No; under those circumstances they’ll just kill the billionaires and take their money. Billionaires exist on sufferance, and trying to conquer the world would exceed that sufferance.
What do you mean, try and conquer the world? Look at the income inequality numbers lately? To get back to the topic on hand, AI is likely to make the situation worse.
That’s what taking over all of society, overthrowing all governments and marginalizing the rest of humanity is.
Billionaires versus authoritarian government is an interesting topic of discussion, but maybe in a new thread?
I don’t think billionaires actually want to RUN the world. At least not the mundane stuff like delivering the mail and keeping the trains running on time. They just want the world paying them to use their mail service and their trains and have everyone kissing their ass over how their mail and trains are so awesome.
Yes. Their goal is to collect a percentage = a tax, on every activity of all the proles.
Just to make my point clear, the emphasis should have been on “try.” You seem to be implying that they haven’t done so already.
Ahem. For the thread, a lot of the reason they are pushing AI so hard is that it is now an arms race, with companies worrying about losing out on AI and winding up in the dustbin of technological history. Meta bet on the wrong horse (VR)
and they are trying to catch up.
The same thing happened during the bubble, where we sold servers to all these places who probably didn’t need them. But they had to have them to keep up.
They haven’t. For example a while back there was a dispute between Ethan Musk and Brazil, and for all his bluster Musk ended up caving in to Brazil on every point because he just doesn’t have any tools to deal with a government that simply tells him “No”.
The billionaires don’t keep getting their way because they are all-powerful, but because governments just don’t care. The instant they care, that billionaire gets steamrolled. That doesn’t happen anymore in a scenario where the billionaires get to replace the government and military with AI and robots they control, which is why no government is likely to let it happen.
Yeah, it’s got to be a little depressing for someone worth $100 billion or more that the President-for-life* of the shittiest shithole on the planet is still in many ways more powerful and important.
* like the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, not necessarily a long time
And it will only offer train and mail service where it’s profitable so if you’re out in the boonies you are OOL.
But then again, walking is healthy… so there’s that.
AaaS
(Activity as a Service)
/s
Woodrow Wilson in his book “The New Freedom” pushed progressive Big Government precisely in opposition to the growing power of corporations and big business, which Wilson claimed that the original model of American democracy couldn’t counter. I sometimes wonder if this was out of any love or concern for the public and more that Wilson wanted the government to firmly establish just who took orders from who.
It seems that Trump has definitly established that.
My desktop computer crapped out on me over the weekend, and I’m adjusting to a flat-keyboard laptop. Anyway, I got AI popups every time I made a keystroke (I am exaggerating only slightly) and FINALLY figured out how to undo that.
As for the scenarios about AI killing off the human population, I can think of one scenario where that MIGHT be possible, and it was addressed in a late 1990s sci-fi thriller I once saw in a used bookstore. It involved a computer virus that was somehow altered to infect people, and while I’m sure there are some wackadoodles out there trying to do this, I don’t see it happening any time soon.
Yes, I have read Annie Jacobsen’s new book “Biological War: A Scenario” and that involved a mutated strain of plague bacteria, NOT a computer virus.
You might be referring to “Snow Crash”.
I’ve been wondering about this myself (thread title question, I mean).
Some of it (maybe most of it) feels like the Tulip Craze or the Dot.com Bubble. i.e., everyone wants it because everyone else wants it, and the main people getting rich off it are speculators investing in and selling off technology they don’t personally use or benefit from.
Certainly there are people using AI, but that’s only relevant if they’re getting very rich or very powerful via their use of it, because AI is very expensive on a lot of concurrent fronts.
I’m open to being told that I’m missing something and should not be dismissive-with-eyerolls about AI.
When I was a young adult, our parents bought whole-life insurance policies for my sibs and me, presumably as a gift to their future grandchildren. They told us about it at the 21-year mark, and my brother and sister both chose to cash them in. I kept mine and paid the premium each year, until my brother informed me that the company is currently subsidizing AI server farms, and be prepared for the eventual crash.
I cashed it in, and that money is sitting in CDs that may eventually go to my nieces when I kick off, which I hope is not for a long time. They’re the only grandchildren.
No, I use it frequently and it’s mostly stupid.
Very good organizational tool. Makes fantastic spreadsheets. I’d put it above Microsoft office for sure. It has some real practical applications. But I’m a bit perplexed that we are staking our global economy on something that really doesn’t seem up to the task.
Never trust the people who have a financial stake in how this plays out. They are liars trying to make their product sound like the second coming of Christ (or the anti-Christ. Strange choice they made there.)