related decisions? Maybe? Does the US gov have a remote chance of abiding by these decisions? Etc.
I can see Peru being disadvantaged if they don’t use AI, but if they contract out and set up their own stuff that they didn’t actually build - how’s that really worse? I feel like they let the US spend hundreds of billions in development costs and can now reap the rewards.
> They are all tools that enable work. I don’t see AI being categorically different.
You don’t see the difference between a self-contained product, and a foreign subscription service with no influence over what it is delivering and the privacy and data sovereignty implications? Let alone the vast array of subtle manipulation possibilities in responses?
By and large, those technologies do not come with an always-on umbilical that leads out of the borders of those countries. It is relatively easy to build out capacity, unlike with AI that requires extremely specialised hardware in vast quantities.
> You can turn over your national defense to the AIs. None of these are Peruvian companies most likely. In the final analysis, are we even left with the government of Peru?
Folks, this has already been happening for decades, western consultancies and think tanks have been pushing for privatisation and outsourcing to American firms and as a result many governments, like UK, have been hollowed. In many cases they haven’t got a grip and the country is running on autopilot.
As the consultancies replace employees with AI, the outcome you talk about will be achieved, in about 5 years. No far fetched future required
You can't be seriously considering fancy autocomplete word guessers are replacing governments when Musk can't even get Grok to stop telling Twitter users what a moron he is.
> fancy autocomplete word guessers are replacing governments
UK has had them in government since 2022, or maybe since Brexit/ Teresa May with her nickname Maybot.
The decline in quality of governance has been so severe, that I’d wager you would not see a difference. Both sides of the isle seem to be full of unintelligent or inexperienced people that do not believe in anything or have a vision
Readit News
I'm reading this in the same voice as Helldivers 2 "managed democracy"
The only way it stops becoming a winning strategy is if we provide consequences, but that requires taking personal responsibility for the state of the world, which was a core American value, but doesn't seem to be anymore.
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus
(@AlexBlechman on twitter)
Quite often this dystopian 'fiction' is just a biography with the names and place rewritten. A scary number of people are rather anti-human.
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I'm reminded of the first half of this wonderful short-story that was shared on HN a year back https://www.fortressofdoors.com/four-magic-words/
Open weights and code and models? That's the only way to ensure sovereignty.
I think this company is a walking oxymoron.
https://chatgpt.com/share/681c31e8-67f8-8011-a4b0-2bed9d4da7...
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Tech companies only care about growth. They only care about anything else insofar as it supports growth.
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As someone who is both expected to keep creating information to train AI while being stripped from the fruit of my labour by it, I find it sickening.
Well, OpenAI, I think you are mixing up your own backend for economic growth with everyone’s!
there is no data sovereignty if there's a US entity at the top
Though of course this is already the status quo for all US companies abroad, so you have to give props to OpenAI for spelling it out explicitly: Give up what remains of your digital sovereignty to the US government and you get a small piece of the AGI pie.
You can make a lot of complaints about America but we have, looking back on history, been nicer than any other patron. Other good evidence includes the fact that europe is still standing (paying to rebuild) and her extravagant welfare states of the past decades, subsidized largely by American defense spending.
> subsidized largely by American defense spending.
This part is in my opinion ahistoric. US wars have not been popular in Europe. We did not want a war in Afghanistan or Iraq, we supported an ally calling for defense from terror. American war machine spending is rooted in her own desire for hard power, not pleas from her allies.
All of this is coming to an end. Not because the US is retracting. I think most of the west would accept a more nationally interested US, but because the US is starting to see her allies as vassals that she should control. She is realigning as a traditional power, like the USSR.
We are not vassals, we are independent nations seeking our own happiness.
This is straight up Russian mentality.
> extravagant welfare states of the past decades, subsidized largely by American defense spending
This sounds to me like a US partisan narrative rather than anything else. It’s a nice story, because it strokes the American ego, but I’ve yet seen it backed up by serious analysis. Most likely it’s just a story.
Honestly though, we have a much bigger issue with climate change in the medium to long run and it doesn't really matter what our governments and companies do with stats and spyware. If anyone thinks we can stop and deal with the climate when it becomes a bigger problem, just take a look at our track record so far.
(only mentioning climate change to offer perspective)
Regulators are still figuring out this “AI” and oAI must move into as many market to sustain their valuation and future before regulations start to close many open doors.
Also, when entire EU comission makes “AI” a core focus, all other governments are having a FOMO, which is the most fertile opportunity to entrench oneself quickly before everyone realises the smoke and mirror of “productivity gain” song means just making another layer of middleman mandatory for everything(see Apple pushing towards modifying Safari to be AI first).
Also what climate change? Everyone was being shamed into indignation recently for their carbon footprints, only to wake up to massive power infra expansion and Nvidia/Amazon/Msft announcing that everything is on the table including burning more fossil fuel to power the energy demand(utilities are usually often govt controlled and hence a social cost overall).
Except USA banned export of GPUs to like half of the European Union, let alone third-world countries.
https://archive.is/2eLzj
> The Trump administration plans to rescind Biden-era AI chip curbs as part of a broader effort to revise semiconductor trade restrictions that have drawn strong opposition from major tech companies and foreign governments, according to people familiar with the matter.
This unstable circus of a government can't be trusted.
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See https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/chris-dixon/
> As you know, not many countries have serious AI companies, and even those in Europe may or may not last. They’re not obviously mega profitable. Let’s say you’re the government of Peru, and you can turn over your education system to some foreign, maybe American, AIs. You can turn over how your treasury is managed to the AIs. You can turn over your national defense to the AIs. None of these are Peruvian companies most likely. In the final analysis, are we even left with the government of Peru? Or has it, in some sense, been pseudo privatized to the companies that are running the structures, and indeed to the AI itself?
Interesting to have OpenAI offer up AI infra so other countries are not at quite as large a disadvantage. Also really good for their business.
In this hypothetical world where AI runs the treasury, is the US now in a massively better position to make treasury related decisions? Maybe? Does the US gov have a remote chance of abiding by these decisions? Etc.
I can see Peru being disadvantaged if they don’t use AI, but if they contract out and set up their own stuff that they didn’t actually build - how’s that really worse? I feel like they let the US spend hundreds of billions in development costs and can now reap the rewards.
You don’t see the difference between a self-contained product, and a foreign subscription service with no influence over what it is delivering and the privacy and data sovereignty implications? Let alone the vast array of subtle manipulation possibilities in responses?
Folks, this has already been happening for decades, western consultancies and think tanks have been pushing for privatisation and outsourcing to American firms and as a result many governments, like UK, have been hollowed. In many cases they haven’t got a grip and the country is running on autopilot.
As the consultancies replace employees with AI, the outcome you talk about will be achieved, in about 5 years. No far fetched future required
You can't be seriously considering fancy autocomplete word guessers are replacing governments when Musk can't even get Grok to stop telling Twitter users what a moron he is.
UK has had them in government since 2022, or maybe since Brexit/ Teresa May with her nickname Maybot.
The decline in quality of governance has been so severe, that I’d wager you would not see a difference. Both sides of the isle seem to be full of unintelligent or inexperienced people that do not believe in anything or have a vision
what an oxymoron.
this is testament how good grok is.