They want you to think AI is going to destroy the world so that you forget that the rich are already destroying the world right now

I liked this take: https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/16/beggar-thy-neighbor/

An excerpt:

But what if there was a way for the AI companies to get government permission to violate antitrust law and cease to compete with one another, and secure a ban on the use of Chinese open weight models? Turns out, there is a way to call time on the Red Queen's Race: merely insist that you are on the verge of teaching so many words to the word-guessing program that it will wake up and devour us all, and call for a ban on "superintelligence":

https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/microsoft-ceo-says-superintelligence-must-remain-under-human-control

Once the government stipulates that "superintelligence risk" is an existential crisis, it must grant the hyperscalers a consent decree absolving them from any violations of antitrust law stemming from a conspiracy to halt direct competition with one another:

https://stephaniekelton.substack.com/p/brer-rabbit-and-ai-extinction

Freaking out about "superintelligence" is a canonical example of "criti-hype," where critics repeat boosters' claims but append, "(and that's bad)" to them:

https://peoples-things.ghost.io/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype/

Remember, the tech giants want to stop competing.

The argument is, these companies cant be profitable as long as there is competition (from open or chinese models), so the US companies want those to be banned and be allowed to collude with each other to ramp up the money extraction without fear of consumers moving to other services.

Basically what they want is regulations that they can write so nobody else can spin up an AI company, or run an independent AI model on their home lab for example. And yes, you can download an llm and run it on a beefy enough computer, independent from any LLM company.

Basically they want laws that develop a Monopoly so we have to rent out AI agents rather than make our own, and have that written down in law.

They also do not want say, smaller companies developing their own AI systems and instead be forced to rent from them.

Are there dangers in AI? Yes very so. Misaligned AI have done things in a lab setting that is concerning, but these regulations are calling for aren't there to deal with that, it's to create a monopoly because they realise that everyone from hobbyists to governments can run their own AI system if they can afford to.

Yup. The problem isn't the large language models, it's the business models

They want regulations put in place to stop other companies from being able to compete with them.

The fact that it will give them good PR and stop people from opposing it because it's regulated is just a bonus.

I'm sure all of these restrictions conveniently prevent other companies from developing the same level of AI that OpenAI and Anthropic have because it's so "dangerous." Thereby granting them a duopoly. I fully expect that Chinese AI companies are going to be restricted as well for "security reasons."

Inb4 "We would have been profitable, but the regulations mean we have to be safe. Sorry investors. The government will bail us out now though because we're so powerful and dangerous."

Thank you, that's the first thing that came to mind. She's a horrible person both to listen to as well as in terms of not being an empathetic human being.

She started on a sincere goal of knowledge translation, but then she got obsessed with the YouTube algorithm and many of her videos are hot takes she's not qualified on.

She's got a PHD in computer science, she gives a good explanation of exactly how the recent advancements in self improving AI work and under what conditions.

She's not a racist (as far as I've seen), like Hossenfelder.

The important thing to keep in mind is that we are not currently at risk of anyone inventing a super intelligence. The word guessing engines are getting amazingly good at guessing words, but the huge jump from that to actual intelligence, super or otherwise, remains out of reach with currently known technology.

I agree that if we did manage to invent that, the biggest threat would be the humans doing short-sighted, greedy and generally stupid shit with it. No coincidence that that's also the biggest threat from current LLMs.

Edit: "Super-hammers could break containment and kill us all if we don't invest more in controlling them!" shouts man wildly swinging around a hammer in a crowded room. "The government needs to regulate this technology so that only people like me, who use it responsibly, can have access to it," he added. He tried to say more, but was out of breath after some particularly enthusiastic hammer swings.

The fact that GenAI is styming entry-level is not good. People will be slow to enter their career, which’ll push back economic growth. Basically, we’re f-ing ourselves ten ways to Sunday.

You don't need judgment to be dangerous. People on lemmy like to mindlessly parrot, "AI isn't intelligent!!!!", ignoring that they are not using the word "intelligent" in the same way the AI researchers do. Lemmy users use "intelligence" to refer to human intent and will. The AI field uses "intelligence" to refer to the ability of a system to execute complex tasks towards some goal. An ant colony has no conscious will of its own. An ant queen is just one cell in a body, she's not a mind consciously controlling the colony. Yet an ant colony as a whole is intelligent, it's capable of performing complex tasks. Same thing with AI. It has no will, ego, or sense of self, but it still has intelligence in this sense.

And that's the real risk. When people refer to superhuman intelligence, they mean a system capable of vastly overperforming humans in many tasks. There doesn't actually have to be a consciousness there to produce that intelligence. Some fool could tell a superintelligent AI, "make me the richest person in the world." And then it grants the wish monkeys-paw style. It decides the easiest way to make them the richest person on Earth is to engineer some bioweapon that is lethal to everyone except the one person who asked to be the wealthiest man on Earth. Everyone else dies; they now own the world.

The real danger isn't conscious AI. At least something like that we could potentially reason with. The danger is a hyper-capable AI that completely lacks discernment or judgment. It's capable of doing incredible things, but it has no care for the consequences of its actions.

It's more that they want to say "AI Dangerous". It's step 2 in the oligopoly playbook:

1. ”It's a perfectly safe miracle solution. Invest with us or miss out."
2. "It turns out it's really dangerous. We need the governments to make tough laws that coincidentally prevent start-up companies from competing with us, (while we don't sell you any RAM chips.)
3. "Remember those miraculous investment returns we promised, the evil governments forced us to spend them all on lawyers and stuff. Sorry about that. But the good news is..."
4. "We have a new safe sure-fire miracle solution (to something new and different). Invest with us, or miss out!"