alt Hacker News> if powerful AI is coming regardless, Anthropic believes it's better to have safety-focused labs at the frontier than to cede that ground to developers less focused on safety (see our core views).
It used to be that only skilled men trained to wield a weapon such as a sword or longbow would be useful in combat.
Then the crossbow and firearms came along and made it so the masses could fight with little training.
Democracy spread, partly because an elite group could no longer repress commoners simply with superior, inaccessible weapons.
Replies
skybrian • yesterday at 8:55 PM
It would be more accurate to say that there are rich people on both sides. For example, George Washington was the richest man in America at the time.
None of that is historically accurate. Most soldiers were just ordinary untrained men.
And democracy spread because wealthy men wanted a say in how things were run, rather than just the upper classes, and then it expanded into working men with unions, and even women! Bugger all to do with weapons.