Posted by 1vuio0pswjnm7 4 hours ago
The technologists who create it believe they should control it, the people who use it are starting to believe they should control it and the governments who write the laws believe they should control it. And now the priests believe they should also play role.
So is the next phase of "Democracy" electing who controls technology?
Meanwhile, 500 years later Uber could disrupt the livery industry with VC cash that rendered a NY cab's owner/operator 6-figure financed medalion license worthless, and somehow that wasn't Uber's problem.
Now AI (set loose in the wild at the AI industry's strategic and choice so as to be irreversible) seems poised to disrupt and render a very significant part of the labor force disrupted on an unprecedented societal scale and it appears to be a foregone conclusion that collateral damages might be be the causal industry's expense. Nevermind that its also poised to easily afford those social costs, and don't even consider that maybe society should be considering this obvious cause and effect. For me at least the feudal suppression of this otherwise obvious and necessary discussion is perhaps more spectacular than the causal technological breakthrough itself.
Now *that's* control.
I think there's an interesting phenomenon where it is _not_ the people who control it, but instead a kind of international finance man cum-captain of industry (perhaps best embodied by Sam Altman) who does not create the technology and yet has ended up wielding the levers.
I think it goes deeper than this when you listen to them talk. They truly think society will be re-ordered by this technology... and they should be in control of that re-ordering rather than democratically elected governments.
We even had one out tariffs on steel, thinkinf this would be good for jobs here. If there was 0.1 seconds of thought they'd realize any manufacturing job you make from a steel tariff cuts 2 more well paid trade jobs
They knew that was the case. They don't care. The maga crowd isn't acting in good faith. Nobody other than the cult members and people who aren't paying attention thought that would actually bring manufacturing back to the US. The point of the tariffs is to devalue USD (something Trump wants to do since circa the 80s) and to strengthen Trump power/influence. He wants everybody in the world to be forced to come and negotiate directly with him so he can see them bend their knees. The whole thing is a power play
By increasing tariffs they will have to pay their proper obeisance for their inferiority, and be inspired to actually work hard like us Americans.
I draft and write some code for construction companies and personally saw layoffs and not taking work due to increased material costs. The structural companies we worked with similarly did a few layoffs. The average pay of these jobs was 60k+.
Manufacturing of steel is very competitive and I haven't seen the American steel drop in price. I can't personally imagine it adding more than a few thousand jobs since it's so competitive (thin margins) and you would have to add a ton of production to add one job.
Meanwhile, the profitability of building a building is a direct feed into whether buildings get built. A building not being built directly led to laying off about 100 field guys for us.
You just make less of them. Some buildings are discretionary, like your big apartment buildings you probably want (these were the two that got cancelled).
Person funding can make x profit over building per year. Person loaning loans x for y sum. Building costing more than interest amortized profit means it doesn't get built.
And I just had a doctor's office fitout cancelled mid project (drafted it personally :) ). so apparently those are, too.
Public projects like schools rarely get cancelled. Factories I personally don't draft so I really can't tell you.
Healthcare absolutely has a ton of discretion for their buildouts.
What's the alternative to steel? You just make less if it's not profitable to make.
And we are very competitive in machines, already set up to win.
It’s also fantasy that even 4 years of tariffs will convince anyone to build brand-new smelting operations, as they’re very large, capital intensive, take a while to build. And again, mostly worse jobs.
It should be put in the hands of the most trustworthy, transparent institution that can validate it works for all of us, not just the few.
I don't think private companies or specific leaders want the best for the common good, so it would make the most sense to give control to a supra-nation entity like the UN - at least that would be the most democratic as we all have the chance to influence it (via voting from national to international level).
But I also feel that it has been a particularly toothless organization. If a member state decides it is in their interest to flout some safeguard they were to mandate, that state will do so, and the U.N. won’t do anything about it unless there’s broad agreement between the US, China, and probably Russia. And the chances are that whoever is in need of enforcement is one of those, or a closely allied country of one.
Dark times ahead...
Mitigating seemingly has devolved to trade wars and protectionism.
The genie is out the bottle with AI though. So perhaps decentralisation of it puts us all on a new level playing field.
A better solution would be to just not have AI at all, outside of the few research roles where LLMs actually make sense.
More to the point it's trained on copyrighted material, so why entertain any use at all on that front if anything.
If it's trained on the world's information, give the world the model.
It doesn't need a tech company to pilfer everything and charge X if we're going to ignore the IP.
The models free to download aren't the models used by OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. You aren't going to get all of OpenAI downloaded to your desktop and running fully on just your hardware.
And in each case (search and AI) the potential to decentralize and maintain "usable quality" is limited by these technologies requiring physical infrastructure at a scale that isn't available to the home consumer.
"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
And when the dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites now down to 10 seconds or less, lowest-common-denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance."
- Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (with Ann Druyan)
> Thiel: [...] There’s a risk of nuclear war, there’s a risk of environmental disaster. Maybe something specific, like climate change, although there are lots of other ones we’ve come up with. There’s a risk of bioweapons. You have all the different sci-fi scenarios. Obviously, there are certain types of risks with A.I.
> But I always think that if we’re going to have this frame of talking about existential risks, perhaps we should also talk about the risk of another type of a bad singularity, which I would describe as the one-world totalitarian state. Because I would say the default political solution people have for all these existential risks is one-world governance.
> [...]
> The atheist philosophical framing is “One World or None.” That was a short film that was put out by the Federation of American Scientists in the late ’40s. It starts with the nuclear bomb blowing up the world, and obviously, you need a one-world government to stop it — one world or none. And the Christian framing, which in some ways is the same question, is: Antichrist or Armageddon? You have the one-world state of the Antichrist, or we’re sleepwalking toward Armageddon. “One world or none,” “Antichrist or Armageddon,” on one level, are the same question.
> [...]
> Thiel: [...] The way the Antichrist would take over the world is you talk about Armageddon nonstop. You talk about existential risk nonstop, and this is what you need to regulate. It’s the opposite of the picture of Baconian science from the 17th, 18th century, where the Antichrist is like some evil tech genius, evil scientist who invents this machine to take over the world. People are way too scared for that.
> In our world, the thing that has political resonance is the opposite. The thing that has political resonance is: We need to stop science, we need to just say “stop” to this. And this is where, in the 17th century, I can imagine a Dr. Strangelove, Edward Teller-type person taking over the world. In our world, it’s far more likely to be Greta Thunberg.
> [...]
> Douthat: [...] You’re an investor in A.I. You’re deeply invested in Palantir, in military technology, in technologies of surveillance and technologies of warfare and so on. And it just seems to me that when you tell me a story about the Antichrist coming to power and using the fear of technological change to impose order on the world, I feel like that Antichrist would maybe be using the tools that you are building. Like, wouldn’t the Antichrist be like: Great, we’re not going to have any more technological progress, but I really like what Palantir has done so far. Isn’t that a concern? Wouldn’t that be the irony of history, that the man publicly worrying about the Antichrist accidentally hastens his or her arrival?
> Thiel: Look, there are all these different scenarios. I obviously don’t think that that’s what I’m doing.
---
We live in crazy times. The Pope is pleading for multilateralism and responsible regulation of technology. On the other side, Thiel says fear of technological progress could lead us to a one-world totalitarian government (which he relates to the antichrist, and to me seems like a straw man of multilateralism), while at the same time (arguably) building the technological infrastructure such a totalitarian government would need.
I don't know, I think I'm siding with the Pope on all future antichrist related issues.
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/opinion/peter-thiel-antic...
According to the Economist at least, he doesn't seem to know what he wants. The encyclical sounds like a grabbag of every progressive meme and worry out there, whether they contradict each other or not.
You can't have both multilateralism and AI regulation (however that's defined). If you have genuine multilateralism then there will always be some jurisdictions that say they don't want to regulate and gain a competitive advantage by doing so. Because AI is symbolic and accessed over networks, in a truly multilateral world there is no such thing as AI regulation, really. Model development and serving will slowly migrate to jurisdictions that don't pin it down too much.
The only way to stop this is for every jurisdiction in the world to agree on the same set of rules. Which is the One World Government solution, normally in the 21st century approximated with economic pressure e.g. threatening to sanction or blacklist your country if you don't comply with some new rules. The anti-money laundering system is an example of that. And if you become familiar with the stories of its abuse, then AML can sound pretty darn Antichristy. So Thiel isn't far off.
Of course you can have multilateralism and regulations. And no, AML is not an antichrist.
And Thiel with his plan yo create totalitatian fascist word is one of the greater danger to most of us. Way greater then AML regulations.
Sincerely,
Guy Who Talks About Armageddon Nonstop
A studied person once admonished me "avoid the word IS when comparing systems in the abstract"
Because of the nuance involved in explaining theological concepts there's a long, long history of reviewing and approving books that explain doctrine. LLM outputs can be reviewed by a competent authority and approved for publication but releasing an AI to explain the theology to the general public in any sort of official way is impossible.
(downloaded the full PDF and looking forward to read it on my eReader)
(No, I have not read it, nor do I intend to read 42,000 words, thank you)
And baby sisters’ walkin’ on her knees
Now did the Lord say that machines ought to take place of livin’?
And what’s a substitute for bread and beans? I ain’t seen it!
Do engines get rewarded for their steam?”
- “John Henry” sung by Johnny Cash