this is the fucking root of every fucking “will technology kill us?!” statement.

The tech won’t do shit, the goddamn assholes owning it will.

Mostly the AIs are built and controlled by public companies. Anthropic’s ownership is secret, but about 10% is owned by Google, and about 10% by Amazon. For OpenAI, 1/4 is owned by Microsoft, 1/4 is owned by their non-profit arm in some bullshit scheme, 1/4 is the employees (presumably including CEO, etc), and the remaining bits are early investors. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, nVidia, Oracle, and other public companies are owned by regular investors, pension funds, investment banks, etc.

Billionaires are part of the problem, but so are pension funds, investment banks, and regular investors who own a bit of stock in their 401(k)s.

This isn’t billionaires using their private money on private projects to fuck up the world like some kind of mad Bond villain. They’re not breaking any laws. They’re not doing anything in secret. They’re not doing it in order to kill people, or to try to take over the world.

This is the whole system where these companies are following the laws and trying to generate profits for their investors. Killing all the billionaires would be easy and satisfying, but it wouldn’t fix the problem, because the problem is a systemic one.

If it were Doctor Evil hiding in a cave, working on a doomsday machine, you’d need to send in Austin Powers to stop him. When it’s regular public companies doing it, you can stop it by just changing a law. The US system is so fucked up that it may be impossible to do that. But, in say France it’s probably much more likely that someone can just pass a simple law saying “you can’t do that”.