We are currently witnessing the merging of government and corporations. It was bad before but the process is accelerating now.

there's some pretty good quotes about that by Mussolini. Things are getting bleak at an incredible pace.

You make broad assumptions about someone, talk down to them, and then claim they need to grow up?

E: parent edited their comment.

Can you elaborate on what you mean?

Sure, tl;dr: Coastals are in a cultural bubble and Orange Man Bad™ is not literally Hitler/Mussolini/{insert-favorite-despot}.

Judging by the reactions it seems fascism has become very popular around here too lately.

The original quote I was referring to:

Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power. - Benito Mussolini

If you keep posting in the flamewar style we're going to have to ban you again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Then you need to ban me again, because I have no idea how I violated the guidelines any more than the OP submission did. My comment was a digression along relevant, imperative and inoffensive lines that were introduced by the source. I am not the only person raising this point, I am not inviting extremist interpretations, and I'm not misrepresenting the consequences presented in the article. For years, Hacker News has tolerated pugilist insults being hurled at the EU with the sole purpose of starting ideological flamewars. Now that someone steps up to accuse America of a double-standard, it's offensive and insensitive? I really don't get it. What culture are you even trying to foster, at this point? Certainly not one that gratifies an audience's curiosity.

If you want to threaten people with the guidelines, then they have to be interpretable. The current "politics is bad except when it's not" rationale is not going to age with grace - it's going to create a series of unsustainable and conflicting precedents that only get worse as America's political landscape further deteriorates. Take a stance on it and stand your ground, people will not listen if your guidelines "maybe" enforce something or provide "probably" off-topic criteria.

Your GP comment, like the one you were replying to, was just ideological flamebait, without substance or information. We want thoughtful conversation here, not people taking swipes at enemies.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> For years, Hacker News has tolerated pugilist insults being hurled at

Other people breaking the site guidelines doesn't make it ok for you to do it (I don't mean you personally, of course, but anyone who comments here). Otherwise we just end up in a downward spiral (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).

If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). You can help by flagging it or emailing us at [email protected].

Can you please not perpetuate flamewars or use HN for political battle? Your account has unfortunately been doing this repeatedly lately. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Absolutely dang. I’m sorry for causing you any grief.

Appreciated!

Weird question. Business deals are announced by politicians all the time, especially on overseas trips. Just an example:

https://boeing.mediaroom.com/2015-04-10-Presidents-Varela-Ob...

This isn't an overseas trip though. It's a private partnership announced by the sitting president in the Roosevelt room, literally across the hall from the oval office. I don't know how unprecedented that truly is, but it certainly feels unusual.

I thought the business prop for AI was that it eliminates jobs?

It will. The short-term sale is that it will create thousands of temporary jobs, and long-term reduce hundreds of thousands of jobs, while handing the savings to stock holdings and moving wealth to the stockholders.

Looks on pace to eliminate every human job over 10 years.

What is the hard limiting factor constraining software and robots from replacing any human job in that time span? Lots of limitations of current technology, but all seem likely to be solved within that timeframe.

What data to you have to support such a claim?

From Zuckerberg, for example:

>> "a lot of the code in our apps and including the AI that we generate, is actually going to be built by AI engineers instead of people engineers."

https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/meta-developing-a...

Ikea's been doing this for a while:

>> Ingka says it has trained 8,500 call centre workers as interior design advisers since 2021, while Billie - launched the same year with a name inspired by IKEA's Billy bookcase range - has handled 47% of customers' queries to call centres over the past two years.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/ikea-bets-remote-interior...

By your own admission, Ikea eliminated 0 jobs and you gave no number for Meta.

Do you expect all companies to retrain? Do you expect CEOs to be wrong? Do you expect AI to stay the same, get better, or get worse? I never made the claim that new jobs will NOT be made, that is yet to be seen, but jobs will be lost to AI.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/may/18/bt-cut-jobs...

>> “For a company like BT there is a huge opportunity to use AI to be more efficient,” he said. “There is a sort of 10,000 reduction from that sort of automated digitisation, we will be a huge beneficiary of AI. I believe generative AI is a huge leap forward; yes, we have to be careful, but it is a massive change.”

Goldman Sacs:

https://www.gspublishing.com/content/research/en/reports/202...

>> Extrapolating our estimates globally suggests that generative AI could expose the equivalent of 300mn full-time jobs to automation.

I'm on your side, but there's two readings of these reports:

1) "We are serious, this is going to happen."

2) "AI is big right now so if we hype it we might get some money!"

I do not have any hard data from 10 years from now.

My speculation is based on not seeing any constraints that will block progress of machine intelligence from reaching those capabilities within 10 years.

Also, Kurzweil's predictions from early 2000s have been eerily prescience and this is the time frame he predicted for the Singularity.

> Why are corporations announcing business deals from the White House?

You're answering your own question:

> potential job creation. Which could be significant

It's foreign investment money into the US. Softbank and MGX are foreign and presumably stumping up much of the cash.

For profit? I don't understand what's complicated about this.

This is my question too, but I haven't seen a journalist ask it yet. My baseless theory: Trump has promised them some kind of antitrust protections in the form of legislation to be written & passed at a later date.

An announcement of a public AI infrastructure program joined by multiple companies could have been a monumental announcement. This one just looks like three big companies getting permission to make one big one.

Easier: Trump likely committed that the federal agencies wouldn't slow roll regulatory approval (for power, for EIS, etc.).

Ellison stated explicitly that this would be "impossible" without Trump.

Masa stated that this (new investment level?) wouldn't be happening had Trump not won, and that the new investment level was decided yesterday.

I know everyone wants to see something nefarious here, but simplest explanation is that the federal government for next four years is expected to be significantly less hostile to private investment, and - shocker - that yields increased private investment.

That is a better one. I don't know why three rich guys investing in a new company would result in a slowness that Trump could fix, though, and a promise to rush or sidestep regulatory approval still sounds nefarious.

Lots of politicians announce major investments in their area.

If the announced spending target is true, this will be a strategic project for the US exceeding Biden's stimulus acts in scale. I think it would be pretty normal in any country to have highest-level involvement for projects like this. For example, Tesla has a much smaller revenue than this and Chancellor Olaf Scholz was still present when they opened their Gigafactory near Berlin.

The US is now officially a full on oiligarchy. It always was one, it's just that the powers that be don't care to hide it anymore and are flaunting that they have the power.