4 ms·

I know I am a little drunk and that makes my inner socialist pop out, but is there any particular reason why we don't tax Schmidt and then use the 125M to inves

I know I am a little drunk and that makes my inner socialist pop out, but is there any particular reason why we don't tax Schmidt and then use the 125M to invest in AI, plus other things, with the outcomes being released openly? It's time for that conversation.

tedivm 5y ago
Oh I'm sure we can trust the guy who runs the company that fired a bunch of people for publishing research about the harms of AI to also be the person to fund ethical AI research.
- axg11 5y ago
  > runs the company Schmidt doesn’t run Google by any definition of the word run. He also has a great track record of funding basic science (Schmidt Science Fellows).
  - pengaru 5y ago
    While we're on his track records, his documented privacy stance is not great to say the least. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt#Privacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt#Privacy
- visarga 5y ago
  > fired a bunch of people for publishing research about the harms of AI That paper was activism dressed up as science. It even tried to coin a derogatory term for language models. The authors were full of vitriol on forums against many respected researchers. After calling them out on their perceived ethical problems, they refused to have a dialogue in order not to "offer a platform" to their opponents. Never seen anything like it in 10 years of following the field. It was so sad to see people trying to have a sincere talk and being shut down. If there is any good outcome from that scandal is that now big model papers devote 50% of their length to harm analysis. A bunch of better papers on harm reduction came out in the last year. The authors of the scandal paper moved on to exploit their new gained notoriety, so it wasn't necessarily a bad career step for them.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Oh I'm sure we can trust the guy who runs the company He doesn't. > that fired a bunch of people for publishing research about the harms of AI They didn't. They fired one person for pointing out internal race and gender issues at the company, and particularly management dishonesty in the handling of those issues (part of that firing process was a constructive termination campaign—an effort to make the workplace hostile enough to them that they would quit—that involved, among other things, subjecting her research to review processes not used for other researchers at Google in the same area, which came to light around a piece on the harms of AI, which, sure, it was in the company's interest to suppress, but the only reason that even became an issue is because of the process they had already focussed on her to force her out.) Then they fired a number of other people for things like pointing out holes in the narrative around firing the first person, including pointing out the unusual research oversight process. In the process, a number of people also quit the company over those events.
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  > that fired a bunch of people for publishing research about the harms of AI You're either extremely misinformed or are intentionally lying, but either way, this is just a flat out incorrect statement on multiple levels. You can just google "Timnit Gebru" to find out all the details of her dismissal. And Eric Schmidt doesn't run Google, and had literally zero to do with Timnit and others getting fired(which - to be clear, was entirely because of their response to Google's response to their paper, not because of the paper itself).
jlrubin 5y ago
The free market is usually better at allocating resources than the government. Plus, the government already has much more than $125M it could use to fund AI research, why do we need to take away Schmidt's funds to do so?
- lifeisstillgood 5y ago
  So I wrote this for another reason but it is pretty appropriate here:: Take a billionaire. Any one. At some point they inevitably will have made a public proncement something like "Why do we bother with these useless politicians ? I am a self made man. I can make much better investment decisions than those guys. Let me keep all my money and I will keep making better investment decisions." Guess what - Maybe. Err, Mostly No. Look firstly you are not a self-made man. You are an investment from your society that built a school, paid the teachers, injected you with vaccines and fed your growing body and mind and after twenty years of that sent you and millions like you out to make money and give some of it back in tax to pay for the repairs to the roads and schools and hospitals. And even after that you did not do all the work at your compmay yourself - you hired people (at a presumably fair wage) and arranged things so that more of the profits flowed to you than to them. This was all legal. (I hope!) But most especially you were not the only visionary in the desert. Every startup that succeeds has competitors - there is even a Sillicon Valley saying "competition is Gods way of saying there is money to be made". You gave a great pitch - but it fell on fertile ground. Investors realised this was a good opportunity and pushed cash into your hands, engineers and sales people realised this was the industry they wanted and shoved CVs into your hands. You did a great job as an Enteprenuer - well done. But you were not the only one, you are not an island and you are fortunate to have benefitted from a specific corporate structure. Imagine how rich you would be if you had started a co-operative owned solely by employees or like a Vanguard investment fund owned by shareholders (unlike most hedge funds). you would still be rich - just normal rich. Of course my dear self made billionaire, you probably are a better invester than our politicians, smarter too. But that is not the point. We are asking them to make investments that dwarf even your funds - the President of the USA hands out a 6Trillion dollar budget and that's just the federal bit. And we want a bit more ... accountability and a bit more responsiveness from the guy investing so much of our hard earned. If you want to invest that (and let's agree you will probably do a better job) you need to persuade us (ie your new investors) that you are the right person to spend it. So is your name on the ballot? No? ok so you are not, in our terms, handing out a prospectus. in tat case you don't get to invest on our behalf. how it works is that people who invest our tax money get elected. That way we can remove them when we don't like it. (it's not a great system i have to admit but no better alternatives seem to exist) So give us back (most?) of then money you made. we will use it to build schools for the next entrepreneurs, and also lots of other stuff we will all massively argue about. In short, you are an investment in our massive VC fund, and you have paid off handsomely. Now we want our exit please. Death and taxes are the only two promises we ever make. Having said that we would be very interested in your manifesto (sorry prospectus). Can you do anything about the potholes round my way?
lkbm 5y ago
> It's time for that conversation. The idea of taxing rich people is an ongoing conversation. I hear it discussed literally every day.
- rgifford 5y ago
  People talk about it quite a bit. It hasn't amounted to anything material in my lifetime. If anything just the opposite. I don't think effective tax rates for the uber wealthy have ever been lower.
jonas21 5y ago
Because it would end up getting spent like the rest of the discretionary budget, so around $65M would go to the military, and $4M would go to science, of which about $80K would be allocated to AI research.
- visarga 5y ago
  Can't even hire a web dev with that.
- lifeisstillgood 5y ago
  Ok. And then that's a conversation around our spending priorities. Which is another conversation "we should" be having. And by that I mean legally enforcing all media to put a pie chart of each politicians spending plans above their head. I am now drunk enough to mistake HN for twitter so should stop.
  - pjscott 5y ago
    It's a cute idea, but I see two obvious issues. First, spending priorities tend to be pretty similar among politicians, with each differing only in small details, so approximately all of the pie charts would look more or less like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/media/File:2020_US_Federal_Budget_Infographic.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/... (Only about a quarter of the pie is even discretionary! The rest is on budgetary auto-pilot.) Second, how many people are well-informed enough to have an opinion on how much of the budget should be spent on AI research? How many have even thought about the question? There are a kajillion such questions, and it would be unreasonable for most citizens to put in the time to consider even a small fraction of them, considering how little a single person's vote affects them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_ignorance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_ignorance
    - wolverine876 5y ago
      > how many people are well-informed enough to have an opinion on how much of the budget should be spent on AI research? Unfortunately, there is no super-human, super-political authority who can give us answers. We each get to decide who we trust and to what degree. You are free to trust Eric Schmidt to whatever degree; I might vote otherwise. Certainly nobody gets to assert authority over others by simply claiming to be an expert.
rgifford 5y ago
I doubt we taxed him anywhere near his fair share. That effective tax rates decline with wealth floors me. It also bothers me how cut throat capitalists grow into philanthropists as they become old and vulnerable. Years tax dodging, suppressing wages, lobbying, and engaging in veiled class warfare to gain every bit of wealth possible. And then they deign to give a fraction of what was owed the people (for roads, the internet, public safety, etc.) back in bits and spurts to be celebrated as generous. It makes me laugh. At least your run-of-the-mill Scrooge has the decency to be consistent, to be hated. While I say all that, I am also glad he's donating.
- savant_penguin 5y ago
  How much is a fair share?
  - rgifford 5y ago
    From what I've read the uber wealthy pay an effective tax rate of ~10%. US voters and legislators have set our top tax brackets at ~40%. What is a fair tax rate? I don't know. Less is more IMO. But by the terms we've all agreed on, the uber wealthy skimp by ~3/4.
    - visarga 5y ago
      Money you need to spend is different from money you can save or invest. That's why they can do it.
      - rgifford 5y ago
        Most Americans don't have money to save or invest. Capital gains functionally rewrites tax brackets. There's lots of ways to make sure that people so rich they don't have to wage earn pay their fair share. We choose not to.
        AlchemistCamp 5y ago
AlchemistCamp 5y ago
> I am a little drunk and that makes my inner socialist pop out, but is there any particular reason why we don't tax Schmidt and then use the 125M to invest in AI, plus other things, with the outcomes being released openly? There are two reasons: 1) Mr. Schmidt already pays taxes and the US is not an authoritarian socialist regime that creates arbitrary, retroactive new taxes to confiscate the money of its citizens as soon as they decide to make a donation. I think that sort of system has been repeatedly shown to be a failure but if it's what you prefer, try N. Korea. Light versions can also be found in other ethno-states founded in the 20th century that put the words like socialist and people's in the names of their institutions. 2) We actually want research results and 125M in a directed investment goes a lot further than 125M in a federal budget with half a dozen intermediaries and overpaid contractors in the districts of enough legislators to swing the vote. This is part of why SpaceX is able to accomplish so much more, more quickly and more cheaply than NASA can. The government is absolutely crucial for some things, but preventing people from making any decisions about what they want to donate to or spend their money on is a disaster. A more reasonable solution to solve for what it sounds like you want would be to decrease the number tax loopholes and exemptions, particularly those only the wealthy can take advantage of.
esyir 5y ago
I would also like to point out the discrepancy between government investment in general as compared to private investment. In particular, risk tolerance and moonshot projects. I view private investment in domains as a counterbalance to gaps where the slow, grinding machine that is the government misses, or is too entrenched to consider alternative approaches. An example here would be with the disruption of the aerospace industry by SpaceX.

tedivm 5y ago

Oh I'm sure we can trust the guy who runs the company that fired a bunch of people for publishing research about the harms of AI to also be the person to fund ethical AI research.

axg11 5y ago
> runs the company Schmidt doesn’t run Google by any definition of the word run. He also has a great track record of funding basic science (Schmidt Science Fellows).
- pengaru 5y ago
  While we're on his track records, his documented privacy stance is not great to say the least. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt#Privacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt#Privacy
visarga 5y ago
> fired a bunch of people for publishing research about the harms of AI That paper was activism dressed up as science. It even tried to coin a derogatory term for language models. The authors were full of vitriol on forums against many respected researchers. After calling them out on their perceived ethical problems, they refused to have a dialogue in order not to "offer a platform" to their opponents. Never seen anything like it in 10 years of following the field. It was so sad to see people trying to have a sincere talk and being shut down. If there is any good outcome from that scandal is that now big model papers devote 50% of their length to harm analysis. A bunch of better papers on harm reduction came out in the last year. The authors of the scandal paper moved on to exploit their new gained notoriety, so it wasn't necessarily a bad career step for them.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> Oh I'm sure we can trust the guy who runs the company He doesn't. > that fired a bunch of people for publishing research about the harms of AI They didn't. They fired one person for pointing out internal race and gender issues at the company, and particularly management dishonesty in the handling of those issues (part of that firing process was a constructive termination campaign—an effort to make the workplace hostile enough to them that they would quit—that involved, among other things, subjecting her research to review processes not used for other researchers at Google in the same area, which came to light around a piece on the harms of AI, which, sure, it was in the company's interest to suppress, but the only reason that even became an issue is because of the process they had already focussed on her to force her out.) Then they fired a number of other people for things like pointing out holes in the narrative around firing the first person, including pointing out the unusual research oversight process. In the process, a number of people also quit the company over those events.
oh_sigh 5y ago
> that fired a bunch of people for publishing research about the harms of AI You're either extremely misinformed or are intentionally lying, but either way, this is just a flat out incorrect statement on multiple levels. You can just google "Timnit Gebru" to find out all the details of her dismissal. And Eric Schmidt doesn't run Google, and had literally zero to do with Timnit and others getting fired(which - to be clear, was entirely because of their response to Google's response to their paper, not because of the paper itself).

jlrubin 5y ago

The free market is usually better at allocating resources than the government. Plus, the government already has much more than $125M it could use to fund AI research, why do we need to take away Schmidt's funds to do so?

lifeisstillgood 5y ago
So I wrote this for another reason but it is pretty appropriate here:: Take a billionaire. Any one. At some point they inevitably will have made a public proncement something like "Why do we bother with these useless politicians ? I am a self made man. I can make much better investment decisions than those guys. Let me keep all my money and I will keep making better investment decisions." Guess what - Maybe. Err, Mostly No. Look firstly you are not a self-made man. You are an investment from your society that built a school, paid the teachers, injected you with vaccines and fed your growing body and mind and after twenty years of that sent you and millions like you out to make money and give some of it back in tax to pay for the repairs to the roads and schools and hospitals. And even after that you did not do all the work at your compmay yourself - you hired people (at a presumably fair wage) and arranged things so that more of the profits flowed to you than to them. This was all legal. (I hope!) But most especially you were not the only visionary in the desert. Every startup that succeeds has competitors - there is even a Sillicon Valley saying "competition is Gods way of saying there is money to be made". You gave a great pitch - but it fell on fertile ground. Investors realised this was a good opportunity and pushed cash into your hands, engineers and sales people realised this was the industry they wanted and shoved CVs into your hands. You did a great job as an Enteprenuer - well done. But you were not the only one, you are not an island and you are fortunate to have benefitted from a specific corporate structure. Imagine how rich you would be if you had started a co-operative owned solely by employees or like a Vanguard investment fund owned by shareholders (unlike most hedge funds). you would still be rich - just normal rich. Of course my dear self made billionaire, you probably are a better invester than our politicians, smarter too. But that is not the point. We are asking them to make investments that dwarf even your funds - the President of the USA hands out a 6Trillion dollar budget and that's just the federal bit. And we want a bit more ... accountability and a bit more responsiveness from the guy investing so much of our hard earned. If you want to invest that (and let's agree you will probably do a better job) you need to persuade us (ie your new investors) that you are the right person to spend it. So is your name on the ballot? No? ok so you are not, in our terms, handing out a prospectus. in tat case you don't get to invest on our behalf. how it works is that people who invest our tax money get elected. That way we can remove them when we don't like it. (it's not a great system i have to admit but no better alternatives seem to exist) So give us back (most?) of then money you made. we will use it to build schools for the next entrepreneurs, and also lots of other stuff we will all massively argue about. In short, you are an investment in our massive VC fund, and you have paid off handsomely. Now we want our exit please. Death and taxes are the only two promises we ever make. Having said that we would be very interested in your manifesto (sorry prospectus). Can you do anything about the potholes round my way?

lkbm 5y ago

> It's time for that conversation. The idea of taxing rich people is an ongoing conversation. I hear it discussed literally every day.

rgifford 5y ago
People talk about it quite a bit. It hasn't amounted to anything material in my lifetime. If anything just the opposite. I don't think effective tax rates for the uber wealthy have ever been lower.

jonas21 5y ago

Because it would end up getting spent like the rest of the discretionary budget, so around $65M would go to the military, and $4M would go to science, of which about $80K would be allocated to AI research.

visarga 5y ago
Can't even hire a web dev with that.
lifeisstillgood 5y ago
Ok. And then that's a conversation around our spending priorities. Which is another conversation "we should" be having. And by that I mean legally enforcing all media to put a pie chart of each politicians spending plans above their head. I am now drunk enough to mistake HN for twitter so should stop.
- pjscott 5y ago
  It's a cute idea, but I see two obvious issues. First, spending priorities tend to be pretty similar among politicians, with each differing only in small details, so approximately all of the pie charts would look more or less like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/media/File:2020_US_Federal_Budget_Infographic.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/... (Only about a quarter of the pie is even discretionary! The rest is on budgetary auto-pilot.) Second, how many people are well-informed enough to have an opinion on how much of the budget should be spent on AI research? How many have even thought about the question? There are a kajillion such questions, and it would be unreasonable for most citizens to put in the time to consider even a small fraction of them, considering how little a single person's vote affects them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_ignorance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_ignorance
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    > how many people are well-informed enough to have an opinion on how much of the budget should be spent on AI research? Unfortunately, there is no super-human, super-political authority who can give us answers. We each get to decide who we trust and to what degree. You are free to trust Eric Schmidt to whatever degree; I might vote otherwise. Certainly nobody gets to assert authority over others by simply claiming to be an expert.

rgifford 5y ago

I doubt we taxed him anywhere near his fair share. That effective tax rates decline with wealth floors me. It also bothers me how cut throat capitalists grow into philanthropists as they become old and vulnerable. Years tax dodging, suppressing wages, lobbying, and engaging in veiled class warfare to gain every bit of wealth possible. And then they deign to give a fraction of what was owed the people (for roads, the internet, public safety, etc.) back in bits and spurts to be celebrated as generous. It makes me laugh. At least your run-of-the-mill Scrooge has the decency to be consistent, to be hated. While I say all that, I am also glad he's donating.

savant_penguin 5y ago
How much is a fair share?
- rgifford 5y ago
  From what I've read the uber wealthy pay an effective tax rate of ~10%. US voters and legislators have set our top tax brackets at ~40%. What is a fair tax rate? I don't know. Less is more IMO. But by the terms we've all agreed on, the uber wealthy skimp by ~3/4.
  - visarga 5y ago
    Money you need to spend is different from money you can save or invest. That's why they can do it.
    - rgifford 5y ago
      Most Americans don't have money to save or invest. Capital gains functionally rewrites tax brackets. There's lots of ways to make sure that people so rich they don't have to wage earn pay their fair share. We choose not to.
      - AlchemistCamp 5y ago

AlchemistCamp 5y ago

> I am a little drunk and that makes my inner socialist pop out, but is there any particular reason why we don't tax Schmidt and then use the 125M to invest in AI, plus other things, with the outcomes being released openly? There are two reasons: 1) Mr. Schmidt already pays taxes and the US is not an authoritarian socialist regime that creates arbitrary, retroactive new taxes to confiscate the money of its citizens as soon as they decide to make a donation. I think that sort of system has been repeatedly shown to be a failure but if it's what you prefer, try N. Korea. Light versions can also be found in other ethno-states founded in the 20th century that put the words like socialist and people's in the names of their institutions. 2) We actually want research results and 125M in a directed investment goes a lot further than 125M in a federal budget with half a dozen intermediaries and overpaid contractors in the districts of enough legislators to swing the vote. This is part of why SpaceX is able to accomplish so much more, more quickly and more cheaply than NASA can. The government is absolutely crucial for some things, but preventing people from making any decisions about what they want to donate to or spend their money on is a disaster. A more reasonable solution to solve for what it sounds like you want would be to decrease the number tax loopholes and exemptions, particularly those only the wealthy can take advantage of.

esyir 5y ago

I would also like to point out the discrepancy between government investment in general as compared to private investment. In particular, risk tolerance and moonshot projects. I view private investment in domains as a counterbalance to gaps where the slow, grinding machine that is the government misses, or is too entrenched to consider alternative approaches. An example here would be with the disruption of the aerospace industry by SpaceX.