this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2026
494 points (98.8% liked)
Technology
81653 readers
4384 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
So with all the news on hardware shortages...someone is building skynet..and we just don't know about it.
Less skynet and more a surveillance state thats gonna put England and even CCP to shame.
They need the hard drives because they're storing everything about us. Every time we drive by a camera, gps paths of our cell phones constant travel, every bank transaction including small purchases, every social media comment, page we view from WiFi or cellphone, all our connections to everyone else, tags for various groups.
Not even just the people we know we know, they'll know who's usually next to us in traffic on commutes and when, who makes our sandwich from the deli we go to every other Tuesday, what cops would be most likely to respond to a call to our house at a certain time...
Like, "skynet" is useful because everyone knows the term.
The real danger is what humans will do with access to that much information on everyone, and what a normal human would do to/for a stranger to protect all their darkest secrets.
Imagine if tech was 20 years ahead right now with trump in office, do you think someone like him would hesitate to start wide scale blackmail?
You think they're above telling a couple thousand people in highly targeted districts that they had to vote a certain a way or else?
It's not the AI we need to be scared of, it's the data.
It's extremely unhealthy for a free society, to have too much power imbalance between the ruling classes and the people.
That said, imagine an actual AGI (ASI) AI gets developed and (of course) escapes to the internet because the idiots who built it gave it unrestricted internet access.
If such an AI wanted to take control of the world in order to further whatever goals it has, all this collected information will be an incredible treasure trove for it. Like you said, many people can be manipulated an controlled with threats of blackmail. The few who can't can then be more directly threatened by those acting under blackmail threats.
It doesn't matter who has it, it's the one ring.
It's sheer existence is too dangerous to be allowed. But everyone focuses on what they could do with the power and think they'll be able to keep it.
That's why there's such pushback against opposition to datacenters, it's not just the money from the stocks, everyone pictures themselves as the only ones who gets to abuse the tech once it's built.
That's literally the plot of the last two Mission Impossible movies.
What do you think all those data centers are for?
We do know about it. Most of the big name ai services are all public about working for government enforcement agencies. Palantir, Flock, Boston Dynamics, Tesla xAI, etc
Skynet or Sauron.
This goddamn timeline.