- cross-posted to:
- world@quokk.au
- cross-posted to:
- world@quokk.au
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/47891893
Javier Milei, the president of Argentina, has shed light on billionaire Peter Thiel’s reason for suddenly planting roots in his country.
In a Financial Times op-ed, Milei announced plans to make Argentina the world’s top destination for tech billionaires seeking to escape regulation, legal liability, and taxes. Milei’s op-ed trumpeted new legislation that would do three things:
“Keep AI unregulated,” providing a haven for companies wishing to develop the technology without guardrails or government rules.
Create a new business category for what Milei called the “non-human corporation.” These would be companies supposedly “operated by AI agents or robots” that could “exercise independent judgment in unpredictable environments.” These non-human companies would receive major protections in the form of limited liability for whatever decisions they might allegedly make on their own, without human intervention.
Allow tech companies to duck taxes. Milei’s legislation would impose low corporate tax rates and also allow shareholders to “select the corporate governance law of their choosing.”
Milei made it clear that he intends his legislation as an “invitation” to attract tech moguls to his country, highlighting his nation’s “world-class energy and mining resources” and “geopolitical stability.” The president heralded his plans for Argentina as the dawn of a new Dutch East India Company, the joint-stock corporation founded in 1602 that was granted sweeping, quasi-governmental monopoly powers to carry out trade activities in Asia.
“The logic of 1602 still applies today,” wrote Milei. “Companies run by new technologies such as AI agents require the same legal framework that has underpinned capitalism for over four centuries, one suitable for development and experimentation.”
In essence, Milei plans to turn Argentina into a top destination for the Network State cult. His plan to create a new framework by which tech moguls (and their machines) can escape regulation, laws and taxes is an almost-perfect expression of the Network State idea promoted by Thiel protégé Balaji Srinivasan, who calls for Silicon Valley to secede from the United States. The only thing missing from Milei’s proposal is an option for tech billionaires to create their own private nations on Argentine soil.
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Libertarian my ass
Providing free reign to authoritarians
“The logic of 1945 still applies today.”
Libertarianism fails faster than communism EVERY time they try it. I give it 5 years before theil is swinging in the gallows.
We can only hope. Feel bad for the poor people that have had generations of shit government.
Nazis in Argentina. I’ve seen this before.
USians pointing fingers to nazis elsewhere. Funny and tragic.
I don’t think their intent was to blame the Argentinian people. But yes, we have Nazis here too. Fuck em.
It still surprises me every day how much virtually every country is tolerating the speed running of evil, out in the open.
we do this every couple decades, when rich people forget they bleed like the rest of us
Oh man we really don’t.
Specifically, Thiel has a name for critics and opponents of AI: “legionnaires of the Antichrist.”
LOL
hail satan
If they want people to go along with them, they should stop making it sound so cool to oppose them
Well, you know, Peter Theil knows about the an-tee-christ. Peter Theil knows about the an-tee-christ.
Because he is the anti christ
Billionaires don’t “plant roots”, they’re cosmopolitan - they dont see countries or borders, they go, work, and live wherever they please without hindrances.
To say that parasite planted roots anywhere is an insult to plants and humans together.
I don’t get it. Ok, so you are willing to do away with safety, legality and basic human decency to attract capitals to your country. Fair enough.
But then why not drugs? Drugs are almost as addictive as AI and create less damage to the environment. But above all, unlike AI, drugs are very profitable, even if they face a harsh regulatory environment.
Give it some thought, Milei. True, you like theatrics and the Sinaloa cartel are not as cartoonishly evil as Thiel (they are probably more standard business-like evil) but I’m sure you can work out some effective PR stunt with them too.
But then why not drugs?
Who says he’s not preparing the field? Several members or allies of his party are known to have received narco money.
The international drug trade is a role model for libertarians.
Robot drug runners.
I really like programming, 3d printing, arduino/pi stuff, and technology in general but I am starting to seriously hate technology and all these techno-solutionist stuff.
I’m 30 years into a technology career, and I can’t wait to retire and throw it all into a lake.
I gueeeeeees because drugs still look bad to the eyes of the politics and the IA not?
WDYM why not drugs? Strong alcohol and tobacco were a state monopoly in many countries for many years, and still are that kind of business heavily intertwined with state.
And prohibited drugs are in a similar position, just the state monopoly is unofficial. Well, officially they are prohibited. As I said. OK.
There are plenty of different kinds of drugs with different degrees of addiction, lethality, damage to the environment in production too.
Anyway, about AI - were it not profitable, it wouldn’t be rolling. It might be a bubble, but it’s, for the users of this kind of technology, a qualitative change from precise algorithms and industrial optimization to fuzzy decisions based on statistics. Basically machines following human orders as humans mean them. Well, kinda like that, except very computationally expensive and as good as your dataset, but there are tasks hard to do the old way and easy to do the new way. Hence (on Jingle Bells melody) bombing swarms, bombing swarms, bombing all the way. I suppose not all the way, but the essence is here. Also surveillance, detecting and stopping people harmful for some political end without ever alarming them or anyone or using direct visible force, predicting events.
It’s inefficient when used for the same tasks a shell script can do. It starts being efficient when used on the scale of lives and families and groups and communities, and armies and economies. Matter of scale.
Google quotes a standard Gemini query at 0.24Wh - and I’ll say if you’re continuously asking normal questions and getting answers at normal speed from Gemini, you might get 100 queries in per hour - so, at that rate, Gemini is consuming 24 watts while in use.
Interestingly, the human brain also consumes about 20 watts, so I’m here wondering if Gemini is cooking its own numbers on the first response.
When you ask it complex questions, it takes longer to respond, but says they might range up to 15Wh per response, so maybe more on the order of 500W while in continuous use for complex queries - like the power of 25 human brains instead of one.
Of course, human watts come from direct digestion of rice and beans and other “solar powered” energy sources, while electricity comes from more environmentally challenging sources.
and that is the sound of Argentina being flushed down the toilet
Might not have enough water for that
Again. They’re on the rinse-lather-repeat cycle for 400 years now.
Funny how the US is always ready to lend a hand in every cicle.
Lend a hand to the looters, I mean.
US, UK, tale as old as time really - how to stay powerful? Undermine your competition.
Argentina is becoming an increasingly interesting case study on how economic policy affects everyday life of a population.
Argentina think this will make their population high value / quality.
I think the billionaires will just gut everything instead.
Nah, they think they can stay in power of the country with this deal.
Worlds biggest survalliance and propaganda machine is moving in, and you can be 100% sure it will be used in elections.
Not Argentina. Milei and his voters. The rest of us know better.
Can reality please stop trying to outdo dystopian sci-fi
Why not, WWI and WWII and things around them outdid all the scary stuff people were predicting just fine.
I dont live in those times. I live in current times.
And they didn’t live during 30 years war or whatever they remembered as scary. Didn’t matter.
What the actual fuck is your point? That we should all stop caring because you’re a broken nihilist?
I really hate the way the word “nihilist” is used in modern English.
That aside - my point is that this was expected.
This is the Star Trek episode What Are Little Girls Made Of. and Peter Thiel is an android from the future trying to make sure his timeline comes to pass.
Someone explain why these aren’t the prerequisite steps required if the ultimate goal was building a robot army.
Deregulate, and create a legal buffer from what “your” robots do and you. That’s not my “army”, that’s my independent security force im contracting.
They blasted some guy by mistake? Accidents happen. Also they’re thier own company.
You guys remember Prospera and how that turned out? Argentina is gonna be that on steroids, gonna be absolutely awful for the average person there.
WDYM turned out? Reading about it, seems to just be a long-running project. Still in construction, nothing to see there, such stuff.
