Posted by mefengl 3 hours ago
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".
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”.
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?
I want the US to win AI because if it doesn't, China will, and China's functionally an ethnostate, and I'm not Han Chinese.
That's not the only reason I don't want China to win. We're talking about a country where freedom of expression and democratic representation are foreign ideas. But it so happens that I was born not Han Chinese and have no ancestry in China, and the preponderance of evidence over the last few decades shows that the result of this, is that China will pretty much never "share the wealth" with me in any meaningful form. I can't really immigrate there, start a business there and so on without encountering huge risks that stem from a system which preferences Han Chinese. It is run by a government which takes wealth away from non-Han Chinese that get too successful.
AI is going to reshape the global economy one way or another, maybe for better, maybe for worse. But if the Chinese come out ahead of us economically in the process, pretty much all non-Chinese will suffer because that is how they operate their state, and their economy is an instrument of their state.
And yes -- if you are also non-Chinese -- in the long run one way or another this will hit you in the pocketbook too; sooner or later a shift in global commerce will increase your cost of living.
- very little of this has ever extended outside Chinese borders, apart from the extraterritorial policing of Chinese nationals; they've not "gone global" in the way the US did
- the current US faction is also trying to work towards an ethnostate, and has turned hard against non-USians and increasingly against non-white US nationals: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/01/politics/trump-immigratio...
As a Brit:
"it so happens that I was born not [American] and have no ancestry in [America], and the preponderance of evidence over the last few decades shows that the result of this, is that [American billionaires] will pretty much never "share the wealth" with me in any meaningful form." Moreover, American and Russian billionaires have shown substantial interest in making the politics of my home country much worse.
> 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.
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.
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)
All US is doing is taking brunt of the cost of developing it
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.