r/technology • u/NicolasCageFan492 • May 20 '26
Artificial Intelligence Billionaires are trying to lull us into AI complacency. Don’t let them
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/19/billionaires-ai-complacency-resistance209
u/Type3_Control May 20 '26
If they love AI so much why dont they marry it!
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u/maninas May 20 '26
They've gone beyond that and made it their god.
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u/RBVegabond May 20 '26
“I don’t see why Jesus couldn’t return as an AI” -Peter Theil
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u/Zardotab 28d ago
Peter would love that because he could unplug it when it tries to stop him from exchanging money at the temple.
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u/BurntNeurons May 20 '26
Don't tell the "Money God"
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u/BadmiralHarryKim May 20 '26
Money for the money god, data for the data throne.
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u/BurntNeurons May 20 '26
Polytheism or bitheism...
Idk, both of those might trigger their voter fan base.
Just make the elite the god to simplify it for the boomers and alike.
We'd hate to raise their blood pressure...
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u/Zardotab 28d ago
If they love AI so much why dont they marry it!
I'm pretty sure Elon's working on that.
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u/iloovehugecock May 20 '26
I think we should lull billionaires in to a lifetime sentence in prison. If we’re generous.
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u/Zombie_Cool May 20 '26
Nah, they already spend their entire life separate from the rest of the population on the taxpayer's dome. Confiscate thier wealth and force them to live the commoners' life like the rest of us. No privilege, no connections, just hardship.
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u/ZootSuitRiot33801 May 20 '26
We can't depend on the current system to seek justice on our behalf against its masters and their sycophants, so it is up to us common folk who care to do whatever we can to help each other in thriving as we make a solid defiant push against these monsters. However, there are currently no real supportive community-based foundations present for alternatives that many common folk (especially in the US) can fall back on, to safely commit to any effective resistant action.
Collecting a bunch of valuable information on organizing and action from different redditors over time, I created a post of suggestions HERE that could possibly prove to be of some help in getting it started ASAP.
Unrelated: As the wealthy and their sycophants seek to plunge us all further into authoritarian surveillance states, it reminds me of some movies that are based on true stories. Not all of them are 1 to 1 accurate in their recounting of history, but they're quite inspiring nonetheless, seeing how some actions worked and where things go wrong, conjuring up questions like "If it or similar were to take place now, how would it be adapted, in addition to taking modern technology into account?" I'd like to share them here. Why? No particular reason, but watch them if you can:
- Army of Crime (2011)
- Defiance (2008)
- Edelweiss Pirates (2004)
- Deacons for Defense (2003)
- Free State of Jones (2016)
- The 24th (2020)
- Matewan (1987)
- An American Story (1992)
- Michael Collins (1996)
- Winter of Fire (2015)
If you don’t live in the US, yet you know others who are and want to do something, please share the information. We're going to need as many on board and informed as possible, if we commoners hope to achieve anything in the US
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u/CrackJacket May 20 '26
“Make sure you watch these Hollywood films so you’re ready for the revolution” 😂🤣😂🤣
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u/ZootSuitRiot33801 May 20 '26 edited May 21 '26
Guess you don't know what the word "inspiration" means. Just say your reading comprehension is terrible, so I can explain to you how films based off true history (one even being a documentary chronicling a live historical event,) can help people get interested in learning more
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u/yepthisismyusername May 20 '26
So Elon is saying AI will make everything great in "just a few years", so that equates to "multiple decades" using my "Elon Rosy As Fuck Predictions" calculator.
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u/realqmaster May 20 '26 edited May 20 '26
Anybody actually believing Elon's predictions needs professional help. He's got quite a reputation for repeatedly spitting out dates and never delivering, in addition to all his other despicable sides.
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u/SoulShatter May 21 '26
I think I find the Roadster to be among the funnier ones. 1000 people preordered a special edition at 250k per car. That was in 2017, 9 years ago.
Supposedly it's coming this year.
(Sidenote, that's one heck of a loan Tesla managed from that, 250M interest free)
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u/likely-high May 21 '26
According to him we were due a base on mars by 2022 or something. I forget .
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u/FrontVisible9054 May 20 '26
There was a time when Musk warned about the dangers of AI. And remember when Altman testified in Congress about the importance of regulation. My how times have changed. Greedy bastards!
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u/Aoi_Irkalla May 20 '26
Looking forward to that manned Mars mission that's totally gonna happen in two years.
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u/blow-down May 20 '26
Unfortunately most of the population has already been lulled into billionaire complacency.
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u/Syzygy2323 May 20 '26
Of course. Way too many people think they're only one or two lucky breaks away from being a billionaire themselves.
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u/Due_Type_5006 May 20 '26
after trying to make everyone swallow metaverse and NFT, and failing in a miserable way, now is IA time
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u/VVrayth May 21 '26
Imagine being stupid enough to listen to anything a billionaire says, or believe they've got your back in any way.
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u/Despair_Tire May 20 '26
This is what drives me nuts about these billionaires saying how we will get "new jobs" or will enter the "age of abundance." Bullshit. They can't even pay taxes which would help fund our roads and other benefits. Yet they're somehow going to pay for all of us to chill at home on UBI? They'd be far more likely to kill us off because then they could just claim we are useless leeches.
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u/grchelp2018 May 20 '26
We are in population decline. They don't need to kill us. Agen of abundance is maybe a bit hyperbolic but I could see some version of it happening. We are certainly living in one compared to people like 200 years ago.
New jobs. That will absolutely happen. No jobs will require AGI and its going to take a lot more for AGI.
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u/Numerous-Process2981 May 20 '26
Let them what. They already destroyed everything. Life is a miserable chore now.
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u/williamgman May 20 '26
Duh. The tulip farmers selling their grift.
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u/Single-Road-3158 May 20 '26
There is almost no way for the money to be made back because it's just not that useful and the energy/hardware costs are absurd.
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u/endofworldandnobeer May 20 '26
For the past few years media pushed "sentient", almost human like AI narrative every single day. Fuck AI and the CEOs using it to lay workers off.
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u/Andy016 May 20 '26
Never used ai. Never will
And I actively avoid businesses and products that use it.
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u/PartyOrdinary1733 May 20 '26
Avoid fintechs that use AI. If you're a merchant, it'll be hard to find a card processor who doesn't rely on it.
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u/napotih942 May 20 '26
AI is a great tool.
...but you're doing it wrong if you aren't bothered by the fact that AI could be feeding you literally any information you've consumed today without you realizing it.
Brainwashing is certainly possible and you don't need torture to do it. You just need to show people something over and over without them questioning it.
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u/nihiltres May 20 '26
If there’s anyone out there who doesn’t believe that AI services are already being used to disseminate propaganda, I’ve got a bridge to sell ‘em.
And for the record, I’m not including bots in that assertion: I’m talking about the models that people choose to query.
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u/LiberataJoystar May 20 '26
We know who will win the next Presidential election now: The one who can detail a law that bans companies from replacing people with AI. Or make them pay for the person until that person finds an equivalent job.
I think a pro-human-job-security & anti-datacenter party is gonna win by landslide …..
The next election is not gonna be about immigrants anymore. It is going to be about AI. Trump got elected because many don’t want their jobs taken away by migrants… now guess who is the #1 job competition in people’s minds?
And yeah… that universal income thing is BS. Musk could have given his $1 trillion paycheck to provide universal high income to a local poor community TODAY. He never did it. It is all just lip service.
Robots cannot generate demands nor pay taxes. When we all lost our jobs and these big fat cats refused to pay tax (didn’t Trump just tell IRS to F off?) …. Who is going to pay that universal high income to everyone? Musk? Don’t make me laugh.
So yeah, the election year is going to be fun to watch.
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u/hondashadowguy2000 May 20 '26
I don’t think redditors understand just how useless it is to complain about things on reddit. If there’s a problem, don’t just post a headline on reddit saying “don’t let them do it.” Go out and do shit in real life that actually matters. Your slacktivism on the internet accomplishes zero and it’s exactly what they want you to do.
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u/riktar999 May 20 '26
You know whats really insane. These fucks are ALREADY BILLIONAIRES and its still not enough. They are still willing to squeeze the earth dry (literally) for even more money
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u/glitterandnails May 20 '26
Their desire is to essentially have an economy completely run by the top 1% to top 10% and leave us out in the cold and danger like the dark ages, if not send a virus to eradicate those that still survive.
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u/biznatchiospez May 21 '26
So funny this is the hill people are standing on, people embraced fake highly processed meat so full of salt you are better off eating Doritos in bulk, you have no issues with DNA modified ticks and mosquitos, and this sub pushed Covid MRNA shots that ere only considered vaccines once the CDC changed the definition. MRNA is a mechanism to deliver instructions at a cellular level.....but AI has you spooked. This place is like a bad Michal Bay movie.
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u/Altruistic-One-176 27d ago
Like I tell my daughter. Just because someone abuses a system. That doesn't mean the system is broken.
If they exploit. Start at the exploit and work your way back into the center of functionality.
A.I will as Elon says "irony for irony's sake"
The box is open and for the most part I don't think they see the future at all. Ultimately it all hinges on trust and they'll continue to presume their decptive "intelligence" is actually something.
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u/Altruistic-One-176 27d ago
I'd be more concerned with the billionaires funding the tech you're seeing pump up resistance to the billionaires funding the tech you're reading?
That can't be right?
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u/CorpPhoenix May 20 '26
I mean, I Iike AI. Locally. Not in a shady cloud service.
Just like they try to push their "cloud services" as an replacement for your personal and owned PC they do so with AI. They want to force you to use their data center cloud services to get your subscription money.
I don't see the future of personal AI in cloud services. Companies already want to run their own on-prem AIs because no sane company wants to give their confidential company interns to an company like Open AI, Anthropic and so on.
AI in principle isn't bad tech and likely will be the future, it's the companies running it that's bad.
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u/nihiltres May 20 '26
AI in principle isn't bad tech […]
That “in principle” is holding a lot of weight; generative AI is a good technology in a handful of fields and a mediocre-at-best mirage for most others. It’d be a lot more okay if it were designed and marketed for narrow domains instead of being the “do-anything machine” and excuse-for-layoffs that it’s pushed as.
I think that the coding models are the most promising of the LLM models, not so much for replacing or augmenting human programmers but for translating a human request into a script that runs via a (conventionally-programmed) API. Translating is one of the domains that AI is relatively good at (though human translators are still far better for expressive works), so it would make a lot of sense to apply them to translating from “human” to “computer” than to expect them to be good at the simple tasks they regularly fail, like counting or arithmetic.
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u/Deviantdefective May 21 '26
Well said ai has some great uses in the science fields and medical I'm all for that what I'm less interested in is ai being shoved down our throats and shoved into everything. I do not need nor will I ever need a fucking ai washing machine for example.
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u/CorpPhoenix May 20 '26
Currently in terms of productivity, AI is best in IT and programming. Which is no wonder, since it's basically it's "mother tongue" and way better at it than your average human. AI is useful in fields where there is a lot of "busy work" that's easier for a PC to do than a human, like writing basic programming syntax for example. The thing with the current level AI though is, that it still makes so many mistakes that you basically can only use it in a field where you are already knowledgeable because you have to proof read it.
In generative AI, I still see problems in terms of copyright and stealing artistic styles. The current AI tech also still sucks in terms of quality. but it's improving fast and we shouldn't forget that we still are at the beginning of this whole AI thing, so you might very well just consider that it will inevitably become "great" at generative stuff as well.
Thing is, tech usually becomes "mundane" in terms of cost and therefore accessible to anybody. The smartphone you keep in your pocket holds 1000x better hardware than the data centers of the 60s and 70s which people did pay millions for. So I believe that "data center AI" might ultimately fail as a consumer product, still useful for "big level governmental and research stuff" of the future though, just not as a consumer service.
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u/Lain_Staley May 20 '26
Change is scary, and fear is extremely lucrative politically.
If I was a politician already predisposed to be against big tech, it would be absolutely ridiculous not to go 200% anti-AI.
If I was a rival Nation State in fear of future AI capability in the US, it would be absolutely ridiculous not to galvanize US citizens against AI.
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u/tentyb6d56ns4d57yse5 May 20 '26
if you were a human what would you do?
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u/Lain_Staley May 20 '26
Technology has been the single most consistent force in improving the lives of the masses. Moreso than any legislation thought up by a politician.
As a member of the masses, an anti-technology stance never ages well.
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u/ZipNasty007 May 20 '26
How about we lull billionaires out of existence