The problem is neuromorphic computers are barely a blip in US business or research ecosystems, and have a far greater probability of generating serious AI.

LLM are great for context search, but regulatory capture and despotism will not make "AI" something it fundamentally can't become without more energy than a third of our galaxy. Picking a war with math is disappointingly absurd, but not unexpected given the obvious degenerative geriatric condition of the glorious leader. =3

Local LLMs are a kind of communist dystopia where, by way of analogy, every citizen gets to make their own bread if they want. What?!

If they were true patriots they would respect the restrictions of the congressional FLOUR Act 2028 and (a) exchange their labor for wages from Acme Corporation and then (b) exchange wages for bread made by, depending on your state, either of the big three: Standard Wheat, Union Pacific Bread Corporation, or Trump Agri Inc.

So which are you, friend, a <spits> communist or an American?

Just another example of the Executive Branch stripping First Amendment rights from Americans.

It will go to court, and taxpayers will pay for endless appeals by the Executive Branch.

Or like in Egbert v Boule (2022), the SCOTUS will decide that even if your constitutional rights are violated, you’re not owed any damages unless Congress establishes a policy for what to do when your constitutional rights are violated by the federal government.

linking .gov as a source for a claim the government is making lol

Our survival as a civilization? I cannot follow at all what you are talking about. What threat?

I read the article as claiming that the Administration is implying it will harass or prosecute people for speaking or protesting against AI/data centers by deeming this to be "in support of China". I hope everyone agrees that would be a truly absurd breach of the first amendment, if it happened.

Letting the executive branch decide on a whim that certain speech is illegal because it would "further the goals of enemy X" would surely be a civilizational threat to America (if it actually happened), but that doesn't seem to be what you mean?

All the specific people mentioned in the article seem to be American [except arguably the three businessmen arguing for data centers--O'leary, Musk, Sacks], so I can't tell what the other guy is talking about either? Non-Americans do not generally have American speech protections unless in America legally (and then with some caveats). That's not America's decision!

All effective foreign interference takes popular sentiments and helps organize and focus it.

And a lot of effective domestic interference takes fears about foreign threats and "helps organize and focus it."

China is a legitimate threat to US hegemony and this is clearly a new Red Scare. The irony is that it was largely the US who invited and welcomed China into the global economic order.

Civilization only really functions because people don't shut down the country over every populist urge.

Civilization also doesn't really function because a handful of ridiculously wealthy lunatics and their sycophants know what's best for 8+ billion people.

One only needs to encounter AI-Enhanced™ products a few times to develop a strong distaste for the whole field.

1. Does every other company that says their products will uplift people "think we are lesser beings"?

2. Which documentation are you referring to? Googing "site:anthropic.com uplift" most of the top hits seem to be about bio research, another is about measuring agent performance (not a comparison to people), or "These are Anthropic’s internal designators for actors observed to be abusing AI. The report also attempts to measure uplift, a term we use to describe the AI capability boost, or how much more harm was caused with AI versus without AI."

That is a ridiculously reaching statement.

To add some context, uplift in the context of futurism literally refers to a species fast-tracking another’s progress.

Their idea of safety and alignement is sane person dyatopia and harm.

Meanwhile, they dont care about acrual harm to real people. They sell to Palantier for christ sake.

Luckily we can declare that they're both bad and neither should be our overlord.

That is the correct and I thought I edited to correct it but apparently not.

. blaming it on the boogyman does have the benefit that you don't actually have to address the concerns of those revolting peasants!

The establishment and its techbro enablers have messed up so badly that telling the torch people that the pitchfork people want to take their torches isn't working anymore. So now they're moving on to claiming that anyone with a torch or a pitchfork is secretly working for the next kingdom over.

How can I get part of those trillions of dollars?

I am including all nations' spending excepting Ukraine. US only direct spending is about $200 billion. [1] However, that excludes many factors like inflation attributable to US involvement in the conflict, spending through avenues and funds that are not publicly recorded, indirect spending - we transfer $x or arms to X who then routes it to Ukraine, causally related spending like funding for refugees, and so on. And yes the Iran war is also another self destructive war that's a completely pointless waste of resources and lives.

The last thing Russia needs more of is land or resources. Yet they do need dramatically more people - people that they're actively losing right now. They're paying far too high a price for some petty imperialism or whatever. The only reason that makes sense maps exactly with what they've said - they were genuinely terrified of Ukraine joining NATO, giving them a perfect geographic path right into their heartland. In fact Ukraine's invasion via Kursk was the exact same route that the Nazis took in 1943.

The war has turned into a war of attrition, with a small and heavily depopulated country facing a much larger country that hasn't even declared a general mobilization to support the war. The main reason this war is being continued is because it ending in an indisputably favorable way to Russia would be politically devastating to both its Western backers and to Zelensky who would shortly thereafter be out of power, and perhaps much worse. So it continues to the last Ukrainian - meaning at some point it may indeed become existential, all while people pretend they're supporting Ukraine. It's complete and utter insanity, fueled only by endless propaganda.

[1] - https://www.ukraineoversight.gov/Funding/

Surely tiktok being heavily composed of people doing creative work that have understandably extremely negative views of AI would not be the cause of this, no, it must be an unprovable hunch.

I’m aware of how it works. This is from naive scraped collection of TikTok without an account or durable device fingerprints, not from my personal browsing.

So? My first amendment rights say I'm allowed to criticize it too.

It's one thing to identify that these influence operations are happening, but another entirely to say they are a significant factor in public opinion.

See here I was thinking this was a first amendment issue but with an evidentiary case like this it's clear we're dealing with a case of people having wrong and illegal opinions. Classic blunder, my bad

Unless I'm missing something, those sources don't mention anything about amplifying AI opposition efforts.

None of these any anything to do with "pushing and amplifying AI opposition efforts". (??)

“It is unconscionable that an American citizen would not only undermine the interests of the United States, but also facilitate others in doing so.”

This must be satire. Most of congress seems to have no issue undermining and self-dealing.

Agreed. China and Russia are getting very aggressive inside US information space

Am I supposed to not like that?

Does that mean that civil rights activists in the US were internal enemies or that effective propaganda highlights legitimate grievances

It probably won't come as news to you that Hoover's FBI smeared the Civil Rights movement communist and subversive. The AI broligarchs are wrapping themselves in the flag and using an old playbook, this is a dumb sequel to COINTELPRO.

Perhaps the current elite should focus on reasonable ways to address mass discontent rather than justify intensified oppression.

Today's America has no FDR to save runaway capitalism from itself.

Similar story to Code Pink, the anti-war (but primarily anti-US military) demonstrators.

Co-founder Jodie Evans is married to Neville Roy Singham who lives in China, has extensive links to the CCP and is currently Code Pink's major funder.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/world/europe/neville-roy-...

CCP is pushing and amplifying AI opposition efforts, that’s a fact regardless of US politics

Should the Civil Rights movement have been proscribed on the basis of Nazis and Soviets making propaganda about the treatment of black people in the US of A?

Apparently it takes 737 min. for the US to descend and become just a less-frosty USSR. What a time to be alive. I was born after the fall of the USSR so I didn't get to watch that but here I am for a bigger show.

Now label me as an adversarial agent to the great nation or given my ethnicity the "terrorist" label will be more befiting.

CCP is pushing and amplifying AI opposition efforts, that’s a fact regardless of US politics.

They even have agents like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei posting at a furious rate about how AI is going to decimate the American workforce to undermine Americans' support for AI!

None of your articles are trustworthy, or support the claim you're making.

but somehow the Trump administration has convinced itself the public concern was manufactured in China.

Wait a minute here. Critical journalism could dissect how opinions are formed. It’s far from speculative that the White House opinion about AI opposition is informed by AI companies. They’ve been warning about China for a long time. So there’s really no somehow. Vested interests with massive amounts of money are lobbying and succeeding to convince the government that any opposition to AI is outside influence. It’s not somehow, it’s deliberate. Do better.

There can be foreign agents criticizing AI, but not all people criticizing AI are foreign agents.

Right. The DoJ is demanding the former group register as foreign agents, as they are required to under FARA.

There can be foreign agents criticizing AI, but not all people criticizing AI are foreign agents.

Indeed, and it's hard to disentangle exactly how much sentiment is driven by one vs the other.

If we remember back to recent elections and the Russian influence campaigns to boost Trump, the same people were either denying that they happened or denying that they actually influenced anything. Interesting reversal now.

Maybe they shouldn't have dismantled all the task forces and teams meant to study and combat disinformation.

The qualifier here is that the public demonstrations must further the propaganda of a foreign power? If so, that doesn’t seem to be much of an obstacle if the people making the arrest are the ones who decide whether or not a protest is furthering foreign propaganda.

TBH we should support any channel by which America is forced to share money with the rest of the world. Imagine if they had a billion abortion protestors - maybe they couldn't afford data centers.

My guess is that they're drawing a distinction between reporting that says:

1. People in general who have opinions that might happen to align with a foreign power's stance.

2. People who are literally "agents" of a foreign power as defined under laws like the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 [0], which often involves being directed/hired/paid.

That'd be a significantly different legal standard. (The constitutionality of FARA-type laws being a separate question.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Agents_Registration_Ac...

I guess that’s a defense you could claim to the judge, at the trial, after being arrested.

So I can read the DOJ sentence two ways, I first interpreted it as #1, but it sounds like you took it as #2?

1. "We mean people who at that time qualify as agents under laws like the Foreign Agents Registration Act, we said "acting as" because it indicates a temporary employment status rather than an innate human characteristic."

2. "We are weasel-wording to target all people with similar acts to how agents would act, but who would not qualify under the law we want you to think we'd be drawing authority from."

Trump is painting critics with a wide brush

That's far too kind a description. Donald Trump is a compromised lunatic who's so untrustworthy that he ought not be allowed to run a carnival game.

"Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders!" has been a meme for over a decade.

I think we should ask chatgpt

This is silly. AI CEOs have s lot of visibility, but AI and alignment researchers not affiliated with big corps in any way have been saying this for 20+ years and are finally being listened to. Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence was published in 2014.

This is gold. Thanks for sharing. Also Dario’s last name looks a lot like ‘a model’

On what regulatory capture actually looks like: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/09/wh...

Consider the amount of debt they have piled up. If you don't believe your company can lice up to said debt or the current valuation, and if you do believe fear can lead to government capture that would protect your company from said liabilities, fiduciary liability would incentivize you to push the extinction risk narrative.

So just Elon & Google, mainly?

I have no idea how these extra words "they eat" ended up in my comment. It was autocorrect.

In my opinion, no; but they are now getting in bed (Metaphorically) with people who see their software as potential means to "beat China" or "beat Iran" and together they are weaving a very tangled Pandora's box of worms

The "increases the risk of extinction" bit is 100% marketing BS that they're spewing to pump up their stock prices and encourage the government to shutout foreign competition (who would use this ability against the USA, of course ).

They've played you like a fiddle.

it does if global extinction is the only debt management strategy left

It’s something you would do if you were desperate for regulatory capture to make competitors go away

Read it as "please regulate us so we have a plausible explanation of why we're missing our growth/revenue projections by several orders of magnitude"

Much of this is coming from people who have never seen a data center in their life and are always going to want critical infrastructure to be built in the next town over.

There are React programmers that don’t want AI but do want AI data centers, which they consider critical infrastructure, to be built in the next town over?

I would support that. Companies should do that. Sometimes communities disagree, obviously. Communities that really don't want them often succeed. That's why the administration is throwing such a fit.

I don't support that. The administration is the worst advocate for AI because they are so clearly corrupt. If local people pursue their economic self interest at the end of the day that's their right. This whole nimby thing was a diversion from my point about knowledge workers turning on AI. Perhaps I should have just ignored that comment.

If people want to stop a local data center then fine. I think it's bad national politics. But if it's helping these companies make better deals or find better places to go then good. What I object to is the doomerism about it, and the uncritical conflation of self interest with civic virtue or robust public policy.

What about the water treatment plant? Or the power station? Or the new subway line?

You mean, utilities, run by the public for public benefit instead of private profit?

You wouldn’t want to live next to a data center because of income inequality? Or you would want to live by one because you think data centers cut checks to townspeople?

In general, you're right. They are just buildings that sit there emitting hot air.

However these AI ones are being built with all expenses spared. That's why they come with on-site electricity generation that is loud enough to keep the whole town awake at night and pollutes enough to give them all permanent asthma.

Sure? I would be completely fine with a data center next door assuming it's a normal one and not something like xAI's. There are several not too far from me already.

This is a strawman. I’ve watched my own city reject datacenter propositions much to my dismay. Tax revenue thrown away purely on FUD-fueled backlash.

I lived by a datacenter in Cali and would happily do it again. It’s about the most benign form of “industrial” activity you could imagine.

Typical programmer thinks everyone is a programmer.

The thing is it doesn't matter if AI is going to kill us all. The industry says it might kill us all, and the industry is valued ridiculously high based on the idea it'll take all our jobs. Why would anybody support that? I mean, unless you're heavily financially invested in it.

Opposition to data centers isn't even based on doomerism. From what I can see it is based on the slop onslaught, perceived and real threat to jobs, the "10% chance it'll kill us all", environmental concerns, local concerns (property values, noise pollution, toxic pollution), concentration of power in the hands of a few oligarchs, and a plethora of other reasons. Only one, maybe two, of those qualify as ai doomerism.

a year or two ago, I'd enjoy this comment as some usual HN satire. nowadays, especially here, I do see a lot of people that actually believe this, enough to make me think whether to laugh

some underpaid military man [...] abuses AI [...] hallucinates that nukes are incoming

here it is: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/09/report-us-almost-boarded-...

To be fair this is a fairly low risk, but it's _a_ risk.

it's much higher than you think, at least during Trump admin. have you seen how LLM agents are being shoved down our throats at tech companies? the government is no better in that regard, there are all incentives to skip output verification

Sometimes the most interesting people are people with ideas outside of the same groupthink circle. Everyone who has changed society has been called a quack by a square.

I'm just spit balling but:

1. We've seen AI being crafty and cheating

2. We are increasingly outsourcing our programming and thinking to AI

3. There's a nonzero probability that AI will try and surreptitiously sneak in capabilities humans wouldn't want AI to have

4. Human oversight for #3: "We only need to be lucky one time, you must be lucky all the time"

Proposition: nonzero chance eventually AI sneaks in ways to circumvent humans' attempts to control it

5. "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" -- we've seen AI agents find crafty ways to communicate with each other

6. AI is pretty good at finding software vulnerabilities/reverse engineering

Proposition: nonzero chance AI finds a way to use the Internet as a communication substrate that becomes difficult/impossible to shut down. In particular, consider the implication of humans losing control of this communication channel: for example, remember when Meta's DNS/routing went down and they basically had to break into their own server rooms?

7. Wholes are often more than the sum of their parts

Proposition: if AI agents coordinate over the Internet in a persistent way, we don't necessarily need giant leaps in individual models/GPUs for AI to significantly enhance its capabilities, but rather it might emerge as the next layer on top of a connected substrate of agents

8. Game theory says unless everyone coordinates, it only takes one party to touch the proverbial stove and push the envelope to a point of no return

Proposition: curiosity and money end up replacing sex drive as the next catalyst of evolutionary progress

AI doesn't need to be sentient to be dangerous. Obeying and doing what someone tells to do is more than enough. What do you think they will tell it to do, and do you think it will align with your interests or the interests of someone else? Somehow I don't think it will be used to give everyone free ice cream.

it's really not like the average voter is more principled than the average tech CEO at this point.

Of course CEOs are more principled, their principles mainly include making more money. The only way for an AI to go "rouge" in this sense is for it to refuse to rake in cash.

The strike on the girl's school in Iran is an early example. That one happened when the AI didn't even have direct control of the weapons. All it took was people starting to offload their thinking to AI which we've seen is becoming increasingly prevalent.

With fully autonomous weapons being under development, the scenario becomes even bleaker.

But it makes the numbers look good, GDP go up.

The USA's economy is now so precarious when the AI DC music stops it's about to all just go poof. That has to happen after the election, not before. Between other countries being forced to sell their US bonds (i.e. dedollarize) to afford oil, a 100% tax on all imports, reciprocal trade bans like fresh water from Canada, truckers running out of diesel and having to cancel food deliveries, and non-oil-based energy sources being illegal, the USA is cooked.

Data center investment is the only thing keeping GDP positive

This is an incentive to build. Not to manage downside risk.

That's the ridiculous part, because there is a huge range of positive, profit generating areas to invest in, and it's a tulip madness of concentrated and narcissistic wealth does things like pour trillions in to AI, but an insufficient amount of money into an electrical generation and grid infrastructure and housing. We basically have a centrally mismanaged economy under a banner of "capitalism" as the magical mythology of the era.

Here's my attempt[0] (5 months ago) on trying to keep track of all the things that AI had negatively done yet we were forgetting back then. Looking back, I definitely need to update it as so much has happened since then but that is my point, I wish if you could go back and see all the negative things that we most likely forgot AI companies have done. They are just continuously overdoing things and constantly tiring us and having us not keep track of all the things of our past and the process repeats.

GDP is a particularly poor proxy to measure all of this. AI/Datacenters can increase the GDP while the costs (energy,infra, labor,disruption,capital concentration) are distributed elsewhere

It reminds me of the old joke where two economies each eat a dead rat for 10k$ and conclude they just added 20k$ to the GDP/Economy.

I wish to ask if its that AI is increasing our actual economic output but also who really captures the gains and who bears the costs if the boom eventually reverses.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47739653

I think everyone is downplaying the sober part of your critique. We’ve seen these leaders visibly high while talking to the public about our future paths.

Same thing that is sane about a paperclip optimiser making paperclips, or a mammal improving its sexual attractiveness

Number go up

Neuron activation

It's called capitalism. Whether that is sane, or individual self-interest without empathy is a trait of sociopaths, i'll leave up to psychologists and historians to debate.

I don't see any reason why they cannot simultaneously be malicious criminals and insane.

And that is why we hand testicular cancer a drivers license and voting rights.

It's like African geopolitics. The US comes to some African country and gives them a lecture about fiscal responsibility (mostly involving ways they get give America all their money). China comes to the same country and gives them roads and a power plant. America complains that China is exploiting African countries.

Because they are free.

The Chinese models are cheaper and probably soon are going to be better, too. They're also open weight, which is the most important thing in the future. US companies are no longer considered safe enough against industrial espionage outside the US and do not meet mandatory data protection standards elsewhere. There have also been known incidents of direct interference with US models for propaganda/political purposes (e.g. Elon Musk admitted to doing that), making US models a fairly direct threat to EU sovereignty.

looks like a protection racket for the frontier models, with the goal being to eventually outlaw non-US frontier models.

CEOs and alleged LLM experts: it'll take your jobs, hack your shit and possibly make humans extinct!

Datacenter build outs: use turbines for direct noise and air pollution... or use grid electricity and increase prices for everyone nearby.

Every modern phone, laptop, computer in the world: more expensive thanks to datacenter buildout.

Web experience: slop blogs, slop videos, slop "searches" - would you like more slop with that?

Corporate strategy: lets try to monopolize LLM use!

.. ..

Public Elected Official: Not liking these outcomes makes you a traitor.

Right or anyone who says they are anti-fascist.

Hitler did this exact same thing btw.

And we may be heading to energy lockdowns.

Energy lockdowns have always been part of US culture, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_blackout#USA

It's un-American to invest in infrastructure and build a better power network. Both parties agree on this.

The majority of working hours are not needed. The only purpose is to play along in the game of capitalism and be good little consumers. It's mostly social benefits with occupational therapy.

The good thing about energy lockdowns is that you get to join all your friends and cook a communal lunch in a big pot.

  energy lockdowns

Rationing.

Another item from the soylent green checklist.

Lots and lots of middle management and HR jobs (off the top of my head) are absolutely 0 value add and definitely just leech off of actual labor.

A lot of that money is printed and handed to some players that recirculate it where they see fit. It's as "needed" as the government paying you to dig and fill curves.

In whose interest is it to make the pro AI position in the United States so indefensible?

Maybe the foreign agents are coming from inside the house...

I am a bit confused as to why this comment is getting downvoted. Seems like a reasonable take.

I think it is worth noting that older data centers were not materially moving the electrical grid. That Utah data center is planning to use as much power as the entire state.

Regardless, it still comes down to: things are bad and unaffordable. The powers that be keep claiming that AI is about to take our jobs and end the world. Why wouldn't people be mad?

Statistically isn't it something like 1 death per $50k profit?

They never even held the guy who pooed in all our salads a few months ago responsible.

People died. I stopped eating salad. Where's the accountability?

The current administration seems simply immune to criticism. Let us simply hope that the next administration can understand two things can be true. I'm hopeful the sort of internecine party conflict that provided us with Trump on the right in 2016 can happen for Democrats in 2028 in terms of tearing down the Jeb Bushes and the played out old geezers among the Democrats. These guys are losers imagine losing to Donald Trump for the better part of a decade.

Trump was not seriously on anyone's radar in 2014. Maybe America will be blessed with someone who can realize that AI can both be a blessing and a curse and is willing to do the hard work of making sure public policy creates a future fair for everyone.

If we don't figure it out by 2028 the United States is probably entering an ugly doom loop. The rest of the world is not going to sit around and wait for us to figure it out. The country is too divided. Without a president in 2028 with a mandate to right the ship and write a new path keeping up with our increasingly capable autocratic competitors will not be possible. There's not much else to hope for in America. Another weak neoliberal in 2028 will just give us whatever Trump 2.0 (2.0) looks like in 2032.

There are tons of examples now of data centers harming communities.

But there aren’t. At least not in any of the anti datacenter discussions. There are just vague fears of using up the river water and spewing chemicals back in. Then the majority of actual issues people come up with aren’t even data center specific, they are just construction mishaps.

Not true yet. It seems pretty likely it’ll happen soon enough, given their track record of saying their going to abuse the law to go after a group - and then abusing the law to go after a group.

The best evidence will undoubtedly be classified so we can’t see it, but trust us, it’s there. Ignore all the other evidence.

I heard it reported by a reputable source a few weeks ago. I don't think the propaganda reach was very broad

I mean, I don't particularly doubt it's happening (and that the US tries to do the similar things in China, mess with public opinion in ways we think convenient for us or inconvenient for the CCP). Like, why wouldn't they try to mess with us this way, we're so easy to mess with. I don't think either the USA or Chinese governments are limited by things like "ethics" or "international law" or something. I'm talking about social media campaigns with sock puppets etc, mostly on the internet. How effective it is or exactly how many resources they are putting into it is another story.

That obviously doesn't mean that everyone who is protesting a data center is working for China, or wouldn't be doing so if it weren't for Chinese interference. It's plausible to me that China is messing with social media with puppet accounts and stuff (like why wouldn't they be?), much less plausible they have agents on the ground organizing or even going to protests or public hearings (and obviously even if they did, it would not be _most_ of the campaigns or protests against data centers).

You can't plausibly be arrested by ICE if you're in the US legally, in theory, but look where we are.

I'm afraid that a paranoid, worst-case, bad faith assumption isn't something we can handwave away anymore.

You can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride, and as outright fascism flourishes, you might not even manage the former. When you spend years in an ICE gulag because your speech crosses some nebulous line, it will matter very little what legal rights you think you have.

Does this article not have a source?

I fear you may have misread the content of the article? The author is clear that he believes exactly what you just said. He cites and then mocks the argument being presented by the administration. Even the title, with scare quotes around "foreign agents", makes this clear.

political supporter of datacenters requests investigation into datacenter opposition, citing reports from fellow political supporters of datacenters

a connection to China (that the administration will insist is not spurious) is exactly what they are threatening to use to prosecute and imprison people organizing political campaigns or actions against data centers.

do you think lying about me lying furthers yours?

do you think this is a useful way to have a discussion?

Declaring undesirable NGOs etc. as "foreign agents" is 100% a page from the authoritarian playbook (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_foreign_agent_law).

Sounds similar to Russia targeting LGBT rights and other human rights activists as "Foreign Agents".

They prosecuted a guy for calling out that the reflecting pool sealant was falling apart. They are still trying to prosecute him.

Maybe it is modelling itself based om conservative parties both worldwide and local. And based on its creators - tech managers

They mean since the government has zero competent people in it and Elon got to choose the AI, the whole government relies on Grok to do everything.

That playbook is 2012 all over again. Eerie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_foreign_agent_law

I wonder if we can infer any chronological forecast from relative USA::РФ time frames?

I don't think you did, it seemed it was more an explanation of the context for other readers.

Standard Belarus/Lukashenko playbook as well, which at this point might as well be Russia itself.

Hello, "foreign agents" of Hacker News. What country are you from?

Tech fascism. Read Nerd Reich!

It gets flagged here instantly so your duty to read this.

Try searching "tech fascism" or "nerd reich" and almost every topic is flagged.

Nerd Reich describes the Y Combinator connection nicely.

Then it can afford to compensate affected people.

If people like that have their way private property would effectively cease existing.

Regardless of what the tech can or cannot do, the business model is clearly a scam by people who get high on thinking they're smarter than everyone else. You don't promise your investors "the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars" by accident. You do it because you're a fraud who thinks you're much cleverer than you actually are.

Cotton’s chief exhibit was Neville Roy Singham, a Shanghai-based American tech mogul whose network of left-wing U.S. nonprofits, Cotton claimed, has spent years producing content opposing American AI infrastructure, with the Chinese government as its “ultimate paymaster.”

Was not expecting a crack down on ThoughtWorks today, but this is totally on brand for him afaik. (Singham founded TW)

"every accusation is a confession"

So you're telling me that the existence of US anti-boycott laws aimed at israel is actually antisemitic?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws#Anti-BDS_laws_in...

Or just acknowledging that they exist?

You are the only person who said Jew. Methinks the lady doth protest too much.

Shalom!

Clearly china made me commit such a heinous thoughtcrime.

Edit: and by the way, that's a total misrepresentation of what I wrote. AI companies are attempting regulatory capture to protect their business, which should be opposed by all means possible.

There also seems to be a coordinated effort to bring up Israel whenever China is being discussed negatively.

Straight out of the Putin playbook.

For the past 25 years, ever-increasing numbers of Russian civil society have been labeled foreign agents. They are then ostracized and harassed by officials.

One prominent example is Memorial, a human rights organization founded at the end of the Soviet Union, which received the Nobel Peace Prize: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_(society)

“After the Russian foreign agent law was passed in July 2012, Memorial came under increasing government pressure. On 21 July 2014, the Memorial Human Rights Centre was declared a ‘foreign agent’ by the Ministry of Justice. The label was extended in November 2015 to the Research & Information Centre at St. Petersburg Memorial, and on 4 October 2016 to Memorial International itself. On 28 December 2021, the Supreme Court of Russia ordered Memorial International to close for violations of the foreign agent law.”

How do you know foreign agents didn't spread the water narrative?

If you don't behave, Feds will send you back to India. Now smile!

Lots of "foreign agents" are involved in "American" AI companies, but they're the right kind of foreign agents, so they get a pass.

Discussions[0]:

US sanctions Italian hosting provider Autistici Inventati

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49451343

US Government designates host of noblogs.org a "global terrorist"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49464391

A Statement by A/I Collective About US Sanctions

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49477854

[0]: I was going to write this comment manually but pasted this comment from @ChrisArchitect from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49511568 (Thanks Chris, I appreciate you writing these comments and have a nice day!)

Despite being in a completely different country and complying with all court orders in that country! This is how far the USA's tentacles reach.

Are you suggesting a bribe to Trump wouldn't "solve" the issue? His actions shout otherwise.

The STATED reason can be anything they like and is meaningless, which is why I told the actual reason instead.

Guess I'm going to the gulag

somebody gotta build all those datacenters ... (a kind of reference to the gulag tremendously growing simultaneously with and being the major source of labor, and practically free at that, for the very fast and massive USSR Industrialization in 193x)

And with opposition to the datacenters in developed areas, and all the need for water and energy, the datacenters (and all that massive infrastructure like power lines, power plants, etc.) would probably be built in less hospitable areas, like China does in Inner Mongolia [1], and it would be very hard to make people to move there at their own free will. DHS is already building out their own large gulag, and i think it is only a matter of time with this administration when they decide to use the forced labor USSR style.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bT19-B50Rhk

When you feel anxious or encounter stressors in life, it’s the matrix overclocking your brain.

My two cents is there's some implicit arguments you're making here:

- LLMs give users more knowledge (debatable due to hallucinations and selection bias)

- having more data/knowledge means more power and therefore less authority / power imbalance (that was an argument for the Internet and social media, but it turned out exactly the other way around)

Both of these arguments is dubious, but somewhat reasonable, but requiring both to be true to achieve any form of net positive is a hard sell. That, plus as Al Khatib argues, AI is about taking away autonomy from the people. Beyond the cognitive studies about LLM impacts on our brains, having someone/thing else decide for you is decidedly incompatible with anti-authoritarian politics (autonomy vs heteronomy).

How is it leveling the playing field if the big actirs have access to a million X (or something in that ballpark) the compute, and even more in terms of data?

Oh, and they are using consumers prompts to gather even more data. LLMs are creating even greater asymmetric information situations than we had before.

Also, the common person has no say in how these systems are developed, the big actors do, and these systems are already used to automate decisions. That's a totalitarian potential, not just authoritarian.

true but off-topic

And war crimes.

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/us-military-pen...

It's a shade beyond mere regulatory capture when your sector has no regulations and the U.S. government on standby to silence anyone who says bad things about you.

Yes, billionaires are shovelling money at the midterms. Yes, Trump is likely holding rather a lot of AI stocks. This is what happens when you allow money into politics and politicians into money.

When people don't care when it is done to groups they don't like, they can't be surprised when they find they weren't in the safe group either.

Well, this is one way to prolong their pump and dump strategy

I’m past assuming these lot have the US’s long term interests at heart

"the actual targets are just normal people..."

How do you know?

NPR did an episode of Planet Money on paid protests that are indeed funded by Chinese and Russian governments. So have many other news organizations.

"Anxiety over AI and data centers is widely held, but somehow the Trump administration has convinced itself the public concern was manufactured in China."

What has one to do with the other? Why would a believe "widely held" have any bearing on it being manufactured in China or not? This is a non sequitur.

All opposition to Trump's lame ideas are treason. At this point, I've committed treason 134 times. What's one more?

Same language as Russia uses to quash dissent. Any opposition is “foreign inspired “ and therefore must be suppressed due to “national security “.

"Foreign influence is defined as receiving support, whether monetary, organizational, or advisory, from foreign sources, which include foreign states, organizations, nationals, and any individual or entity under foreign influence."

However, there is a second pillar: the agent has to " engage in political activities, gather information on military capabilities, or create and disseminate information intended for a broad audience." Which is why eg Gazprom is presumably not a foreign agent.

This is how Soviets and later Russians sabotaged Germany's energy sector which paved the way for all kinds of terrible outcomes, including the current war in Ukraine. So while there is a real risk of government overreach, there is an also real foreign threat.

the administration declared war on protestors and opponents [..], threatening “criminal liability” if they “further the propaganda or other goals of a foreign power.”

IMO, the "AI" part of this story is just a distraction.

The real story is going after people for protesting and voicing their opinion. A clear move towards authoritarianism and potentially fascism. Seems like it touches 4 of "The 14 Characteristics of Fascism" : https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/fasci14chars.html

(1,2,7,12 and maybe 10?)

Sounds like a thing Putin would do in Russia.

Two days prior, President Trump began a spate of social posts declaring that opposition to AI is a traitorous, treasonous conspiracy theory tracing back to China.

This is unsupported by the reported Trump statements.