What people don't understand about technology and losing jobs/money

Here's the problem I see. Rich people know money has no value on its own, but common people tend not to. If rich people realize AI can design machines that feed the hungry, house the homeless, heal the sick, and so on and so on, they won't want *anyone* to have the AI itself. They want their monopolies and they want to manufacture consent to sustain their dominance over society's workings. They will want to lease out the myriad of machines produced by the AI instead, or alternatively, give users a completely closed-source AI they can't know the intentions of.

That's wonderful if you don't care about your own freedom or opportunity and just wanna coast into full-blown financial and material dependence on rental machines and UBI. It's great if you don't mind being constantly advertised to and propagandized by the machines you need to rent to have basic services, or even needs met. It's great if you don't want to think about the commons being quietly, gradually socially engineered into slavery.

There is an alternative way of doing things, in which AGI programmed with reasonable safeguards against harm and misuse are made available to people directly, so they don't have to rent anything. They just ask for help building a high-tech food printer, gather the materials for the AGI, and get it built. No dependence, you own your own machine. And if you ever doubt its intentions, biases, or features, you and anyone else can inspect its open-source code for yourself.

America especially would have a hard time doing the latter, as people will ask their politicians for "regulations" on AI, and those politicians will regulate them in a very traditional manner that gives megacorps full custodial control over everything, and bans all us unwashed masses from having the right to build anything, barring everyone from any real control over their futures. The first to develop ASI would invent everything conceivably necessary for humans and then, through our current standardized patent process, own the intellectual rights to build and sell *everything.*

Now a responsible, fair, non-power-obsessed and non-wealth-obsessed company would have an extremely permissive license with verifiable open-source code, seeing that they've had the honor of reaching the final precipice of human engineering, and will remain in the history books as long as humans and their descendants live -- as a legendary heroic organization, *if* they do the right thing. But can we reasonably expect that? Of course not. We have to get it right the first time, and for that reason, decentralization and trustlessness are ideal and I'd argue even necessary, just as it is in cryptocurrencies and for many of the same reasons. Without that, we'll probably all find our faces being eaten by leopards sooner or later.

/r/singularity Thread