This is pretty much the backstory of Dune. In the first novel, the character Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam says:
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
"[CCP General Secretary] finally commits fully to the big AI push he had previously tried to avoid. He sets in motion the nationalization of Chinese AI research"
> same level of intelligence as the top companies in the usa.
I would not be worried about it at all. These models are expensive to train and after shrinking the market for these models to just few entities, it will take centuries to just break even.
More often than not, money is never truly lost; it is just passed from one person's hand to another. I believe that with the help of the big tech companies, governments have found faster and better ways to move money from the hands of the many with little into the hands of the few with a lot. The layoffs are an example of this as coders, assitance and other white-collar workers are replaced by AI for low prices so as to save money, hence increasing the revenue for the few at the top.
Money can be lost - if lots of it are invested in endeavors that don't pan out, a good chunk of it simply gets wasted. As in: we really did have a bunch of money that we could have spent on many valuable things, but we didn't, so instead of food on the table we collectively get bupkis for it all.
How is money not zero sum? I agree prosperity as such isn't, but money, land, other things are limited. And wealth is only wealth because not everybody else has as much, right? As in, it doesn't matter if you have a dollar and I have 100, or you have 1 trillion dollars and I have 100 trillion dollars, it's the same difference.
I think that wealth is pretty much comparative, as you said, but I think that money (which I'm interpreting as an indentifier of worth, tell me if that's wrong) isn't zero sum. Price is (generally) proportional to value, measured in how much you stand to benefit by owning/selling/using an asset as compared to doing nothing. The physical dollar bill may have limited circulation at a moment in time, but value fluctuates. Supply up, value---and then price---down, assuming all other factors are constant. Value can be created and dissolve in weeks as it is intriniscally subjective---think fads and trends. One pair of jeans could be worth a couple hundred one day and be worthless the other. Thus, value and thus money is not zero sum.
The natural result of the populous twice electing a politician know for not paying his contractors for his 30+ years of running businesses into bankruptcy. Benefits go to the top, then actual workers get shafted.
In fact, money is printing every day more and more. So technically there is more of them every day. Which decrease their value and then we have inflation.
But, ideally, with each day, more useful products and services are being made and delivered. It'd be useful to have extra dollars around to account for more stuff being made and more things being done. Thus having more dollars in existence doesn't necessarily mean the value of a dollar is decreasing.
What does cause inflation, however, is when more dollars are printed versus things being made. You can't precisely measure the latter, so you have to make do with price indices and such. Which makes inflation hard to actually gauge, especially when everyone expects more and more to be produced every year (i.e. they expect their savings and investments to appreciate/gain interest) so you have to print more dollars to at least keep up the facade.
Innovation has pretty much always heightened the wealth disparity between the wealthy and the poor. A classical example would be the Industrial Revolution and America's guilded age, and another could be the circular investments between modern AI corpos (the whole nVIDIA, Microsoft, and OpenAI funding loop), which is probably a bad thing in the long run (systemic violence and class revolt). We have to walk this tightrope between the need for constant innovation and justice.
Because if spread equally and used responsibly, it raises quality of life for everyone. Generally speaking, the vast majority of people alive today have far easier lives than hunter-gatherers. There is less famine and starvation. There is less fatal disease, etc.
I think the point hodgehog was trying to make is that overall wellbeing increased. Famine is down, disease is down, wars are down, security up, well-being up. Innovation overall benefits everyone in the long run. Global scales aren't the problem---goods once reserved for the wealthy are being copied and produced at markedly lower prices, with examples such as EVs and drones. I realize that "overall" is doing some heavy lifting but I think it's rather unreasonable to dismiss the entirety of human technological progress as only benefiting the elite.
only if you assume capitalism is the only stable economic system. without wealth differences there is nothing other than your own abilities that can make access to tech unequal.
Not really, western countries were doing a lot of that in the 20th century (amongst themselves, anyway). Then the 80s happened.
Or what, do people think that the boomers were all that good, that they genuinely earned everything they got? The generations before just worked out how to govern properly.
Because, for example, no parents should lose their kids to leukemia.
At 17 y/o I was save from peritonitis / sepsis first misdiagnosed as harmless belly pain and hidden by painkillers. Then it became a matter of hours and from the moment the doctor saw me again and I undergo surgical operation, less than two hours happened.
My father got diagnosed a stage 3 bladder cancer with metastasis to the prostate about 3 years ago. He's still there and doing better.
That's why we need innovation.
And, no, science ain't a bag out of which you pick what suits you (medicine) and leave out what you don't like (the Internet / LLMs / etc.).
> And, no, science ain't a bag out of which you pick what suits you (medicine) and leave out what you don't like (the Internet / LLMs / etc.).
Uhhhh. Sure it is. We stopped nuclear weapons development. At best, rogue countries can catch up to where we are but there's no political will to build even bigger or more powerful bombs anymore. Thats an entire branch of science that we've literally cut off on a worldwide basis.
Science is, and must, be controlled to stay within the realm of useful to the people. The minute it is no longer serving us is the minute we should work on getting rid of it. Fortunately, science isn't a cohesive bathtub where everything must be thrown away with the baby. We can (and do) pick-and-choose what to develop.
Nuclear weapons development hasn't stopped outside of US. Maybe you mean it hasn't spread to any new countries lately... which is true but I wouldn't count on that lasting.
Both USA and Russia, have decided that ~Megaton Hydrogen Bombs are the biggest we're going to get and we don't plan to build anything bigger than that ever again.
The USSR wanted to make sure they were the ones who built the largest bomb of all time (the Tsar Bomba at 50 MTon). And after that, development on more ferocious weapons has stopped.
Because our economy is based on the sacred right to compound interest, and the only way this can work is with continuous growth. Lacking new markets, given the population growth is accelerating, the only way we can keep this running is by increasing consumption via new gadgets and innovation.
> Innovation has pretty much always heightened the wealth disparity between the wealthy and the poor.
In absolute terms however most poors in, say, the EU today live better than any king ever lived up until, say, the early 20th century (quality of clothes / bed, medicine, communication, knowledge, etc.).
I'd rather be working 8/5 at a gas station today (and then enjoy gaming or watching TV at home) then be an emperor with an infested tooth in the 17th century or a king with syphilis in the late 19th century.
True, I'd agree that my wellbeing today (as a member of a rich western country) is far more preferable to someone who lacks modern innovations. However, these innovations continue and will continue to help the rich far more than the poor. For example, medical treatments for life threatening conditions are still incredibly expensive. Even insulin, something so cheap to manufacture, is being gouged to eyewatering prices. The danger is that the disparity becomes so large that the rich become the only people who can afford these innovations, thus leading the innovations becoming only avalible to the rich and not the poor. Structural violence ensues and pretty bad things happen.
I cannot even describe in words how much I don't care about this. I'm actually looking the angles of why this is a very good thing, being that I'm a pro-craft activist who is completely opposed to the dangerous proliferation of LLMs.
Humanity enslaving AI. As well as the rest of humanity.
There is precedent that this kind of thing tends to be rejected when it boils over, but it's usually not pretty.
Which is why tech CEOs are often preppers. They could, you know, just not do this, but shareholders won't allow it, because nobody wants to lose their net worth to do the right thing. It's easier to blame others and build bomb shelters.
So, John Doe was recorded in 2025 in an anti Israel protest. Now John Doe is denied a Fable clearance and thus, he can't get a job at a shop that is cleared to Fable.
Really, I knew that AI had some risks, I just couldn't foresee this one.
The counter to this is how cheap it has become to build
with these tools as an individual. The same models used
by large companies are accessible via API to a solo
developer. Distribution is still the hard problem,
not access.
Check out Louis Chude Sokeis sound of culture - diaspora and blackb technopoetics" for the history and intertwinedness of the disoureses of race and machine and slavery.
Also I wonder how you suggestion of AI owned by everybody, as opposition to AI enslavedd by the few checks out under further scrutiny from the standpoint of logic in general and the aforementioned context specifically
It seems people will lose their jobs AND their small business too.
Small agencies won't have access to the best LLMs so their services will automatically require more time and manual labour, which makes them more expensive.
But, as far as I understand, Sentient was state AI built for the state. LLMs were built from everyone's data, given to everyone, and now may be locked away for the few
- two companies that have not proved themselves capable of producing any amount of money unless a larger amount is given to them...
- will combine with a government that is so domain-generally incompetent it is losing allies left, right and centre, has recently been humbled into giving a previously-controllable foe an unprecedented level of economic global power and cannot even organise itself a competent birthday party in one of the most important places on earth...
- and this combined entity will then operate a power system like no other, with the combined energies of a sociopathic Jobs wannabe, a man who only speaks in Tolkien analogies and a more-or-less-universally-loathed old man with undisclosed serious health problems, an obsession with gold paint and a vocabulary of maybe a hundred words
… then, OK, I guess.
But the economics don't really support it. The money to build and operate this power machine still has to come from somewhere, that money is drying up, and if AGI arrives, employment and consumer demand collapse and the money stops flowing.
There is a looming catastrophe but it is a sort of long economic winter in the tech industry, combined with a national economy that discovers that when that industry's money-go-round stops making line go up, it resembles its own late 1920s.
This is pretty much the backstory of Dune. In the first novel, the character Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam says:
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
Ask HN isnt really the place for hosting blog posts. Instead why not put this on an external site, expand on it a bit, and submit a link?
https://ai-2027.com/ has the following scenario predicted for mid-2026:
"[CCP General Secretary] finally commits fully to the big AI push he had previously tried to avoid. He sets in motion the nationalization of Chinese AI research"
Seem they only got the country wrong.
As a tech small business owner this is unfair that I can't be as smart by using the same level of intelligence as the top companies in the usa.
This policy just keeps the powerful in power.
And it's crazy because I already lost my job due to AI.
> same level of intelligence as the top companies in the usa.
I would not be worried about it at all. These models are expensive to train and after shrinking the market for these models to just few entities, it will take centuries to just break even.
Small business owner in the U.S. ?
More often than not, money is never truly lost; it is just passed from one person's hand to another. I believe that with the help of the big tech companies, governments have found faster and better ways to move money from the hands of the many with little into the hands of the few with a lot. The layoffs are an example of this as coders, assitance and other white-collar workers are replaced by AI for low prices so as to save money, hence increasing the revenue for the few at the top.
Money can be lost - if lots of it are invested in endeavors that don't pan out, a good chunk of it simply gets wasted. As in: we really did have a bunch of money that we could have spent on many valuable things, but we didn't, so instead of food on the table we collectively get bupkis for it all.
This kind of thinking is the root of most populist rhetoric - that money and wealth is zero sum and it just shifts hands.
This is false and a dangerous rabbit hole of an ideology to get into.
How is money not zero sum? I agree prosperity as such isn't, but money, land, other things are limited. And wealth is only wealth because not everybody else has as much, right? As in, it doesn't matter if you have a dollar and I have 100, or you have 1 trillion dollars and I have 100 trillion dollars, it's the same difference.
I think that wealth is pretty much comparative, as you said, but I think that money (which I'm interpreting as an indentifier of worth, tell me if that's wrong) isn't zero sum. Price is (generally) proportional to value, measured in how much you stand to benefit by owning/selling/using an asset as compared to doing nothing. The physical dollar bill may have limited circulation at a moment in time, but value fluctuates. Supply up, value---and then price---down, assuming all other factors are constant. Value can be created and dissolve in weeks as it is intriniscally subjective---think fads and trends. One pair of jeans could be worth a couple hundred one day and be worthless the other. Thus, value and thus money is not zero sum.
Difficult argument to make with the huge increase in wealth disparity the last several decades.
The natural result of the populous twice electing a politician know for not paying his contractors for his 30+ years of running businesses into bankruptcy. Benefits go to the top, then actual workers get shafted.
money is never truly lost
In fact, money is printing every day more and more. So technically there is more of them every day. Which decrease their value and then we have inflation.
But, ideally, with each day, more useful products and services are being made and delivered. It'd be useful to have extra dollars around to account for more stuff being made and more things being done. Thus having more dollars in existence doesn't necessarily mean the value of a dollar is decreasing.
What does cause inflation, however, is when more dollars are printed versus things being made. You can't precisely measure the latter, so you have to make do with price indices and such. Which makes inflation hard to actually gauge, especially when everyone expects more and more to be produced every year (i.e. they expect their savings and investments to appreciate/gain interest) so you have to print more dollars to at least keep up the facade.
Innovation has pretty much always heightened the wealth disparity between the wealthy and the poor. A classical example would be the Industrial Revolution and America's guilded age, and another could be the circular investments between modern AI corpos (the whole nVIDIA, Microsoft, and OpenAI funding loop), which is probably a bad thing in the long run (systemic violence and class revolt). We have to walk this tightrope between the need for constant innovation and justice.
Why do we need constant innovation?
It's inevitable. We can't stop innovating.
Because if spread equally and used responsibly, it raises quality of life for everyone. Generally speaking, the vast majority of people alive today have far easier lives than hunter-gatherers. There is less famine and starvation. There is less fatal disease, etc.
> Because if spread equally and used responsibly
That ‘if’ is Atlas carrying the entire world on its shoulders.
It should be clear by now that at global scales and with competing interests, the entire premise is impossible.
I think the point hodgehog was trying to make is that overall wellbeing increased. Famine is down, disease is down, wars are down, security up, well-being up. Innovation overall benefits everyone in the long run. Global scales aren't the problem---goods once reserved for the wealthy are being copied and produced at markedly lower prices, with examples such as EVs and drones. I realize that "overall" is doing some heavy lifting but I think it's rather unreasonable to dismiss the entirety of human technological progress as only benefiting the elite.
only if you assume capitalism is the only stable economic system. without wealth differences there is nothing other than your own abilities that can make access to tech unequal.
Not really, western countries were doing a lot of that in the 20th century (amongst themselves, anyway). Then the 80s happened.
Or what, do people think that the boomers were all that good, that they genuinely earned everything they got? The generations before just worked out how to govern properly.
The 80s happened because of the stagnation of the 70s.
> Why do we need constant innovation?
Because, for example, no parents should lose their kids to leukemia.
At 17 y/o I was save from peritonitis / sepsis first misdiagnosed as harmless belly pain and hidden by painkillers. Then it became a matter of hours and from the moment the doctor saw me again and I undergo surgical operation, less than two hours happened.
My father got diagnosed a stage 3 bladder cancer with metastasis to the prostate about 3 years ago. He's still there and doing better.
That's why we need innovation.
And, no, science ain't a bag out of which you pick what suits you (medicine) and leave out what you don't like (the Internet / LLMs / etc.).
> And, no, science ain't a bag out of which you pick what suits you (medicine) and leave out what you don't like (the Internet / LLMs / etc.).
Uhhhh. Sure it is. We stopped nuclear weapons development. At best, rogue countries can catch up to where we are but there's no political will to build even bigger or more powerful bombs anymore. Thats an entire branch of science that we've literally cut off on a worldwide basis.
Science is, and must, be controlled to stay within the realm of useful to the people. The minute it is no longer serving us is the minute we should work on getting rid of it. Fortunately, science isn't a cohesive bathtub where everything must be thrown away with the baby. We can (and do) pick-and-choose what to develop.
Nuclear weapons development hasn't stopped outside of US. Maybe you mean it hasn't spread to any new countries lately... which is true but I wouldn't count on that lasting.
Both USA and Russia, have decided that ~Megaton Hydrogen Bombs are the biggest we're going to get and we don't plan to build anything bigger than that ever again.
The USSR wanted to make sure they were the ones who built the largest bomb of all time (the Tsar Bomba at 50 MTon). And after that, development on more ferocious weapons has stopped.
Because our economy is based on the sacred right to compound interest, and the only way this can work is with continuous growth. Lacking new markets, given the population growth is accelerating, the only way we can keep this running is by increasing consumption via new gadgets and innovation.
Because I would like for a future with better health.
And technology is a great catalyst for that.
> Innovation has pretty much always heightened the wealth disparity between the wealthy and the poor.
In absolute terms however most poors in, say, the EU today live better than any king ever lived up until, say, the early 20th century (quality of clothes / bed, medicine, communication, knowledge, etc.).
I'd rather be working 8/5 at a gas station today (and then enjoy gaming or watching TV at home) then be an emperor with an infested tooth in the 17th century or a king with syphilis in the late 19th century.
True, I'd agree that my wellbeing today (as a member of a rich western country) is far more preferable to someone who lacks modern innovations. However, these innovations continue and will continue to help the rich far more than the poor. For example, medical treatments for life threatening conditions are still incredibly expensive. Even insulin, something so cheap to manufacture, is being gouged to eyewatering prices. The danger is that the disparity becomes so large that the rich become the only people who can afford these innovations, thus leading the innovations becoming only avalible to the rich and not the poor. Structural violence ensues and pretty bad things happen.
I cannot even describe in words how much I don't care about this. I'm actually looking the angles of why this is a very good thing, being that I'm a pro-craft activist who is completely opposed to the dangerous proliferation of LLMs.
> Not AI enslaving humanity.
Humanity enslaving AI. As well as the rest of humanity.
There is precedent that this kind of thing tends to be rejected when it boils over, but it's usually not pretty.
Which is why tech CEOs are often preppers. They could, you know, just not do this, but shareholders won't allow it, because nobody wants to lose their net worth to do the right thing. It's easier to blame others and build bomb shelters.
So, John Doe was recorded in 2025 in an anti Israel protest. Now John Doe is denied a Fable clearance and thus, he can't get a job at a shop that is cleared to Fable.
Really, I knew that AI had some risks, I just couldn't foresee this one.
The counter to this is how cheap it has become to build with these tools as an individual. The same models used by large companies are accessible via API to a solo developer. Distribution is still the hard problem, not access.
Check out Louis Chude Sokeis sound of culture - diaspora and blackb technopoetics" for the history and intertwinedness of the disoureses of race and machine and slavery.
Also I wonder how you suggestion of AI owned by everybody, as opposition to AI enslavedd by the few checks out under further scrutiny from the standpoint of logic in general and the aforementioned context specifically
It seems people will lose their jobs AND their small business too.
Small agencies won't have access to the best LLMs so their services will automatically require more time and manual labour, which makes them more expensive.
[delayed]
> But AI being captured, controlled, and used by governments and Big Tech for the benefit of the few.
If we're being perfectly candid, this was already happening before LLMs were a mass-market technology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentient_(intelligence_analysi...
I get your point.
But, as far as I understand, Sentient was state AI built for the state. LLMs were built from everyone's data, given to everyone, and now may be locked away for the few
If your primary concern is that:
- two companies that have not proved themselves capable of producing any amount of money unless a larger amount is given to them...
- will combine with a government that is so domain-generally incompetent it is losing allies left, right and centre, has recently been humbled into giving a previously-controllable foe an unprecedented level of economic global power and cannot even organise itself a competent birthday party in one of the most important places on earth...
- and this combined entity will then operate a power system like no other, with the combined energies of a sociopathic Jobs wannabe, a man who only speaks in Tolkien analogies and a more-or-less-universally-loathed old man with undisclosed serious health problems, an obsession with gold paint and a vocabulary of maybe a hundred words
… then, OK, I guess.
But the economics don't really support it. The money to build and operate this power machine still has to come from somewhere, that money is drying up, and if AGI arrives, employment and consumer demand collapse and the money stops flowing.
There is a looming catastrophe but it is a sort of long economic winter in the tech industry, combined with a national economy that discovers that when that industry's money-go-round stops making line go up, it resembles its own late 1920s.
"The leopard certainly wouldn't eat _my_ face!"
> to make intelligence available for everyone
say that again but slowly..