Thread

1. pcestrada · 1789660165 · focus · HN ↗

   OpenAI and Anthropic should be nationalized. I find it difficult to trust Sam Altman or Dario Amodei.

   1. indymike · 1789661081 · focus · HN ↗

      I find it even harder to trust elected leaders from any party. At least Sam and Dario are aligned with a value set that is understood and clear, whereas political leaders values changes as do the polls their livelihood depends on changes.

      1. jsrozner · 1789661854 · focus · HN ↗

         No system of governance can deal with immense concentration of power. The US Constitution was about separation of powers. Democracy is about (in theory at least) giving each person a meaningful say in their own governance, which in turn implies not allowing any single person to become too powerful.

         Political leaders become a problem when they amass too much power. Corporations become a problem when they amass too much power. It doesn't matter what Sam and Dario's purported values are. They aspire to power and absolutely power always corrupts absolutely.

         Technologies which are infinitely powerful or whose power grows too quickly outrun any reasonable attempt at regulation. If you imagine that tomorrow everyone were given a tank, we might think, "alright, everyone has a tank so it's not too bad." But humans are squishy, and our houses are (relatively) squishy compared to tanks. Substantial collateral damage would result from everyone having a tank, and it seems likely that substantial collateral damage will result from everyone having a cyberterrorism-capable slop machine.

         1. throwaway13337 · 1789662353 · focus · HN ↗

            Nearly everyone in the US has a giant car that is basically a tank.

            They are dangerous. But it’s managed.

            Centralized power never works. We have the worst times in history to look at.

            Nationalization just centralizes to a different set of people. It’s personal ownership or oppression.

            We all need open weight R2D2s.

            1. boie0025 · 1789666585 · focus · HN ↗

               I can't properly read the tank/car comment, the comparison is bizarre to me. But I think this misses the point a bit. The reality of these new risks is literally being learned in front of us in real time, and in my opinion, anyone who claims to understand these risks is speculating at best, and actively manipulating the situation for whatever reasons.

               While I am a (mostly) capitalist and generally disagree with nationalization (including, for the time being, this situation), I also don't think we can say that "centralized power never works". Maybe we scope that a bit. I know plenty of business owners who centralize power in their businesses and they are effective, ethical and it works perfectly fine. In theory, in the US, nationalizing some unit of the economy _decentralizes_ power; the US is, after all, a representative democracy. Trustworthiness of the electorate is a different problem. But I don't think we can generalize much about centralization beyond sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. There is a difference between centralizing all power in a given administrative unit, and centralizing certain powers, but that's more analogous to non-democratic units.

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.