Raw LLM Responses

The last ten years has shown that the working class will absolutely destroy the country with authoritarian leaders (e.g. Trump) rather than accept permanent welfare dependence or retraining. Remember how "learn to code" became something right-wingers shouted at liberal politicians that got voted out? The working class has been here before. Prior waves of automation were padded over with 'retraining' courses that were little more than scams, and the welfare systems people got thrown to get repeatedly cut or means-tested to oblivion whenever a legislator needs a few more bucks in the budget. UBI will not fix the problems of automation. The political pressure to cut welfare and force-feed the poors self-reliance will not go away. Actually, it will get way worse, because the kind of automation economy that will be built by big tech looks a lot more like Saudi Arabia than America. The thing that makes petrostates authoritarian hellholes is centralization: all the wealth of the country is in a bunch of oil fields owned by a handful of people. Oil fields don't require lots of labor input, so labor has no economic power to bargain with and thus no political power. This is the same future we're barrelling towards, except instead of "who owns the oil fields", the principle question of the economy is "who owns the robots". (Oh, and for any right-wingers reading this and thinking, "don't worry, Daddy Trump will punish the big bad Big Tech guys and give me my high-paying factory job back", Big Tech is already cozying up to Trump hard. That's why he's suddenly *really* pro-Bitcoin all of a sudden. And no, "give all the Trump voters Bitcoin and crash the dollar" is not a viable solution either.) The way you fix this is not with welfare, but with decentralization. Again, going back to the oil analogy, the opposite of a petrostate would be something like a solar economy. You can't monopolize the sun (at least not until someone figures out how to make a Dyson sphere), so solar is just inherently more decentralized, all you need to do is build panels and batteries and research better panels and batteries. Going back to automation, that means we need automation technologies that are nonproprietary. The increasingly misnamed OpenAI has fought against this, arguing safety concerns that their chatbots and image generators might somehow become sentient and turn us all into paperclips. What they have instead done is centralize control over their AI to a *startling* degree: every request you make of their AI gets run on their servers, with the *very explicit* goal of being able to spy on everything you type into ChatGPT. If the AI hype ever actually bears fruit, this makes OpenAI a new sovereign state and Sam Altman its king.