AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It
thealgorithmicbridge.com315 points by gHeadphone 11 hours ago
315 points by gHeadphone 11 hours ago
I feel like if people keep using AI as a blanket term for "inequality" and "inequality accelerants" then yeah, it's "AI"'s fault. When in reality the whole thing needs to be decoupled..
"Gleefully taking away people's livelihoods will be met with violence, and nothing good will come of it." - fixed.
I wholeheartedly agree with and encourage this kind of academic distinction. However...
Until people with billions of dollars behind them do something with that money to offset the financial hardship that they're knowingly - and gleefully - bringing to others... The distinction has no practical use.
(And before someone says "that's the government's job!", consider how much lobbying money is coming from CEOs and companies who know the domain best and are agitating for better financial and social safeguards for all. None, naturally.)
We often look back on earlier stages in world history like we're somehow more advanced, or inherently smarter, than past societies. But one of the things made clear by the way this problem lines up perfectly with conflict during the industrial revolution (including the innovators flagrantly violating the law in order to win their advantage) is that for all our technological sophistication, we haven't really gotten better at the hard, human things: social coordination, planning, democracy. (Perhaps that's because we're still living under the same system that the industrial revolution finally birthed.)
How much actual money do you think the “people with billions of dollars” have in comparison to the needs of the population as a whole? I think you’re very confused about where the actual income in the economy goes.
I am not at all proposing that "people with billions of dollars" somehow directly pay for "the needs of the population as a whole".
I'm considering "actual power", rather than "actual income".
Then who pays for it?
That is the question society is currently asking with articles like this one.
Given that (allegedly) "your salary" won't be the answer for a significant chunk of the population soon, and all that money will instead (allegedly) go to the bosses doing the firings, and the AI companies they employ instead.
Frankly, the entire world is now paying for what is happening in the US.
Were you talking about specifically how do you restrain the power of massive corporations to harm people? AI is coming but a lot of the other things that are happening are preventable - like the rise of no-benefit gig work.
Raising taxes is the only possible way a UBI would be feasible, and even then it wouldn't be a large enough amount for most people to live off of.
Also, a UBI is likely to cause inflation.
I don’t understand why welfare is the answer. To me it seems we’ve super failed if that’s the case — just brings everyone down except a few ultra rich people.
UBI is not welfare. It is just a livable minimum wage, for everyone who works. For those who cannot work, it replaces welfare, but that is not it's primary purpose.
As a welfare replacement, it is much more efficient, since there is no effort spent determining who qualifies. People can spent their money however they want, rather than the patchwork of separate programs we have now.
It doesn't need to bring anyone down. It's just a different way of distributing what we already receive. For you ordinary workers, they will receive $X in a monthly check, and their salary can be reduced by $X (since the minimum wage can also be abolished).
That does mean that the desirability of some jobs will shift. Good. We have a bunch of very dirty jobs being done for minimum wage, even though demand is extremely high. I'd love to see the garbage men and chicken processors get more money for their dangerous work.
And if I get less for my cushy desk job, oh well. Especially since we seem to be putting all of the effort into replacing me, and none into the jobs that come with hazards to life and limb.
The annual minimum wage (at the federal level, not counting states with higher) is around $15k. There are about 267 million adults in the US.
That is double current federal and state welfare spending.
I'm dead tired right now so I'm sure I'm missing something, but considering that is far below the poverty threshold in any big city, I dont think we'll be solving anything by eliminating welfare in favor of UBI.
UBI is basically of no benefit to the upper middle class or wealthy, and it won't be enough for the poor who cannot work enough. It really only benefits the upper lower class and lower middle class the most.
But surely you can see that if the main selling point of UBI is
"Everyone gets a livable minimum wage! Oh by the way if you had a cushy desk job, that's gone because Claude can do it, or you get paid peanuts to manage Claude instances if you're lucky. Don't worry though, you can still make big bucks by working as a garbage man or at a chicken processing plant"
and the alternative is
"Burn the data centers down"
then the 2nd option may have a bit more appeal?
A UBI is basically impossible to implement on a large scale without there being significant downsides. In what world does increasing the budget by a trillion dollars or more work out well?
If the promises of AGI pan out, there will be nothing a human will be able to do better than an AI. If humans can't contribute economically, what else could things look like?
well inflation is equivalent to a flat wealth tax that doesn't consider insoluble assets, and is entirely in the hands of the government that imposes the UBI.
"cause increased prices for consumer/essential goods" is what you meant (since buying power is moved to people who are reliant on buying them), but this is a one-time transition to a new equilibrium (so is mitigable by increasing the UBI to account for it), not a constant ever-looming devaluator.
True, but again, the other points are more damning.
We're talking about an increased federal budget in the hundreds of billions/trillions to support such a UBI. That will cause a massive increase in taxation on the people who can still find jobs.
To make matters worst, the government in 10-15 years will likely be spending ~25% of it's budget on interest payments alone. Hiking the federal budget up even more sounds like a hard sell.
I’m not saying it would be revenue neutral, but a UBI would (or should) eliminate a bunch of various other entitlements. Even social security should be relatively non controversial to get rid of.
You seem to think feeding the population is optional. The current form of government and personal asset accumulation is actually much more optional in the situation.
Look at Rome and what it had to do when the system shock of so many slaves disrupted labor. Wild that Roman patricians understood you have to...like...feed society, but modern right wing Americans don't.
As opposed to dead people because no one is hiring to pay people to participate in a market they've been evicted from?
There is currently more than enough total production for people to live quite well.
If AIs simply replace people, the same total work gets done. It's just a matter of who gets the profits from it.
It won't be that simple, to be sure. Nonetheless we already produce far more than subsistence, and there's no reason why a UBI would change that. If it increases the price of some commodities because now everyone can buy them, I'm ok with that. It already horrifies me that some go hungry in the fattest nation in history.
If that were true, we wouldn’t see the inflation we do from more dollars chasing the same (or less) goods.
Even if it were true, you still have distribution. You can’t get goods across a nation, let alone the globe, without significant inputs.
Are you checking the local grocery store and extrapolating globally?
Inflation is more likely when the net number of dollars increases without a corresponding increase to production. Taxing earners at a higher rate doesn’t do this. Printing money at the central bank does.
Everyone. That includes the small number of people hoarding a majority of the wealth. Everyone needs to contribute to the wellbeing of society as a whole and nobody is exempt.
I'd like to emphasize that the above should be immediately obvious. The fact that it's not does not bode well for humanity's future.
Billionaires simply _should not exist_. The fact that the power to shape societies is concentrated in so few can account for many of the existential threats we face today. AI is not "the problem", it's merely the latest symptom of our broken system and the prioritization of the wrong goals and outcomes.
EDIT: grammar
AI, automation, and globalization would all be uncontroversially brilliant if the benefits weren't distributed like "150% of net benefit to capital, -50% net benefit to labor, better hope some of it trickles down brokie!"
I wholeheartedly agree, these are all "tools" at our disposal. We're just holding them wrong.
>Billionaires simply _should not exist_. T
If American billionaires couldn't exist then America would be even poorer and underdeveloped than Europe, the entire tech industry wouldn't exist, and it'd be entirely at the mercy of China. Because nobody's going to start a business in a country that violently confiscates their wealth just for being successful. The envy of people like yourself is a deep moral illness that destroys civilizations if left unchecked.
Good luck taking away the detached single family homes, pickup trucks, SUVs, commercial flights, out of season fruits/vegetables, and imported manufactured goods. The people that expect those things are the “ small number of people hoarding a majority of the wealth”, and there are quite a few of them (probably 1B+ worldwide).
Is what you say really controversial?
Except for commercial flights (which I would easily give up for a hopeful society), I do not find anything on your list remotely relevant to my happiness or well-being.
Imported cheap goods are obviously something all of us consume a lot, but we only need them to feel good in comparison to our neighbours.
As long as we keep them for hospitals and medicine, the rest going away would be just fine. Children would play with whatever they can find instead of cheap plastic toys, we would have to learn to multi-purpose our tools instead of having a specific object for every minor purpose.
There is a wild difference between asking people not to eat apples in December in the northern hemisphere and asking people not to move wealth around to avoid paying taxes when they have more resources available to them than multiple countries.
Comparing middle income 1st world citizens to dragons on their mountains of gold is disingenuous at best.
> Comparing middle income 1st world citizens to dragons on their mountains of gold is disingenuous at best.
Those two groups are on the greater side of the inequality, and the third group is on the lesser side of the inequality. All the dragons on their mountains of gold can stop existing, and the inequality barely changes.
Most of the younger people don't care about most of those things. That preference just isn't reflected in markets because older generations control a disproportionate (unfair) portion of wealth.
Comparing those people to the richest few thousand people in the US and Europe is very disingenuous.
Yes, but in the opposite way to what you think. Do the math, there's billions of people consuming the overly cheap, massively subsidized goods and services parent listed; there's only so many billionaires and they have only so many billions, and most of it is just fake bullshit accounting paper-shuffling anyway.