alt Hacker NewsI pray that we can all get to the following simple standard:
* AI and states cannot peacefully coexist, and AI is not going to be stopped. Therefore, we must begin to deprecate states.
I think it's very unlikely that this is unrelated to the pressure from the US administration, as the anonymous-but-obvious-anthropic-spokesperson asserts.
We're at a point now where the nation states are all totally separate creatures from their constituencies, and the largest three of them are basically psychotic and obsessed with antagonizing one another.
In order to have a peaceful AI age, we need _much_ smaller batches of power in the world. The need for states that claim dominion over whole continents is now behind us; we have all the tools we need to communicate and coordinate over long distances without them.
Please, I pray for a gentle, peaceful anarchism to emerge within the technocratic leagues, and for the elder statesmen of the legacy states to see the writing on the wall and agree to retire with tranquility and dignity.
That's hilarious, and very sweet.
Humans are, by nature, forgetful and argumentative. Fourteen hundred years ago, the Qur'an said this unequivocally (20:115, 18:54, 22:8, 18:73). Not to moralize here, I'm just saying if camel-herders could build a medieval superpower out of nothing, they knew something we don't.
Any state or system that insists good humans are always nice, smart, cogent, and/or aware is doomed to fail. A Washington or a Cincinnatus that can get out of his own way (and that of society) is rare indeed, a one-in-a-billion soul. We shouldn't sit around and wait for that, while your run-of-the-mill dictator in a funny hat (or a funny toupée for that one orange fellow) has his way with us.