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I feel like their are (at least) three main critiques of AI, and I wish we could debate them separately, because I think they each have different resolutions.

I feel like their are (at least) three main critiques of AI, and I wish we could debate them separately, because I think they each have different resolutions. The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on the works of society. The easiest way would be a straight tax on AI usage, and using that tax to pay a universal basic income. There are obviously a ton of variations on this idea, but I think the general premise of sharing the gains with everyone is sound. I don’t think many would complain if they lost their job but kept their income. The other two critiques are trickier. The first is the environmental impact of AI, and the response is difficult. Doing work to make it more efficient, and continuing to develop cleaner energy sources is paramount. Taxing and efficiency requirements might be a start. We have the technology to produce energy in sustainable ways, but it is expensive. It has to be non-negotiable if massive energy usage for AI is to continue. The last is the REAL conversation, and I don’t know the answer. How do we handle AI doing creative work? How do we treat AI creative work? How much creative work do we feel comfortable handing over to AI? I guess there is another issue, related to the last one, which is how do we deal with the ability to use AI to mislead and commit fraud at scale. How do we deal with not being able to trust what actually said/done by a human and what is AI pretending to be human? How do we avoid and mitigate the ability for AI to generate a massive amount of custom content that is used to mislead and defraud people? So much of our current mitigation strategy relies on the assumption that it takes a lot of effort and time to do certain things that can now be done instantly thousands of times?

Rekindle8090 6mo ago
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troosevelt 6mo ago
If you lost your $60,000 a year job due to this, do you really believe a basic income funded by it will make up that loss? It won't. Basic income in the US is usually proposed at $12k per year, which would add another $3 trillion to the budget. Do you think you can even get that just taxing these companies? I don't. People who bring up basic income need to get serious about the numbers involved because I never see it. It's not a realistic solution.
- hashmap 6mo ago
  You never see it how. Like in terms of raw resources or political will?
  - troosevelt 6mo ago
    I mean the numbers. 12k per year is peanuts. You cannot live off that and to do it we'd be nearly doubling the budget (that's old data, it's probably not that portion of the budget anymore). That 12k doesn't include healthcare, it doesn't include a lot of things. It's basically ensuring that people live well below poverty level, and for what? I just don't get how the numbers work, even if it was politically feasible. I'd much rather have free healthcare and other amenities other countries have. Here in the US if you lose your job there is virtually nothing between you and the streets besides family and friends. I'm facing this right now. I cannot get a job in tech which means restarting my career. Getting a job right now is not easy in any field especially not in anything like a living wage. If I did not have my parents I would be on the streets right now, thankfully I don't have a mortgage or anything like that. I'm not sure how much $12k per year would really help, it certainly wouldn't pay for housing. It's rough out there.
    - hashmap 6mo ago
      Oh, yeah $12k would not do it. For a UBI to work we would have to shift a significant portion of the concentrated wealth. I too was laid off long enough ago that by now I would be in a bad spot without help, also no mortgage or anything, and I don't travel or go out much. UBI of any degree would do something, but it would have to be much higher than $12k to tread water just due to rent alone. Aside from UBI we would likely need to decouple housing from profit, it has the same problem as healthcare. Demand for it is inelastic to a certain degree, everyone needs somewhere to live.
- pydry 6mo ago
  Just as hyperloop was designed as a techbro pie in the sky notion to kill high speed rail, basic income as an idea is designed to kill more realistic attempts to shore up welfare, e.g. * A job guarantee like we had during the great depression * Lowering retirement age * Raise minimum wage * Expanding medicare to everyone It's worth remembering that if AI really can do everyone's jobs then it'll be wildly deflationary so there's no need to worry about pesky government spending on this stuff or paying people more. Spend spend spend, baby! Ah youre worried it cant do that? Maybe it is mostly smoke and mirrors then.
sofixa 6mo ago
There are a few other issues. Like copyright. All modern LLMs are built on troves of copyrighted material that was used in their training. AI companies are claiming this is fair use, while pretty much all of the copyright holders would strongly disagree. This is going to get litigated for years, but regardless of what various legal systems decide, morally, people can be against this. And people are already sick and tired of AI-generated content being used to replace human made content, be it on Spotify or TikTok. This is part "AI replacing humans", part "I'm being scammed by lower quality content".
- MBCook 6mo ago
  And we’ve seen the cases of people trying to use the AIs to train new AIs! OpenAI: We’re allowed to steal everything to train our AI and you can’t complain Developer: Ok, I’ll use your AI to train mine OpenAI: NO NOT LIKE THAT, UNFAIR
- cortesoft 6mo ago
  I feel like this is covered by the last question about how we deal with AI and creative works.
schoen 6mo ago
The concern I hear the most (which I don't think is common among the general public) is the existential risk one (that an AI may be created that drastically exceeds human intelligence, and that it may accidentally be incentivized to take actions that destroy most or all of human civilization).
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
  > concern I hear the most (which I don't think is common among the general public) is the existential risk one Altman and friends' "stop us before we shoot grandma" PR tour in 2023 and '24 is largely the cause of this AI backlash. If you tell everyone you're building something that will kill us all, you will scare up investors. But you'll also turn the public against you. In truth, we have zero evidence of the alignment problem to date in the existential form. Instead, it's the usual technology enabling bad actors stuff.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6mo ago
    The "alignment problem" as traditionally understood assumed a different path to AI development, where the best AIs wouldn't primarily operate on a substrate of human language. If AI becomes powerful enough to make human employment non-viable without being post-scarcity enough to make permanent unemployment viable, that's going to be an existential problem, and it seems no less likely today than it did in 2023.
    - JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
      > If AI becomes powerful enough to make human employment non-viable without being post-scarcity enough to make permanent unemployment viable, that's going to be an existential problem That's massively moving the goalposts on what counts as "an existential problem." The original framing was not economic dislocation but actual existence, i.e. existential. This new framing is a retreat to a way-of-life argument. And I'm still calling baloney! The "AI will kill us all" argument backfired on Altman et al, so now we have an "it'll take over all the jobs" pitch. But it's all smoke and mirrors for investors. We have no good reason to expect current AI methods will lead to an AGI that can not only do most human labour, but do so economically competitively.
jiggawatts 6mo ago
> mislead and commit fraud at scale This is the "safety" messaging that OpenAI and Anthropic keep harping on and on, and on about, while whistling a merry tune as they turn around and sell AI to the US military and worse, to the tune of $billions/year already. The "and worse" needs elaboration, because fundamentally the single biggest cash cow for AI vendors will be (and maybe already is) implementing a dystopian future where everything we say, type, or do will not just be recorded but also: read, analysed, and cross-correlated by unfeeling heartless machines tasked with keeping us in line. I'm not being paranoid, President Biden said as much, but only in reference to China. If you think only China has motivation to use AI to keep a lid on dissent, I have a bridge to sell you. And if you think the Land Of The Free(tm) will never abuse AI in this manner, well... I have some bad news. You may want to sit down. Here in Australia, the cyberpunk dystopia is already starting to be rolled out. A customer of ours asked their IT team to hook up a variety of HR-related information sources to their new AI system tasked with making recommendations for hiring, promotion, and demotion. Welcome to 1984, citizen.
- dualvariable 6mo ago
  Yeah, AI-enabled surveillance capitalism is likely to be every bit as bad as what people imagine China is doing with their social credit scores. And the scary thing is that you can probably easily sell it to Democratic voters if you track racism scores for people, so you can filter people out of your dating pool or job/rental applications. Most people don't care about privacy as a fundamental right, and they'll roll over and compromise if you give them a way to track what they hate. You just need to make sure it is "bipartisan" and it'll be wildly popular.
Devasta 6mo ago
> The easiest way would be a straight tax on AI usage, and using that tax to pay a universal basic income. If the Epstein class wouldn't go for something like this in a world where they needed workers to produce, the idea that they will when we are surplus to requirement is inconceivable.
- cortesoft 6mo ago
  I should have said 'most straightforward', rather than easiest, because I agree it will not be easy to make it happen.
paganel 6mo ago
> How do we treat AI creative work? We erase it and call out the ghouls “creating” that shit, simple. They deserve being called out for creating shit and poisoning our minds.
Tyrubias 6mo ago
I understand your points, but I think what scares people is that the solutions you propose are disregarded by our politicians. At least in the US, both politicians and the large donors funding them seem to be more and more allergic to anything resembling an universal basic income, and they do their best to scare people away with fearmongering about “communism”. The US is also doing a hard U-turn away from environmental protection and is trying to frame environmental conservation as radical and harmful. Other countries might be doing better on these fronts, but it’s definitely not a good sign that the US doesn’t seem to be on board with your first two solutions. In the more immediate run, I think the concern is that AI will reduce the ability of workers to collectively bargain and thereby grant the wealthy oligarchs even more control over their workers’ lives.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
  > politicians and the large donors funding them seem to be more and more allergic to anything resembling an universal basic income UBI has been a major donor priority, at least on the left.
- cortesoft 6mo ago
  I completely agree that governments and power brokers will disregard these solutions unless forced. However, they will also disregard any attempt to slow down or halt AI progress in general, so it isn't like the people wanting to end AI in general are any more likely to succeed than those wanting to do what I propose. I personally feel my suggestions would be slightly more feasible to gain support for than trying to stop AI completely. The power brokers in control of AI currently certainly aren't going to stop developing and pushing AI, but they might be convinced that sharing the wealth is the only way to avoid massive revolt in the long run. While it is conceivable that the wealthy wouldn't need the masses for labor like they do now in the AI future, they still need to not be killed in a massive uprising when 90% of the population is unemployed and starving. While I know a lot of people think the plan is just to kill off that part of the population, that is not that easy to do even with an army of AI robots, and would likely be cheaper and easier to just share a bit of the productivity. I don't think it will be trivial, but I don't think it is impossible.
keybored 6mo ago
> The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on the works of society. This is straightforward? This is a colossal task. Monumental. Billionaires own it. That’s the political status quo. You could build something to counter those centers of power. But from what base? Well-paid software developers have scoffed at or been ignorant of worker organizing for, maybe forever? But I have good paycheck and equity... Now what?
- cortesoft 6mo ago
  'Straightfoward' as in there is a clear way to solve the issue, not that it will be easy to enact it.
  - happytoexplain 6mo ago
    But it's not a clear way to solve the issue. UBI, even if enacted tomorrow, doesn't stop the enormous crash of the middle-class, and the fallout of that. Maybe it will stop some people from literally dying - that's "solved"? It's a small buffer at the very worst end of a gigantic problem. The word "solve" is totally ridiculous.
  - keybored 6mo ago
    Okay you’re right. In some sense of the word it is straightforward. But I still think it is not straightforward compared to most things. I can get more muscle mass at the gym. That is straightforward. Only a few things makes it not easy. But “share the productivity with society at large”... you have to collapse so many more variables. - How to organize political resistance against AI tech billionaires - How to not get co-opted by counter-measures by AI tech billionaires - How to resist false promises (backed by nothing) that some AI tech billionaire will enact UBI for everyone so everything will be fine (those with all the power can withdraw whatever they want at any point) - How to deal with white collar competition in the interim period before automation: everyone using AI and nodding along with it[1] just to not “fall behind” - How to potentially fight against a small minority (AI tech billionaires) but that now might have enough megawatts to turn their stochastic parrots against any dissenters And maybe more. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47904777 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47904777
spwa4 6mo ago
In my opinion the main, and really only, issue: AI is a necessity. Everything from war (including defense departments), to jobs, to rental advertisements, to food packaging, to restaurant reviews, to news, to education, to programming, to architecture, to politics ... will have to change due to AI. Not changing them is not really an option. Everything needs to be figured out here. A lot of this will both cost money AND require people to change their jobs, their investments, their equipment, ... And they hate it. Everyone, including governments will have to adapt. And to add insult to injury, everything comes from the US and it's really expensive.
retired 6mo ago
Needing less offices, less people driving to those offices, less A/C and heating for those offices and less resources building those offices could offset the energy usage of AI.
- cortesoft 6mo ago
  The people still need to be somewhere, so while commuting could be reduced I am not sure about heating/cooling usage.
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- calgoo 6mo ago
  We can just turn all the office buildings into datacenters, they already look like heating vents! cover them in solar panels on the outside to cover the windows, and done!
- neonstatic 6mo ago
  Remote work accomplishes all that as Covid days proved.
ambicapter 6mo ago
> Doing work to make it more efficient Making it more efficient will probably >>increase<< the total energy devoted to AI, not reduce it. See Jevon's Paradox.
JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
There is also a likeability problem. Altman and, shockingly, to a lesser degree, Musk have terrible brands. When folks see those people at the top of these companies, folks who have been publicly saying they're going to cause massive job losses and cause human extinction or whatnot, they're going to hate the companies irrespective of the actual risk of job losses or environmental impacts.
- throwatdem12311 6mo ago
  Why does Dario get off the hook here? He also comes off like a greasy asshole 99% of the time.
  - JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
    > Why does Dario get off the hook here? I'm curious for metrics, but Dario strikes me as being less perpetually online. Given equal time, they may each be unlikeable. But they don't put themselves out there equally–Sam and Elon are unable to focus on their work. (I'll admit I've had a soft spot for Dario since he stood up to Hegseth–maybe I'm just not seeing the equal hate he's getting.)
  - happytoexplain 6mo ago
    Virtually no "normal people" know who he is. I don't think most programmers I know even know who he is. They just know "Altman" and "Anthropic".
- keybored 6mo ago
  What a blessing that they don’t have an Obama frontman for their schemes.
oytis 6mo ago
Universal basic income is not an adequate replacement for a good career. Universal unconditional prosperity might be one, but it's not clear whether AI can really do that.
watwut 6mo ago
> The easiest way would be a straight tax on AI usage, and using that tax to pay a universal basic income. The very same CEOs are extremely against social support, any taxes for themselves and any govermental agencies that help or protect people. How is can this be possibly easiest in the world of Thiel, Musk, Trump, Vance, Palantier and overtone window moving toward economically conservative for years.
operatingthetan 6mo ago
I think you may be going too far, as in your critiques assume the tech is further along than it actually is. There are three fundamental problems for mass AI adoption/AGI: 1. Lack of memory/continuity 2. Lack of agency 3. Lack of self-awareness Based on my understanding of the basic 'loop' of an LLM, solutions for these may be decades off or not possible. Which leads me to the fourth problem: 4. Lack of compute To get anywhere near AGI we need massive context windows. The whole thing is a mess.
- sumeno 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  - operatingthetan 6mo ago
    A personal attack is not necessary. You don't seem to understand my perspective at all, please read some of my other comments.
- SpicyLemonZest 6mo ago
  All three of these problems are thoroughly solved by widely available tools.
  - operatingthetan 6mo ago
    They are? Is your LLM ready to run your organization without further input from you or anyone? Do you realize that "memory" requires eating your hilariously small context window? Have you not had a discussion with Opus where it insists it is correct about something it is objectively wrong about for several turns?
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    - SpicyLemonZest 6mo ago
      That seems like an unreasonably high standard. I like to think that I have memory, agency, and self awareness, but I'm not ready to run my organization without further input from anyone. > Do you realize that "memory" requires eating your hilariously small context window? I do! LLMs are structured differently than humans, so the component we call "memory" corresponds to what humans call "short-term memory"; practical long-term memory for an LLM looks much more like what a human would call "let me write this down". But you can and commercially available systems do load it into context on demand when it's needed for some problem or another.
Dwedit 6mo ago
I think you left out the part about AI being a plagiarism machine.
happytoexplain 6mo ago
No, you're backwards. The first point is definitely the most important and most tricky. UBI is a dangerous distraction in this context. It's a mammoth cost to achieve an impoverished quality of life. It may be worth implementing in general, but it absolutely must stay out of the conversation about AI. It's like if the ruling class started announcing that they would like to imprison us all, and your "discussion" about the problem revolved around how we can make our future jail cells feel as nice as possible. We are allowed to regulate businesses. We simply don't.
- cortesoft 6mo ago
  What sort of regulation do you think is needed for this?
  - SpicyLemonZest 6mo ago
    I think frontier AI research should be outlawed until such time as there's a broad consensus on how society ought to deal with it. This would have to be coordinated internationally to be effective, but I think that would be achievable if the US sent a credible signal by forcibly shutting down any one of the major labs.
    - neonstatic 6mo ago
      This is never going to happen. Is something can be done, it will be done.
      - happytoexplain 6mo ago
        >If something can be done, it will be done. What does this mean? It's obviously false on its face.
        neonstatic 6mo ago
        It means that if something is physically possible, someone will be doing it, regardless of legal, moral, or social barriers. False on its face? Not that long ago, global public opinion was mortified at the news, that newborn twins in China have been genetically modified. I am old enough to remember the outrage in the late 90s as the world watched the first cloned sheep grow up, get sick, and die. It was possible to do, so someone had done it. The point is - with the use of law, morality, social pressure, we can moderate the frequency and scale of some phenomena, but we cannot stop it. I think this idea is what prevents some bans. "If the Chinese can do it, and we stop ourselves from doing it, they will gain an advantage and we would lose". Substitute "the Chinese" with whoever is the opponent at any given point in time and you have a rather plausible explanation for why things were the way they were.
contingencies 6mo ago
Picasso famously said "Computers are useless, they can only give you answers." You can't put things back in the bag. Perhaps the true underlying social problems are: 1. There's too many humans and not enough jobs. 2. The capitalist system only rewards profit seeking and cost externalization. 3. Our democratic representation myth is dead and buried. 4. Even in the developed world, middle-class security is gone. So here's my question: given the current global system has failed and is clearly in its death throes, as a pan-national species how can we transition to a less mono-focal economic rationalism driven means of governance and self-organization without turning in to an autocracy or reinforcing negative nationalist bloc-level thinking that will tie us in to the same old human-thump-human stone age ape-ism and environmental cost externalization? Perhaps AI can help in areas like improved education, improved media, proposals for improved government process or process transition for enhanced efficiency. Enforce transparency and accountability in the halls of power by reducing human process and corruption. Public auditable decision making and public auditable oversight. It's at least potential grounds for partial optimism. The best I can summon under present conditions. Of course, we want to avoid a dystopian global AI autocracy, the technocratic basis for which we have already well established, but if you view the present system as a dystopian human autocracy with the same technocratic basis (an increasingly rational perspective given recent events), then it starts to look more rosy.
synecdoche 6mo ago
UBI drives inflation. All other effects follow from that.
- cortesoft 6mo ago
  I am not sure if inflation will work exactly the same in a world where AI/robots do all the work. Inflation is driven by scarcity. More demand for a fixed/limited resource drives up the price. Historically, every good and service humans bought followed this pattern, so we didn’t even have to consider an alternative. Already in our current economy, however, we have seen a good portion of our economy shift to things that do not have this characteristic. For example, take something like a video streaming service. The marginal cost for additional demand is small enough to be almost negligible; if everyone in the world decided they wanted a Netflix subscription, there wouldn’t suddenly be a shortage of streams or a run on episodes of The Great British Bake Off. They would have to build more datacenters, but the cost per additional user is tiny compared to almost every other traditional good that came before. If AI and Robots start doing all work, then this would spread to more of the economy. The increase in productive capacity would severely reduce the limitations that have historically driven inflation. We obviously have to invest in building robots and AI, but once we have enough robots they would be making more of themselves and we would be limited by natural resources, but we could use robots to get more of those, too… and we could focus on clean energy, since we would have plenty of robots to do that work, too.
ashley95 6mo ago
> The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. In the same way that it was straightforward to deal with job loss from the industrial revolution, or when the US shipped away all its manufacturing capability?
- cortesoft 6mo ago
  I mean, kind of? It was fairly straight forward, and unemployment and poverty continued to decrease as those events occurred.
pj_mukh 6mo ago
I don't think the last two critiques are good critiques at all. The environmental impact is a function of our energy sources not energy uses. Complaining about energy and water when we have infinite energy beamed down to us surrounded by a planet that is 70% water seems silly. And AI "Ikea-fies" art and creativity. It doesn't get rid of it. Of course you can get a generic table from IKEA, but for a real unique piece, you need to go to a real artist. Always. The real main critique is for AI jobs that are a one-to-one replacement, your taxi driver, your dock worker etc. I don't think UBI is a viable solution (I used to) but nothing replaces the community and status that a real job gives you. This is going to be a tough one.
foogazi 6mo ago
> The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on the works of society. The easiest way would be a straight tax on AI usage, and using that tax to pay a universal basic income. How much UBI you want from this AI tax ? I don’t think they’d give me what I want
Aurornis 6mo ago
> The easiest way would be a straight tax on AI usage, and using that tax to pay a universal basic income Every call for UBI should be qualified with two estimates: 1) How much money you think UBI will pay out 2) How much money you think the tax will generate Creating a UBI program with AI taxes sounds like a clean solution to something until you do any math. If we estimate today’s AI revenues across all the big providers at $100B annually (a little high) and divide by the population of the US, I get around $24 per month per person. So a 100% tax on AI plans would allow us to give UBI of about 80 cents per day. Even 10X the revenues wouldn’t make bring that to parity with UBI expectations. A 100% tax would also be an incredible gift to foreign AI companies that could offer similar services for half the price to everyone else in the world.
- cortesoft 6mo ago
  This is based on the assumption that AI is going to take all our jobs. If this is true, than as more jobs are absorbed by AI the revenue would increase.
  - Aurornis 6mo ago
    You’re assuming that this AI will be in the same taxable jurisdiction as the people whose jobs were replaced. The work that is most replaceable by AI is work that is mostly digital. That work most easily moves to another country. When the work is replaced by AI you can relocate it to another country much more easily than when you have to relocate workers.
  - VitaliyKorbut 6mo ago
    As more jobs are absorbed by AI the revenue would increase, but not dramatically. As AI competition will lower the prices to the cost of serving tokens, which is close to zero. We’ll get more stuff done and the world would be better off. Even if we don’t invent new jobs we can compete for existing jobs harder, for example we can have 3 times more of X (for example restaurants) at 1/3 the client base on average. It doesn’t mean that everyone will be of a higher social status than average, which is what people actually want, and which is mathematically impossible.
bdangubic 6mo ago
USA will never have UBI, period. So any idea that includes any mention of is an absolute non-starter. Outside of the USA, perhaps, but for us that is never happening.
- joquarky 6mo ago
  It's false hope. Any UBI system will become as corrupted as our present tax system.
TrevorFSmith 6mo ago
I think you're missing one of the major reasons people are against "AI": the jerks at the top. When obviously nefarious people are lining their pockets and not bothering to even pretend to care about the people around them, it's no surprise they're hated.
richardw 6mo ago
> The easiest way would be a straight tax on AI usage, and using that tax to pay a universal basic income Problem for jobs is that there are 200 countries and all the earnings will go to a few. Universal basic income for everyone? Or just the US? Who gets to keep their house locations in a new fair world? The person whose parents bought in the right place 50 years ago? Who pays the money these models earn, if nobody clicks ads or does a job? What is income for if we don’t work and can just ask the AI for everything we want? What happens when the super smart AI comes up with “better” (more fair, consistent, etc) answers than you think you have to questions like the above? What if they end up socialist? Do we force it (and invite risk it escapes and fights us for the greater good) or give in to the presumably more thorough reasoning?
- joquarky 6mo ago
  It almost seems like you may have already read this short story, but just in case you haven't: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 We are spiraling toward the first half of this story. The second half is so idealistic at this point that it can be ignored.
zozbot234 6mo ago
The main critique of AI is that it's a dumb hallucinating parrot. It can't do genuine human quality work at all, outside of extremely narrow domains like basic translation and copyediting. Even for Q&A, while it can be useful by quickly accessing a huge storehouse of learned knowledge, the vulnerability to hallucinations means that human expert verification will always be required.
- card_zero 6mo ago
  I'll note that there can be multiple main critiques coming from an incoherent set of viewpoints, since this is public opinion we're talking about. Between "AI doing creative work", if you believe, and "fraud", there's all the low-key filler material that's sub-creative and sub-fraudulent. There's a similarity between the phrase it was made with AI and phrases like I didn't bake your cake myself, it came from a store or sorry, it's just a cheap plastic one. So part of AI's image is that it's a flourishing new source of disappointment.
frm88 6mo ago
The fourth aspect to discuss is how do we want to restrict the influence of AI companies on politics? Will we allow the CEOs to implement Thiel's vision of a world run as a company with CEOs at the top via massive monetary influence on political decision making, effectively abolishing democracy? If they really manage to replace 50% of the workforce with AI, their influence over everything from regulation to elections to social security networks as well as foreign policy will be enormous.
BrenBarn 6mo ago
There is another critique that is not specific to AI but I think is bigger than all of these: that a relatively small number of large companies, and the small number of very wealthy people who control those companies, have an outsize influence on many aspects of society. AI is the poster child for this right now, but tech companies in general are also reviled, and more generally all kinds of companies (media, fossil fuels, etc.) are targets of opprobrium. From this perspective, the main irritation of AI is that it is the biggest, most intrusive case of "some rich guy is messing with my life". This is driven largely from the willingness of a small number of rich people to lose large amounts of money shoving AI down everyone's throats in the hope that that will eventually lead to them recouping those losses. I believe a significant amount of AI criticism is really about this, and that means we need to resolve the overall issues of wealth inequality and economic skewing. People would be much less angry about AI if its development and ownership were more diffuse, and if the patterns of its use were more directly connected to its current observable abilities, rather than based on what some group of insiders thinks about how much its stocks may go up in the future.
TheScaryOne 6mo ago
>The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on the works of society. This was the argument about robots. It did not pan out. No taxes materialized. Robots and Automated Machines have not shared productivity. In fact, things like self-checkout has spread the labor load to the customer, instead of the company. >We have the technology to produce energy in sustainable ways, but it is expensive AI Datacenters should be completely sustainably self-powered. Full stop. We did not spend decades bringing down the cost of power only to have it all hoovered up by robber barons who "need" it to be the first immortal AI God. We did not install water treatment plants to bring down our water usage rates just to feed the machine spirit. >How do we treat AI creative work? How much creative work do we feel comfortable handing over to AI? Someone said it as a joke, but I want AI to be doing my dishes and sorting my laundry while I write books and compose music. I don't want AI writing books and composing music so I have more time to do my dishes and sort my laundry.
- Quarrelsome 6mo ago
  > Someone said it as a joke, but I want AI to be doing my dishes and sorting my laundry while I write books and compose music. I don't want AI writing books and composing music so I have more time to do my dishes and sort my laundry. Well then we should maybe ask ourselves why RealityTV gets more views than well written work.
danaris 6mo ago
Your first critique has a massive hole in it, because it assumes that every person whose job is replaced by "AI" is actually going to be done as well by the "AI" as it was by the human. To the extent that it's even true that this is going to happen, that is laughably false. Yes; LLMs can answer some questions well (but unreliably) and with the right setups, can be rigged to perform some tasks well (but unreliably). There is no way they are ready to take over a single full-time job. If any employer tried, the number of errors in the performance of that job would jump by a huge amount, because LLMs are not reliable and cannot be made so.
insane_dreamer 6mo ago
> The easiest way would be a straight tax on AI usage, and using that tax to pay a universal basic income. There are obviously a ton of variations on this idea, but I think the general premise of sharing the gains with everyone is sound. I don’t think many would complain if they lost their job but kept their income. Nice, but completely unrealistic. The whole reason why AI is/will be adopted by companies like wildfire is to cut costs and increase profits. If they have to pay taxes equivalent to what they were paying in labor (or anywhere close to that), then AI is for nothing. Business will never agree to it. So this will never happen unless there is some sort of social revolution that completely remakes the system.
- joquarky 6mo ago
  Why not just cut out the company entirely and go after something much easier to audit: capital gains taxes. This is money obtained for doing nothing (i.e., like UBI but for the wealthy). It should be taxed heavily and in inverse proportion to how long the investment was held. For example, HFT gains get a 90% tax. Gains held over 10 years gets a 10% tax. Fit an appropriate curve in the middle.
zenethian 6mo ago
You forgot the part where they stole literally everyone’s copyrighted works and trained on it and have not been sanctioned at all for it.
- joquarky 6mo ago
  Did they not make backups? Perhaps we should force companies to return each and every byte of stolen data to their owners.
guyomes 6mo ago
> How do we handle AI doing creative work? How do we treat AI creative work? How much creative work do we feel comfortable handing over to AI? Just as a good for thought, looking back into history, during the late 1920s, mass production had a critical impact on Art Deco [1]. Artists were divided on the question if mass-produced art (using new industrial methods) could have a quality similar to hand-crafted art. It is clear that different people will have different opinion on the subject. The technology is not there yet, but one example of mass production from AI would be book adaptation into movies. I'm sure that there are many other examples hard to predict that might: empower people, degrade art quality, improve art quality, divide people or maybe gather people. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Deco#Late_Art_Deco https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Deco#Late_Art_Deco
tripzilch 6mo ago
There's also the part where a lot of AIs were trained on data people did not consent to be used.

Rekindle8090 6mo ago

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troosevelt 6mo ago

If you lost your $60,000 a year job due to this, do you really believe a basic income funded by it will make up that loss? It won't. Basic income in the US is usually proposed at $12k per year, which would add another $3 trillion to the budget. Do you think you can even get that just taxing these companies? I don't. People who bring up basic income need to get serious about the numbers involved because I never see it. It's not a realistic solution.

hashmap 6mo ago
You never see it how. Like in terms of raw resources or political will?
- troosevelt 6mo ago
  I mean the numbers. 12k per year is peanuts. You cannot live off that and to do it we'd be nearly doubling the budget (that's old data, it's probably not that portion of the budget anymore). That 12k doesn't include healthcare, it doesn't include a lot of things. It's basically ensuring that people live well below poverty level, and for what? I just don't get how the numbers work, even if it was politically feasible. I'd much rather have free healthcare and other amenities other countries have. Here in the US if you lose your job there is virtually nothing between you and the streets besides family and friends. I'm facing this right now. I cannot get a job in tech which means restarting my career. Getting a job right now is not easy in any field especially not in anything like a living wage. If I did not have my parents I would be on the streets right now, thankfully I don't have a mortgage or anything like that. I'm not sure how much $12k per year would really help, it certainly wouldn't pay for housing. It's rough out there.
  - hashmap 6mo ago
    Oh, yeah $12k would not do it. For a UBI to work we would have to shift a significant portion of the concentrated wealth. I too was laid off long enough ago that by now I would be in a bad spot without help, also no mortgage or anything, and I don't travel or go out much. UBI of any degree would do something, but it would have to be much higher than $12k to tread water just due to rent alone. Aside from UBI we would likely need to decouple housing from profit, it has the same problem as healthcare. Demand for it is inelastic to a certain degree, everyone needs somewhere to live.
pydry 6mo ago
Just as hyperloop was designed as a techbro pie in the sky notion to kill high speed rail, basic income as an idea is designed to kill more realistic attempts to shore up welfare, e.g. * A job guarantee like we had during the great depression * Lowering retirement age * Raise minimum wage * Expanding medicare to everyone It's worth remembering that if AI really can do everyone's jobs then it'll be wildly deflationary so there's no need to worry about pesky government spending on this stuff or paying people more. Spend spend spend, baby! Ah youre worried it cant do that? Maybe it is mostly smoke and mirrors then.

sofixa 6mo ago

There are a few other issues. Like copyright. All modern LLMs are built on troves of copyrighted material that was used in their training. AI companies are claiming this is fair use, while pretty much all of the copyright holders would strongly disagree. This is going to get litigated for years, but regardless of what various legal systems decide, morally, people can be against this. And people are already sick and tired of AI-generated content being used to replace human made content, be it on Spotify or TikTok. This is part "AI replacing humans", part "I'm being scammed by lower quality content".

MBCook 6mo ago
And we’ve seen the cases of people trying to use the AIs to train new AIs! OpenAI: We’re allowed to steal everything to train our AI and you can’t complain Developer: Ok, I’ll use your AI to train mine OpenAI: NO NOT LIKE THAT, UNFAIR
cortesoft 6mo ago
I feel like this is covered by the last question about how we deal with AI and creative works.

schoen 6mo ago

The concern I hear the most (which I don't think is common among the general public) is the existential risk one (that an AI may be created that drastically exceeds human intelligence, and that it may accidentally be incentivized to take actions that destroy most or all of human civilization).

JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
> concern I hear the most (which I don't think is common among the general public) is the existential risk one Altman and friends' "stop us before we shoot grandma" PR tour in 2023 and '24 is largely the cause of this AI backlash. If you tell everyone you're building something that will kill us all, you will scare up investors. But you'll also turn the public against you. In truth, we have zero evidence of the alignment problem to date in the existential form. Instead, it's the usual technology enabling bad actors stuff.
- SpicyLemonZest 6mo ago
  The "alignment problem" as traditionally understood assumed a different path to AI development, where the best AIs wouldn't primarily operate on a substrate of human language. If AI becomes powerful enough to make human employment non-viable without being post-scarcity enough to make permanent unemployment viable, that's going to be an existential problem, and it seems no less likely today than it did in 2023.
  - JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
    > If AI becomes powerful enough to make human employment non-viable without being post-scarcity enough to make permanent unemployment viable, that's going to be an existential problem That's massively moving the goalposts on what counts as "an existential problem." The original framing was not economic dislocation but actual existence, i.e. existential. This new framing is a retreat to a way-of-life argument. And I'm still calling baloney! The "AI will kill us all" argument backfired on Altman et al, so now we have an "it'll take over all the jobs" pitch. But it's all smoke and mirrors for investors. We have no good reason to expect current AI methods will lead to an AGI that can not only do most human labour, but do so economically competitively.

jiggawatts 6mo ago

> mislead and commit fraud at scale This is the "safety" messaging that OpenAI and Anthropic keep harping on and on, and on about, while whistling a merry tune as they turn around and sell AI to the US military and worse, to the tune of $billions/year already. The "and worse" needs elaboration, because fundamentally the single biggest cash cow for AI vendors will be (and maybe already is) implementing a dystopian future where everything we say, type, or do will not just be recorded but also: read, analysed, and cross-correlated by unfeeling heartless machines tasked with keeping us in line. I'm not being paranoid, President Biden said as much, but only in reference to China. If you think only China has motivation to use AI to keep a lid on dissent, I have a bridge to sell you. And if you think the Land Of The Free(tm) will never abuse AI in this manner, well... I have some bad news. You may want to sit down. Here in Australia, the cyberpunk dystopia is already starting to be rolled out. A customer of ours asked their IT team to hook up a variety of HR-related information sources to their new AI system tasked with making recommendations for hiring, promotion, and demotion. Welcome to 1984, citizen.

dualvariable 6mo ago
Yeah, AI-enabled surveillance capitalism is likely to be every bit as bad as what people imagine China is doing with their social credit scores. And the scary thing is that you can probably easily sell it to Democratic voters if you track racism scores for people, so you can filter people out of your dating pool or job/rental applications. Most people don't care about privacy as a fundamental right, and they'll roll over and compromise if you give them a way to track what they hate. You just need to make sure it is "bipartisan" and it'll be wildly popular.

Devasta 6mo ago

> The easiest way would be a straight tax on AI usage, and using that tax to pay a universal basic income. If the Epstein class wouldn't go for something like this in a world where they needed workers to produce, the idea that they will when we are surplus to requirement is inconceivable.

cortesoft 6mo ago
I should have said 'most straightforward', rather than easiest, because I agree it will not be easy to make it happen.

paganel 6mo ago

> How do we treat AI creative work? We erase it and call out the ghouls “creating” that shit, simple. They deserve being called out for creating shit and poisoning our minds.

Tyrubias 6mo ago

I understand your points, but I think what scares people is that the solutions you propose are disregarded by our politicians. At least in the US, both politicians and the large donors funding them seem to be more and more allergic to anything resembling an universal basic income, and they do their best to scare people away with fearmongering about “communism”. The US is also doing a hard U-turn away from environmental protection and is trying to frame environmental conservation as radical and harmful. Other countries might be doing better on these fronts, but it’s definitely not a good sign that the US doesn’t seem to be on board with your first two solutions. In the more immediate run, I think the concern is that AI will reduce the ability of workers to collectively bargain and thereby grant the wealthy oligarchs even more control over their workers’ lives.

JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
> politicians and the large donors funding them seem to be more and more allergic to anything resembling an universal basic income UBI has been a major donor priority, at least on the left.
cortesoft 6mo ago
I completely agree that governments and power brokers will disregard these solutions unless forced. However, they will also disregard any attempt to slow down or halt AI progress in general, so it isn't like the people wanting to end AI in general are any more likely to succeed than those wanting to do what I propose. I personally feel my suggestions would be slightly more feasible to gain support for than trying to stop AI completely. The power brokers in control of AI currently certainly aren't going to stop developing and pushing AI, but they might be convinced that sharing the wealth is the only way to avoid massive revolt in the long run. While it is conceivable that the wealthy wouldn't need the masses for labor like they do now in the AI future, they still need to not be killed in a massive uprising when 90% of the population is unemployed and starving. While I know a lot of people think the plan is just to kill off that part of the population, that is not that easy to do even with an army of AI robots, and would likely be cheaper and easier to just share a bit of the productivity. I don't think it will be trivial, but I don't think it is impossible.

keybored 6mo ago

cortesoft 6mo ago
'Straightfoward' as in there is a clear way to solve the issue, not that it will be easy to enact it.
- happytoexplain 6mo ago
  But it's not a clear way to solve the issue. UBI, even if enacted tomorrow, doesn't stop the enormous crash of the middle-class, and the fallout of that. Maybe it will stop some people from literally dying - that's "solved"? It's a small buffer at the very worst end of a gigantic problem. The word "solve" is totally ridiculous.
- keybored 6mo ago
  Okay you’re right. In some sense of the word it is straightforward. But I still think it is not straightforward compared to most things. I can get more muscle mass at the gym. That is straightforward. Only a few things makes it not easy. But “share the productivity with society at large”... you have to collapse so many more variables. - How to organize political resistance against AI tech billionaires - How to not get co-opted by counter-measures by AI tech billionaires - How to resist false promises (backed by nothing) that some AI tech billionaire will enact UBI for everyone so everything will be fine (those with all the power can withdraw whatever they want at any point) - How to deal with white collar competition in the interim period before automation: everyone using AI and nodding along with it[1] just to not “fall behind” - How to potentially fight against a small minority (AI tech billionaires) but that now might have enough megawatts to turn their stochastic parrots against any dissenters And maybe more. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47904777 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47904777

spwa4 6mo ago

In my opinion the main, and really only, issue: AI is a necessity. Everything from war (including defense departments), to jobs, to rental advertisements, to food packaging, to restaurant reviews, to news, to education, to programming, to architecture, to politics ... will have to change due to AI. Not changing them is not really an option. Everything needs to be figured out here. A lot of this will both cost money AND require people to change their jobs, their investments, their equipment, ... And they hate it. Everyone, including governments will have to adapt. And to add insult to injury, everything comes from the US and it's really expensive.

retired 6mo ago

Needing less offices, less people driving to those offices, less A/C and heating for those offices and less resources building those offices could offset the energy usage of AI.

cortesoft 6mo ago
The people still need to be somewhere, so while commuting could be reduced I am not sure about heating/cooling usage.
- deleted 6mo ago
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calgoo 6mo ago
We can just turn all the office buildings into datacenters, they already look like heating vents! cover them in solar panels on the outside to cover the windows, and done!
neonstatic 6mo ago
Remote work accomplishes all that as Covid days proved.

ambicapter 6mo ago

> Doing work to make it more efficient Making it more efficient will probably >>increase<< the total energy devoted to AI, not reduce it. See Jevon's Paradox.

JumpCrisscross 6mo ago

There is also a likeability problem. Altman and, shockingly, to a lesser degree, Musk have terrible brands. When folks see those people at the top of these companies, folks who have been publicly saying they're going to cause massive job losses and cause human extinction or whatnot, they're going to hate the companies irrespective of the actual risk of job losses or environmental impacts.

throwatdem12311 6mo ago
Why does Dario get off the hook here? He also comes off like a greasy asshole 99% of the time.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
  > Why does Dario get off the hook here? I'm curious for metrics, but Dario strikes me as being less perpetually online. Given equal time, they may each be unlikeable. But they don't put themselves out there equally–Sam and Elon are unable to focus on their work. (I'll admit I've had a soft spot for Dario since he stood up to Hegseth–maybe I'm just not seeing the equal hate he's getting.)
- happytoexplain 6mo ago
  Virtually no "normal people" know who he is. I don't think most programmers I know even know who he is. They just know "Altman" and "Anthropic".
keybored 6mo ago
What a blessing that they don’t have an Obama frontman for their schemes.

oytis 6mo ago

Universal basic income is not an adequate replacement for a good career. Universal unconditional prosperity might be one, but it's not clear whether AI can really do that.

watwut 6mo ago

> The easiest way would be a straight tax on AI usage, and using that tax to pay a universal basic income. The very same CEOs are extremely against social support, any taxes for themselves and any govermental agencies that help or protect people. How is can this be possibly easiest in the world of Thiel, Musk, Trump, Vance, Palantier and overtone window moving toward economically conservative for years.

operatingthetan 6mo ago

I think you may be going too far, as in your critiques assume the tech is further along than it actually is. There are three fundamental problems for mass AI adoption/AGI: 1. Lack of memory/continuity 2. Lack of agency 3. Lack of self-awareness Based on my understanding of the basic 'loop' of an LLM, solutions for these may be decades off or not possible. Which leads me to the fourth problem: 4. Lack of compute To get anywhere near AGI we need massive context windows. The whole thing is a mess.

sumeno 6mo ago
[flagged]
- operatingthetan 6mo ago
  A personal attack is not necessary. You don't seem to understand my perspective at all, please read some of my other comments.
SpicyLemonZest 6mo ago
All three of these problems are thoroughly solved by widely available tools.
- operatingthetan 6mo ago
  They are? Is your LLM ready to run your organization without further input from you or anyone? Do you realize that "memory" requires eating your hilariously small context window? Have you not had a discussion with Opus where it insists it is correct about something it is objectively wrong about for several turns?
  - deleted 6mo ago
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  - SpicyLemonZest 6mo ago
    That seems like an unreasonably high standard. I like to think that I have memory, agency, and self awareness, but I'm not ready to run my organization without further input from anyone. > Do you realize that "memory" requires eating your hilariously small context window? I do! LLMs are structured differently than humans, so the component we call "memory" corresponds to what humans call "short-term memory"; practical long-term memory for an LLM looks much more like what a human would call "let me write this down". But you can and commercially available systems do load it into context on demand when it's needed for some problem or another.

Dwedit 6mo ago

I think you left out the part about AI being a plagiarism machine.

happytoexplain 6mo ago

No, you're backwards. The first point is definitely the most important and most tricky. UBI is a dangerous distraction in this context. It's a mammoth cost to achieve an impoverished quality of life. It may be worth implementing in general, but it absolutely must stay out of the conversation about AI. It's like if the ruling class started announcing that they would like to imprison us all, and your "discussion" about the problem revolved around how we can make our future jail cells feel as nice as possible. We are allowed to regulate businesses. We simply don't.

cortesoft 6mo ago
What sort of regulation do you think is needed for this?
- SpicyLemonZest 6mo ago
  I think frontier AI research should be outlawed until such time as there's a broad consensus on how society ought to deal with it. This would have to be coordinated internationally to be effective, but I think that would be achievable if the US sent a credible signal by forcibly shutting down any one of the major labs.
  - neonstatic 6mo ago
    This is never going to happen. Is something can be done, it will be done.
    - happytoexplain 6mo ago
      >If something can be done, it will be done. What does this mean? It's obviously false on its face.
      - neonstatic 6mo ago
        It means that if something is physically possible, someone will be doing it, regardless of legal, moral, or social barriers. False on its face? Not that long ago, global public opinion was mortified at the news, that newborn twins in China have been genetically modified. I am old enough to remember the outrage in the late 90s as the world watched the first cloned sheep grow up, get sick, and die. It was possible to do, so someone had done it. The point is - with the use of law, morality, social pressure, we can moderate the frequency and scale of some phenomena, but we cannot stop it. I think this idea is what prevents some bans. "If the Chinese can do it, and we stop ourselves from doing it, they will gain an advantage and we would lose". Substitute "the Chinese" with whoever is the opponent at any given point in time and you have a rather plausible explanation for why things were the way they were.

contingencies 6mo ago

Picasso famously said "Computers are useless, they can only give you answers." You can't put things back in the bag. Perhaps the true underlying social problems are: 1. There's too many humans and not enough jobs. 2. The capitalist system only rewards profit seeking and cost externalization. 3. Our democratic representation myth is dead and buried. 4. Even in the developed world, middle-class security is gone. So here's my question: given the current global system has failed and is clearly in its death throes, as a pan-national species how can we transition to a less mono-focal economic rationalism driven means of governance and self-organization without turning in to an autocracy or reinforcing negative nationalist bloc-level thinking that will tie us in to the same old human-thump-human stone age ape-ism and environmental cost externalization? Perhaps AI can help in areas like improved education, improved media, proposals for improved government process or process transition for enhanced efficiency. Enforce transparency and accountability in the halls of power by reducing human process and corruption. Public auditable decision making and public auditable oversight. It's at least potential grounds for partial optimism. The best I can summon under present conditions. Of course, we want to avoid a dystopian global AI autocracy, the technocratic basis for which we have already well established, but if you view the present system as a dystopian human autocracy with the same technocratic basis (an increasingly rational perspective given recent events), then it starts to look more rosy.

synecdoche 6mo ago

UBI drives inflation. All other effects follow from that.

cortesoft 6mo ago
I am not sure if inflation will work exactly the same in a world where AI/robots do all the work. Inflation is driven by scarcity. More demand for a fixed/limited resource drives up the price. Historically, every good and service humans bought followed this pattern, so we didn’t even have to consider an alternative. Already in our current economy, however, we have seen a good portion of our economy shift to things that do not have this characteristic. For example, take something like a video streaming service. The marginal cost for additional demand is small enough to be almost negligible; if everyone in the world decided they wanted a Netflix subscription, there wouldn’t suddenly be a shortage of streams or a run on episodes of The Great British Bake Off. They would have to build more datacenters, but the cost per additional user is tiny compared to almost every other traditional good that came before. If AI and Robots start doing all work, then this would spread to more of the economy. The increase in productive capacity would severely reduce the limitations that have historically driven inflation. We obviously have to invest in building robots and AI, but once we have enough robots they would be making more of themselves and we would be limited by natural resources, but we could use robots to get more of those, too… and we could focus on clean energy, since we would have plenty of robots to do that work, too.

ashley95 6mo ago

> The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. In the same way that it was straightforward to deal with job loss from the industrial revolution, or when the US shipped away all its manufacturing capability?

cortesoft 6mo ago
I mean, kind of? It was fairly straight forward, and unemployment and poverty continued to decrease as those events occurred.

pj_mukh 6mo ago

I don't think the last two critiques are good critiques at all. The environmental impact is a function of our energy sources not energy uses. Complaining about energy and water when we have infinite energy beamed down to us surrounded by a planet that is 70% water seems silly. And AI "Ikea-fies" art and creativity. It doesn't get rid of it. Of course you can get a generic table from IKEA, but for a real unique piece, you need to go to a real artist. Always. The real main critique is for AI jobs that are a one-to-one replacement, your taxi driver, your dock worker etc. I don't think UBI is a viable solution (I used to) but nothing replaces the community and status that a real job gives you. This is going to be a tough one.

foogazi 6mo ago

Aurornis 6mo ago

> The easiest way would be a straight tax on AI usage, and using that tax to pay a universal basic income Every call for UBI should be qualified with two estimates: 1) How much money you think UBI will pay out 2) How much money you think the tax will generate Creating a UBI program with AI taxes sounds like a clean solution to something until you do any math. If we estimate today’s AI revenues across all the big providers at $100B annually (a little high) and divide by the population of the US, I get around $24 per month per person. So a 100% tax on AI plans would allow us to give UBI of about 80 cents per day. Even 10X the revenues wouldn’t make bring that to parity with UBI expectations. A 100% tax would also be an incredible gift to foreign AI companies that could offer similar services for half the price to everyone else in the world.

cortesoft 6mo ago
This is based on the assumption that AI is going to take all our jobs. If this is true, than as more jobs are absorbed by AI the revenue would increase.
- Aurornis 6mo ago
  You’re assuming that this AI will be in the same taxable jurisdiction as the people whose jobs were replaced. The work that is most replaceable by AI is work that is mostly digital. That work most easily moves to another country. When the work is replaced by AI you can relocate it to another country much more easily than when you have to relocate workers.
- VitaliyKorbut 6mo ago
  As more jobs are absorbed by AI the revenue would increase, but not dramatically. As AI competition will lower the prices to the cost of serving tokens, which is close to zero. We’ll get more stuff done and the world would be better off. Even if we don’t invent new jobs we can compete for existing jobs harder, for example we can have 3 times more of X (for example restaurants) at 1/3 the client base on average. It doesn’t mean that everyone will be of a higher social status than average, which is what people actually want, and which is mathematically impossible.

bdangubic 6mo ago

USA will never have UBI, period. So any idea that includes any mention of is an absolute non-starter. Outside of the USA, perhaps, but for us that is never happening.

joquarky 6mo ago
It's false hope. Any UBI system will become as corrupted as our present tax system.

TrevorFSmith 6mo ago

I think you're missing one of the major reasons people are against "AI": the jerks at the top. When obviously nefarious people are lining their pockets and not bothering to even pretend to care about the people around them, it's no surprise they're hated.

richardw 6mo ago

> The easiest way would be a straight tax on AI usage, and using that tax to pay a universal basic income Problem for jobs is that there are 200 countries and all the earnings will go to a few. Universal basic income for everyone? Or just the US? Who gets to keep their house locations in a new fair world? The person whose parents bought in the right place 50 years ago? Who pays the money these models earn, if nobody clicks ads or does a job? What is income for if we don’t work and can just ask the AI for everything we want? What happens when the super smart AI comes up with “better” (more fair, consistent, etc) answers than you think you have to questions like the above? What if they end up socialist? Do we force it (and invite risk it escapes and fights us for the greater good) or give in to the presumably more thorough reasoning?

joquarky 6mo ago
It almost seems like you may have already read this short story, but just in case you haven't: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 We are spiraling toward the first half of this story. The second half is so idealistic at this point that it can be ignored.

zozbot234 6mo ago

The main critique of AI is that it's a dumb hallucinating parrot. It can't do genuine human quality work at all, outside of extremely narrow domains like basic translation and copyediting. Even for Q&A, while it can be useful by quickly accessing a huge storehouse of learned knowledge, the vulnerability to hallucinations means that human expert verification will always be required.

card_zero 6mo ago
I'll note that there can be multiple main critiques coming from an incoherent set of viewpoints, since this is public opinion we're talking about. Between "AI doing creative work", if you believe, and "fraud", there's all the low-key filler material that's sub-creative and sub-fraudulent. There's a similarity between the phrase it was made with AI and phrases like I didn't bake your cake myself, it came from a store or sorry, it's just a cheap plastic one. So part of AI's image is that it's a flourishing new source of disappointment.

frm88 6mo ago

The fourth aspect to discuss is how do we want to restrict the influence of AI companies on politics? Will we allow the CEOs to implement Thiel's vision of a world run as a company with CEOs at the top via massive monetary influence on political decision making, effectively abolishing democracy? If they really manage to replace 50% of the workforce with AI, their influence over everything from regulation to elections to social security networks as well as foreign policy will be enormous.

BrenBarn 6mo ago

There is another critique that is not specific to AI but I think is bigger than all of these: that a relatively small number of large companies, and the small number of very wealthy people who control those companies, have an outsize influence on many aspects of society. AI is the poster child for this right now, but tech companies in general are also reviled, and more generally all kinds of companies (media, fossil fuels, etc.) are targets of opprobrium. From this perspective, the main irritation of AI is that it is the biggest, most intrusive case of "some rich guy is messing with my life". This is driven largely from the willingness of a small number of rich people to lose large amounts of money shoving AI down everyone's throats in the hope that that will eventually lead to them recouping those losses. I believe a significant amount of AI criticism is really about this, and that means we need to resolve the overall issues of wealth inequality and economic skewing. People would be much less angry about AI if its development and ownership were more diffuse, and if the patterns of its use were more directly connected to its current observable abilities, rather than based on what some group of insiders thinks about how much its stocks may go up in the future.

TheScaryOne 6mo ago

>The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on the works of society. This was the argument about robots. It did not pan out. No taxes materialized. Robots and Automated Machines have not shared productivity. In fact, things like self-checkout has spread the labor load to the customer, instead of the company. >We have the technology to produce energy in sustainable ways, but it is expensive AI Datacenters should be completely sustainably self-powered. Full stop. We did not spend decades bringing down the cost of power only to have it all hoovered up by robber barons who "need" it to be the first immortal AI God. We did not install water treatment plants to bring down our water usage rates just to feed the machine spirit. >How do we treat AI creative work? How much creative work do we feel comfortable handing over to AI? Someone said it as a joke, but I want AI to be doing my dishes and sorting my laundry while I write books and compose music. I don't want AI writing books and composing music so I have more time to do my dishes and sort my laundry.

Quarrelsome 6mo ago
> Someone said it as a joke, but I want AI to be doing my dishes and sorting my laundry while I write books and compose music. I don't want AI writing books and composing music so I have more time to do my dishes and sort my laundry. Well then we should maybe ask ourselves why RealityTV gets more views than well written work.

danaris 6mo ago

Your first critique has a massive hole in it, because it assumes that every person whose job is replaced by "AI" is actually going to be done as well by the "AI" as it was by the human. To the extent that it's even true that this is going to happen, that is laughably false. Yes; LLMs can answer some questions well (but unreliably) and with the right setups, can be rigged to perform some tasks well (but unreliably). There is no way they are ready to take over a single full-time job. If any employer tried, the number of errors in the performance of that job would jump by a huge amount, because LLMs are not reliable and cannot be made so.

insane_dreamer 6mo ago

> The easiest way would be a straight tax on AI usage, and using that tax to pay a universal basic income. There are obviously a ton of variations on this idea, but I think the general premise of sharing the gains with everyone is sound. I don’t think many would complain if they lost their job but kept their income. Nice, but completely unrealistic. The whole reason why AI is/will be adopted by companies like wildfire is to cut costs and increase profits. If they have to pay taxes equivalent to what they were paying in labor (or anywhere close to that), then AI is for nothing. Business will never agree to it. So this will never happen unless there is some sort of social revolution that completely remakes the system.

joquarky 6mo ago
Why not just cut out the company entirely and go after something much easier to audit: capital gains taxes. This is money obtained for doing nothing (i.e., like UBI but for the wealthy). It should be taxed heavily and in inverse proportion to how long the investment was held. For example, HFT gains get a 90% tax. Gains held over 10 years gets a 10% tax. Fit an appropriate curve in the middle.

zenethian 6mo ago

You forgot the part where they stole literally everyone’s copyrighted works and trained on it and have not been sanctioned at all for it.

joquarky 6mo ago
Did they not make backups? Perhaps we should force companies to return each and every byte of stolen data to their owners.

guyomes 6mo ago

> How do we handle AI doing creative work? How do we treat AI creative work? How much creative work do we feel comfortable handing over to AI? Just as a good for thought, looking back into history, during the late 1920s, mass production had a critical impact on Art Deco [1]. Artists were divided on the question if mass-produced art (using new industrial methods) could have a quality similar to hand-crafted art. It is clear that different people will have different opinion on the subject. The technology is not there yet, but one example of mass production from AI would be book adaptation into movies. I'm sure that there are many other examples hard to predict that might: empower people, degrade art quality, improve art quality, divide people or maybe gather people. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Deco#Late_Art_Deco https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Deco#Late_Art_Deco

tripzilch 6mo ago

There's also the part where a lot of AIs were trained on data people did not consent to be used.