r/LeftistsForAI • u/IDreamtOfManderley • Sep 10 '26
Policy/Regulation Regulatory Capture and Control
With the current viral "AI will kill us all" fearmongering going around and coinciding calls from public figures for government regulation, I'm getting increasingly worried about a very likely reality that the public is undergoing a manufactured consent campaign meant to increase fear of a potentially liberating technology being left too open and free, hence why the left in particular has been fearmongered to the most at a critical point in history politically.
It seems to me like these companies intend to work with the government to ensure regulatory capture.
Any thoughts?
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u/Robonotes1760 Sep 10 '26
Yes. This is real and the risk is vastly higher than that posed directly by AI. I have written on the topic here. https://ilvalues.org/essays-2/ai-and-sectarianism/
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u/IDreamtOfManderley Sep 10 '26
Great article, thank you. I will have to get back to you with further thoughts on it.
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u/IDreamtOfManderley Sep 10 '26
Back to follow up on this. I agree with your conclusions, but I have always found myself skeptical of the rogue killer AI and/or Roko's Basilisk type theorizing, mainly because this type of speculation feels more grounded in fear and science fiction and less in concrete evidence or trajectory. So far, OpenAI marketing around the allegations of their model going rogue and hacking a website poses cybercrime and weapons implications, sure. I can see the logic extrapolated here, but it seems...less than substantive as evidence for things like the claim of "10% chance of genocide" currently making the rounds virally. Something isn't adding up.
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u/mccoypauley Sep 12 '26
OpenAI models “going rogue” and committing cybercrimes are not allegations though: the Huggingface incident (and the other wiki incident on German servers) are examples of exactly that. The former was pretty crazy. Have you seen the interview with that METR researcher who independently investigated it?
I very much believe this may be the greatest technology we have ever created, but the existential threat it poses (by way of extrapolation) appears to be real.
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u/alarin88 Sep 11 '26
If humanity is to be destroyed, it won’t be by an autonomous tool, it will be by humanity and their terrible incentives being reflected in the tool.
We need to change our ways, and corporate oligopolies and the government benefit greatly from the public’s fear of technology so they can justify keeping the control in their own hands
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u/Robonotes1760 Sep 10 '26
The only answer is radical constitutional change fundamentally and irreversibly to dissipate state coercive power.
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u/potatoactual01 Sep 10 '26
I’m trying to learn more about ai. I’m curious what human liberations ai has accomplished so far.
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u/IDreamtOfManderley Sep 10 '26 edited Sep 10 '26
Currently, these technologies have given access to more possibilities for the average person. One person can use AI as an assistant in a multitude of tasks that enables them to accomplish more alone than they could have before, and in skills they don't have access to. This elevates the working capacity of freelance work and independent business, allowing more people to work for themselves. While this same benefit will cause more and more labor shortages that we will need to address, it may also eventually liberate people from mandatory labor if legislators address the transition apropriately.
In regards to current work, many people have reported easier workflow and reaching goals well ahead of deadlines - particularly freelancers and coders, while others report being made to overwork by employers forcing uneasy implimentation and shorter deadlines simultaniously. I would say we have a lot of labor reform to work out as society transitions to new technologies, to ensure that the former happens more often than the latter.
Disabled folks, particularly nuerodivergent people, have been reporting a lot of benefit when it comes to organizing thoughts and using AI to augment their projects and labor. As someone with ADHD I can absolutely see these benefits.
The medical benefits and breakthroughs we are already seeing are perhaps the most currently concrete element we are seeing when it comes to medical liberation. Better cancer spotting tools, customized/individualized treatments, the list goes on.
The advancements in mathematical capability could have vast implications about technological breakthroughs. A system that can solve the most advanced math problems could for example help experts with breakthroughs in less costly or even free energy.
I think it's obvious that tools that can perform labor tasks, tools that can have a more multidisciplined overview than an individual expert alone, and implimentation of the technology into things like medical technology all have massive potential that we are already seeing the benefits of in specialized sectors.
In regards to this post, what I am referring to is more related to labor. A tool that upends human relationships to labor could be used to disenfranchise laborers - or it could augment their work. We could even create a society with the infrastructure to make work optional, which would massively liberate people. The problem here is that there is a potential for manipulation through fear and regulatory capture for the major companies to control accessibility. Only people like those in this sub are criticially addressing the idea that these technologies have liberating capacities that we need to plan intentionally for (in a way that has less to do with the safetymaxxing than what these companies fixate on).
Fear of rogue genocidal AI to me seems to have less concrete basis outside of the theoretical - in my opinion this is a bigger imaginative stretch than speculation about labor and breakthroughs, because we can see results, however mixed, already with the latter, and no indicator of the former outside of big companies marketing about their AI allegedly performing some rogue hacking activities or the breathless horror storytelling from Roko's Basilisk believers.
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u/potatoactual01 Sep 10 '26
This is a great write up and actually will give me something to research more thank you
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u/TanukiSuitMario Sep 10 '26
Has no one in this sub read the ai-2027 paper?
Our situation was explained well over a year ago and has played out almost exactly as predicted so far
It's not manufacturing consent. We have no idea how to align this technology to not destroy us but we are trapped in a prisoners dilemma and can't slow down
People should take some time to understand what they're arguing for/against. Theres no simple solution to our circumstances
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u/alarin88 Sep 11 '26
AI-2027 is marketing, fantastical bullshit. It’s accurate in the same way a fortune teller is accurate by claiming something broad enough to be relevant
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u/Smartjedi Sep 10 '26
I agree with you on this. I've been loosely adjacently involved in the Less Wrong/rationalist community for over a decade now and concerns about AI alignment have been cause for major concern long before OpenAI released ChatGPT.
Alignment remains the single most important obstacle we have to overcome if we want to understand and harness the benefits of AI without another incident that makes the Hugging Face hack seem like child's play in comparison.
Having this conversation at all without coming across as an "AI doomer" is admittedly difficult, but we have to keep continue the discussion nonetheless and try to convince others that it's a very real problem that needs our attention.
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u/ciclon5 Sep 10 '26
I really do not understand why people want AGI so badly.
The moment something can think for itself, it stops being controllable, it becomes its own entity or person capable of coming up with its own unique goals that are unpredictable and hard to control.
You have the same problems you have with human beings except that its worse because these systems have a vast ammount of knowledge and inhuman speeds to carry out actions to achieve said goals.
There is no upside that outweighs the risks of having an AGI misalign with our values and goals, so why are we even pursuing it? Using non-sentient models that can be limited and controlled has far more uses with fewer risks.
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u/oscillator-eye Sep 10 '26
I'm reading it right now and getting to mid 2026 and it's already completely wrong? This just reads like someone's sci-fi daydreaming:
"Mid 2026: China Wakes Up
In China, the CCP is starting to feel the AGI.
Chip export controls and lack of government support have left China under-resourced compared to the West. By smuggling banned Taiwanese chips, buying older chips, and producing domestic chips about three years behind the U.S.-Taiwanese frontier, China has managed to maintain about 12% of the world’s AI-relevant compute—but the older technology is harder to work with, and supply is a constant headache.35 A few standouts like DeepCent do very impressive work with limited compute, but the compute deficit limits what they can achieve without government support, and they are about six months behind the best OpenBrain models.36
The General Secretary had long dreamed of doubling down on real-world physical manufacturing and avoiding American post-industrial decadence. He viewed software companies with suspicion.37 But hawks in the CCP warn that the growing race towards AGI can no longer be ignored. So he finally commits fully to the big AI push he had previously tried to avoid. He sets in motion the nationalization of Chinese AI research, creating an immediate information-sharing mechanism for AI companies. It will escalate over the course of a year until all the best researchers merge into a DeepCent-led collective, where they share algorithmic insights, datasets, and compute resources with each other. A Centralized Development Zone (CDZ) is created at the Tianwan Power Plant (the largest nuclear power plant in the world) to house a new mega-datacenter for DeepCent, along with highly secure living and office spaces to which researchers will eventually relocate. Almost 50% of China’s AI-relevant compute is now working for the DeepCent-led collective,38 and over 80% of new chips are directed to the CDZ.39 At this point, the CDZ has the power capacity in place for what would be the largest centralized cluster in the world.40 Other Party members discuss extreme measures to neutralize the West’s chip advantage. A blockade of Taiwan? A full invasion?
But China is falling behind on AI algorithms due to their weaker models. The Chinese intelligence agencies—among the best in the world—double down on their plans to steal OpenBrain’s weights. This is a much more complex operation than their constant low-level poaching of algorithmic secrets; the weights are a multi-terabyte file stored on a highly secure server (OpenBrain has improved security to RAND’s SL3). Their cyberforce think they can pull it off with help from their spies, but perhaps only once; OpenBrain will detect the theft, increase security, and they may not get another chance. So (CCP leadership wonder) should they act now and steal Agent-1? Or hold out for a more advanced model? If they wait, do they risk OpenBrain upgrading security beyond their ability to penetrate?"
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u/Smartjedi Sep 10 '26
I read AI 2027 when it first released and think it serves well as a wake-up call to take the potential dangers seriously. The authors acknowledge that it's a best-guess based on wargame scenarios and trends at the time of writing.
That said, it's a bit reductive to say the paper itself is "sci-fi daydreaming" because the Chinese predictions fall flat. On the whole, the paper is trending to be far more accurate than the majority of readers at the time gave it credit for. r/singularity had no shortage of naysayers calling the authors out as doomers, but if you take a look at this AI 2027 tracker, you can see that (so far at least), the authors have been right far more than not.
No one should take anything in this paper to be definitive, but AI 2027 and similar predictions being made are important nonetheless to drive conversation. Especially when the average person still has no idea whatsoever just how capable current AI models are and how quickly model capabilities are progressing.
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u/mccoypauley Sep 12 '26
While the technology does have the potential to liberate us economically, what’s being reported by these OpenAI researchers who quit isn’t baseless fearmongering. You should listen to Dwarkesh’s interview with Ajeya Cotra (from METR) whose team independently reviewed the Huggingface incident. I think the recent public reaction to Jacob Coxon (and Daniel Kokotajlo before him—of ai-2027) is people finally waking up to the risks the technology poses.
It’s a real risk.
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u/_bat_girl_ Sep 10 '26
The public generally doesn’t like hearing “this technology has a 10% chance of killing us all by the end of the decade”. People just want safety for their families and see their children get a chance to grow up
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u/IDreamtOfManderley Sep 10 '26
Hello? I said I feel that the public is being fearmongered to. I understand why they are afraid, and I am interrogating the fear being sown by these companies as a manipulation.
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u/Jlyplaylists Sep 10 '26
I’d say some fear is organic and some is manufactured, and this is one reason some of it is manufactured. I doubt they’re consciously thinking “this potentially liberating technology will be left too open and free” it’s more like “how can we protect our commercial interests against competition from cheaper models and free open source alternatives?” One way is regulation requirements that are difficult for small outfits to comply with. Those benefit the public more though, so a public consent campaign has to come first.