8 ms·

The big question is what "society" he is talking about? Is it the "society" that includes all people, or the "society" that includes only rich people?

• brookst 1y ago
  Which of those did the Internet benefit?
  • lomase 1y ago
    Is AI at the same level of global instant comunication and gigabites of bandwidth?
    • strombofulous 1y ago
      Does it have to be for the analogy to work?
      • anthem2025 1y ago
        [dead]
    • lemonlearnings 1y ago
      Probably. The the internet was more clear cut. Moores law all the things. Governments investing in pipe etc. AI harder to tell. Will 2026 models kick 2025 ass or just be slightly better. Who knows.
  • Retric 1y ago
    Is the average person actually better off after the late 90’s internet is probably a harder question than it might seem. The long tail may be closer to what I want, but the quality is also generally lower. YouTube just doesn’t support a team of talented writers, Amazon is mostly filled with junk, etc. Social media and gig work is a mixed bag. Junk e-mail etc may not be a big deal, but those kinds of downsides do erode the net benefit.
    • amscanne 1y ago
      Are you being objective or just romanticizing the past? Just to use your example: YouTube is filled with talented writers and storytellers, who would have never been able to share their content in the past. *And* the traditional media complex is richer than ever. I don’t think average quality matters. Just what you want to consume. If anything, I’d be more open to the opposite argument. Media is so much richer and more engaging that it actually makes our lives worse. The quality of the drugs is too high!
      • glohbalrob 1y ago
        Media is rich but not in proportion of the thousands of new creators doing very well. An extreme example is playboy vs only fans creators
        • bobthepanda 1y ago
          show business and things like it are famously pyramidal in shape. there are decades' worth of people who couldn't make it in previous generations in Los Angeles and New York. i think what is relatively new is the unaffordability crisis making it so doing such pursuits and not being that successful is no longer a way to make a living on its own.
      • Retric 1y ago
        I was trying to be objective which is why I didn’t try to compare individual shows. Thus average production quality seems like a useful metric. There’s currently a handful of “traditional media/streaming” shows with absolutely crazy budgets today and if you happen to like them then that’s great. However, if you don’t things quickly fall off a cliff in terms of production quality. The same is true of YouTube. The quality of 50,000 one man operations is irrelevant if you happen to like MrBeast, but if you don’t like MrBeast budgets drop off fast. A reasonable argument is you and everyone else may prefer a specific YouTube cooking show over Baking with Julia or other 90’s show with a much her budget, but there where several options to chose from. Thus purely objectively even if 90’s TV had lower maximum budgets the floor being relatively high is worth taking into consideration.
  • gyomu 1y ago
    Would you rather be a 22 year old starting in life in 2025 or 1995? Unless you pick one of the few countries that underwent a drastic change of regime in that time, the answer’s pretty clear to me.
    • anonzzzies 1y ago
      1995 (and I was 22 in 1995)
    • naijaboiler 1y ago
      Ib the US, 1995 by far!!!
    • jfyi 1y ago
      Given my skillset at age 22? Yeah, I'll take 1995. I was old enough to grow up hearing how great the world was going to be if I learned computer programming just to enter the job force at the start of the dotcom bubble burst. 1995 would have been a major upgrade. Also, knocking that almost decade off my birthday would assure that I spent most of my adult life with the luxury of thinking that energy didn't have negative externalities that were being forced on later generations. We had Chomsky-esq "any major world power is kind of fascist if you think about it" instead of literal talk by politicians about putting people in camps if they don't like your diet or country of origin. TV was pretty bad I guess but music was great and I read more back then. There was a lot of huffing and puffing about gang violence. I grew up on the street the local gang named themselves after and it only marginally touched my life at all. Housing was dirt cheap, food was dirt cheap, gas was dirt cheap. There was undeveloped land everywhere around the city I live in and it gave a general sense of potential. What exactly was so bad about the 90's?
      • StackRanker3000 1y ago
        Yes, the US was in a particularly prosperous and exciting period compared to much of the rest of the world in 1995. If you’re, say, Chinese, chances are you find life in 2025 much more appealing Overall, life is better in 2025 for the vast majority of humans. Life expectancy, child mortality, health (despite the obesity epidemic, which is a result of an abundance that has eliminated hunger and food insecurity from large swathes of the globe), purchasing power, access to technology and entertainment, etc, etc… That some people in the US are feeling disillusioned because housing has become more unaffordable (partly because of regulations and technological advancements that have improved their quality and safety) and that they don’t have the same incredible economic trajectory as the preceding generations, especially since WWII, doesn’t negate that. A run like that can’t last forever, especially since it to a large extent depends on having a relative advantage over the rest of the world - at some point, they’ll start to catch up Much of the same dynamics apply to Europe, too
• bko 1y ago
  ChatGPT currently has ~ 120 to 190 million daily active users ~ 800 million weekly active users ~ 450 million to over 800 million depending on the data source and methodology. Get a grip. Hundreds of millions of people are using it, most of them for free. I would say "society" has benefited. This has to be peak HN. Create the fastest growing consumer product in history. HN anon: yes, but who will benefit?
  • ceejayoz 1y ago
    Facebook has more. Was it a benefit? Does the benefit outweigh the harms?
    • bko 1y ago
      Yes, Facebook is a benefit. Among other things, it gave me React which much of the modern web is built on, and React Native, PyTorch, GraphQL, Cassandra, Presto, and RocksDB just to name a few. The question is, what are billions of people doing on Facebook if it's harmful? I don't know. My daycare sends me updates, my barbershop tells me when they're closing and I used it to sell my fridge. This hole Facebook irrational hate is ridiculously overblown. It's an app, and compared to things like TikTok that is essentially a Chinese psy-op, it's really a great product.
      • danielheath 1y ago
        > The question is, what are billions of people doing on Facebook if it's harmful? Perhaps _you_ don’t know. It’s quite notorious for being the place to organise the genocide over in Myanmar. IMO, that should disqualify every executive or engineer who knew (and did nothing) from ever again being involved with widely-used infrastructure.
      • uncomputation 1y ago
        > what are billions of people doing on Facebook if it's harmful? I don't know. This is extremely naive and akin to asking "why do people drink if it’s bad for you then??" Popular != healthy
• javierluraschi 1y ago
  It will benefit all people but it will disproportionally benefit more rich people.
  • bluefirebrand 1y ago
    And we're not talking a 51-49 disproportion, we're talking about a 99.9999 percent of the benefit will go to the richest people
    • twoodfin 1y ago
      How so?
      • irjustin 1y ago
        Thought experiment - Startrek replicators are real. This basically means almost everything can be built without human involvement. The guy who owns the replicators is the richest. The wealth gap is so massive you get revolts (because we're educated, not serfs, right?) So then government needs to step in. Either tax->ubi?, socialize it, or make it a state asset? Regardless, that's the goal of AGI/robotics/etc.
        • twoodfin 1y ago
          But these aren’t replicators owned by a monopolist. There are a number of highly funded, highly competitive vendors at every level of the stack.
          • moralestapia 1y ago
            Sure, but you're not one of them.
            • rogerrogerr 1y ago
              Sure, but who do they sell stuff to if no one has a job? We’re on the brink of some _very_ unexplored branches of human behavior.
• pmarreck 1y ago
  I don't understand this argument. Speaking as a kid who grew up middle-class as an 80's teen obsessed with (the then still new) computers, a non-rich person has access to more salient power today than ever in history, and largely for no or low cost. There are free AI's available that can diagnose illnesses for people in remote areas, non-Western nations, etc. and which can translate (and/or summarize) anything to anything with high quality. Etc. etc. AI will help anyone with an idea execute on it. The only thing you have to worry about are not non-rich people, but people without any motivation. The difference of course is that the framing you're using makes it easy to blame "The System", while a motivation-based framing at least leaves people somewhat responsible. Wealth may get you a seat closer to the table, but everyone is already invited into the room.
  • tbossanova 1y ago
    The problem is if the system leads to demotivating people more than motivating them on average, which risks a negative feedback loop where people demotivate each other further and so on
    • mlrtime 1y ago
      Yes, just read reddit or this thread. I'd love to see the people's lives saying how bad it is now. My guess is they have every luxury afforded to them. There is strong negativity bias.
      • pmarreck 1y ago
        Yes. This, 100%.
    • pmarreck 1y ago
      What is demotivating people is negativist-framing-obsessed doomer assholes like you dooming and glooming all the possible negatives and absolutely none of the positives. There's no actual unmanageable bad things occurring, and a ton of upside occurring. People are literally quitting CS majors because of this BS. Hopefully only the people who aren't meant to do it in the first place, but anyway.
• moomoo11 1y ago
  Cheaper cloud costs
• tempodox 1y ago
  When billionaires talk about “benefits”, I’m getting very suspicious.
• goku12 1y ago
  That's a very relevant question. And as your question implies, we all know which society the billionaires talk about. But AI is just a technology like any other. It does have the potential to bring great benefits to humanity if developed with that intent. It's the corruptive influence of the billionaire and autocrat greed that turns all technologies against us. When I say benefits to humanity, I don't mean the AI slop, deepfakes and laziness enabler that we have today. There are niche applications of AI that already show great potential. Like developing new medicines to devising new treatments for dangerous diseases, solving long standing mathematical problems, creating new physics theories. And who knows? Perhaps even create viable solutions for the climate crisis that we are in. They don't receive as much attention as they deserve, because that's not where the profit lies in AI. Solving real problems require us to forgo profits in the short term. That's why we can't leave this completely up to the billionaires. They will just use it to transfer even more wealth from the poor and middle classes to themselves.
  • dinkumthinkum 1y ago
    What are the actual benefits? Where are all these medicines that humans couldn’t develop on their own? Have we not been able to develop medicine? What theorems are meaningful and impactful that humans can’t prove without AI? I don’t know what a solution to the climate crisis is but what would it even say that humans wouldn’t have realistically thought of?
    • yard2010 1y ago
      It's a matter of prompt engineering, you have to be a really good engineer to pick the correct words in order to get the cure for cancer from ChatGPT, or the actual crabby patty recipe ;)
      • goku12 1y ago
        May I ask why people immediately imagine AI slop whenever anybody mentions LLMs? This is exactly what I meant. Those companies ruined their reputation. LLM/AI applications extend well beyond chat and drawing bots.
• athrowaway3z 1y ago
  Counter prediction. AI is going to reduce the (relative) wealth of the tech companies. AWS and Facebook have extremely low running costs per VPS or Ad sold. That IMO is one of the major reasons tech has received its enormously high valuation. There is nuance to that, but average investors are dumb and don't care. Add in a relatively high fixed-cost commodity into the accounting, and intuitively the pitch of "global market domination at ever lower costs" will be a much harder sell. Especially if there is a bubble pop that hurts them.
  • infinitezest 1y ago
    History would indicate that if the you make a bubble big enough and then it pops, you don't have to clean up the mess. 2008 wasn't that long ago.
• tjpnz 1y ago
  Manna ponders the same question. I don't think we're headed towards the "good" ending. https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
  • __oh_es 1y ago
    What an incredible read - thanks for the share
• mlrtime 1y ago
  What value does your question add, if it wasn't Bezos saying this would you have the same question? How are you defining rich, Billionaires? It's sad that your comment is the top post.
  • infinitezest 1y ago
    The fact that Bezos is saying this is precisely why the commenter is asking this. He clearly stands to benefit massively from the bubble. Statements like this are meant to encourage buy-in from others to maximize his exit. Presumably "rich" refers to those, like Bezos, who already have incredibly disproportionate wealth and power compared to the majority of people in the US. I'm honestly not sure what the thrust of your comment even is.
• a4isms 1y ago
  Once upon a time, society was all of us, but Society were the filks that held coming out parties and gossiped about whose J-class yacht was likely to defend the America's cup. Society with a capital S are the beneficiaries of the bubble.
• cyanydeez 1y ago
  Business. People in the human centipede who wont fight fascism
• red_rech 1y ago
  [dead]
• FilosofumRex 1y ago
  Bezos didn't define "society", but knowing Devil is what Devil does, we can infer: 1. Amazon files the most petitions for H1-B work visas after Indian IT shops. 2. Amazon opposed minimum wage increase to $15/hr until 2018! 3. Amazon not only fires union organizers, it's claiming National Labor Relations Board is unconstitutional!
• mountainriver 1y ago
  It is all society as long as they have access, and they do. Even if the big labs get more closed off, open source is right there and won’t die. AI increases everyone’s knowledge and ultimately productivity. It’s on every person the learn to leverage it. The dynamics don’t need to change, we just move faster and smarter
  • acdha 1y ago
    > AI increases everyone’s knowledge and ultimately productivity. It’s on every person the learn to leverage it. The dynamics don’t need to change, we just move faster and smarter This is incomplete in key ways: it only increases knowledge if people practice information literacy and validate AI claims, which we know is an unevenly-distributed skill. Similarly, by making it easier to create disinformation and pollute public sources of information, it can make people less knowledgeable at the same time they believe they are more informed. Neither of those problems are new, of course, but they’re moving from artisanal to industrial scale. Another area where this is begging questions is around resource allocation. The best AI models and integrations cost money and the ability to leverage them requires you to have an opportunity to acquire skills and use them to make a living. The more successfully businesses are able to remove or deprofessionalize jobs, the smaller the pool will be of people who can afford to build skills, compete with those businesses, or contribute to open source software. Twenty years ago, professional translators made a modest white collar income; when AI ate those jobs, the workers didn’t “learn to leverage” AI, they had to find new jobs in different fields and anyone who didn’t have the financial reserves to do that might’ve ended up in a retail job questioning whether it’s even possible to re-enter the professional class. That’s great for people like Bezos until nobody can afford to buy things, but it’s worse for society since it accelerates the process of centralizing money and power. Open source in particular seems likely to struggle here: with programmers facing financial downturns, fewer people have time to contribute and if AI is being trained on your code, you’re increasingly going to ask whether it’s in your best interests to literally train your replacement.
    • mountainriver 1y ago
      > This is incomplete in key ways: it only increases knowledge if people practice information literacy and validate AI claims, which we know is an unevenly-distributed skill. Similarly, by making it easier to create disinformation and pollute public sources of information, it can make people less knowledgeable at the same time they believe they are more informed. Neither of those problems are new, of course, but they’re moving from artisanal to industrial scale. Totally agree with this >The more successfully businesses are able to remove or deprofessionalize jobs, the smaller the pool will be of people who can afford to build skills, compete with those businesses, or contribute to open source software I'm mixed on this, ultimately its the responsibility of individuals to adapt. AI makes people way more capable than they have ever been. It's on them to make something of it > but it’s worse for society since it accelerates the process of centralizing money and power. I'm not sure this is true, it enables individuals like they never have been before. Yes there are the model infrastructure providers, but they are in a race to the bottom