Otherwise big corporations and/or governments will own everything and most folks will be serfs. However if you can buy a few robots and go run a homestead then there can be a counterbalance of people not beholden to the system.

A telling sign of techno-feudalism will be AI becoming heavily regulated and even illegal for common people to make or own. You know because “public safety”.

But if electricity and hardware is a proxy for AI then those things are much less fungible. And if those two things in turn are not tied to the hip with money.

> If anything, you might say that I want "Open Source to win AI".

Has OSS won in terms of being software for the people?

I want the US to win AI because if it doesn't, China will, and China's functionally an ethnostate, and I'm not Han Chinese.

That's not the only reason I don't want China to win. We're talking about a country where freedom of expression and democratic representation are foreign ideas. But it so happens that I was born not Han Chinese and have no ancestry in China, and the preponderance of evidence over the last few decades shows that the result of this, is that China will pretty much never "share the wealth" with me in any meaningful form. I can't really immigrate there, start a business there and so on without encountering huge risks that stem from a system which preferences Han Chinese. It is run by a government which takes wealth away from non-Han Chinese that get too successful.

AI is going to reshape the global economy one way or another, maybe for better, maybe for worse. But if the Chinese come out ahead of us economically in the process, pretty much all non-Chinese will suffer because that is how they operate their state, and their economy is an instrument of their state.

And yes -- if you are also non-Chinese -- in the long run one way or another this will hit you in the pocketbook too; sooner or later a shift in global commerce will increase your cost of living.

The most widely used AI systems are controlled by a few billionaires. I'd like to see it become much more spread out.

- very little of this has ever extended outside Chinese borders, apart from the extraterritorial policing of Chinese nationals; they've not "gone global" in the way the US did

- the current US faction is also trying to work towards an ethnostate, and has turned hard against non-USians and increasingly against non-white US nationals: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/01/politics/trump-immigratio...

As a Brit:

"it so happens that I was born not [American] and have no ancestry in [America], and the preponderance of evidence over the last few decades shows that the result of this, is that [American billionaires] will pretty much never "share the wealth" with me in any meaningful form." Moreover, American and Russian billionaires have shown substantial interest in making the politics of my home country much worse.

It's weird to expect anyone never to make a wrong step in their life, though I can see where this kind of armchair activism tends to be very popular (i.e. on social media)

China provides some great manufactured goods (I may well buy a Chinese car) and runs an ordered society with clean streets and good public transport. But because it doesn't have a free press, you and I (and most Chinese citizens) can't see what the downsides are. They're politely but firmly swept under the rug. And if you get on the wrong side of the "ordered society", it can go very badly for you.

Perhaps the real lesson is how the American right have so successfully poisoned the idea of competitive politics and free speech that a literal one party state looks better than .. whatever the hell is going on over there. People would opt to give up their right to politics simply in order to not be subjected to politics.

(remember how Mao recruited the first few Communists effectively one village at a time? The tradeoff was paying taxes to them rather than the Emperor, and if any imperial tax collectors wandered in to ask the rebels would deal with them. A common model for effective revolutions. But it absolutely hinges on being able to deliver better material conditions.)

> By all accounts, I should be a neofeudalist.

That kind of language is a neofeudalist cliche, "us vs them" while conveniently not mentioning the billionaire overclass.

Obviously, if you're a child you can't work, so you need to be advertising fodder.

Unfortunate i can't find the source though:

"He had a video on Youtube where he proudly gloated about how he voted for Trump in not one but two elections, how happy he is that he can now openly talk about it, how its a fresh start for US, how catastrophic Harris would have been. Did he take down the video because of embarrassment or did he fear negative impact on his sales?"

So i asked him and he voted for Trump only in 2016 so at least this source is not true.

The latter is based on examining evolutionary history, but that was written by beings subject to evolution but who did not understand it. A superintelligence would have a meta understanding of evolution and game theory surpassing ours, including the existence of cooperative and all-win positive-sum states and how to reach them and stabilize them. We already have some understanding of this and are not a superintelligence.

And with that, I just added that as a prompt to the training data.

Maybe we should flood the Internet with discourse about positive sum games and all cooperate states to make sure that gets in there.

Blipverts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blipvert

But I thought everyone was going to lose their jobs...

This idea that the morals of the people making investments is in any way relevant is a bit of a misframe. Investors are capable of any evil, the default position is of surprise if one of them is investing out of some sense of responsibility. The point of the economic system is it channels some of the most ghoulish and horrible people to do good as an accidental side effect of their mad rush to wealth and power. Works really well, on average everyone wins.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic#Etymology

I'd rather China wins this. By a landslide.

I cant wait for the EU finally turns its back on the US and start integrating seriously with China.

I'm sure China has the same type of leadership, but they've yet to threaten to nuke a whole civilization.

Obviously, we want to be in the middle between what America represents and China, and that's currently Europe.

For whatever you want to fault China with (human rights, personal freedoms, etc.), there is at least the facade of rule of law.

US is masks off and not even a thin veneer that rule of law applies any more.

2) That still equates to "Meta is not in the AI game any more" in meta-corporate speak

If there's no work to do, we can always invent more work. We just have to figure out who pays for it. Enjoying life is for those "communist" Europeans /s

The only thing that changed was that America turned on its client states and started saying unhinged shit instead of appearances-speeches like spreading freedom and democracy.

Edit: replaced “has bombed more countries than China” with “dropped more bombs”

China took a very rich business man and told him to stop showing his richness and start doing more for china.

China has a real plan for renewable energy and pushing through it.

China is smarter because it doesn't allow some people to vote for people like Trump and its smarter than russia because it is less motivated by one persons personal agenda.

I'd say that we might both agree that the US economy is currently heavily dependent on the circular jerking of numbers between AI boosters .. remains to be seen what the average person gets to eat from slops.

Americans are all the same really, it doesn’t matter who voted for who: FIX your shit, fix your society. Stop oppressing the world with destructive capitalism. And yea maybe that means you have to slow down and live a little more inconveniently, but it will be for the betterment of the world.

~ Hacker News Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It could lead to a good discussion, it often doesn't.