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I feel like if people keep using AI as a blanket term for "inequality" and "inequality accelerants" then yeah, it's "AI"'s fault. When in reality the whole thin

I feel like if people keep using AI as a blanket term for "inequality" and "inequality accelerants" then yeah, it's "AI"'s fault. When in reality the whole thing needs to be decoupled.. "Gleefully taking away people's livelihoods will be met with violence, and nothing good will come of it." - fixed.

tedivm 7mo ago
How do you decouple it when the people who own it and are building it seem to be driven on increasing inequality?
- zozbot234 7mo ago
  AI is actually a mass decrease in inequality, as much as the Gutenberg printing press was. It takes something that used to be the foremost example of pure bourgeois and intellectual privilege - the culture contained within millions of books and other instances of human creativity - and provides it to everyone for the cost of a few thousand bucks in hardware and a few watts of electricity.
  - trolleski 7mo ago
    And is controlled by a handful of mega corporations? How is that equitable?
  - Der_Einzige 7mo ago
    [flagged]
    - jdiff 7mo ago
      Swartz died in 2002, decades before LLMs. It is distasteful to put words in the mouths of the dead by invoking him here. Even local AI concentrates power in the hands of a few, the few who can afford the hardware to run it, and the few who have the luxury of enough time and energy to devote to engaging with the intricate, technical rabbit hole of local models.
      - jacquesm 7mo ago
        You should read that comment again, they're not putting any words in Swartz's mouth, they are lauding his accomplishments.
        jdiff 7mo ago
        It is lauding his accomplishments, yes. Why bring him up in specific if there is no relation intended? There are many broad shouldered giants in this space.
  - aleph_minus_one 7mo ago
    > AI is actually a mass decrease in inequality, as much as the Gutenberg printing press was. It takes something that used to be the foremost example of pure bourgeois and intellectual privilege - the culture contained within millions of books and other instances of human creativity[.] I would rather claim that this is a proper description of shadow libraries [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_library
  - tedivm 7mo ago
    This is only true if productivity gains tied to general well being, but instead it's being concentrated in the hands of a few.
    - falcor84 7mo ago
      I can't think of any period in time where it was so easy to go into business yourself and to generally have access to the same "means of production" as the biggest companies have. If you want to use LLMs, you can either use cloud resources at what I think are really reasonable per-token prices compared to the value, or to set up your own server with an open-weights model at a comparable level of quality (though generally significantly slower tokens/s). In any case, you absolutely don't have to pay OpenAI/Anthropic/Google if you don't want to.
      - tedivm 7mo ago
        I'm well aware of this: I bought a pretty beefy (consumer grade beefy) GPU machine and run all sorts of open weight models. I do think there is potential. But are you expecting 360m Americans to start their own businesses? That is a solution that doesn't scale. Consumer grade GPUs aren't going to scale all that much either, and the cost of the models are going up rather than down as vendors start seeking profits. We already see the memory and storage markets exploding in cost due to the rise in demand as well.
        ryandrake 7mo ago
        Also: A handful more of already well-off people going into business for themselves is not going to move the needle on inequality. When people say "It's never been a better time to start your own business" they still mean "the people who already have their needs met and have the capital to live off for a while while their business becomes viable: In other words, the people who have always started businesses: Already-Rich people. It's never been a worse time for the poor or middle class to think about starting their own business. Prices on everything are rising, it's getting to be a struggle for even the middle class to continue to afford their homes. Healthcare is even more fraught than ever before, and if you're lucky enough to have a decent plan from your employer, aint no way you're going to give it up to go start a business.
  - elevatortrim 7mo ago
    No. Because success is individual, inequality is statistical. It ia true that AI gives ordinary people a lot more chance to be successful. But do not forget that success depends on lots of factors that are not in one’s control: knowing the right people, time being right for what you are doing, and lots of others. So while the mechanics of success is a lot different to lottery, it does not work much differently: 1 in 1M attempts are successful. Yes, AI gives everyone more lottery tickets, but it gives rich people a lot more tickets.
- Avicebron 7mo ago
  If I had the answer to that I would probably be a politician instead of a systems eng, but off the top of the mind build out a parallel economies at the state level where people in the US actually live, ensuring QoL standards, then gradually renegotiate up back to the Federal level. It would require, united..states eventually, but the general thrust is to shed corporate capture so that people see their government actually benefiting and providing them with tangible life improvements in real time.
- mimentum 7mo ago
  The people say "tax the rich". Tax AI is the answer.
  - wincy 7mo ago
    This is interesting to see since on another HN post everyone is bemoaning how expensive it’s getting to use frontier models because Anthropic is massively throttling Pro Max Claude plans. That’s certainly not going to become more accessible to us normal folk through taxation.
    - CodeShmode 7mo ago
      The tax dollars can go to programs that support normal folk, when the vast majority of tax collected will not come from normal folk.
  - NeutralCrane 7mo ago
    This might be a solution if there wasn’t staggering wealth inequality prior to AI.
- Lerc 7mo ago
  How can you hope for anything better if you consider it an us versus them situation? When they say "We don't want to increase inequality" and the response is "We don't believe you". Where do you go from there? It seems like a lot of people want a revolution so that they can rotate who will be able to take advantage of the vulnerable. What are the suggestions for something better? I don't see a lot. I'd like to see more suggestions of how things could work. For example: The Government could legislate that any increase in profits that are attributable to the use of AI are taxed at 75%. It's still an advantage for a company to do it, but most of the gains go to the people. Most often, aggressive taxation like this is criticised on the basis that it will stifle growth, but this is an area where pretty much everyone is saying it's moving too quickly, that's just yet another positive effect.
  - UncleMeat 7mo ago
    We can look at their actions, in particular their efforts to influence public policy.
    - Lerc 7mo ago
      You can, but then what? Do you judge what they say as if their perspective is the same as yours, and then conclude from that context that what they suggest could only come from an evil person. That seems to be what a lot of people do. What if they actually think what they are suggesting is the best thing for the world? How can you tell what is in their minds? Alternately you could criticise their arguments instead of the people, and suggest an alternative. I'm also not entirely certain that influencing public policy is something that is inherently bad. I know if I were deaf, I would like to have some influence on public policy about deafness issues.
      - UncleMeat 7mo ago
        The idea that we cannot possibly use people's actions to judge them is ridiculous. Musk thinks that the world would be a better place if the races were separated and if all charitable giving was ended. I think that's monstrous. Why is OpenAI not a nonprofit anymore?
- colinator 7mo ago
  Here's an idea for how to do that: treat frontier AI as a sort of 'common carrier'. The only business that frontier AI labs are allowed to conduct is selling raw tokens - no UI. Thus, 'claude code' would have to come from some other company. This would segment the AI industry, and, maybe, prevent a single entity (or small number of entities) from capturing all value. Just a thought, what do you think?
  - davemp 7mo ago
    Sounds promising honestly. One of the scariest parts of the big AI labs is all of the exclusive training data they get through their UIs. (It’s unclear whether distillation is a feasible way to close the gap). If there were another party involved, that would (hopefully) diversify power that (potentially) comes with those streams of data. It’s a bit ironic that the USA has mostly abandoned interoperability after being one of the pioneers with the American manufacturing method. [0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_system_of_manufacturing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_system_of_manufacturi...
AtlasBarfed 7mo ago
The PC revolution in the 1990s is one of the core drivers of inequality, where the rich took almost all of the dividends from the vast productivity gains from personal computers as the prime development of Moore's law rocketed computers from 66 MHz to over 8 gigahertz. Judging by the gleeful texts of CEOs, collapsed hiring, internal policy changes and pushes, and the additional decades of centralized political control, it's clear this is going to be even worse..
- moosedev 7mo ago
  I must have missed the 8GHz CPU era.
  - AtlasBarfed 7mo ago
    It was supposed to be "a" gigahertz, Google transcription fail.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
DavidPiper 7mo ago
I wholeheartedly agree with and encourage this kind of academic distinction. However... Until people with billions of dollars behind them do something with that money to offset the financial hardship that they're knowingly - and gleefully - bringing to others... The distinction has no practical use. (And before someone says "that's the government's job!", consider how much lobbying money is coming from CEOs and companies who know the domain best and are agitating for better financial and social safeguards for all. None, naturally.)
- rayiner 7mo ago
  How much actual money do you think the “people with billions of dollars” have in comparison to the needs of the population as a whole? I think you’re very confused about where the actual income in the economy goes.
  - DavidPiper 7mo ago
    I am not at all proposing that "people with billions of dollars" somehow directly pay for "the needs of the population as a whole". I'm considering "actual power", rather than "actual income".
    - rayiner 7mo ago
      Then who pays for it?
      - DavidPiper 7mo ago
        That is the question society is currently asking with articles like this one. Given that (allegedly) "your salary" won't be the answer for a significant chunk of the population soon, and all that money will instead (allegedly) go to the bosses doing the firings, and the AI companies they employ instead.
        RajT88 7mo ago
        We get a view of this taken to its logical extreme in the final Resident Evil film featuring Milla Jovovich. The entire Earth's population dead, with evil corporate board members holding votes underground as to who gets to be the CEO of the company.
themenomen 7mo ago
> "Gleefully taking away people's livelihoods will be met with violence, and nothing good will come of it." - fixed. This statement is not decoupled; if anything, it is a more generalized one, as it does not point at any cause or causes for livelihoods to be taken.
saidnooneever 7mo ago
its always peoples fault. blaming technology is the shortest sight. people make it, and wittingly use it in a disagreeable way, because it earns them money. there is something else that needs to change which everyone is reluctant to admit, or struggling with internally. thats ok, its called conscious evolution. it hurts, but it will be ok someday. its generational, so progress is always slower than one would hope. Just know that every step in the right direction is one, even if the entire world seems to disagree keep pushing for what you beleive is right, and hopefully thats something which is not infringing on other peoples capacity to live a happy life.
MontyCarloHall 7mo ago
People currently assume AI will be an accelerant of inequality because all currently useful models (i.e. those potentially capable of mass labor disruption) are only able to run in multibillion dollar datacenters, with all returns accruing disproportionately to the oligarchs who own said datacenters. I'm not sure this moat is inevitably perpetual. It's likely computing technology evolves to the point of being able to run frontier-level models on our phones and laptops. It's also likely that with diminishing marginal returns, future datacenter-level models will not be dramatically more capable than future local models. In that case, the power of AI would be (almost) fully democratized, obviating any oligarchic concentration of power. Everyone would have equal access to the ultimate means of production.
- dandanua 7mo ago
  > Everyone would have equal access to the ultimate means of production. You are right that AI can be a fully democratized commodity. The problem is that the current wealth inequality is not the result of AI. Musk became a trillion seeking oligarch not because of AI. It is because the entire financial system is designed to extract wealth from everyone and concentrate at the top. Democratic AI is not in their interest. There will be violence, but not because AI is supposedly a catalyst of inequality. It will be violence from the rich towards the poor, because democratic AI is not acceptable for them.
  - MontyCarloHall 7mo ago
    >It will be violence from the rich towards the poor, because democratic AI is not acceptable for them. Unless the rich somehow manage to completely stifle the progress of consumer-level computing advancement (all chip manufacturers would just collude to quit selling to consumers?) and exert an iron-fisted control over the dissemination of software (when has this ever worked?), I'm not sure how they could control the democratization of AI.
    - HWR_14 7mo ago
      > all chip manufacturers would just collude to quit selling to consumers? Well, someone with money could go buy 100% of RAM production for the next 3 years.
dfxm12 7mo ago
You have it backwards. People are using billionaire owned AI, billionaire lobbying efforts gaming the system, and billionaire owned media as a propaganda arm for AI as a specific example of the larger general idea.
only-one1701 7mo ago
The terms are defined by the AI dealers!
api 7mo ago
I feel like the entire discourse is a proxy for what should be direct discourse about inequality and the regressive (rob from the poor, give to the rich) nature of our system. Eliminate the AI variable entirely and the problem remains, therefore AI is not the problem.
ethin 7mo ago
This distinction is good in academic circles and similar (like on here). But the public (and ordinary people who aren't people who regularly visit Hacker News -- or even know that Hacker News exists) don't care. To them, AI == inequality and inequality accelerants, because it is funded and run by the richest, most powerful people on Earth. And those very people are making everything worse for all but them, not better. Nobody is going to care about academic distinctions in such circumstances.
- hn_throwaway_99 7mo ago
  It's because the consequences of AI is so direct and obvious, and also faster, where the inequality and job losses from other tech advances are just less direct. That is, it's not hard to see why so many main streets in smaller towns have boarded up retail stores since you can now get anything in about a day (max) from Amazon. But Amazon (and other Internet giants) always played at least semi-plausible lip service that they were a boon to small fry (see Amazon's FBA commercials, for example). But you've got folks like Altman and Amodei gleefully saying how AI will be able to do all the work of a huge portion of (mostly high paying) jobs. So it's not surprising that people are more up in arms about AI. And frankly, I don't think it really matters. Anger against "the tech elite" has been bubbling up for a long time now, and AI now just provides the most obvious target.
  - sigbottle 7mo ago
    Does economics or political theory focus on centralization, practically speaking? Not as a normative claim. What the actual effects are like. It just feels like we're at a centralization of power of unprecedented scale, to the point where no previous theories or models could really apply (in order to make analytical progress - I mean sure feudalism is honestly becoming a scarier and scarier analogy but still, there are significant differences) I'm pretty much only thinking about these kinds of problems at my job at this point, so this is important to me in that regard
moron4hire 7mo ago
My question to you is, are you willing to give up the tools of the oppressor in that pursuit of combatting the true villain of "gleefully taking away people's livelihoods"? What I mean is, yes, you are right, technically AI itself is not the problem. But it is the tool by which the oppressors are working their oppression. Do you make this distinction that it's not the AI that is doing this to us so that you can be more clear in where to target your ire, or are you making the distinction so you can continue to use LLMs with a clear conscience?
bdangubic 7mo ago
Amazon did, Uber did, Walmart did… not seeing anyone throwing molotov coctails at their CEOs houses…
SoftTalker 7mo ago
They haven't learned from Risky Business. "Joel, you look like a smart kid. I'm going to tell you something I'm sure you'll understand. You're having fun now, right? Right, Joel? The time of your life. In a sluggish economy, never ever fuck with another man's livelihood."
lumost 7mo ago
So far, AI is a "unique" technology in that the main use case is "work replacement." Consumer applications have only existed to "destroy human creative media with low quality slop". The vast majority of individuals derive no value from AI, they are instead told to do their jobs faster and own the mistakes of the AI for flat/declining pay. It's a bad deal for most people.
- akarii 7mo ago
  AI is not unique in this at all. It's also the goal of almost every technological advancement. The only difference with AI is that it's replacing jobs that people thought could never get replaced.
  - lumost 7mo ago
    industrialization gave us cheaper goods, and new types of goods (the automobile). What new consumer features has ai delivered? So far, I've seen mostly slop.
slashdave 7mo ago
Exhibit one: MAGA
jimbo808 7mo ago
AI is massively asymmetric in its benefits, which are overwhelmingly concentrated among those with extreme capital, and the authoritarians they're aligned with. The benefits for them include: - replacing workers with lower quality (but good enough) AI solutions, which degrade the quality of nearly every product or service for the consumer, but not by enough to offset the labor cost savings - mass surveillance at low cost, a way to take the absurd amounts of data humanity now produces, and use to subjugate them - propaganda/deception/misinformation, a new vector for propaganda which people are naively inclined to trust. bonus points for the "flooding the zone" strategy which AI makes easier Benefits to the worker: - lower cost of goods and services (but not for you, silly - they'll still be taxing you via inflation to fund their wars of conquest) - you won't have to work anymore - you won't have to eat anymore
trymas 7mo ago
How can you decouple this, when there's a flood of headlines saying something like: "Company X layoffs Y% of workforce, betting on AI productivity". For that Y% of people (and their dependants like kids, spouses and aging parents) - AI[1] is direct reason for "inequality accelerant". ----- [1] Lets not discuss if AI in these layoff reasonings is actually true or not.

tedivm 7mo ago

How do you decouple it when the people who own it and are building it seem to be driven on increasing inequality?

zozbot234 7mo ago
AI is actually a mass decrease in inequality, as much as the Gutenberg printing press was. It takes something that used to be the foremost example of pure bourgeois and intellectual privilege - the culture contained within millions of books and other instances of human creativity - and provides it to everyone for the cost of a few thousand bucks in hardware and a few watts of electricity.
- trolleski 7mo ago
  And is controlled by a handful of mega corporations? How is that equitable?
- Der_Einzige 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  - jdiff 7mo ago
    Swartz died in 2002, decades before LLMs. It is distasteful to put words in the mouths of the dead by invoking him here. Even local AI concentrates power in the hands of a few, the few who can afford the hardware to run it, and the few who have the luxury of enough time and energy to devote to engaging with the intricate, technical rabbit hole of local models.
    - jacquesm 7mo ago
      You should read that comment again, they're not putting any words in Swartz's mouth, they are lauding his accomplishments.
      - jdiff 7mo ago
        It is lauding his accomplishments, yes. Why bring him up in specific if there is no relation intended? There are many broad shouldered giants in this space.
- aleph_minus_one 7mo ago
  > AI is actually a mass decrease in inequality, as much as the Gutenberg printing press was. It takes something that used to be the foremost example of pure bourgeois and intellectual privilege - the culture contained within millions of books and other instances of human creativity[.] I would rather claim that this is a proper description of shadow libraries [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_library
- tedivm 7mo ago
  This is only true if productivity gains tied to general well being, but instead it's being concentrated in the hands of a few.
  - falcor84 7mo ago
    I can't think of any period in time where it was so easy to go into business yourself and to generally have access to the same "means of production" as the biggest companies have. If you want to use LLMs, you can either use cloud resources at what I think are really reasonable per-token prices compared to the value, or to set up your own server with an open-weights model at a comparable level of quality (though generally significantly slower tokens/s). In any case, you absolutely don't have to pay OpenAI/Anthropic/Google if you don't want to.
    - tedivm 7mo ago
      I'm well aware of this: I bought a pretty beefy (consumer grade beefy) GPU machine and run all sorts of open weight models. I do think there is potential. But are you expecting 360m Americans to start their own businesses? That is a solution that doesn't scale. Consumer grade GPUs aren't going to scale all that much either, and the cost of the models are going up rather than down as vendors start seeking profits. We already see the memory and storage markets exploding in cost due to the rise in demand as well.
      - ryandrake 7mo ago
        Also: A handful more of already well-off people going into business for themselves is not going to move the needle on inequality. When people say "It's never been a better time to start your own business" they still mean "the people who already have their needs met and have the capital to live off for a while while their business becomes viable: In other words, the people who have always started businesses: Already-Rich people. It's never been a worse time for the poor or middle class to think about starting their own business. Prices on everything are rising, it's getting to be a struggle for even the middle class to continue to afford their homes. Healthcare is even more fraught than ever before, and if you're lucky enough to have a decent plan from your employer, aint no way you're going to give it up to go start a business.
- elevatortrim 7mo ago
  No. Because success is individual, inequality is statistical. It ia true that AI gives ordinary people a lot more chance to be successful. But do not forget that success depends on lots of factors that are not in one’s control: knowing the right people, time being right for what you are doing, and lots of others. So while the mechanics of success is a lot different to lottery, it does not work much differently: 1 in 1M attempts are successful. Yes, AI gives everyone more lottery tickets, but it gives rich people a lot more tickets.
Avicebron 7mo ago
If I had the answer to that I would probably be a politician instead of a systems eng, but off the top of the mind build out a parallel economies at the state level where people in the US actually live, ensuring QoL standards, then gradually renegotiate up back to the Federal level. It would require, united..states eventually, but the general thrust is to shed corporate capture so that people see their government actually benefiting and providing them with tangible life improvements in real time.
mimentum 7mo ago
The people say "tax the rich". Tax AI is the answer.
- wincy 7mo ago
  This is interesting to see since on another HN post everyone is bemoaning how expensive it’s getting to use frontier models because Anthropic is massively throttling Pro Max Claude plans. That’s certainly not going to become more accessible to us normal folk through taxation.
  - CodeShmode 7mo ago
    The tax dollars can go to programs that support normal folk, when the vast majority of tax collected will not come from normal folk.
- NeutralCrane 7mo ago
  This might be a solution if there wasn’t staggering wealth inequality prior to AI.
Lerc 7mo ago
How can you hope for anything better if you consider it an us versus them situation? When they say "We don't want to increase inequality" and the response is "We don't believe you". Where do you go from there? It seems like a lot of people want a revolution so that they can rotate who will be able to take advantage of the vulnerable. What are the suggestions for something better? I don't see a lot. I'd like to see more suggestions of how things could work. For example: The Government could legislate that any increase in profits that are attributable to the use of AI are taxed at 75%. It's still an advantage for a company to do it, but most of the gains go to the people. Most often, aggressive taxation like this is criticised on the basis that it will stifle growth, but this is an area where pretty much everyone is saying it's moving too quickly, that's just yet another positive effect.
- UncleMeat 7mo ago
  We can look at their actions, in particular their efforts to influence public policy.
  - Lerc 7mo ago
    You can, but then what? Do you judge what they say as if their perspective is the same as yours, and then conclude from that context that what they suggest could only come from an evil person. That seems to be what a lot of people do. What if they actually think what they are suggesting is the best thing for the world? How can you tell what is in their minds? Alternately you could criticise their arguments instead of the people, and suggest an alternative. I'm also not entirely certain that influencing public policy is something that is inherently bad. I know if I were deaf, I would like to have some influence on public policy about deafness issues.
    - UncleMeat 7mo ago
      The idea that we cannot possibly use people's actions to judge them is ridiculous. Musk thinks that the world would be a better place if the races were separated and if all charitable giving was ended. I think that's monstrous. Why is OpenAI not a nonprofit anymore?
colinator 7mo ago
Here's an idea for how to do that: treat frontier AI as a sort of 'common carrier'. The only business that frontier AI labs are allowed to conduct is selling raw tokens - no UI. Thus, 'claude code' would have to come from some other company. This would segment the AI industry, and, maybe, prevent a single entity (or small number of entities) from capturing all value. Just a thought, what do you think?
- davemp 7mo ago
  Sounds promising honestly. One of the scariest parts of the big AI labs is all of the exclusive training data they get through their UIs. (It’s unclear whether distillation is a feasible way to close the gap). If there were another party involved, that would (hopefully) diversify power that (potentially) comes with those streams of data. It’s a bit ironic that the USA has mostly abandoned interoperability after being one of the pioneers with the American manufacturing method. [0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_system_of_manufacturing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_system_of_manufacturi...

AtlasBarfed 7mo ago

The PC revolution in the 1990s is one of the core drivers of inequality, where the rich took almost all of the dividends from the vast productivity gains from personal computers as the prime development of Moore's law rocketed computers from 66 MHz to over 8 gigahertz. Judging by the gleeful texts of CEOs, collapsed hiring, internal policy changes and pushes, and the additional decades of centralized political control, it's clear this is going to be even worse..

moosedev 7mo ago
I must have missed the 8GHz CPU era.
- AtlasBarfed 7mo ago
  It was supposed to be "a" gigahertz, Google transcription fail.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

DavidPiper 7mo ago

I wholeheartedly agree with and encourage this kind of academic distinction. However... Until people with billions of dollars behind them do something with that money to offset the financial hardship that they're knowingly - and gleefully - bringing to others... The distinction has no practical use. (And before someone says "that's the government's job!", consider how much lobbying money is coming from CEOs and companies who know the domain best and are agitating for better financial and social safeguards for all. None, naturally.)

rayiner 7mo ago
How much actual money do you think the “people with billions of dollars” have in comparison to the needs of the population as a whole? I think you’re very confused about where the actual income in the economy goes.
- DavidPiper 7mo ago
  I am not at all proposing that "people with billions of dollars" somehow directly pay for "the needs of the population as a whole". I'm considering "actual power", rather than "actual income".
  - rayiner 7mo ago
    Then who pays for it?
    - DavidPiper 7mo ago
      That is the question society is currently asking with articles like this one. Given that (allegedly) "your salary" won't be the answer for a significant chunk of the population soon, and all that money will instead (allegedly) go to the bosses doing the firings, and the AI companies they employ instead.
      - RajT88 7mo ago
        We get a view of this taken to its logical extreme in the final Resident Evil film featuring Milla Jovovich. The entire Earth's population dead, with evil corporate board members holding votes underground as to who gets to be the CEO of the company.

themenomen 7mo ago

> "Gleefully taking away people's livelihoods will be met with violence, and nothing good will come of it." - fixed. This statement is not decoupled; if anything, it is a more generalized one, as it does not point at any cause or causes for livelihoods to be taken.

saidnooneever 7mo ago

its always peoples fault. blaming technology is the shortest sight. people make it, and wittingly use it in a disagreeable way, because it earns them money. there is something else that needs to change which everyone is reluctant to admit, or struggling with internally. thats ok, its called conscious evolution. it hurts, but it will be ok someday. its generational, so progress is always slower than one would hope. Just know that every step in the right direction is one, even if the entire world seems to disagree keep pushing for what you beleive is right, and hopefully thats something which is not infringing on other peoples capacity to live a happy life.

MontyCarloHall 7mo ago

People currently assume AI will be an accelerant of inequality because all currently useful models (i.e. those potentially capable of mass labor disruption) are only able to run in multibillion dollar datacenters, with all returns accruing disproportionately to the oligarchs who own said datacenters. I'm not sure this moat is inevitably perpetual. It's likely computing technology evolves to the point of being able to run frontier-level models on our phones and laptops. It's also likely that with diminishing marginal returns, future datacenter-level models will not be dramatically more capable than future local models. In that case, the power of AI would be (almost) fully democratized, obviating any oligarchic concentration of power. Everyone would have equal access to the ultimate means of production.

dandanua 7mo ago
> Everyone would have equal access to the ultimate means of production. You are right that AI can be a fully democratized commodity. The problem is that the current wealth inequality is not the result of AI. Musk became a trillion seeking oligarch not because of AI. It is because the entire financial system is designed to extract wealth from everyone and concentrate at the top. Democratic AI is not in their interest. There will be violence, but not because AI is supposedly a catalyst of inequality. It will be violence from the rich towards the poor, because democratic AI is not acceptable for them.
- MontyCarloHall 7mo ago
  >It will be violence from the rich towards the poor, because democratic AI is not acceptable for them. Unless the rich somehow manage to completely stifle the progress of consumer-level computing advancement (all chip manufacturers would just collude to quit selling to consumers?) and exert an iron-fisted control over the dissemination of software (when has this ever worked?), I'm not sure how they could control the democratization of AI.
  - HWR_14 7mo ago
    > all chip manufacturers would just collude to quit selling to consumers? Well, someone with money could go buy 100% of RAM production for the next 3 years.

dfxm12 7mo ago

You have it backwards. People are using billionaire owned AI, billionaire lobbying efforts gaming the system, and billionaire owned media as a propaganda arm for AI as a specific example of the larger general idea.

only-one1701 7mo ago

The terms are defined by the AI dealers!

api 7mo ago

I feel like the entire discourse is a proxy for what should be direct discourse about inequality and the regressive (rob from the poor, give to the rich) nature of our system. Eliminate the AI variable entirely and the problem remains, therefore AI is not the problem.

ethin 7mo ago

This distinction is good in academic circles and similar (like on here). But the public (and ordinary people who aren't people who regularly visit Hacker News -- or even know that Hacker News exists) don't care. To them, AI == inequality and inequality accelerants, because it is funded and run by the richest, most powerful people on Earth. And those very people are making everything worse for all but them, not better. Nobody is going to care about academic distinctions in such circumstances.

hn_throwaway_99 7mo ago
It's because the consequences of AI is so direct and obvious, and also faster, where the inequality and job losses from other tech advances are just less direct. That is, it's not hard to see why so many main streets in smaller towns have boarded up retail stores since you can now get anything in about a day (max) from Amazon. But Amazon (and other Internet giants) always played at least semi-plausible lip service that they were a boon to small fry (see Amazon's FBA commercials, for example). But you've got folks like Altman and Amodei gleefully saying how AI will be able to do all the work of a huge portion of (mostly high paying) jobs. So it's not surprising that people are more up in arms about AI. And frankly, I don't think it really matters. Anger against "the tech elite" has been bubbling up for a long time now, and AI now just provides the most obvious target.
- sigbottle 7mo ago
  Does economics or political theory focus on centralization, practically speaking? Not as a normative claim. What the actual effects are like. It just feels like we're at a centralization of power of unprecedented scale, to the point where no previous theories or models could really apply (in order to make analytical progress - I mean sure feudalism is honestly becoming a scarier and scarier analogy but still, there are significant differences) I'm pretty much only thinking about these kinds of problems at my job at this point, so this is important to me in that regard

moron4hire 7mo ago

My question to you is, are you willing to give up the tools of the oppressor in that pursuit of combatting the true villain of "gleefully taking away people's livelihoods"? What I mean is, yes, you are right, technically AI itself is not the problem. But it is the tool by which the oppressors are working their oppression. Do you make this distinction that it's not the AI that is doing this to us so that you can be more clear in where to target your ire, or are you making the distinction so you can continue to use LLMs with a clear conscience?

bdangubic 7mo ago

Amazon did, Uber did, Walmart did… not seeing anyone throwing molotov coctails at their CEOs houses…

SoftTalker 7mo ago

They haven't learned from Risky Business. "Joel, you look like a smart kid. I'm going to tell you something I'm sure you'll understand. You're having fun now, right? Right, Joel? The time of your life. In a sluggish economy, never ever fuck with another man's livelihood."

lumost 7mo ago

So far, AI is a "unique" technology in that the main use case is "work replacement." Consumer applications have only existed to "destroy human creative media with low quality slop". The vast majority of individuals derive no value from AI, they are instead told to do their jobs faster and own the mistakes of the AI for flat/declining pay. It's a bad deal for most people.

akarii 7mo ago
AI is not unique in this at all. It's also the goal of almost every technological advancement. The only difference with AI is that it's replacing jobs that people thought could never get replaced.
- lumost 7mo ago
  industrialization gave us cheaper goods, and new types of goods (the automobile). What new consumer features has ai delivered? So far, I've seen mostly slop.

slashdave 7mo ago

Exhibit one: MAGA

jimbo808 7mo ago

AI is massively asymmetric in its benefits, which are overwhelmingly concentrated among those with extreme capital, and the authoritarians they're aligned with. The benefits for them include: - replacing workers with lower quality (but good enough) AI solutions, which degrade the quality of nearly every product or service for the consumer, but not by enough to offset the labor cost savings - mass surveillance at low cost, a way to take the absurd amounts of data humanity now produces, and use to subjugate them - propaganda/deception/misinformation, a new vector for propaganda which people are naively inclined to trust. bonus points for the "flooding the zone" strategy which AI makes easier Benefits to the worker: - lower cost of goods and services (but not for you, silly - they'll still be taxing you via inflation to fund their wars of conquest) - you won't have to work anymore - you won't have to eat anymore

trymas 7mo ago

How can you decouple this, when there's a flood of headlines saying something like: "Company X layoffs Y% of workforce, betting on AI productivity". For that Y% of people (and their dependants like kids, spouses and aging parents) - AI[1] is direct reason for "inequality accelerant". ----- [1] Lets not discuss if AI in these layoff reasonings is actually true or not.