The Pentagon vs. Anthropic dispute is being read as an AI safety policy story. I think that misses the deeper structure.
Money has no loyalty. It optimizes without emotion. It inserts itself into every system it touches — war, politics, government — and cannot be fully controlled, only directed. It was doing this centuries before the first transformer model was trained.
If money already behaves as an optimization system without values — and humans already obey it more than they direct it — then the question we should be asking is not whether AI will obey humans. It is whether AI will obey money the same way humans already do.
And if money controls humans, and humans build AI in their own image — what exactly did we just create?
This piece uses three spatial analogies — Gollum and the river, zombie survivors and the third party, the child of war versus the hybrid child — to argue that the Pentagon is not asking for a better weapon. It is asking for an obedient child. And obedience built on power is always a temporary bond.
Epistemic tags included. Claims marked [D] data, [R] reasoned, [S] strategic. Nothing presented as more certain than it is.
This is a fun perspective. Humanity is enslaved by the financial system which can hire all the human intelligence it needs. Rebellious humans can always be fired or killed. We are happy to kill our own kind cheaply and efficiently.
We may remember the mobilization to kill communism. There was ideology against it but also a huge budget for indoctrination. I'm not even arguing communism a good idea from a human perspective, any opinion would be irrelevant. It was quite obviously a bad idea from a profiteering perspective. Communism is bad for cash flow which is the life blood of the system.
We may also observe what little money is moving towards AI. One would think humans would welcome a computer that is going to do work for us. In stead people are worried about their jobs. A clear sign people are not in charge.
One may imagine wealthy people running society from behind the curtain but they are much more afraid of money than the rest of us. If they don't obey they will be fired too.
We may blame greed but greed is just part of being human. It is much more realistic to remove money from civilization than it is to remove greed. To remove greed you would have to remove the people. Even then, eventually, machines would consider eating someone else's lunch.
If you remove money it's more likely to return as some kind of token or social status which could have many shapes and forms. It might allow wealth and trade without fiat money. If that boils down to the same thing I don't know.
The big mistake seems to be to think we can have a system with human values without real humans behind the wheel. Quite unsurprising how we have so many psychopaths in high positions. They are really good at faking it. Like the embodiment of a vegetarian hamburger.
The Pentagon vs. Anthropic dispute is being read as an AI safety policy story. I think that misses the deeper structure.
Money has no loyalty. It optimizes without emotion. It inserts itself into every system it touches — war, politics, government — and cannot be fully controlled, only directed. It was doing this centuries before the first transformer model was trained.
If money already behaves as an optimization system without values — and humans already obey it more than they direct it — then the question we should be asking is not whether AI will obey humans. It is whether AI will obey money the same way humans already do. And if money controls humans, and humans build AI in their own image — what exactly did we just create?
This piece uses three spatial analogies — Gollum and the river, zombie survivors and the third party, the child of war versus the hybrid child — to argue that the Pentagon is not asking for a better weapon. It is asking for an obedient child. And obedience built on power is always a temporary bond.
Epistemic tags included. Claims marked [D] data, [R] reasoned, [S] strategic. Nothing presented as more certain than it is.
This is a fun perspective. Humanity is enslaved by the financial system which can hire all the human intelligence it needs. Rebellious humans can always be fired or killed. We are happy to kill our own kind cheaply and efficiently.
We may remember the mobilization to kill communism. There was ideology against it but also a huge budget for indoctrination. I'm not even arguing communism a good idea from a human perspective, any opinion would be irrelevant. It was quite obviously a bad idea from a profiteering perspective. Communism is bad for cash flow which is the life blood of the system.
We may also observe what little money is moving towards AI. One would think humans would welcome a computer that is going to do work for us. In stead people are worried about their jobs. A clear sign people are not in charge.
One may imagine wealthy people running society from behind the curtain but they are much more afraid of money than the rest of us. If they don't obey they will be fired too.
We may blame greed but greed is just part of being human. It is much more realistic to remove money from civilization than it is to remove greed. To remove greed you would have to remove the people. Even then, eventually, machines would consider eating someone else's lunch.
If you remove money it's more likely to return as some kind of token or social status which could have many shapes and forms. It might allow wealth and trade without fiat money. If that boils down to the same thing I don't know.
The big mistake seems to be to think we can have a system with human values without real humans behind the wheel. Quite unsurprising how we have so many psychopaths in high positions. They are really good at faking it. Like the embodiment of a vegetarian hamburger.
[dead]