According to several recent polls, a clear majority of the population in the US is concerned by AI development. A recent poll by Ipsos shows that 55% of the population would be in favour of slowing down its development.
Polls in Canada and Europe show similar views.
People who believe in "Might makes Right" usually only do so while they hold the might. In America "Might makes Right" is a core belief of a large contingent of people.
AI makes people uncomfortable because it promises to disempower the vast majority of people. Altman thinks he's on the right side of that bargain. Most people agree with this kind of bargain, if they are on the right side of it.
You can't just assert machiavellianism as the norm. Sam is an extreme edge case, and while the system itself may be machiavellian, the majority of people live within it despite disagreement with it, or even with active animosity toward it. That has been my experience my whole life. The only people who are actively expressing joy with capitalism come in 2 flavors: people who experienced something much worse in a country with a different system, and the uber-rich.
Most people in all human history owned the land they farmed. There were no papers or offices with titles, people just roamed anywhere they could with their goats and so on.
Centralised government is a relatively recent thing in terms of the human timeline.
> Most people in all human history owned the land they farmed.
I would argue this isn't actually true, though. Agriculture itself is a relatively recent thing in the human timeline, and centralized government developed simultaneously with it. Many argue that agriculture actually led to centralized government because it necessitated the concept of owning land, which requires some sort of centralized authority.
For a lot longer than that, nobody really owned the land and the economic systems were much more like socialism (in the economic sense, where the means of production is not owned privately) than capitalism.
> For a lot longer than that, nobody really owned the land and the economic systems were much more like socialism (in the economic sense, where the means of production is not owned privately) than capitalism.
The old rule was that if you lived on the land, it was yours, you owned it.
Today nobody in HK owns the land they live on or run their factories. Everything is leased from the government for 99 years. Are you really going to tell me that HK isnt capitalist ?
Of course not.
China also has some strange land is not owned but leased, are you really going to tell me they are communist because of the name and red flag ?
Of course not they are capitalist.
People are selfish, they do things for their own personal benefit and that my friend is definition of capitalism.
That is exactly the mindset of most people and the philosophy underneath freemarket Capitalism.
That people elected the current administration is just a broad reflection of the American public's level of consciousness.