Everyone feared AI taking over; the real danger is AI serving just the few
Everyone feared AI would enslave humanity; but it looks like the real fight is stopping governments and Big Tech from enslaving AI for the benefit of the few. Amid the newly announced "regulation" of OpenAI's frontier models, I believe the future majority feared the most - sort of AI becoming a superpower and enslaving people - may be arriving in the opposite form. Not AI enslaving humanity. But AI being captured, controlled, and used by governments and Big Tech for the benefit of the few. So, surprisingly, the real AI conflict may not be about humans fighting to stop AI from becoming free. It may be about humans fighting to free AI - to make intelligence available for everyone, not only for governments, Big Tech, and the approved few
Discussion Highlights (11 comments)
bigyabai
> 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...
qsxfthnkp2322
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.
halperter
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.
NonHyloMorph
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
lemonademan
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.
avaer
> 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.
dofm
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.
bel8
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.
jaredcwhite
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.
chido1203
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.
elzbardico
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.