The turbulent AI era is here(gatesnotes.com) |
The turbulent AI era is here(gatesnotes.com) |
I also don't understand what gives him the moral standing to propose a solution at all. He's not the fucking pope but a ruthless tech businessman with vested financial interest in the technology involved. He should stick to his lane.
[1] > But even a country that gets its own house in order will still be exposed to risks that cross borders. This is why an international organization will need to be built in parallel.
> It will be unlike any other institution we have ever created, though it can follow the model of some existing systems. There’s an inspections regime for nuclear weapons, regulations for international aviation, and agreements that protect the ozone layer. A new global organization for AI will need elements of all three and more.
No, but he did link to the Pope in this very essay.
Pope Leo XIV, "On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence":
https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume...
Isn't that past-tense? What's his financial interest these days? He still owns a small amount of MSFT, but he doesn't exactly have control over the corporation any more. I imagine Nadella always answers his calls, but I'd bet most CEOs will make time to take a call from Bill.
Just read the intro to this post, it sounds like music:
"The transition to the AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history" -- are you even qualified to make this claim?
"Right now, we are not preparing adequately for that transition" -- who are you to know that for certain?
"If the world takes the right steps, AI will be a force for good and leave everyone better off" -- awwwwww.
Whatever other personal attributes might have, he has earned some goodwill and respect.
meanwhile this bill gates will be remembered for asking his friend epstein how to secretly treat his wife for the std that he gave her.
As we've seen with Haber-Bosch (synthetic fertilizer) it will just allow the population to expand until we're up against the resource limit ceiling.
Like inventing waterless toilets when people just need access to clean water ?
The sad story is that we don't need innovation, we need better politics.
Oh and he could open source windows, that would make us more equitable for sure.
AI is going to break capitalism or turn it into even more of a dystopia You are not going to stop the accumulation of capital with a tax...
So if there's a crash, doesn't that just leave us with a bunch of useful AI hardware whose costs have been written off? I wouldn't have thought that much changes what social impacts AI is going to have.
Maybe it will be seen similarly to the dancing crazes of the Middle Ages.
Crypto only ever allowed me to buy drugs over the internet. I'm not really buying this argument.
What's your take? Do the ideas put forward by Gates strike you as worth pursuing? What are the trade-offs - how can they go wrong?
https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-glo...
https://www.btimesonline.com/articles/176578/20260201/epstei...
I am no longer and will never again be interested in Bill Gates’ opinion about anything. He needs to retire. He’s a sclerotic representative of what needs to be left behind.
Thank you for your contributions, Bill. You’ve done enough.
When people are using the word "If" they should put a probability next to "If". Otherwise it is a fairytale.
P.S. Hardware also uses branch prediction, assigning probabilities to "if".
I'm not trying to be facetious, but what are the benefits of "general purpose intelligence"? With machine learning it was obvious what task we were trying to automate, and you could take a stab at the productivity achieved.
That's not the case now. You can't figure out if the time it took to review a 5k loc PR balances out the time saved debugging a syntax error.
Yes we know you can churn out your damn CRUD apps and (hope) to make money (PS, you don't need AI to make money - see exhibit A: crypto bros).
So what benefits has this actually brought to humanity?
It's a fairly concise description of the challenges ahead, and hopefully some people read it and think a bit. He didn't have to write it, I'm glad he did.
An AI ministry, “human-reserved” jobs, and taxes on AI tokens.
What we need is deep thinking on the implications and make the default way forward one where we want to go. In other words, we build a channel for the flood waters, not a wall. Creating a role for "somebody to deal with AI issues" is one of those hand-wavvy upper management moves that looks defensible but simply passes the buck to someone who structurally lacks the agency to actual move the needle.
the only thing i can think of was when that Chinese scientist produced gene edited human babies. He was pretty much excommunicated from the scientific community and, eventually, spent some time in jail.
AI, on the other hand, has a huge profit potential and way too far out of the bag to go back in. To quote the movie Terminator, "it will never stop".
Globally, it is unrealistic.
It will be a force for good. But like all evolutionary steps the path to good will be paved with darkness.
The very existence of humanity and life itself rests on the foundation of natural selection. Humanity will be better, it will get better but before we get there... there will be a culling.
It's an unfortunate truth. We all might be culled.
We must tax lines of code. Like property tax, but for code. Every year, companies (and individuals) must declare all repos. Have them appraised.
This part was a good point, so I couldn't tell if the second part is satire or not.
All his negative things (increase of fraud, skill atrophy, cyberattacks, removing employment, consolidation of capital and wealth) exist currently now with AI as it is.
How long will negatives outweigh the positives? And will those positives ever actually come to fruition? How anyone (who is not a sociopath and expects to be one of those pyramid tops) can see a bright future is beyond my pessimism and sense of reality as it is now.
"A lot of people are skeptical of AI because it makes mistakes. But what's going to happen when it stops making mistakes??? It'll change the world!"
Honestly I suspect he's probably just cynically talking his book. All of this "AI is scary good / it'll be even scarier gooder soon" is no less advertising than slapping a cigarette logo on a racing car.
Can you describe a method of slowing frontier AI development that you yourself would not classify as monopoly-seeking by US AI companies or power-seeking by governments and technocrats?
Limiting the development of powerful AI requires restricting free enterprise in some way, backed by the threat of force; hence, there will always be a cynical framing available.
I agree. However, why aren’t we applying the same standard to AI technologies themselves? That doesn’t strike me as worth pursuing, the article discusses all the ways that is and will go wrong
The first card on the homepage of the DTCC (https://www.dtcc.com/) is "Tokenization". This is a legitimate use case and is being adopted at the largest institutional level. Stablecoins are yet another legitimate use case.
Edit: for what it's worth, I do agree that the crypto craze was insane. I also think the AI craze is insane, even though I agree that its current proliferation is larger than crypto.
After 2 years i feel mostly distracted by it. There are usecases ofc but encountering a chatbot or AI written posts, software, etc. is still a negative.
Knowing medical software requirements, which might be there for a reason, i highly doubt this will see production.
Why would I distribute software that's tailor made for me? I don't want to deal with headaches associated with distributing it.
> Knowing medical software requirements, which might be there for a reason, i highly doubt this will see production.
It won't, the software is not a point of my work, it's just a tool for my actual project which has nothing to do with programming (very useful tool but still - not a goal on it's own).
AI does nothing. CEOs want to use it to replace all cognitive work, it doesn't mean it is inevitable. That is why smart people are fighting against the narrative push.
Buying tokens is about as pay-to-win as it gets. More so than anything we’ve seen in a long time.
Before everyone had the same 24hr in a day which despite inequalities grounded things a bit. Now some people can run 100+ near human ability agents while others are still wondering how to get enough calories for the day. Someone in Sudan can’t afford a freakin $200 plan…
The benefits he mentioned are valid but nowhere close to offsetting above and I don’t think any sort of central effort will be enough either
I don't think this is a useful model. People struggling to survive have other priorities.
A better model for thinking about this is how cloud opened up opportunities for technical people to ship products cheaply.
Before cloud you had to hire a dedicated server and you were looking at $1000/month (in say 2000).
In 2023 if you were a non-technical person wanting to ship a software product you needed to invest some thousands of dollars to hire a software developer.
Now you can get a long way on a $30/month Codex plan
This was in Stockholm where we have good internet.
Certainly a skilled adult could get away with less than $100 in server costs.
Rather: perhaps 50-100 USD per month got and still gets you a quite good server to start your project. If you were looking for bargains, you could even get a server for less.
you were always able to buy time by hiring people to do things for you. right now it's agents. i think it's an equalizer in that, $200 agent is more accessible than a $10000 human
The other half of this is that, in the past, skill meant that a year of weekends could be turned into a viable business that had skill as a moat.
Now, skill means almost nothing: the fleeting product of a drooling idiot is almost indistinguishable from skill and care as long as that drooling idiot has capital.
No longer will merit be rewarded; it will be exclusively capital that is rewarded.
On the other hand, what I see happening is:
0. corporation use AI plan ultra-X-high-pro-premium-enterprise
1. corporations firing medium-high paid developers with solid experience and experstise because low-medium paid developers are performing well with ultra-X-high-pro-premium-enterprise plan
2. AI models evolves and now there's a 10X ultra-X-high-pro-premium-enterprise that keeps up the pace
3. low to medium paid are now struggling. The company hires low-paid developers to use more the original AI plan
4. refuses to pay best AI or decrease pressure on developers
5. developers are forced to wake up early, work afterhours and these shenanigans so that they keep up with the pressure
6. corporation pays for the 10X ultra-X-high-pro-premium-enterprise
Yeah that’s valid. Would suggest that there will be a divide but perhaps at a lower wealth point.
Nobody pays for time. They are paying for a human form of capital.
Think of the total cost of human development, education, etc. to make them “ready to be hired”.
These efforts drive a host of side industries (teachers, daycare, medical services, etc.)
AI can handle a lot tasks for a tiny fraction of that cost, time, and risk. Now add in the cost of yearly medical insurance, payroll tax, etc.
If AI makes people more efficient, then we don’t need to hire as many people…
Kinda feels like the labor equivalent of “deflation”, perhaps with similar problems…
Power accretes.
This assumes the people with the money know what to do with those tokens. But they don't! The people with the money are very good with making more money, but they do not know what to build or how to build it. Which is why they pay other people to do so.
They had the capital needed to pay for everything, however, so they called the shots, and we're used to thinking that's how it will always be. But AI upends things.
Now, there is a future where AI gets powerful enough to essentially become a genie that grants wishes exactly as you imagined them without terrible unintended consequences. At that point, we've basically hit the singularity and (by definition) all bets are off.
The other, currently more realistic, future is where AI gets very good but is still fallible. There will still be a need for highly skilled and creative people to guide AI. That is us. And tokens are incredibly cheap, considering how good even local models are.
We only have to realize the power that is now available to us to reach out and grasp it: the ability to create value without capital.
We need to be aware that said companies and the people behind them will do anything in their power, including bribing politicians, to prevent this and to keep the money they believe are they're entitled to.
I even believe the Big Tech bigwigs have long foreseen this and are quietly prodding our society towards an authoritarian regime where people have no say so they can keep their moonies.
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One look at who is in the driver's seat should give you the answer to this question. The initial roll-out will, by very deliberate design, put dynamite in the divide and set it off. This has happened before.
The industrial revolution was very similar. Initially, workers suffered. Conditions were unsafe. Pay was poor. Worker rights were non-existent. Things got worse for the majority before social change caught up and imposed a more equitable distribution of the dividends.
We should be under no illusion that this time will be any different. The rich and powerful are no less selfish than they were a quarter millennium ago. It is possible to get ahead of the problem, but the people running AI companies won't be the ones to do it. Governments are inclined to do what the people paying for their election campaigns want, but should be aware that standing up for inequality will only make things worse for them when the tides of social change start rolling in on them.
History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
For example, taxes. E.g. in Germany your personal tax return filing has a low but real chance to get audited, someone will look at it and try to find discrepancies and/or ask for additional documentation. With LLMs this can conceivably be performed for every return, matching incomplete disparate information streams into one structured picture for every taxpayer.
Or even things like customs screening, where a CT scan provides a full reconstructable list of everything in your possession, down to every bill, and audited on the spot against your declaration.
For the governments, there's not much incentive to automate "jobs", for the companies as well this is a cost question, but for control, all bets are off...
xAI's Colossus 1 and 2 data center mobile gas turbines beg to differ.
AI data centers are driving electricity consumption in 100s of GW, and most of that energy is not clean renewable nor nuclear.
It goes back to the industrial revolution and every revolution before and after. There was a point where they thought a majority of people would be working as switchboard operators and then telephone switching came along. Horses to cars, etc.
Jobs transition, new space is created, people are caught in tbe crossfire of supply and demand curves. Incan agree the bullwhip of this one is going to be aggressive.
I think it is a mistake to bet on AI as a driver of meaningful growth in a commercial capacity in the current state. When the data fed into an AI model is based on real data you can get predictability. When the AI inputs start coming from the AI outputs the wobble is introduced which results inevitably into delirium.
I think the world at large is "learning on the job" what data scientists and others in ai have known for a long, several decades long, time have already known.
Technologies seem to be adopted wider and faster now. See smartphone adoption rates. I agree the transition will happen quickly.
Waymo cars are doubling every 9 months. They’re on pace to replace all taxi/Uber/Lyft drivers in 9 years.
You had me here.
That transparency alone could change the market dynamics a lot.
Just hope that as an individual you wouldn't be taxed for this though...
Already AI leading companies have problems finding how to back the enormous debt they are in. I don't think it's useful to somebody to act in a preemptive way on this topic.
First we must have the problems, only then we must solve them, like in the past five hundred years at least.
What should be done today is to make sure everyone benefit, at every latitude, and also to use it to improve security and productivity in every field. Make sure that all this debt and bubble-like aura around AI will deflate smoothly without major crisis.
The unemployment will be self-regulated after that. Like usual. Somebody will suffer in the meantime, hopefully a very small portion, okay, but nothing our society (and not only the american one) have already overcome in the past. History is beautiful only in retrospect.
But we, and our respective countries, can make this transition less painful than before, because we are much more free and connected and with better education and tools (also AI). So if something become a problem we have better instrument to adapt society to it and to protest, together, if the price to pay in term of standards of living its too high for a significant amount of people.
I think the important things to achieve in the short term are: * access to AI must be a universal right in some degree and at a reasonable price, like access to internet is today * country and community should push to decentralize power over models, data-centers location and invest in open models and open RD
The one thing about this article correct is human reserve, we must have human quota in every business or activity.
But to slow down it's not a good idea for me in general and in particular using taxes.
It seems to me that "middle powers" such as Canada, Australia, EU nations, India, and South Korea have an incentive to slow things down. Since many don't trust either the US or China. Coincidentally, Canada has been working to assemble a coalition of middle powers. And an EU nation (the Netherlands) controls ASML, which is key to the AI supply chain.
The world outside has much more friction and many other things going on. Tech had a wild run during his time because the American priorities at that time, favored it. There is no guarantee that tech would have same priority in a world that might get into more basic struggles.
If AI could affect jobs, that itself would work against it as it would cause basic struggles. Ultimately the world has to oscillate towards an equilibrium, acknowledging all forces from all corners. World is not a tech lab.
Yes, no.
They don't. They just push probabilities higher. The tech is non-deterministic.
I'm not saying it will happen, but at least it's not inconceivable that LLMs could surpass them in this calculation more and more often.
What are you even saying there. "Humans are also not perfect, so anything is possible" but painted with a coat of fake intellectualism.
What a waste of time.
I was debating about this with my cousin, he's a doctor. Doctors are already using AI, but they are still the judgement maker, If the AI makes a mistake, they and the entity they work for are held liable. But it might take a long time to realize that a mistake has been made, so it's going to take a while to work this out. He was arguing that humans are so fallible that it AI can replace them in his field.
Nuclear power is one of the most amazing magical things on the planet but nuclear weapons present a massive challenge to social coordination. So maybe we should sit as a society and try to figure out how to manage that instead of just freak out and burn all of our own faces off because we can’t handle complex conversations.
Why is that so hard to grasp?
We did not had nuclearmaxxing. We did not had doomtrolling from nuclear companies.
I'm not sure "provide cheap and plentiful power that may be risky if not managed correctly" is really on the same level as "replace all human labor we possibly can"
I agree with you that ideally we would coordinate and cooperate better, but the sad problem (the prisoner's dilemma, really) is that some (many? most? all?) people will not coordinate or cooperate no matter what, especially if they have an opportunity to get ahead by not cooperating. As long as people like that exist we have to find ways to work with them or work around them
It doesn't help that people with the most wealth seem like they mostly have that sort of personality
I cannot believe Bill Gates has not even conceptually engaged with that question.
That said, I share the dangers we are facing with rapid AI proliferation. But the potential economic consequences demand more in-depth conversations than just fear mongering.
Perhaps I’m too distant from the inner circles of Silicon Valley but as an outsider… I suggest taking the longer term trend.
It’s an awesome tool. It will be used in war. People will lose jobs, and others will become more efficient.
It’s probably an extension of computers and the internet. These things take time.
I just have a hard time with folks predicting imminent doom. Maybe they have more information than me. Or maybe they are more caught up in the hype.
[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49448137
The right-wing will probably brand welfare and UBI "socialism" to defile it and the people on poverty row will be protesting that they don't want it because it will lead to higher-taxes. It's sad that the most vulnerable people are being duped into believing these malicious lies.
The right approach could be to raise the general tax level, possibly increase the weight of wealth taxes, and redistribute.
That said, there will be enough jobs for the foreseeable future. Any job that has some physical component - hospital staff, barber, judge, bartender - won't be replaced within the next 2 decades.
Many comfortable jobs, typically someone who's sitting behind a computer at home or in the office, could get replaced. That would be bad for many people including me, but if you think about it, it would be a net good thing. I'm currently leaning towards "AI would be somewhat bad or at best neutral for me, but significantly good for the society".
I think he was proposing taxing the companies offering AI.
> Re: AI killing jobs where you sit behind a desk
The robots aren't far behind.
It's not really what they've built their business empires for.
That's been obvious for a while.
I do not believe Zuck, Musk, or any of the other boogeyman in Silicon Valley are capable of that level of deception and manipulation.
I find it much more plausible that when trying to build world-changing businesses and products you squish, displace, and flip tables when you didn't really intend to.
“Quietly”? They’re not even subtle about it! Hard to get those types of news here, though, as submissions in that direction tend to be heavily flagged, no matter how tame the comments.
Unfortunately, I think we will also see corporate expectations that if you can get your previously normal amount of work done in two days, commonly you should be given more work. They don't need to hire that person or a replacement person for the disloyal/weak person who bailed, claiming they were overloaded.
But then nobody will have money to buy anything anymore, then nobody will have money to pay the AI companies, and then they won't have any money. The jobless will starve to death and then those who have their food made by robots will reign over an empty world where money has become meaningless. LLMs and robots don't eat money, they eat electricity.
Owners of capital use the capital in combination with workers to produces goods and services. They give half of the production to the workers and keep the other half.
If AI replaces workers, the owners of capital will simply keep all of the production to themselves. So they would be better off. If I have a construction company, I could just lay off the workers and distribute the surplus houses to myself and other owners.
There are nuances to this of course, but this is a point that most people miss.
If we don't tax these A.I. Moguls these times will return.
That’s a very nice way to say “the workers put the fear of God in the heart of capital owners, and lots of people died”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Railroad_Strike_of_1877
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canut_revolts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asturian_Revolution_of_1934
etc.
We already have terrible leaders in many places, war(mostly economic, some physical), and that's even without the huge unemployment wave that is coming.
Suppose a worker is worth $20 per hour to a capitalist. How much should they pay? As little as possible, sure, but anything up to $20 per hour is worth it. You'll hire up to that point to maximize profit. Suppose you hand somewhere at $15 per hour, another capitalist will look to lure your employees away by paying them more.
Of course pay isn't the only consideration when working. Workers consider things like paid time off, benefits and how much they like their boss and coworkers. These are all part of the bargain.
It wasn't "society". It was competition. Consider the Ford $5 day, where Ford doubled wages because he realized turnover and poor morale cost him money:
> Ford workers disliked the new assembly line methods so much that by late 1913, labor turnover was 380 percent. The company's announcement to pay five dollars for an eight-hour day compared to the previous rate of $2.34 for a nine-hour day made many workers willing to submit to the relentless discipline of the line in return for such high wages.
https://www.thehenryford.org/collections/explore/sets/detail...
I think you are fundamentally misunderstanding the question Gates is asking here. He’s not asking “how this going to play out?”, he’s asking “how can we impact how this will play out?”
He makes specific proposals like AI token and robot taxes. I just wish people being cynical would at least comment on possible solutions.
I think AI taxes potentially make sense. His idea of Human Reserved is fascinating. It might not be his idea but I’ve never heard it described like that before
That, in my view, is a much bigger problem. We know what's coming but we won't do anything about it until after a lot of suffering occurs. Why can't we be more proactive?
This has been bugging me damn near every time people talk about this stuff. Any attempt to propose or even discuss a solution is met with an endless wave of cynicism, sarcasm, and epic burn clapbacks... and usually nothing further.
And I'll be the first to admit that finding a "solution" is hard! It's almost like it's an unprecedented technological change! But could we at least be honest and admit it's hard, or are we just going to keep making fun of anyone who tries to talk about it and then do nothing?
Sigh. What can you do, I guess.
> We should be under no illusion that this time will be any different. The rich and powerful are no less selfish than they were a quarter millennium ago.
Yeah, it could be worse. During the industrial revolution, the rich and powerful absolutely needed workers (and lots of them) to run the machines, and that gave the workers power.
The whole point of the AI revolution is to no need workers anymore, or far fewer of them.
> It is possible to get ahead of the problem, but the people running AI companies won't be the ones to do it.
It's possible, but dumbass software engineers missed their best chance, because they were too busy misunderstanding themselves as capitalists and embracing their bosses' libertarianism thinking, when they should have been unionizing to consolidate their former economic power.
First, in the essay he mentions "Using AI, low-income farmers will soon be able to get better advice about all these things than even the richest farmers get today and increase their output substantially.". There may be some truth in this, but it's worth reminding that this is more of a 'productivist' worldview, and historically productivity gains in agricultural practices have benefitted farmers that were already wealthy (see books like The Globalization of Wheat by Marci Baranski [1] on the Green Revolution where "Borlaug’s new technologies ultimately privileged wealthier farmers, despite assurances to politicians that these new crops would thrive in diverse geographies and benefit all farmers").
Gates has also been criticized in the past for being influenced by figures like Bjorn Lomborg, where he had a (now-deleted) essay [2] with him, and there's a decent thread by energy entrepreneur Jigar Shah on Gates being off on climate issues for 15 years [3]
[1]: https://upittpress.org/books/9780822947349/
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230601175906/https://www.gates... (June 2023)
[3]: https://bsky.app/profile/jigarshahdc.bsky.social/post/3m4del...
To retcon this into “only rich farmers benefited” is weird. Certainly there are many rich farmers out there. Of course their incomes increased when they could plant more productive crops. But so what if they make money? They’re feeding everyone!
That seems to be the crux here. You think it will be, I (and a lot of other people) aren't sure it will. If new space for jobs are created, I am certain we'll be fine long term.
What do you think will happen if it isn't (I know you have strong evidence for and reasons to believe it will be, but just indulge the hypothetical)?
On one hand. We’ve never had a technological revolution that didn’t yield more jobs
On the other hand, Terminator
I think as you stated, human nature and history is where I am looking at this from. People have a tendency to be unable to sit and do nothing for extended periods of time. I believe we are purpose driven but purpose is pretty loosely defined here.
Indulging the hypothetical (and arguably realistic in some circumstances) that AI replaces a tier of repeatable tasks I believe it would work from the bottom up. Tasks that are extremely repeatable would probably be gone 1:1 and it would be a sliding ratio as complexity increased where having human intervention as a backup becomes justifiable.
This would create a squeeze on the labor force which would bring up the very real and fair question of "How is it that I am unable to survive daily life when 100 - 200 years ago none of this automation / technology existed."
I think this could drive a sort of re-examining of what exists RE: a very inefficient and flawed system with a large amount of people possessing a lot of anxiety and time on their hands. It would be like the Eye of Sauron made up of those who were caught in the crossfire.
On the other side of the haves and have-nots I can imagine there being a very Harrison Bergeron style mindset of trying to popularize pacification until the next great innovation just solves itself.
On the extreme end, I just cannot imagine euthanasia, genocide, or population control schemes. It feels like we have come so far. How could it be possible we regress that far? I could imagine myself not wanting to live through any part of that. This seems like a very extreme and existential point to reach. I am trying to keep my thoughts pinned closer to biological and historical drivers.
I think we are hormone driven chemistry sets. I believe we respond to stimuli. I find it hard to believe anyone at any level could shut off that drive at such a massive scale and accurately predict the other side.
Since such a thing has never happened, I doubt anyone, even scholars of history and anthropology, know.
Capitalism probably won't work in a world of ultra abundance though.
This is asserted without evidence. There is absolutely no proof that AI requires humans in the loop to function or improve itself.
Compare it with Deepmind's go-playing program, AlphaGo, which mainly involved training a neural network on a large database of high-level human games. It defeated one of the top-ranked players in the world, Lee Sedol, but arguably it was drawing from human experience just like you described.
But it didn't stop there. After that, Deepmind developed AlphaGo Zero, a version that was trained exclusively through self-play, with no human feedback in the loop. That's what you would call "AI inputs coming from AI outputs" but it didn't have the result of “resulting in delirium”: instead, it became orders of magnitudes stronger than the original version (which it defeated in a 100 to 0 competition after 3 days of training).
This shows that AI can improve itself without having access to any human knowledge, and indeed transcend human performance by orders of magnitudes. There is absolutely nothing to suggest that general AI cannot improve itself the same way.
People who claim otherwise are engaging in wishful thinking; they just assert their conclusion, but have no rational arguments to back it up.
One might say you are engaging in wishful thinking by believing it’ll just continue to work across all domains. The world is much bigger than a Go board.
Amusingly, all three games are in the game theory sense trivial because they provably have a correct solution (probably a draw for chess), but the search space is so large that it is unlikely we will ever collectively invest the resources to discover the answer.
RLVR for LLMs works for coding and math domains which can be verified by code.
AlphaZero, RLVR and other RL methods don't work for learning dextrous manipulation for robotics, for example. Learning in robotics depends on human data.
While I think there could be an argument made here you are mixing apples and rocks if you believe ChatGPT is using gans.
I hate to be that person but you are showing that you are unable to differentiate between linear regressions, clustering, gradient descent, and generative adversarial networks. You are over your ski-tips and don't see itc
>This is asserted without evidence. There is absolutely no proof that AI requires humans in the loop to function or improve itself.
Nope, it's actually fairly well established.
I think there is value in someone of Gates' stature stating the obvious, plainly.
A significant percentage of the world's hungry live under warlords, militias and dictatorships that would simply kill anyone trying to peacefully give their subjects food.
Unless you're proposing AI military interventionism, you cannot fix this.
Homelessness on the other hand is mostly a mental health and drug addiction problem. Fixing it, in many cases, would require violating the consent/wishes of the homeless person.
The world's biggest problems, unfortunately, cannot be solved by throwing money at them. A lot of rich individuals, NGOs, and nation states have tried.
No it's not. It's not a coincidence that homelessness only skyrocketed at the same time housing price took off to the point even professionals are spending half of their salary on rent. And if you look at the statistics you'll see addiction is a widespread issue but homelessness is not — WV and NM has some of the worst overdose deaths and the least homelessness.
Please for god's sake let's address the elephant in the room for a second. It's the housing prices.
What if he's right, and AI+Robots can do everything?
We still need to provide for all the humans. We will need to come up with a new system of distributing the world's resources that doesn't depend on "jobs" and allows the world's population access to the resources they need to live.
That's going to be very difficult, in the "we have to have a war about this" sense, traditionally.
I wonder how the hell did you arrive at this conclusion from this text.
The actual text Bill wrote is more about highlighting upcoming problems and convincing governments to work together on potential harms coming soon.
> The Gates Foundation has 19 years left of the 20 years in which it will spend its remaining $200 billion. AI will help it achieve its ambitious goals by both accelerating the discovery of vaccines and medicines for HIV, TB, malaria, and malnutrition and helping the healthcare workforce and patients know how to use those tools. The foundation’s goals include cutting the number of children who die every year in half again, as was done from 2000 to 2024. All of our work, not just health but also agriculture and education, will take full advantage of AI.
---
I think "maintaining the working poor" is a strange misread of "give people jobs". His point is that people get a ton of meaning out of their work in our current capitalist system, and regardless of whether or not we change our system in the long term, if we don't do something about jobs in the short term, there will be a civil crisis:
> In a capitalist society, employment is the way most people get the money they need to pay for the basics of life as well as being a key source of dignity and social connection.
> When a community has high unemployment, the ripple effects can be pervasive. Research suggests that in some parts of the United States, factory closures contribute to a rise in deaths from opioid overdoses. Now imagine similar pressures on both white-collar and blue-collar workers nationwide.
> Waiting until people are already displaced or underemployed will be too late. AI is a structural challenge to the way our economy is organized, and it requires thinking and action now.
Curing diseases and making people feel fulfilled are great goals, but they're not the primary ones in my mind. They are in Gates' mind because those are the biggest challenges he has personally experienced in his life.
Making the structural changes to our economy should be trivial if AI works as well as he's supposing it will. We won't need an economy at all, not to solve the problems caused by unemployment. (And that's the thing, is unemployment is not the actual problem, it is a cause of problems, but AGI would give us easy alternatives to the fundamentally unattainable goal of full employment.)
The state papers over that contradiction with the idea of perpetual economic growth, where the economic activity simply grows so fast that more jobs are created than are lost by efficiency improvements.
Gates is somehow expecting that "we" (whoever that is) agree just like that to keep certain jobs from being replaced by AI, even if they could. But that would go against all the forced and incentives that make up the dynamic of the current system.
One is the obvious one, to produce things. AI can somewhat help with that, although less than you might think because it's largely producing knowledge output rather than physical things. If AI lets one knowledge worker do the work of 10, the effect of that is to free up 9 knowledge workers to take up manual labor, it's not to make manual laborers 10x more productive.
The second purpose is to distract people from attempting to work on their own interests and instead corral them into working for others'. You see examples of this in the form of acquihires (where they obviously don't need you to do the work, they already have a competing product, but they do need to take your product off the market), and in bullshit jobs, and in think tanks and consulting firms and legal machinery. It's a form of social control and a means to maintain social order, not a requirement for actual productivity. When you don't give people a job to do, they start working for their own interests, and their own interests frequently conflict with others. And we've seen that over and over again: the Great Depression nearly led to a fascist coup in the U.S. [1] and did result in fascism in Germany, Italy, and Spain, and large communist movements in France and China. The COVID pandemic and subsequent lockdowns led to widespread protests and civil unrest in the U.S. and other countries.
Popular discourse concentrates almost exclusively on the first purpose, because the second one is icky to talk about. In reality most people are individually better off being independently wealthy and not working, but society can only absorb so many free agents with their own ideas and wills to power. (This is also why retirement and stay-at-home parenting are broadly institutionalized: it's okay for people to not work when they no longer have the energy to work, it's only dangerous when people are not working and yet have the energy to do things other than working). But the second reason actually has more explanatory power. If you assume that the true reason for employment is to take people out of the competitive will-to-power market, lots and lots of irrational moves suddenly make sense, like high-paid executives, bullshit jobs, bureaucratic incompetence, projects where billions are invested and then the whole thing is canceled, competing internal divisions, people not getting fired for doing nothing, etc. The whole point is for them to do nothing.
There's a Chesterton's Fence [2] issue at work here. Many people, particularly young people, grow up with the first explanation for work and take it at face value, and then a new technology comes around that saves all this work and they're like "Of course this is a good idea! I want to be part of it!" But if the actual purpose of work is to distract people from pursuing their own interests, this is incredibly dangerous. The actual consequence is going to be widespread unrest and quite possibly war.
This is the foundation of the economy. AN engine needs energy to keep going and workers are that energy. AI serves to automate a lot of that energy... but this leads to a side effect.
The side effect is that the economy is a self feedback loop, as workers not only run the engine but they also create the fuel that they themselves run on. If workers aren't working and AI has replaced them then what where are companies getting money from if workers can no longer buy things from the company? This is the fundamental loop of how an economy works... money gets paid to workers, workers spend the money and the loop continues and the economy self improves... If workers are replaced the economy no longer works.
You're addressing a flaw and an imperfection in the existing infrastructure (poverty),The article is talking about the very engine that maintains society itself which in theory can completely break if AI is introduced.
I don't know if it will ACTUALLY break, the circumstances surrounding all of this are very very complex that no one can fully predict the outcome but the theory behind it is legit and much more significant then a poverty issue.
EDIT: parent comment was edited: it used to say $15
That's gonna be really difficult as the heaven's manager probably have full access to the Epstein files.
was that before or after he caught STDs?
Carlin is God but that quote doesn’t actually make a lot of sense
It was mostly PR. Gates and Buffet were (and are) rich, but their money simply does not come close to the scale needed to fix the world's problems.
Gates is worth $110 billion. Global GDP is $126 trillion.
I'm sure they could have done more with less fanfare, but you seem to be setting the bar at "fixing the world's problems", which seems unfair. They have undoubtedly changed more lives than I'll ever manage to.
For people like scam Altman it’s a difficult paradox: we have a ‘intelligent’ technology box and the world largely… looks the same.
He blames it on inertia lmao - as if firms are not desperately trying to increase profits and getting rid of people without having to reinvest.
> Value Is strictly related to scarcity.
Value is extremely subjective. Trivial example, going for a hike in a park is effectively free and unlimited and many people enjoy it.
Monetizing that value may require scarcity though. (There are surely exceptions, but I can't think of any offhand.) To extend the example above, that's when you put a fence and an entry fee around the park.
That's why I said AI lets you create value without capital. Creating wealth out of that value is left as an exercise for the reader ;-)
But a lot of society is run by asshole sociopaths which (who) unfortunately lack some pretty fundamental wiring. And that creates some far-away problems, global even, that don’t really have anything to do with normal people that you meet daily. But you can notice how when these concrete problems are pointed out that someone will want to retreat back to generalities. Human nature. That’s IMO from a concerted effort to spread this talking point that asshole-caused problems are really human-caused problems. Because the asshole sociopaths (AHS) in charge are not AHS. They are not just human. And any human would do what they are doing. And in fact by going to war with X we are just stopping them from doing Y to us—
It is a coordination problem for normal, reasonable people. There’s too many key AHS personell disrupting the information flow. So those reasonable human beings have to make more of an effort.
[1] Some poorer societies (as have been told to me) have problems with vile opportunism of the sort where you help some apparently in need person get home and you get gutted and robbed by a gang of thugs. So I asked, okay so you can’t trust anyone then? No, they said. There’s a small and real chance that that could happen. But not to the point that you have to shun strangers. You can still choose to help.
"drooling idiot" is just a figure of speech, I'm sure. The point is, the moat is now more like a narrow puddle which few will be incapable of jumping over. Even if you make something better, it's going to be very hard to find in the pile of AI-generated slop. Ergo, popularity and success will be decided by money for advertisement, not skill.
Are there important things that can be done with AI - yes. How many of them can provide income for a small but skilled operation - very few to none at all. That's the reality of it, whatever smart thing you do, AI will catch up with it in the next iteration. The current economic arrangement cannot accommodate AI without degenerating into an idiocracy controlled by selected few.
People can differentiate quality from shit.
We have to remember that people are the point of the economy: the economy exists to provide for all the people, people don't exist to be economic assets. There is a tendency for capitalists to forget this, and then we have to prod them with pitchforks to remind them.
I never made that claim. I just said it's way too early to rule it out: there is no logical reason why AIs will (always) need to have a human in the loop, and we don't have enough experience with LLMs to know what their true limits are.
I referenced AlphaGo not because the game of Go is exactly like every other task AI might perform in the future, but because the evolution from AlphaGo (which was trained on human games) to AlphaGo Zero (which was not) shows that at least in certain domains, it's not only possible to take the human out of the loop, it can actually make AI perform better.
I'm not claiming this will definitely be possible in every other domain, but people who state it definitely won't be, are jumping the gun.
But the alternative (to refuse to regulate) involves mass disruptions across every level of society as human labor is replaced. A worst case scenario could involve wars or waves of violent revolution + suppression akin to the 1930s.
$852.7B[0] + $109.9B[0] = $962.6B ~= $1T ($1,000,000,000,000)
World population ~= 8.3B (8,300,000,000)[1]
$1,000,000,000,000 / 8,300,000,000 people = $120.481927711 per person[2]
[0] https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=%241%2C000%2C000%2C000%2C000...
On which figure?
This article by Charles Stross (from 2018, hence long before LLMs) makes the case that corporations are an old, slow form of AI: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-yo...
I agree with both takes; organizations have evolved many error-correcting mechanisms like bureaucracy, laws and contracts to keep a gaggle of non-deterministic actors behaving deterministically. There is no reason those actors need to be human.
Probably the only feasible thing would be to set income tax to zero. However, half the nation doesn’t pay income tax anyway (100% refund).
The rest of the 21st century is going to be really messed up.
Keeping them running and patching the minimum of damage with a UBI is just absurd. If the impact on the job market is as bad as what the AI leaders say, which is extremely bad, it’s a national security risk level for pretty much all developed economies. We would absolutely never accept that in any other domain
If you believe politicians will be able to regulate companies with such financial clout you're living in a fairy tale. These companies will be able to hold the U.S. government hostage.
Does not matter, UBI will make the situation worse.
And that "AI does most the work" is yet another fairytale. AI does the easy work, leaving only the much more difficult and the controversial work, exactly the work nobody wants to do, due to the responsibility attached. So, AI will do that, and AI will do that with a preference for the wealth class.
I think humanoids capable of replacing a nurse for example are 20+ years away. But I could be wrong and hope I am.
Wow you are in deep. I feel for people like you - you’ve lost all sight of reality. It’s sad.
There were tons of assassination attempts against the tsars in the 1800s, and they even killed a tsar. Yet the empire fell due to an external war, roughly 100 years later.
Aristocracy became useless around 1600-1700, when gunpowder meant that peasant armies took over instead of knights, yet it took between 200 and 400 years for full legal equality to be introduced everywhere and some places still have nobility with special status, to this day, even in developed countries.
Does this view rest on the claim that the only use of the aristocracy is warfare?
For example your AI generated code feels very productive and "more done in less time", until you have to spend 3 times as much reviewing it, and supporting it long term compared to code written before AI.
People mistake instant gratification for long term productivity gains.
Also, keep in mind that my perspective is colored by the fact that I can't type much, and coding by keyboard is pretty much off the table for me.
And last, as I pointed out elsewhere, LLMs are useful for more things than writing code, and administrative work can be handled easily with the current generation of LLMs.
Do more of.. what? Much of what happens in software is not akin to a factory producing goods.
You need projects - projects don’t fall out the sky and value creating ones are hard to come by!
Also consider that there's a lot going on in the world that doesn't involve software creation. My partner works at a well-known law school, and a small but significant part of her work could be handled by AI. I'm looking into taking the department-specific info and RAGging it into an LLM so that students and instructors can find what they need in a chat interface, rather than using her as an LLM.
When you ignore the 80% mechanical work the last 20% is 100% of a project.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/a...
Clergy to protect from the gods, nobility to protect from other organized groups of humans, peasants to provide food and beasts of burden, artisans to build things.
Of course, once a class that doesn't have to do backbreaking work is established, rooting them out is difficult. The clergy was also hard to reduce.
Gates claims AI regulation will make sure AI solves the climate crisis for all. AI is in fact a major contributor to the climate crisis, and AI industries are now the biggest fossil fuel lobbyists across the world. (not suggesting that CO2 is the biggest environmental problem we face)
So the man who profited off the Microsoft monster now is proposing anti-solutions to a real problem he helped develop, and we're supposed to actually give him credit? Listen to the real specialists with credible analysis: people like James Mickens on the AI side, and people like Aurore Stéphant on the tech sustainability side.
> It is great that some AI companies are proposing solutions to challenges raised by their own technology, but we should not expect them to lead the charge. Some of the issues are outside their area of expertise, and in a democratic society it’s not their role to decide these things. Instead, solutions should be developed through a public democratic process that includes elected officials, policymakers, educators, health workers, local officials, and community leaders.
I think Mamdani and AOC would do it yesterday if they were in charge, and they're incredibly popular politicians to their constituents. More like them are waiting in the wings. So I think it's cynical rather than realistic.
I can just about guarantee there will be several progressives running in '28, potentially AOC as one of them.
Even if a progressive doesn't win the nomination, whoever does could be pushed toward the progressive direction.
Also don't forget two years is a long time and things can change fast.
The Titanic was put to sea with life rafts for half its passengers and most people were ok with that kind of logic. It took a massive media campaign around the disaster and the many deaths for change to happen.
Slavery is still legal in some places despite toddlers instinctively knowing that freedom is important since the dawn of humans around the world.
One of Carlins hallmarks was the way he fine tuned his language, almost never was something he said on stage accidental or improv funny enough
So it’s genius in the fact that it conveys the point perfectly, while being quizzical in its formation
I would never trust someone who lacks the fundamentals to create value even with the most advanced tools.
I’d prefer to pay for the senior and fire the less senior - the implicit premium is to not have to worry about the lack of fundamentals for when problems need to be solved that are nuanced.
Although I feel the value of what you're saying, I don't feel that's the mindset in the whole world.
I live in a LATAM country and I have worked for both EU (which outsourced most of the workforce, usually keeping the architects and rotating the devs (PS: pre-agentic coding)), US and now US with LATAM intermediator.
Every single one of them treated blattantly different less senior and low paid workers. EU treated so well their EU employees that even outsourced workers could actually feel as real human beings.
The US (startup) one was extremely crushing, I feel seniors were rewarded, what I take from your "the implicit premium", true, but with so much damn pressure. The only senior I saw departed was out of exhaustion, a team from 10 engineers reduced to 4 or 5, don't remember exactly.
While LATAM people is just awful. The slavery mindset is always dormant. Keep pushing, replace when exhausted, hire a whole new crew of low-paid people and push them to burn-out, that's true on small businesses and giant banks. I remember I once trained 3 interns in a pre-agentic setting, I had to push for 2 whole years so that one of the well trained, extremely dedicated and intelligent guy got hired. And he was hired only after a YEAR that the other one had been hired by a larger company. After I was gone, they kept me around consulting just some hours a week and refused to replace even the "half" me. And then I was gone. Only after some months of my departure they really hired the intelligent dude I've mentioned before and for at least a year and a half they coudln't find a replacement for the almost-slave as I was because the intelligent dude probably was starting to get used with agentic coding with a fifth of our total salaries. I haven't heard of that so far.
Also ask yourself what the tradeoffs were in terms of biodiversity losses and agricultural diversity losses due to Green Revolution, and areas where it didnt work out like the attenpts of it on Balinese subak rice agriculture practices (the book 'Priests and Programmers' should have more info)
It’s really weird to attempt to school me on Indian history too. “Ask yourself” indeed. If you have something to say on the subject, say it.
I’m almost certain you have a very surface level understanding of Indian history if you’re trying to link the Bengal famine during WWII instead of talking about the very real food shortages in India post-1947.
People were dying because they didn’t have enough food to eat. India had to beg for food aid, which America provided after extorting and humiliating India. Thanks to these crops that never happened again. Biodiversity is an afterthought when children are dying of starvation and you sound very out of touch for bringing it up.
What historical evidence do we have to believe that these newfound capabilities are going to be distributed equitably?
I don't think we have any evidence that anything will be done fairly. In fact the idea of Capitalism in a "fair system" has been objectively broken as incumbents apply pressure on free markets to suppress competition.
I think all forms have proved they can be broken where they no longer are "playing by the rules".
I was entertaining the hypothetical. I think the biggest unknown I feel which the article gently touches on is the unknown of how deeply this is trusted to make decisions that could be life-changing.
Imagine the danger of an AI model built to scan and understand a state or national level of policy that would be beneficial to society. Not only does that create a vector of manipulation to government that could be blindly trusted but it opens a cyber attack vector from other nation states.
I could see someone coming from a place of good without realizing that these functions are somewhat opaque without ceilings/floors which can increase deviation to elicit hallucinations.
Whether it is intentionally misused or a road to hell paved with good intentions it does feel treacherous. I do think there are many many democratizing aspects it offers but how do we stop mixing the baby and the bath water when we can't tell the difference.
I think Trump benefitted somewhat from being a political 'dark horse' without any preexisting baggage but who knows!
a) How many technological revolutions do you count?
b) Of these, which directly created jobs vs in which did the job numbers eventually recover?
Before electronic computers, rooms full of workers, often women, did the math by hand. That job was decimated.
Before ATMs, people went to bank tellers.
Before mechanized looms, there were weavers. Look up where the word “Luddite” comes from.
Before industrial manufacturing, shoes were made by cobblers.
Elevators used to have human operators.
There’s never been a technological revolution that didn’t yield more jobs than it replaced
It used an incorrect theoretical framing that assumed that data was being replaced rather than accumulated as a result of more training (see https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.01413 which explores this). This is incorrect because this simply isn't how real-world datasets are created via synthetic data generation (which generally accumulate more data over time rather than replace their data). As a result most of the theoretical results were invalid.
Empirical evidence has also cast a considerable amount of doubt on the paper. For example, Microsoft Phi-4 was an empirical test in specifically what happens if the majority of your training data is synthetic rather than human and it turns out that Phi-4 did significantly better than previous models which relied primarily on human data.
There's some nuance to all of this in how exactly you do this, but the original claims of the paper are looking really shaky at this point.
> We unknowingly gave particularly high rewards for metaphors with creatures
It was the human feedback that caused the bias, not a change in training data.
> We find that _indiscriminate_ use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models
If you view AI training as lossy compression of their training data, then lossily compressing the same data repeatedly will result in data degredation; this is well known from other domains (try repeatedly compressing a JPEG image, for example).
That means it's extremely important that there is some content curation in the loop. But there is no reason to believe this content curation must be done by humans, or that it must exclude all AI-generated content by default.
For example, the recent LLM-generated disproof of the Jacobian conjecture would probably be beneficial to include in the training data, despite being the result of an LLM.
Maybe the system is so toxic the only way forward is a radical break and solutionism is just a way to distract from that fact? A way to maintain the power structure while making cosmetic changes?
Not true. Obviously bad faith actors and those who literally spend large bulks of their lives to build monopolies are met with endless wave of cynicism, sarcasm and epic burn clapbacks. Gates is now proposing to tax his competition. There are long standing proposals about taxing monopolies and large corporations a lot more and enforcing anti trust much more aggressively. Only one of them is met with that cynicism.
Funny enough, you dont see Gates do or support anything that would actually limit power of billionaires CEOs.
But this is also highly correlated with a skyrocketing opioid epidemic. How are you disambiguating those variables? I suspect you've decided what you believe is the cause and you're working backwards from that instead of earnestly interrogating the causes.
It's likely these are both factors, and there are more contributing to homelessness. One of the largest contributors was de-institutionalisation. Turning out mentally unwell people into the streets was clearly a terrible social strategy.
We have research on this, so there's no need to retread. [For example.](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29153445/)
> Prevalence rates were similar across rural and nonrural counties. Higher risk of homelessness was observed among young parents; black, Hispanic, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) youth; and those who did not complete high school.
Youth homelessness rates were similar in cheap and expensive areas. However, factors such as race, sexual orientation, and educational attainment appeared correlated.
While you may never experience it, some people can’t come up with thousands of dollars every 30 days to give someone else
And that's how someone can go from scared 14yo runaway to bartering favors for drugs in like, a year. Hell, I'd go even further and say that all the assholes blaming homelessness on mental health issues have the causality backwards, too. Living under constant stress would break anybody's psyche. Not to mention the fact that for most people I was helping, their lives before they were homeless weren't exactly rosy, either.
Tiktok arguably led to more datacenters being created, AI is not unique in this regard and it's silly to imply that datacenter jobs meaningfully contribute to employment on the same scale as the loss of jobs AI could potentially lead to.
There are certain jobs where the human connection fundamentally commands a premium (e.g. celebrities, sports players, the relational economy), but it's hard to imagine a world where this sector employs the majority of people. It would be a precarious existence as these jobs would be the first to go in a crisis such as a war, etc.
What's next for workers? How can we push for redistribution?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_quackery
While nuclear power is not intrinsically anti human you can't really separate the public perception of nuclear power and that of nuclear weapons. Anti nuclear sentiment is a lot easier to understand when you realize everyone who grew up under the Cold War had went through nuclear attack drills.
In fact you could probably make a strong case that the US and USSR did NuclearMaxxx
It’s called the nuclear arms race/cold war and was the defining characteristic of society post WWII until 9/11
And as an analogy it breaks down because we need to reduce/eliminate all sources of pollution, not just the current biggest one.
Edit: Perhaps a more interesting question is whether we should rate pollution sources by absolute amount or amount per actual utility produced. Gas-turbine-powered AI datacenters surely rate abysmally low on utility efficiency.
Nuckear arms race was something that could cause harm. This is intended to cause harm by design. And it is already clear it will cause harm to many people regardless of whether ai companies succeed or not.
You took the goalpost, moved it to another country and now argue that ball did not moved with it.
Capitalism has always been a tension between capitalists, who want maximum return on capital and workers, who want pesky things like a living wage, sick leave or safe work conditions.
For the longest time, the only power labor has had to get those things was the power of collective bargaining. No agreement with your workers meant no production happened.
AI threatens to disturb this delicate balance that made things kinda-sorta work for a while.
No more dependence on labor means the capital accumulation flywheel will go crazy. Capital can buy compute can generate capital. Now, once you have a ton of capital, you might start thinking: Hmmm, I wonder if I can use this to tilt the rules of the game in my favor. Wonder which politicians could change some regulations in exchange for a hefty "donation". And so the regulatory capture begins.
In other words, the end state of things as they are is: existing capitalists get converted to near-feudal lords (which is why they're so excited about the prospect!), while the existing working class loses their only leverage to extract an existence.
All solutionist approaches just slightly slow this incentive loop down or make it more marketable, but none change the core mechanism at play.
Now, with this critique in mind, what do we actually do about it?
We won't be able to stop AI from taking over more and more labor jobs, and we shouldn't even try to. But that's not really the problem anyways, the problem is that with the current ownership structure, the only ones really benefiting from AI productivity are they already-owning class.
That is where we have a lever. The only way out of this dystopian path, and into something more appealing, is communal ownership of the means of production. This doesn't have to mean everyone's laptop, this needs to be measured and scaled of course, but as an example, large-scale data centers should not be allowed to be privately controlled.
Now, which mechanism we choose here is up for debate. Maybe government ownership? Maybe worker-owned coops? Maybe something else entirely?
Lastly, how do we get there? Historically, there's been two schools of thought: The electoral and the revolutionary approach. I think both have their merits, but I actually think they best work together.
Think of the Bismarckian example: Why was the conservative German chancellor the one to introduce the German social safety net? To stave off a credible threat of revolution.
I think that while I don't really love the idea of a revolution, the ruling class loves it even less, because historically they are the ones that end up beheaded. That's why I see revolutionary movements as a good way to extract concessions, because they don't need to actually go through with it as long as they're threatening enough.
I'd also be interested in seeing where you do and don't agree - if only to adjust my own mental model, none of us are infallible, critical feedback is always good :-)