> Is anyone else worried at how easily Anthropic/Google/OpenAI can basically cut you off if you do something they don't like?
Yeah, had that thought here a few weeks ago on HN after reading about someone getting cut off from Claude:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46723384#46728649
Though tbh I'm far more worried about the societal impacts of large scale job displacement across so many professional industries at the same time.
I think it is likely to be very, very ugly for society in the near term. Not because the problems are unsolvable, but because everyone is choosing to ignore the threat of them.
And I realize a lot of people will handwave my concerns away with stories of Luddites and Jevon's paradox, but we've never had a tidal wave this big hit all at once and I think the scale (combined with speed of change) fundamentally changes things this time.
I stopped worrying. Western societies have about 30 to 40% of the people doing knowledge work, which contributes to the economy that employs the other 60%.
If that 40% is automated away in one go, there's no economy as we know it anymore. Either it acts as a negative void coefficient and moderates it into something sustainable, or it blows up.