Imagine an AI future where being banned means you are now economically useless

AtlasBarfed

AI is the perfect tool of total permanent authorization control, and it seems inevitable at this point between the ample supply of authoritarian wannabes and the fundamentally compromised institutions that would resist them

notnaut

I can run a local model on my 5080 that gets 1/8th of the way to where current evil overlord models are capable… are they going to figure out how to ban that too?

tjpnz

Had a plumber do a job in my apartment the other day and he came up with a pipe wrench. Assuming he was an owner operator it would be his to do with as he pleases. It's not going to charge him by the job and the company that made it certainly won't take it off him because they don't like the way he's using it. Yet this is the kind of future some are trying to build, where the tool is only available as a subscription from one of two companies, and where owning the tool makes you an enemy of the state.

eesmith

Ahh, so like the smartphone present in many countries where if the US doesn't like you then it's almost impossible to have a normal economic life?

bitexploder

Not if you have your own TB of fast RAM.

jasonpeacock

With AWS Bedrock, and similar hosted solutions, you can’t be banned directly by the AI companies. With local models, you can’t be banned. While employed, you’re using corporate accounts and can’t be banned.

graemep

How is this different being banned from smartphones, Microsoft accounts, Google accounts, the banking system or whatever? Technology enables central control. That has been obvious for decades now. AI makes it a bit worse.

bdcravens

Don't we do that to felons already? They violated the TOS of society, and are categorically banned from a significant portion of the job market.

rckt

Amazing how this doesn’t consider a future where “AI” is non-obligatory.

besterman23

> you’ll have to live in the world as it is instead of playing pretend in AI graphics land! > you’ll be forced to love your wife for who she is and not her AI generated fake persona! Seriously…? Apparently this is some dystopia with or without the AI companies banning you from their services, yet somehow the big scary thing is not having open weight models. The entire tech world needs to get a grip on reality, like the fact that this random Twitter fanfic gained any traction at all on this site is a massive indictment of the quality of discourse here.

notthemessiah

You don't have to imagine it, it's already happened when a teenage son talking to Gemini on the family iPad managed to get his entire family and all their business accounts banned from all Google services: https://www.pcworld.com/article/3104521/teenagers-gemini-mis...

jqpabc123

open source is the only way to protect your freedom, your economic viability & your ability to tell these companies to fuck right off. Open Source is economically viable??? And AI feeds on open source??? Am I missing the sarcasm or something? Or perhaps that an AI bot created this post.

0c3ca83

Imagine a future where the AI can figure out what needs to be done on its own. There's no need for banning to make people economically useless, it's the natural end state for AI.

throw20261022

This already happened to me. I was blocked by OpenAI from GitHub after I reported an issue and sought technical help. They prefer ignoring their bugs and blocking their users over acknowledging and addressing them.

7777777phil

I been part of many discussions on how access to the internet should become a fundamental human right, like access to clean water. Maybe at some point we will have a discussion like that about access to AI?

hliyan

Perhaps this is where the question of "what is a human right?" becomes important. A human right is not where you are automatically entitled to the thing in question (e.g. food, water, education), but where no entity can prevent you from your pursuit of the thing. Whether the thing qualifies as a human right depends on whether a human can function in society without it. In the earliest, most basic societies, food and water qualified, but not necessarily education, clothing or even permanent housing. Fast forward to the twenty first century, I think now electricity, internet and access to the financial system qualifies. Perhaps in the future, access to machine learning models would qualify too.

TheAceOfHearts

A bit amusing that this is also posted to a centralized social media platform that will also suspend your account for no reason without a functioning appeal process. Unless you're someone famous or well connected, it becomes impossible to restore your account with all these big tech platforms.

WillAdams

This was looked at pretty thoroughly in the novella: https://karmak.org/archive/2003/12/manna/manna1.htm (time for it to be reposted and discussed again since the author's untimely demise? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42228759 )

tamimio

Well isn’t that the case already? You get banned from social media, and you lost your connection with friends or maybe your business, you get banned by dating apps and you are lonely, you get banned by streaming services and you lost your entertainment, you get banned by AI companies and now your work lost its intelligence, you get banned by your email company and your life is ruined by losing access to many things were relying on it, get banned by apple and all your hardware and cloud storage is inaccessible, list goes on. Things might get even more worse, with AI aggregators, a cross domain happens, a social media post can result in debanking you entirely in near future.

shahbaby

A similar thing already exists today but in some ways it's worse because the economic harm can come from anyone with a grudge against you. Introducing, Google Maps Review in 2026. Anyone can say almost any type of slander about your business without even being a customer. If you report it to Google, the burden of proof is on you to show that they violated a policy. How can you prove that a review came from a personal grudge vs a genuine review of the business? Sure you can say that you have no record of that reviewer, but how do you prove it? Google rejects nearly all such reports and appeals without giving any reason. A Google Map "review" is more like a public messaging board where anyone can write whatever they want and as long as it appears loosely related to the business it'll be nearly impossible for the business owner to take down. I think the best thing that business owners can do is take matters into their own hands by showing genuine reviews on their own site.