39 pointsby fortran778 hours ago11 comments
  • stonyrubbish5 hours ago
    AI is probably in need of far more legal safeguards than we have now, but I am sort of tired of the "everyone will lose their jobs" narrative. There are so few jobs LLMs can fully automate. I think what will actually happen is that corporate CEOs will try to cut staff, it won't work, people will be rehired, and AI will largely make people's jobs easier and less labor-intensive.
  • garbawarb7 hours ago
    What do the American people hold dear?
    • kelseyfrog6 hours ago
      Pathological demand avoidance.
      • rdevilla5 hours ago
        In Canada, demands are not actually demands. That way if the demand is avoided, there never was a demand to begin with; however, if it was fulfilled, then of course there was always a demand all along.
    • 2 hours ago
      undefined
    • neonstatic7 hours ago
      [flagged]
      • rdevilla7 hours ago
        It's extremely prevalent in Canada as well; almost certainly even more so. It's really a North American thing.

        I expect copious downvotes with no actual replies. Then the comment will be flagged by the bot armies so the administration here can preserve its dearly held national identity of being "diverse" while never having elected an ethnic minority PM.

        • nozzlegearan hour ago
          I would expect more downvotes for your needless "I'm going to get downvoted because the sheep hate when wolves tell the truth!" persecution complex. Your comment was at least mildly interesting before you got to that.
  • Ancalagon5 hours ago
    wow why are so many comments in this thread against Bernie's stance?
    • 2OEH8eoCRo04 hours ago
      The vitriol I see here only makes me like him more.
    • rdevilla5 hours ago
      HN will flag and downvote anti AI sentiment. There is lots of it here, you just aren't allowed to see it.
      • LarsDu882 hours ago
        I posted Bernie's "Conversation with Claude" a while back, and it was just about immediately taken down.

        Let's face it Y combinator is mostly AI startups for the next few years, and any anti-AI sentiment is going to hurt the bottom line.

        That being said, I disagree with Sanders on a number of points. He wants to stop data center construction. Can't think of a more luddite un-nuanced solution to the "problem"

        The real AI danger is not the threat to white collar jobs (which will simply have to evolve), but something we will see roughly 18 months now when Joe Schmo asks Claude Giga Max Supreme 8.0 to help him reduce his taxes, and it hacks into the IRS and deletes everyone's records.

        • jrflowers2 hours ago
          You think there won’t be any taxes in 2028-2029 because of AI?
          • LarsDu8830 minutes ago
            Just an example off the top of my head
      • lizardking5 hours ago
        I feel like we must be visiting different websites.
    • 5 hours ago
      undefined
    • KetoManx645 hours ago
      [flagged]
      • gravypod4 hours ago
        I've heard this brought up many times but I don't really understand the implications of it. I can't really think of a system of government which hasn't killed large numbers of people. Even the USA's early wars like the civil war have death tolls >500k. We also lose ~7k homeless people every year.

        Removing the contexts of those deaths makes it very difficult to evaluate the true causes and if the political ideology is to blame or if the centralization of power common across all governments leads to deaths.

      • CamperBob25 hours ago
        Not a Bernie supporter, to put it mildly, but to be fair he has never called himself a communist. Making up BS doesn't help.
        • bko5 hours ago
          He honeymooned in USSR. Which is a rather odd place to honeymoon in 1988. But yes, he never explicitly said he was a communist, but just someone that wants to seize the means of production.
        • KetoManx644 hours ago
          Sure has done a lot to support communism for someone that has never called himself a communist: https://nypost.com/2016/01/16/dont-be-fooled-by-bernie-sande...
          • Capricorn24812 hours ago
            My god dude. This is an opinion piece from the New York Post, which is a truly bottom of the barrel rag. Why are you posting this? You can plainly see how hard they are stretching the truth here. An actual anti-communist Republican already explained how stupid this article is [1].

            They call the United Packinghouse Workers Union a communist organization, which is a flat out lie. The UPWA was a mainstream CIO (later AFL-CIO) union. It wasn't even among the unions the CIO purged in 1949 for being communist-led. By the time Bernie was involved in 1964, the union had formally banned communists from holding office under the AFL-CIO Ethical Practices Code, and Martin Luther King Jr. literally sat on the commission overseeing that compliance. The union is famous historically for its civil rights work, not for being a communist front.

            They said Eugene Debs was "arrested for espionage" which is a lie. He was arrested for being critical of the Wilson administration. It was under the "Espionage act," but it was not espionage, just good old-fashioned arresting people for speaking their mind. They neglect to mention Debs refused to join the Communist party when they split off from the Socialist party.

            They implied the Young People’s Socialist League was a communist organization, when it was extremely anti-communist.

            They said the "American People’s History Society" was an organ for Marxist propaganda, but there's absolutely nothing to suggest that. They are implying this organization had a long history of spreading communist propaganda and that the Eugene Debs film is further evidence of that. But that's not the case. They just made a Eugene Debs film, which by itself, doesn't really rise to the level of Marxist Propaganda. He was a socialist, and an important figure in American History. Or is American History just supposed to cover the Carnegies of the world?

            It's funny to watch people pearl clutch over a politician championing workers rights because it might overlap slightly with the politics of a distant revolution while we have a sitting President that kills citizens, bombs children's hospitals, jails journalists, and publicly salivates over the idea of inflicting retribution on anyone left of the alt-right. This is concern trolling at it's finest.

            [1] https://pjmedia.com/ron-radosh/2016/01/18/no-new-york-post-b...

  • bko5 hours ago
    Few notes:

    The author uses polls that people are negative on AI, but people use it. All the time. And it's organic. Much like people started bringing Excel into the workplace and IT departments had to catch up, people are using personal AI and IT departments are freaking out. It's obvious that people find it useful (it's the fastest growing product in history). Why go off some polls that spread doomer nonsense?

    Billionaires investing money in creating products that nearly a billion people use rather than improving the lives of working families? Are the billionaires elected leaders? Why is that burden on them. The government gets trillions every year, yet try to get people to believe they are just a few billion shy of providing medicare for all and free childcare. Give me a break

    AI will create a police state? We've had cameras pretty much everywhere for decades, yet somehow unsolved killings reach a record high in 2023. We don't even bother locking up the people that get arrested. The number of prisoners that have had 15 or more prior arrests is over 26%

    No one's buying it from these politicians anymore. You're in politics, you have trillions to spend. Just get your shit together, actually help people and stop with these hysterics.

    https://www.npr.org/2023/04/29/1172775448/people-murder-unso...

    https://substack.com/home/post/p-149002604

  • SilverElfin4 hours ago
    It’s a threat to employment, stability, and democracy. AI is going to solidify the concentration of wealth and power like never before. It’s why so many young people fear being in the “permanent underclass”. I haven’t agreed with socialists historically but we need to change our economic and political system to have more socialism than before, and especially to reduce the concentration in the hands of a few individuals and companies. So he’s not wrong.
    • 0xy4 hours ago
      Explain why this stance, repeated often throughout history at the first sight of innovation (the plow, the car, electricity, phones, the internet, etc), and wrong every single time, is correct now.
      • AnimalMuppet4 hours ago
        The plow was regarded as a threat to democracy? I'm going to need to see some references for that claim...
        • slater4 hours ago
          (not OP but likely they're trying some "Luddites were wrong, too!" thing. And if so, also misunderstanding the Luddites)
  • therobots9274 hours ago
    [flagged]
    • fortran774 hours ago
      I think flagging an op-ed by a sitting Senator that appeared in the WSJ is an abuse of the flagging system. I don’t like Bernie at all, but I thought it was a very relevant item to post.
  • boznz7 hours ago
    [flagged]
    • verdverm7 hours ago
      I would not call him an existential threat, but he is certainly not representative being on one of the extremes and old af
  • EricHolden127 hours ago
    [flagged]
  • KetoManx648 hours ago
    [flagged]
    • treetalker7 hours ago
      Pray tell, for which special-interest groups is the venerable senator a mouthpiece?
      • bko5 hours ago
        Bootleggers and Baptists is a concept put forth by regulatory economist Bruce Yandle, derived from the observation that regulations are supported both by groups that want the ostensible purpose of the regulation, and by groups that profit from undermining that purpose.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootleggers_and_Baptists

      • KetoManx645 hours ago
        The AI companies, obviously. They use government puppets to create regulation that put competitors out of business under the guide of "child safety" and "threat to everything you hold dear".

        https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/openai...

      • robotburrito4 hours ago
        People who want healthcare and maybe kids who would like school lunch I guess?
      • 5 hours ago
        undefined
    • bigyabai8 hours ago
      It takes a special, uniquely American type of politician to look at a war in Iran and conclude that domestic AI policy is the real threat to American people.
      • Trasmatta7 hours ago
        Both of those things can be a threat to the American people
        • Nevermark7 hours ago
          The US once had a strong reputation for a can-do cooperative spirit, and solving big problems.

          Today, it has an equally significant reputation for divisiveness and creating potentially existential (in various senses) threats to itself.

  • johannesrexx5 hours ago
    [flagged]