>> Are you claiming a lack of gun / AI control is democratizing?
> This is obviously the case. It results in a greater distribution of power.
That's the theory. In practice, it doesn't work.
Most people don't spend a lot of time looking for ways to acquire and/or retain wealth and power. But absent regulation, we'll gradually lose out to those driven folks who do. Perhaps they do so because they want to serve humanity and they imagine that their gifts make them the logical choice to run things. Or perhaps they just want to dominate things.
And the rest of us have every right to insist on guardrails, so those driven folks can't take us over the cliff. Certainly those folks can make huge contributions to society. But they can also fuck up spectacularly — because talent in one field isn't necessarily transferable to another. (Recall that Michael Jordan was one of the greatest basketball players of all time. But he wasn't even close to being the GOAT ... as a baseball player.)
Sure, maybe through some combination of genetics, rearing, and/or just plain hard work, you've managed to acquire "a very particular set of skills" (to coin a phrase ...) for making money, or for persuading people to do what you want. That doesn't mean you necessarily know WTF you're talking about when it comes to the myriad details of running the most-complex "organism" ever seen on the planet, namely human society.
And in any case, the rest of us are entitled to refuse to roll the dice on either the wisdom or the benevolence of the driven folks.
> This is obviously the case. It results in a greater distribution of power.
That's the theory. In practice, it doesn't work.
Most people don't spend a lot of time looking for ways to acquire and/or retain wealth and power. But absent regulation, we'll gradually lose out to those driven folks who do. Perhaps they do so because they want to serve humanity and they imagine that their gifts make them the logical choice to run things. Or perhaps they just want to dominate things.
And the rest of us have every right to insist on guardrails, so those driven folks can't take us over the cliff. Certainly those folks can make huge contributions to society. But they can also fuck up spectacularly — because talent in one field isn't necessarily transferable to another. (Recall that Michael Jordan was one of the greatest basketball players of all time. But he wasn't even close to being the GOAT ... as a baseball player.)
Sure, maybe through some combination of genetics, rearing, and/or just plain hard work, you've managed to acquire "a very particular set of skills" (to coin a phrase ...) for making money, or for persuading people to do what you want. That doesn't mean you necessarily know WTF you're talking about when it comes to the myriad details of running the most-complex "organism" ever seen on the planet, namely human society.
And in any case, the rest of us are entitled to refuse to roll the dice on either the wisdom or the benevolence of the driven folks.