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The Demon, Kia's avatar

I find the current AI/AGI discussions make a lot more sense if I view them as complaints about having to hire servants. Complaining about 'the help', a favored pastime of the servant-hiring classes going back in perpetuity. Only now the servant-hiring class is lured by fantasies of never having to be bogged down in other people, robotics will replace all those annoying servant-people with their needs & their wants & their foibles & limitations. Perfected machine-servants will fix so many problems, starting with all that money spent on administering non-disclosure agreements. No more worrying about servants spying & gossiping & knowing. The Shakespearean bonus that is firing all those lawyers needed to administer all those NDAs. Above & beyond the more obvious advantages fantasy pseudo-sentient machinery would have over actual people.

The way that AI talk gets venture-capital wallets open has been much discussed & is kinda obvious, but the underlying emotion-logic of servant-keeping has & is not.

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Inside Outrance's avatar

I think it's incredibly telling how involved some people who could reasonably be called 'private equity vultures' are with the whole DOGE project. To me, this demonstrates that even if some of the people supporting it are motivated by a belief that AGI is imminent, there are others who view it purely as an extractive enterprise. I suppose those beliefs aren't mutually exclusive though.

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/doges-private-equity-playbook/

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