To me it increasingly seems like there's no version of reality where doing anything will solve the problem, unless you're one of the special few people who can influence the world. The violence is a sign of that. Average people don't do things like these, but when they start feeling helpless, the most unstable people of that society that don't have anything to lose will start acting more erratically. If there's no pressure relief, these actions propagate and will become more common and normalized. This is driven by desperation, not strategically weighing the pros and cons and what impact it'll have on society or what have you.
We invented something called “democracy” to fix this, and then we allowed enough wealth to accumulate that the wealthy just bought it and nerfed it.
We went through a cycle like this once before in U.S. history, and the amount of violence it took to correct the overreach of organized money was not 0.
when government’s aren’t wealthy and investing heavily in the public private individuals are and that’s where inequality starts. the only way out of this is with enough taxation to level the playing field for the common man and to provide the government with the resources to lift the welfare of it’s citizens
Don't forget we created our own 'papal indulgence' system where if someone hides their morally bad actions/choices behind articles of incorporation/LCCs then somehow everything that person does is morally excused away by society and almost said to be an act of nature as if those people HAD to make those choices (because shareholder accountability or the market demands or whatever).
Shareholder accountability > societal accountability.
Accountability falling on a made up corporation > accountability falling to the humans that made the choices.
You can only get away with this structure up to a certain level of morally bankrupt behavior. But there can be a point where people refuse to defer to it as being legitimate.
I think the Sacklers and the opioid epidemic was the beginning of the end of legitimacy for this 'indulgences' system where the government wiped away/waves away horrific immoral behavior just because it was done under the government's papal indulgences system. You can literally ruin millions of lives, push thousands to hundreds of thousands of young girls/boys into prostitution, cause death and community destruction, and the consequences are mostly waived away because the Sacklers were protected by their papal indulgences.
Describing something does not equal condoning something. Whether GP is correct in assessment or no, they are describing a pattern they see, as an observer. I don't see a value judgment in their language unless I'm missing something.
Whether they are correct or not I'm not going to weigh in on, but I will make the claim that figuring out why something happens is the best way of preventing it from happening again.
This has been the historical cycle for as long as we have records of human history. Power begets power and greed. Eventually either everyone else reaches a breaking point and "eat the rich", or an external group takes advantage and eats everyone. Then we try again.
Agreed. Anyone who thinks democracy isn't punctuated by economically-redistributive violence hasn't been studying history.
Based in the simple fact that humans will not cede power/wealth willingly once they gain it.
Ergo, violence (either state or individual) to effect a new balance.
Which isn't to legitimize violence, but is to say that stripping away a population's ability to effect change by being violent, if enough of them choose, is more dystopian than some violence.
There are a LOT of stages between "resigning and doing nothing" and "deadly violence" that have some effect.
Demonstrations are a start, though they seem to be more useful for networking inside a group and forcing the press to pay attention to some matter. Decision makers can easily ignore them.
What's less easy to ignore are strikes, especially general strikes, as e.g. port workers in Italy threatened during the total blockade in the Gaza war.
Given what AI has always been about, since well before LLMs, go-slows and work-to-rules aren't going to help, they'll just speed up transitions to AI.
The disinvestment, boycotts, public shunning, adverse publicity, picketing, blockades, I can see those working. Certainly seems to have an impact in the video game news I see.
Those only work as long as legislators have shame, or there is a significant faction that can use the provided legitimacy to redistribute power away from the elites towards the people. That's not the case at a national level in the US right now.
This kind of sentiment, on its own, is hollow. Just more "violence bad", until the next round.
There is growing anger and discontentment in a large part of the population, driven by inequality of wealth and power. Hopelessness and a lack of control over the future.
Are the nodes of power willing to spread wealth and control more widely to stabilize the country? What are they willing to do to consolidate their power? The vast majority of violence is perpetrated by those nodes, to either consolidate power, or gain more of it.
Other people in this thread have already suggested more actionable responses: organize, unionize, understand class dynamics, and vote accordingly.
If you talk to the average individual outside of California or NYC about AI, or even Waymos, they will get increasingly irate and start spouting off about “water usage” and everyone’s jobs getting taken away—as if RLHF contract work is not available to basically anyone with a college degree. I hate to say it but you cannot trust “the masses,” Marx never said mob rule, he said rule by the proletarian, the class which knows, on account of their labor, the best integration of the human organism into mechanical production. No, there is no concern for the “masses” living in pre-industrialized agrarian communities or those who have been mystified by reactionary ideas (like this so-called majority), he was referring to those whose existence was an exception, that which was free and not predictable, contingent in the operation of the economy. It is by their exceptional circumstance that radical social change is even possible, not because of any moral need to raise humanity out of its savage condition. The masses, without the right understanding, will just become a lynch mob and start burning everything in sight, as they tend to in most circumstances.
The masses seem kind of right to be in that mindset, if you consider it from thier point of view for even one second?
So, yes RLHF is available right now, for people with specific backgrounds. That RLHF work is temporary and it's going to make hundreds of thousands of people redundant. The RLHF work is actually job-negative, it is work which will later deprive others of a way to make a living.
Once that training work dries up, what happens to the people who were doing the job which AI now does? How do they pay rent? How do they feed and clothe themselves? What answers do any AI proponant actually have for this, or is the intention that every person shuts the critical thinking part of their brain off and trusts the computer will come up with something?
Yes well you are trusting your instinct, meanwhile the actual postings for RLHF work keep increasing, and the rates contractors accept keep going up. But who knows, maybe some superAI is going to take all their jobs away soon.
> and everyone’s jobs getting taken away—as if RLHF contract work is not available to basically anyone with a college degree.
Huh? The jobs aren't going away because a few people can get temp work as traitors to automate away the jobs of their fellows? I suppose that's technically correct (e.g. the there-exists counterexample to a for-all statement), but it totally misses the point.
> The masses, without the right understanding, will just become a lynch mob and start burning everything in sight, as they tend to in most circumstances.
BTW, totally fine. If you like nice things and have political or economic power, it's totally on you to prevent things from getting bad enough that people want to do that. That's something libertarians would do well to remember. Propaganda only gets you so far.
All productive labor, profitable labor, involves creating something that reduces labor time. The people who manufactured looms took away the jobs of the weavers
Ah, the real Marxist constant finally rears its head. Thank you for so well demonstrating the primitive contempt for humanity which your ideology requires. What a shame none of you has actually read or studied any of that "theory" you prate about.
That title reeks of the paper equivalent of clickbait. The paper is about subjective well-being and mental health in the psychological sense. Broader well-being includes material conditions like income, housing, health care, safety, and social connections. So a null result on subjective well-being is not necessarily a null result on material welfare, and the problems that leads to. The paper’s own abstract also talks about context effects rather than a simple universal null.
Unions are not perfect, but they have been an important check on exploitation. Organized labor helped win the 40-hour workweek. If you demand perfect solutions, you end up doing nothing. And given that you're up against people with nearly unlimited resources, you can't afford to be picky.
I very much agree with you, but also consider that there has not been a single instance (I can think of) that violence was able to stop the spread of a new technology. The human race is just a moth to the flame, and it simply cannot resist.
Obligatory 'war is a continuation of politics by other means' Clausewitz -- the act of forcibly compelling others to adopt ones position doesn't have an inherent 'acceptable vs not-acceptable' line in method, other than that which we socially layer on top.
It goes both ways. Afrika Had eight military coups since 2020. Many of its countries are plagued by civil wars and terrorism.
I'm not arguing any points how these conflicts will ever be solved, but it shows that violence hasn't solved anything until now, for decades over decades.
The type of person who posts here is unlikely to be the type of criminal that does that sort of thing. The virtue signaling is well-noted - good to have good citizens on here with strongly-worded top posts that get upvoted to the top.
I'm just waiting for dang, et. al to fix our thread voting system as it's a little too Reddity around here these last days.
I love when the comments start out a little spicy, all the spicy comments get flagged or removed, and the top comment becomes "wow, I can't believe all these spicy comments, I thought HN was better than this."
While I 100% do not support violence against Sam Altman, or anyone else for that matter, what are people without billions of dollars and without the ear of the president supposed to do to affect change in this modern, post-capitalist hellscape? And I am genuinely interested in ideas that people think will work, not just trying to be combative.
> what are people without billions of dollars and without the ear of the president supposed to do to affect change in this modern, post-capitalist hellscape?
The honest truth? They're supposed to do nothing and take their licks with a smile. If that's not good enough for them, they are allowed to occupy themselves with ineffectual political activities, preferably on issues that are exhausting and do not disturb the power of the elite (e.g. abortion, transgenderism, etc.).
The people saying it doesn’t work are the same people who can’t must the effort to even contact their representative.
I had a professor in college who was big on entrepreneurship. So he formed an organization, got others involved, went to Washington to lobby his rep. His rep said “let’s do it”, and sat him down with her staff to write a bill. That bill was brought to the floor for a vote and passed.
Until you’ve done that, dont complain the system doesn’t work.
The issue with politics today is the level of engagement of the average voter. Few people ever get involved, so the vacuum gets filled with whichever power-hungry mediocre person who puts some effort in.
I have worked on electoral and initiative campaigns, and traveled thousands of miles to knock on doors. I’ve donated money. I’ve called my congresspeople. I’ve gone to and spoken at public meetings. I’ve protested, been tear gassed, beaten, and thrown in jail. I’ve been doing all of this continuously for about 20 years. I can tell you, from extensive experience going through the official channels, that the formal mechanisms of our democracy are fundamentally broken. We need to seriously face this problem and fix it, or things are just going to keep getting worse.
Yeah, America as a whole voted for Trump, and later atleast reading online I am seeing people be like: "I didn't know he was this bad" when reading his policies, he was exactly this bad :-/
People don't vote for their own gains but rather the gains of the few and to be honest, one can argue that within America this is a both-party problem and sometimes you are just picking for the less wrong politician and then you have these biases which blind them.
if this is the case, I have seen American people online say that "But, people know that the American govt and american people are different"
It is almost as if people are saying whatever is convenient at the time. This can only be one or the other.
If the average American's intent is of the system which is current administration, then forget about the trust within the system. I find your position with a bit of irony.
The system isn't working and that's a fact. You can say that people are to be blamed for that, sure, but then the people will be blamed entirely.
To be honest, The americans I sometimes talk online to don't share this ideal of the govt. and are fighting against it in some way or another but they are tired and hopeless, for the most part. I really take a deeper offense to your statement as that makes all the problems persist longer and thus to many people who have nothing to lose, violence feels like the only option which might be what GP might be referring to.
Either America needs to fix itself or violence will keep on happening. To be honest, I am not that much hopeful that America can fix itself though in the sense that the corporate influence is so immense with the two party system and the trust is still lost in some ways in America and times in future are gonna be even more harder yet America is completely polarized. These problems are also existing in other countries to be honest but America is at another magnitude and at these levels of inequality, violence to many people feel like the only way to share their voice which has been suppressed by the system for far too long. From my time reading history, this is a very repeating phenomenon and in a sense, history is messy but when people got really pissed at the system failing, mass scale revolt and violence was always picked as the last resort and we are in those times now.
I feel like we can either condemn or do anything as a society but if people (and humans just like you and me actually) get so frustrated within the system that violence seems like an good choice, then that is upon the fault of the system and I feel like the condemnation of act just does nothing in the long grand scheme of things.
TLDR: People should really act together to solve these things peacefully but its very far from happening in reality and reality is messy and always has been in some regards, we just read it from the line of statistics and history.
Yes many people couldn't vote (say youngsters) and many people didn't vote on the election day and from that sample who could and did vote did Trump win and within the election itself Democrats had gotten 75 million people.
In a similar fashion, my point is, I actually agree with you sir @mbgerring and your original comment. you tried your best to raise awareness and there are people who do the same and there are many who reach the support of millions but still no change is enacted because of the way system is enacted.
Yet the system can make someone like trump with maybe even sometimes far fewer people supporting it and billionaire's capital flowing into propaganda etc. too thus the people saying "we didn't vote for this"
My point was that the system is ultimately rigged by some people at the top against the average person and @refurb saying to you that oh this is then what the people must want, is a factually wrong statement.
I think you yourself have put it right: "We need to seriously face this problem and fix it, or things are just going to keep getting worse."
And I also agree with your overall statement that if the system continues on being as hopeless as it is, then for some people violence would become the only option for their voices as their voices get shutted from every peaceful way.
Because so many people are being ground down. You have time to organize something, instead of making rent? Well now you have to fight to even get your voting rights back, that you were silently stripped off because of your skin color and demographic, or social status. Then you need to see if you can ever get the gerrymandered border back to where it should be so the other party will ever have a chance at winning in your area, instead of losing by default. Pretty sure the next election is only about two swing-states again.
This system totally works so long as you can take time off work to form a lobbying group -- this does not pass the sniff test to me.
Reminder that even in the scenario that constituents 100% support or 100% reject a policy, their opinions hold almost no statistical sway to their elected representative. It's actually worse than a coin flip.
It's only when you restrict your constituent demographic to just those in the top 10% of wealth (...like a professor in college for example...) that suddenly their voting decisions align to constituent opinions.
Look up "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens", this has been known for some time.
> I had a professor in college who was big on entrepreneurship. So he formed an organization, got others involved, went to Washington to lobby his rep. His rep said “let’s do it”, and sat him down with her staff to write a bill. That bill was brought to the floor for a vote and passed. Until you’ve done that, dont complain the system doesn’t work
This is a sign of the system not working. A well connected professor, with plenty of free time to form an organization and go to Washington to talk to his rep
Might as well be an industry lobbyist.
Could a worker from Walmart do the same thing? In theory sure. In practice unlikely, for any number of reasons. Not least because people are unlikely to take a Wal Mart worker seriously enough to join their organization.
> Nothing stops the average citizen from organizing and getting similar access to representatives
I disagree pretty strongly. There are tons of soft power social levers and bureaucratic structures designed exactly to prevent your average Joe from getting access to representatives
Even a comparatively powerful person like a wealthy CEO of a big company often experiences friction trying to get access to public servants. That's why they hire lobbyists whose job it is to get past the friction
> what are people without billions of dollars and without the ear of the president supposed to do to affect change in this modern, post-capitalist hellscape?
California has a referendum system. Get signatures for a policy and put it to the voters.
They absolutely do. On September 12, 2001, ~nobody in the United States was interested in starting a war with Iraq.
Two years of propaganda later, and all of a sudden, half the population had acquired keen geopolitical insights which necessitated an invasion and occupation of a country that had exactly fuck-all to do with 9/11.
A decade later, all of a sudden, nobody wanted to fess up to wanting anything to do with that mess.
Public wants aren't discovered in some interference-free democratic vacuum. The people who own the press put a millstone on their side of the scales.
> Two years of propaganda later, and all of a sudden, half the population had acquired keen geopolitical insights which necessitated an invasion and occupation of a country that had exactly fuck-all to do with 9/11
There was desire for vengeance on 12 September. Reporting and politicians channeled it. That’s very different from driving consensus against something people would otherwise support.
You're proving my point. The thumb was put on the scale, he public was bombarded 24/7 with self-serving false dichotomies and viola, you've just manufactured mass public support for insane bullshit.
It works the same way in other countries too. Look at any country that you believe to believe in insane shit - most of those beliefs aren't organic.
Neither are the insane things you believe in. It's just that you can't even see that they aren't the product of your own reasoning. Fish don't have a word for water.
> You're proving my point. The thumb was put on the scale, he public was bombarded 24/7 with self-serving false dichotomies and viola, you've just manufactured mass public support for insane bullshit.
See also Covid-19. Same shit only waaaaaaay more batshit insane and waaaaaaaay more crazy 24-7 fear mongering.
They're just speaking to a hypothetical person who thinks this will solve a problem. In no way does their post imply they'd be ok with it if it solved some problem.
A little wild to me that so many of the replies don't understand that.
No no i do get that of course, and i agree. Its just that the thing that struck me about the phrasing was that its a bit revealing. We are reviled by violance but we do allow its use in society everyday. But what violance and for what utility is acceptable seems to be a matter of debate. The line doesnt seem to be universally agreed on given the passion seen in this thread
> If it did solve a problem, it's possible it would be legal.
FL crafted a law to help safeguard someone who gets sued for running over a protestor. I think this illustrates how a law can protect problems rather than solving them.
>> FL crafted a law to help safeguard someone who gets sued for running over a protestor
> Source?
the defendant in the lawsuit can use the plaintiff’s participation
in a "riot," as defined by the 2021 law, as "an affirmative defense."
This means that the person being sued can argue in court that their
action was justified by the riot.
Why not? There are only two redresses against elites who don't abide by a social contract: the law & courts, and physical violence. The courts are much preferable, but legislators now serve those elites rather than the public, and the courts are impotent or unwilling to use what power remains with them. What's left but physical violence to either dissuade or punish?
The specific stigma against physical violence (and not against other types, even for cumulatively worse actions) strikes me as very self-serving, an instance of "the law forbids both rich and poor to sleep under a bridge." It's increasingly the only remedy available to everyday people, and the mad acceleration of government capture by elites in the last decade is making murder and rioting inevitable, at least as long as ordinary people still feel they should have some power.
Any sort of violence is bad, singling out physical violence as uniquely bad gives misbehaving elites impunity.
Yes, and in addition to this, we see examples daily of violence being inflicted on the poor by the rich, both literally (ICE, police militarization, harsh prison conditions, poor oversight of prisons) and figuratively (reduced social safety net, threat of ruin and bankruptcy due to medical debt, thread of lost jobs and corresponding loss of safety, a lack of consequences for criminal behavior directly correlated to wealth).
I often can't help but see the "all violence is bad" narrative as another tool of oppression by the ruling class. Even if that isn't its intent, it certainly seems to serve their purposes.
In the United States, not having a job for the short term means you lose your healthcare, for the medium term means you're living out of your car, and for the long term means you're out on the street, incarcerated, or dead. AI executives talk to the public like "investors are pouring billions into my new invention, the Job Killer 9000. Sure millions of people are going to get laid off and over time it'll force the price of wage work closer and closer to zero, but that's just the price of progress!" That in itself is inherently a violent threat. I am not surprised that some people are responding to it with violence.
Similarly, as one meme puts it "Unions were the answer to violence" but now they've been ground into dust we have people torching warehouses instead, saying "All you had to do was pay us enough to live"
Because people might have missed it last thread, here's dang's response to the discourse:
> I don't think I've ever seen a thread this bad on Hacker News. The number of commenters justifying violence, or saying they "don't condone violence" and then doing exactly that, is sickening and makes me want to find something else to do with my life—something as far away from this as I can get. I feel ashamed of this community.
> Edit: for anyone wondering (or hoping), no I'm not leaving. That was a momentary expression of dismay.
I recently saw a lecture by neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky [1] which discussed the complexities of human violence. We both condone and don't condone violence all the time, depending on social context. And furthers, our ways of expressing violence are varied (even down to tiny things like the silent treatment). We (along with other animals) have always used aggression to enforce social order and obtain social benefit.
Perhaps something to think about in a scenario like this. Personally I think it's interesting that some people are so quick to condone aggressive attacks on powerful people, yet have no comment on those powerful people committing lower levels of violence against the masses. It's all social context.
I believe that unique community of HN consist mostly of individuals that weren't able to fully understand those elements of human nature as elementary (and sometimes high-school) schoolers. I stand as one example of such person, it took me about 30 years before I understood that I lacked such innate understanding at school.
> Perhaps something to think about in a scenario like this. Personally I think it's interesting that some people are so quick to condone aggressive attacks on powerful people, yet have no comment on those powerful people committing lower levels of violence against the masses. It's all social context.
Can I just say that out of all of this discourse happening, this might be the most insightful yet succint position to explain my stance on all of this especially the "its all social context." line.
I feel like many of us here might share an answer publicly but I have always believed that if I am in the shoes of someone else, I might act the way they do so in a sense I understand the human part of it. A human did the violence and why. I understand that. Now we can call this violence inhuman, sure, but this action is still done by human and for many reasons. And I also understand why people condemn these actions, we wish to live in a clean and structural world and then we see the messiness of the world.
I just feel like just condemning an action would do nothing unless we change the ground conditions but that isn't in the hands of even many of us Hackernews users and this is basically a class aspect to it.
I personally feel like there are some similarities to this incident to the Trolley problem actually. Vsauce did a video about it worth watching[0]
How is a person from a nation that the US President has threatened to annex or invade supposed to feel about seeing domestic violence in the United States? From their perspective a divided United States is less of a personal threat to them.
All this talk about how 'we can't have this in a democracy!' forgets that many of us don't live in that particular democracy, and that particular democracy is threatening other democracies.
What should my response be if a North Korean General is executed? Or if a Russian oligarch 'falls out a window'? Or a corrupt Mexican politician is beheaded by a rival cartel?
These American oligarchs aren't my countrymen, They don't have my best interests in mind, they fund the people who threaten my country, and now they provide the American military with technology that it can use to attack my country.
Their lobbying and campaign contributes have resulted in a Mad King waging an unwinnable war that has severely damaged the global economy and has made my life demonstrably worse. I have never done anything to these people and yet they callously did this to all of us for personal profit well beyond what any human being could never need in a thousand life times.
At the end of the day the less cohesive the American tribe is the better off my tribe is. I wish our incentives were aligned but they just aren't and I am not in any way responsible for that.
It is fascinating to me that this was the thing that dang thinks is the most violent in the forum's history.
Not people advocating for hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths from covid. Not people advocating for bombing campaigns blowing children to smithereens. Not people advocating for mass cuts to programs treating people with tuberculosis. Not people advocating for mass cuts to programs feeding the starving. Not people defending ICE in murdering people either via gunshot or medical neglect in their disgusting prisons.
In fact, a lot discussion critical of that stuff just gets [flagged].
None of that counts as violence to dang. But threaten a billionaire? Oh that's a bridge too far.
This is obviously true, but you're just inviting the rebuttals. Arguments that civil violence is unproductive are boring and obvious. Normal people have been acculturated to understand the point already. The only way to have an "interesting" conversation about this is to take the other side.
All of those arguments will be vile, as they have to be given the context.
I'm not criticizing you, and I guess I'm glad someone wrote this comment quickly. You're right. But I would caution people against reading too much into the countervailing sentiment here. It's not trolling, but it is something adjacent to it.
Except they only won because UK was too busy spending money on a way to stop the French.
Like 1812 when the Brits weren't busy with the French they easily came in and burnt the US capital as punishment for burning the Canadian one. It's not that the British army suddenly got a lot stronger; they just weren't busy fighting on two continents.
That said, civil disobedience is largely pointless. We're in a capitalistic society so money is the name of the game. Rosa Parks did shit-all; it was the boycott of the bus system for 9 months that made the buses cave.
There is a super interesting and complicated discussion to have about the pragmatics and morality of concerted military action versus stochastic civil violence. Unfortunately, thread conditions on HN aren't conducive to it; the discussion will instantly devolve (via people joining in) to valence arguments about the cause of this or that campaign of violence. I genuinely think you'd need a moderation regime designed from the ground up to support a productive conversation about this topic, which, for good reasons, HN doesn't provide.
Honestly, it's not really that complicated. Americans (at least Pennsylvanians) born before, say 2000 were explicitly taught that violence is ok if it's against tyranny. Apparently, they stopped teaching that after 2010, so we're now in a post-natural-rights era.
While I typically avoid touching non-technical topics, I have the opportunity to chime in as another PA highschooler from the 90's, we absolutely were taught that, down to details in AP courses such as the impact of individuals like John Brown. While I'm not sure I'd have worded it precisely like the parent, the concept of "the four boxes of liberty" and the progression thereof was certainly understood and conveyed. (There was substantial study of the labor rights movements and conflicts/resistance therein as well)
I went to Jesuit high school in Chicago in the early 1990s. There's a lot more to say about all of this stuff and nothing wrong with what you just said, but to hash it out any further, we'd have to attempt a philosophical discussion about violence in a forum that (unavoidably, and to the consternation of its moderators) has reward circuits wired around hyping up action.
You've basically just said anyone who doesn't hold the "approved" opinion is wrong and then you called them names. But you wrapped it in extra words so that it's less flagrant.
Did you ever think that maybe people do in fact believe what they say they believe?
Everybody who believes civil violence is a productive solution to any problems we have in 2026 is wrong. I don't see myself as having called anyone names; rather, I said that the point was so banal that the only conversation you're likely to see is from people who get dopamine hits from taking the edgy other side of the argument.
> Everybody who believes civil violence is a productive solution to any problems we have in 2026 is wrong
I'd love your thoughts on the violence people committed during the following civil uprising: BLM riots, Minneapolis ICE (there are many more instances through history but Ive selected the most recent ones for simplicity).
Where you condemning the actions of people in those threads, encouraging them to have more civil "discussion" or do you think it was the duty of people to take arms against injustice?
If so, how do you corroborate the justification of violence with your current stance?
The violence during the BLM riots was awful. I live adjacent (across the street, at the time) from the Austin neighborhood on the west side of Chicago, and those riots trashed all the grocery stores on the west side, already a food desert. One grocer I know slept on the floor of his store with a shotgun in his hands. I got to watch video footage of another retailer elsewhere beaten in his store in the middle of the night.
The idea that people think that the BLM riots are somehow a mic drop argument for the effectiveness of civil violence is just further illustration of how far apart our premises are.
>Everybody who believes civil violence is a productive solution to any problems we have in 2026 is wrong.
Hilarious joke, Mr. Fukuyama. You have masked goons running around, detaining and even killing people without probable cause. If the results of the 2026 midterms are not to the liking of the current POTUS, it isn't unthinkable that he would try to overturn them, even by force. Would you be hand-wringing on HN about how violence is always bad, then?
But I digress. Firebombing Sam Altman is very bad; there is a multitude of good points against it, from the moral to the pragmatic. "Violence is fundamentally evil" is just a lazy and evidently false argument that does you a disservice.
> Hilarious joke, Mr. Fukuyama. You have masked goons running around, detaining and even killing people without probable cause. If the results of the 2026 midterms are not to the liking of the current POTUS, it isn't unthinkable that he would try to overturn them, even by force. Would you be hand-wringing on HN about how violence is always bad, then?
Also the official opposition is actually not really interested in representing many discontented people. It sticks to loser issues at are alienating to many except activist base (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/16/opinion/democrats-senate-...), and seems totally fine with not being competitive in many elections. And it continues to be that way in the dire political environment you describe.
You said they were "abnormal" and "trolls" but you dressed it up in the sort of snooty language that HN expects you to dress it up in.
Civil violence is the backstop of literally every societal system. While it would be better if the systems work, civil violence is what happens if they don't and tends to increase until they do.
I'm walking away because there's nothing more to be said. The idea that there has to be a last word in all these threads that satisfies everybody, including random people who weren't even participating, is part of what makes these threads so awful. I'm not going to keep a slapfight going just to entertain you. Deal with it.
In Sam Altman's case that is true. He is just one frontman for and beneficiary of a giant technological revolution that is almost inevitably happening whether anyone wants it to or not, since it is pushed forward by pure Darwinian logic: all key world actors feel compelled to develop AI, since they know that if they don't they will be outcompeted by others who do develop AI. Altman's death would change nothing about that fundamental calculus. You'd have to kill probably tens of thousands of people to really put a dent in AI development, and even then it would probably just be temporarily delayed.
In general, violence can certainly solve problems, especially when the problems are not being caused by almost-inevitable technological revolutions. One of the issues to keep in mind, though, is that it often also creates new ones, often surprising ones. For example, the assassination that led to World War One. For another example, if Trump had been assassinated last year, that would have solved many problems for people who dislike Trump. However, that doesn't necessarily mean it would have made the world overall a better place - that is almost impossible to predict. Hence the sci-fi sort of scenario of "you go back in time and kill Hitler, but when you return to your own time it turns out that Hitler dying just let mega-Hitler take power".
>Altman's death would change nothing about that fundamental calculus. You'd have to kill probably tens of thousands of people to really put a dent in AI development
Your analysis seems to assume that people will remain more afraid of being "outcompeted" than of being murdered, even after a campaign of terrorism that would make 9/11 look minor.
>it often also creates new [problems], often surprising ones
Let's reframe this to remove the negative bias: murder has the obvious direct first-order effect of removing the target from existence, but also a host of non-obvious higher-order effects resulting from people's response to that violence. These can be counterproductive to the goals of the murderer, but they can also work in favor of it. That is why "terrorism" is a real thing - the higher-order effects are essentially a force multiplier, and if you have nothing to lose then the calculus of causing a major disruption begins to look favorable; any disruption, because regression to the mean is good if you're at the shitty end of the bell curve.
>Your analysis seems to assume that people will remain more afraid of being "outcompeted" than of being murdered, even after a campaign of terrorism that would make 9/11 look minor.
AI is such an important technology that in the face of such a campaign of terrorism, governments would bring the development of the technology directly under the protection of the state security forces, largely outside the reach of terrorists. If not in the US, then in China or other places. At that point the terrorists would have to attain a level of power where they could feasibly overthrow the government in order to stop the development of the technology. Now, some scientists would be uncomfortable in such conditions and would stop working on the technology, but enough would remain that the technology would continue to progress, albeit more slowly.
>and if you have nothing to lose then the calculus of causing a major disruption begins to look favorable; any disruption, because regression to the mean is good if you're at the shitty end of the bell curve.
Very true, if the status quo feels shitty enough one becomes extremely willing to just roll the dice.
> Hence the sci-fi sort of scenario of "you go back in time and kill Hitler, but when you return to your own time it turns out that Hitler dying just let mega-Hitler take power".
Sure, but keep in mind that Hitler is already pretty bad. So while yes, killing him might open the door to someone worse stepping in, it may also open the door to someone more level headed.
The people who are doing this stuff are unhinged but why? Perhaps they do not trust law and order. Perhaps they feel helpless and have been led to believe its over for the labour class due to the overhyped marketing and so on.
A serious frank conversation needs to be had and the hyping needs to stop.
I think it's entirely fair for the average american to no longer trust the courts to provide justice against the rich, given your current political environment.
Or, if you truly believed AI was a threat and represented material harm and managed to get standing to bring a suit, you are looking at years and years and years of litigation.
Before passing judgment consider that while you may have the privilege of posting from a country that's never had to fight for relief from tyranny, that's not necessarily the case for others.
Totally agree. I’m speaking to cases in America. If you’re in a rich country broadly at peace with competitive elections to any degree, and you’re choosing violence, you should vacation to e.g. Burma or Sudan or Libya or Ethiopia and see the cost of the violence you’re glorifying.
Since your point seems to be that not all the founding fathers parent was referring to were actually slave owners do you have a claim for a rough ratio? I think that would be interesting and would be a more informative thing regardless of where on the scale it lands from "everybody but Adams" all the way up to "only a big names like Washington, Jefferson".
To a first order approximation half the founders were from New England (no slavery) and the other half were from Virginia (no realistic chance of being important/rich enough to be a signatory without owning slaves). So call it 50-50
>People who shoot someone or throw bombs at someone even though that someone never did something against them
I think the point is that there's going to be an increasingly large percentage of the populace who think that the AI bosses / billionaire class did indeed do something against them.
This has always been the case, hasn't it? There have always been groups of people who perceive technology change as a negative, or they are in fact negatively impacted.
But they didn't ask the rest of us if we're ok for them to murder someone on our behalf.
Personally I hope that AI will be a step change for the positive. I think it is inevitable that it will progress form here, in the darwinian sense, that someone else on this thread mentioned.
With that in mind, we should all be pushing for it to be used to our benefit, rather than detriment. And like almost all technological advances in the past, I think this can happen.
So if people are saying violence against Sam Altman is expected, then they're also saying violence against me is expected, because I am hopeful and vaguely supportive of the technology. That's quite scary.
> <...> even though that someone never did something against them, <...>
Many tech billionaires openly, publicly and loudly said something among the lines: "I/we/my company/tech-bros are building torment nexus - it will take your job and/or kill people and/or shut up political opponents. You are powerless to stop this."
There are some of those billionaires willing to put their name and face in front of billions of people in the world. You will have no trouble finding people that will think that X or Y tech bro is personally responsible for some poor persons problems.
Especially when there's a bunch of news like "layoffs due to AI", "record investments due to AI", etc.
I am not supporting violence, never done it and never considered it. Though not surprising when talking heads of political/economical extremes can get threats from people that have nothing to lose.
> There isnt a well known CEO in europe whos been the target of a failed stabbing
Sure. Figurative language will be figurative. There have been tons of assasinations in the last 10 years of police chiefs, politicians, journalists and an MP.
If we’re being pedantic, there isn’t technically a CEO in America who’s been killed. Mangione potted a middle manager with a CEO title. The billionaires who own the company are fine, as is the group CEO, and none of them materially changed any policies as a result of his death.
"The other side are where all of the bad guys and crazy violent lunatics are. The side I align with is the only sensible one; we would never do anything like that."
This sort of thinking causes extremism and division. It only perpetuates more of the thing you don't want!
It's also empirically not true: there are crazy people on both sides, but most people are pretty reasonable. If you treat them as if they are, despite your differences, they won't feel so alienated and perhaps you can both have a productive conversation. Both sides views are then likely to soften, and you can maybe even start working together.
This is about propaganda regimes, as much as about whataboutisms. Both sides paint the other as violent. Which is more believable. Sad as though the answer may be.
Nope. Both sides are not equivalent. The political right, in the U.S., has been significantly more violent than the political left for quite some time. And it’s not even close. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9335287/
I encourage anyone reading to look at the charts. There’s a single clearly anomalous data point with significantly reduced violence for “right terrorists” and significantly high number for “left” in 2025. It is the only year in any chart where left violence exceeds (or even comes near to) right.
It’d be extremely silly to infer some trend from this one anomaly.
Does it really matter who is more violent? The fact of the matter is both sides do have a nonzero amount of crazy/violent people and both sides could treat the other with more respect instead of furthering division.
You will notice I never said that both sides have the same amount of violence (since I don't think that that's actually relevant), so you are responding to a point I never made to begin with.
Vending machines and guns both kill people, so we should expend equal effort addressing the problems with both. Do I have that right?
This obsession with just pretending the two sides are mirror images, who simply need respect each other more is just lazy thinking. Interrogate what the contemporary American right values and believes. It is deep seated resentment (urban elites!), hate (owning the libs), bigotry (mass deportations now!), all wrapped up in a victimhood (white replacement theory) / inferiority complex. It should surprise exactly no one that the statistics are what they are.
The left’s biggest problem is people find them annoying for suggesting others could be more empathetic or do better at being inclusive. These two camps are just nowhere near comparable.
To address an issue, you first must understand it. I very much believe what the right values informs why they’re violent. These values and beliefs need to be shamed into oblivion. Diversity is a strength! Expertise is valuable! People should have freedom to live their lives so long as they don’t harm others! People who believe otherwise should tremble with embarrassment to say so.
Well, I guess you'll always live in a land of division and spite, always angry yourself, and the "others" always angry back at you, squabbling forever while things slowly get worse. I hope you enjoy the bed you've made for yourself.
Is this why shop owners board their windows and doors up every time there’s an [insert left wing cause] protest in their area? I haven’t kept up but was Charlie Kirk’s assassin a left or right winger, or one of those horseshoe fellas.
I’m one of the types who can parse observable reality and notice that businesses don’t board up when democrats win elections. They do it when the other guy wins. The claim that the “right wing”, such as it exists as a cohesive entity, is uniquely responsible for political violence today is an absurd claim on its face because I could look out my window on my commute and simply notice who was doing the violence. Or, in the case of Charlie Kirk, who was doing the assassinating.
The left right spectrum refers to representation in legislatures, a physical seating chart if you will, even in the US Electoral College. There is a reason to keep some people more physically separated, learned over time by civil institutions. These organizations, that exist in a left-right spectrum context, are the rulers, decisively in republics. Independently and regardless of where the electors or anyone else are. There is always a left-right spectrum even if not party-based.
But ultimately that is what you get for fucking with the people for too long and assuming wealth/status/power is an armor. Source: the French revolution
1. Violent attacks against AI CEOs, researchers, and engineers is going to begin. This is due to widespread negative press that AI receives and as well as a pervasive feeling of economic uncertainty and doom in the population. Some of this being caused by the current administration's leadership, but much of it attributed to AI taking jobs and destroying opportunity.
2. Violent acts taken against non-tech CEOs will increase hand-in-hand.
3. If AI continues to demonstrate impressive new capabilities for automation, this rate will increase substantially.
4. The government may come down hard on these individuals, which will further inflame the situation.
5. Data centers will come under attack / sabotage.
6. This will all wind up further inflamed by prediction markets.
I have a colleague at Anthropic that refuses to put it on his LinkedIn. We all now know why.
If violent attacks start metastasizing, it legitimately justifies a police crackdown. Most of the population will be for that.
The pro-Palestinian activists set their cause back a year by overplaying their hands in Columbia at the start of the war. If we want to ensure zero AI legislation for the next 2 years, I couldn’t think of a better way to ensure that than to start potting randos in the streets.
It depends on what kind of violent attacks they are exactly. I believe that most of the population would either not care about people of the Altman and Zuckerberg wealth level getting killed or would be happy about it.
I think the general population is much more likely to feel joy about it than want a police crackdown.
If we're talking about attacks against average software engineers and obscure founders, fewer people would be happy about it, but a great number still would be. There is a lot of envy toward software engineers and founders.
I doubt it. It would further polarize your population and what you really want is to unite them. You could make a video documentation that contrasts all the known, massive corruption cases in your administration (and SV personae) with the equally massive decay in your infrastructure from roads to bridges to the closure of maternity wings in hospitals because they are no longer profitable. Make as little dialogue/narration as possible and quote dollar numbers as often as possible. Spread posts contrasting corruption/decay to every outlet/social media.
Most people don't understand technology and/or its second order effects. They do understand when they are being stolen from.
Overplaying their hands? They broke a few windows and were in a place they weren't allowed to be in. How horrible.
Doesn't complaining about protestors at Columbia just make it clear that these complaints aren't actually about violence but are instead about rabble-rousers?
> They broke a few windows and were in a place they weren't allowed to be in. How horrible
I was in New York during that time. They turned an entire swath of the city into a police zone. The dominant narrative was sympathy for the cause increasingly giving way to frustration to the destruction.
Potato potato. It’s a predictable, even necessary, response to occupying a building. Same as increasing police present if vigilante violence ramps up somewhere.
People who don’t understand that will keep trashing the causes they purport to represent.
"People do nonviolent thing which produces a violent police response so we can criticize them for being violent through their indirect cause of police violence" is wild to me.
It seems so clear that this is not about violence but instead about people who don't know their place.
Most of the population will be for the violent attacks. Techbros went way too far in gleefully describing how they would destroy most people's careers while enriching themselves. Never bothered to think whether they should just because they could. Now the rooster is coming home to roost.
The best way for the attacks on AI executives to stop is to pass meaningful legislation that limits the use and scope of AI.
> the sentiment for many is that 'we don't care we have nothing to lose anyway'
Everyone says this before they learn what they didn’t value. Peace, for example.
> Its easy for you to say, all perched up as a VC
It’s easy to say for anyone who has read the history of political violence. When that comes on the table, universally [1], the people with power also have the power to raise armies. The people who stand to benefit from violent insurrection, today, are the oligarchs.
This happens every time because it’s obvious. If CEOs getting killed is normal, then activists against those companies getting killed is normal too. A lot more people will kill for a million dollars than because they hate some guy.
[1] Apart from early 20th century Communist revolutions, where elites actually suffered.
Here in Sweden, political violence by the farmer class ensured that by the end of the pre-democracy era, self-owning farmers held 50% of the land, whereas in Denmark, it was only 10%.
This was due to violence, serious, organized war-like violence; and yes, of course the government brought in mercenaries, noble forces, etc. but fighting the farmer class had a substantial cost, and that they were willing to impose that cost gave them better conditions.
Killing guys at the bottom is very different from killing somebody at the top. If people are killing activists, journalists etc. that is always oppression. If people are killing people at the top it can be either way, depending on whether they are put there by some large grass-roots phenomenon or are trying to run society from the top of a pyramid, but in your argument you are placing these things as equal, you say:
>If CEOs getting killed is normal, then activists against those companies getting killed is normal too
and this is false. It is so false I don't quite understand how anyone can write it.
Yes, but that later stuff can't happen without destabilization, and that's what this kind of thing does.
>It’s deeply precedented.
Ah, we are confused about what we mean. You mean that workers, activists etc. will be killed. I mean that their killing is oppression, whereas the killing of non-grassroots supported people at the top of power pyramids, isn't.
But that isn't the point: you are in fact right, I am right too, but the thing I want to say is: the oppression of workers, activists, journalists etc. that might be triggered by the destabilizing violence is necessary in order to get the reaction.
When a person who understands destabilization does it, he of course wants to trigger this oppression, and for that oppression to trigger the organized war-like stuff.
If CEOs getting killed is normal, then activists against those companies getting killed is normal too. A lot more people will kill for a million dollars than because they hate some guy.
The more likely result is either that every member of the board and c-suite ends up on death row, or in a grave. There are far more people willing to avenge loved ones than there are people willing to kill for money.
How should people who live in allied countries that the US has recently threatened to economically annex or invade feel about US military contractor oligarchs being attacked?
The way I see it, the pragmatic choice is to prefer to see Americans attack themselves because a divided America is less of a threat to my country.
Sometimes less civilized countries fall into civil war, sometimes they invade neighbours. If you're the neighbour which would you prefer?
Altman needs to sell off that house and move to an anonymized address. I don’t see these attacks letting up any time soon. Two targeted attacks in three days is nuts.
Having lived on military bases that is a false sense of security. That's one gate guard away from a problem. They make mistakes. There are far better options he can afford.
I am seeing information about the attacker that show he was being influenced by Rationalist thinkers - he posted about “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares.
This information of course might be false, so take the words below with a grain of salt. I might be completely wrong.
When an influential group in the Valley that has ties to many tech companies spends years speading rhetoric about “bombing data centers” or the title of the book above, I fear this kind of psychosis is inevitable. People in this thread are focusing on labour and AI issues as the motivation but I am afraid the problem might be closer to home.
Disclaimer: I am not American, just an outside observer.
Yudkowsky, like Altman, isn't a great public speaker*: too close to the in-group, not aware enough of how the words he uses are understood by people who don't already Get It. Ironically for AI safety, I think Yudkowsky and Altman are, if not on the same page, extending the metaphor they're on the same chapter.
Some random people with a gun and a Molotov aren't even the same (metaphorical) book.
* likely still better than me though, even on this specific measure. But even being the ten thousandth best speaker on the planet, out of 8 billion, leaves you at a huge disadvantage compared to the best.
> bombing data centers
At the risk of demonstrating the exact mistake I've just accused Yudkowsky and Altman of:
With B-52s, not as a DIY job with home-made Molotovs.
If you start with the claim "AI has the potential to cause as much harm as nuclear weapons", and "the USA already uses B-52s to enforce the non-proliferation treaty", this follows naturally.
If you're not willing to call on your representative to sign a binding international treaty to stop data centres that forcefully, talking about "stopping AI" or "pausing AI" seems hollow, because even if your government agrees to not build data centres near you as a result of low-grade domestic terrorism, in the absence of a credible threat to use a B-52 on someone else's sovereign territory there's nothing that you and your flaming rag in a bottle of petroleum distillate can do about them being built outside your country, in exactly the same way and for exactly the same reasons that German public opposition to nuclear weapons completely failed to influence North Korea.
if you just believe the title of that book, you can justify any action against the makers of AI. plot of so many sci-fi to send someone back in time to kill the creator of ai
The Zizians had only a tangential relationship to the people that believe that AI "progress" should be prohibited. They were banned from events run by the Berkeley rationalists well before they started killing people, and their ideological reasons they told each other to justify the killings were trans rights and farm-animal welfare, not to slow down AI "progress".
How many people believe continued AI "progress" would be so dangerous that it should be prohibited? 136,513 people signed a statement to that effect:
The name of the man that threw the Molotov cocktail is Daniel Alejandro Moreno-Gama, and "Daniel Moreno" is one of the signatures on the statement. I concede that his motivation almost certainly was to try to slow down AI "progress".
Here in Sweden, back in the 1400eds etc. the farmers often made war on the government whenever it did anything they didn't like. This had the long term consequence, that by the end of this era, self-owning farmers owned 50% of the land in Sweden, whereas in Denmark, which did not have this kind of violence, it was only 10%.
It's incredibly important to be feared and to engage in violence, so that you are in practice and can threaten your political opponents, and this remains true in a democracy.
It's important that powerful people know they can't trust that they will truly be protected by the laws if they do something which harms others-- that the veneer of civilization is thin and the masses dangerous. Otherwise you end up with very dangerous situations where people can get away with anything that's legal.
I believe it doesn't matter. You see, if you try applying this trick to different traits of a society, it would lead to conclusions like: it is impossible for us to build an environmentally conscious society because we come here by being environmentally unconscious. It is a historical determinism, and it just don't work. For example, Europe was mostly a constant war between states, but after WWII it managed to come to EU. No more wars between European countries. Or U.S. was a country of slavers and racists, and it managed to change itself. It is still not perfect, as I hear, but at least there are no more slavery or segregation, and racism is not accepted anymore.
The long gone history of a country is not a something that should be allowed to determine its modern narratives. You shouldn't forget your history, but there are limits you shouldn't cross. When I hear arguments going back for centuries, it is a red flag for me. It is most likely a propaganda.
Psychologists talk about two common failing of their clients. People often fixate over the past or they fixate over the future, while forgetting about the present. The healthy approach is to keep a good balance between the past, the future, and the present, with a strong accent on the present. The history determinism reminds me a lot of the over-fixation on the past, and propaganda actively tries to unsettle balances in people's minds and fixate them on anything but the present.
It feels like there’s a flaw in your argument somewhere. Your thesis is historical determinism doesn’t work and therefore using it as an argument for political violence is flawed. …But the fact remains that political violence does work and we expect it to work. For a current example, see the bombing of Iran to effect regime change.
Back to the argument that historical determinism is flawed…
I think it’s very reasonable to say that it happened in the past, therefore it probably will happen in the future. That’s the basis for pretty much any kind of prediction.
If you want to argue against historical determinism, you have to make the specific argument for why the current state is different enough that we can’t use the past to predict the future.
> it would lead to conclusions like: it is impossible for us to build an environmentally conscious society because we come here by being environmentally unconscious
No. My logic applied here would imply that environtal unconsciousness can produce results becuase we got here by being environmentally unconscious. And that is true, burning coal for energy, while unsustainable, does produce results. Youll get energy, on demand, in a controlled manner.
Now, we should be careful doing it, but if you go to an amazonian tribesperson and yell at them for burning wood for a fire, becaise solar panels exist, then thats doesnt make complete sense
Political violence is wielded against dissidents in the United States constantly. Another way to think of this is that a government that resorts to political violence against its own citizens is not a democracy.
Yes, exactly. One of the definitions of a State is that it's the organization holding the monopoly on legitimate use of violence.
When a State becomes undemocratic, it can more easily wield that violence against its own people. Part of the founding ideals of the US is the hope that the people would oust such a State, explicitly through the threat and application of violence if necessary, thus the second amendment.
Political violence created and has sustained democracy, democracy is what happens when the violence fails and violence is what happens when the democracy fails.
> Treating a rigged game as fair doesn't make it fair, it just makes you easier to beat
Not playing at all makes you easier to beat still. Anyone pining for civil war should vacation in a war zone first. It’s difficult to encapsulate the privilege of peace until it’s been lost.
I am a resident of the Twin Cities and I agree wholeheartedly with this perspective. I found reading the book Waging A Good War very educational about the deliberate, strategic use of nonviolence by the American Civil Rights Movement and its ultimate triumph as a means to win support and achieve social change. It was a clear and inspiring parallel for me during the worst times of this year so far.
That's the one! Space oat opera, I suppose I should have said.
Good grief, I wonder if it's held up. Oh, early Whedon, it's sure to have that "creepier than Tarantino" vibe at times, but maybe it'd be an interesting rewatch. Seeing a young Nathan Fillion is its own reward, certainly.
> Civil war or getting screwed by elites aren't the only two options. That's a false dichotomy
I completely agree. But political violence increasingly polarises the outcomes to those two. (The elites can buy gunmen faster than you or I can.)
California has a referendum system. Get an AI measure on the ballot. Companies that are doing the things Anthropic got fired for refusing to provide are banned from doing business in the State of California. (Or with the State. Find a balance that gets the votes.)
Something is fundamentally broken when the sitting president of the United States pardoned thousands convicted in a court of law of attempting to use violence to achieve political ends.
No wonder people are increasingly recognizing that democracy is now broken.
Violence against datacenters or AI company CEOs is very bad, they must be allowed to fail organically so that they don't have any excuse.
The last thing I want is for someone, in 2029, to say "but LLMs just weren't given a fair chance last time, we would have definitely reached AGI with more funding if it wasn't for [targeted attack]"
I've been seeing some version of "Sam Altman is the antichrist" on every platform in the last few weeks. I'm still trying to find concretely what makes this guy so bad compared to every executive out there. So far, all I could find is:
- OpenAI made a deal with the Pentagon (fair)
- OpenAI changed their business model from non-profit to for-profit (fair?)
- Sexual assault allegations by his sister. Sam Altman denies this and it's currently before a court.
- Overpromised AI to investors (everyone does this)
- Lobbying against regulations (I support)
- Some vague accusations of "being a liar" and a "sociopath" by his competitors Ilya Sutskever and Dario Amodei.
- He doesn't know how to code (lol)
Is there anything that I'm missing? Does he put ketchup on his pizza?
For me, he's an awful person for the smarminess in the pentagon deal (the DIC is too entwined with American industry to bemoan making any deal at all), the business model change, the behavior described in that recent article, the 180 on how he and OpenAI consider AI ethics, and the way he's gone about overpromising.
It'd be one thing if he was just promising more than he could actually deliver, but he went further, making promises of buying up unrealistically large chunks of the global RAM supply, causing everyone else to suffer, with no remorse.
There's also WorldCoin. I don't think a decent person would continue to push such an awful, untrustworthy system. This is a supposedly privacy-focused project that several countries are investigating for privacy violations and has been found to be in violation of privacy laws in some of them.
It's almost as if he goes out of his way to do as much harm to the world as he thinks he can get away with while maintaining the facade of just doing business. I don't think he's the antichrist, I think Peter Thiel is the closest to deserving that description.
There's a reason why OpenAI and Anthropic (and before them Google, Apple, Meta, etc.) were started in the US and not Europe. And let's not compare salaries we each get for similar work because that tends to make my European friends very sad.
Yes, and that reason is a big single market (and a huge military and 100 years of power play to back it up) - and yes, there's a lot the EU could to unify its market - but it's not "less regulations".
> compare salaries
Let's not even begin this trope prevalet on HN, those taxes are funding a working healthcare and public infrastructure in EU.
> and that reason is a big single market (and a huge military and 100 years of power play to back it up)
That certainly helps. You could also add talent concentration due to excellent universities and top-tier companies already being here. But the truth is that you can incorporate a business in less than a week here, employment is at-will, there are no unions or other such bullshit, taxes are low, the general way you deal with regulator is ask for forgiveness instead of ask for permission, etc.
Say I'm currently working on a project in the crypto or AI space. If I wanted to make it into a commercial product, do you think I'm gonna go to France or Germany? It might take me a few weeks just to get past the first layers of red-tape to get a business licence there. If I hire someone who turns out to be incompetent, I'm probably stuck with them until I gather enough evidence to justify firing. And I have to live in constant fear of the state deciding my business is illegal.
> funding a working healthcare
Btw the US healthcare system is the best in the world if you can afford it. Health insurance is usually provided through the employer. I can have an appointment with a doctor within days, emergency room wait time is on the order of minutes. Never had a problem with the quality of care.
I swear I have this same conversation every month, and I think it is repeated by others like a thousand times if one searches for it, but I think it's worth it. I see your position and arguments in x.com culture a lot.
> talent concentration, excellent universities and top-tier companies
This is all just a consequence of above. And note that talent in US historically was mostly gen 1-2-3 immigrants.
> incorporate a business in less than a week
This is one is important. EU strives for it, but I think the reasons lie in the different worldview, see below.
> no unions or other such bullshit
> taxes are low
> if I hire someone who turns out to be incompetent
> best healthcare
See, you purely view this topic as someone wanting to minmax gains, profit, effort. Yes, this is easier to do in the US right now.
What kind of world do you build with all this? What does it all lead to? I envision something like futuristic Mexico where a few lucky get in the top ~30% who can afford healthcare and education, and live in gated apartment communities, businesses are owned by the top 2%. The rest of the population works in gig jobs and farms (and are a nuisance, until automation makes them unneeded).
How much of the US popultion has realistic access to that "best healthcare"? Children, elderly, disabled?
If it were up to "free markets", there would be no 5 day workweek, if you were born with one arm you'd die in a ditch, and cartelling businesses would be free to exploit the population, their privacy, time and assets at their will (just click agree on our T&C).
Do you care about these issues? You must not, you're a businessman and want to do business. But the state certainly should. And I wouldn't live in a state which doesn't. This is what everyone in the EU gets with your taxes. It's far from great, varies per member country, but this is the general idea. And this is something that US tech industry people have a hard time to get, who just look at comp levels think money and enough hustle can solve anything for anyone.
I recommend you to travel and see other types of societies. But even the US itself will undergo a massive change in the next decade with how its old powers, influx of people and world economy grasp evaporates.
> I recommend you to travel and see other types of societies
I actually travel pretty often to Europe and have lived there for extended periods of time. I have family and hold the passport of an EU member state.
I'm going to try to be 100% fair: people in Europe are generally poor and they don't realize it. Salaries are very low, but the cost of living is almost equivalent. I am currently enjoying a quality of life that I don't think I could have built anywhere else in the world within a single generation. If I wasn't grinding constantly, I could afford to go on vacation pretty much anywhere on earth for a few weeks without thinking about how much I would be spending. If I stopped working tomorrow, I could coast on my savings for years without cutting any expense. I will be able to pay tutors and private schools for my children without hesitating. And I'm not saying this to brag, because it is frankly not that special. I'm nowhere near the private jet class. This is "middle class" here. Almost everyone who worked in this industry (Bay Area or NYC) for a few years could tell you something similar. Tesla and BMWs are not luxury cars, the parking lot of my building is filled with them. Everyone hates tipping culture, but we tip 20-25% because it's just a rounding error and it makes the servers happy so might as well. I'm not sure if "free healthcare" can really make up for this.
It is also great to be surrounded by people who are ambitious and really value performance. The US is one of the only places in the world where high performance is rewarded to this extent. For me, this is a huge factor, and I don't think I would have learned as much as I did in the last few years if I was anywhere else.
But sure, there are tradeoffs. When my wife gave birth, she got 3 months of paid maternity leave. 3 months is considered generous here and it is a benefit provided by her company. Not everyone gets even 3 months.
And I can't deny that every time I land in Europe I go through the "this is so beautiful, I should really move here" phase. It's nice to be able to walk around or take public transit and not need a car. It's nice to hang around in a nice park instead of a shopping mall.
If Europe is more your kind of vibe, I don't judge you. But don't judge me either for valuing other things.
> See, you purely view this topic as someone wanting to minmax gains, profit, effort
My position is more nuanced, but in general, I believe that technological progress is what increases the standard of living for everyone. Competitive free market capitalism, with all its flaws, is currently the best system we have to continue moving forward.
I'm just gonna address the first one, don't necessarily disagree with the rest:
> Callous disregard of lost jobs, disinformation, mental health issues / deaths, IP theft, environmental cost, skill atrophy
ChatGPT is a tool that changed people's lives. OpenAI released something that wasn't perfect, for free, and forced all their competitors to release these products publicly.
You can't stop technological progress to protect old jobs, or because you are afraid people are gonna misuse it. I'm fascinated how many grown adults want to be treated like children their whole lives, but more nefariously, they want to impose this on others who want more freedom and agency.
As for IP "theft", all I'm gonna say is: fuck intellectual property as a concept and the whole parasitic industry that grew around it. The only contribution of IP has been to stifle innovation and set our civilization back by decades. Making IP obsolete and unenforceable has been one of the best things to come out of LLMs and one of the great catalysts of the scientific, technological, and creative advancements that are coming in the near future. For that alone, Sam Altman deserves a statue, no matter what his other flaws are.
It's not about stopping change, it's about a blithe, uncaring attitude about how it affects other people, along with empty assurances of UBI and abundance that we are unlikely to see / distribute broadly. People expect to get shafted and I don't blame them for worrying when you look what happened to the Rust Belt, coal miners in Appalachia, etc.
IP can hurt or help depending on the industry - how do you enable R&D-heavy industries like pharma to recoup costs over time without something like this? I don't see how you incentivize innovation without the concept but I'm open to reforms like not resetting patent timelines for minor tweaks, etc.
Whenever people object to thing-x they go for the most prominent leader of thing-x.
I personally object from him trying to divert trillions in investment from potential helping the hungry type stuff which is popular to sticking slop in everything which many don't want.
Ilya Sutskever and Dario Amodei were high up at OpenAI before becoming competitors. They are just two of many people who have known Altman personally who have accused him of being a lying sociopath. I would not call that vague.
It is not just a question of morality. A sociopath with that amount of power can be a danger.
> It is not just a question of morality. A sociopath with that amount of power can be a danger.
You probably think that "sociopathy" is an incurable disease which would make him some sort of vampire. This is pure bs. The way these "personality disorders" are diagnosed is the same as taking a buzzfeed personality quiz. This is not very rigorous stuff, I would even classify it as pseudoscience. As a tangent, I really despise how they are using greek and latin roots to prompt into our brains that what their models are describing is in any way similar to actual pathologies.
So yeah, maybe Sam Altman is generally a dishonest person if we believe what Ilya Sutskever, Dario Amodei, and others are saying. If that's the case (I have no reason to doubt it), he should stop lying and manipulating people, there are more satisfying ways to achieve one's objectives.
But the "sociopath" label is pure bs, along with the rest of those "personality disorders". That shit is more dangerous and harmful than a million lying Sam Altmans.
Somewhat funny to read all these holy, well-tamed, moral people condemning violence with most dumb, ungrounded "violence bad" that cannot even hold a second of scrutiny.
Yes, violence shouldn't be the first resort, and when violence is unleashed innocent suffer as well, but there is a great difference between choosing not to use violence due to whatever consideration, and being so toothless and tamed that a sight of dog that finally bites when being constantly beaten sickens you.
It's not good for this sort of disagree with a CEO stuff. Fighting Hitler is ok. Typed from England where we fought Hitler but don't generally go for CEOs. Is that privileged?
I think it’s the opposite: many of these keyboard warriors advocating for violence in 2026 in America have no fucking clue what they’re advocating for, or how stupid they sound.
I feel like Altman's PR team is dropping the ball. We somehow need to get the word out that AI tools will benefit all of humanity, not detract from it.
I don't think AI is benefiting humanity when you consider:
- It's heavy use in military and surveillance engagements
- The billions+ spent, yet no economic gains were noted
- The pressure on white-collar jobs
The threat to AI far exceeds any benefits I can see.
Did something change? HN has always been very pro-AI until recently, and now it seems to have swung dramatically the other way. Not one comment even agreeing with me.
Is this really the case though? Currently it appears to benefiting a small few and there is not much reason to think it will change going forward.
If 95% of jobs go away, the destabilization leads to violent conflicts, and power and wealth become more centralized does it really matter if we have better healthcare or automated cars? Will people have purpose in their lives? Will this be a better world for most?
When they’re saying that most people will be unemployable in a few years and there is no plan to fix that…in a country where you go hungry and homeless without a job, people will get a bit restless.
Altman has made suggestions on how to fix this. I believe his main one is for AI to be subsidised so that it remains free for public use. The public could then use those free tokens to enrich themselves and offset any negative societal impacts.
This is obviously unworkable and delusional. Not sure what kind of worldview would produce this type of idea and see it as practical. Maybe more exposure to normal people is needed instead of being insulated in the AI filter bubble.
So are we seeing a massive lobbying effort by Altman and OpenAI to make this happen? Or is this another "maybe we can build a dyson sphere?"
OpenAI was a nonprofit and then it was restructured to be a for-profit corporation. That seems like the opposite of what he claims to advocate for if we look at his actual actions.
idk, maybe Altman should stop giving interviews talking about how he’s going to get rich making everyone’s job obsolete. Just a thought! Any PR firms hiring?
He’s already rich, he doesn’t even own any stock in OpenAI, and the societal (and geopolitical) changes are coming from AI no matter what Sam Altman does. Should he just not talk about it?
People are stupid, but not stupid enough not to see right through the lie that AI will benefit all of humanity. This is exactly why they are throwing molotovs at his house.
Then these companies can make the AIs they build a publicly owned good that is free for everyone.
What I instead see is a massive system of rents that will be affordable only by other businesses who replace their workers and leave tons of people out in the cold with no income and minimal access to these tools.
sama, i know the odds of you seeing this are very low, but i'm so sorry you're being targeted like this. you don't deserve this. i recently saw you do a q&a with francois challet and.. after it was over, you went to your car very quickly and you were driven away. i think these days you must think a lot about your safety and the safety of your family and i wish it didn't have to be that way. wishing you and your family all the best.
Police employ violence all the time and I think we who are okay/well off all agree that they solve our problems every day.
What us cushy engineers haven't realized yet is that the gradient for who are well off are sliding more and more towards one end. Sooner or later engineers will be on the wrong side of that gradient.
>What us cushy engineers haven't realized yet is that the gradient for who are well off are sliding more and more towards one end. Sooner or later engineers will be on the wrong side of that gradient.
Finally someone who said it. There was this quote I saw in the movie "Air"(about michael Jordan) about how people with true wealth only ever part with it not out of charity but out of greed. It takes someone or something truly special to force them to part with that money.
This whole era that we've lived through, where software engineers have amazing working conditions compared to blue collar workers and manage to pull ahead in society, helping to form a white collar elite class, is an aberration caused by the miracle of the microprocessor and Moore's Law. The elites saw the opportunity to obtain so much wealth from the lower classes(in the form of automating labor with computers) that they were forced to part with a bit of it, allowing some special people: software engineers like you and me to achieve what we consider a middle class life.
But sooner or later those same people will want that wealth back. They will continue to fight and find ways to take that wealth back: whether through H‑1B visas, "learn to code" initiatives to increase supply, or now AI. AI could very well crash and burn tomorrow but they will be back, and it will be an ongoing battle for the rest of our lives.
Indeed. Violence can be and is met with violence, and refusing to discern against them is a logical failure that needs correcting. Inevitably it comes down to process, and being a one-party state in control, the Democrats control the violence. Arguably on both sides.
The elites after the French Revolution were not only mostly the same as before, they escaped with so much money and wealth that it’s actually debated if they increased their wealth share through the chaos [1].
The comment refers to an article specifically discussing only one aspect of a major historical event.
The French revolution is considered one of the most important events in the history of Europe, because of the great impact it had on the (among others) politics, economy and the quality of life of common people.
Downplaying its importance by trying to water its impact down to "but rich still rich, no?" is a sign, that the comment might have been made in bad faith or without proper understanding of the source material.
I’m not underplaying its signaling value. Just that nobody that signaled was better off for it. Choosing a revolution-style coup is condemning your and your loved ones’ lives to horribleness. If that’s worth it, roll the dice. But don’t think the elites will suffer for it.
IIRC, you've already made this argument in the past, but it's a bad one. Yes, the Ancien Régime's nobility became the bourgeoisie in the successive governments of the French 18th century, but it allowed many from the tiers état to rise to places that were literally illegal for them to occupy under the old monarchy.
> it allowed many from the tiers état to rise to places that were literally illegal for them to occupy under the old monarchy
I’ve never argued some upward mobility wasn’t permitted by the revolution. I’m just pushing back on the notion that elites should fear an American revolution. They don’t, because historically, they shouldn’t. Nine times out of ten they’ll consolidate power among themselves, which means more wealth flowing upwards. Nine times out of the rest of the time, they’ll escape with most of their money.
And for the average Frenchman, the revolutions were terrible. Some folks win. But they were seldom powerless before. Just wealthy. Compare that to the British case, where land and electoral reform permitted the emergence of a broad middle class, one that continued accruing power for another century.
The elites that survived ended up better off. 50,000 other elites were killed during the French Revolution.
By the same token, the normal populace was also way better off after the French Revolution, since using the money and wealth of the dead elites to improve everyone's lives made a substantial impact on the French civilization that they are still benefiting from today.
In other words...the French Revolution is exactly the wrong type of example you want to be using when talking about whether violence against tech elites is acceptable.
I get that as a VC you have a deeply emotional attachment to encouraging people not to resort to violence, but your energies are best directed toward your fellow tech elite to encourage to stop doing things that are leading millions of people to contemplate violence against them.
All the jets in the world won't stop the violence once that bridge is crossed. Because the mob also has access to jets, and boats, and (at that point) an emotional reason to pursue their targets to the ends of the earth.
Ish. Most survived. And they didn’t have jets.
You have a very VC/tech-bro/Theranosesque definition of "most survived". More than 2/3rds of the French aristocracy was killed in the French Revolution. Even the low bound using just the official numbers puts almost half of the aristocrats having been executed or died in prison during the French Revolution.
Revolutions today are broadly accretive for elites.
They aren't, unless you're referring to the weapons dealers, warlords, or the complicit. Revolutions tend to have outsized impacts on reducing the wealth of elites. The only exceptions are where the elites were part of the security apparatus on the side that won the conflict and gained their wealth by murdering the people who had what they wanted. The inevitable result though is that when they lose that power, they tend to lose their lives (see e.g., Syria and South Africa).
> as a VC you have a deeply emotional attachment to encouraging people not to resort to violence
…why? Most of Silicon Valley’s elites are itching for violence in politics. To the degree they’re putting thumbs on the scale, on the net, it’s for more violence.
> the mob also has access to jets
No. It doesn’t. In zero civil breakdowns in the last half century did the mob get the jets during breakdown. The closest one can get is the Taliban seizing U.S. materiel.
> More than 2/3rds of the French aristocracy was killed in the French Revolution
Source? The majority of those killed were commoners.
> They aren't, unless you're referring to the weapons dealers, warlords, or the complicit
Complicit. A breakdown in violence would give the authoritarians a bona fide Reichstag fire.
> inevitable result though is that when they lose that power, they tend to lose their lives (see e.g., Syria and South Africa)
The former president of Syria is in Russia. Much of the South African elite is complaining about white genocides in the U.S.
I agree this is a symptom of large systemic issues.
Long gone are the days a bumbling fool could get a well paying job at the local power plant and provide a good life for a wife and three children, with a large home, decent insurance and two cars.
but we haven't even proven that AI will destroy vast amounts of jobs. Some, sure, junior software engineers are in trouble. but other then that, do we really have any quantified evidence as to how many jobs have been displaced by AI? i've been looking for numbers on this but it all seems murky and wishy washy. i'm open to be convinced, if anyone's got numbers.
also, if the worst case scenario does happen and most of the population finds itself without money. there are other ways to live with very little money.
examples include: Great depression, third world countries like ghana, south africa, etc (and countries that have collapsed like syria), also the hazda tribe and other native tribes untouched by technology, as well as other similar to human mammalian species that share our planet like monkeys, apes, chenobos, all are able to survive without money albeit with more favorable climate/physiology.
I might not really understand this response - are you trying to justify a dystopia by describing how it can be literally survived? I.e. imminent physical death is your bar for where revolting is "allowed"? I'm reeling trying to understand how this can be what you're doing.
Because the parent accused you of acquiescence and you just replied with a list of examples to follow, I don't think you understood what they meant.
In the worst-case world, there is still more than enough wealth and work done to provide the bare minimum quality of life to everyone. The automation of most occupations would lower the bar of creating the simplest food supplies and homes even more. But, in that horrific world, the elite class would say "lol no" and use that wealth to live in paradise, away from everyone else, while the rest are left with almost nothing. The parent is saying that your immediate reaction is depressing, because instead of anger or even disapproval, your instinct is to put your head down and reason that you and all the future generations should just live like a monkey, forever.
Do you expect people to wait by while billionaires pour trillions of dollars into replacing them? Evidence takes years to mount; present events are moving far faster than that. Your argument is the exact same as that of COVID denialists in 2019 -- that we don't know how bad it'll be yet, that there's so little evidence, that we shouldn't jump to hasty action before getting results in. Empiricism can only go so far.
If I knew someone was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars building a big laser pointed at my house, I would not wait for "quantified evidence" of its effect to take some sort of action. The only real debate is what kind of action.
> also, if the worst case scenario does happen and most of the population finds itself without money. there are other ways to live with very little money.
If you have so little attachment to your money, why hold on to it at all? Do not be upset that other people are operating on a slightly larger time horizon than you are, and are interested in their livelihood not just today, but three or five years from now.
>> Do you expect people to wait by while billionaires pour trillions of dollars into replacing them?
Well, I tried to warn my family and friends and they're looking at me like I'm crazy. So yes, I think most people will just treat all their layoffs like it's just a regular recession. Until, at least half your friends are laid off, most people won't be any more alarmed than if in a recession.
>> If you have so little attachment to your money, why hold on to it at all?
You'll need whatever you have left. The barter economy won't take the place of the primary economy, rather it will supplement it with transactions between members who have no currency. but, there will always be some things that you want to get from the primary economy, if you can.
I saw this all the time when ICE was doing their business in Minneapolis. That was only a few months ago and it doesn't take too long to dig and find some truly odious posts.
Well for one, nobody was killed here. But second of all, sure -- because Hacker News are not the class of people involved in drive-by gang shootings; to most of us they are essentially abstractions, barely more real than the trolley problem. If you went around asking people who knew a guy that was shot, you'd eventually find someone who said he had it coming -- he got involved with the wrong guys, he shot at one of them first, he did something he shouldn't have (a common thread: the livelihood of the people involved). This is obviously atrocious: nobody should go around shooting people on the streets. But we can recognize that both are playing with fire, and understand the violence in that context -- such that the solution to gang violence is not, "moralize at the gang members until they stop shooting eachother", but rather "improve socio-economic conditions until they stop wanting to". So yes, there are elements of HN's population that will cheer these events on. But this should not be surprising -- the ruling class is playing with fire.
The same thing happened with Kirk. Everyone standing up to "mourn" a neo-nazi, fake tears, rolling with the grift. Rolling with the white supremacist grindbox.
Not a proponent of this, but it's worth understanding that a certain part of the population believe once AGI is reached the world will change, and whoever reached it first wields all power. The increase in usability of recent models has no doubt shocked them. With such a mindset it does make sense to consider it a life or death thing. I can understand that some people think attacking these companies is the only way of protecting themselves from a whole different and much less dignified life.
I don't know if they are right, neither in world view nor conclusion. But it seems this is the world we currently lived in. This is one of the cases where for once i wish there was a manifesto to read, because i badly want to understand why
To stop AI now, you would need an absolutely totalitarian government. I am a libertarian but AI will kill us all unless we get an absolutely totalitarian government.
> that he would rather live in an underground bunker
He isn’t, never has and never will. I know some of the bunker people. They basically have them in the way you or I might have a fancy tool in the garage or piece of art. It’s a discussion piece for a different class of wealth.
That's a cute theory that it's just a conversation starter. Truth is, he knows he will need that bunker when the shit hits the fan. And it's already starting to.
I don't see the bunkers as being as useful as some might imagine them to be. In the kind of apocalyptic scenario which would actually make him want to move to the bunker in New Zealand, why would his security people bother to keep taking orders from him instead of just taking his stuff and demoting him to an advisor or maybe even killing him? I guess it's better than dying outside the bunkers, but there's a good chance that he would lose his status and live subordinate to whoever the local warlord turns out to be.
Yeah, I guess the practical problem with shock collars / implanted brain bombs is that you would have to somehow convince your security people to put them on or get them implanted before the apocalyptic scenario happens, which seems like a tough sell even for someone with Altman's business acumen.
I think you mean he has a bunker in New Zealand because he expected so much violence. I don't think anyone should engage in violence (or property damage) like this.
> it's hard to sympathize with someone like Altman
The thing about rights is you believe in them universally or you don’t believe in them at all. If we have a right to life, sympathy isn’t relevant. Awful people can be awful, but if we start compromising their rights then we deface all of our freedoms and security.
>you believe in them universally or you don’t believe in them at all
I know what you mean, of course, but it's just not true in honesty - when pressed, there are no binaries in morality, as romantic and proud as the idea is. "Violence is never the answer" is both true and also irrelevant once a person is asked to consider the existence of his very way of life, his values, his livelihood, his culture, his home, or other resources historically at the center of revolutions.
> “Violence is never the answer" is both true and also irrelevant
That statement is factually false. Sometimes violence is the answer. But we’re a social species. One-off violence is pretty much never the answer unless you need a short-term solution to e.g. entrapment.
I didn’t say rights are absolute. Just universal. The process for abrogating them must be just that—a process you’d wish to be visited upon you. Unilateral action destroys the idea of a right.
I consider rights a functional abstraction. That is to say, they're useful, we should abide them as a tenet of a civilized society, but we also made them up. And importantly we all recognize that they're conditional - if you cross certain lines of conduct you lose them - and there's actually a lot of debate to be had about where those lines are.
So I disagree with your axiom that you have to believe in them 100% or 0%.
> all recognize that they're conditional - if you cross certain lines of conduct you lose them - and there's actually a lot of debate to be had about where those lines are
One hundred percent of those debates end at process, not unilateral action. If it can be unilaterally nullified, it is no longer a right.
> you have to believe in them 100% or 0%
Not degree but range. We don’t have a right to infinite life or medicine. But everyone has to have the same level of right for it to be a right. Otherwise I can disagree with your right to a right and nullify it on my own terms.
Just to clarify, here's my actual position - it was only implied in the first comment so I'll spell it out:
1. We shouldn't kill or harass or destroy the property of someone like Altman. AKA, I'm not in disagreement with your take on abiding by the laws of the land.
2. But it's not surprising that such things happen to individuals like him, for reasons outlined. Put it this way - if I was in his position, I would be very wary of my public image, and I'd be very wary of my intentions - am I acting for the greater good, or only for my own good?
Of course it's possible he's actually acting with the best of intentions and is just terrible at presenting himself, which is one of the reasons I'd agree with due process and respecting his rights.
> it's not surprising that such things happen to individuals like him
It’s understandable. But that also justifies a crackdown against it. I want to see AI regulation. Dumbfucks shooting a housekeeper in Sam Altman’s house is only going to stall that.
Well folks who know about the Unabomber manifesto by Ted Kaczynski will see this attack as unsurprising, and Sam knows this sort of attack was expected; false flag or not.
It is not okay. But if we don't have any solution to the ramifications of what really is "AGI" then it unfortunately won't be the last.
People can think of ML on a government level, but it has an inescapably international dimension as a kind of gunpowder-like discovery. Relatedly, if war becomes increasingly automated and cheap, then civilian targets will be seen as obvious.
As we discuss policy ideas to pump the breaks on a domestic level, I hope we balance that against the arms race that's happening around the world.
Agreed, and also now any actions people don’t personally agree with that have a negative effect on someone (which is everything) can be labeled “structural violence”, so they can claim to have a moral justification for physical violence. It’s disgusting and breathtakingly stupid.
Look, I think Sam Altman is a terrible person too, but to anyone reading that hates people like him as much as I do you should want him alive while we work to build a world where he can live out a long life in complete safety, in prison.
Violence never solves anything. You will never make anything in this world better by becoming a worse person than your enemies.
It is something that the sticking point with Anthropic was autonomous AI killing machines and turning the military AI on the US population. I could see people not being happy with that.
This is unacceptable and a growing issue in America, anti-AI has become just another focal point for the far end of the political spectrum to rally and ultimately radicalize violence.
What is unacceptable is how these technology companies steal the IP of collective humanity, gate keep it and force us to pay a subscription service to use it against each other in a perverted downward spiral powered by capitalist game theory.
The neoluddite revolution is forming, have no doubts about that.
Somewhere I read that vigilanteism arises when there is a perceived last of justice. This guy gets rich while people everywhere are losing jobs. Seems about right.
We went through a cycle like this once before in U.S. history, and the amount of violence it took to correct the overreach of organized money was not 0.
I live in Switzerland, which has a highly functional democracy.
Shareholder accountability > societal accountability. Accountability falling on a made up corporation > accountability falling to the humans that made the choices.
You can only get away with this structure up to a certain level of morally bankrupt behavior. But there can be a point where people refuse to defer to it as being legitimate.
I think the Sacklers and the opioid epidemic was the beginning of the end of legitimacy for this 'indulgences' system where the government wiped away/waves away horrific immoral behavior just because it was done under the government's papal indulgences system. You can literally ruin millions of lives, push thousands to hundreds of thousands of young girls/boys into prostitution, cause death and community destruction, and the consequences are mostly waived away because the Sacklers were protected by their papal indulgences.
Whether they are correct or not I'm not going to weigh in on, but I will make the claim that figuring out why something happens is the best way of preventing it from happening again.
Based in the simple fact that humans will not cede power/wealth willingly once they gain it.
Ergo, violence (either state or individual) to effect a new balance.
Which isn't to legitimize violence, but is to say that stripping away a population's ability to effect change by being violent, if enough of them choose, is more dystopian than some violence.
Fix the issue: don't complain about the symptoms.
Demonstrations are a start, though they seem to be more useful for networking inside a group and forcing the press to pay attention to some matter. Decision makers can easily ignore them.
What's less easy to ignore are strikes, especially general strikes, as e.g. port workers in Italy threatened during the total blockade in the Gaza war.
Also: disinvestment, boycotts, public shunning, adverse publicity, picketing, blockades.
Start small, increase the pressure over time, be clear about what you're doing and why.
The disinvestment, boycotts, public shunning, adverse publicity, picketing, blockades, I can see those working. Certainly seems to have an impact in the video game news I see.
Even then I don’t they they get a lot of choice as far as results go.
There is growing anger and discontentment in a large part of the population, driven by inequality of wealth and power. Hopelessness and a lack of control over the future.
Are the nodes of power willing to spread wealth and control more widely to stabilize the country? What are they willing to do to consolidate their power? The vast majority of violence is perpetrated by those nodes, to either consolidate power, or gain more of it.
Other people in this thread have already suggested more actionable responses: organize, unionize, understand class dynamics, and vote accordingly.
So, yes RLHF is available right now, for people with specific backgrounds. That RLHF work is temporary and it's going to make hundreds of thousands of people redundant. The RLHF work is actually job-negative, it is work which will later deprive others of a way to make a living.
Once that training work dries up, what happens to the people who were doing the job which AI now does? How do they pay rent? How do they feed and clothe themselves? What answers do any AI proponant actually have for this, or is the intention that every person shuts the critical thinking part of their brain off and trusts the computer will come up with something?
Huh? The jobs aren't going away because a few people can get temp work as traitors to automate away the jobs of their fellows? I suppose that's technically correct (e.g. the there-exists counterexample to a for-all statement), but it totally misses the point.
> The masses, without the right understanding, will just become a lynch mob and start burning everything in sight, as they tend to in most circumstances.
BTW, totally fine. If you like nice things and have political or economic power, it's totally on you to prevent things from getting bad enough that people want to do that. That's something libertarians would do well to remember. Propaganda only gets you so far.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/10/ar...
That title reeks of the paper equivalent of clickbait. The paper is about subjective well-being and mental health in the psychological sense. Broader well-being includes material conditions like income, housing, health care, safety, and social connections. So a null result on subjective well-being is not necessarily a null result on material welfare, and the problems that leads to. The paper’s own abstract also talks about context effects rather than a simple universal null.
> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/10/ar...
Unions are not perfect, but they have been an important check on exploitation. Organized labor helped win the 40-hour workweek. If you demand perfect solutions, you end up doing nothing. And given that you're up against people with nearly unlimited resources, you can't afford to be picky.
I'm not arguing any points how these conflicts will ever be solved, but it shows that violence hasn't solved anything until now, for decades over decades.
I'm just waiting for dang, et. al to fix our thread voting system as it's a little too Reddity around here these last days.
The honest truth? They're supposed to do nothing and take their licks with a smile. If that's not good enough for them, they are allowed to occupy themselves with ineffectual political activities, preferably on issues that are exhausting and do not disturb the power of the elite (e.g. abortion, transgenderism, etc.).
The people saying it doesn’t work are the same people who can’t must the effort to even contact their representative.
I had a professor in college who was big on entrepreneurship. So he formed an organization, got others involved, went to Washington to lobby his rep. His rep said “let’s do it”, and sat him down with her staff to write a bill. That bill was brought to the floor for a vote and passed.
Until you’ve done that, dont complain the system doesn’t work.
The issue with politics today is the level of engagement of the average voter. Few people ever get involved, so the vacuum gets filled with whichever power-hungry mediocre person who puts some effort in.
But that’s the intent of the system? Represent what most people want.
Fixed.
Thankfully, there is a paper on this that you can read, so that we don’t need to argue about this.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
It would be great if the media channels that manufacture wants weren't co-opted by the very people who are the problem.
People don't vote for their own gains but rather the gains of the few and to be honest, one can argue that within America this is a both-party problem and sometimes you are just picking for the less wrong politician and then you have these biases which blind them.
if this is the case, I have seen American people online say that "But, people know that the American govt and american people are different"
It is almost as if people are saying whatever is convenient at the time. This can only be one or the other.
If the average American's intent is of the system which is current administration, then forget about the trust within the system. I find your position with a bit of irony.
The system isn't working and that's a fact. You can say that people are to be blamed for that, sure, but then the people will be blamed entirely.
To be honest, The americans I sometimes talk online to don't share this ideal of the govt. and are fighting against it in some way or another but they are tired and hopeless, for the most part. I really take a deeper offense to your statement as that makes all the problems persist longer and thus to many people who have nothing to lose, violence feels like the only option which might be what GP might be referring to.
Either America needs to fix itself or violence will keep on happening. To be honest, I am not that much hopeful that America can fix itself though in the sense that the corporate influence is so immense with the two party system and the trust is still lost in some ways in America and times in future are gonna be even more harder yet America is completely polarized. These problems are also existing in other countries to be honest but America is at another magnitude and at these levels of inequality, violence to many people feel like the only way to share their voice which has been suppressed by the system for far too long. From my time reading history, this is a very repeating phenomenon and in a sense, history is messy but when people got really pissed at the system failing, mass scale revolt and violence was always picked as the last resort and we are in those times now.
I feel like we can either condemn or do anything as a society but if people (and humans just like you and me actually) get so frustrated within the system that violence seems like an good choice, then that is upon the fault of the system and I feel like the condemnation of act just does nothing in the long grand scheme of things.
TLDR: People should really act together to solve these things peacefully but its very far from happening in reality and reality is messy and always has been in some regards, we just read it from the line of statistics and history.
It’s hardly a representative sample of the country, and in many instances isn’t even an American citizen.
- 32% of the citizen voting age population
- 44% of eligible voters
- 49% and some change of the people who actually voted
“America as a whole” did not vote for Trump
In a similar fashion, my point is, I actually agree with you sir @mbgerring and your original comment. you tried your best to raise awareness and there are people who do the same and there are many who reach the support of millions but still no change is enacted because of the way system is enacted.
Yet the system can make someone like trump with maybe even sometimes far fewer people supporting it and billionaire's capital flowing into propaganda etc. too thus the people saying "we didn't vote for this"
My point was that the system is ultimately rigged by some people at the top against the average person and @refurb saying to you that oh this is then what the people must want, is a factually wrong statement.
I think you yourself have put it right: "We need to seriously face this problem and fix it, or things are just going to keep getting worse."
And I also agree with your overall statement that if the system continues on being as hopeless as it is, then for some people violence would become the only option for their voices as their voices get shutted from every peaceful way.
I think we are in agreement sir. Have a nice day.
Reminder that even in the scenario that constituents 100% support or 100% reject a policy, their opinions hold almost no statistical sway to their elected representative. It's actually worse than a coin flip.
It's only when you restrict your constituent demographic to just those in the top 10% of wealth (...like a professor in college for example...) that suddenly their voting decisions align to constituent opinions.
Look up "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens", this has been known for some time.
This is a sign of the system not working. A well connected professor, with plenty of free time to form an organization and go to Washington to talk to his rep
Might as well be an industry lobbyist.
Could a worker from Walmart do the same thing? In theory sure. In practice unlikely, for any number of reasons. Not least because people are unlikely to take a Wal Mart worker seriously enough to join their organization.
And not only that but one who was "big on entrepreneurship!" Guy wasn't really rocking the boat, was he?
Nope. She had been working on entrepreneurship for a while so had met her reps years ago. No money involved. Hell, not even from a very big state.
Nothing stops the average citizen from organizing and getting similar access to representatives.
Instead we get people who don’t even know who their representative is claiming they’re sure the whole system is rigged.
It’s not that different than people who claim there are no jobs when they haven’t even applied to any.
I disagree pretty strongly. There are tons of soft power social levers and bureaucratic structures designed exactly to prevent your average Joe from getting access to representatives
Even a comparatively powerful person like a wealthy CEO of a big company often experiences friction trying to get access to public servants. That's why they hire lobbyists whose job it is to get past the friction
California has a referendum system. Get signatures for a policy and put it to the voters.
This is a long way to say you don’t have the votes. Airwaves affect turnout. They don’t flip people on positions.
They absolutely do. On September 12, 2001, ~nobody in the United States was interested in starting a war with Iraq.
Two years of propaganda later, and all of a sudden, half the population had acquired keen geopolitical insights which necessitated an invasion and occupation of a country that had exactly fuck-all to do with 9/11.
A decade later, all of a sudden, nobody wanted to fess up to wanting anything to do with that mess.
Public wants aren't discovered in some interference-free democratic vacuum. The people who own the press put a millstone on their side of the scales.
There was desire for vengeance on 12 September. Reporting and politicians channeled it. That’s very different from driving consensus against something people would otherwise support.
It works the same way in other countries too. Look at any country that you believe to believe in insane shit - most of those beliefs aren't organic.
Neither are the insane things you believe in. It's just that you can't even see that they aren't the product of your own reasoning. Fish don't have a word for water.
See also Covid-19. Same shit only waaaaaaay more batshit insane and waaaaaaaay more crazy 24-7 fear mongering.
A little wild to me that so many of the replies don't understand that.
FL crafted a law to help safeguard someone who gets sued for running over a protestor. I think this illustrates how a law can protect problems rather than solving them.
> Source?
https://api.politifact.com/article/2025/jun/13/can-florida-d...>> FL crafted a law to help safeguard someone who gets sued for running over a protestor
> Not true.
This last bit seems like a pretty firm assertion. What is your source for it?
Second, a rioter is not the same as a protestor.
Third, someone must have been in threat from a rioter to use that defense successfully.
The specific stigma against physical violence (and not against other types, even for cumulatively worse actions) strikes me as very self-serving, an instance of "the law forbids both rich and poor to sleep under a bridge." It's increasingly the only remedy available to everyday people, and the mad acceleration of government capture by elites in the last decade is making murder and rioting inevitable, at least as long as ordinary people still feel they should have some power.
Any sort of violence is bad, singling out physical violence as uniquely bad gives misbehaving elites impunity.
I often can't help but see the "all violence is bad" narrative as another tool of oppression by the ruling class. Even if that isn't its intent, it certainly seems to serve their purposes.
By sending bombs to people Ted Kaczynski made the "should we really do this" discussion of technology off limits for decades.
> I don't think I've ever seen a thread this bad on Hacker News. The number of commenters justifying violence, or saying they "don't condone violence" and then doing exactly that, is sickening and makes me want to find something else to do with my life—something as far away from this as I can get. I feel ashamed of this community.
> Edit: for anyone wondering (or hoping), no I'm not leaving. That was a momentary expression of dismay.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47728106
Perhaps something to think about in a scenario like this. Personally I think it's interesting that some people are so quick to condone aggressive attacks on powerful people, yet have no comment on those powerful people committing lower levels of violence against the masses. It's all social context.
[1] https://youtu.be/GRYcSuyLiJk?si=HhnAUKelmR7igO9x
Can I just say that out of all of this discourse happening, this might be the most insightful yet succint position to explain my stance on all of this especially the "its all social context." line.
I feel like many of us here might share an answer publicly but I have always believed that if I am in the shoes of someone else, I might act the way they do so in a sense I understand the human part of it. A human did the violence and why. I understand that. Now we can call this violence inhuman, sure, but this action is still done by human and for many reasons. And I also understand why people condemn these actions, we wish to live in a clean and structural world and then we see the messiness of the world.
I just feel like just condemning an action would do nothing unless we change the ground conditions but that isn't in the hands of even many of us Hackernews users and this is basically a class aspect to it.
I personally feel like there are some similarities to this incident to the Trolley problem actually. Vsauce did a video about it worth watching[0]
Thank you for writing this comment.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sl5KJ69qiA
How is a person from a nation that the US President has threatened to annex or invade supposed to feel about seeing domestic violence in the United States? From their perspective a divided United States is less of a personal threat to them.
All this talk about how 'we can't have this in a democracy!' forgets that many of us don't live in that particular democracy, and that particular democracy is threatening other democracies.
What should my response be if a North Korean General is executed? Or if a Russian oligarch 'falls out a window'? Or a corrupt Mexican politician is beheaded by a rival cartel?
These American oligarchs aren't my countrymen, They don't have my best interests in mind, they fund the people who threaten my country, and now they provide the American military with technology that it can use to attack my country.
Their lobbying and campaign contributes have resulted in a Mad King waging an unwinnable war that has severely damaged the global economy and has made my life demonstrably worse. I have never done anything to these people and yet they callously did this to all of us for personal profit well beyond what any human being could never need in a thousand life times.
At the end of the day the less cohesive the American tribe is the better off my tribe is. I wish our incentives were aligned but they just aren't and I am not in any way responsible for that.
Not people advocating for hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths from covid. Not people advocating for bombing campaigns blowing children to smithereens. Not people advocating for mass cuts to programs treating people with tuberculosis. Not people advocating for mass cuts to programs feeding the starving. Not people defending ICE in murdering people either via gunshot or medical neglect in their disgusting prisons.
In fact, a lot discussion critical of that stuff just gets [flagged].
None of that counts as violence to dang. But threaten a billionaire? Oh that's a bridge too far.
All of those arguments will be vile, as they have to be given the context.
I'm not criticizing you, and I guess I'm glad someone wrote this comment quickly. You're right. But I would caution people against reading too much into the countervailing sentiment here. It's not trolling, but it is something adjacent to it.
Like 1812 when the Brits weren't busy with the French they easily came in and burnt the US capital as punishment for burning the Canadian one. It's not that the British army suddenly got a lot stronger; they just weren't busy fighting on two continents.
That said, civil disobedience is largely pointless. We're in a capitalistic society so money is the name of the game. Rosa Parks did shit-all; it was the boycott of the bus system for 9 months that made the buses cave.
I went to high school in Pennsylvania.
Did you ever think that maybe people do in fact believe what they say they believe?
I'd love your thoughts on the violence people committed during the following civil uprising: BLM riots, Minneapolis ICE (there are many more instances through history but Ive selected the most recent ones for simplicity).
Where you condemning the actions of people in those threads, encouraging them to have more civil "discussion" or do you think it was the duty of people to take arms against injustice?
If so, how do you corroborate the justification of violence with your current stance?
Thank you.
The idea that people think that the BLM riots are somehow a mic drop argument for the effectiveness of civil violence is just further illustration of how far apart our premises are.
Hilarious joke, Mr. Fukuyama. You have masked goons running around, detaining and even killing people without probable cause. If the results of the 2026 midterms are not to the liking of the current POTUS, it isn't unthinkable that he would try to overturn them, even by force. Would you be hand-wringing on HN about how violence is always bad, then?
But I digress. Firebombing Sam Altman is very bad; there is a multitude of good points against it, from the moral to the pragmatic. "Violence is fundamentally evil" is just a lazy and evidently false argument that does you a disservice.
Also the official opposition is actually not really interested in representing many discontented people. It sticks to loser issues at are alienating to many except activist base (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/16/opinion/democrats-senate-...), and seems totally fine with not being competitive in many elections. And it continues to be that way in the dire political environment you describe.
Civil violence is the backstop of literally every societal system. While it would be better if the systems work, civil violence is what happens if they don't and tends to increase until they do.
In general, violence can certainly solve problems, especially when the problems are not being caused by almost-inevitable technological revolutions. One of the issues to keep in mind, though, is that it often also creates new ones, often surprising ones. For example, the assassination that led to World War One. For another example, if Trump had been assassinated last year, that would have solved many problems for people who dislike Trump. However, that doesn't necessarily mean it would have made the world overall a better place - that is almost impossible to predict. Hence the sci-fi sort of scenario of "you go back in time and kill Hitler, but when you return to your own time it turns out that Hitler dying just let mega-Hitler take power".
Your analysis seems to assume that people will remain more afraid of being "outcompeted" than of being murdered, even after a campaign of terrorism that would make 9/11 look minor.
>it often also creates new [problems], often surprising ones
Let's reframe this to remove the negative bias: murder has the obvious direct first-order effect of removing the target from existence, but also a host of non-obvious higher-order effects resulting from people's response to that violence. These can be counterproductive to the goals of the murderer, but they can also work in favor of it. That is why "terrorism" is a real thing - the higher-order effects are essentially a force multiplier, and if you have nothing to lose then the calculus of causing a major disruption begins to look favorable; any disruption, because regression to the mean is good if you're at the shitty end of the bell curve.
AI is such an important technology that in the face of such a campaign of terrorism, governments would bring the development of the technology directly under the protection of the state security forces, largely outside the reach of terrorists. If not in the US, then in China or other places. At that point the terrorists would have to attain a level of power where they could feasibly overthrow the government in order to stop the development of the technology. Now, some scientists would be uncomfortable in such conditions and would stop working on the technology, but enough would remain that the technology would continue to progress, albeit more slowly.
>and if you have nothing to lose then the calculus of causing a major disruption begins to look favorable; any disruption, because regression to the mean is good if you're at the shitty end of the bell curve.
Very true, if the status quo feels shitty enough one becomes extremely willing to just roll the dice.
Sure, but keep in mind that Hitler is already pretty bad. So while yes, killing him might open the door to someone worse stepping in, it may also open the door to someone more level headed.
You know. In theory.
The people who are doing this stuff are unhinged but why? Perhaps they do not trust law and order. Perhaps they feel helpless and have been led to believe its over for the labour class due to the overhyped marketing and so on.
A serious frank conversation needs to be had and the hyping needs to stop.
Or, if you truly believed AI was a threat and represented material harm and managed to get standing to bring a suit, you are looking at years and years and years of litigation.
Totally agree. I’m speaking to cases in America. If you’re in a rich country broadly at peace with competitive elections to any degree, and you’re choosing violence, you should vacation to e.g. Burma or Sudan or Libya or Ethiopia and see the cost of the violence you’re glorifying.
There's a reason the founding fathers all had slaves; they weren't the common folk.
Ah, yes. All Slaveholders. I once toured John Adam's former plantation. It's expansive. Really puts Monticello to shame.
(the joke here being that John Adams was a practicing lawyer in state that didn't even have slavery).
Since your point seems to be that not all the founding fathers parent was referring to were actually slave owners do you have a claim for a rough ratio? I think that would be interesting and would be a more informative thing regardless of where on the scale it lands from "everybody but Adams" all the way up to "only a big names like Washington, Jefferson".
Do you have an example of such a country?
Here's your canary.
People who shoot someone or throw bombs at someone even though that someone never did something against them, should be marginalized. In prison.
I think the point is that there's going to be an increasingly large percentage of the populace who think that the AI bosses / billionaire class did indeed do something against them.
But they didn't ask the rest of us if we're ok for them to murder someone on our behalf.
Personally I hope that AI will be a step change for the positive. I think it is inevitable that it will progress form here, in the darwinian sense, that someone else on this thread mentioned.
With that in mind, we should all be pushing for it to be used to our benefit, rather than detriment. And like almost all technological advances in the past, I think this can happen.
So if people are saying violence against Sam Altman is expected, then they're also saying violence against me is expected, because I am hopeful and vaguely supportive of the technology. That's quite scary.
Many tech billionaires openly, publicly and loudly said something among the lines: "I/we/my company/tech-bros are building torment nexus - it will take your job and/or kill people and/or shut up political opponents. You are powerless to stop this."
There are some of those billionaires willing to put their name and face in front of billions of people in the world. You will have no trouble finding people that will think that X or Y tech bro is personally responsible for some poor persons problems.
Especially when there's a bunch of news like "layoffs due to AI", "record investments due to AI", etc.
I am not supporting violence, never done it and never considered it. Though not surprising when talking heads of political/economical extremes can get threats from people that have nothing to lose.
Sure. Figurative language will be figurative. There have been tons of assasinations in the last 10 years of police chiefs, politicians, journalists and an MP.
If we’re being pedantic, there isn’t technically a CEO in America who’s been killed. Mangione potted a middle manager with a CEO title. The billionaires who own the company are fine, as is the group CEO, and none of them materially changed any policies as a result of his death.
This sort of thinking causes extremism and division. It only perpetuates more of the thing you don't want!
It's also empirically not true: there are crazy people on both sides, but most people are pretty reasonable. If you treat them as if they are, despite your differences, they won't feel so alienated and perhaps you can both have a productive conversation. Both sides views are then likely to soften, and you can maybe even start working together.
The times they are a-changin'.
Here’s a report on political terrorism up to 2025: https://www.csis.org/analysis/left-wing-terrorism-and-politi...
I encourage anyone reading to look at the charts. There’s a single clearly anomalous data point with significantly reduced violence for “right terrorists” and significantly high number for “left” in 2025. It is the only year in any chart where left violence exceeds (or even comes near to) right.
It’d be extremely silly to infer some trend from this one anomaly.
You will notice I never said that both sides have the same amount of violence (since I don't think that that's actually relevant), so you are responding to a point I never made to begin with.
This obsession with just pretending the two sides are mirror images, who simply need respect each other more is just lazy thinking. Interrogate what the contemporary American right values and believes. It is deep seated resentment (urban elites!), hate (owning the libs), bigotry (mass deportations now!), all wrapped up in a victimhood (white replacement theory) / inferiority complex. It should surprise exactly no one that the statistics are what they are.
The left’s biggest problem is people find them annoying for suggesting others could be more empathetic or do better at being inclusive. These two camps are just nowhere near comparable.
To address an issue, you first must understand it. I very much believe what the right values informs why they’re violent. These values and beliefs need to be shamed into oblivion. Diversity is a strength! Expertise is valuable! People should have freedom to live their lives so long as they don’t harm others! People who believe otherwise should tremble with embarrassment to say so.
I’ve got news for you, friend!
1. Violent attacks against AI CEOs, researchers, and engineers is going to begin. This is due to widespread negative press that AI receives and as well as a pervasive feeling of economic uncertainty and doom in the population. Some of this being caused by the current administration's leadership, but much of it attributed to AI taking jobs and destroying opportunity.
2. Violent acts taken against non-tech CEOs will increase hand-in-hand.
3. If AI continues to demonstrate impressive new capabilities for automation, this rate will increase substantially.
4. The government may come down hard on these individuals, which will further inflame the situation.
5. Data centers will come under attack / sabotage.
6. This will all wind up further inflamed by prediction markets.
I have a colleague at Anthropic that refuses to put it on his LinkedIn. We all now know why.
The pro-Palestinian activists set their cause back a year by overplaying their hands in Columbia at the start of the war. If we want to ensure zero AI legislation for the next 2 years, I couldn’t think of a better way to ensure that than to start potting randos in the streets.
I think the general population is much more likely to feel joy about it than want a police crackdown.
If we're talking about attacks against average software engineers and obscure founders, fewer people would be happy about it, but a great number still would be. There is a lot of envy toward software engineers and founders.
Someone blindly shooting at Altman’s house is going to kill a neighbour or the housekeeper. Not Sam Altman. Probably not even his family.
The internet may be happy. But the locals will get scared. This happens every time these lone-wolf escalations occur.
I doubt it. It would further polarize your population and what you really want is to unite them. You could make a video documentation that contrasts all the known, massive corruption cases in your administration (and SV personae) with the equally massive decay in your infrastructure from roads to bridges to the closure of maternity wings in hospitals because they are no longer profitable. Make as little dialogue/narration as possible and quote dollar numbers as often as possible. Spread posts contrasting corruption/decay to every outlet/social media.
Most people don't understand technology and/or its second order effects. They do understand when they are being stolen from.
Doesn't complaining about protestors at Columbia just make it clear that these complaints aren't actually about violence but are instead about rabble-rousers?
I was in New York during that time. They turned an entire swath of the city into a police zone. The dominant narrative was sympathy for the cause increasingly giving way to frustration to the destruction.
Potato potato. It’s a predictable, even necessary, response to occupying a building. Same as increasing police present if vigilante violence ramps up somewhere.
People who don’t understand that will keep trashing the causes they purport to represent.
It seems so clear that this is not about violence but instead about people who don't know their place.
Most of the population will be for the violent attacks. Techbros went way too far in gleefully describing how they would destroy most people's careers while enriching themselves. Never bothered to think whether they should just because they could. Now the rooster is coming home to roost.
The best way for the attacks on AI executives to stop is to pass meaningful legislation that limits the use and scope of AI.
Everyone says this before they learn what they didn’t value. Peace, for example.
> Its easy for you to say, all perched up as a VC
It’s easy to say for anyone who has read the history of political violence. When that comes on the table, universally [1], the people with power also have the power to raise armies. The people who stand to benefit from violent insurrection, today, are the oligarchs.
This happens every time because it’s obvious. If CEOs getting killed is normal, then activists against those companies getting killed is normal too. A lot more people will kill for a million dollars than because they hate some guy.
[1] Apart from early 20th century Communist revolutions, where elites actually suffered.
Here in Sweden, political violence by the farmer class ensured that by the end of the pre-democracy era, self-owning farmers held 50% of the land, whereas in Denmark, it was only 10%.
This was due to violence, serious, organized war-like violence; and yes, of course the government brought in mercenaries, noble forces, etc. but fighting the farmer class had a substantial cost, and that they were willing to impose that cost gave them better conditions.
Killing guys at the bottom is very different from killing somebody at the top. If people are killing activists, journalists etc. that is always oppression. If people are killing people at the top it can be either way, depending on whether they are put there by some large grass-roots phenomenon or are trying to run society from the top of a pyramid, but in your argument you are placing these things as equal, you say:
>If CEOs getting killed is normal, then activists against those companies getting killed is normal too
and this is false. It is so false I don't quite understand how anyone can write it.
This works. Disciplined, organized violence. Lone wolves shooting at homes and gunning down healthcare middle managers does not.
> this is false
It’s deeply precedented.
>It’s deeply precedented.
Ah, we are confused about what we mean. You mean that workers, activists etc. will be killed. I mean that their killing is oppression, whereas the killing of non-grassroots supported people at the top of power pyramids, isn't.
But that isn't the point: you are in fact right, I am right too, but the thing I want to say is: the oppression of workers, activists, journalists etc. that might be triggered by the destabilizing violence is necessary in order to get the reaction.
When a person who understands destabilization does it, he of course wants to trigger this oppression, and for that oppression to trigger the organized war-like stuff.
Reading and understanding do not always go along, though.
The more likely result is either that every member of the board and c-suite ends up on death row, or in a grave. There are far more people willing to avenge loved ones than there are people willing to kill for money.
The way I see it, the pragmatic choice is to prefer to see Americans attack themselves because a divided America is less of a threat to my country.
Sometimes less civilized countries fall into civil war, sometimes they invade neighbours. If you're the neighbour which would you prefer?
Is that a reasonable perspective to you?
I doubt they’re on this forum.
> Clearly you're not a fella who's faced much hardship in life
Ha. Putting my own past aside, I’ve found it’s folks who grew up never knowing violence who are the quickest to embrace it.
> They already do
There is always more.
But even if the DA prosecutes, the jury can nullify the charges, which is a risk. What happens when a jury finds the accused not guilty?
The masses will only tolerate so much before the elite start dying. See all of human history.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36497537
This information of course might be false, so take the words below with a grain of salt. I might be completely wrong.
When an influential group in the Valley that has ties to many tech companies spends years speading rhetoric about “bombing data centers” or the title of the book above, I fear this kind of psychosis is inevitable. People in this thread are focusing on labour and AI issues as the motivation but I am afraid the problem might be closer to home.
Disclaimer: I am not American, just an outside observer.
Some random people with a gun and a Molotov aren't even the same (metaphorical) book.
* likely still better than me though, even on this specific measure. But even being the ten thousandth best speaker on the planet, out of 8 billion, leaves you at a huge disadvantage compared to the best.
> bombing data centers
At the risk of demonstrating the exact mistake I've just accused Yudkowsky and Altman of:
With B-52s, not as a DIY job with home-made Molotovs.
If you start with the claim "AI has the potential to cause as much harm as nuclear weapons", and "the USA already uses B-52s to enforce the non-proliferation treaty", this follows naturally.
If you're not willing to call on your representative to sign a binding international treaty to stop data centres that forcefully, talking about "stopping AI" or "pausing AI" seems hollow, because even if your government agrees to not build data centres near you as a result of low-grade domestic terrorism, in the absence of a credible threat to use a B-52 on someone else's sovereign territory there's nothing that you and your flaming rag in a bottle of petroleum distillate can do about them being built outside your country, in exactly the same way and for exactly the same reasons that German public opposition to nuclear weapons completely failed to influence North Korea.
How many people believe continued AI "progress" would be so dangerous that it should be prohibited? 136,513 people signed a statement to that effect:
https://superintelligence-statement.org/
The name of the man that threw the Molotov cocktail is Daniel Alejandro Moreno-Gama, and "Daniel Moreno" is one of the signatures on the statement. I concede that his motivation almost certainly was to try to slow down AI "progress".
Full stop, no "but". That's all that needs to be said on this thread.
Here in Sweden, back in the 1400eds etc. the farmers often made war on the government whenever it did anything they didn't like. This had the long term consequence, that by the end of this era, self-owning farmers owned 50% of the land in Sweden, whereas in Denmark, which did not have this kind of violence, it was only 10%.
It's incredibly important to be feared and to engage in violence, so that you are in practice and can threaten your political opponents, and this remains true in a democracy.
It's important that powerful people know they can't trust that they will truly be protected by the laws if they do something which harms others-- that the veneer of civilization is thin and the masses dangerous. Otherwise you end up with very dangerous situations where people can get away with anything that's legal.
The long gone history of a country is not a something that should be allowed to determine its modern narratives. You shouldn't forget your history, but there are limits you shouldn't cross. When I hear arguments going back for centuries, it is a red flag for me. It is most likely a propaganda.
Psychologists talk about two common failing of their clients. People often fixate over the past or they fixate over the future, while forgetting about the present. The healthy approach is to keep a good balance between the past, the future, and the present, with a strong accent on the present. The history determinism reminds me a lot of the over-fixation on the past, and propaganda actively tries to unsettle balances in people's minds and fixate them on anything but the present.
Back to the argument that historical determinism is flawed…
I think it’s very reasonable to say that it happened in the past, therefore it probably will happen in the future. That’s the basis for pretty much any kind of prediction.
If you want to argue against historical determinism, you have to make the specific argument for why the current state is different enough that we can’t use the past to predict the future.
That’s just an example of American propaganda
No. My logic applied here would imply that environtal unconsciousness can produce results becuase we got here by being environmentally unconscious. And that is true, burning coal for energy, while unsustainable, does produce results. Youll get energy, on demand, in a controlled manner.
Now, we should be careful doing it, but if you go to an amazonian tribesperson and yell at them for burning wood for a fire, becaise solar panels exist, then thats doesnt make complete sense
When a State becomes undemocratic, it can more easily wield that violence against its own people. Part of the founding ideals of the US is the hope that the people would oust such a State, explicitly through the threat and application of violence if necessary, thus the second amendment.
you can disagree that this was necessary, which I'd agree with.
You can't call yourself a democracy just because we can change the colour of the same bus every 3 to 4 years
Not playing at all makes you easier to beat still. Anyone pining for civil war should vacation in a war zone first. It’s difficult to encapsulate the privilege of peace until it’s been lost.
Keep pushing your state investigators. Work to flip the House. And keep protesting and disrupting the browncoats.
Alex Pretti did more to stop ICE than anyone e.g. killing an individual ICE agent would do.
Good grief, I wonder if it's held up. Oh, early Whedon, it's sure to have that "creepier than Tarantino" vibe at times, but maybe it'd be an interesting rewatch. Seeing a young Nathan Fillion is its own reward, certainly.
I completely agree. But political violence increasingly polarises the outcomes to those two. (The elites can buy gunmen faster than you or I can.)
California has a referendum system. Get an AI measure on the ballot. Companies that are doing the things Anthropic got fired for refusing to provide are banned from doing business in the State of California. (Or with the State. Find a balance that gets the votes.)
Something is fundamentally broken when the sitting president of the United States pardoned thousands convicted in a court of law of attempting to use violence to achieve political ends.
No wonder people are increasingly recognizing that democracy is now broken.
You’re describing harm. Violence involves physical force against living things. Delineating there concepts is useful.
The last thing I want is for someone, in 2029, to say "but LLMs just weren't given a fair chance last time, we would have definitely reached AGI with more funding if it wasn't for [targeted attack]"
Didn't work for a german political party some centuries ago, don't work for this.
But violence is false.
- OpenAI made a deal with the Pentagon (fair)
- OpenAI changed their business model from non-profit to for-profit (fair?)
- Sexual assault allegations by his sister. Sam Altman denies this and it's currently before a court.
- Overpromised AI to investors (everyone does this)
- Lobbying against regulations (I support)
- Some vague accusations of "being a liar" and a "sociopath" by his competitors Ilya Sutskever and Dario Amodei.
- He doesn't know how to code (lol)
Is there anything that I'm missing? Does he put ketchup on his pizza?
That's it, I don't think much of the rest has any weight outside internet forums like this one.
*I've seen people using copilot and calling it "chatgpt".
It'd be one thing if he was just promising more than he could actually deliver, but he went further, making promises of buying up unrealistically large chunks of the global RAM supply, causing everyone else to suffer, with no remorse.
There's also WorldCoin. I don't think a decent person would continue to push such an awful, untrustworthy system. This is a supposedly privacy-focused project that several countries are investigating for privacy violations and has been found to be in violation of privacy laws in some of them.
It's almost as if he goes out of his way to do as much harm to the world as he thinks he can get away with while maintaining the facade of just doing business. I don't think he's the antichrist, I think Peter Thiel is the closest to deserving that description.
one US mindset I can't wrap my mind around
> compare salaries
Let's not even begin this trope prevalet on HN, those taxes are funding a working healthcare and public infrastructure in EU.
That certainly helps. You could also add talent concentration due to excellent universities and top-tier companies already being here. But the truth is that you can incorporate a business in less than a week here, employment is at-will, there are no unions or other such bullshit, taxes are low, the general way you deal with regulator is ask for forgiveness instead of ask for permission, etc.
Say I'm currently working on a project in the crypto or AI space. If I wanted to make it into a commercial product, do you think I'm gonna go to France or Germany? It might take me a few weeks just to get past the first layers of red-tape to get a business licence there. If I hire someone who turns out to be incompetent, I'm probably stuck with them until I gather enough evidence to justify firing. And I have to live in constant fear of the state deciding my business is illegal.
> funding a working healthcare
Btw the US healthcare system is the best in the world if you can afford it. Health insurance is usually provided through the employer. I can have an appointment with a doctor within days, emergency room wait time is on the order of minutes. Never had a problem with the quality of care.
> talent concentration, excellent universities and top-tier companies
This is all just a consequence of above. And note that talent in US historically was mostly gen 1-2-3 immigrants.
> incorporate a business in less than a week
This is one is important. EU strives for it, but I think the reasons lie in the different worldview, see below.
> no unions or other such bullshit > taxes are low > if I hire someone who turns out to be incompetent > best healthcare
See, you purely view this topic as someone wanting to minmax gains, profit, effort. Yes, this is easier to do in the US right now.
What kind of world do you build with all this? What does it all lead to? I envision something like futuristic Mexico where a few lucky get in the top ~30% who can afford healthcare and education, and live in gated apartment communities, businesses are owned by the top 2%. The rest of the population works in gig jobs and farms (and are a nuisance, until automation makes them unneeded).
How much of the US popultion has realistic access to that "best healthcare"? Children, elderly, disabled?
If it were up to "free markets", there would be no 5 day workweek, if you were born with one arm you'd die in a ditch, and cartelling businesses would be free to exploit the population, their privacy, time and assets at their will (just click agree on our T&C).
Do you care about these issues? You must not, you're a businessman and want to do business. But the state certainly should. And I wouldn't live in a state which doesn't. This is what everyone in the EU gets with your taxes. It's far from great, varies per member country, but this is the general idea. And this is something that US tech industry people have a hard time to get, who just look at comp levels think money and enough hustle can solve anything for anyone.
I recommend you to travel and see other types of societies. But even the US itself will undergo a massive change in the next decade with how its old powers, influx of people and world economy grasp evaporates.
I actually travel pretty often to Europe and have lived there for extended periods of time. I have family and hold the passport of an EU member state.
I'm going to try to be 100% fair: people in Europe are generally poor and they don't realize it. Salaries are very low, but the cost of living is almost equivalent. I am currently enjoying a quality of life that I don't think I could have built anywhere else in the world within a single generation. If I wasn't grinding constantly, I could afford to go on vacation pretty much anywhere on earth for a few weeks without thinking about how much I would be spending. If I stopped working tomorrow, I could coast on my savings for years without cutting any expense. I will be able to pay tutors and private schools for my children without hesitating. And I'm not saying this to brag, because it is frankly not that special. I'm nowhere near the private jet class. This is "middle class" here. Almost everyone who worked in this industry (Bay Area or NYC) for a few years could tell you something similar. Tesla and BMWs are not luxury cars, the parking lot of my building is filled with them. Everyone hates tipping culture, but we tip 20-25% because it's just a rounding error and it makes the servers happy so might as well. I'm not sure if "free healthcare" can really make up for this.
It is also great to be surrounded by people who are ambitious and really value performance. The US is one of the only places in the world where high performance is rewarded to this extent. For me, this is a huge factor, and I don't think I would have learned as much as I did in the last few years if I was anywhere else.
But sure, there are tradeoffs. When my wife gave birth, she got 3 months of paid maternity leave. 3 months is considered generous here and it is a benefit provided by her company. Not everyone gets even 3 months.
And I can't deny that every time I land in Europe I go through the "this is so beautiful, I should really move here" phase. It's nice to be able to walk around or take public transit and not need a car. It's nice to hang around in a nice park instead of a shopping mall.
If Europe is more your kind of vibe, I don't judge you. But don't judge me either for valuing other things.
> See, you purely view this topic as someone wanting to minmax gains, profit, effort
My position is more nuanced, but in general, I believe that technological progress is what increases the standard of living for everyone. Competitive free market capitalism, with all its flaws, is currently the best system we have to continue moving forward.
- Barely gave 1% of compute (on oldest chips) to safety team after promise of 20%
- Worked behind the scenes to try to land federal deal that gives mil no guardrails control and ability for mass surveillance
- Lied about China AI 'Marshall Plan' to get federal funding
- Tried to get MBS money ever after Jamal Kashoggi
While long, I'd recommend just reading the New Yorker article
> Callous disregard of lost jobs, disinformation, mental health issues / deaths, IP theft, environmental cost, skill atrophy
ChatGPT is a tool that changed people's lives. OpenAI released something that wasn't perfect, for free, and forced all their competitors to release these products publicly.
You can't stop technological progress to protect old jobs, or because you are afraid people are gonna misuse it. I'm fascinated how many grown adults want to be treated like children their whole lives, but more nefariously, they want to impose this on others who want more freedom and agency.
As for IP "theft", all I'm gonna say is: fuck intellectual property as a concept and the whole parasitic industry that grew around it. The only contribution of IP has been to stifle innovation and set our civilization back by decades. Making IP obsolete and unenforceable has been one of the best things to come out of LLMs and one of the great catalysts of the scientific, technological, and creative advancements that are coming in the near future. For that alone, Sam Altman deserves a statue, no matter what his other flaws are.
IP can hurt or help depending on the industry - how do you enable R&D-heavy industries like pharma to recoup costs over time without something like this? I don't see how you incentivize innovation without the concept but I'm open to reforms like not resetting patent timelines for minor tweaks, etc.
I personally object from him trying to divert trillions in investment from potential helping the hungry type stuff which is popular to sticking slop in everything which many don't want.
It is not just a question of morality. A sociopath with that amount of power can be a danger.
You probably think that "sociopathy" is an incurable disease which would make him some sort of vampire. This is pure bs. The way these "personality disorders" are diagnosed is the same as taking a buzzfeed personality quiz. This is not very rigorous stuff, I would even classify it as pseudoscience. As a tangent, I really despise how they are using greek and latin roots to prompt into our brains that what their models are describing is in any way similar to actual pathologies.
So yeah, maybe Sam Altman is generally a dishonest person if we believe what Ilya Sutskever, Dario Amodei, and others are saying. If that's the case (I have no reason to doubt it), he should stop lying and manipulating people, there are more satisfying ways to achieve one's objectives.
But the "sociopath" label is pure bs, along with the rest of those "personality disorders". That shit is more dangerous and harmful than a million lying Sam Altmans.
Yes, violence shouldn't be the first resort, and when violence is unleashed innocent suffer as well, but there is a great difference between choosing not to use violence due to whatever consideration, and being so toothless and tamed that a sight of dog that finally bites when being constantly beaten sickens you.
We're not on first resort anymore, people are dying because they cannot afford living.
The threat to AI far exceeds any benefits I can see.
If 95% of jobs go away, the destabilization leads to violent conflicts, and power and wealth become more centralized does it really matter if we have better healthcare or automated cars? Will people have purpose in their lives? Will this be a better world for most?
So are we seeing a massive lobbying effort by Altman and OpenAI to make this happen? Or is this another "maybe we can build a dyson sphere?"
OpenAI was a nonprofit and then it was restructured to be a for-profit corporation. That seems like the opposite of what he claims to advocate for if we look at his actual actions.
What I instead see is a massive system of rents that will be affordable only by other businesses who replace their workers and leave tons of people out in the cold with no income and minimal access to these tools.
Violence can solve problems. This kind of violence is stupid, counterproductive and immoral.
Strategically deploying violence takes time, resources and discipline. Wanking off with a gun does not.
Right before we see drone body guards and protest monitors gun down innocent bystanders.
What us cushy engineers haven't realized yet is that the gradient for who are well off are sliding more and more towards one end. Sooner or later engineers will be on the wrong side of that gradient.
Finally someone who said it. There was this quote I saw in the movie "Air"(about michael Jordan) about how people with true wealth only ever part with it not out of charity but out of greed. It takes someone or something truly special to force them to part with that money.
This whole era that we've lived through, where software engineers have amazing working conditions compared to blue collar workers and manage to pull ahead in society, helping to form a white collar elite class, is an aberration caused by the miracle of the microprocessor and Moore's Law. The elites saw the opportunity to obtain so much wealth from the lower classes(in the form of automating labor with computers) that they were forced to part with a bit of it, allowing some special people: software engineers like you and me to achieve what we consider a middle class life.
But sooner or later those same people will want that wealth back. They will continue to fight and find ways to take that wealth back: whether through H‑1B visas, "learn to code" initiatives to increase supply, or now AI. AI could very well crash and burn tomorrow but they will be back, and it will be an ongoing battle for the rest of our lives.
The elites after the French Revolution were not only mostly the same as before, they escaped with so much money and wealth that it’s actually debated if they increased their wealth share through the chaos [1].
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/650023
The comment refers to an article specifically discussing only one aspect of a major historical event.
The French revolution is considered one of the most important events in the history of Europe, because of the great impact it had on the (among others) politics, economy and the quality of life of common people.
Downplaying its importance by trying to water its impact down to "but rich still rich, no?" is a sign, that the comment might have been made in bad faith or without proper understanding of the source material.
I’ve never argued some upward mobility wasn’t permitted by the revolution. I’m just pushing back on the notion that elites should fear an American revolution. They don’t, because historically, they shouldn’t. Nine times out of ten they’ll consolidate power among themselves, which means more wealth flowing upwards. Nine times out of the rest of the time, they’ll escape with most of their money.
And for the average Frenchman, the revolutions were terrible. Some folks win. But they were seldom powerless before. Just wealthy. Compare that to the British case, where land and electoral reform permitted the emergence of a broad middle class, one that continued accruing power for another century.
What the British did. Tale of Two Cities. Land and electoral reform.
One of them stayed geopolitically relevant for another century. One of them became Germany’s sock puppet.
Mostly by conquest. Not revolution, certainly not the popular kind.
By the same token, the normal populace was also way better off after the French Revolution, since using the money and wealth of the dead elites to improve everyone's lives made a substantial impact on the French civilization that they are still benefiting from today.
In other words...the French Revolution is exactly the wrong type of example you want to be using when talking about whether violence against tech elites is acceptable.
Ish. Most survived. And they didn’t have jets. Revolutions today are broadly accretive for elites.
All the jets in the world won't stop the violence once that bridge is crossed. Because the mob also has access to jets, and boats, and (at that point) an emotional reason to pursue their targets to the ends of the earth.
Ish. Most survived. And they didn’t have jets.
You have a very VC/tech-bro/Theranosesque definition of "most survived". More than 2/3rds of the French aristocracy was killed in the French Revolution. Even the low bound using just the official numbers puts almost half of the aristocrats having been executed or died in prison during the French Revolution.
Revolutions today are broadly accretive for elites.
They aren't, unless you're referring to the weapons dealers, warlords, or the complicit. Revolutions tend to have outsized impacts on reducing the wealth of elites. The only exceptions are where the elites were part of the security apparatus on the side that won the conflict and gained their wealth by murdering the people who had what they wanted. The inevitable result though is that when they lose that power, they tend to lose their lives (see e.g., Syria and South Africa).
…why? Most of Silicon Valley’s elites are itching for violence in politics. To the degree they’re putting thumbs on the scale, on the net, it’s for more violence.
> the mob also has access to jets
No. It doesn’t. In zero civil breakdowns in the last half century did the mob get the jets during breakdown. The closest one can get is the Taliban seizing U.S. materiel.
> More than 2/3rds of the French aristocracy was killed in the French Revolution
Source? The majority of those killed were commoners.
> They aren't, unless you're referring to the weapons dealers, warlords, or the complicit
Complicit. A breakdown in violence would give the authoritarians a bona fide Reichstag fire.
> inevitable result though is that when they lose that power, they tend to lose their lives (see e.g., Syria and South Africa)
The former president of Syria is in Russia. Much of the South African elite is complaining about white genocides in the U.S.
I agree this is a symptom of large systemic issues.
Long gone are the days a bumbling fool could get a well paying job at the local power plant and provide a good life for a wife and three children, with a large home, decent insurance and two cars.
also, if the worst case scenario does happen and most of the population finds itself without money. there are other ways to live with very little money.
This is even more hideous than expressions of approval for individual violence. This is a dystopian acquiescence.
In the worst-case world, there is still more than enough wealth and work done to provide the bare minimum quality of life to everyone. The automation of most occupations would lower the bar of creating the simplest food supplies and homes even more. But, in that horrific world, the elite class would say "lol no" and use that wealth to live in paradise, away from everyone else, while the rest are left with almost nothing. The parent is saying that your immediate reaction is depressing, because instead of anger or even disapproval, your instinct is to put your head down and reason that you and all the future generations should just live like a monkey, forever.
If I knew someone was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars building a big laser pointed at my house, I would not wait for "quantified evidence" of its effect to take some sort of action. The only real debate is what kind of action.
> also, if the worst case scenario does happen and most of the population finds itself without money. there are other ways to live with very little money.
If you have so little attachment to your money, why hold on to it at all? Do not be upset that other people are operating on a slightly larger time horizon than you are, and are interested in their livelihood not just today, but three or five years from now.
Well, I tried to warn my family and friends and they're looking at me like I'm crazy. So yes, I think most people will just treat all their layoffs like it's just a regular recession. Until, at least half your friends are laid off, most people won't be any more alarmed than if in a recession.
>> If you have so little attachment to your money, why hold on to it at all?
You'll need whatever you have left. The barter economy won't take the place of the primary economy, rather it will supplement it with transactions between members who have no currency. but, there will always be some things that you want to get from the primary economy, if you can.
The same thing happened with Kirk. Everyone standing up to "mourn" a neo-nazi, fake tears, rolling with the grift. Rolling with the white supremacist grindbox.
It's gross.
I don't know if they are right, neither in world view nor conclusion. But it seems this is the world we currently lived in. This is one of the cases where for once i wish there was a manifesto to read, because i badly want to understand why
Is this a bit?
He isn’t, never has and never will. I know some of the bunker people. They basically have them in the way you or I might have a fancy tool in the garage or piece of art. It’s a discussion piece for a different class of wealth.
Shock collars / implanted brain bombs would be my evil plan, but he's got smarter people than me on this so who knows?
The thing about rights is you believe in them universally or you don’t believe in them at all. If we have a right to life, sympathy isn’t relevant. Awful people can be awful, but if we start compromising their rights then we deface all of our freedoms and security.
I know what you mean, of course, but it's just not true in honesty - when pressed, there are no binaries in morality, as romantic and proud as the idea is. "Violence is never the answer" is both true and also irrelevant once a person is asked to consider the existence of his very way of life, his values, his livelihood, his culture, his home, or other resources historically at the center of revolutions.
That statement is factually false. Sometimes violence is the answer. But we’re a social species. One-off violence is pretty much never the answer unless you need a short-term solution to e.g. entrapment.
I didn’t say rights are absolute. Just universal. The process for abrogating them must be just that—a process you’d wish to be visited upon you. Unilateral action destroys the idea of a right.
So I disagree with your axiom that you have to believe in them 100% or 0%.
One hundred percent of those debates end at process, not unilateral action. If it can be unilaterally nullified, it is no longer a right.
> you have to believe in them 100% or 0%
Not degree but range. We don’t have a right to infinite life or medicine. But everyone has to have the same level of right for it to be a right. Otherwise I can disagree with your right to a right and nullify it on my own terms.
1. We shouldn't kill or harass or destroy the property of someone like Altman. AKA, I'm not in disagreement with your take on abiding by the laws of the land.
2. But it's not surprising that such things happen to individuals like him, for reasons outlined. Put it this way - if I was in his position, I would be very wary of my public image, and I'd be very wary of my intentions - am I acting for the greater good, or only for my own good?
Of course it's possible he's actually acting with the best of intentions and is just terrible at presenting himself, which is one of the reasons I'd agree with due process and respecting his rights.
It’s understandable. But that also justifies a crackdown against it. I want to see AI regulation. Dumbfucks shooting a housekeeper in Sam Altman’s house is only going to stall that.
No you don’t. Terrorists and dictators are routinely martyred. You just need symbolic value. The actual person rarely represents their canonized form.
It is not okay. But if we don't have any solution to the ramifications of what really is "AGI" then it unfortunately won't be the last.
Welcome to "AGI".
As we discuss policy ideas to pump the breaks on a domestic level, I hope we balance that against the arms race that's happening around the world.
You get comments like "violence is bad but we would not have $x if not for violence" and then you get to justify violence for any pet cause they have.
I expect to see more of this until it dies down because of how ridiculous the premise is.
Violence never solves anything. You will never make anything in this world better by becoming a worse person than your enemies.
I have seen anti-AI sentiments from people known all over the spectrum.