To me it increasingly seems like there's no version of reality where doing anything will solve the problem, unless you're one of the special few people who can influence the world. The violence is a sign of that. Average people don't do things like these, but when they start feeling helpless, the most unstable people of that society that don't have anything to lose will start acting more erratically. If there's no pressure relief, these actions propagate and will become more common and normalized. This is driven by desperation, not strategically weighing the pros and cons and what impact it'll have on society or what have you.
We invented something called “democracy” to fix this, and then we allowed enough wealth to accumulate that the wealthy just bought it and nerfed it.
We went through a cycle like this once before in U.S. history, and the amount of violence it took to correct the overreach of organized money was not 0.
Democracy stops working when no one can agree on what the problem even is. Your comment is one that implicitly condones these kinds of attacks because it’s part of some kind of “cycle” repeating itself, and ah of course we’ll see more violence before the issue is “corrected”. We may even need it!
A little disturbing to be quite honest, though I suppose this is what happens when a generation takes “eat the rich” not as a LARPy political slogan but as a real call to action.
Describing something does not equal condoning something. Whether GP is correct in assessment or no, they are describing a pattern they see, as an observer. I don't see a value judgment in their language unless I'm missing something.
Whether they are correct or not I'm not going to weigh in on, but I will make the claim that figuring out why something happens is the best way of preventing it from happening again.
This has been the historical cycle for as long as we have records of human history. Power begets power and greed. Eventually either everyone else reaches a breaking point and "eat the rich", or an external group takes advantage and eats everyone. Then we try again.
Agreed. Anyone who thinks democracy isn't punctuated by economically-redistributive violence hasn't been studying history.
Based in the simple fact that humans will not cede power/wealth willingly once they gain it.
Ergo, violence (either state or individual) to effect a new balance.
Which isn't to legitimize violence, but is to say that stripping away a population's ability to effect change by being violent, if enough of them choose, is more dystopian than some violence.
There are a LOT of stages between "resigning and doing nothing" and "deadly violence" that have some effect.
Demonstrations are a start, though they seem to be more useful for networking inside a group and forcing the press to pay attention to some matter. Decision makers can easily ignore them.
What's less easy to ignore are strikes, especially general strikes, as e.g. port workers in Italy threatened during the total blockade in the Gaza war.
Given what AI has always been about, since well before LLMs, go-slows and work-to-rules aren't going to help, they'll just speed up transitions to AI.
The disinvestment, boycotts, public shunning, adverse publicity, picketing, blockades, I can see those working. Certainly seems to have an impact in the video game news I see.
Those only work as long as legislators have shame, or there is a significant faction that can use the provided legitimacy to redistribute power away from the elites towards the people. That's not the case at a national level in the US right now.
This kind of sentiment, on its own, is hollow. Just more "violence bad", until the next round.
There is growing anger and discontentment in a large part of the population, driven by inequality of wealth and power. Hopelessness and a lack of control over the future.
Are the nodes of power willing to spread wealth and control more widely to stabilize the country? What are they willing to do to consolidate their power? The vast majority of violence is perpetrated by those nodes, to either consolidate power, or gain more of it.
Other people in this thread have already suggested more actionable responses: organize, unionize, understand class dynamics, and vote accordingly.
If you talk to the average individual outside of California or NYC about AI, or even Waymos, they will get increasingly irate and start spouting off about “water usage” and everyone’s jobs getting taken away—as if RLHF contract work is not available to basically anyone with a college degree. I hate to say it but you cannot trust “the masses,” Marx never said mob rule, he said rule by the proletarian, the class which knows, on account of their labor, the best integration of the human organism into mechanical production. No, there is no concern for the “masses” living in pre-industrialized agrarian communities or those who have been mystified by reactionary ideas (like this so-called majority), he was referring to those whose existence was an exception, that which was free and not predictable, contingent in the operation of the economy. It is by their exceptional circumstance that radical social change is even possible, not because of any moral need to raise humanity out of its savage condition. The masses, without the right understanding, will just become a lynch mob and start burning everything in sight, as they tend to in most circumstances.
The masses seem kind of right to be in that mindset, if you consider it from thier point of view for even one second?
So, yes RLHF is available right now, for people with specific backgrounds. That RLHF work is temporary and it's going to make hundreds of thousands of people redundant. The RLHF work is actually job-negative, it is work which will later deprive others of a way to make a living.
Once that training work dries up, what happens to the people who were doing the job which AI now does? How do they pay rent? How do they feed and clothe themselves? What answers do any AI proponant actually have for this, or is the intention that every person shuts the critical thinking part of their brain off and trusts the computer will come up with something?
That title reeks of the paper equivalent of clickbait. The paper is about subjective well-being and mental health in the psychological sense. Broader well-being includes material conditions like income, housing, health care, safety, and social connections. So a null result on subjective well-being is not necessarily a null result on material welfare, and the problems that leads to. The paper’s own abstract also talks about context effects rather than a simple universal null.
Unions are not perfect, but they have been an important check on exploitation. Organized labor helped win the 40-hour workweek. If you demand perfect solutions, you end up doing nothing. And given that you're up against people with nearly unlimited resources, you can't afford to be picky.
Obligatory 'war is a continuation of politics by other means' Clausewitz -- the act of forcibly compelling others to adopt ones position doesn't have an inherent 'acceptable vs not-acceptable' line in method, other than that which we socially layer on top.
Why not? There are only two redresses against elites who don't abide by a social contract: the law & courts, and physical violence. The courts are much preferable, but legislators now serve those elites rather than the public, and the courts are impotent or unwilling to use what power remains with them. What's left but physical violence to either dissuade or punish?
The specific stigma against physical violence (and not against other types, even for cumulatively worse actions) strikes me as very self-serving, an instance of "the law forbids both rich and poor to sleep under a bridge." It's increasingly the only remedy available to everyday people, and the mad acceleration of government capture by elites in the last decade is making murder and rioting inevitable, at least as long as ordinary people still feel they should have some power.
Any sort of violence is bad, singling out physical violence as uniquely bad gives misbehaving elites impunity.
The type of person who posts here is unlikely to be the type of criminal that does that sort of thing. The virtue signaling is well-noted - good to have good citizens on here with strongly-worded top posts that get upvoted to the top.
I'm just waiting for dang, et. al to fix our thread voting system as it's a little too Reddity around here these last days.
They're just speaking to a hypothetical person who thinks this will solve a problem. In no way does their post imply they'd be ok with it if it solved some problem.
A little wild to me that so many of the replies don't understand that.
No no i do get that of course, and i agree. Its just that the thing that struck me about the phrasing was that its a bit revealing. We are reviled by violance but we do allow its use in society everyday. But what violance and for what utility is acceptable seems to be a matter of debate. The line doesnt seem to be universally agreed on given the passion seen in this thread
> If it did solve a problem, it's possible it would be legal.
FL crafted a law to help safeguard someone who gets sued for running over a protestor. I think this illustrates how a law can protect problems rather than solving them.
>> FL crafted a law to help safeguard someone who gets sued for running over a protestor
> Source?
the defendant in the lawsuit can use the plaintiff’s participation
in a "riot," as defined by the 2021 law, as "an affirmative defense."
This means that the person being sued can argue in court that their
action was justified by the riot.
While I 100% do not support violence against Sam Altman, or anyone else for that matter, what are people without billions of dollars and without the ear of the president supposed to do to affect change in this modern, post-capitalist hellscape? And I am genuinely interested in ideas that people think will work, not just trying to be combative.
The people saying it doesn’t work are the same people who can’t must the effort to even contact their representative.
I had a professor in college who was big on entrepreneurship. So he formed an organization, got others involved, went to Washington to lobby his rep. His rep said “let’s do it”, and sat him down with her staff to write a bill. That bill was brought to the floor for a vote and passed.
Until you’ve done that, dont complain the system doesn’t work.
The issue with politics today is the level of engagement of the average voter. Few people ever get involved, so the vacuum gets filled with whichever power-hungry mediocre person who puts some effort in.
I have worked on electoral and initiative campaigns, and traveled thousands of miles to knock on doors. I’ve donated money. I’ve called my congresspeople. I’ve gone to and spoken at public meetings. I’ve protested, been tear gassed, beaten, and thrown in jail. I’ve been doing all of this continuously for about 20 years. I can tell you, from extensive experience going through the official channels, that the formal mechanisms of our democracy are fundamentally broken. We need to seriously face this problem and fix it, or things are just going to keep getting worse.
Because so many people are being ground down. You have time to organize something, instead of making rent? Well now you have to fight to even get your voting rights back, that you were silently stripped off because of your skin color and demographic, or social status. Then you need to see if you can ever get the gerrymandered border back to where it should be so the other party will ever have a chance at winning in your area, instead of losing by default. Pretty sure the next election is only about two swing-states again.
> I had a professor in college who was big on entrepreneurship. So he formed an organization, got others involved, went to Washington to lobby his rep. His rep said “let’s do it”, and sat him down with her staff to write a bill. That bill was brought to the floor for a vote and passed. Until you’ve done that, dont complain the system doesn’t work
This is a sign of the system not working. A well connected professor, with plenty of free time to form an organization and go to Washington to talk to his rep
Might as well be an industry lobbyist.
Could a worker from Walmart do the same thing? In theory sure. In practice unlikely, for any number of reasons. Not least because people are unlikely to take a Wal Mart worker seriously enough to join their organization.
> what are people without billions of dollars and without the ear of the president supposed to do to affect change in this modern, post-capitalist hellscape?
California has a referendum system. Get signatures for a policy and put it to the voters.
This is obviously true, but you're just inviting the rebuttals. Arguments that civil violence is unproductive are boring and obvious. Normal people have been acculturated to understand the point already. The only way to have an "interesting" conversation about this is to take the other side.
All of those arguments will be vile, as they have to be given the context.
I'm not criticizing you, and I guess I'm glad someone wrote this comment quickly. You're right. But I would caution people against reading too much into the countervailing sentiment here. It's not trolling, but it is something adjacent to it.
Except they only won because UK was too busy spending money on a way to stop the French.
Like 1812 when the Brits weren't busy with the French they easily came in and burnt the US capital as punishment for burning the Canadian one. It's not that the British army suddenly got a lot stronger; they just weren't busy fighting on two continents.
That said, civil disobedience is largely pointless. We're in a capitalistic society so money is the name of the game. Rosa Parks did shit-all; it was the boycott of the bus system for 9 months that made the buses cave.
There is a super interesting and complicated discussion to have about the pragmatics and morality of concerted military action versus stochastic civil violence. Unfortunately, thread conditions on HN aren't conducive to it; the discussion will instantly devolve (via people joining in) to valence arguments about the cause of this or that campaign of violence. I genuinely think you'd need a moderation regime designed from the ground up to support a productive conversation about this topic, which, for good reasons, HN doesn't provide.
Honestly, it's not really that complicated. Americans (at least Pennsylvanians) born before, say 2000 were explicitly taught that violence is ok if it's against tyranny. Apparently, they stopped teaching that after 2010, so we're now in a post-natural-rights era.
While I typically avoid touching non-technical topics, I have the opportunity to chime in as another PA highschooler from the 90's, we absolutely were taught that, down to details in AP courses such as the impact of individuals like John Brown. While I'm not sure I'd have worded it precisely like the parent, the concept of "the four boxes of liberty" and the progression thereof was certainly understood and conveyed. (There was substantial study of the labor rights movements and conflicts/resistance therein as well)
I went to Jesuit high school in Chicago in the early 1990s. There's a lot more to say about all of this stuff and nothing wrong with what you just said, but to hash it out any further, we'd have to attempt a philosophical discussion about violence in a forum that (unavoidably, and to the consternation of its moderators) has reward circuits wired around hyping up action.
You've basically just said anyone who doesn't hold the "approved" opinion is wrong and then you called them names. But you wrapped it in extra words so that it's less flagrant.
Did you ever think that maybe people do in fact believe what they say they believe?
Everybody who believes civil violence is a productive solution to any problems we have in 2026 is wrong. I don't see myself as having called anyone names; rather, I said that the point was so banal that the only conversation you're likely to see is from people who get dopamine hits from taking the edgy other side of the argument.
>Everybody who believes civil violence is a productive solution to any problems we have in 2026 is wrong.
Hilarious joke, Mr. Fukuyama. You have masked goons running around, detaining and even killing people without probable cause. If the results of the 2026 midterms are not to the liking of the current POTUS, it isn't unthinkable that he would try to overturn them, even by force. Would you be hand-wringing on HN about how violence is always bad, then?
But I digress. Firebombing Sam Altman is very bad; there is a multitude of good points against it, from the moral to the pragmatic. "Violence is fundamentally evil" is just a lazy and evidently false argument that does you a disservice.
You said they were "abnormal" and "trolls" but you dressed it up in the sort of snooty language that HN expects you to dress it up in.
Civil violence is the backstop of literally every societal system. While it would be better if the systems work, civil violence is what happens if they don't and tends to increase until they do.
In Sam Altman's case that is true. He is just one frontman for and beneficiary of a giant technological revolution that is almost inevitably happening whether anyone wants it to or not, since it is pushed forward by pure Darwinian logic: all key world actors feel compelled to develop AI, since they know that if they don't they will be outcompeted by others who do develop AI. Altman's death would change nothing about that fundamental calculus. You'd have to kill probably tens of thousands of people to really put a dent in AI development, and even then it would probably just be temporarily delayed.
In general, violence can certainly solve problems, especially when the problems are not being caused by almost-inevitable technological revolutions. One of the issues to keep in mind, though, is that it often also creates new ones, often surprising ones. For example, the assassination that led to World War One. For another example, if Trump had been assassinated last year, that would have solved many problems for people who dislike Trump. However, that doesn't necessarily mean it would have made the world overall a better place - that is almost impossible to predict. Hence the sci-fi sort of scenario of "you go back in time and kill Hitler, but when you return to your own time it turns out that Hitler dying just let mega-Hitler take power".
> Hence the sci-fi sort of scenario of "you go back in time and kill Hitler, but when you return to your own time it turns out that Hitler dying just let mega-Hitler take power".
Sure, but keep in mind that Hitler is already pretty bad. So while yes, killing him might open the door to someone worse stepping in, it may also open the door to someone more level headed.
Because people might have missed it last thread, here's dang's response to the discourse:
> I don't think I've ever seen a thread this bad on Hacker News. The number of commenters justifying violence, or saying they "don't condone violence" and then doing exactly that, is sickening and makes me want to find something else to do with my life—something as far away from this as I can get. I feel ashamed of this community.
> Edit: for anyone wondering (or hoping), no I'm not leaving. That was a momentary expression of dismay.
I recently saw a lecture by neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky [1] which discussed the complexities of human violence. We both condone and don't condone violence all the time, depending on social context. And furthers, our ways of expressing violence are varied (even down to tiny things like the silent treatment). We (along with other animals) have always used aggression to enforce social order and obtain social benefit.
Perhaps something to think about in a scenario like this. Personally I think it's interesting that some people are so quick to condone aggressive attacks on powerful people, yet have no comment on those powerful people committing lower levels of violence against the masses. It's all social context.
I believe that unique community of HN consist mostly of individuals that weren't able to fully understand those elements of human nature as elementary (and sometimes high-school) schoolers. I stand as one example of such person, it took me about 30 years before I understood that I lacked such innate understanding at school.
How is a person from a nation that the US President has threatened to annex or invade supposed to feel about seeing domestic violence in the United States? From their perspective a divided United States is less of a personal threat to them.
All this talk about how 'we can't have this in a democracy!' forgets that many of us don't live in that particular democracy, and that particular democracy is threatening other democracies.
What should my response be if a North Korean General is executed? Or if a Russian oligarch 'falls out a window'? Or a corrupt Mexican politician is beheaded by a rival cartel?
These American oligarchs aren't my countrymen, They don't have my best interests in mind, they fund the people who threaten my country, and now they provide the American military with technology that it can use to attack my country.
Their lobbying and campaign contributes have resulted in a Mad King waging an unwinnable war that has severely damaged the global economy and has made my life demonstrably worse. I have never done anything to these people and yet they callously did this to all of us for personal profit well beyond what any human being could never need in a thousand life times.
At the end of the day the less cohesive the American tribe is the better off my tribe is. I wish our incentives were aligned but they just aren't and I am not in any way responsible for that.
But ultimately that is what you get for fucking with the people for too long and assuming wealth/status/power is an armor. Source: the French revolution
The people who are doing this stuff are unhinged but why? Perhaps they do not trust law and order. Perhaps they feel helpless and have been led to believe its over for the labour class due to the overhyped marketing and so on.
A serious frank conversation needs to be had and the hyping needs to stop.
I think it's entirely fair for the average american to no longer trust the courts to provide justice against the rich, given your current political environment.
Or, if you truly believed AI was a threat and represented material harm and managed to get standing to bring a suit, you are looking at years and years and years of litigation.
Before passing judgment consider that while you may have the privilege of posting from a country that's never had to fight for relief from tyranny, that's not necessarily the case for others.
Totally agree. I’m speaking to cases in America. If you’re in a rich country broadly at peace with competitive elections to any degree, and you’re choosing violence, you should vacation to e.g. Burma or Sudan or Libya or Ethiopia and see the cost of the violence you’re glorifying.
Since your point seems to be that not all the founding fathers parent was referring to were actually slave owners do you have a claim for a rough ratio? I think that would be interesting and would be a more informative thing regardless of where on the scale it lands from "everybody but Adams" all the way up to "only a big names like Washington, Jefferson".
>People who shoot someone or throw bombs at someone even though that someone never did something against them
I think the point is that there's going to be an increasingly large percentage of the populace who think that the AI bosses / billionaire class did indeed do something against them.
This has always been the case, hasn't it? There have always been groups of people who perceive technology change as a negative, or they are in fact negatively impacted.
But they didn't ask the rest of us if we're ok for them to murder someone on our behalf.
Personally I hope that AI will be a step change for the positive. I think it is inevitable that it will progress form here, in the darwinian sense, that someone else on this thread mentioned.
With that in mind, we should all be pushing for it to be used to our benefit, rather than detriment. And like almost all technological advances in the past, I think this can happen.
So if people are saying violence against Sam Altman is expected, then they're also saying violence against me is expected, because I am hopeful and vaguely supportive of the technology. That's quite scary.
> <...> even though that someone never did something against them, <...>
Many tech billionaires openly, publicly and loudly said something among the lines: "I/we/my company/tech-bros are building torment nexus - it will take your job and/or kill people and/or shut up political opponents. You are powerless to stop this."
There are some of those billionaires willing to put their name and face in front of billions of people in the world. You will have no trouble finding people that will think that X or Y tech bro is personally responsible for some poor persons problems.
Especially when there's a bunch of news like "layoffs due to AI", "record investments due to AI", etc.
I am not supporting violence, never done it and never considered it. Though not surprising when talking heads of political/economical extremes can get threats from people that have nothing to lose.
Violence against datacenters or AI company CEOs is very bad, they must be allowed to fail organically so that they don't have any excuse.
The last thing I want is for someone, in 2029, to say "but LLMs just weren't given a fair chance last time, we would have definitely reached AGI with more funding if it wasn't for [targeted attack]"
I am seeing information about the attacker that show he was being influenced by Rationalist thinkers - he posted about “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares.
This information of course might be false, so take the words below with a grain of salt. I might be completely wrong.
When an influential group in the Valley that has ties to many tech companies spends years speading rhetoric about “bombing data centers” or the title of the book above, I fear this kind of psychosis is inevitable. People in this thread are focusing on labour and AI issues as the motivation but I am afraid the problem might be closer to home.
Disclaimer: I am not American, just an outside observer.
Yudkowsky, like Altman, isn't a great public speaker*: too close to the in-group, not aware enough of how the words he uses are understood by people who don't already Get It. Ironically for AI safety, I think Yudkowsky and Altman are, if not on the same page, extending the metaphor they're on the same chapter.
Some random people with a gun and a Molotov aren't even the same (metaphorical) book.
* likely still better than me though, even on this specific measure. But even being the ten thousandth best speaker on the planet, out of 8 billion, leaves you at a huge disadvantage compared to the best.
> bombing data centers
At the risk of demonstrating the exact mistake I've just accused Yudkowsky and Altman of:
With B-52s, not as a DIY job with home-made Molotovs.
If you start with the claim "AI has the potential to cause as much harm as nuclear weapons", and "the USA already uses B-52s to enforce the non-proliferation treaty", this follows naturally.
If you're not willing to call on your representative to sign a binding international treaty to stop data centres that forcefully, talking about "stopping AI" or "pausing AI" seems hollow, because even if your government agrees to not build data centres near you as a result of low-grade domestic terrorism, in the absence of a credible threat to use a B-52 on someone else's sovereign territory there's nothing that you and your flaming rag in a bottle of petroleum distillate can do about them being built outside your country, in exactly the same way and for exactly the same reasons that German public opposition to nuclear weapons completely failed to influence North Korea.
Here in Sweden, back in the 1400eds etc. the farmers often made war on the government whenever it did anything they didn't like. This had the long term consequence, that by the end of this era, self-owning farmers owned 50% of the land in Sweden, whereas in Denmark, which did not have this kind of violence, it was only 10%.
It's incredibly important to be feared and to engage in violence, so that you are in practice and can threaten your political opponents, and this remains true in a democracy.
It's important that powerful people know they can't trust that they will truly be protected by the laws if they do something which harms others-- that the veneer of civilization is thin and the masses dangerous. Otherwise you end up with very dangerous situations where people can get away with anything that's legal.
I believe it doesn't matter. You see, if you try applying this trick to different traits of a society, it would lead to conclusions like: it is impossible for us to build an environmentally conscious society because we come here by being environmentally unconscious. It is a historical determinism, and it just don't work. For example, Europe was mostly a constant war between states, but after WWII it managed to come to EU. No more wars between European countries. Or U.S. was a country of slavers and racists, and it managed to change itself. It is still not perfect, as I hear, but at least there are no more slavery or segregation, and racism is not accepted anymore.
The long gone history of a country is not a something that should be allowed to determine its modern narratives. You shouldn't forget your history, but there are limits you shouldn't cross. When I hear arguments going back for centuries, it is a red flag for me. It is most likely a propaganda.
Psychologists talk about two common failing of their clients. People often fixate over the past or they fixate over the future, while forgetting about the present. The healthy approach is to keep a good balance between the past, the future, and the present, with a strong accent on the present. The history determinism reminds me a lot of the over-fixation on the past, and propaganda actively tries to unsettle balances in people's minds and fixate them on anything but the present.
It feels like there’s a flaw in your argument somewhere. Your thesis is historical determinism doesn’t work and therefore using it as an argument for political violence is flawed. …But the fact remains that political violence does work and we expect it to work. For a current example, see the bombing of Iran to effect regime change.
Back to the argument that historical determinism is flawed…
I think it’s very reasonable to say that it happened in the past, therefore it probably will happen in the future. That’s the basis for pretty much any kind of prediction.
If you want to argue against historical determinism, you have to make the specific argument for why the current state is different enough that we can’t use the past to predict the future.
> it would lead to conclusions like: it is impossible for us to build an environmentally conscious society because we come here by being environmentally unconscious
No. My logic applied here would imply that environtal unconsciousness can produce results becuase we got here by being environmentally unconscious. And that is true, burning coal for energy, while unsustainable, does produce results. Youll get energy, on demand, in a controlled manner.
Now, we should be careful doing it, but if you go to an amazonian tribesperson and yell at them for burning wood for a fire, becaise solar panels exist, then thats doesnt make complete sense
Political violence is wielded against dissidents in the United States constantly. Another way to think of this is that a government that resorts to political violence against its own citizens is not a democracy.
Political violence created and has sustained democracy, democracy is what happens when the violence fails and violence is what happens when the democracy fails.
Something is fundamentally broken when the sitting president of the United States pardoned thousands convicted in a court of law of attempting to use violence to achieve political ends.
No wonder people are increasingly recognizing that democracy is now broken.
> Treating a rigged game as fair doesn't make it fair, it just makes you easier to beat
Not playing at all makes you easier to beat still. Anyone pining for civil war should vacation in a war zone first. It’s difficult to encapsulate the privilege of peace until it’s been lost.
I am a resident of the Twin Cities and I agree wholeheartedly with this perspective. I found reading the book Waging A Good War very educational about the deliberate, strategic use of nonviolence by the American Civil Rights Movement and its ultimate triumph as a means to win support and achieve social change. It was a clear and inspiring parallel for me during the worst times of this year so far.
> Civil war or getting screwed by elites aren't the only two options. That's a false dichotomy
I completely agree. But political violence increasingly polarises the outcomes to those two. (The elites can buy gunmen faster than you or I can.)
California has a referendum system. Get an AI measure on the ballot. Companies that are doing the things Anthropic got fired for refusing to provide are banned from doing business in the State of California. (Or with the State. Find a balance that gets the votes.)
Altman needs to sell off that house and move to an anonymized address. I don’t see these attacks letting up any time soon. Two targeted attacks in three days is nuts.
sama, i know the odds of you seeing this are very low, but i'm so sorry you're being targeted like this. you don't deserve this. i recently saw you do a q&a with francois challet and.. after it was over, you went to your car very quickly and you were driven away. i think these days you must think a lot about your safety and the safety of your family and i wish it didn't have to be that way. wishing you and your family all the best.
Somewhat funny to read all these holy, well-tamed, moral people condemning violence with most dumb, ungrounded "violence bad" that cannot even hold a second of scrutiny.
Yes, violence shouldn't be the first resort, and when violence is unleashed innocent suffer as well, but there is a great difference between choosing not to use violence due to whatever consideration, and being so toothless and tamed that a sight of dog that finally bites when being constantly beaten sickens you.
It's not good for this sort of disagree with a CEO stuff. Fighting Hitler is ok. Typed from England where we fought Hitler but don't generally go for CEOs. Is that privileged?
I think it’s the opposite: many of these keyboard warriors advocating for violence in 2026 in America have no fucking clue what they’re advocating for, or how stupid they sound.
I've been seeing some version of "Sam Altman is the antichrist" on every platform in the last few weeks. I'm still trying to find concretely what makes this guy so bad compared to every executive out there. So far, all I could find is:
- OpenAI made a deal with the Pentagon (fair)
- OpenAI changed their business model from non-profit to for-profit (fair?)
- Sexual assault allegations by his sister. Sam Altman denies this and it's currently before a court.
- Overpromised AI to investors (everyone does this)
- Lobbying against regulations (I support)
- Some vague accusations of "being a liar" and a "sociopath" by his competitors Ilya Sutskever and Dario Amodei.
- He doesn't know how to code (lol)
Is there anything that I'm missing? Does he put ketchup on his pizza?
Whenever people object to thing-x they go for the most prominent leader of thing-x.
I personally object from him trying to divert trillions in investment from potential helping the hungry type stuff which is popular to sticking slop in everything which many don't want.
For me, he's an awful person for the smarminess in the pentagon deal (the DIC is too entwined with American industry to bemoan making any deal at all), the business model change, the behavior described in that recent article, the 180 on how he and OpenAI consider AI ethics, and the way he's gone about overpromising.
It'd be one thing if he was just promising more than he could actually deliver, but he went further, making promises of buying up unrealistically large chunks of the global RAM supply, causing everyone else to suffer, with no remorse.
There's also WorldCoin. I don't think a decent person would continue to push such an awful, untrustworthy system. This is a supposedly privacy-focused project that several countries are investigating for privacy violations and has been found to be in violation of privacy laws in some of them.
It's almost as if he goes out of his way to do as much harm to the world as he thinks he can get away with while maintaining the facade of just doing business. I don't think he's the antichrist, I think Peter Thiel is the closest to deserving that description.
There's a reason why OpenAI and Anthropic (and before them Google, Apple, Meta, etc.) were started in the US and not Europe. And let's not compare salaries we each get for similar work because that tends to make my European friends very sad.
Ilya Sutskever and Dario Amodei were high up at OpenAI before becoming competitors. They are just two of many people who have known Altman personally who have accused him of being a lying sociopath. I would not call that vague.
It is not just a question of morality. A sociopath with that amount of power can be a danger.
1. Violent attacks against AI CEOs, researchers, and engineers is going to begin. This is due to widespread negative press that AI receives and as well as a pervasive feeling of economic uncertainty and doom in the population. Some of this being caused by the current administration's leadership, but much of it attributed to AI taking jobs and destroying opportunity.
2. Violent acts taken against non-tech CEOs will increase hand-in-hand.
3. If AI continues to demonstrate impressive new capabilities for automation, this rate will increase substantially.
4. The government may come down hard on these individuals, which will further inflame the situation.
5. Data centers will come under attack / sabotage.
6. This will all wind up further inflamed by prediction markets.
I have a colleague at Anthropic that refuses to put it on his LinkedIn. We all now know why.
If violent attacks start metastasizing, it legitimately justifies a police crackdown. Most of the population will be for that.
The pro-Palestinian activists set their cause back a year by overplaying their hands in Columbia at the start of the war. If we want to ensure zero AI legislation for the next 2 years, I couldn’t think of a better way to ensure that than to start potting randos in the streets.
It depends on what kind of violent attacks they are exactly. I believe that most of the population would either not care about people of the Altman and Zuckerberg wealth level getting killed or would be happy about it.
I think the general population is much more likely to feel joy about it than want a police crackdown.
If we're talking about attacks against average software engineers and obscure founders, fewer people would be happy about it, but a great number still would be. There is a lot of envy toward software engineers and founders.
I doubt it. It would further polarize your population and what you really want is to unite them. You could make a video documentation that contrasts all the known, massive corruption cases in your administration (and SV personae) with the equally massive decay in your infrastructure from roads to bridges to the closure of maternity wings in hospitals because they are no longer profitable. Make as little dialogue/narration as possible and quote dollar numbers as often as possible. Spread posts contrasting corruption/decay to every outlet/social media.
Most people don't understand technology and/or its second order effects. They do understand when they are being stolen from.
Most of the population will be for the violent attacks. Techbros went way too far in gleefully describing how they would destroy most people's careers while enriching themselves. Never bothered to think whether they should just because they could. Now the rooster is coming home to roost.
The best way for the attacks on AI executives to stop is to pass meaningful legislation that limits the use and scope of AI.
This is unacceptable and a growing issue in America, anti-AI has become just another focal point for the far end of the political spectrum to rally and ultimately radicalize violence.
What is unacceptable is how these technology companies steal the IP of collective humanity, gate keep it and force us to pay a subscription service to use it against each other in a perverted downward spiral powered by capitalist game theory.
The neoluddite revolution is forming, have no doubts about that.
It is something that the sticking point with Anthropic was autonomous AI killing machines and turning the military AI on the US population. I could see people not being happy with that.
I agree this is a symptom of large systemic issues.
Long gone are the days a bumbling fool could get a well paying job at the local power plant and provide a good life for a wife and three children, with a large home, decent insurance and two cars.
I feel like Altman's PR team is dropping the ball. We somehow need to get the word out that AI tools will benefit all of humanity, not detract from it.
I don't think AI is benefiting humanity when you consider:
- It's heavy use in military and surveillance engagements
- The billions+ spent, yet no economic gains were noted
- The pressure on white-collar jobs
The threat to AI far exceeds any benefits I can see.
When they’re saying that most people will be unemployable in a few years and there is no plan to fix that…in a country where you go hungry and homeless without a job, people will get a bit restless.
Altman has made suggestions on how to fix this. I believe his main one is for AI to be subsidised so that it remains free for public use. The public could then use those free tokens to enrich themselves and offset any negative societal impacts.
This is obviously unworkable and delusional. Not sure what kind of worldview would produce this type of idea and see it as practical. Maybe more exposure to normal people is needed instead of being insulated in the AI filter bubble.
Is this really the case though? Currently it appears to benefiting a small few and there is not much reason to think it will change going forward.
If 95% of jobs go away, the destabilization leads to violent conflicts, and power and wealth become more centralized does it really matter if we have better healthcare or automated cars? Will people have purpose in their lives? Will this be a better world for most?
People are stupid, but not stupid enough not to see right through the lie that AI will benefit all of humanity. This is exactly why they are throwing molotovs at his house.
idk, maybe Altman should stop giving interviews talking about how he’s going to get rich making everyone’s job obsolete. Just a thought! Any PR firms hiring?
He’s already rich, he doesn’t even own any stock in OpenAI, and the societal (and geopolitical) changes are coming from AI no matter what Sam Altman does. Should he just not talk about it?
Not a proponent of this, but it's worth understanding that a certain part of the population believe once AGI is reached the world will change, and whoever reached it first wields all power. The increase in usability of recent models has no doubt shocked them. With such a mindset it does make sense to consider it a life or death thing. I can understand that some people think attacking these companies is the only way of protecting themselves from a whole different and much less dignified life.
I don't know if they are right, neither in world view nor conclusion. But it seems this is the world we currently lived in. This is one of the cases where for once i wish there was a manifesto to read, because i badly want to understand why
Police employ violence all the time and I think we who are okay/well off all agree that they solve our problems every day.
What us cushy engineers haven't realized yet is that the gradient for who are well off are sliding more and more towards one end. Sooner or later engineers will be on the wrong side of that gradient.
>What us cushy engineers haven't realized yet is that the gradient for who are well off are sliding more and more towards one end. Sooner or later engineers will be on the wrong side of that gradient.
Finally someone who said it. There was this quote I saw in the movie "Air"(about michael Jordan) about how people with true wealth only ever part with it not out of charity but out of greed. It takes someone or something truly special to force them to part with that money.
This whole era that we've lived through, where software engineers have amazing working conditions compared to blue collar workers and manage to pull ahead in society, helping to form a white collar elite class, is an aberration caused by the miracle of the microprocessor and Moore's Law. The elites saw the opportunity to obtain so much wealth from the lower classes(in the form of automating labor with computers) that they were forced to part with a bit of it, allowing some special people: software engineers like you and me to achieve what we consider a middle class life.
But sooner or later those same people will want that wealth back. They will continue to fight and find ways to take that wealth back: whether through H‑1B visas, "learn to code" initiatives to increase supply, or now AI. AI could very well crash and burn tomorrow but they will be back, and it will be an ongoing battle for the rest of our lives.
Indeed. Violence can be and is met with violence, and refusing to discern against them is a logical failure that needs correcting. Inevitably it comes down to process, and being a one-party state in control, the Democrats control the violence. Arguably on both sides.
The elites after the French Revolution were not only mostly the same as before, they escaped with so much money and wealth that it’s actually debated if they increased their wealth share through the chaos [1].
The comment refers to an article specifically discussing only one aspect of a major historical event.
The French revolution is considered one of the most important events in the history of Europe, because of the great impact it had on the (among others) politics, economy and the quality of life of common people.
Downplaying its importance by trying to water its impact down to "but rich still rich, no?" is a sign, that the comment might have been made in bad faith or without proper understanding of the source material.
I’m not underplaying its signaling value. Just that nobody that signaled was better off for it. Choosing a revolution-style coup is condemning your and your loved ones’ lives to horribleness. If that’s worth it, roll the dice. But don’t think the elites will suffer for it.
The elites that survived ended up better off. 50,000 other elites were killed during the French Revolution.
By the same token, the normal populace was also way better off after the French Revolution, since using the money and wealth of the dead elites to improve everyone's lives made a substantial impact on the French civilization that they are still benefiting from today.
In other words...the French Revolution is exactly the wrong type of example you want to be using when talking about whether violence against tech elites is acceptable.
but we haven't even proven that AI will destroy vast amounts of jobs. Some, sure, junior software engineers are in trouble. but other then that, do we really have any quantified evidence as to how many jobs have been displaced by AI? i've been looking for numbers on this but it all seems murky and wishy washy. i'm open to be convinced, if anyone's got numbers.
also, if the worst case scenario does happen and most of the population finds itself without money. there are other ways to live with very little money.
examples include: Great depression, third world countries like ghana, south africa, etc (and countries that have collapsed like syria), also the hazda tribe and other native tribes untouched by technology, as well as other similar to human mammalian species that share our planet like monkeys, apes, chenobos, all are able to survive without money albeit with more favorable climate/physiology.
Do you expect people to wait by while billionaires pour trillions of dollars into replacing them? Evidence takes years to mount; present events are moving far faster than that. Your argument is the exact same as that of COVID denialists in 2019 -- that we don't know how bad it'll be yet, that there's so little evidence, that we shouldn't jump to hasty action before getting results in. Empiricism can only go so far.
If I knew someone was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars building a big laser pointed at my house, I would not wait for "quantified evidence" of its effect to take some sort of action. The only real debate is what kind of action.
> also, if the worst case scenario does happen and most of the population finds itself without money. there are other ways to live with very little money.
If you have so little attachment to your money, why hold on to it at all? Do not be upset that other people are operating on a slightly larger time horizon than you are, and are interested in their livelihood not just today, but three or five years from now.
>> Do you expect people to wait by while billionaires pour trillions of dollars into replacing them?
Well, I tried to warn my family and friends and they're looking at me like I'm crazy. So yes, I think most people will just treat all their layoffs like it's just a regular recession. Until, at least half your friends are laid off, most people won't be any more alarmed than if in a recession.
>> If you have so little attachment to your money, why hold on to it at all?
You'll need whatever you have left. The barter economy won't take the place of the primary economy, rather it will supplement it with transactions between members who have no currency. but, there will always be some things that you want to get from the primary economy, if you can.
I saw this all the time when ICE was doing their business in Minneapolis. That was only a few months ago and it doesn't take too long to dig and find some truly odious posts.
Well for one, nobody was killed here. But second of all, sure -- because Hacker News are not the class of people involved in drive-by gang shootings; to most of us they are essentially abstractions, barely more real than the trolley problem. If you went around asking people who knew a guy that was shot, you'd eventually find someone who said he had it coming -- he got involved with the wrong guys, he shot at one of them first, he did something he shouldn't have (a common thread: the livelihood of the people involved). This is obviously atrocious: nobody should go around shooting people on the streets. But we can recognize that both are playing with fire, and understand the violence in that context -- such that the solution to gang violence is not, "moralize at the gang members until they stop shooting eachother", but rather "improve socio-economic conditions until they stop wanting to". So yes, there are elements of HN's population that will cheer these events on. But this should not be surprising -- the ruling class is playing with fire.
The same thing happened with Kirk. Everyone standing up to "mourn" a neo-nazi, fake tears, rolling with the grift. Rolling with the white supremacist grindbox.
Agreed, and also now any actions people don’t personally agree with that have a negative effect on someone (which is everything) can be labeled “structural violence”, so they can claim to have a moral justification for physical violence. It’s disgusting and breathtakingly stupid.
Look, I think Sam Altman is a terrible person too, but to anyone reading that hates people like him as much as I do you should want him alive while we work to build a world where he can live out a long life in complete safety, in prison.
Violence never solves anything. You will never make anything in this world better by becoming a worse person than your enemies.
In case someone reading this is thinking similar thoughts: there's no version of reality where doing this will solve any problem. Don't.
To me it increasingly seems like there's no version of reality where doing anything will solve the problem, unless you're one of the special few people who can influence the world. The violence is a sign of that. Average people don't do things like these, but when they start feeling helpless, the most unstable people of that society that don't have anything to lose will start acting more erratically. If there's no pressure relief, these actions propagate and will become more common and normalized. This is driven by desperation, not strategically weighing the pros and cons and what impact it'll have on society or what have you.
We invented something called “democracy” to fix this, and then we allowed enough wealth to accumulate that the wealthy just bought it and nerfed it.
We went through a cycle like this once before in U.S. history, and the amount of violence it took to correct the overreach of organized money was not 0.
That was a design feature of democracy all along, not a bug.
Democracy stops working when no one can agree on what the problem even is. Your comment is one that implicitly condones these kinds of attacks because it’s part of some kind of “cycle” repeating itself, and ah of course we’ll see more violence before the issue is “corrected”. We may even need it!
A little disturbing to be quite honest, though I suppose this is what happens when a generation takes “eat the rich” not as a LARPy political slogan but as a real call to action.
Describing something does not equal condoning something. Whether GP is correct in assessment or no, they are describing a pattern they see, as an observer. I don't see a value judgment in their language unless I'm missing something.
Whether they are correct or not I'm not going to weigh in on, but I will make the claim that figuring out why something happens is the best way of preventing it from happening again.
This has been the historical cycle for as long as we have records of human history. Power begets power and greed. Eventually either everyone else reaches a breaking point and "eat the rich", or an external group takes advantage and eats everyone. Then we try again.
Agreed. Anyone who thinks democracy isn't punctuated by economically-redistributive violence hasn't been studying history.
Based in the simple fact that humans will not cede power/wealth willingly once they gain it.
Ergo, violence (either state or individual) to effect a new balance.
Which isn't to legitimize violence, but is to say that stripping away a population's ability to effect change by being violent, if enough of them choose, is more dystopian than some violence.
Fix the issue: don't complain about the symptoms.
There are a LOT of stages between "resigning and doing nothing" and "deadly violence" that have some effect.
Demonstrations are a start, though they seem to be more useful for networking inside a group and forcing the press to pay attention to some matter. Decision makers can easily ignore them.
What's less easy to ignore are strikes, especially general strikes, as e.g. port workers in Italy threatened during the total blockade in the Gaza war.
Not just strikes: go-slows, work-to-rules, using whatever power you have at whatever level to act more ethically.
Also: disinvestment, boycotts, public shunning, adverse publicity, picketing, blockades.
Start small, increase the pressure over time, be clear about what you're doing and why.
Given what AI has always been about, since well before LLMs, go-slows and work-to-rules aren't going to help, they'll just speed up transitions to AI.
The disinvestment, boycotts, public shunning, adverse publicity, picketing, blockades, I can see those working. Certainly seems to have an impact in the video game news I see.
Those only work as long as legislators have shame, or there is a significant faction that can use the provided legitimacy to redistribute power away from the elites towards the people. That's not the case at a national level in the US right now.
Isn’t violence just “no I get to be one of the few not them”?
Even then I don’t they they get a lot of choice as far as results go.
This kind of sentiment, on its own, is hollow. Just more "violence bad", until the next round.
There is growing anger and discontentment in a large part of the population, driven by inequality of wealth and power. Hopelessness and a lack of control over the future.
Are the nodes of power willing to spread wealth and control more widely to stabilize the country? What are they willing to do to consolidate their power? The vast majority of violence is perpetrated by those nodes, to either consolidate power, or gain more of it.
Other people in this thread have already suggested more actionable responses: organize, unionize, understand class dynamics, and vote accordingly.
If you talk to the average individual outside of California or NYC about AI, or even Waymos, they will get increasingly irate and start spouting off about “water usage” and everyone’s jobs getting taken away—as if RLHF contract work is not available to basically anyone with a college degree. I hate to say it but you cannot trust “the masses,” Marx never said mob rule, he said rule by the proletarian, the class which knows, on account of their labor, the best integration of the human organism into mechanical production. No, there is no concern for the “masses” living in pre-industrialized agrarian communities or those who have been mystified by reactionary ideas (like this so-called majority), he was referring to those whose existence was an exception, that which was free and not predictable, contingent in the operation of the economy. It is by their exceptional circumstance that radical social change is even possible, not because of any moral need to raise humanity out of its savage condition. The masses, without the right understanding, will just become a lynch mob and start burning everything in sight, as they tend to in most circumstances.
The masses seem kind of right to be in that mindset, if you consider it from thier point of view for even one second?
So, yes RLHF is available right now, for people with specific backgrounds. That RLHF work is temporary and it's going to make hundreds of thousands of people redundant. The RLHF work is actually job-negative, it is work which will later deprive others of a way to make a living.
Once that training work dries up, what happens to the people who were doing the job which AI now does? How do they pay rent? How do they feed and clothe themselves? What answers do any AI proponant actually have for this, or is the intention that every person shuts the critical thinking part of their brain off and trusts the computer will come up with something?
This isn’t my experience at all when talking to non-techies all over the country.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09797-z
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/10/ar...
> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09797-z
That title reeks of the paper equivalent of clickbait. The paper is about subjective well-being and mental health in the psychological sense. Broader well-being includes material conditions like income, housing, health care, safety, and social connections. So a null result on subjective well-being is not necessarily a null result on material welfare, and the problems that leads to. The paper’s own abstract also talks about context effects rather than a simple universal null.
> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/10/ar...
Unions are not perfect, but they have been an important check on exploitation. Organized labor helped win the 40-hour workweek. If you demand perfect solutions, you end up doing nothing. And given that you're up against people with nearly unlimited resources, you can't afford to be picky.
This "violence never solved anything" mindset is in stark contrast with recorded history.
Obligatory 'war is a continuation of politics by other means' Clausewitz -- the act of forcibly compelling others to adopt ones position doesn't have an inherent 'acceptable vs not-acceptable' line in method, other than that which we socially layer on top.
Why not? There are only two redresses against elites who don't abide by a social contract: the law & courts, and physical violence. The courts are much preferable, but legislators now serve those elites rather than the public, and the courts are impotent or unwilling to use what power remains with them. What's left but physical violence to either dissuade or punish?
The specific stigma against physical violence (and not against other types, even for cumulatively worse actions) strikes me as very self-serving, an instance of "the law forbids both rich and poor to sleep under a bridge." It's increasingly the only remedy available to everyday people, and the mad acceleration of government capture by elites in the last decade is making murder and rioting inevitable, at least as long as ordinary people still feel they should have some power.
Any sort of violence is bad, singling out physical violence as uniquely bad gives misbehaving elites impunity.
The type of person who posts here is unlikely to be the type of criminal that does that sort of thing. The virtue signaling is well-noted - good to have good citizens on here with strongly-worded top posts that get upvoted to the top.
I'm just waiting for dang, et. al to fix our thread voting system as it's a little too Reddity around here these last days.
Interesting way to put it. If it did solve problems, you would be ok with it happening?
They're just speaking to a hypothetical person who thinks this will solve a problem. In no way does their post imply they'd be ok with it if it solved some problem.
A little wild to me that so many of the replies don't understand that.
No no i do get that of course, and i agree. Its just that the thing that struck me about the phrasing was that its a bit revealing. We are reviled by violance but we do allow its use in society everyday. But what violance and for what utility is acceptable seems to be a matter of debate. The line doesnt seem to be universally agreed on given the passion seen in this thread
Not gp, but if they were exceptionally large problems... Yeah.
Violence is never but sometimes the answer.
If it did solve a problem, it's possible it would be legal.
> If it did solve a problem, it's possible it would be legal.
FL crafted a law to help safeguard someone who gets sued for running over a protestor. I think this illustrates how a law can protect problems rather than solving them.
> FL crafted a law to help safeguard someone who gets sued for running over a protestor
Not true.
Source?
>> FL crafted a law to help safeguard someone who gets sued for running over a protestor
> Source?
https://api.politifact.com/article/2025/jun/13/can-florida-d...>> FL crafted a law to help safeguard someone who gets sued for running over a protestor
> Not true.
This last bit seems like a pretty firm assertion. What is your source for it?
The truth is somewhere in the middle. Overview: https://eu.tallahassee.com/story/news/politics/2025/06/13/fl...
While I 100% do not support violence against Sam Altman, or anyone else for that matter, what are people without billions of dollars and without the ear of the president supposed to do to affect change in this modern, post-capitalist hellscape? And I am genuinely interested in ideas that people think will work, not just trying to be combative.
Organize, petition your representative and vote.
The people saying it doesn’t work are the same people who can’t must the effort to even contact their representative.
I had a professor in college who was big on entrepreneurship. So he formed an organization, got others involved, went to Washington to lobby his rep. His rep said “let’s do it”, and sat him down with her staff to write a bill. That bill was brought to the floor for a vote and passed.
Until you’ve done that, dont complain the system doesn’t work.
The issue with politics today is the level of engagement of the average voter. Few people ever get involved, so the vacuum gets filled with whichever power-hungry mediocre person who puts some effort in.
I have worked on electoral and initiative campaigns, and traveled thousands of miles to knock on doors. I’ve donated money. I’ve called my congresspeople. I’ve gone to and spoken at public meetings. I’ve protested, been tear gassed, beaten, and thrown in jail. I’ve been doing all of this continuously for about 20 years. I can tell you, from extensive experience going through the official channels, that the formal mechanisms of our democracy are fundamentally broken. We need to seriously face this problem and fix it, or things are just going to keep getting worse.
If you don’t have large support for your ideas then it shouldn’t be a surprise it’s hard.
But that’s the intent of the system? Represent what most people want.
And what happens when your government heavily restricts who is allowed to vote?
> Represent what most people [and capital] want[s]
Fixed.
Because so many people are being ground down. You have time to organize something, instead of making rent? Well now you have to fight to even get your voting rights back, that you were silently stripped off because of your skin color and demographic, or social status. Then you need to see if you can ever get the gerrymandered border back to where it should be so the other party will ever have a chance at winning in your area, instead of losing by default. Pretty sure the next election is only about two swing-states again.
> I had a professor in college who was big on entrepreneurship. So he formed an organization, got others involved, went to Washington to lobby his rep. His rep said “let’s do it”, and sat him down with her staff to write a bill. That bill was brought to the floor for a vote and passed. Until you’ve done that, dont complain the system doesn’t work
This is a sign of the system not working. A well connected professor, with plenty of free time to form an organization and go to Washington to talk to his rep
Might as well be an industry lobbyist.
Could a worker from Walmart do the same thing? In theory sure. In practice unlikely, for any number of reasons. Not least because people are unlikely to take a Wal Mart worker seriously enough to join their organization.
And because workers at the bottom with no rights and no money are fired as soon as they try to organize anything beyond their continued immiseration
> A well connected professor, with plenty of free time
And not only that but one who was "big on entrepreneurship!" Guy wasn't really rocking the boat, was he?
Well connected? A professor at a small college from a town of 15,000?
Nope. She had been working on entrepreneurship for a while so had met her reps years ago. No money involved. Hell, not even from a very big state.
This seems like fantastic fantasy or fanfic, but unless you have a citation or some actual names, I think I'll put it down to fiction
> what are people without billions of dollars and without the ear of the president supposed to do to affect change in this modern, post-capitalist hellscape?
California has a referendum system. Get signatures for a policy and put it to the voters.
The billionaires will blanket the airwaves with bad-faith argument ads and you will lose.
I read this comment as saying that you (100-k)% do not support violence against Sam Altman, for some positive real number k.
There Is No Alternative, again?
Agreed. I'm not, by any means, a fan of Altman's. But this kind of nonsense is counterproductive.
By sending bombs to people Ted Kaczynski made the "should we really do this" discussion of technology off limits for decades.
This is obviously true, but you're just inviting the rebuttals. Arguments that civil violence is unproductive are boring and obvious. Normal people have been acculturated to understand the point already. The only way to have an "interesting" conversation about this is to take the other side.
All of those arguments will be vile, as they have to be given the context.
I'm not criticizing you, and I guess I'm glad someone wrote this comment quickly. You're right. But I would caution people against reading too much into the countervailing sentiment here. It's not trolling, but it is something adjacent to it.
In high school the 90s, I learned about what the founding fathers said about violence. But, I guess that's too 18th century now.
Except they only won because UK was too busy spending money on a way to stop the French.
Like 1812 when the Brits weren't busy with the French they easily came in and burnt the US capital as punishment for burning the Canadian one. It's not that the British army suddenly got a lot stronger; they just weren't busy fighting on two continents.
That said, civil disobedience is largely pointless. We're in a capitalistic society so money is the name of the game. Rosa Parks did shit-all; it was the boycott of the bus system for 9 months that made the buses cave.
I meant more that we wouldn't have the Bill of Rights if it wasn't for Patrick Henry.
There is a super interesting and complicated discussion to have about the pragmatics and morality of concerted military action versus stochastic civil violence. Unfortunately, thread conditions on HN aren't conducive to it; the discussion will instantly devolve (via people joining in) to valence arguments about the cause of this or that campaign of violence. I genuinely think you'd need a moderation regime designed from the ground up to support a productive conversation about this topic, which, for good reasons, HN doesn't provide.
Honestly, it's not really that complicated. Americans (at least Pennsylvanians) born before, say 2000 were explicitly taught that violence is ok if it's against tyranny. Apparently, they stopped teaching that after 2010, so we're now in a post-natural-rights era.
I went to high school in Pennsylvania.
We went to different high schools in the 1990s, because that isn't at all what I was taught.
While I typically avoid touching non-technical topics, I have the opportunity to chime in as another PA highschooler from the 90's, we absolutely were taught that, down to details in AP courses such as the impact of individuals like John Brown. While I'm not sure I'd have worded it precisely like the parent, the concept of "the four boxes of liberty" and the progression thereof was certainly understood and conveyed. (There was substantial study of the labor rights movements and conflicts/resistance therein as well)
I went to Jesuit high school in Chicago in the early 1990s. There's a lot more to say about all of this stuff and nothing wrong with what you just said, but to hash it out any further, we'd have to attempt a philosophical discussion about violence in a forum that (unavoidably, and to the consternation of its moderators) has reward circuits wired around hyping up action.
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants” has been a popular quote in the US for a long time.
You've basically just said anyone who doesn't hold the "approved" opinion is wrong and then you called them names. But you wrapped it in extra words so that it's less flagrant.
Did you ever think that maybe people do in fact believe what they say they believe?
Everybody who believes civil violence is a productive solution to any problems we have in 2026 is wrong. I don't see myself as having called anyone names; rather, I said that the point was so banal that the only conversation you're likely to see is from people who get dopamine hits from taking the edgy other side of the argument.
>Everybody who believes civil violence is a productive solution to any problems we have in 2026 is wrong.
Hilarious joke, Mr. Fukuyama. You have masked goons running around, detaining and even killing people without probable cause. If the results of the 2026 midterms are not to the liking of the current POTUS, it isn't unthinkable that he would try to overturn them, even by force. Would you be hand-wringing on HN about how violence is always bad, then?
But I digress. Firebombing Sam Altman is very bad; there is a multitude of good points against it, from the moral to the pragmatic. "Violence is fundamentally evil" is just a lazy and evidently false argument that does you a disservice.
You said they were "abnormal" and "trolls" but you dressed it up in the sort of snooty language that HN expects you to dress it up in.
Civil violence is the backstop of literally every societal system. While it would be better if the systems work, civil violence is what happens if they don't and tends to increase until they do.
Our premises are too far apart for it to be productive to discuss this.
In Sam Altman's case that is true. He is just one frontman for and beneficiary of a giant technological revolution that is almost inevitably happening whether anyone wants it to or not, since it is pushed forward by pure Darwinian logic: all key world actors feel compelled to develop AI, since they know that if they don't they will be outcompeted by others who do develop AI. Altman's death would change nothing about that fundamental calculus. You'd have to kill probably tens of thousands of people to really put a dent in AI development, and even then it would probably just be temporarily delayed.
In general, violence can certainly solve problems, especially when the problems are not being caused by almost-inevitable technological revolutions. One of the issues to keep in mind, though, is that it often also creates new ones, often surprising ones. For example, the assassination that led to World War One. For another example, if Trump had been assassinated last year, that would have solved many problems for people who dislike Trump. However, that doesn't necessarily mean it would have made the world overall a better place - that is almost impossible to predict. Hence the sci-fi sort of scenario of "you go back in time and kill Hitler, but when you return to your own time it turns out that Hitler dying just let mega-Hitler take power".
Hitler survived 40 assassination attempts, BTW. I don't know what to make out of it. Non-professionals have low chance of success maybe?
> Hence the sci-fi sort of scenario of "you go back in time and kill Hitler, but when you return to your own time it turns out that Hitler dying just let mega-Hitler take power".
Sure, but keep in mind that Hitler is already pretty bad. So while yes, killing him might open the door to someone worse stepping in, it may also open the door to someone more level headed.
You know. In theory.
Because people might have missed it last thread, here's dang's response to the discourse:
> I don't think I've ever seen a thread this bad on Hacker News. The number of commenters justifying violence, or saying they "don't condone violence" and then doing exactly that, is sickening and makes me want to find something else to do with my life—something as far away from this as I can get. I feel ashamed of this community.
> Edit: for anyone wondering (or hoping), no I'm not leaving. That was a momentary expression of dismay.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47728106
I recently saw a lecture by neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky [1] which discussed the complexities of human violence. We both condone and don't condone violence all the time, depending on social context. And furthers, our ways of expressing violence are varied (even down to tiny things like the silent treatment). We (along with other animals) have always used aggression to enforce social order and obtain social benefit.
Perhaps something to think about in a scenario like this. Personally I think it's interesting that some people are so quick to condone aggressive attacks on powerful people, yet have no comment on those powerful people committing lower levels of violence against the masses. It's all social context.
[1] https://youtu.be/GRYcSuyLiJk?si=HhnAUKelmR7igO9x
only on this site would people need a neuroscience lecture to understand elements of human nature that are apparent to most elementary schoolers
I believe that unique community of HN consist mostly of individuals that weren't able to fully understand those elements of human nature as elementary (and sometimes high-school) schoolers. I stand as one example of such person, it took me about 30 years before I understood that I lacked such innate understanding at school.
I think you meant condemn, but otherwise, well said.
Ah yes in the second paragraph I definitely meant condemn, thank you.
There's also the international angle here.
How is a person from a nation that the US President has threatened to annex or invade supposed to feel about seeing domestic violence in the United States? From their perspective a divided United States is less of a personal threat to them.
All this talk about how 'we can't have this in a democracy!' forgets that many of us don't live in that particular democracy, and that particular democracy is threatening other democracies.
What should my response be if a North Korean General is executed? Or if a Russian oligarch 'falls out a window'? Or a corrupt Mexican politician is beheaded by a rival cartel?
These American oligarchs aren't my countrymen, They don't have my best interests in mind, they fund the people who threaten my country, and now they provide the American military with technology that it can use to attack my country.
Their lobbying and campaign contributes have resulted in a Mad King waging an unwinnable war that has severely damaged the global economy and has made my life demonstrably worse. I have never done anything to these people and yet they callously did this to all of us for personal profit well beyond what any human being could never need in a thousand life times.
At the end of the day the less cohesive the American tribe is the better off my tribe is. I wish our incentives were aligned but they just aren't and I am not in any way responsible for that.
But ultimately that is what you get for fucking with the people for too long and assuming wealth/status/power is an armor. Source: the French revolution
Its not really about that though is it?
The people who are doing this stuff are unhinged but why? Perhaps they do not trust law and order. Perhaps they feel helpless and have been led to believe its over for the labour class due to the overhyped marketing and so on.
A serious frank conversation needs to be had and the hyping needs to stop.
I think it's entirely fair for the average american to no longer trust the courts to provide justice against the rich, given your current political environment.
Or, if you truly believed AI was a threat and represented material harm and managed to get standing to bring a suit, you are looking at years and years and years of litigation.
They’re some combination of deranged, depressed and looking for a thrill. In most countries they fail to stab someone. Here they have guns.
Before passing judgment consider that while you may have the privilege of posting from a country that's never had to fight for relief from tyranny, that's not necessarily the case for others.
> that's not necessarily the case for others
Totally agree. I’m speaking to cases in America. If you’re in a rich country broadly at peace with competitive elections to any degree, and you’re choosing violence, you should vacation to e.g. Burma or Sudan or Libya or Ethiopia and see the cost of the violence you’re glorifying.
Tyranny of a bunch of rich white men having to pay taxes lol.
There's a reason the founding fathers all had slaves; they weren't the common folk.
>There's a reason the founding fathers all had slaves; they weren't the common folk.
Ah, yes. All Slaveholders. I once toured John Adam's former plantation. It's expansive. Really puts Monticello to shame.
(the joke here being that John Adams was a practicing lawyer in state that didn't even have slavery).
Super good joke.
Since your point seems to be that not all the founding fathers parent was referring to were actually slave owners do you have a claim for a rough ratio? I think that would be interesting and would be a more informative thing regardless of where on the scale it lands from "everybody but Adams" all the way up to "only a big names like Washington, Jefferson".
> a country that's never had to fight for relief from tyranny
Do you have an example of such a country?
You can't keep marginalizing people and expecting stability.
Here's your canary.
> You can't keep marginalizing people and expecting stability.
People who shoot someone or throw bombs at someone even though that someone never did something against them, should be marginalized. In prison.
>People who shoot someone or throw bombs at someone even though that someone never did something against them
I think the point is that there's going to be an increasingly large percentage of the populace who think that the AI bosses / billionaire class did indeed do something against them.
This has always been the case, hasn't it? There have always been groups of people who perceive technology change as a negative, or they are in fact negatively impacted.
But they didn't ask the rest of us if we're ok for them to murder someone on our behalf.
Personally I hope that AI will be a step change for the positive. I think it is inevitable that it will progress form here, in the darwinian sense, that someone else on this thread mentioned.
With that in mind, we should all be pushing for it to be used to our benefit, rather than detriment. And like almost all technological advances in the past, I think this can happen.
So if people are saying violence against Sam Altman is expected, then they're also saying violence against me is expected, because I am hopeful and vaguely supportive of the technology. That's quite scary.
Okay
> <...> even though that someone never did something against them, <...>
Many tech billionaires openly, publicly and loudly said something among the lines: "I/we/my company/tech-bros are building torment nexus - it will take your job and/or kill people and/or shut up political opponents. You are powerless to stop this."
There are some of those billionaires willing to put their name and face in front of billions of people in the world. You will have no trouble finding people that will think that X or Y tech bro is personally responsible for some poor persons problems.
Especially when there's a bunch of news like "layoffs due to AI", "record investments due to AI", etc.
I am not supporting violence, never done it and never considered it. Though not surprising when talking heads of political/economical extremes can get threats from people that have nothing to lose.
Violence against datacenters or AI company CEOs is very bad, they must be allowed to fail organically so that they don't have any excuse.
The last thing I want is for someone, in 2029, to say "but LLMs just weren't given a fair chance last time, we would have definitely reached AGI with more funding if it wasn't for [targeted attack]"
"they must be allowed to fail organically so that they don't have any excuse."
Didn't work for a german political party some centuries ago, don't work for this.
But violence is false.
Right now your comment is the 1st response for the 1st comment. Godwin's law speedrun I guess.
I am seeing information about the attacker that show he was being influenced by Rationalist thinkers - he posted about “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares.
This information of course might be false, so take the words below with a grain of salt. I might be completely wrong.
When an influential group in the Valley that has ties to many tech companies spends years speading rhetoric about “bombing data centers” or the title of the book above, I fear this kind of psychosis is inevitable. People in this thread are focusing on labour and AI issues as the motivation but I am afraid the problem might be closer to home.
Disclaimer: I am not American, just an outside observer.
Yudkowsky, like Altman, isn't a great public speaker*: too close to the in-group, not aware enough of how the words he uses are understood by people who don't already Get It. Ironically for AI safety, I think Yudkowsky and Altman are, if not on the same page, extending the metaphor they're on the same chapter.
Some random people with a gun and a Molotov aren't even the same (metaphorical) book.
* likely still better than me though, even on this specific measure. But even being the ten thousandth best speaker on the planet, out of 8 billion, leaves you at a huge disadvantage compared to the best.
> bombing data centers
At the risk of demonstrating the exact mistake I've just accused Yudkowsky and Altman of:
With B-52s, not as a DIY job with home-made Molotovs.
If you start with the claim "AI has the potential to cause as much harm as nuclear weapons", and "the USA already uses B-52s to enforce the non-proliferation treaty", this follows naturally.
If you're not willing to call on your representative to sign a binding international treaty to stop data centres that forcefully, talking about "stopping AI" or "pausing AI" seems hollow, because even if your government agrees to not build data centres near you as a result of low-grade domestic terrorism, in the absence of a credible threat to use a B-52 on someone else's sovereign territory there's nothing that you and your flaming rag in a bottle of petroleum distillate can do about them being built outside your country, in exactly the same way and for exactly the same reasons that German public opposition to nuclear weapons completely failed to influence North Korea.
Unfortunately, no one is an outside observer when it comes to America.
Yudkowsky followers already have killed at least six people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zizians
Political violence is not acceptable in a democracy.
Full stop, no "but". That's all that needs to be said on this thread.
Political violence is actually really important.
Here in Sweden, back in the 1400eds etc. the farmers often made war on the government whenever it did anything they didn't like. This had the long term consequence, that by the end of this era, self-owning farmers owned 50% of the land in Sweden, whereas in Denmark, which did not have this kind of violence, it was only 10%.
It's incredibly important to be feared and to engage in violence, so that you are in practice and can threaten your political opponents, and this remains true in a democracy.
It's important that powerful people know they can't trust that they will truly be protected by the laws if they do something which harms others-- that the veneer of civilization is thin and the masses dangerous. Otherwise you end up with very dangerous situations where people can get away with anything that's legal.
I get the sentiment but this is disengenuous. Political violence built this democracy
I believe it doesn't matter. You see, if you try applying this trick to different traits of a society, it would lead to conclusions like: it is impossible for us to build an environmentally conscious society because we come here by being environmentally unconscious. It is a historical determinism, and it just don't work. For example, Europe was mostly a constant war between states, but after WWII it managed to come to EU. No more wars between European countries. Or U.S. was a country of slavers and racists, and it managed to change itself. It is still not perfect, as I hear, but at least there are no more slavery or segregation, and racism is not accepted anymore.
The long gone history of a country is not a something that should be allowed to determine its modern narratives. You shouldn't forget your history, but there are limits you shouldn't cross. When I hear arguments going back for centuries, it is a red flag for me. It is most likely a propaganda.
Psychologists talk about two common failing of their clients. People often fixate over the past or they fixate over the future, while forgetting about the present. The healthy approach is to keep a good balance between the past, the future, and the present, with a strong accent on the present. The history determinism reminds me a lot of the over-fixation on the past, and propaganda actively tries to unsettle balances in people's minds and fixate them on anything but the present.
It feels like there’s a flaw in your argument somewhere. Your thesis is historical determinism doesn’t work and therefore using it as an argument for political violence is flawed. …But the fact remains that political violence does work and we expect it to work. For a current example, see the bombing of Iran to effect regime change.
Back to the argument that historical determinism is flawed…
I think it’s very reasonable to say that it happened in the past, therefore it probably will happen in the future. That’s the basis for pretty much any kind of prediction.
If you want to argue against historical determinism, you have to make the specific argument for why the current state is different enough that we can’t use the past to predict the future.
> at least there are no more slavery or segregation, and racism is not accepted anymore.
That’s just an example of American propaganda
> it would lead to conclusions like: it is impossible for us to build an environmentally conscious society because we come here by being environmentally unconscious
No. My logic applied here would imply that environtal unconsciousness can produce results becuase we got here by being environmentally unconscious. And that is true, burning coal for energy, while unsustainable, does produce results. Youll get energy, on demand, in a controlled manner.
Now, we should be careful doing it, but if you go to an amazonian tribesperson and yell at them for burning wood for a fire, becaise solar panels exist, then thats doesnt make complete sense
And sustains this "democracy"
Political violence is wielded against dissidents in the United States constantly. Another way to think of this is that a government that resorts to political violence against its own citizens is not a democracy.
Without political violence, the USA would not exist in any form
Our current President disagrees and has pardoned political violence. Take it up with him.
Political violence created and has sustained democracy, democracy is what happens when the violence fails and violence is what happens when the democracy fails.
sure it is. what a ridiculous comment. go read how this country was formed, or how the civil war was resolved, or...
you can disagree that this was necessary, which I'd agree with.
Tell that to the parisians.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp84sRpM1Js
America was built with violence, what makes you think that violence will not be this year's theme? People are tired
You'd think so, but increasingly a larger and larger section of the population does not think so. https://www.npr.org/2025/10/01/nx-s1-5558304/poll-political-...
Something is fundamentally broken when the sitting president of the United States pardoned thousands convicted in a court of law of attempting to use violence to achieve political ends.
No wonder people are increasingly recognizing that democracy is now broken.
An election is two (or more) armies going to the ballot box to see who has more numbers. Nothing more.
I agree. Is the US still a democracy, or already an oligarchy?
This is the point.
You can't call yourself a democracy just because we can change the colour of the same bus every 3 to 4 years
The more we treat it like a democracy, the more democratic it is. The more we treat it like an oligarchy, the less democratic it is.
Treating a rigged game as fair doesn't make it fair, it just makes you easier to beat.
> Treating a rigged game as fair doesn't make it fair, it just makes you easier to beat
Not playing at all makes you easier to beat still. Anyone pining for civil war should vacation in a war zone first. It’s difficult to encapsulate the privilege of peace until it’s been lost.
What do you say to the people in Minneapolis demanding justice for the murder of Alex Pretti?
> What do you say to the people in Minneapolis demanding justice for the murder of Alex Pretti?
Keep pushing your state investigators. Work to flip the House. And keep protesting and disrupting the browncoats.
Alex Pretti did more to stop ICE than anyone e.g. killing an individual ICE agent would do.
I am a resident of the Twin Cities and I agree wholeheartedly with this perspective. I found reading the book Waging A Good War very educational about the deliberate, strategic use of nonviolence by the American Civil Rights Movement and its ultimate triumph as a means to win support and achieve social change. It was a clear and inspiring parallel for me during the worst times of this year so far.
I appreciate and support you. If I can help, let me know how to contact you.
Brownshirts. I believe "browncoats" refers to a now-extinct space opera fandom from a few decades ago.
Firefly?
Civil war or getting screwed by elites aren't the only two options. That's a false dichotomy.
> Civil war or getting screwed by elites aren't the only two options. That's a false dichotomy
I completely agree. But political violence increasingly polarises the outcomes to those two. (The elites can buy gunmen faster than you or I can.)
California has a referendum system. Get an AI measure on the ballot. Companies that are doing the things Anthropic got fired for refusing to provide are banned from doing business in the State of California. (Or with the State. Find a balance that gets the votes.)
Altman needs to sell off that house and move to an anonymized address. I don’t see these attacks letting up any time soon. Two targeted attacks in three days is nuts.
Or he could move to a military base like several prominent administration officials.
How long could a public figure have a hidden address? It doesn't seem practical.
More likely he will have a new contract with some private security firm.
Some poor security guards are going to end up getting gunned down.
I was thinking more like Blackwater, not standard security.
Maybe he can build a moat, and a well fortified structure on the inside, with a little draw bridge to let people in.
https://archive.is/eLssu
sama, i know the odds of you seeing this are very low, but i'm so sorry you're being targeted like this. you don't deserve this. i recently saw you do a q&a with francois challet and.. after it was over, you went to your car very quickly and you were driven away. i think these days you must think a lot about your safety and the safety of your family and i wish it didn't have to be that way. wishing you and your family all the best.
Only a matter of time before ChatGPT of the future sends a terminator back in time to protect and/or stop him...
The layoffs haven't even really started yet... I'm very worried about the next two years
Somewhat funny to read all these holy, well-tamed, moral people condemning violence with most dumb, ungrounded "violence bad" that cannot even hold a second of scrutiny.
Yes, violence shouldn't be the first resort, and when violence is unleashed innocent suffer as well, but there is a great difference between choosing not to use violence due to whatever consideration, and being so toothless and tamed that a sight of dog that finally bites when being constantly beaten sickens you.
I agree. A lot of commenters who have probably had privileged lives and never faced a situation where violence was, in fact, the answer.
It's not good for this sort of disagree with a CEO stuff. Fighting Hitler is ok. Typed from England where we fought Hitler but don't generally go for CEOs. Is that privileged?
And they live in a country where the industry of violence is the largest slice of government budget.
I think it’s the opposite: many of these keyboard warriors advocating for violence in 2026 in America have no fucking clue what they’re advocating for, or how stupid they sound.
Where violence is acceptable as a tool, it empowers "cruel humans" on average much more than "beaten dogs".
If you are getting bombed by the opposing country, is a ballot going to stop that?
We're not on first resort anymore, people are dying because they cannot afford living.
True, but at one point the calculus shift to justifying that risk. Basically when the beaten dogs outnumber the cruel humans by alot
Crazy, as bad of a person as I think Altman is, he isn't even the worst AI CEO. But even the worst of them doesn't deserve this.
I've been seeing some version of "Sam Altman is the antichrist" on every platform in the last few weeks. I'm still trying to find concretely what makes this guy so bad compared to every executive out there. So far, all I could find is:
- OpenAI made a deal with the Pentagon (fair)
- OpenAI changed their business model from non-profit to for-profit (fair?)
- Sexual assault allegations by his sister. Sam Altman denies this and it's currently before a court.
- Overpromised AI to investors (everyone does this)
- Lobbying against regulations (I support)
- Some vague accusations of "being a liar" and a "sociopath" by his competitors Ilya Sutskever and Dario Amodei.
- He doesn't know how to code (lol)
Is there anything that I'm missing? Does he put ketchup on his pizza?
I think it is simpler than that. For a lot of people he's the one who "created the AI"* so he is the reason they have been fired.
That's it, I don't think much of the rest has any weight outside internet forums like this one.
*I've seen people using copilot and calling it "chatgpt".
Whenever people object to thing-x they go for the most prominent leader of thing-x.
I personally object from him trying to divert trillions in investment from potential helping the hungry type stuff which is popular to sticking slop in everything which many don't want.
For me, he's an awful person for the smarminess in the pentagon deal (the DIC is too entwined with American industry to bemoan making any deal at all), the business model change, the behavior described in that recent article, the 180 on how he and OpenAI consider AI ethics, and the way he's gone about overpromising.
It'd be one thing if he was just promising more than he could actually deliver, but he went further, making promises of buying up unrealistically large chunks of the global RAM supply, causing everyone else to suffer, with no remorse.
There's also WorldCoin. I don't think a decent person would continue to push such an awful, untrustworthy system. This is a supposedly privacy-focused project that several countries are investigating for privacy violations and has been found to be in violation of privacy laws in some of them.
It's almost as if he goes out of his way to do as much harm to the world as he thinks he can get away with while maintaining the facade of just doing business. I don't think he's the antichrist, I think Peter Thiel is the closest to deserving that description.
“Everyone does this,” and iirc recently a few people went to jail for it. So what’s happening with Altman?
If the investors want to sue him, they can. But it’s nice that you’re worried about the billionaire class like this :)
> Lobbying against regulations (I support)
one US mindset I can't wrap my mind around
There's a reason why OpenAI and Anthropic (and before them Google, Apple, Meta, etc.) were started in the US and not Europe. And let's not compare salaries we each get for similar work because that tends to make my European friends very sad.
The jacuzzi "parties" with VCs are more than questionable
- Callous disregard of lost jobs, disinformation, mental health issues / deaths, IP theft, environmental cost, skill atrophy
- Barely gave 1% of compute (on oldest chips) to safety team after promise of 20%
- Worked behind the scenes to try to land federal deal that gives mil no guardrails control and ability for mass surveillance
- Lied about China AI 'Marshall Plan' to get federal funding
- Tried to get MBS money ever after Jamal Kashoggi
While long, I'd recommend just reading the New Yorker article
Are you serious? This is why he supposedly deserves it?
Ilya Sutskever and Dario Amodei were high up at OpenAI before becoming competitors. They are just two of many people who have known Altman personally who have accused him of being a lying sociopath. I would not call that vague.
It is not just a question of morality. A sociopath with that amount of power can be a danger.
He fucked the RAM market. Not a biggie but I am salty.
I have a few predictions for this year:
1. Violent attacks against AI CEOs, researchers, and engineers is going to begin. This is due to widespread negative press that AI receives and as well as a pervasive feeling of economic uncertainty and doom in the population. Some of this being caused by the current administration's leadership, but much of it attributed to AI taking jobs and destroying opportunity.
2. Violent acts taken against non-tech CEOs will increase hand-in-hand.
3. If AI continues to demonstrate impressive new capabilities for automation, this rate will increase substantially.
4. The government may come down hard on these individuals, which will further inflame the situation.
5. Data centers will come under attack / sabotage.
6. This will all wind up further inflamed by prediction markets.
I have a colleague at Anthropic that refuses to put it on his LinkedIn. We all now know why.
If violent attacks start metastasizing, it legitimately justifies a police crackdown. Most of the population will be for that.
The pro-Palestinian activists set their cause back a year by overplaying their hands in Columbia at the start of the war. If we want to ensure zero AI legislation for the next 2 years, I couldn’t think of a better way to ensure that than to start potting randos in the streets.
It depends on what kind of violent attacks they are exactly. I believe that most of the population would either not care about people of the Altman and Zuckerberg wealth level getting killed or would be happy about it.
I think the general population is much more likely to feel joy about it than want a police crackdown.
If we're talking about attacks against average software engineers and obscure founders, fewer people would be happy about it, but a great number still would be. There is a lot of envy toward software engineers and founders.
Most of the population will be for that
I doubt it. It would further polarize your population and what you really want is to unite them. You could make a video documentation that contrasts all the known, massive corruption cases in your administration (and SV personae) with the equally massive decay in your infrastructure from roads to bridges to the closure of maternity wings in hospitals because they are no longer profitable. Make as little dialogue/narration as possible and quote dollar numbers as often as possible. Spread posts contrasting corruption/decay to every outlet/social media.
Most people don't understand technology and/or its second order effects. They do understand when they are being stolen from.
Whether most of the population will or will not be for that is an open question.
Victim blaming and pearl clutching is not a substantial justification for the status quo
Most of the population will be for that.
Most of the population will be for the violent attacks. Techbros went way too far in gleefully describing how they would destroy most people's careers while enriching themselves. Never bothered to think whether they should just because they could. Now the rooster is coming home to roost.
The best way for the attacks on AI executives to stop is to pass meaningful legislation that limits the use and scope of AI.
DAs can refuse to prosecute.
But even if the DA prosecutes, the jury can nullify the charges, which is a risk. What happens when a jury finds the accused not guilty?
The masses will only tolerate so much before the elite start dying. See all of human history.
Cartier owner was right to be afraid.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36497537
This is unacceptable and a growing issue in America, anti-AI has become just another focal point for the far end of the political spectrum to rally and ultimately radicalize violence.
You're so right, only the Wealthy are allowed to infiltrate homes!
What is unacceptable is how these technology companies steal the IP of collective humanity, gate keep it and force us to pay a subscription service to use it against each other in a perverted downward spiral powered by capitalist game theory. The neoluddite revolution is forming, have no doubts about that.
I don't think it is obvious which "far end" of the political spectrum you are referring to.
I have seen anti-AI sentiments from people known all over the spectrum.
Sam Altman the war contractor? I assume they are no longer called defense contractors under this administration.
It is something that the sticking point with Anthropic was autonomous AI killing machines and turning the military AI on the US population. I could see people not being happy with that.
[flagged]
Very well said.
I agree this is a symptom of large systemic issues.
Long gone are the days a bumbling fool could get a well paying job at the local power plant and provide a good life for a wife and three children, with a large home, decent insurance and two cars.
I feel like Altman's PR team is dropping the ball. We somehow need to get the word out that AI tools will benefit all of humanity, not detract from it.
I don't think AI is benefiting humanity when you consider: - It's heavy use in military and surveillance engagements - The billions+ spent, yet no economic gains were noted - The pressure on white-collar jobs
The threat to AI far exceeds any benefits I can see.
When they’re saying that most people will be unemployable in a few years and there is no plan to fix that…in a country where you go hungry and homeless without a job, people will get a bit restless.
Altman has made suggestions on how to fix this. I believe his main one is for AI to be subsidised so that it remains free for public use. The public could then use those free tokens to enrich themselves and offset any negative societal impacts.
This is obviously unworkable and delusional. Not sure what kind of worldview would produce this type of idea and see it as practical. Maybe more exposure to normal people is needed instead of being insulated in the AI filter bubble.
Is this really the case though? Currently it appears to benefiting a small few and there is not much reason to think it will change going forward.
If 95% of jobs go away, the destabilization leads to violent conflicts, and power and wealth become more centralized does it really matter if we have better healthcare or automated cars? Will people have purpose in their lives? Will this be a better world for most?
People are stupid, but not stupid enough not to see right through the lie that AI will benefit all of humanity. This is exactly why they are throwing molotovs at his house.
idk, maybe Altman should stop giving interviews talking about how he’s going to get rich making everyone’s job obsolete. Just a thought! Any PR firms hiring?
He’s already rich, he doesn’t even own any stock in OpenAI, and the societal (and geopolitical) changes are coming from AI no matter what Sam Altman does. Should he just not talk about it?
Not a proponent of this, but it's worth understanding that a certain part of the population believe once AGI is reached the world will change, and whoever reached it first wields all power. The increase in usability of recent models has no doubt shocked them. With such a mindset it does make sense to consider it a life or death thing. I can understand that some people think attacking these companies is the only way of protecting themselves from a whole different and much less dignified life.
I don't know if they are right, neither in world view nor conclusion. But it seems this is the world we currently lived in. This is one of the cases where for once i wish there was a manifesto to read, because i badly want to understand why
Violence won't solve anything, everyone is worse off.
> Violence won't solve anything
Violence can solve problems. This kind of violence is stupid, counterproductive and immoral.
Strategically deploying violence takes time, resources and discipline. Wanking off with a gun does not.
When do you think that we will see the first successful strike on a CEO with a drone?
Violence solves problems every day. Worse off is relative. I think you mean to qualify your statement.
Police employ violence all the time and I think we who are okay/well off all agree that they solve our problems every day.
What us cushy engineers haven't realized yet is that the gradient for who are well off are sliding more and more towards one end. Sooner or later engineers will be on the wrong side of that gradient.
>What us cushy engineers haven't realized yet is that the gradient for who are well off are sliding more and more towards one end. Sooner or later engineers will be on the wrong side of that gradient.
Finally someone who said it. There was this quote I saw in the movie "Air"(about michael Jordan) about how people with true wealth only ever part with it not out of charity but out of greed. It takes someone or something truly special to force them to part with that money.
This whole era that we've lived through, where software engineers have amazing working conditions compared to blue collar workers and manage to pull ahead in society, helping to form a white collar elite class, is an aberration caused by the miracle of the microprocessor and Moore's Law. The elites saw the opportunity to obtain so much wealth from the lower classes(in the form of automating labor with computers) that they were forced to part with a bit of it, allowing some special people: software engineers like you and me to achieve what we consider a middle class life.
But sooner or later those same people will want that wealth back. They will continue to fight and find ways to take that wealth back: whether through H‑1B visas, "learn to code" initiatives to increase supply, or now AI. AI could very well crash and burn tomorrow but they will be back, and it will be an ongoing battle for the rest of our lives.
Indeed. Violence can be and is met with violence, and refusing to discern against them is a logical failure that needs correcting. Inevitably it comes down to process, and being a one-party state in control, the Democrats control the violence. Arguably on both sides.
I agree, French Revolution was pretty peaceful
> French Revolution was pretty peaceful
The elites after the French Revolution were not only mostly the same as before, they escaped with so much money and wealth that it’s actually debated if they increased their wealth share through the chaos [1].
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/650023
This is called cherry picking.
The comment refers to an article specifically discussing only one aspect of a major historical event.
The French revolution is considered one of the most important events in the history of Europe, because of the great impact it had on the (among others) politics, economy and the quality of life of common people.
Downplaying its importance by trying to water its impact down to "but rich still rich, no?" is a sign, that the comment might have been made in bad faith or without proper understanding of the source material.
I’m not underplaying its signaling value. Just that nobody that signaled was better off for it. Choosing a revolution-style coup is condemning your and your loved ones’ lives to horribleness. If that’s worth it, roll the dice. But don’t think the elites will suffer for it.
Do you have any suggestions for a real peaceful approach to get rid of the French royalty?
> suggestions for a real peaceful approach to get rid of the French royalty?
What the British did. Tale of Two Cities. Land and electoral reform.
One of them stayed geopolitically relevant for another century. One of them became Germany’s sock puppet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execution_of_Charles_I_of_Engl...
Yes. Trial. Banana, sure. But a precedent for peace.
And yet feudalism was abolished, and the map of Europe remade.
> yet feudalism was abolished
Mostly by conquest. Not revolution, certainly not the popular kind.
The elites that survived ended up better off. 50,000 other elites were killed during the French Revolution.
By the same token, the normal populace was also way better off after the French Revolution, since using the money and wealth of the dead elites to improve everyone's lives made a substantial impact on the French civilization that they are still benefiting from today.
In other words...the French Revolution is exactly the wrong type of example you want to be using when talking about whether violence against tech elites is acceptable.
> * 50,000 other elites were killed during the French Revolution*
Ish. Most survived. And they didn’t have jets. Revolutions today are broadly accretive for elites.
Any word on the motivation of the attach? Any manifesto or a group taking responsibility?
Just speculating, but I assume the motivation is in a similar vein to the Stop AI movement. https://www.stopai.info/
Thank you for the heads up.
They took 'er jobs?
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Why is this comment flagged? It's not advocating violence just asking why some violence is actively opposed while others are ignored
but we haven't even proven that AI will destroy vast amounts of jobs. Some, sure, junior software engineers are in trouble. but other then that, do we really have any quantified evidence as to how many jobs have been displaced by AI? i've been looking for numbers on this but it all seems murky and wishy washy. i'm open to be convinced, if anyone's got numbers.
also, if the worst case scenario does happen and most of the population finds itself without money. there are other ways to live with very little money.
>[if] most of the population finds itself without money. there are other ways to live with very little money.
This is even more hideous than expressions of approval for individual violence. This is a dystopian acquiescence.
examples include: Great depression, third world countries like ghana, south africa, etc (and countries that have collapsed like syria), also the hazda tribe and other native tribes untouched by technology, as well as other similar to human mammalian species that share our planet like monkeys, apes, chenobos, all are able to survive without money albeit with more favorable climate/physiology.
Do you expect people to wait by while billionaires pour trillions of dollars into replacing them? Evidence takes years to mount; present events are moving far faster than that. Your argument is the exact same as that of COVID denialists in 2019 -- that we don't know how bad it'll be yet, that there's so little evidence, that we shouldn't jump to hasty action before getting results in. Empiricism can only go so far.
If I knew someone was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars building a big laser pointed at my house, I would not wait for "quantified evidence" of its effect to take some sort of action. The only real debate is what kind of action.
> also, if the worst case scenario does happen and most of the population finds itself without money. there are other ways to live with very little money.
If you have so little attachment to your money, why hold on to it at all? Do not be upset that other people are operating on a slightly larger time horizon than you are, and are interested in their livelihood not just today, but three or five years from now.
>> Do you expect people to wait by while billionaires pour trillions of dollars into replacing them?
Well, I tried to warn my family and friends and they're looking at me like I'm crazy. So yes, I think most people will just treat all their layoffs like it's just a regular recession. Until, at least half your friends are laid off, most people won't be any more alarmed than if in a recession.
>> If you have so little attachment to your money, why hold on to it at all?
You'll need whatever you have left. The barter economy won't take the place of the primary economy, rather it will supplement it with transactions between members who have no currency. but, there will always be some things that you want to get from the primary economy, if you can.
I have never once seen someone on HN express happiness that someone was killed in a drive-by gang shooting.
I saw this all the time when ICE was doing their business in Minneapolis. That was only a few months ago and it doesn't take too long to dig and find some truly odious posts.
Well for one, nobody was killed here. But second of all, sure -- because Hacker News are not the class of people involved in drive-by gang shootings; to most of us they are essentially abstractions, barely more real than the trolley problem. If you went around asking people who knew a guy that was shot, you'd eventually find someone who said he had it coming -- he got involved with the wrong guys, he shot at one of them first, he did something he shouldn't have (a common thread: the livelihood of the people involved). This is obviously atrocious: nobody should go around shooting people on the streets. But we can recognize that both are playing with fire, and understand the violence in that context -- such that the solution to gang violence is not, "moralize at the gang members until they stop shooting eachother", but rather "improve socio-economic conditions until they stop wanting to". So yes, there are elements of HN's population that will cheer these events on. But this should not be surprising -- the ruling class is playing with fire.
The manufactured consent is very creepy.
The same thing happened with Kirk. Everyone standing up to "mourn" a neo-nazi, fake tears, rolling with the grift. Rolling with the white supremacist grindbox.
It's gross.
Prediction: the general populace have internalised Marxism to such an extent that they think class warfare is the solution to everything.
You get comments like "violence is bad but we would not have $x if not for violence" and then you get to justify violence for any pet cause they have.
I expect to see more of this until it dies down because of how ridiculous the premise is.
Agreed, and also now any actions people don’t personally agree with that have a negative effect on someone (which is everything) can be labeled “structural violence”, so they can claim to have a moral justification for physical violence. It’s disgusting and breathtakingly stupid.
Look, I think Sam Altman is a terrible person too, but to anyone reading that hates people like him as much as I do you should want him alive while we work to build a world where he can live out a long life in complete safety, in prison.
Violence never solves anything. You will never make anything in this world better by becoming a worse person than your enemies.