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People should be compensated for the entire _transitive_ wealth created by their work proportional to the amount of time spent and their skill. If a translator

People should be compensated for the entire _transitive_ wealth created by their work proportional to the amount of time spent and their skill. If a translator's work is used to train a model which replaces him, he should get a part of the income every time the model is used. Same for programmers, artists and other people who created "content"[0] used to train AI models. In fact, the designers of chips used to train the models should get a part of the income. And the people who built the data centers and the factories. And the miners who mines the raw materials. Actually, when you look at it this way, you realize the big names[1] behind these behemoth AI companies did very little. Their amount of work put in is the same as of any other worker, maybe double, if their bragging about 80-hour weeks is to be believed. And their skill level? It's a bell curve. Even if they are 2 SD to the right, how much more productive are they than the average person (with the same amount of education and connections) put in their position. I am OK with the owner of such a company getting paid maybe 3-5x more than the average worker. [0]: https://eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/the-rise-of-whatever/#:~:text=this%20is%20why%20i%20absolutely%20cannot%20fucking%20stand%20creative%20work%20being%20referred%20to%20as%20%22content%22. https://eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/the-rise-of-whatever/#:~:text... [1]: Who "make" more money every day than most people make in their lifetime.

ndriscoll 1y ago
So are we to compensate the workers who make pipes and plumbers that install them each time we open the tap and water comes out? Or each time an air conditioner turns on to cool you off? Do we compensate the manufacturers of processors and fiber optic lines each time we write a message online instead of needing to give it to a courier to take to a scribe's home to copy? Instead of making your entire life into a microtransaction-fest requiring dystopian tracking of everything, what if we just converted expected sequence of value to current dollars and made a lump sum payment? Of course different people will have different utility functions, so we could allow them to judge what is a fair trade.
- danaris 1y ago
  > So are we to compensate the workers who make pipes and plumbers that install them each time we open the tap and water comes out? This philosophy only really applies for things that we have to pay for on a subscription, or in a metered fashion. So setting up a fund to ensure that people who laid the pipes, etc, get paid a portion of our collective water bills would follow, but doing the same with our air conditioning would not. Ultimately, that sort of tracking is likely much more effort than it's worth, and what makes by far the most sense is a UBI, funded by appropriate taxes.
  - ndriscoll 1y ago
    So do we exclude open LLMs like Deepseek or Llama then? If you do your own taxes on a computer, you don't owe anyone anything, but if you pay an accountant and they use a computer, they should revenue share with the entire chain of production from mining to manufacturing for the tools they use? Or if you pay an HVAC technician, they should revenue share from each job to miners and tool manufacturers, but that's not necessary if you DIY? Why is the idea of just owning a tool bad in the first place? There still seems to be plenty of labor to be done to improve the world before we reach a point of unconditional UBI making sense. Why not have guaranteed work instead? Plenty of streets to clean or beautify, kids to tutor, buildings that need efficiency upgrades, etc.
    - danaris 1y ago
      There's plenty of resources to go around to make UBI (the "unconditional" is baked right in) make sense. There's plenty of work that people want to do, that's otherwise unprofitable, that UBI would enable. The barrier to UBI is not that we don't have enough to go around if not everyone is doing "productive work". It's that we're stuck on a model of human value that only considers productive work, and that we're stuck on a model of resource ownership that gives everything to the people at the top. "Guaranteed jobs" is certainly better than what we have today, but it seems stupid to tell someone who's got an amazing artistic talent, "Nope, you don't get to do the thing you're great at that gives you fulfillment in life and brightens other people's lives with your work. You have to clean the streets."

ndriscoll 1y ago

So are we to compensate the workers who make pipes and plumbers that install them each time we open the tap and water comes out? Or each time an air conditioner turns on to cool you off? Do we compensate the manufacturers of processors and fiber optic lines each time we write a message online instead of needing to give it to a courier to take to a scribe's home to copy? Instead of making your entire life into a microtransaction-fest requiring dystopian tracking of everything, what if we just converted expected sequence of value to current dollars and made a lump sum payment? Of course different people will have different utility functions, so we could allow them to judge what is a fair trade.

danaris 1y ago
> So are we to compensate the workers who make pipes and plumbers that install them each time we open the tap and water comes out? This philosophy only really applies for things that we have to pay for on a subscription, or in a metered fashion. So setting up a fund to ensure that people who laid the pipes, etc, get paid a portion of our collective water bills would follow, but doing the same with our air conditioning would not. Ultimately, that sort of tracking is likely much more effort than it's worth, and what makes by far the most sense is a UBI, funded by appropriate taxes.
- ndriscoll 1y ago
  So do we exclude open LLMs like Deepseek or Llama then? If you do your own taxes on a computer, you don't owe anyone anything, but if you pay an accountant and they use a computer, they should revenue share with the entire chain of production from mining to manufacturing for the tools they use? Or if you pay an HVAC technician, they should revenue share from each job to miners and tool manufacturers, but that's not necessary if you DIY? Why is the idea of just owning a tool bad in the first place? There still seems to be plenty of labor to be done to improve the world before we reach a point of unconditional UBI making sense. Why not have guaranteed work instead? Plenty of streets to clean or beautify, kids to tutor, buildings that need efficiency upgrades, etc.
  - danaris 1y ago
    There's plenty of resources to go around to make UBI (the "unconditional" is baked right in) make sense. There's plenty of work that people want to do, that's otherwise unprofitable, that UBI would enable. The barrier to UBI is not that we don't have enough to go around if not everyone is doing "productive work". It's that we're stuck on a model of human value that only considers productive work, and that we're stuck on a model of resource ownership that gives everything to the people at the top. "Guaranteed jobs" is certainly better than what we have today, but it seems stupid to tell someone who's got an amazing artistic talent, "Nope, you don't get to do the thing you're great at that gives you fulfillment in life and brightens other people's lives with your work. You have to clean the streets."