Yet another Hacker News

Imagine an AI future where being banned means you are now economically useless

32 points MrBuddyCasino 2 hours ago 22 comments

AtlasBarfed 1 hour ago | parent

AI is the perfect tool of total permanent authorization control, and it seems inevitable at this point between the ample supply of authoritarian wannabes and the fundamentally compromised institutions that would resist them

notnaut 50 minutes ago | parent

I can run a local model on my 5080 that gets 1/8th of the way to where current evil overlord models are capable… are they going to figure out how to ban that too?

dgellow 43 minutes ago | parent

I assume so, yes. With enough lobbying and political pressure I’m sure hardware manufacturers would be willing to only allow vetted models to be loaded. Is it probable? Who the fuck knows what can happen with the current US admin

Almondsetat 27 minutes ago | parent

retroactively?

mannykannot 18 minutes ago | parent

At the rate things are changing, retroactivity is moot.

manphone 11 minutes ago | parent

It’s amazing what can be made legal or illegal.

4bpp 7 minutes ago | parent

> Who the fuck knows what can happen with the current US admin

The ratchet of authoritarianism has been turning steadily in the US (and the rest of the world) for at least the past 25 years, and a big part of why no coherent opposition to it managed to manifest is how it was turned into a partisan issue. Republicans and the apathetic centre tune out Democratic complaints about the authoritarianism of a Republican administration just as it happened when the party associations were reversed some 5 years ago, because a group resenting its outgroup wielding power is the most unsurprising dog-bites-man event.

At the same time, neither side is willing to criticise authoritarianism by their own, both because they do not want to "stab their soldiers in the back" in the culture war and because in practical terms more power to wield against the outgroup is too useful to forego. Would you still be happy to support a durable circumscription of the current US admin's ability to regulate local AI, if it also meant that no future Democratic administration could interfere with a cataclysmic AI-driven campaign of right-wing misinformation and propaganda that is threatening everything you hold dear?

fredley 32 minutes ago | parent

The company that built your phone can disable it, making it physically useless. It is not hard to imagine the same tech shipping baked into GPUs.

tjpnz 41 minutes ago | parent

Had a plumber do a job in my apartment the other day and he came up with a pipe wrench. Assuming he was an owner operator it would be his to do with as he pleases. It's not going to charge him by the job and the company that made it certainly won't take it off him because they don't like the way he's using it. Yet this is the kind of future some are trying to build, where the tool is only available as a subscription from one of two companies, and where owning the tool makes you an enemy of the state.

eesmith 32 minutes ago | parent

Ahh, so like the smartphone present in many countries where if the US doesn't like you then it's almost impossible to have a normal economic life?

bitexploder 30 minutes ago | parent

Not if you have your own TB of fast RAM.

julianlam 19 minutes ago | parent

That is the subtext of the linked post.

jasonpeacock 24 minutes ago | parent

With AWS Bedrock, and similar hosted solutions, you can’t be banned directly by the AI companies.

With local models, you can’t be banned.

While employed, you’re using corporate accounts and can’t be banned.

jeremyjh 6 minutes ago | parent

Uhm...enterprise accounts still have terms of service. Violations could get your employer's entire account banned.

graemep 23 minutes ago | parent

How is this different being banned from smartphones, Microsoft accounts, Google accounts, the banking system or whatever?

Technology enables central control. That has been obvious for decades now. AI makes it a bit worse.

ryan_n 21 minutes ago | parent

This is correct, even just google alone. Most people have their entire lives linked in some way or another to their email address. One ban and you're pretty screwed...

chung8123 14 minutes ago | parent

For this reason I try not to intermingle accounts. I won't touch good for email or other services because what happens if they decide using an ad blocker on youtube is bannable?

bdcravens 17 minutes ago | parent

Don't we do that to felons already? They violated the TOS of society, and are categorically banned from a significant portion of the job market.

rckt 17 minutes ago | parent

Amazing how this doesn’t consider a future where “AI” is non-obligatory.

besterman23 16 minutes ago | parent

> you’ll have to live in the world as it is instead of playing pretend in AI graphics land!

> you’ll be forced to love your wife for who she is and not her AI generated fake persona!

Seriously…?

Apparently this is some dystopia with or without the AI companies banning you from their services, yet somehow the big scary thing is not having open weight models.

The entire tech world needs to get a grip on reality, like the fact that this random Twitter fanfic gained any traction at all on this site is a massive indictment of the quality of discourse here.

notthemessiah 6 minutes ago | parent

You don't have to imagine it, it's already happened when a teenage son talking to Gemini on the family iPad managed to get his entire family and all their business accounts banned from all Google services:

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3104521/teenagers-gemini-mis...