Maybe it’s my own lived experience coloring my perspective, but man the author feels like a centrist sitting upon an imagined moral high ground. “Violence is bad but inevitable” is the kind of milquetoast non-committal position one takes when they have nothing else to contribute to the discussion at hand.

My own take goes that one step further, as I said in a prior comment rebutting Altman’s whinging blog post:

> Your staunch refusal to heed the critiques of those you harm means that these outcomes were inevitable; not acceptable, not justifiable, but inevitable nonetheless. In a society where two full-time working adults still cannot afford a home, or children, or healthcare, or education, your insistence upon robbing them of their ability to survive at all is tantamount to a direct threat of violence against them. Your insistence that the pain is necessary, that others must clean up the messes that you and your peers are willfully creating, is the sort of behavior expected from toddlers rather than statesmen.

The problem does not lie with technological innovation itself, so much as the powerful humans behind it leveraging it for selfish ends without the consent of the governed. Violence becomes inevitable when people see no alternative, and necessary when the stakes are kill or be killed, as AI is currently steered towards. That’s not to condone the actions of the alleged perpetrators so much as it’s highlighting the litany of historical examples around such transformations and the effects violence has in forcing a peaceful compromise in most (but not all) cases. The New Deal couldn’t have happened without the decades of preceding strikes, protests, and government-sanctioned violence against workers; the violence made it impossible to ignore or delay any further, and the result was outing corporate entities who had been stockpiling chemical weapons and machine guns, so fierce was their opposition to sharing the products of labor with the workforce. AI already has the weapons, it has the surveillance apparatus, the government backing; violence is presently the sole recourse left to a growing number of people, because they know they’re an obstacle to the powers that be - and will be destroyed, lest they strike first.

That’s the real story, here, and those who haven’t lived in the gutters of society cannot possibly understand the desperation of those victimized by it in the name of greed.

I like Tristan Harris' take on the situation, which is both more nuanced and more actionable. The idea being that the system and incentives are set up to select amoral technologists who will make money for shareholders, so inevitably the ones that come into power will be the ones don't see a problem with replacing all of human labor (because that's the only outcome that can justify the investment made). Reading Cory Doctorow's article from yesterday (https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/11/obvious-terrible-ideas/) was a poignant example of how the incentives are stacked against anyone with a conscience. The only solution, is political action, because the interests of the 99.9% are aligned here. And I say this as someone who loves technology and sees lots of value in AI, but it needs governance, and while in the past I was wary of government regulation in technology, in this case it's way broader and more existential to our civilization than one category of labor being disrupted.

Well said. It’s striking to me how many adults can’t conceive of “violence” as an abstraction that results in certain effects and fall back on “violence is dealing direct physical injury to a person’s body or building.”

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