We went through a cycle like this once before in U.S. history, and the amount of violence it took to correct the overreach of organized money was not 0.
A little disturbing to be quite honest, though I suppose this is what happens when a generation takes “eat the rich” not as a LARPy political slogan but as a real call to action.
There is growing anger and discontentment in a large part of the population, driven by inequality of wealth and power. Hopelessness and a lack of control over the future.
Are the nodes of power willing to spread wealth and control more widely to stabilize the country? What are they willing to do to consolidate their power? The vast majority of violence is perpetrated by those nodes, to either consolidate power, or gain more of it.
Other people in this thread have already suggested more actionable responses: organize, unionize, understand class dynamics, and vote accordingly.
I'm just waiting for dang, et. al to fix our thread voting system as it's a little too Reddity around here these last days.
> I don't think I've ever seen a thread this bad on Hacker News. The number of commenters justifying violence, or saying they "don't condone violence" and then doing exactly that, is sickening and makes me want to find something else to do with my life—something as far away from this as I can get. I feel ashamed of this community.
> Edit: for anyone wondering (or hoping), no I'm not leaving. That was a momentary expression of dismay.
Perhaps something to think about in a scenario like this. Personally I think it's interesting that some people are so quick to condone aggressive attacks on powerful people, yet have no comment on those powerful people committing lower levels of violence against the masses. It's all social context.
A little wild to me that so many of the replies don't understand that.
FL crafted a law to help safeguard someone who gets sued for running over a protestor. I think this illustrates how a law can protect problems rather than solving them.
Not true.
Source?
The people saying it doesn’t work are the same people who can’t must the effort to even contact their representative.
I had a professor in college who was big on entrepreneurship. So he formed an organization, got others involved, went to Washington to lobby his rep. His rep said “let’s do it”, and sat him down with her staff to write a bill. That bill was brought to the floor for a vote and passed.
Until you’ve done that, dont complain the system doesn’t work.
The issue with politics today is the level of engagement of the average voter. Few people ever get involved, so the vacuum gets filled with whichever power-hungry mediocre person who puts some effort in.
This is a sign of the system not working. A well connected professor, with plenty of free time to form an organization and go to Washington to talk to his rep
Might as well be an industry lobbyist.
Could a worker from Walmart do the same thing? In theory sure. In practice unlikely, for any number of reasons. Not least because people are unlikely to take a Wal Mart worker seriously enough to join their organization.
California has a referendum system. Get signatures for a policy and put it to the voters.
All of those arguments will be vile, as they have to be given the context.
I'm not criticizing you, and I guess I'm glad someone wrote this comment quickly. You're right. But I would caution people against reading too much into the countervailing sentiment here. It's not trolling, but it is something adjacent to it.
Like 1812 when the Brits weren't busy with the French they easily came in and burnt the US capital as punishment for burning the Canadian one. It's not that the British army suddenly got a lot stronger; they just weren't busy fighting on two continents.
That said, civil disobedience is largely pointless. We're in a capitalistic society so money is the name of the game. Rosa Parks did shit-all; it was the boycott of the bus system for 9 months that made the buses cave.
I went to high school in Pennsylvania.
Did you ever think that maybe people do in fact believe what they say they believe?
Civil violence is the backstop of literally every societal system. While it would be better if the systems work, civil violence is what happens if they don't and tends to increase until they do.
In general, violence can certainly solve problems, especially when the problems are not being caused by almost-inevitable technological revolutions. One of the issues to keep in mind, though, is that it often also creates new ones, often surprising ones. For example, the assassination that led to World War One. For another example, if Trump had been assassinated last year, that would have solved many problems for people who dislike Trump. However, that doesn't necessarily mean it would have made the world overall a better place - that is almost impossible to predict. Hence the sci-fi sort of scenario of "you go back in time and kill Hitler, but when you return to your own time it turns out that Hitler dying just let mega-Hitler take power".
The people who are doing this stuff are unhinged but why? Perhaps they do not trust law and order. Perhaps they feel helpless and have been led to believe its over for the labour class due to the overhyped marketing and so on.
A serious frank conversation needs to be had and the hyping needs to stop.
Here's your canary.
People who shoot someone or throw bombs at someone even though that someone never did something against them, should be marginalized. In prison.
Totally agree. I’m speaking to cases in America. If you’re in a rich country broadly at peace with competitive elections to any degree, and you’re choosing violence, you should vacation to e.g. Burma or Sudan or Libya or Ethiopia and see the cost of the violence you’re glorifying.
There's a reason the founding fathers all had slaves; they weren't the common folk.
Ah, yes. All Slaveholders. I once toured John Adam's former plantation. It's expansive. Really puts Monticello to shame.
(the joke here being that John Adams was a practicing lawyer in state that didn't even have slavery).
Since your point seems to be that not all the founding fathers parent was referring to were actually slave owners do you have a claim for a rough ratio? I think that would be interesting and would be a more informative thing regardless of where on the scale it lands from "everybody but Adams" all the way up to "only a big names like Washington, Jefferson".
Sure. Figurative language will be figurative. There have been tons of assasinations in the last 10 years of police chiefs, politicians, journalists and an MP.
If we’re being pedantic, there isn’t technically a CEO in America who’s been killed. Mangione potted a middle manager with a CEO title. The billionaires who own the company are fine, as is the group CEO, and none of them materially changed any policies as a result of his death.
This sort of thinking causes extremism and division. It only perpetuates more of the thing you don't want!
It's also empirically not true: there are crazy people on both sides, but most people are pretty reasonable. If you treat them as if they are, despite your differences, they won't feel so alienated and perhaps you can both have a productive conversation. Both sides views are then likely to soften, and you can maybe even start working together.
The times they are a-changin'.
You will notice I never said that both sides have the same amount of violence (since I don't think that that's actually relevant), so you are responding to a point I never made to begin with.
Full stop, no "but". That's all that needs to be said on this thread.
The long gone history of a country is not a something that should be allowed to determine its modern narratives. You shouldn't forget your history, but there are limits you shouldn't cross. When I hear arguments going back for centuries, it is a red flag for me. It is most likely a propaganda.
Psychologists talk about two common failing of their clients. People often fixate over the past or they fixate over the future, while forgetting about the present. The healthy approach is to keep a good balance between the past, the future, and the present, with a strong accent on the present. The history determinism reminds me a lot of the over-fixation on the past, and propaganda actively tries to unsettle balances in people's minds and fixate them on anything but the present.
Back to the argument that historical determinism is flawed…
I think it’s very reasonable to say that it happened in the past, therefore it probably will happen in the future. That’s the basis for pretty much any kind of prediction.
If you want to argue against historical determinism, you have to make the specific argument for why the current state is different enough that we can’t use the past to predict the future.
you can disagree that this was necessary, which I'd agree with.
You can't call yourself a democracy just because we can change the colour of the same bus every 3 to 4 years
Not playing at all makes you easier to beat still. Anyone pining for civil war should vacation in a war zone first. It’s difficult to encapsulate the privilege of peace until it’s been lost.
I completely agree. But political violence increasingly polarises the outcomes to those two. (The elites can buy gunmen faster than you or I can.)
California has a referendum system. Get an AI measure on the ballot. Companies that are doing the things Anthropic got fired for refusing to provide are banned from doing business in the State of California. (Or with the State. Find a balance that gets the votes.)
Keep pushing your state investigators. Work to flip the House. And keep protesting and disrupting the browncoats.
Alex Pretti did more to stop ICE than anyone e.g. killing an individual ICE agent would do.
You’re describing harm. Violence involves physical force against living things. Delineating there concepts is useful.
The threat to AI far exceeds any benefits I can see.
If 95% of jobs go away, the destabilization leads to violent conflicts, and power and wealth become more centralized does it really matter if we have better healthcare or automated cars? Will people have purpose in their lives? Will this be a better world for most?
1. Violent attacks against AI CEOs, researchers, and engineers is going to begin. This is due to widespread negative press that AI receives and as well as a pervasive feeling of economic uncertainty and doom in the population. Some of this being caused by the current administration's leadership, but much of it attributed to AI taking jobs and destroying opportunity.
2. Violent acts taken against non-tech CEOs will increase hand-in-hand.
3. If AI continues to demonstrate impressive new capabilities for automation, this rate will increase substantially.
4. The government may come down hard on these individuals, which will further inflame the situation.
5. Data centers will come under attack / sabotage.
6. This will all wind up further inflamed by prediction markets.
I have a colleague at Anthropic that refuses to put it on his LinkedIn. We all now know why.
The pro-Palestinian activists set their cause back a year by overplaying their hands in Columbia at the start of the war. If we want to ensure zero AI legislation for the next 2 years, I couldn’t think of a better way to ensure that than to start potting randos in the streets.
I think the general population is much more likely to feel joy about it than want a police crackdown.
If we're talking about attacks against average software engineers and obscure founders, fewer people would be happy about it, but a great number still would be. There is a lot of envy toward software engineers and founders.
Most of the population will be for the violent attacks. Techbros went way too far in gleefully describing how they would destroy most people's careers while enriching themselves. Never bothered to think whether they should just because they could. Now the rooster is coming home to roost.
The best way for the attacks on AI executives to stop is to pass meaningful legislation that limits the use and scope of AI.
But even if the DA prosecutes, the jury can nullify the charges, which is a risk. What happens when a jury finds the accused not guilty?
The masses will only tolerate so much before the elite start dying. See all of human history.
Everyone says this before they learn what they didn’t value. Peace, for example.
> Its easy for you to say, all perched up as a VC
It’s easy to say for anyone who has read the history of political violence. When that comes on the table, universally [1], the people with power also have the power to raise armies. The people who stand to benefit from violent insurrection, today, are the oligarchs.
This happens every time because it’s obvious. If CEOs getting killed is normal, then activists against those companies getting killed is normal too. A lot more people will kill for a million dollars than because they hate some guy.
[1] Apart from early 20th century Communist revolutions, where elites actually suffered.
The more likely result is either that every member of the board and c-suite ends up on death row, or in a grave. There are far more people willing to avenge loved ones than there are people willing to kill for money.
Reading and understanding do not always go along, though.
I doubt they’re on this forum.
> Clearly you're not a fella who's faced much hardship in life
Ha. Putting my own past aside, I’ve found it’s folks who grew up never knowing violence who are the quickest to embrace it.
> They already do
There is always more.
- OpenAI made a deal with the Pentagon (fair)
- OpenAI changed their business model from non-profit to for-profit (fair?)
- Sexual assault allegations by his sister. Sam Altman denies this and it's currently before a court.
- Overpromised AI to investors (everyone does this)
- Lobbying against regulations (I support)
- Some vague accusations of "being a liar" and a "sociopath" by his competitors Ilya Sutskever and Dario Amodei.
- He doesn't know how to code (lol)
Is there anything that I'm missing? Does he put ketchup on his pizza?
It'd be one thing if he was just promising more than he could actually deliver, but he went further, making promises of buying up unrealistically large chunks of the global RAM supply, causing everyone else to suffer, with no remorse.
There's also WorldCoin. I don't think a decent person would continue to push such an awful, untrustworthy system. This is a supposedly privacy-focused project that several countries are investigating for privacy violations and has been found to be in violation of privacy laws in some of them.
It's almost as if he goes out of his way to do as much harm to the world as he thinks he can get away with while maintaining the facade of just doing business. I don't think he's the antichrist, I think Peter Thiel is the closest to deserving that description.
also, if the worst case scenario does happen and most of the population finds itself without money. there are other ways to live with very little money.
This is even more hideous than expressions of approval for individual violence. This is a dystopian acquiescence.
If I knew someone was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars building a big laser pointed at my house, I would not wait for "quantified evidence" of its effect to take some sort of action. The only real debate is what kind of action.
> also, if the worst case scenario does happen and most of the population finds itself without money. there are other ways to live with very little money.
If you have so little attachment to your money, why hold on to it at all? Do not be upset that other people are operating on a slightly larger time horizon than you are, and are interested in their livelihood not just today, but three or five years from now.
Well, I tried to warn my family and friends and they're looking at me like I'm crazy. So yes, I think most people will just treat all their layoffs like it's just a regular recession. Until, at least half your friends are laid off, most people won't be any more alarmed than if in a recession.
>> If you have so little attachment to your money, why hold on to it at all?
You'll need whatever you have left. The barter economy won't take the place of the primary economy, rather it will supplement it with transactions between members who have no currency. but, there will always be some things that you want to get from the primary economy, if you can.
The same thing happened with Kirk. Everyone standing up to "mourn" a neo-nazi, fake tears, rolling with the grift. Rolling with the white supremacist grindbox.
It's gross.
He isn’t, never has and never will. I know some of the bunker people. They basically have them in the way you or I might have a fancy tool in the garage or piece of art. It’s a discussion piece for a different class of wealth.
Shock collars / implanted brain bombs would be my evil plan, but he's got smarter people than me on this so who knows?
The thing about rights is you believe in them universally or you don’t believe in them at all. If we have a right to life, sympathy isn’t relevant. Awful people can be awful, but if we start compromising their rights then we deface all of our freedoms and security.
I know what you mean, of course, but it's just not true in honesty - when pressed, there are no binaries in morality, as romantic and proud as the idea is. "Violence is never the answer" is both true and also irrelevant once a person is asked to consider the existence of his very way of life, his values, his livelihood, his culture, his home, or other resources historically at the center of revolutions.
That statement is factually false. Sometimes violence is the answer. But we’re a social species. One-off violence is pretty much never the answer unless you need a short-term solution to e.g. entrapment.
I didn’t say rights are absolute. Just universal. The process for abrogating them must be just that—a process you’d wish to be visited upon you. Unilateral action destroys the idea of a right.
So I disagree with your axiom that you have to believe in them 100% or 0%.
One hundred percent of those debates end at process, not unilateral action. If it can be unilaterally nullified, it is no longer a right.
> you have to believe in them 100% or 0%
Not degree but range. We don’t have a right to infinite life or medicine. But everyone has to have the same level of right for it to be a right. Otherwise I can disagree with your right to a right and nullify it on my own terms.
1. We shouldn't kill or harass or destroy the property of someone like Altman. AKA, I'm not in disagreement with your take on abiding by the laws of the land.
2. But it's not surprising that such things happen to individuals like him, for reasons outlined. Put it this way - if I was in his position, I would be very wary of my public image, and I'd be very wary of my intentions - am I acting for the greater good, or only for my own good?
Of course it's possible he's actually acting with the best of intentions and is just terrible at presenting himself, which is one of the reasons I'd agree with due process and respecting his rights.
It’s understandable. But that also justifies a crackdown against it. I want to see AI regulation. Dumbfucks shooting a housekeeper in Sam Altman’s house is only going to stall that.
It is not okay. But if we don't have any solution to the ramifications of what really is "AGI" then it unfortunately won't be the last.
Welcome to "AGI".
As we discuss policy ideas to pump the breaks on a domestic level, I hope we balance that against the arms race that's happening around the world.
Can Sam Altman not afford security for his house? I'm confused.
Let's look at history:
Nancy Pelosi's husband (D).
Steve Scalise (R).
Ronald Regan (R).
Gabby Giffords (D).
Abraham Lincoln (R).
Harvey Milk (D, I assume).
Martin Luther King Jr. (D, I assume).
John F Kennedy (D).
Violence can solve problems. This kind of violence is stupid, counterproductive and immoral.
Strategically deploying violence takes time, resources and discipline. Wanking off with a gun does not.
What us cushy engineers haven't realized yet is that the gradient for who are well off are sliding more and more towards one end. Sooner or later engineers will be on the wrong side of that gradient.
Finally someone who said it. There was this quote I saw in the movie "Air"(about michael Jordan) about how people with true wealth only ever part with it not out of charity but out of greed. It takes someone or something truly special to force them to part with that money.
This whole era that we've lived through, where software engineers have amazing working conditions compared to blue collar workers and manage to pull ahead in society, helping to form a white collar elite class, is an aberration caused by the miracle of the microprocessor and Moore's Law. The elites saw the opportunity to obtain so much wealth from the lower classes(in the form of automating labor with computers) that they were forced to part with a bit of it, allowing some special people: software engineers like you and me to achieve what we consider a middle class life.
But sooner or later those same people will want that wealth back. They will continue to fight and find ways to take that wealth back: whether through H‑1B visas, "learn to code" initiatives to increase supply, or now AI. AI could very well crash and burn tomorrow but they will be back, and it will be an ongoing battle for the rest of our lives.
The elites after the French Revolution were not only mostly the same as before, they escaped with so much money and wealth that it’s actually debated if they increased their wealth share through the chaos [1].
The comment refers to an article specifically discussing only one aspect of a major historical event.
The French revolution is considered one of the most important events in the history of Europe, because of the great impact it had on the (among others) politics, economy and the quality of life of common people.
Downplaying its importance by trying to water its impact down to "but rich still rich, no?" is a sign, that the comment might have been made in bad faith or without proper understanding of the source material.
What the British did. Tale of Two Cities. Land and electoral reform.
One of them stayed geopolitically relevant for another century. One of them became Germany’s sock puppet.
By the same token, the normal populace was also way better off after the French Revolution, since using the money and wealth of the dead elites to improve everyone's lives made a substantial impact on the French civilization that they are still benefiting from today.
In other words...the French Revolution is exactly the wrong type of example you want to be using when talking about whether violence against tech elites is acceptable.
Violence never solves anything. You will never make anything in this world better by becoming a worse person than your enemies.