The risks of AI, while mostly hypothetical, have been understood for years.
If they were really this concerned about the risks of AI re: the survival of the human race, they wouldn't have joined a company working in such a space to begin with.
I hate to be this cynical, but part of me wonders what the financial angle is here.
You have technically brilliant people working in a white-hot target for investment and who can draw a high salary. Anthropic is a hyper-scaler that has the moat of high hardware prices and very little else. Every day, that moat gets a little smaller, and FLOSS models get a little better at being "good enough" for the price. You're an Anthropic employee looking to jump on the next big wave since the wave Anthropic is riding is starting to peter out. You go on the record across the trades and news sites talking about how dangerous AI is. That creates a need for someone to make it less dangerous. In theory, you could satisfy that need, for the right amount of money.
Again, I hate to be this cynical, but... it's the tech industry.
Because people are apathetic by nature until things become a real problem.
It's not just Meta, either. How often do we have people on here talking about how amazing Chinese models are when the list of security breaches involving the Chinese government is extensive?
People want something easy, quick, and free. Do those things and they'll let you get away with anything.
Most Americans really, really don't. Gallup puts Americans' trust in major institutions, including several parts of the government, at around 30% [0]
In OECD countries, trust in government sits at around 39% [1]
I would say that most people in Western nations don't trust their government. Whether they agree with what all their governments are doing is another issue-by-issue matter, but I would guess they don't love that on the whole, either.
Its another to do something truly effective about it.
Alas, the American people seem to be utterly paralyzed. Catatonic, even.
When all it really needs is civic responsibility and an understanding that the government derives its power from the people, and thus the people always get the government they deserve.
> When all it really needs is civic responsibility and an understanding that the government derives its power from the people, and thus the people always get the government they deserve.
Look I encourage people to vote and participate in government and politics as much as possible, but it's extremely clear at this point that this is more and more untrue every day. The government derives it's power from billionaires now, and thus the people always get the government billionaires want. It may not be exactly the route they want, but it's the same end results.
Look no further for proof than the endless slew of city and county governments that capitulate to big tech and sign sweeping data center contracts without even notifying their constituents, intentionally ignoring the feedback they get, or simply silencing the dissenters when they speak at meetings. Even local government has been sold to the highest bidder.
This has frequently been true in American history though.
Think folks were thrilled with the robber barons of the railroad area also owning newspapers?
Imho, the core thing that worsened was the election system. Specifically, closed primaries and gerrymandering. Both because they disincentivize centrists and compromise.
Ranked choice, mandatory opening of party primaries, and a Supreme Court definition of unacceptable gerrymandering (mathematically-based) would get us better government.
> When all it really needs is civic responsibility and an understanding that the government derives its power from the people, and thus the people always get the government they deserve.
You've had people being apologists for all manner of bad forms of government around the world for at least the past 25 years. This shouldn't be surprising.
It's also clearly the wrong question for this decade. Private / public sector cooperation and all of the barriers between them that have been degraded and chipped away has left us with a very broken economic system that looks less and less like capitalism every day.
They say that and then act the opposite. The cognitive dissonance is astonishing. Consider the MAGA deep state narrative and how it literally now exists because of them.
Distrust of the government comes in different levels: you can be just distrustful enough to be skeptical yet accepting, and so distrustful that you actively try to vote the bums out. I don't think the polls distinguish between them.
Trump didn't bring the CIA and MI6 into existence. That's liberal cope from the years they spent yelling about how secret police were actually good now, because they didn't like Trump. Well now they like Trump - happy?
The Trump (read: Russell Vought et al.) playbook is transparently self-serving:
1. Complain loudly about weaponization of institutions
2. Use public support to "reform" those institutions
3. Weaponize those institutions against opponents
4. (Implied) Everyone forgets those institutions were previously less corrupt
The entire reason Trump spent so much time talking about the swamp was that his band always had every intention of furthering government corruption, albeit to his own ends.
That's a lot easier if you've first degraded public trust in institutions.
lol. Talk about cope. You just invented a strawman and assumed it was my position so that you could claim victory. I guess you don’t know many progressives because by and large the CIA has been considered problematic forever. But it wasn’t celebrated the way MAGA cheers for ICE.
I would encourage you to refrain from saying things like ‘lol. Talk about cope.’ here, let your argument stand on its own without baiting the other person into responding emotionally.
I’m not offering this advice because I’m perfect either, I find it difficult sometimes to be respectful of someone I disagree with. You can take it or leave it, I’ll just say editing those sorts of things out of my own posts has been helpful.
This is what happens when you let business school grads do whatever they want to make money; particularly, gutting the company over the long run without having to make considerations for the people who did the actual value creation.
If you had to award bonds and/or equity and severance to the people you laid off in order to lay them off, you might have to look beyond the quarterly bump you got for treating customers, vendors, and employees like crap.
Technically, they do already kill people for profit.
When some coked-out analyst in Manhattan projects what a company will be able to earn in profit in the next fiscal quarter, people listen to him and thus, the company must perform to that standard. Budgets are set accordingly.
If you have a maintenance backlog at a company facility, and that backlog includes things likely to cause injury or death to workers or the general public, that backlog must be handled in such a way as to satisfy that projection. If that means that you don't spend money to replace a series of gauges that alert operators as to overflow of a dangerous chemical, or don't hire enough people so that the operators are too fatigued to do their jobs safely, that's what that means.
The US CSB documents these as the cause of the 2005 BP Amoco Texas City disaster [0]
If you don't deliver the quarterly numbers expected, investors get mad, and in our current system and regulatory regime, that's worse than people being killed.
The schadenfreude is that, at least for OpenAI, they were originally set up to make open models.
They were set up as a public benefit company and their returns were capped at 100x. They (well, Sam) went out of their way to put themselves in this death march to the IPO. If they had just done what Mark Zuckerberg did with Muse, they're not in this position.
Do you know how bad you have to be at the tech business to make Mark Zuckerberg look like a prudent-yet-visionary leader?
If he knew how to wear a suit and answer questions from politicians, there are several regulatory penalties over the last decade that Meta doesn't have to pay.
The job of a CEO is to have a vision that is compelling for the market and an ability to execute upon it, thus the "executive" in "Chief Executive Officer". Zuckerberg doesn't have this. What he does have is an absolute majority of voting control over Meta's shares, so his actual ability to do his job doesn't matter.
It's almost as if creating incentivizing systems that don't hold people to account is a bad idea.
To them, the consent is using the device/service/whatever.
You see it in various bits of EULA and ToS all the time. "Continued use of <insert thing here> implies agreement with the license terms".
Now, is that at all feasible when you need a smartphone to do things like pay for parking in cities or to read menus at restaurants? No. Do the people in SV who think this way also try to wedge their products and services in every single nook, cranny, and crevice of our lives as a way to increase their net worth? Yes. Is this indicative that these people have severe antisocial or sociopathic tendencies that we, as a society, need to handle? I'm not a psychologist.
Well, at least with Flock, "Your elected leaders voted to enter the municipality into the contract."
For the other part, well, them being tried would require them to be in a jurisdiction where the local prosecutor actually has the courage to do his or her job.
As a non American, I don't think you can get back from this unless you get rid of the 2-parties system. Identity politics is a big component to what compelled individuals to operate against their own interests and those of their country. Good luck, though.
I am not an American either, but there is a great deal of work on this subject, and the two-party system is actually one of the most resistant to single-individual or single-party takeover. The reason is that multi-party systems are vulnerable to having a party in power 'promoting diversity' (or something similar), in order to disempower all their opponents, while making it look like they're allowing for more views. Examples of this include quotas for minority representation, and (strategically designed) multi-member voting districts.
I have that book and am a big fan of it, but I think it needs some expansion in the light of the last few decades - not just in the US, but considering Brexit and both major parties subsequently burning through strings of short-lived leaders, coalition politics in places like Europe and Japan etc.
well this book was written in 2003 and current day events in USA clearly contradict this statement : "two-party system is actually one of the most resistant to single-individual or single-party takeover."
With lots of examples of contrary , where multi party system has not devolved in one man shit show.
North Korea, China, Russia, Uganda, etc. are examples of one party taking over; the USA is just a country that has one party (you don't seem to like) with most (but not all) of the political power at the moment.
Japan occupied Korea from 1910 until 1945, at which point administration of the country was split between the USA in the South and the USSR in the north. Following an indecisive war lasted from 1950-53, the Korean peninsula ended up witht he situation we see today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_North_Korea
China's history is more complicated, but is also the product of military conflict following colonial imposition by Japan. To suggest that either country's political system is the outcome of inherent structural weaknesses in multi-party democracy is absurd.
I didn’t say that either of those two were the result of multi-party democracy; I was trying to give the GP a variety of examples of single-party government, with different origins.
Please note that the comment I replied to has been substantially modified since I posted.
I'm sure I'm missing something from the GGP being edited, but when you said 'are examples of one party taking over' it's hard to read that outside of a parliamentary/electoral context.
In multi-party systems, the parties focus more on weakening their opponents and horse trading, as voters are divided and winning elections is dependent on an already razor-thin voting share. Look what's going on in India, for instance.
Parliamentary systems of other countries usually have the advantages of lessons learned since the American revolution. The necessary feature of the American system is countervailing powers, but as a uniparty for corporations or one weakened, it ceases to function and cannot be easily reformed or competed against with a new party. These are flaws addressed to some degree by parliamentary systems where new party(ies) can challenge incumbents more easily.
Secondary to the extreme corruption. Corruption is the issue that must be resolved before everything else. The fashions of political parties or their structures are superficial by comparison.
It's not nature, it's the strategic actions of members of those parties to create and protect that system. For example, look at laws in states that make it very difficult for 3rd parties to get on ballots, participate in debates, and then the expensive lawfare against them if they show any signs of life.
> getting rid of the two party system is a pipe dream
It certainly won't happen tomorrow, but the best time to start such things is today.
The U.S. has a Green Party, a Libertarian Party. If they ever had a chance to take any serious votes from the other two, one of the two major parties would co-opt enough of their platform to make the threat go away.
As we seem to be seeing, the Democratic Party in the U.S. is in fact, internally, two parties. As populations age out, we'll likely see the party itself evolve.
They naturally evolve because we put them in an enviroment where they thrive. Changing voting systems to proportional representation instead of winner-takes-all would be a huge start.
Sure, and all it took was a systematic dismantling and building anew the whole government and a bunch of institutions, not exactly a "oh, the other party will figure something out over the course of the next term"
You have Jared Kushner pulling a lot of strings on one side, and you have his brother, Josh Kushner, giving enormous amounts of money to the other side.
They’re both incredibly evil. And it’s obvious that both sides completely disdain their civilian constituents, because their real constituents are corporations and oligarchs.
It’s not just the two party system. You have to get the money out out of politics before anything else can positively move back toward democracy.
Trying to establish ties with decent people in my community, physically staying in shape, training and learning. Ultimately, you have very little control over things when something large like government/societal collapse happens. All you can do is put yourself in a position where you can try to adapt to whatever may come.
>but some people need to spend a significant amount of their lives in prison.
Short of rewriting the constitution, that just isn't going to happen. The president is immune to prosecution for any crime committed in office and has unlimited power to pardon anyone else of any federal crimes.
And if the Democrats even attempt to do anything of the sort, people will just consider it a partisan witchhunt. It will be litigated all the way to a SCOTUS that's stacked with Trumpist ideologues.
People will correctly consider it a partisan witchhunt, but that is ultimately the only way back to "normal". Pack the court and start the prosecutions. Look at Hungary and Poland.
(The UK has the opportunity to do this before the fash get into power, but we can watch it being fumbled in real time)
Realistically this is what the Constitutional convention mechanism is for, but for the last several decades the Democrats have viewed any suggestion of employing it as a Republican plot and have opted instead for not having a plan and trying to prop up a creaky status quo.
> The president is immune to prosecution for any crime committed in office
That's a misreading of the SC decision. If he walks down the street and murders someone, unless he can make a case that it was an official act, then he wouldn't have immunity. He'd need to demonstrate that he has the Constitutional authority to murder people on the street, and he doesn't, so it wouldn't be an official act and he wouldn't have any immunity.
ok, so we managed to get a decision that the president wan't immune from having to pay out in a civil suit related to the molestation of a woman from before he even became a politician. but part of the problem here is the blurring of the personal and the official. should the president be liable for overtly violating the constitution 'while performing official acts'. Is interfering in the state's right to hold their own elections an official act? is instructing the military to order someone in cold blood an official act? does pursuing a series of novel legal interpretations imply that he was violating the law or not? is accepting money in exchange for a presidential pardon an official act?
whether or not you believe this is a pass from the Supreme Court, it opens up a whole new unexplored space of lack of culpability.
The point is that the state needs to flip enough that Trump would not be in a position to control what the state (the court actually) views as an official act.
If Trump continues to have enough influence in the SCOTUS after he's done being president, then yes, you could imagine they contort any action into an official act. But that'd be a failure of the next government to first establish a less biased SCOTUS (either by packing it or removing existing justices).
“Aye, scallywag, yer SCOTUS rulings reading ain’t fit for kindergarten; read the chart again: official acts may be immune, but private crimes still face prosecution.”
For a king, and one that presumes themselves king, every act is official. The theory is that Congress can always impeach but we have seen and still see that they have no interest in doing so for any reason, no matter how egregious.
I really can't find any other possible interpretation of their wall to wall decisions on anything election related. They are a knowing and enthusiastic participant in the coup.
Thomas is a born and bred loser, but otherwise they're afraid of being assassinated. Judges are under massive, massive amounts of threat whenever they think to hold Trump to literally any scrutiny whatsoever.
Not a conspiracy theory, this is an open discussion topic among federal judges within their own conferences.
Probably more loyalists than ideologues. It’s the Project 2025 influence that has the ideologues. And the Thiel/Vance sector has the traditional influence-focused corruption, while the Trump family is more low-trust-society personal enrichment grift.
That may be, but the consequences for not taking these bad actors to task would have worse and longer lasting consequences. The portion of society that will fracture the most loudly has already attempted to storm the seat of government after a national election. We've seen what they're capable of and I'm much less afraid of that than permanently mafiatizing basically every level of the Federal government.
Yes, but expect those prison sentences will be more popular than you might expect. The current admin expends an insane amount of energy pumping the size of their supposed fanbase.
Forgiving the south after the civil war led to Jim Crow. Forgiving most of the nazis after WW2 seems to be the reason nazis are rising again so quickly. Forgiveness has been given enough chances already. I think we should try giving the full punishment a try.
The British lacking the military strength and will is different from how the tactic would have been had it been executed fully. Ignoring one's views about the founding of America, suppose Britain had executed this war with complete merciless brutality and fielded its entire Imperial might and militarily crushed the rebels thoroughly. Do you think America would have existed then?
If they were really this concerned about the risks of AI re: the survival of the human race, they wouldn't have joined a company working in such a space to begin with.
I hate to be this cynical, but part of me wonders what the financial angle is here.
You have technically brilliant people working in a white-hot target for investment and who can draw a high salary. Anthropic is a hyper-scaler that has the moat of high hardware prices and very little else. Every day, that moat gets a little smaller, and FLOSS models get a little better at being "good enough" for the price. You're an Anthropic employee looking to jump on the next big wave since the wave Anthropic is riding is starting to peter out. You go on the record across the trades and news sites talking about how dangerous AI is. That creates a need for someone to make it less dangerous. In theory, you could satisfy that need, for the right amount of money.
Again, I hate to be this cynical, but... it's the tech industry.
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