16 ms·

AI Is Useful for Capitalists but Probably Terrible for Anyone Else

100 points by mebassett 4y ago

jefftk 4y ago
The author doesn't get into whether even capitalists will be able to reliably get their AIs to do what they want. Good news: AI may end up being terrible for everyone!
- biscottigelato 4y ago
  Underrated comment.
rogerkirkness 4y ago
Counter arguing the central point: AI will be terrible for capitalists, and great for most others. Reason being, the surplus value created by AI is hard to defend (e.g. models and trade secrets seem to leak out on a 1-2 year timescale). Anything that requires Google scale in 2-3 years will only need iPhone scale. This will lead to hardcore deflation too fast for capitalism to escape, which will be passed on to consumers in the form of surplus discretionary spending income.
- simple-thoughts 4y ago
  If you’re correct, the policy response will be a return to zero interest rate policies and QE, to guarantee that the rate of money creation prevents price deflation. This would result in a massive increase in the monetary price of goods such as real estate, stocks, and nfts. The benefits would primarily go to owners of these assets - whether the owners are public or private will vary from country to country.
  - SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
    There is always war, don’t discount that.
- romeros 4y ago
  Exactly. Imagine every macbook pro/iphone coming up with the open source models preinstalled out of the gate. You don't even need to query google or even see ads. You would have a nightly update that transfers the diffs of the latest news etc.
- nemothekid 4y ago
  This doesn't seem like an effective counterpoint to me; it feels like, to put it harshly, the same sort of conjecture crypto enthusiasts use to point out how Bitcoin will be used to fight the man. The average american is now way more productive but those gains they thought we would get with the advent of the computer (4 day work weeks, 5 hour days) never came; instead Americans work the same, produce more, but get a fewer piece of the pie. If anything I expect these trends to continue as AI becomes more commonplace. In other words, why is this time different?
  - XorNot 4y ago
    Isn't the better question "why is this time unique?" The problem isn't new, it's always existed as a pathology of American society. You already have been trading away the gains of technological improvement to an ever shrinking group of people in control of capital. AI isn't creating a new problem, it's a reminder of an old one. Which should make it clear that even bothering to talk about AI specifically is talking about the wrong issue.
  - chii 4y ago
    > but get a fewer piece of the pie i dont think that's true. The average wealth has grown, and even if you didn't get wage growth, the availability of things you could buy with said wage has grown (which is in and of itself a form of wealth).
    - nemothekid 4y ago
      >i dont think that's true. American productivity/wage gap isn't particularly controversial, it's well documented. >The average wealth has grown Globally yes, but as far as Americans are concerned they largely didn't see their wealth grow as the "Elephant curve" [2] shows. A lot of the wealth growth happened in China and India. >the availability of things you could buy with said wage has grown "You'll own nothing. And you'll be happy" is pretty much what you are saying here. The price of real assets has grown tremendously, but at least you can buy a 60" flatscreen TV for $100. [1] https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ [2] https://www.aeaweb.org/research/charts/elephant-curve-world-inequality https://www.aeaweb.org/research/charts/elephant-curve-world-...
- sp527 4y ago
  "Let them eat AI models on their devices"
motohagiography 4y ago
The term the author is looking for to describe their objection is, "radical monopoly" and it was identified in the 70s. The essential concept refers to a technology that shapes its users to its needs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_monopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_monopoly
ssalka 4y ago
IMO the title would probably be best rephrased as "Centralized/Proprietary AI Is Useful for ..." I think Stable Diffusion, being FOSS & usable on a decent range of consumer hardware, is a pretty clear counterexample to the article's claim - it doesn't matter if you're a capitalist or not, you can get great value from the technology. Funnily, the article totally avoids mentioning SD.
- __loam 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - okwubodu 4y ago
    Isn’t the concept of intellectual property theft a capitalist construct?
    - impalallama 4y ago
      Yes. Such is life in a capitalist societal construct:
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - CuriousCosmic 4y ago
      It is largely capitalist in nature but I don't think it's fair to say that it is solely capitalist. There still exists property in socialism however it exists in collective ownership instead of singular ownership and theft or abuse of that property would still be a thing with socialism. Trademarks would also continue to exist as they generally serve a practical purpose of preventing impersonation of companies, goods, and services. Ownership would be collective among workers as all other property would be and scope requirements for trademark enforcement would likely be limited. Additionally, the subset of copyright that is copyleft fits in very cleanly with socialism. It guarantees the users and the users' users some degree of rights (as well as enforcing attribution which costs nothing). So you could imagine a socialist view of copyright where copyleft is preserved more or less in perpetuity while traditional copyright continues to exist in a limited, reduced form with a shorter lifespan (i.e. 5-10 years instead of death+70/95/120 years). As for patents, it's kind of fuzzy. They don't fit well into any socialist understanding of intellectual property and of all the types of IP that exist, they are the only type that constrains knowledge/inventions/craft/skill as property (vs trademark -> identity and copyright -> specific works/creations). You can argue for ownership of the specific products of your labors and you can argue for ownership your identity but it's near impossible to argue within a socialist framework for ownership of ideas/knowledge in of itself or for ownership of the ability to apply that knowledge. If one was to insist on patents in a socialist society, they'd have to be limited to short lifetimes (i.e. less than 5 years w/ no extension) and copyleft intangibles(ex: software) or products with copyleft manufacturing & design documents would need to be exempt from any exclusivity the patents may grant.
xwdv 4y ago
No way, AI will also be useful in medical fields, or anyone who has to pour over more data that can be parsed in human lifetimes in order to make discoveries, such as a search for extra terrestrial life, or even in the fields of law. Think outside the box.
- romeros 4y ago
  You won't be needing radiologists, family doctors etc. You describe your symptoms and upload the scans, blood tests etc and Dr. ChatGPT will tell you exactly what is wrong with you and the steps you need to take to heal. It would also generate the prescription and have the medication sent to you without you needing to lift a finger.
  - hresvelgr 4y ago
    I actually tried this with someone who is currently attending med school and got him to quiz ChatGPT on diagnosing common and esoteric ailments. According to him, ChatGPT assumed to know the answer when in most cases a good doctor would have asked questions to clarify or be specific to make an accurate diagnosis. In a few of those instances, it misdiagnosed when it could have easily gotten it right just by asking one or two simple follow up questions.
    - avidphantasm 4y ago
      I have had this experience with incurious human doctors as well. We do not need mechanical diagnosticians. We need minds that can think through problems using a mix of logic and intuition built through intensive study and experience.
      - elforce002 4y ago
        My wife is a Doctor. I think I'd never put my life in any "AI" system. This is not trial & error where you can start over.
  - avidphantasm 4y ago
Imnimo 4y ago
>There are only a handful of companies with enough data to be able to train artificial intelligence algorithms. https://commoncrawl.org/ https://commoncrawl.org/
- janalsncm 4y ago
  Data isn’t the only bottleneck. Training models at scale is an expensive and difficult engineering task. It’s something that the “data is the new gold” people always seem to overlook. And then even if you have the data and the engineering talent, it takes competent leadership to deploy a product and shepherd it to success. (Looking at Google’s graveyard here)
  - Imnimo 4y ago
    Totally agree. Data is a problem when you need millions of labels, but when your training corpus is just "all the text I can find on the internet" and the training objective is self-supervised, it's not what's stopping people. But as you say, actually training a model of this size is really, really tricky. You can't just grab a few ML engineers off the street, write a check to AWS for some compute and have your own GPT-3.
greesil 4y ago
You could probably say this about anything that improves productivity. FWIW it would be nice if there was a safety net in place to help people recover from having their jobs automated out of existence.
- lamename 4y ago
  I agree. I think it's imperative, but will come piecemeal...one industry at a time, and always too late.
  - greesil 4y ago
    Piecemeal or possibly never. Ugh
- hresvelgr 4y ago
  > You could probably say this about anything that improves productivity. AI does not improve productivity in the technical sense. Productivity improvements are the result of using better tools. I would classify better tools as force multipliers. AI is a force replacement as far as I'm concerned. If I'm using stable diffusion, I'm not painting, I'm writing prompts and hoping I get what I want. It's as far removed from the actual practice as it can be.
  - greesil 4y ago
    I can produce more articles, or legal filings, more SEO spam, faster. That seems like a productivity gain.
    - hresvelgr 4y ago
      Well, you aren't, ChatGPT is. In spirit, it's the equivalent of asking someone else to do a job for you. You wouldn't claim you wrote that article, legal filing, SEO spam, etc, you'd say an AI did it. If you used Photoshop to manipulate an image over using MS Paint, you wouldn't say that Photoshop made the image for you, because it didn't, you did. Grammarly doesn't write your articles for you, you do. They just maximise your efforts.
boringg 4y ago
This seems like its written to meet the authors agenda.
- akprasad 4y ago
  Is that not the case for all essays?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
thadt 4y ago
Yep - had this discussion today. The problem is that building high quality modern 'AI' tools requires a metric assload of data. Right now everyone is running around scraping the Internet indiscriminately for that data and building the best things that they can. The next step is that the creators of said training data want their cut, and the lawyers step in and shake out the industry for the next few years. Precedent is set, laws are made and content creators get to license their data for training these AI models. Once those laws are in place, the moat is dug - and large corporations with access to capital vacuum up good training data in bulk. The whole time loudly proclaiming that they're 'empowering creators' and 'rewarding original thinkers.' Now the large corporations have the largest and best datasets tied up and neat, deep moat. Any startup wanting to challenge the incumbents could have significantly better models, but without access to the same quality and volume of training data, they'll be at a massive disadvantage.
- mountainriver 4y ago
  Eh not really, we aren’t far off from AI being able to use browsers just like humans and operate in the world like us. There are no reasonable laws that will be able to prevent this
  - chii 4y ago
    > There are no reasonable laws that will be able to prevent this any law can be legislated, if it can be put down as text. It may be considered unreasonable, but if the majority of people _do_ agree, then it could be done.
  - anon291 4y ago
    Yeah there are... There is no fair use for AI. Fair use is about human rights to their own thoughts. AI does not have that. The law is simple... You have to have a license to the data to train a model with that data. If you don't... Get ready to be sued.
    - biscottigelato 4y ago
      Becareful of regulatory capture tho. If the one with AI headstart can capture a huge swath of value, said value can be used to lobby and bribe legislators or the executives of the government. There's no good way to put the AI genie back in the bottle, or make sure it will not create catastrophic undesired consequences. Only way is forward, even if there is no good path in sight.
abeppu 4y ago
When AI provides value that formerly would have been provided by workers, that change allows capital to capture a larger share of the revenue. If this isn't counter-balanced, I think we have to call on the tools that Piketty and others have been advocating: institute wealth taxes, create giant sovereign wealth funds, and give every young person universal inheritance. If we really believe that AI will create a bigger pie, but exacerbate inequality, then let's build better tools for dealing with inequality. But the other side of this is that large corporations will have the upper hand in AI only if the success of that AI is dependent on their other advantages (like having tons of data about all of us). The fact that model architectures are getting somewhat universalized seems to suggest that eventually there may be some highly reusable building blocks that will provide good outcomes ... when trained on enough data with enough diversity. And that data comes from everyone; if we insist on different data governance principles, we could support an ecosystem where anyone can create, train, and run their own AI services.
- biscottigelato 4y ago
  Counter big AI with big government. Dystopian hellscape.
  - piva00 4y ago
    Be more insightful then, what's your counter-proposal to that?
- flangola7 4y ago
  The problem with this idea is it runs counter to any hope of AI alignment and differential technology development. You can't solve the control problem by throwing out what little control you still have. If dumping laundry detergent into a pile creates gold, but once the pile reaches 1 million lbs it causes the Earth to explode, you have to find a way that no one can gather such a pile. Not "democratize" the practice and letting anyone anywhere have as much detergent as they wish.
webdoodle 4y ago
> AI Is Useful for Fascist Propagandists but Probably Terrible for Anyone Else FTFY
taneq 4y ago
Technology as a whole is more useful for people with more resources. When animal husbandry was invented, the shepherd with one sheep still had one sheep at the end of the season, while the shepherd with two sheep might have three at the end of the season.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
olalonde 4y ago
This is an ancient fallacy in economics going back to the mechanization of farm labor. The beauty of capitalism is that what's good for capitalists is also good for everyone else. Jobs will be lost but the standard of living will increase for everyone and new jobs created. Until we reach AGI, at which point we can all collectively retire and just do whatever we want.
- nwiswell 4y ago
  You should probably read some Piketty. There is absolutely nothing which structurally ensures that the wealth created by capitalist pursuits will be distributed sufficiently to ensure that standards of living will increase for everyone, and in fact there are a lot of reasons to believe that the past century was an anomaly in that regard.
  - andsoitis 4y ago
    Why does Pikkety think that capitalism is not the major engine that has been increasing the standard of living for people worldwide? Does he think something else has been the essential motor behind that improvement in the material condition of humans around the world?
    - nwiswell 4y ago
      https://hbr.org/2014/04/pikettys-capital-in-a-lot-less-than-696-pages https://hbr.org/2014/04/pikettys-capital-in-a-lot-less-than-...
- thebradbain 4y ago
  Or, more likely, based on all of human history, you have a few people at the top who “own” the AI, gatekeep and charge for access to it, own the IP-equivalent of whatever it produces, and life will continue as normal for 80%-99% of peasants/laborers working for the lucky few AI-aristocrats. Even if AGI itself was “good”, that does not mean it will be used or deployed fairly and equitably. In fact, I’d posit without major regulation it will just increase the wealth gap
Centigonal 4y ago
This is an extension to the idea that automation is a form of "resource curse" that creates social stratification in a similar way to diamonds or oil. Being able to automate valuable work means you need a smaller coalition of power brokers to maintain the bulk of your GDP, meaning a government can remain in power with the support of an ever-shrinking class of influential people. This is something people have been talking about for decades, with semi-serious proposals like a tax for robots being thrown around. The people in power have yet to take a hard look at any of it, though -- and why should they? It's a safer bet to curry favor with the ever-shrinking circle of influential people. The core problem in my opinion is how to create an incentive for politicians today to put into place measures to combat this consolidation of power. The longer we wait, the stronger the incentives against liberal democracy become, and the harder it will be to make a change.
- XorNot 4y ago
  The problem is that all the aggressive proposals come far in advance of the technology actually being even remotely ready (robots don't serve me meals from McDonalds yet, the minimum-wage worker robotic replacement hasn't happened - it probably won't happen in my lifetime). They're somewhere between reactionary efforts to strangle the technology in the crib, and just completely misinformed naval-gazing by people with nothing better to do - proposing fictional scenarios to argue about rather then dealing with real data.
  - sp527 4y ago
    It's kind of hilarious you chose automating McDonald's as your benchmark, seeing as a proof of concept literally just went live. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mcdonalds-automated-restaurant-robots-drive-thru-conveyer-belt/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mcdonalds-automated-restaurant-...
freemanon 4y ago
It would be useful to a Communist society, one that is able to re-distribute wealth amongst the population. Of course, americans find the very word revolting, but that's what countries like China have the possibility of achieving in the future, while the US is stuck in their ideological dogma and obsession of capitalism, "democracy" and to some extent evangelical christianism.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  You should try stable diffusion with fantasy prompt writing like that. Might make something cool, hey, you can sell it! (I think, I have no idea what the copyright rules are and don’t care, not an artist, but I can make crazy good pictures now)
  - freemanon 4y ago
    These days most americans type like AI bots parroting the propaganda they absorbed from the media. It's the perfect system, populated by serfs toiling for their slavemasters, while blinded by ideologies, forgetting how miserable the typical american life is. Barely 10 days holiday per year, no universal healthcare, car-infested cities, unsafe cities filled by homelessness, racial tension all over the country, drug addiction, and many more. The US is a living nightmare yet people like you are blinded to think you're still the best in the world. Pity.
janalsncm 4y ago
This is because corporations are a type of AI. The squishy human parts that make up a corporation are expensive and ripe for being automated away.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
icapybara 4y ago
I see Hacker News is susceptible to the same anti-status-quo radicalism that Reddit and many other online forums are.
matt3210 4y ago
Capitalists will optimize all the joy out of everything they touch.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  That’s probably true… but at least the mass murders are kept to a minimum, so there is still that going for it.
  - ronsor 4y ago
    Mass murders are usually unprofitable.
  - avidphantasm 4y ago
    The US has done plenty of killing in SE Asia and Central and South America in defense of capitalism.
    - biscottigelato 4y ago
      Definitely not in defence of free market capitalism. In defence of an oligarchy more like.
      - skinnymuch 4y ago
        It’s in defense of capitalism. Most coups are against what leftists want — socialism. Otherwise why would the US do things like get a million plus Indonesian Muslim communist sympathizers murdered by right wingers in 65? America has gone after every non capitalist country and does agitprop for places like Tibet or Taiwan and capitalists as a whole while vilifying and trying to overthrow Cuba.
        freemanon 4y ago
        It's nothing to do with capitalism, it's all about installing regimes that are pro-US, and allow US enterprises to exploit these countries. Indonesia has a lot of resources, including the Grasberg mine in west Papua, that it leases out to US companies with very little benefit for the local population, instead pocketing millions in bribes. It's also a huge country of 200+ million of huge geopolitical importance. The US is simply a thug. It has too much firepower for its own good. It's drunk on its ideologies of freedom or democracy or what have you, that it can never recognise its mistakes.
AlbertCory 4y ago
In 2017, I wrote this as a "retrospective interview" supposedly taking place in 2019. https://issuu.com/stanfordchaparral/docs/parody_119_3-4/17 https://issuu.com/stanfordchaparral/docs/parody_119_3-4/17 To summarize: Larry Page is bragging about how, in 2017, Alphabet created a "data REIT" which contained all of Google's data, and licensed it on FRAND terms to all comers. As a "REIT" it's required to pay out 95% of its profits as dividends, and everyone whose data they use is a shareholder in the "REIT." Yes, I know that's not what REIT's are for. This would take legislation, as Larry hints in the interview. Basically, the AI training data is nationalized, with compensation to the owners, i.e. Google, FB, etc. You could argue, and people would, about who deserves compensation. Congress would have to do its job, for once. In this "interview" Larry is bragging about how well this worked out for Google, since the clients of Google Data can make much better use of the data than Google itself can.
jredwards 4y ago
That seems to be true of almost any significant technological advancement. I would argue that the proper response as a society is to socialize the benefits of these developments in order to stem the otherwise inevitable spreading of the wealth gap. I'm sure someone will eventually call me a commie for such wild notions.
- biscottigelato 4y ago
  That's the exact problem. AI is centralizing. So is empowering the government. Not to mention if AI development is heavily red-taped in one jurisdiction, its development will simply move to a more lax jurisdiction. It makes things even worse. No matter how you slice it, the rich gets richer, those in power centres in government gets more power, and the majority in the lower middle class loses the most.
andsoitis 4y ago
> unless AI is open-source and truly owned by the end users This misses the deeper reality, in my view. AI is predicated on and bootstrapped by the free labor of others. Even if it were “open source” and “owned” by end-users, AI fundamentally requires people to do free work. That’s the problem with it.
suvelule 4y ago
ai is definitely providing us with cheaper knowledge labor. but that's not a bad thing for human knowledge workers. ai is enabling societies to have less expenses. this means more money to spend on the quality of life of everyone. we should push for that.
antisthenes 4y ago
Anything that increases capital-intensity of output, compared to labor intensity (good old Cobb-Douglas production function) will be good for the capitalists. Y = K^(1-x)*L^(x) Here's ONE WEIRD TRICK that CAPITALISTS HATE. Increase X.
loa_in_ 4y ago
Profit driven solutions always serve profit above all else
bearnax 4y ago
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” ― Frank Herbert, Dune

100 points by mebassett 4y ago

The author doesn't get into whether even capitalists will be able to reliably get their AIs to do what they want. Good news: AI may end up being terrible for everyone!

biscottigelato 4y ago
Underrated comment.

rogerkirkness 4y ago

Counter arguing the central point: AI will be terrible for capitalists, and great for most others. Reason being, the surplus value created by AI is hard to defend (e.g. models and trade secrets seem to leak out on a 1-2 year timescale). Anything that requires Google scale in 2-3 years will only need iPhone scale. This will lead to hardcore deflation too fast for capitalism to escape, which will be passed on to consumers in the form of surplus discretionary spending income.

simple-thoughts 4y ago
If you’re correct, the policy response will be a return to zero interest rate policies and QE, to guarantee that the rate of money creation prevents price deflation. This would result in a massive increase in the monetary price of goods such as real estate, stocks, and nfts. The benefits would primarily go to owners of these assets - whether the owners are public or private will vary from country to country.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  There is always war, don’t discount that.
romeros 4y ago
Exactly. Imagine every macbook pro/iphone coming up with the open source models preinstalled out of the gate. You don't even need to query google or even see ads. You would have a nightly update that transfers the diffs of the latest news etc.
nemothekid 4y ago
This doesn't seem like an effective counterpoint to me; it feels like, to put it harshly, the same sort of conjecture crypto enthusiasts use to point out how Bitcoin will be used to fight the man. The average american is now way more productive but those gains they thought we would get with the advent of the computer (4 day work weeks, 5 hour days) never came; instead Americans work the same, produce more, but get a fewer piece of the pie. If anything I expect these trends to continue as AI becomes more commonplace. In other words, why is this time different?
- XorNot 4y ago
  Isn't the better question "why is this time unique?" The problem isn't new, it's always existed as a pathology of American society. You already have been trading away the gains of technological improvement to an ever shrinking group of people in control of capital. AI isn't creating a new problem, it's a reminder of an old one. Which should make it clear that even bothering to talk about AI specifically is talking about the wrong issue.
- chii 4y ago
  > but get a fewer piece of the pie i dont think that's true. The average wealth has grown, and even if you didn't get wage growth, the availability of things you could buy with said wage has grown (which is in and of itself a form of wealth).
  - nemothekid 4y ago
    >i dont think that's true. American productivity/wage gap isn't particularly controversial, it's well documented. >The average wealth has grown Globally yes, but as far as Americans are concerned they largely didn't see their wealth grow as the "Elephant curve" [2] shows. A lot of the wealth growth happened in China and India. >the availability of things you could buy with said wage has grown "You'll own nothing. And you'll be happy" is pretty much what you are saying here. The price of real assets has grown tremendously, but at least you can buy a 60" flatscreen TV for $100. [1] https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ [2] https://www.aeaweb.org/research/charts/elephant-curve-world-inequality https://www.aeaweb.org/research/charts/elephant-curve-world-...
sp527 4y ago
"Let them eat AI models on their devices"

motohagiography 4y ago

The term the author is looking for to describe their objection is, "radical monopoly" and it was identified in the 70s. The essential concept refers to a technology that shapes its users to its needs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_monopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_monopoly

ssalka 4y ago

IMO the title would probably be best rephrased as "Centralized/Proprietary AI Is Useful for ..." I think Stable Diffusion, being FOSS & usable on a decent range of consumer hardware, is a pretty clear counterexample to the article's claim - it doesn't matter if you're a capitalist or not, you can get great value from the technology. Funnily, the article totally avoids mentioning SD.

__loam 4y ago
[flagged]
- okwubodu 4y ago
  Isn’t the concept of intellectual property theft a capitalist construct?
  - impalallama 4y ago
    Yes. Such is life in a capitalist societal construct:
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - CuriousCosmic 4y ago
    It is largely capitalist in nature but I don't think it's fair to say that it is solely capitalist. There still exists property in socialism however it exists in collective ownership instead of singular ownership and theft or abuse of that property would still be a thing with socialism. Trademarks would also continue to exist as they generally serve a practical purpose of preventing impersonation of companies, goods, and services. Ownership would be collective among workers as all other property would be and scope requirements for trademark enforcement would likely be limited. Additionally, the subset of copyright that is copyleft fits in very cleanly with socialism. It guarantees the users and the users' users some degree of rights (as well as enforcing attribution which costs nothing). So you could imagine a socialist view of copyright where copyleft is preserved more or less in perpetuity while traditional copyright continues to exist in a limited, reduced form with a shorter lifespan (i.e. 5-10 years instead of death+70/95/120 years). As for patents, it's kind of fuzzy. They don't fit well into any socialist understanding of intellectual property and of all the types of IP that exist, they are the only type that constrains knowledge/inventions/craft/skill as property (vs trademark -> identity and copyright -> specific works/creations). You can argue for ownership of the specific products of your labors and you can argue for ownership your identity but it's near impossible to argue within a socialist framework for ownership of ideas/knowledge in of itself or for ownership of the ability to apply that knowledge. If one was to insist on patents in a socialist society, they'd have to be limited to short lifetimes (i.e. less than 5 years w/ no extension) and copyleft intangibles(ex: software) or products with copyleft manufacturing & design documents would need to be exempt from any exclusivity the patents may grant.

xwdv 4y ago

No way, AI will also be useful in medical fields, or anyone who has to pour over more data that can be parsed in human lifetimes in order to make discoveries, such as a search for extra terrestrial life, or even in the fields of law. Think outside the box.

romeros 4y ago
You won't be needing radiologists, family doctors etc. You describe your symptoms and upload the scans, blood tests etc and Dr. ChatGPT will tell you exactly what is wrong with you and the steps you need to take to heal. It would also generate the prescription and have the medication sent to you without you needing to lift a finger.
- hresvelgr 4y ago
  I actually tried this with someone who is currently attending med school and got him to quiz ChatGPT on diagnosing common and esoteric ailments. According to him, ChatGPT assumed to know the answer when in most cases a good doctor would have asked questions to clarify or be specific to make an accurate diagnosis. In a few of those instances, it misdiagnosed when it could have easily gotten it right just by asking one or two simple follow up questions.
  - avidphantasm 4y ago
    I have had this experience with incurious human doctors as well. We do not need mechanical diagnosticians. We need minds that can think through problems using a mix of logic and intuition built through intensive study and experience.
    - elforce002 4y ago
      My wife is a Doctor. I think I'd never put my life in any "AI" system. This is not trial & error where you can start over.
- avidphantasm 4y ago

Imnimo 4y ago

>There are only a handful of companies with enough data to be able to train artificial intelligence algorithms. https://commoncrawl.org/ https://commoncrawl.org/

janalsncm 4y ago
Data isn’t the only bottleneck. Training models at scale is an expensive and difficult engineering task. It’s something that the “data is the new gold” people always seem to overlook. And then even if you have the data and the engineering talent, it takes competent leadership to deploy a product and shepherd it to success. (Looking at Google’s graveyard here)
- Imnimo 4y ago
  Totally agree. Data is a problem when you need millions of labels, but when your training corpus is just "all the text I can find on the internet" and the training objective is self-supervised, it's not what's stopping people. But as you say, actually training a model of this size is really, really tricky. You can't just grab a few ML engineers off the street, write a check to AWS for some compute and have your own GPT-3.

greesil 4y ago

You could probably say this about anything that improves productivity. FWIW it would be nice if there was a safety net in place to help people recover from having their jobs automated out of existence.

lamename 4y ago
I agree. I think it's imperative, but will come piecemeal...one industry at a time, and always too late.
- greesil 4y ago
  Piecemeal or possibly never. Ugh
hresvelgr 4y ago
> You could probably say this about anything that improves productivity. AI does not improve productivity in the technical sense. Productivity improvements are the result of using better tools. I would classify better tools as force multipliers. AI is a force replacement as far as I'm concerned. If I'm using stable diffusion, I'm not painting, I'm writing prompts and hoping I get what I want. It's as far removed from the actual practice as it can be.
- greesil 4y ago
  I can produce more articles, or legal filings, more SEO spam, faster. That seems like a productivity gain.
  - hresvelgr 4y ago
    Well, you aren't, ChatGPT is. In spirit, it's the equivalent of asking someone else to do a job for you. You wouldn't claim you wrote that article, legal filing, SEO spam, etc, you'd say an AI did it. If you used Photoshop to manipulate an image over using MS Paint, you wouldn't say that Photoshop made the image for you, because it didn't, you did. Grammarly doesn't write your articles for you, you do. They just maximise your efforts.

boringg 4y ago

This seems like its written to meet the authors agenda.

akprasad 4y ago
Is that not the case for all essays?
- deleted 4y ago
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thadt 4y ago

Yep - had this discussion today. The problem is that building high quality modern 'AI' tools requires a metric assload of data. Right now everyone is running around scraping the Internet indiscriminately for that data and building the best things that they can. The next step is that the creators of said training data want their cut, and the lawyers step in and shake out the industry for the next few years. Precedent is set, laws are made and content creators get to license their data for training these AI models. Once those laws are in place, the moat is dug - and large corporations with access to capital vacuum up good training data in bulk. The whole time loudly proclaiming that they're 'empowering creators' and 'rewarding original thinkers.' Now the large corporations have the largest and best datasets tied up and neat, deep moat. Any startup wanting to challenge the incumbents could have significantly better models, but without access to the same quality and volume of training data, they'll be at a massive disadvantage.

mountainriver 4y ago
Eh not really, we aren’t far off from AI being able to use browsers just like humans and operate in the world like us. There are no reasonable laws that will be able to prevent this
- chii 4y ago
  > There are no reasonable laws that will be able to prevent this any law can be legislated, if it can be put down as text. It may be considered unreasonable, but if the majority of people _do_ agree, then it could be done.
- anon291 4y ago
  Yeah there are... There is no fair use for AI. Fair use is about human rights to their own thoughts. AI does not have that. The law is simple... You have to have a license to the data to train a model with that data. If you don't... Get ready to be sued.
  - biscottigelato 4y ago
    Becareful of regulatory capture tho. If the one with AI headstart can capture a huge swath of value, said value can be used to lobby and bribe legislators or the executives of the government. There's no good way to put the AI genie back in the bottle, or make sure it will not create catastrophic undesired consequences. Only way is forward, even if there is no good path in sight.

abeppu 4y ago

When AI provides value that formerly would have been provided by workers, that change allows capital to capture a larger share of the revenue. If this isn't counter-balanced, I think we have to call on the tools that Piketty and others have been advocating: institute wealth taxes, create giant sovereign wealth funds, and give every young person universal inheritance. If we really believe that AI will create a bigger pie, but exacerbate inequality, then let's build better tools for dealing with inequality. But the other side of this is that large corporations will have the upper hand in AI only if the success of that AI is dependent on their other advantages (like having tons of data about all of us). The fact that model architectures are getting somewhat universalized seems to suggest that eventually there may be some highly reusable building blocks that will provide good outcomes ... when trained on enough data with enough diversity. And that data comes from everyone; if we insist on different data governance principles, we could support an ecosystem where anyone can create, train, and run their own AI services.

biscottigelato 4y ago
Counter big AI with big government. Dystopian hellscape.
- piva00 4y ago
  Be more insightful then, what's your counter-proposal to that?
flangola7 4y ago
The problem with this idea is it runs counter to any hope of AI alignment and differential technology development. You can't solve the control problem by throwing out what little control you still have. If dumping laundry detergent into a pile creates gold, but once the pile reaches 1 million lbs it causes the Earth to explode, you have to find a way that no one can gather such a pile. Not "democratize" the practice and letting anyone anywhere have as much detergent as they wish.

webdoodle 4y ago

> AI Is Useful for Fascist Propagandists but Probably Terrible for Anyone Else FTFY

taneq 4y ago

Technology as a whole is more useful for people with more resources. When animal husbandry was invented, the shepherd with one sheep still had one sheep at the end of the season, while the shepherd with two sheep might have three at the end of the season.

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olalonde 4y ago

This is an ancient fallacy in economics going back to the mechanization of farm labor. The beauty of capitalism is that what's good for capitalists is also good for everyone else. Jobs will be lost but the standard of living will increase for everyone and new jobs created. Until we reach AGI, at which point we can all collectively retire and just do whatever we want.

nwiswell 4y ago
You should probably read some Piketty. There is absolutely nothing which structurally ensures that the wealth created by capitalist pursuits will be distributed sufficiently to ensure that standards of living will increase for everyone, and in fact there are a lot of reasons to believe that the past century was an anomaly in that regard.
- andsoitis 4y ago
  Why does Pikkety think that capitalism is not the major engine that has been increasing the standard of living for people worldwide? Does he think something else has been the essential motor behind that improvement in the material condition of humans around the world?
  - nwiswell 4y ago
    https://hbr.org/2014/04/pikettys-capital-in-a-lot-less-than-696-pages https://hbr.org/2014/04/pikettys-capital-in-a-lot-less-than-...
thebradbain 4y ago
Or, more likely, based on all of human history, you have a few people at the top who “own” the AI, gatekeep and charge for access to it, own the IP-equivalent of whatever it produces, and life will continue as normal for 80%-99% of peasants/laborers working for the lucky few AI-aristocrats. Even if AGI itself was “good”, that does not mean it will be used or deployed fairly and equitably. In fact, I’d posit without major regulation it will just increase the wealth gap

Centigonal 4y ago

This is an extension to the idea that automation is a form of "resource curse" that creates social stratification in a similar way to diamonds or oil. Being able to automate valuable work means you need a smaller coalition of power brokers to maintain the bulk of your GDP, meaning a government can remain in power with the support of an ever-shrinking class of influential people. This is something people have been talking about for decades, with semi-serious proposals like a tax for robots being thrown around. The people in power have yet to take a hard look at any of it, though -- and why should they? It's a safer bet to curry favor with the ever-shrinking circle of influential people. The core problem in my opinion is how to create an incentive for politicians today to put into place measures to combat this consolidation of power. The longer we wait, the stronger the incentives against liberal democracy become, and the harder it will be to make a change.

XorNot 4y ago
The problem is that all the aggressive proposals come far in advance of the technology actually being even remotely ready (robots don't serve me meals from McDonalds yet, the minimum-wage worker robotic replacement hasn't happened - it probably won't happen in my lifetime). They're somewhere between reactionary efforts to strangle the technology in the crib, and just completely misinformed naval-gazing by people with nothing better to do - proposing fictional scenarios to argue about rather then dealing with real data.
- sp527 4y ago
  It's kind of hilarious you chose automating McDonald's as your benchmark, seeing as a proof of concept literally just went live. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mcdonalds-automated-restaurant-robots-drive-thru-conveyer-belt/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mcdonalds-automated-restaurant-...

freemanon 4y ago

It would be useful to a Communist society, one that is able to re-distribute wealth amongst the population. Of course, americans find the very word revolting, but that's what countries like China have the possibility of achieving in the future, while the US is stuck in their ideological dogma and obsession of capitalism, "democracy" and to some extent evangelical christianism.

SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
You should try stable diffusion with fantasy prompt writing like that. Might make something cool, hey, you can sell it! (I think, I have no idea what the copyright rules are and don’t care, not an artist, but I can make crazy good pictures now)
- freemanon 4y ago
  These days most americans type like AI bots parroting the propaganda they absorbed from the media. It's the perfect system, populated by serfs toiling for their slavemasters, while blinded by ideologies, forgetting how miserable the typical american life is. Barely 10 days holiday per year, no universal healthcare, car-infested cities, unsafe cities filled by homelessness, racial tension all over the country, drug addiction, and many more. The US is a living nightmare yet people like you are blinded to think you're still the best in the world. Pity.

janalsncm 4y ago

This is because corporations are a type of AI. The squishy human parts that make up a corporation are expensive and ripe for being automated away.

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icapybara 4y ago

I see Hacker News is susceptible to the same anti-status-quo radicalism that Reddit and many other online forums are.

matt3210 4y ago

Capitalists will optimize all the joy out of everything they touch.

SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
That’s probably true… but at least the mass murders are kept to a minimum, so there is still that going for it.
- ronsor 4y ago
  Mass murders are usually unprofitable.
- avidphantasm 4y ago
  The US has done plenty of killing in SE Asia and Central and South America in defense of capitalism.
  - biscottigelato 4y ago
    Definitely not in defence of free market capitalism. In defence of an oligarchy more like.
    - skinnymuch 4y ago
      It’s in defense of capitalism. Most coups are against what leftists want — socialism. Otherwise why would the US do things like get a million plus Indonesian Muslim communist sympathizers murdered by right wingers in 65? America has gone after every non capitalist country and does agitprop for places like Tibet or Taiwan and capitalists as a whole while vilifying and trying to overthrow Cuba.
      - freemanon 4y ago
        It's nothing to do with capitalism, it's all about installing regimes that are pro-US, and allow US enterprises to exploit these countries. Indonesia has a lot of resources, including the Grasberg mine in west Papua, that it leases out to US companies with very little benefit for the local population, instead pocketing millions in bribes. It's also a huge country of 200+ million of huge geopolitical importance. The US is simply a thug. It has too much firepower for its own good. It's drunk on its ideologies of freedom or democracy or what have you, that it can never recognise its mistakes.

AlbertCory 4y ago

In 2017, I wrote this as a "retrospective interview" supposedly taking place in 2019. https://issuu.com/stanfordchaparral/docs/parody_119_3-4/17 https://issuu.com/stanfordchaparral/docs/parody_119_3-4/17 To summarize: Larry Page is bragging about how, in 2017, Alphabet created a "data REIT" which contained all of Google's data, and licensed it on FRAND terms to all comers. As a "REIT" it's required to pay out 95% of its profits as dividends, and everyone whose data they use is a shareholder in the "REIT." Yes, I know that's not what REIT's are for. This would take legislation, as Larry hints in the interview. Basically, the AI training data is nationalized, with compensation to the owners, i.e. Google, FB, etc. You could argue, and people would, about who deserves compensation. Congress would have to do its job, for once. In this "interview" Larry is bragging about how well this worked out for Google, since the clients of Google Data can make much better use of the data than Google itself can.

jredwards 4y ago

That seems to be true of almost any significant technological advancement. I would argue that the proper response as a society is to socialize the benefits of these developments in order to stem the otherwise inevitable spreading of the wealth gap. I'm sure someone will eventually call me a commie for such wild notions.

biscottigelato 4y ago
That's the exact problem. AI is centralizing. So is empowering the government. Not to mention if AI development is heavily red-taped in one jurisdiction, its development will simply move to a more lax jurisdiction. It makes things even worse. No matter how you slice it, the rich gets richer, those in power centres in government gets more power, and the majority in the lower middle class loses the most.

andsoitis 4y ago

> unless AI is open-source and truly owned by the end users This misses the deeper reality, in my view. AI is predicated on and bootstrapped by the free labor of others. Even if it were “open source” and “owned” by end-users, AI fundamentally requires people to do free work. That’s the problem with it.

suvelule 4y ago

ai is definitely providing us with cheaper knowledge labor. but that's not a bad thing for human knowledge workers. ai is enabling societies to have less expenses. this means more money to spend on the quality of life of everyone. we should push for that.

antisthenes 4y ago

Anything that increases capital-intensity of output, compared to labor intensity (good old Cobb-Douglas production function) will be good for the capitalists. Y = K^(1-x)*L^(x) Here's ONE WEIRD TRICK that CAPITALISTS HATE. Increase X.

loa_in_ 4y ago

Profit driven solutions always serve profit above all else

bearnax 4y ago

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” ― Frank Herbert, Dune