That fact doesn’t prevent the 0.001% from continuing to control it.

Point is, if an AGI becomes powerful and capable enough of replacing 99.999% of humanity, the likes of Sam Altman and Elon Musk won't be able to control it.

An electrician with access to a circuit breaker will be able to control it.

This is called the AI Stop Button Problem. Computerphile has a great video on this (featuring Robert Miles) which explains why this is not a reliable solution to AI getting out of control. When the AI is smarter than all of humanity combined, the only real solution is for the AI to not get out of control in the first place.

If people are going to produce unrealistic sci-fi videos they should at least try to make them entertaining and not just lame.

The AI would have redundancy, both in terms of its power source and also because it can literally replicate itself and have multiple instances running all over the world. Also, an army of drones that you'd have to dodge just to go anywhere near any critical infrastructure.

It's hilarious that your think you know what "AI" would have when it doesn't even exist

It's only a little bit comforting that computers still live in meatspace when you consider something like an AI-controlled Metal Gear roaming around though.

2001 Space Odyssey presents a different scenario

It does exactly present that scenario, as Dave Bowman gains access to the circuit breaker (well, to the memory banks).

Most people don't believe AGI is reachable, or that any of these tech CEOs even want to reach it. So we are discussing the more likely reality

The 0.001% has a controlling stake in AI, so they're in the clear.

The 99.999% needs to assert their controlling stake in the technology. I don't know what this looks like. Maybe ubiquitous unionizing, coupled with a fully public and openly-trained LLM.

There are already several fully open source LLMs. You can start participating in those projects today.

https://www.bentoml.com/blog/navigating-the-world-of-open-so...

Are most of these distilled from other models? I'm talking about publicly owned and fully open foundation models, which will require significant government-level investment into GPU farms and training.

No chance of it happening in the US due to lobbying pressure, but maybe in a more civilized country... (unless a distributed SETI@home-type architecture becomes viable)

I don't understand your comment. The USA is the most civilized country in the world. And some of the LLMs linked above are fully open source.

The monkeys claimed ownership of the world's resources according to monkey law. I guess we are now subservient to the monkeys.

Yes, but that isn’t the question as long as those wealthy people control most of the system: companies aren’t going to lose executives, they’ll shed the jobs which they don’t respect. Someone wealthy does not need to accept a bad deal to avoid sleeping on thr street. It’s everyone who isn’t insulated who has to actually compete for work.

Besides the argument above, that an AGI powerful enough to replace 99.999% of humanity won't be controllable, there's also the economic argument: corporations, executives, all that means nothing if 99.999% are unemployed. Our economy is based on consumerism which will obviously cease to happen in a scenario where 99.999% of humanity is unemployed. The economic system would be so upended that ownership and such notions would become immaterial.

If we meet in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, but I have an android slave with a gun and you have nothing but a rusty spoon, it's going to be pretty clear who the android belongs to, and who it serves. The android also makes it likely that I will have a bunch of other nice stuff that you don't. Food and water, for instance.

This scenario is not meant to be taken literally.

I would worry that it won’t go quickly to 99.999% but instead would grind down different groups of people slowly enough that they’d be able to entrench their power: being a cop will be a growth job, people would be given state-sanctioned automation-resistant work like picking crops as a condition of receiving social benefits, the Republicans would more seriously dust off the previously-fringe proposals to restrict voting to property owners again, etc.

Setting people against each other is a time honored way for a small elite to control a large population.

I have given this serious thought over the years. I even have an unfinished novel exactly around that topic.

Energy. The key is controlling their access to energy.

IMO this is a common trap. Certainly there's no boundary of cognitive capability that separates capitalist elites from those below them in terms of an AI's ability to outperform them.

But that doesn't really matter when we talk about "replacement" because these people don't "do" they simply "own".

They're not concerned about being outpaced at some skill they perform in exchange for money...they just need the productive output of their capital invested in servers/models/etc to go up.

It's not about capability. It's about who "holds the key". And sure, many currently with deep pockets and pushing for AI will miscalculate and get pushed by the wayside. I think many people who are not in the 0.001% are miscalculating right now in HN.

What's important is that ultimately some small subset owns this, and it doesn't matter how smart they are, only that they own the thing and that it cannot be employed against them (because they hold the key).