Podcast Appearances
If, you know, they want to de-escalate the rhetoric, as Sam Altman says, is, you know, is stop interfering in the democratic process, right?
Is to let voters feel empowered and feel some sway over this technology that is, you know, being integrated into every pore of society.
Yeah, no, it's absolutely not a given that we'll see violence and mass disruption at this scale.
There are a couple things that tend to signify that you will see it, right, when you have an immense concentration of capital and power and the development of
and deployment decisions around a technology are flowing expressly from that and being imposed anti-democratically on a population, you're much more likely to see sort of angry uprising and rebellion.
And again, it's another way that this moment sort of maps relatively and worryingly neatly onto the Luddites and the dawn of the Industrial Revolution because
At that time, you had this moment where, you know, automated machinery was beginning to be produced en masse, and factory owners or to-be factory owners realized that they could amass a bunch of these machines, put them in those early factories, and divide and automate labor in a way that could break the power of sort of the workers and the guilds.
They weren't actual guilds, but...
the industries and the cottage industries that had developed and had shared interests.
And so when you have all of that sort of power and decision-making capacity and money sort of concentrated in a few hands, it is a recipe for disaster because the, I mean, the cloth workers, they went to parliament for years and years and years, for a decade, full decade, running up to the actual Luddite rebellion saying,
Look, the new factory owners, they're using these machines in ways that violate the laws on the books.
They're hiring workers that haven't been apprenticed, that shouldn't be allowed to work, all these things that we have to regulate the trade.
They're ignoring all the laws, all the standards, all the norms, and then they're just –
pushing down our wages and pushing down our quality of life, they're destroying our livelihoods and they won't stop.
And so here's a list of things that you could do to fix that.
Funny enough, one of the things that they proposed was very much like a Andrew Yang style VAT, where it was like, why don't you tax the extra amount of cloth that a machine can produce and then use that to sort of fund like, you know, a general fund for workers who need to retrain.
But they were laughed out of parliament, right?
Time and time again, Parliament not only said, no, we're not going to listen to you, they tore up those laws and regulations on the books and basically left it completely up to sort of the whims of the market and these very powerful actors.
And so when you have a situation like that, which increasingly is mirroring what's happening today with an industry that has a ton of power—
You know, at least right now in its alliance with the Trump administration has sort of the ear of, you know, David Sachs and sort of the insiders in the administration.