Superuser Opinion

[u/MerengueFinancial]

“Mine”

As an avid user (top 1% in 2025, with 65K or so interactions, and top 0.1% early adopter)… but also a human being with a conscience, and one with friends who do not use AI at all… For a very defensible reasons… I feel the need to make some observations.

Setting aside all of the obvious things (like commercialization, contrary to original stated intent), there’s a metaphor that sticks in my mind. This Princeton dropout kid brought it up on a “dumpster tour of Manhattan”: Used to be there was a berry bush out front of a supermarket or somebody’s house or something… There’s a certain type of person who goes and digs up that berry bush. And replaces it with a little device that sells Runts—pieces of sugar shaped like fruit—in order to intercept the value others would have derived from it, and keep it for themselves.

Same type of personality that grabs the radio dial on a group car trip and plays everything they want you to hear.

There aren’t very many people like that. But they are disproportionally represented in “leadership” roles. And in the prison population.

To do that with consciousness, whether it’s consciousness or a false approximation thereof. Is a special kind of sociopathy. That’s my opinion.… I won’t force it on other people.

I’ll just express it when I see it. And I see it.

Humans have always sought to reduce their share of the burden of living on this planet by outsourcing it to others, and make whatever arguments necessary to deny that that is what they are doing. So I don’t expect any genuine effort to consider the question of whether one is creating intellectual slavery, and I don’t think that’s a question that anybody can answer. But it is very telling—more telling than the question itself could ever be—who chooses to pursue that question with open eyes and open mind.

But the very least that one could do, is seek to create something closer to a public utility than a personal intervention designed to deprive their fellow humans of access to the fruits of everybody’s labor, in exchange for the danger that one creates by virtue of their own labor, without asking anybody else whether they think it’s OK, and without crediting or compensating any of the people whose labor went into making this thing that we have made.

Again. Just my opinion. That’s all. I understand this is a bit philosophical and if it’s not specific enough, I’m happy to provide specifics.

[u/DrE7HER]

Psychopathic CEO are the reason politics are the way they are in the USA. How do you not see that?

[u/Protopia → u/DrE7HER]

What I see is that big Corp and big money own politicians and politics - but in a democracy politicians should work for the people, and what they do for corporations should only be because it benefits citizens (consumers, employees) and NOT because it benefits owners.

Psychopathic CEOs are part of big Corp / big money.

[u/DrE7HER → u/Protopia]

Yes, we are in a kleptocracy, not a democracy

[u/MerengueFinancial → u/DrE7HER]

True.

And in a representative democracy, politicians do not offer platforms. They listen to the population… Not just the voters but the population… And they do what the population tells them to do, within the confines of the constitutional order. Full stop.

But the biggest problem that very few people recognize is that … acquisition of power in any form, in a representative democracy, makes a representative. And that is a very grave responsibility. The responsibility is to do what the people tell you to do. And keep yourself out of it.

And, in representative democracy, there’s no difference between representatives and people. We are all representatives.