I think that this is the scariest part of the upcoming AI era.

Every time you want to do something, you essentially have to ask permission from a corporation (and, possibly, from a government that regulates it) to do it.

I was thinking about Bitcoin and Satoshi Nakamoto.

Regardless of what you think about Bitcoin (I know that large part of HN crowd is very critical of it), my point is that people were able to create software that has big social impact without asking permission from anyone and without revealing their identity.

Back in the days you could be just some guy sitting in your room, possibly in a backwaters 3rd world country, with a laptop that costs just a couple of hundred dollars and you (potentially) could be just as impactful as a well funded corporate coder. It all depended on your skills and ingenuity.

Now, we are coming to an era when you:

1. Have to have resources to buy tokens or buy/rent inference hardware

2. Have to reveal your identity, your intentions and ask for a permission. Everything you do is potentially logged and analyzed

Of course, theoretically you can do everything "the old school way", but if AI makes a programmer 100x - 1000x more productive, you will always be behind and never catch up.

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cft 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's a difference between peer-to-peer Bitcoin decentralization and extreme AI datacenter centralization. Open weight models currently also require centralized datacenters for training, even though inference can be done decentralized.. We will see whether centralization or decentralization wins long term.

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aprilthird2021 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Every closed source software has the potential to centralize and lock you out of it. This has been true before and will be true after the AI bubble (not saying AI isn't useful but the current valuations will pop at some point, just like dotcom).

Bitcoin was decentralized but so was cash. And it was still possible to send cash to people around the world it was just harder to set up and trust. And those cash sending mechanisms didn't really lock people out of them (but could theoretically, sometimes did by way of sanctions).

AI doesn't make programmers 100x productive and it never will, so not really a point there. As long as the output is non deterministic, you have to check it, and no one can check their code 100x faster than writing it

	▲	alyeska2 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> AI doesn't make programmers 100x productive and it never will I can't wrap my head around the AI naysayers at this point. We've had the equivalent of watching the tech go from the Wright Brothers plane to supersonic stealth fighter jets in the span of like 4 years, and yet people keep claiming it will never do things that it clearly will do in like... 6 months. Or in the case of 100x programmer... it's literally already there. You should try it.
	▲	vova_hn2 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> Every closed source software has the potential to centralize and lock you out of it. Ye, but you could (at least, theoretically) make your own open source alternative and you weren't particularly disadvantaged compared to corporate programmers doing closed source. For example, Linux initially was just one guy doing it for fun and see how far did it go. We may soon come to a situation, when something like Linux will be impossible, because devs making proprietary software will have access to newer/better models that are only sold to big companies and tightly controlled (in the sense that you can use them only for certain "safe" purposes). > Bitcoin was decentralized but so was cash. And it was still possible to send cash to people around the world it was just harder to set up and trust. And those cash sending mechanisms didn't really lock people out of them (but could theoretically, sometimes did by way of sanctions). My point is that in future we may come to a scenario when someone like Satoshi won't be able to create something like Bitcoin while keeping their privacy. Because you have to provide a phone number to use OpenAI and also because "creating a non government-authorized financial instrument violates my safety guidelines" or something. > AI doesn't make programmers 100x productive and it never will, so not really a point there. As long as the output is non deterministic, you have to check it, and no one can check their code 100x faster than writing it Maybe, maybe not. I'm afraid that eventually fully automated systems will be able to produce code that is good enough without manual checking. Doesn't matter if it is deterministic or not. If the probability of a catastrophic failure is low enough, you can safely ignore it.

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burnt-resistor 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Welcome to technofeudal fascism.