But that’s the thing! We could and we can!

then perhaps we should strive not to have those horrible events, not by having nostalgia but by dreaming of a better future.

> AI promises a feudalist future where there is no capital that isn't owned by the ruling class.

We may get that, but only if the ruling class want what the Victorians called a "folly": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folly

AI is wildly, wildly divergent in the possible futures it brings. It's really important to influence what happens, but don't limit the potential downside to only as bad as feudalism (neither neo-feudalist nor re-enacted): much worse monsters exist than the typical feudal lord.

(Was going to say "among those rulers who needed us alive to fight their wars and grow their food", but then I remembered Cambodia and Pol Pot).

> Its power is not democratized, it is concentrated in the hands of those building the data centers. That is why I'm against the data centers

If you really believe this (and I’m not saying I don’t, I just don’t have confidence in it), blocking domestic. datacenters doesn’t preserve that labour value. It just ensures whoever builds those datacenters controls production from afar.

Like, if AI really replaces human labour, does Africa and Europe having few AI datacenters protect it from America and China? Of course not. Not outside a symbolic level that even then would have to exist with the implied consent of the powers who produce.

I was a kid in the 90s. Kinda surprised we got the (almost) universal translator before we got fusion.

> In Star Trek canon, humanity figured out how to live in utopia by destroying all existing power structures in a Third World War.

Perhaps we could try to destroy those power structures without having a giant war lol, just saying.

> What is happening now is we have all our existing structure, and the existing requirement to earn money to live within this structure, and the human creative output we want in our eventual utopia is used to train automata with the express goal to replace humans in those creative endeavors, removing the ability for humans to earn money by being creative themselves.

Right, I get the frustration, but how many "creators" were doing truly creative and expressive work writing ad copy or making up logos for shoe companies or whatever. The problem people have is capitalism, not the robots and it's short sighted of people to be angry at software tools rather than the system that has forced them to trade their time and skills for the right to exist.

I've literally lost my career before. The one thing that getting deathly ill has taught me is that "all things will come to an end." Someday, that will include me, but hopefully not today, and thanks to modern medicine, hopefully not any time soon. The idea that the only way an artist should be able to justify their right to survive is by shitting out jpgs on fiverr or whatever is as absurd as the idea that that was somehow meaningful work. If you're having a hard time getting hired, pivot. Adapt. Overcome. That's been my life for the last decade since I first got sick - and I'm not saying it's great, but you have to be able to adapt to new istuations. The world ain't going back. Do we become the Luddites and lose in the long run? Or do we "seize the means of computation and build something that strives for utopia?"

> Ideally, feeling important wouldn't be pejorative. Ideally, we'd have a way for artists to have food and shelter and continue to produce art.

I think food and shelter should be available for anyone on earth without any sort of need to justify it. But I do think that feeling really important should be a bit pejorative.

> The hopes that AI will cause this to happen are equivalent to hoping WWIII will come along and wipe out 2/3 of humanity so we can start over with United Earth and warp drives and replicators.

That's a false equivalency. Like, not even on the same planet.

It's easy to see why people fear AI when our leaders talk of a future where many are jobless and replaced with no solutions to fill in the gaps.

AI adoption is a leadership failure more than a tech one right now. If you make people feel empowered with it, it can liberate work-free lives that humanity benefits from. If you use it to destroy people's livelihoods with no options it's not going to survive a revolution.

Which would make sense if they chose strategies that might stop that from happening. Instead the ones I know refuse to even learn what AI can do and refuse to see that they're not going to slow it's adoption down by sealing themselves off.

The world was already heading towards a dystopian landscape without AI. So many people on this planet live in a horrific dystopia right now, and here comes along something that might help them. Might give us what we need to stop global warming. I'd rather choose something with a 1% chance of working out than what we had before, 0%.

I think we'd be better off limiting whom to kill to one person only.

Why exactly are you here?