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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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but it's inherently a sort of technology that lends itself to centralization

Yes. Well, it's unavoidable either way, because power is always centralized. If the power exists then it will centralize. It's a law of nature.

Who wields the power of guns? A few large actors.

Who wields the power of nukes? A few large actors.

Who wields the power of compute? The internet was supposed to be the ultimate tool of democratization, total freedom for anyone to say anything to anyone. But who reaps the benefits, who controls the discourse? A few large actors.

A few individuals seem to have a fantasy of using open source AI models to, like, fight OpenAI's models and Meta's models, in an epic battle for truth and freedom, or something. There will obviously be no such thing. It's as fallacious as claiming that the right to gun ownership in America protects us "from government tyranny". You have a gun, but they have bigger guns. No matter how smart your model is, the big guys in charge will always have smarter models, more compute, better logistics, more resources to throw at the problem.

The internet, ultimate tool of freedom and progress, introduced us to the concept of cancellation on a trans-national scale (they canceled the whole god damn country of Russia!), memetic social contagions that cause people to voluntarily sterilize themselves, all sorts of new ways to ruin someone's life with fraud and theft... what new and unanticipated forms of immiseration will AI introduce us to?

The only solution is to just not build it. If you have to build it anyway, well, good luck.