13 ms·

The turbulent AI era is here

• deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
• ETH_start 1mo ago
  I'm going to make an anti-capitalist argument in order to make a pro-capitalist argument. The anti-capitalist argument is that the wealthiest people in the world are not dramatically more intelligent than the average person. Bill Gates is obviously very intelligent and capable, but his IQ does not scale with his wealth. He built the right company at the right time, and Microsoft ended up sitting at the center of massive network effects. Relatively modest advantages in judgment, skill, and industriousness can end up producing enormous differences in wealth due to the compounding effects of success. That's just how scalable markets work. So Gates's success, while evidence that he was very effective at building Microsoft, is not evidence that he is vastly more knowledgeable than everybody else about economics or the future of technology. And the same applies to Bezos, Musk, and every other extremely successful founder. Their arguments should be judged on their merits and not treated as infallible insights from people with superhuman intelligence. Now, that is not to say that I want their wealth to be capped or politically reallocated. The case for private property depends on the argument that decentralized ownership and investment and capital risking is better than politicians allocating a pool of resources to gain clout or win over popular opinion. A wealth cap or high taxes on the wealthy would transfer control over resources from private owners to political institutions. So what we would be doing is replacing imperfect private allocation with imperfect public allocation, where the people allocating the capital have limited information, political incentives, and the ability to impose costs on others without their consent. So I reject blind deference to billionaires, but I do not want politicians to control billionaires' capital. Anyway, let me address Gates's argument about AI: Gates argues that AI will disrupt the economy faster than previous technologies, and therefore stronger government coordination is needed to address the rapidity of the speed of that transition, to cushion people against the speed of that transition. But what his analysis underweights is how quickly AI can help people adapt to the very transformation that AI brings about. For example, a worker taking on a new position now has access to a tutor and an analyst and a business advisor all wrapped up in one, who can provide world-class assistance 24/7 at the cost of a few cents in electricity. And someone who wants to start a business can employ dozens of AI agents at a cost of a few hundred dollars to test out the idea and build out a prototype within a few days. So what this means is that we cannot hold the human adaptive capacity constant while trying to determine the impact of AI's disruptive capacity. The second problem with Gates's argument is that he only counts the income that people might lose when AI replaces jobs, but he doesn't count the fall in prices that the same AI will bring about. The fall in prices is effectively an increase in purchasing power. That increase in purchasing power, in economic terms, means an increase in real wages, and that's exactly why wages increased twentyfold between 1826 and 2026. Automation brought about abundance, which reduced prices and thereby increased purchasing power, i.e. increased real wages. If you look at tokens right now, their prices are going down exponentially. They've gone down about a thousandfold over the last four years, while the capability of the tokens themselves has increased. So AI is following exactly the same price trends as every other previous computer technology. If AI becomes a major input into medicine and education and administration and logistics, that means that all these goods and services become radically cheaper, which means that paychecks can buy a lot more of them. So that's, I think, a huge hole in his analysis. It's also, I think, very simplistic to assume that the future will be based on labor. It could very well be one where the average person becomes a business owner and employs a fleet of hundreds or thousands of AI agents to work for them. That's exactly what the price trends in tokens would suggest. The broader problem I see with his model is that it assumes disaster from a technology that creates abundance. This seems to me to be fundamentally misguided about the essential dynamics of what's actually happening. Finally, if AI is ever capable of doing every single thing that a human can do, AI would possess very dangerous traits. And why I say that is because humans themselves are very dangerous. If we're going to create a product, we're not going to create a product that has human-like traits. But it is some of those very traits that make humans dangerous that also make them useful in the economy. We tolerate humans having these dangerous properties because that's what we were born into, and we accept that and we legally protect humans despite the fact that they're dangerous. But nobody, no company, no country will tolerate people creating AI that is dangerous. An autonomous, self-motivated and potentially rebellious digital intelligence is not only not a useful business tool, it's also not a tolerable risk. And if that is ever created, we will have much bigger things to worry about than unemployment and no solution to the problems that this would create would be found in greater taxation. And as long as that is not created, then there will be abilities or skills that humans uniquely possess that will become the limiting factor in the economy. In other words, all other processes will scale exponentially through mass production of GPUs until all the available scarce human skills are employed in managing those GPUs. That follows the basic pattern that has preceded us over the last 200 years, and there's no reason to assume that pattern will not hold.
  • yhjc2692 1mo ago
    Great food for thought. Thank you.
  • nevertoolate 1mo ago
    > For example, a worker taking on a new position now has access to a tutor and an analyst and a business advisor all wrapped up in one These llm agents don’t have “agency”. No intrinsic goal other than respond. A tutor has judgment and agency. You will get a really good pattern match on the input text you give but you won’t get tutoring.
    • ETH_start 1mo ago
      Maybe you're right, but I've never learned as much and as quickly as I'm learning now with the assistance of LLMs. It's like a hyper-powered search engine. It not only knows what I'm looking for, it knows the context of why I want to know it and how best to convey it to me.
  • loquisgon 1mo ago
    Regarding your last paragraph (And as long as...) Bill Gates convincingly argues that the traits that make AI do good things are not easily separable from those that make it do bad things. So it may not be possible to explicitly avoid an AI that does bad things.
    • ETH_start 1mo ago
      Gates is talking about dual-use capability (e.g. designing a medicine requiring same capabilities that allow it to design a pathogen). This is a real threat, but not a threat to the human role in the economy, which is one of being an independent strategic actor.
  • iamsaitam 1mo ago
    "Now, that is not to say that I want their wealth to be capped or politically reallocated." Why not? It's done for wages, why should wealth be any different? Besides the technicalities, which you are not talking about and therefore I will also not get into them, I don't see any ethical reason why wealth should not suffer the same biases that wage taxation does. This kind of opinion just perpetuates the imbalances in the current terrible lop-sided system we have.
• jqpabc123 1mo ago
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  • Razengan 1mo ago
    If "thinning down the population" was the intent, shouldn't the US reverse their anti-abortion bullshit laws? They'll probably still need a steady supply of meat-based consumers
    • e40 1mo ago
      The GOP stance on abortion is about capturing the religious voters, which is far more important to them than anything else.
    • watwut 1mo ago
      Those are ideological and motivated more by wish to punish women who "did something immoral" then by wish to have growing kids.
    • protimewaster 1mo ago
      > If "thinning down the population" was the intent, shouldn't the US reverse their anti-abortion bullshit laws? There can be more than one motivation, of course. Also, it's very possible that outlawing abortion can result in a decreased birth rate. E.g., if a woman is scared that she'll have a problematic pregnancy, she may decide to just not have a child instead of risking needing and not being able to get an emergency abortion.
  • lanfeust6 1mo ago
    No, anti-vax is comparatively much older with a spike during the pandemic, but even the more recent global populist phenomenon preceded the salience of AI. Software hiring rate has rebounded this year. Even those most impacted aren't looking very "obsolete" yet. But leaving the uncertain future aside, this idea that being economically unproductive means the wealthy would want to "purge" you is for the birds, it doesn't make sense. Especially in a post-scarcity situation, keeping people alive is cheap. Consumers is how rich people get rich in the first place, if no one's buying then they're in stasis as though everything is zero-sum (incidentally, how populists think) and innovation no longer matters. They already don't have to work, they already could just idly sit on a pile of cash, but human nature is such that we still care about status signalling and making impacts, which depends on other people being around.
• debo_ 1mo ago
  > I believe we should tax AI tokens and robots. Right now, if you’re an employer and you hire someone, you pay payroll taxes on their earnings. But if you buy a robot, you can usually write it off right away as a business expense. The tax system nudges you toward replacing people with machines.
  • asdf88990 1mo ago
    Taxing AI tokens and Robots is not going to work. We can’t even define a robot, tokens are also too abstract and there is endless ways of gaming it, and let’s not forget cross border operations. Tax profits, it was always the most equitable option.
    • debo_ 1mo ago
      I do think taxing profits is still insufficient, because unless the tax rate is close to 100% (lol) the "k-shaped" economy is still reinforced, but just slowed slightly. In combination with a wealth/holdings tax, maybe. Personally I think the idea of taxing robots/tokens directly is too narrow an idea.
      • johnnyanmac 1mo ago
        It's undesirable by the companies, but it's not impossible. There's this constant talk about "Making American Great Again (Again)", but not much talk about the economic conditions that made America Great. Like high corporate tax. That's half the battle. The other half is closing all the loopholes and making stuff that used to be illegal, illegal again (e.g. stock buybacks).
      • asdf88990 1mo ago
        It is because personal income tax should have never existed. Nor should have taxes on primary residence. These are the most regressive taxes possible, it is basically serfdom.
        • debo_ 1mo ago
• swed420 1mo ago
  > Instead, solutions should be developed through a public democratic process that includes elected officials, policymakers, educators, health workers, local officials, and community leaders. Millions of people will have their lives disrupted, and we’ll need a stronger, more flexible social safety net to help them manage the transition. Local communities are already raising concerns about the energy and water needed for data centers. Without solutions, some groups will push for stopping AI development and deployment altogether. Sounds great, except it ignores the fact that capital interests have controlled the levers of our faux democracies for decades, with no end in sight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniparty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniparty
  • sophrosyne42 1mo ago
    [flagged]
    • swed420 1mo ago
      > Election denialism is unbecoming of anyone with a brain Convincing argument you have there, but the choices we're provided between shit sandwich A and shit sandwich B are the problem, not which one wins.
      • sophrosyne42 1mo ago
        This is a well known mathematical property of first-past-the-post election systems, as opposed to evidence of your grand conspiracy theory
        • nextaccountic 1mo ago
          Maybe then the US should abandon first past the post?
          • sophrosyne42 1mo ago
            I would support that, and there are states that have already switched to different systems in their local or other elections
• dostick 1mo ago
  > We have to think now about how to reduce job losses so that everyone can share in the prosperity that AI creates. And I thought he is a smart man. This is so last century thinking. We need to prepare that there will definitely be no jobs for everyone and that will be falling all the time, it’s not a one-time event you should “prepare for”. There’s nothing to prepare, we already have funds and productivity to feed and shelter everyone. UBI is not a privilege, previous generations were slaving 9 to 5 all their lives so we can have it. This is it, arrived, and now, enter a few decades of historical period when all of us waiting for government bureaucrats to realise that UBI is a right.
  • debo_ 1mo ago
    I support UBI and wealth taxes, but I also think generally that will be a difficult transition in terms of social upheaval. There are so many people I know who are financially well-off but completely fall apart when there is no visible professional hierarchy to give them meaning. One would hope that this would still go down better than destituting large percentages of the world population, but I wonder.
    • dfxm12 1mo ago
      Based in your first two sentences, I think your understanding of UBI is mistaken. You seem to be under the impression that people don't or can't have a job when there is UBI. This is not the case. If you don't believe me, just look at Alaska. Everyone enjoys some sort of benefit, tax break, subsidy, etc. from the government. UBI is the same thing in the form of a regular, universal transfer payment. Nothing more, nothing less.
      • debo_ 1mo ago
        I do understand UBI. I was referring to the previous context that AI would introduce mass loss of jobs and overall reduced employment, not specifically to UBI being a replacement for jobs.
        • throwaway12053 1mo ago
• simianwords 1mo ago
  It’s a good thoughtful piece. If I may suggest, the main problem and I mean the actual main problem are those people who underestimate the capabilities of AI. The ones who think it hallucinates all the time, unreliable and mostly useless. The average person thinks this technology is overhyped (like Emily Bender) so how would one even begin to have a conversation with them on the risks?
  • tao_oat 1mo ago
    This is my experience too. Many people in my offline, non-techy life seem to get almost upset when I argue that models are good at many things (and getting better fast). And I kind of get it! If your primary exposure to AI is Google search summaries (from their cheapest models) and shitty AI graphic design, it makes sense to think it's vastly overhyped.
    • simianwords 1mo ago
      Unfortunately it’s not just non technical people, it’s also technical people from my experience. They are usually too caught up in “how it always works” so they can’t think outside of it.
    • danofsteel32 1mo ago
      I like how Tyler Cowen puts it: "This is the worst they will ever be". And some people are still stuck on what AI was capable of when GPT-3.5 was SOTA. They don't realize how much they've improved in ~4 years. Even if the rate of improvement slows down, AI will be tremendously more capable in another ~4 years.
      • Anamon 1mo ago
        Not my experience, an I'm a heavy daily user of frontier models for software development. Have they improved at all in the past ~2 years? Not really, at least not noticeably. We've improved some of the tooling around it, developed some mitigations for the many systemic weaknesses, and wrapped some things in a for loop to iterate faster. The worst they'll ever be? Maybe, but maybe also almost as good as they'll ever be, looking at the sharply diminishing returns. Reactions to every new model seem to always be roughly evenly split between it being better or worse. And what do we have to show for it? We can localise some bug causes faster, and it takes some of the mindless boilerplate work off our hands. Which affects maybe 10-20% of our actual job, and even there occasionally eliminates the gains again right away because you have to babysit or manually redo it, without always knowing when and where that might happen. That's not what I'd call a revolutionary increase in efficiency. And this isn't just my impression, it's what I hear from pretty much all of my professional peers, which includes people waaay more experienced and smarter than me.
• Supermancho 1mo ago
  Sigh. Another billionaire whose wealth is being mistaken for authority by the common folk. Worse still, an actual oracle. I see an old (and successful) pirate king trying to wear yet another hat today.
• josefritzishere 1mo ago
  That is a very indirect way to say market crash.
  • ActionHank 1mo ago
    Better than saying bubble, can't say bubble, that implies that people will lose their money because of lies rather than because the market just crashed.
• YCTraffickers 1mo ago
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  • romanovcode 1mo ago
    I love how comments that point the strong and proven connection of the OP to the Epstein islands are either dead, flagged or removed. You might be on to something here.
    • AnimalMuppet 1mo ago
      That particular post went well past that, into both personal attack and racism. It was very properly flagged to death.
      • ActionHank 1mo ago
        Man you are a real defender of the honour the wealthy elite.
• mabini 1mo ago
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• dhd415 1mo ago
  I thought Gates' take on the human relational aspects of AI to be thoughtful, but I am surprised that his analysis on the economic and jobs aspect of AI offers little more than the party line. Every other technological advance that improved productivity (Industrial Revolution, etc.) has resulted in the loss of some jobs but the creation of jobs in other areas and an overall increase in the standard of living (although admittedly not uniformly distributed across the population). Why will AI be different?
  • orangelimesoda 1mo ago
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  • simianwords 1mo ago
    Do you think we could have handled Industrial Revolution with more care by offering a soft landing for those affected? I don’t think he’s disagreeing that this technology can be used for net good.
    • tttrr 1mo ago
      [flagged]
  • johnnyanmac 1mo ago
    > Why will AI be different? Because the pioneers haven't just been saying, but are screaming the quiet part out loud.
  • rescripting 1mo ago
    If you believe the hype then this isn't a transformation like, say, the power loom replacing handmade textiles. Both AI boosters and doomers are envisioning a future where almost all white collar work is obsolete. It isn't just one industry, its broad swaths labour across all segments of the economy.
  • AmbroseBierce 1mo ago
    Because any job it creates it can automate as well, for example a lot of people here think that understanding how AI models operate internally or being up to date with the latest models will save them from making their jobs obsolete, it will not, AI itself will be better than you at picking the next model to deploy, at testing the speed of reasoning that beats it's own. Anything it will need to learn it will learn it faster than you with the ability to handle much more complexity than your brain.
• cupofjoakim 1mo ago
  The issues are global and they are correct. The landscape is not the same in US as in other countries, but this is a global problem and should be handled as such. I'm not against a tax on AI or robots, but I think this may be the big chance we have to look at universal income with new eyes. If jobs are to disappear, why not soften the blow and get rid of some of the inefficiencies many government processes mean in terms of other citizen benefits? What I worry about more however is the malevolent actors across the AI space. I'd argue that most companies mean well, but chasing profit at all costs can very easily turn into malevolence. Both these and actors being malevolent on purpose needs to have a control function.
• vb-8448 1mo ago
  Is this Bill's? Because it looks like Dario's essay!
  • ActionHank 1mo ago
    Everything looks the same when AI is doing the work
• 295817 1mo ago
  That all sounds nice, but does he mean it and can we trust him? Setting up governance bodies and think tanks could be a diversion. He does explicitly suggest a robot and token tax, so that is something. He does not address the issue of IP theft or the possibility of shutting down AI altogether like medium range missiles (SS20/Pershing II) were removed by treaties. The could be AI treaties with China and Russia, except of course the US has no credibility now compared to the 1980s.
  • Laurel1234 1mo ago
    I'm sure we can trust the billionaire who was great chums with Epstein, clearly he's a man of integrity.
  • GolfPopper 1mo ago
    I would say, "No, we cannot trust him" because, even if/when his intentions are good, his interests, and his worldview, and not aligned with the public's (globally or locally). For example: https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2022/07/how-bill-gates-makes-the-world-worse-off https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2022/07/how-bill-gates-m...
• _-_-__-_-_- 1mo ago
  Gates was a close friend and blackmail victim of Epstein. I can't separate his business, technical and philanthropic accomplishments from that fact. Sure, he may have funded charitable campaigns to vaccinate against polio in Afghanistan. But, he was also getting rub-downs from underage children.
  • ShutUpPedo 1mo ago
    He was not a victim he was basically the fucking co-founder
    • AnimalMuppet 1mo ago
      That claim requires some evidence that I, personally, have not yet seen.
      • NellyOfficial 1mo ago
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      • RussianBot9580 1mo ago
        Melinda chose to retract her statements rather than end up a suicide like Virginia Giuffre. Inquiries should be directed to Billy, etc. The rich and powerful do have the power to shut people up you know.
  • tjpnz 1mo ago
    I'm also grossed out by what he's said to have done to his now ex-wife. Icky, icky stuff all round.
• orangelimesoda 1mo ago
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• ViktorRay 1mo ago
  This essay kind of rubs me the wrong way. Starting from the very beginning. During my entire life I’ve only had two jobs. In the first one, I played a role in developing software to empower people through my work at Microsoft. Yikes. We all know powerful people have an incentive to whitewash their pasts but there is whitewashing and then there is whatever that is. I have to mention this because we can't forget that Microsoft's and Bill Gates's history regarding fear uncertainty doubt as well as embrace extend extinguish. "Forgive but don't forget" as the old saying goes. During the 2000's Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer described the GPL as akin to a virus. He begged European governements not to adopt open source software and to adopt Microsoft software instead. Indeed throughout its history Microsoft, along with Gates and Balmer, have consistently fought against implementation of open standards and open source software. They have consistently pushed towards their own proprietary solutions. Given all of this, along with the laughable whitewashing attempt even at the very beginning of his essay, I feel like what Bill Gates has written here is consistent with his previous behavior in regards to all of this. I suspect all this talk of regulation is an attempt to squash open source AI and open weights AI and to ensure Big Tech such as Microsoft continues to be in control of the future of tech and the future of AI. Even his talk of taxing AI tokens and robots would ultimately benefit Microsoft and other Big tech companies and hurt open source. I will repeat what I said earlier. In life it is important to "forgive but never forget." Many have forgiven Bill Gates for all he did in the 90's. Many haven't. But nobody should forget and everyone should take his words with a grain of salt.
  • luisgvv 1mo ago
    ...and this is only his professional life ;)
    • ActionHank 1mo ago
      I heard he likes to work with professionals in his private life too.
  • hammock 1mo ago
    Is there an essay from a tech leader than HASN’T rubbed anyone the wrong way, in some time? Eric Schmidt, Dario Amodei, Palmer Luckey, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, etc etc they all seem one or the other of out of touch or unlikable or unable to connect with rapport to the general public these days
• myaccountonhn 1mo ago
  > With its ability to synthesize knowledge from every scientific field, AI can accelerate innovation in the world’s toughest technical challenges: providing reliable clean energy for everyone, combating climate change, growing enough food, eradicating diseases, and more I really think this is overstated. So far everything is pointing towards AI accelerating climate change. Especially if we'll automate everything with physical robots.
  • hammock 1mo ago
    > I really think this is overstated. So far everything is pointing towards AI accelerating climate change. Ok but if we sprint the Delorean towards the brick wall as fast as possible we might be able to hit 88mph just in time to save ourselves
• shay_ker 1mo ago
  > In the United States, I’ve met families who, understandably, were overwhelmed by the process of applying for health insurance, student aid, or food assistance. Faced with a huge stack of complicated bureaucratic forms, many felt like giving up. AI can streamline things dramatically I'd love to see anyone building Grokbot or ChatGPT Work talk about how they're thinking about this use case, specifically. It seems greatly important and tractable given how little government websites & forms change over time. On the other end - yes, it will create massive vectors for abuse & fraud, since govt services are designed to have roadblocks to reduce usage. But fraud has always been possible, even without AI (so many recent examples to pull from). IMO it's best to maximize social benefits to see where the tradeoffs really are. We won't know until we push on it!
  • CuriouslyC 1mo ago
    An agent with computer use can already navigate all this stuff quite well.
  • lotsofpulp 1mo ago
    >On the other end - yes, it will create massive vectors for abuse & fraud, since govt services are designed to have roadblocks to reduce usage. That the government collects taxes and then understaffs the department that distributes the benefit is the first fraud. 30 years after email was invented, why do people have to wait on the phone for hours to talk to a government employee?
    • shhhutttup 1mo ago
      Bingo, the IRS made me fax them something once and it was a demand and not a request. It was 2022 when this happened.
  • dfxm12 1mo ago
    If the goal is to make things easier for everyday Americans, replacing these with universal schemes would do that and will also prevent abuse and fraud (most of which comes down to forgetting to dot your lowercase j on work requirement form #27).
• ShutUpPedo 1mo ago
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• deleted 1mo ago
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• qudat 1mo ago
  3 citations and a lot of conjecture. Is the article only targeting SWEs? The one study cited said 22-25 age range saw a 16% decrease in relative employment declines (for SWEs)[0]. But everyone outside that range was not impacted. Further, what about all the trades jobs around data center development? “Demand is also being intensified by major investments in infrastructure, manufacturing, reshoring, and AI. Data center growth alone has added a net 315,000 skilled-trade workers over the past five years, according to the report, putting additional pressure on an already tight labor market.” https://www.morningstar.com/news/pr-newswire/20260825cg32433/new-report-defines-135-skilled-trade-occupations-revealing-a-gap-of-13m-workers-and-3-openings-for-every-new-worker-trained https://www.morningstar.com/news/pr-newswire/20260825cg32433... We literally do not have enough trades people to build out data centers and their salaries are increasing as a result. These are skilled labor jobs (plumbers, electricians, IT, etc.). Does Bill Gates care about the rest of the economy outside of SWE? [0]: https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/app/uploads/2025/11/CanariesintheCoalMine_Nov25.pdf https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/app/uploads/2025/11/Cana...
  • ActionHank 1mo ago
    Honestly a lot of those decreases are also because companies are trying to wait and see as much as possible to see if there is any truth to the conjecture.
    • citrin_ru 1mo ago
      I have an impression that most CxO are driven by FOMO. Having a fixed R&D budget (no cheap credit anymore) to get $$$ for tokens they are laying off developers.
  • fittingopposite 1mo ago
    I wonder these specific data center jobs seem to be very cycle specific and will all fall away as soon as we have constructed "enough" data centers.
  • kg 1mo ago
    > Further, what about all the trades jobs around data center development? Those only last as long as data centers are being built. Do you think we're going to keep building more data centers forever?
• shay_ker 1mo ago
  > I’m also worried about AI’s impact on education. Ironically, the same tool that will allow people to learn more than ever could also lead to many people learning less. For teachers/admins who are on HN: what has worked in a past for a "new way to educate" students to actually be implemented by educators? Does it happen through conferences? Do some states take the lead and others follow? Does it follow from private schools into public schools? I know AI labs are trying to include teachers here and there... but IME teachers are very "anti-AI", "anti-datacenter", etc. etc. In coastal cities, the unions will be entirely opposed. This seems less of a "can AI be useful for education" question and more around politics and messaging. But I'd love to learn more.
  • UncleMeat 1mo ago
    My wife is a professor. "Administration contracts with some company that is providing tools to improve pedagogy" is pretty universally garbage. It typically comes with mandates to be used even when it is inappropriate and faculty aren't given time to integrate these tools into their preps. This makes people reasonably skeptical. The only thing I've ever seen work is to simply make a tool available to people while giving them meaningful resources to adopt it if they see utility in their specific situation. But admin hates this because it means that they are paying for a thing that some people aren't using and because they want to write "I've revolutionized teaching by integrating X" on their performance review and that doesn't work unless adoption is near-universal. For AI shit in particular, the ideas have been trash. Mandatory AI summaries of course readings integrated into the discussion platform. Great, now nobody will do the reading. AI tools for "placing" you in history through image generation that constantly generate anachronisms because they are trained on fantasy art. Stuff like that.
  • nunez 1mo ago
    Most teachers participate in PD days (off-days for students) where stuff like this is covered. There are conferences also but getting approval to go can be tough. (My wife is a teacher.)
• phn 1mo ago
  If all jobs are taken away for the sake of robot driven productivity, who will consume the products and services being offered that result in profit?! (EDIT: I am not against AI at all, just trying to understand where this all leads)
  • ActionHank 1mo ago
    Please, don't ask logical questions.
  • dfxm12 1mo ago
    Don't discount that tech billionaires pursuing this are themselves nihilistic. They would enjoy the fruits of our labor and will not care what comes after they die.
    • whythismatters 1mo ago
      "Après nous, le déluge" -- Madame de Pompadour
  • kalleboo 1mo ago
    Other bots. The sequel to "don't build the torment nexus" is "don't make dead internet theory a reality"
  • deleted 1mo ago
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  • dnqthao 1mo ago
    basically, that is the question of wealth distribution. All the wealth created by these AI companies should be distributed to people so that they will have money to buy products from these companies. This can range from more taxes, UBI, or like Marx said: seize the means of productions (basically nationalize all these AI companies and share the profits to everyone)
    • FeloniousHam 1mo ago
      Before the Glorious and Bloody Revolution, just Dollar Cost Average your way into a tech-investing stock fund. Ugh, capitalism.
• cmiles8 1mo ago
  To be blunt I don’t know that the world really cares what Bill Gates thinks anymore.
  • shhhutttup 1mo ago
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  • arein3 1mo ago
    He couldnt even source some clean prostitutes, got gonorheea and passed it to his wife (facepalm)
  • abroszka33 1mo ago
    He spent a decade trying to make a toilet for Africa and ended up with one costing only 100000 dollars. What a bright man, I would listen to him.
    • shimman 1mo ago
      Link? Never heard of this.
      • abroszka33 1mo ago
        https://eu.registerguard.com/story/business/2018/11/11/in-china-bill-gates-encourages/6081155007/ https://eu.registerguard.com/story/business/2018/11/11/in-ch... > Gates acknowledged that some reinvented toilets, in small volumes, could cost as much as $10,000, but added, “That will pretty quickly come down.” I added an extra zero, sorry, I read it 8 years ago. But still doesn't really matter, even the optimistic 500 USD is laughable.
• NellyOfficial 1mo ago
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• seydor 1mo ago
  - If AI and robots are as good as Bill suggests , one can infer that AI will signal the end of cities, at least the end of megacities. If the home robot can clean and cook and also do my taxes, hair, and diagnose my health , one is more likely to escape unemployment by moving to a small town where he can find land and resources, and use robots to exploit them, just like humans have always done when economy was based in agriculture. If there is no longer a reason for people to live close together, decentralization is the most likely outcome. - The biggest geopolitical impact will probably come from AI weapons. Just like previous shifts in weaponry caused the fall of empires , the rise of naval empires and the rise of national modern superpowers, AI may lead to the end of the UN and beginning of something new. - Societies will change but a plan is not needed and it's most likely useless. Societies adapt , and nobody has ever been able to predict how. Let's not make the same mistake again.
  • RunSet 1mo ago
    I will believe that "AI will do all the work" when private prisons stop contracting inmates to do slave labor and employers stop hiring undocumented migrant workers.
    • fittingopposite 1mo ago
      Interesting bar.
      • inanutshellus 1mo ago
        Interesting way to say "never".
    • georgemcbay 1mo ago
      > I will believe that "AI will do all the work" when private prisons stop contracting inmates to do slave labor and employers stop hiring undocumented migrant workers. The majority of the slave labor in prisons in the US make from nothing at all to 50 cents per hour. The powers that be will still shamefully be exploiting that labor source long after AI/robots are capable of cheaply doing that work.
• shay_ker 1mo ago
  > I doubt I would have put in the same work if I had had an AI companion back then. They talk to you in ways you’re already comfortable with. They don’t push you outside your comfort zone. They are always available and never get mad at you. This gives them the potential to become highly addictive and to rob us of the lessons we learn from connecting with other people. I've been waiting for a long, long time for us to figure out how AI makes us more social, not less. Outside of memes of course.
  • dsign 1mo ago
    Anecdotally, I find AIs, and the doom and gloom they will cause, are great water cooler conversation topics that engages most of the team. However, ever since the advent of LLMs developers have stopped speaking of programming languages and software technologies almost entirely. The number of conversations on manual crafts, artistic endeavors and entrepreneurship has gone up.
    • Anamon 1mo ago
      The amount of people voluntarily leaving the business to "do something with wood" right now is insane. We always used to joke about it as inevitable, but now it seems to actually be happening, for everyone at the same time.
• narmiouh 1mo ago
  Its quite interesting that in a matter of few minutes, this went down from 2 to rank 21 on HN front page.
  • istjohn 1mo ago
    I believe there's a controversy filter that down ranks items if the ratio of comments to item upvotes is too high.
  • ThatWasFunny 1mo ago
    I saw that too. It wasn’t ratio’d like the other guy said, it was only ~90 comments. The manually moved it down. HN mods always silence even the slightest thing against their official narrative. Since YC/HN are themselves pedos and connected to Epstein they had no choice but to squash it They probably thought the HN audience would be too dumb or passive to do anything about it, helping them slowly get away with being international sec trafficking pedophiles. And so far they are getting away with it. JPM Chase bank settled with victims for millions of dollars, other victims mysteriously died. Thiel and tech and academia and Israel got prolific pedo Trump as the figurehead so they can try to shift blame to his “base” of racists Americans etc. but we all know it’s the wealthy corporate elite doing this stuff. HN is complicit. They are basically a mouthpiece. HN mods actively help wealthy pedophiles get away with their crimes
  • shimman 1mo ago
    The dude was pals with Epstein and likely had sex with a women that was likely a sex slave, good riddance. Anyone that continues listening to Bill Gates after his Epstein connections, and purposely causing tens of thousands of Indians to die because of his stupid ideas around profiting off a vaccine, should be promptly osctracized.
• dgllghr 1mo ago
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  • Zylokloto 1mo ago
    [flagged]
    • dgllghr 1mo ago
      You fell right into his marketing trap
      • Zylokloto 1mo ago
        No im not. I'm not protecting him and i'm quite disappointed that his good reputation is gone because of it. Before Epstein details, he became a lot more helpful to the society (ebola for example). But "Presumption of innocence" is a real thing. And it doesn't change the fact, that Bill Gates still for sure is knowledgable and probably relevant enough to read what he thinks
      • maplethorpe 1mo ago
        You're speaking directly to his marketing trap.
  • rglover 1mo ago
    Because your betters told you to. That's the whole gambit here: use the system and media to paint a pretty picture of <person so terrible they need PR>, trust that some non-trivial amount of the population will buy it, deny any wrong-doing publicly or on record. Hope they don't come for your head. Rinse and repeat.
• ford 1mo ago
  I'm interested how to mitigate risk without over-regulating & stifling innovation from exactly the people who are most thoughtful about the risk (which is who we should want innovating & leading). Even though this article is new, I'm not sure it has materially new ideas vs what some other labs have been claiming for years. Enforcing safeguards that apply globally to good and bad actors alike so far as proved quite difficult - compute is essentially the only lever, and that's tenuous at best. Unlike nuclear arms (where functionally there's a limit at MAD), so far we believe that with enough compute, energy, and algorithms, intelligence will continue to scale (and not only scale - but compound)
• blastro 1mo ago
  Bill Gates? The Epstein guy?
  • mythrwy 1mo ago
    I thought he was the COVID guy?
    • bschmidt1 1mo ago
      [dead]
• greenowl 1mo ago
  More fearmongering overhyping the technology. The investment bubble MUST continue!
• ajd555 1mo ago
  Interesting read, good to see some nuance in this space for once: not evil, can be used for evil, not good, can be used for good, but requires a lot of safeguards. What really got me is the concept of "Human Reserved" - man that is a depressing thought...
• owen-hill 1mo ago
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• jcattle 1mo ago
  Just to put Bill Gates thoughts on AI into perspective, this was his comment on an AMA 9 years ago to the question "What kind of technological advancement do you wish to see in your lifetime?": > The big milestone is when computers can read and understand information like humans do. There is a lot of work going on in this field - Google, Microsoft, Facebook, academia,... Right now computers don't know how to represent knowledge so they can't read a text book and pass a test. https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5whpqs/im_bill_gates_cochair_of_the_bill_melinda_gates/dea5flw/ https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5whpqs/im_bill_gates_...
  • ViktorRay 1mo ago
    Fascinating. Can't help but wonder how things will change over the next decade or so.
    • petre 1mo ago
      For the worse. Just the same old stuff in faster cars and smellier air, to quote Ford Perfect.
      • jansan 1mo ago
        It's Ford Prefect
    • bbor 1mo ago
      Well it’s just the one breakthrough that we needed — specifically, it was solving the frame problems. Now the dam has burst and we’re in for ‘turbulence’.
  • fittingopposite 1mo ago
    Wow. First time I can't see stuff on Reddit without an account :(
    • schrectacular 1mo ago
      Nitter got shut down yesterday too
• ankurdhama 1mo ago
  If the result will be huge job loss doesn't that mean the overall buying power of all across all economies will go down drastically which begs the question who will buy the stuff that these companies that get rid of people are making?
  • 0xpgm 1mo ago
    Exactly. Henry Ford made sure his own employees could afford the cars they were making. These people making these kind of grand pronouncements either have an embarrassing blind spot, or are not making sincere, but carefully calculated statements. Just via competition, Chinese researchers are doing much more than Bill Gates could ever hope to do through 'thought leadership' spread the benefits of generative AI.
    • ianm218 1mo ago
      You know that Henry Ford thing is a myth right? So your basing your whole world view on a myth about a business man > 100 years ago.
      • deleted 1mo ago
        [deleted]
      • 0xpgm 1mo ago
        Explain why you think it's a myth. Also I'm basing my argument on common sense. And I didn't speak about my 'world view' in the comment.
  • greenowl 1mo ago
    The same exact people that the companies got rid of. The government pays them now instead of their former employer.
  • olalonde 1mo ago
    Prices will also go down dramatically. When you eliminate human labour completely, you are essentially stuck with the problem of efficiently allocating raw materials. And raw materials are abundant compared to what human labour can currently produce. We're still a long way from there though.
• roschdal 1mo ago
  Bill vibe-coded this article text.
• OhNoNotAgain_99 1mo ago
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• k310 1mo ago
  It always is a matter of choice. Rich people choose wisely for the fast buck, and poorly for the suckers they bend, fold, spindle and mutilate. I get the sense of "Every Accusation is a confession" > During my entire life I’ve only had two jobs. In the first one, I played a role in developing software to empower people through my work at Microsoft. Some of us remember the story/urban legend of Bill Gates "developing" BASIC by retrieving a printout of source code from a dumpster, a process infinitely more efficient than an LLM. NOTE. "Played a role in developing", not "Played a role BY developing" The former could be said by the coffee maker. Or dumpster diver.
• grigio 1mo ago
  Bill is great to find solutions for his problems
• andai 1mo ago
  What if there were some mistake and the progression went wrong, and something like an amoeba were given power like a human's? —AKIRA, 1988
• deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
• swills 1mo ago
  Nearly every post about AI turns into a discussion of politics and every post about politics becomes a discussion of AI.
  • reasonableklout 1mo ago
    Yes, because this is a revolution in a general-purpose technology, so it affects everyone.
• HNPedoLovers 1mo ago
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  • Zylokloto 1mo ago
    Is there any particular reason why you respond like this? Do you think this adds anything to this discussion at all? Did you even take the time and effort to read my comment?
    • brazukadev 1mo ago
      > Is there any particular reason why you respond like this? Lots of people are really, really disgusted by billionaire sexual offenders/pedophiles that won't pay for their crimes. And then another bunch get mad at people defending those criminals.
      • Zylokloto 1mo ago
        I do get the general gist of it, but thats not a real discussion and I put out arguments/points someone could address. His involvement made a lot of good reputation go away for me and if anything real comes out of this, he needs to pay. Doesn't change the things he might be able to say about AI though
        • brazukadev 1mo ago
          > if anything real comes out of this, he needs to pay. It doesn't change for you, because you give a powerful multibilionaire criminal the benefit of doubt. We all know he won't be condemned. So it is your decision to only hold him accountable WHEN he gets condemned. Well, you will keep getting outrage from people that think this is a shameful behavior. I hope this thread helps you not be surprised next time. > Doesn't change the things he might be able to say about AI though Some people don't think pedophilia is such a big issue. Most people think someone associated with Epstein should not get public attention much less credibility.
          • 1mo ago
• DangIsComplicit 1mo ago
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• Interesting3 1mo ago
  [flagged]
• HNPedoLovers 1mo ago
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• CrzyLngPwd 1mo ago
  Morpheus; You think that's a genuinely concerned billionaire you are listening to?
• VCFundedGenYer 1mo ago
  He should be talking to Satya, not spitting in the wind. He used to run MS, he still has sway.
  • keeda 1mo ago
    I'm pretty sure he is. If you look at all the Big Tech CEOs, Satya is the only one who's been saying mostly human-aligned things. We don't even need to assume this is out of the goodness of their hearts. Consider that Microsoft is one of the few Big Tech businesses whose business model is primarily making its enterprise customers more productive. If agents replace all knowledge work, half of Microsoft's business disappears. In that sense Microsoft is more aligned with us humans than the other AI companies.
• oriettaxx 1mo ago
  I honestly can't stand reading a single line more of Bill Gates pontificating, I really can't.
  • dang 1mo ago
    Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
• oxag3n 1mo ago
  AI can make everyone miserable. Solution? Partner with all major AI companies using foundation (tax free btw) money. It's like saying Hitler is bad, let's split Europe in half so we can profit as well... ah well, that actually happened.
• BillWho 1mo ago
  Can Bill Gates even code anymore? I bet not. Bro is a useless sex offender, who cares what he thinks about anything. The weirdest part is HN hiding the comments lmao
• whoamii 1mo ago
  “We need a plan to ensure that the good outweighs the bad.” How apt… for Bill Gates to state this.
• saturn_vk 1mo ago
  This is a fundamentally wrong approach. Let AI replace jobs. Start taxing companies that use AI proportionally to their usage, and then distribute the proceedings to the people.
  • somebodythere 1mo ago
    Did you read the article?
• alun 1mo ago
  I think his idea of taxing AI tokens would do more harm than good. It would only make AI more expensive, which would create the exact inequality effect that he is trying to prevent.
  • testerius 1mo ago
    Yeah. If he really wants (but really, not really) to prevent inequality then LLM/AI should be free, open sourced and available to anyone.
• BiraIgnacio 1mo ago
  > If someone had a credible plan for slowing down AI advances globally, I would likely support it. However, I don’t think that’s going to happen. The geopolitical and economic incentives are pushing too hard to go full speed ahead.
  • Paianni 1mo ago
    Another way of saying that the people pushing AI have no discipline.
• kristianpaul 1mo ago
  The choices are for the present but not for a future we dont know yet.
• geraneum 1mo ago
  > Research suggests that in some parts of the United States, factory closures contribute to a rise in deaths from opioid overdoses. It’s so cute some people think that the extent of mass displacement will be limited to what happens to the unemployed. Oh poor unemployed! Nope, pitchforks will be grabbed. It won’t be rosy. Maybe they dream about having killer robots to defend themselves, but imagine a few hundred million people getting angry within one election cycle.
  • rglover 1mo ago
    "Everyone has a plan til' they get punched in the face." - Mike Tyson Sadly, I agree, that's where this is all headed.
  • whatever1 1mo ago
    China’s surveillance state seems very successful at managing population emotions.
    • colordrops 1mo ago
      Well they also at least give something back with infrastructure and general management of the country. None of that is happening in the US.
      • linkregister 1mo ago
        It's undeniable that Chinese transportation infrastructure is amazing, especially high-speed rail. Compared with the United States, public health care is less available in China. Retirement pensions are an order of magnitude lower (even with PPP adjustment), hence their world-leading savings rate. Social mobility is lower: getting a permit to access social services such as schools in a new city is difficult. Youth unemployment was above 25% the last time it was published; it is no longer disclosed. Rule of law is much less strong. Injustices committed by government officials towards citizens are unlikely to be addressed. Housing costs to income ratios are an order of magnitude worse in cities with job opportunities. The Chinese government has chosen to allocate capital toward industrial output at the expense of its citizens' welfare. It has succeeded at its goal. Perhaps in the future more capital allocation will be made to consumption. That is not the case at the current time.
• mvkel 1mo ago
  I'm kind of surprised, but not surprised, by Gates' comments here. Until very recently, apparently, he was a pretty strong techno optimist, now toeing the line of a doomer. The verbiage is substantially in line with the fear-based marketing out of anthropic. I wonder what motive is underneath all of this. Trying to influence policy? But he has so many resources, it transcends policy.
• zzzeek 1mo ago
  poor Bill Gates is one of the richest men on earth but can't get a good ratio on Hacker News
  • paulpauper 1mo ago
    his article went hugely viral and is being discussed. I would say by that metric it was a success.
    • zzzeek 1mo ago
      i define the hacker news "ratio" as number of upvotes / number of comments. lots of comments and few upvotes is a bad ratio indicating the article is not being well received. in this case a ratio of 196 points to 479 comments points to a very poorly received yet comment-inspiring article.
• r721 1mo ago
  Another discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49451313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49451313
• eclips0 1mo ago
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• deleted 1mo ago
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• loglog 1mo ago
  Their suggestion to tax tokens extends the problem of taxing wages to a new type of production. The real solution is, of course, taxing the capital, but you will never hear that from them.
• throwaway23597 1mo ago
  Does anyone really believe that Bill Gates would propose any kind of truly altruistic plan, that is to say, would he ever support any AI regulation plan that actually hurts his bottom line at the end of the day? I don't think that AI-adjacent CEOs are really the most trustworthy people on this topic.
• bartleeanderson 1mo ago
  The title reminds me about the VB6 days and drag and drop controls and efficiency until you get a couple years out. Then the vendors providing the products you used are out of business. That may happen a lot more often and quickly with models, but I have read that they are pretty much just a drop in component as the old one has a superior replacement, you move on and benefit. Sure are interesting times. I want my models, local, small and powerful. Vision and reasoning. My goodness the power we already have is just going to get better.
• Kuyawa 1mo ago
  > Countries need cross-agency bodies, and an international organization must be built in parallel — combining elements of nuclear inspections, aviation regulation, and ozone treaties, including US–China cooperation I see, so force china to cooperate or label them as terrorists in the same vein of irak/iran nuclear capabilities
• cube00 1mo ago
  AI, on the other hand, runs on the devices we already have, and it uses natural language. We don’t have to adapt to it because it can adapt to us. So much for those people who tried to claim they knew how to prompt AI better then the next person.
• 2001zhaozhao 1mo ago
  > The biggest shift for workers will happen when AI provides nearly error-free work. At that point, it will be able to function on its own without a human checking in on it, and companies will have every economic incentive to let it. This is a very succint argument that has a technical implication - that correcting errors and misalignment is incredibly important for autonomous AI capabilities in a fundamental way.
• joncrane 1mo ago
  Unfortunately, this is essentially high level clickbait. At the beginning he immediately portrays the issue as black and white: >AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice. In all likelihood it will probably fall in the middle, with the likelihood that it will tilt power and money towards the already ultra wealthy (to the surprise of no one). But it will enable ordinary people and small businesses to do cool shit and make their lives better.
  • enos_feedler 1mo ago
    Nailed it. Instead of reading this long form post I will eat popcorn and watch the show unfold as laid out here.
    • erickhill 1mo ago
      There's also the video version... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4zGLSlLo5A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4zGLSlLo5A
  • bbor 1mo ago
    I don’t see any reason this highly chaotic system is most likely to settle in a spot that we happen to enjoy/see as a compromise of some sort. The point is that we now have superintelligence; either it helps us conquer death, or it poses a massive —say, existential- risk to us all. It’s hard to imagine such a powerful tool resulting in just another century of slightly-better capitalist nationalism. I guess there could be a second AI winter around the corner that we haven’t seen coming yet. That would be nice! Not likely IMHO, but nice.
    • chr15m 1mo ago
      > we now have superintelligence Wait what?
      • cdelsolar 1mo ago
        There’s a magic box that can literally build you anything you want that you can control from your phone while playing bedtime songs for your kid
• vcryan 1mo ago
  Definitely curious to get the perspective on this topic from some of Jeffrey Epstein's other friends as well.
  • RussianBot9580 1mo ago
    Maybe they'll build AI-powered robot children for their entertainment? Or perhaps figure out a way to control kids bodies with AI, and fulfill even more of their fantasies. Hey, it's a driver of progress!
• lifeisstillgood 1mo ago
  I have been noodling around this for a day or two now and I worry the hype train is clouding everyone’s thoughts (I’m looking at you Dwarkesh) So we are on a weird combination of science (look Language can be modelled, how does that relate to real world concepts, can you even understand the word love without experiencing emotions) and ultra-capitalism (you get that part) So my first thought is you cannot monetise AGI I honestly don’t know where that line is, and different humans will draw it in different places but if (it’s a big if) we do achieve AGI by throwing compute at a pile of language (and seriously that is wrong way round for evolution?) if we do get a model everyone just recognised as alive then, just who in society is going to say “yeah slavery that’s the right approach - those companies definitely should be allowed to keep a data centre of Einsteins, not pay them, and replace call centres for zero cost.” The goal of the journey just is not monetiseable. If we do create alien intelligence we really want to treat it like they landed in a spaceship. Plus you know there is bound to be a Hollywood film in productions already about an evil billionaire who creates an AI and tries to lock it away and make it do his bidding. It ends badly. But even putting AGI aside and just focusing on a word guessing machine that can check its own guesses over and over, you know not an actual intelligent thing but something that is a tool. Just how much of the amazing cost savings and job replacements from LLMs are really just low hanging fruit available to POS (Plain Old Software). Very very few companies are what Inwoukd call software literate - run through and through with programmatically accessible components at every level and people with skills to use them. The old SOA / API based company is first rung on that ladder. But the point is, almost every time we are going to replace some jobs it’s “we never digitised this before but now we can just chuck compute at it.” You know what’s cheaper than chuckingncompute at it - doing the hard graft of getting your software and data aligned and then fixing your processes. Then it can run like the scripts that intern wrote last year but no one listened. Yes CV is used in killchains in Ukraine - but the whole killchain is not AI - it’s hard graft building a process just like any business. With AI used as small Part of a larger ecosystem. Oh and yeah the AI labs and the chip vendors - they are not keeping the value created by firing paralegals. Data centres with almost identical models in them just become utilities. And did I say value created ? So far all the big value is cost reduction - you know the refuge of the business consultant with no ideas. I still am waiting for the big new thing - the company that could not exist otherwise. All I hear is cost reduction and yeah that matters at scale, but if it’s all I hear I begin to suspect it’s all anyone can think of. And moving value around does not count as value creation - Amazon has done amazing things, but if e-commerce did not exist, would humans in America have never bought crap from China ? Or has amazon just mostly taken the growth of the past 30 years away from Walmart ? And talking of that, Amazon has massively reduced warehousing costs - using POS, and these things called robots. If I had to bet it would be the AI revolution (maths proofs apart) is a robot revolution. And that has the usual scaling laws of design, manufacture, deployment and so on. Maybe the reason I am Not seeing a AI killer app, is that the iPhone does not have arms. Anyway needed to get that off my chest :-)
• drnick1 1mo ago
  > AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice. That title already belongs to the handgun. I am finding it difficult to take anything Gates says seriously. Remember, 640K ought to be enough for anybody.
  • ajross 1mo ago
    > Remember, 640K ought to be enough for anybody. This is one of those countersmells that flags people as unserious. It was at best an amusing quip from the days of extended memory PCs about why they should move to modern OSes. Gates, of course, was talking about the address mapping design points in software on a CPU that had 20 address bits. Unless you're arguing that 384k was too much for the paltry framebuffers actually deployed on 8086's and would have preferred a 896/128 split; in which case I agree! But alas.
  • sumedh 1mo ago
    > Remember, 640K ought to be enough for anybody. Gates in one of his reddit amas has said that he never said that. No one working on computers during those days would have said they need less memory.
• HNPedoLovers 1mo ago
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• Obertr 1mo ago
  i agree with everything. AI will bring a lot of unemployment. I have a thought that Peter Thiel saw it coming with mass protests and eventual blame on upper class and billionaires and left to Argentina. i honestly think there is 40% chance the world will be total mess. i know students from top Uni who are graduating and they can’t find positions to work in in California. Entry-level consensused by all of my friends is in deep trouble. something must change. dramatically. and soon. i am all in on AI. and this is scary for the rest of the world. and it should be
• 0xbadcafebee 1mo ago
  "How will we use this technology [..] and keep it from widening the divide between rich and poor?" How about you start with not paying Microsoft's CEO $96M?
• newsomix9xl 1mo ago
  Didn't Bill Gates make the news recently for his association with a certain notorious fellow? Might this be a part of a PR campaign to distract us from his "Island trips"?
• tehjoker 1mo ago
  gates says if he could slow it down he would but the economic and geopolitical aspects are pushing too hard. the china thing is fake, and the developing is taking over a trillion dollars. it could easily be shut off
• croes 1mo ago
  "AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice." The greatest equalizer ? Where you're either dependent on some other companies services, that you can afford their fee and that they don't ban your account or that you can afford the hardware to run a model locally made by the formementioned conmpanies? The internet had a bigger chance of being a equalizer because you could learn things you didn't even knoe about before and what you learned is yours
• hmontazeri 1mo ago
  Another old rich guy trying to stay relevant. That’s all this is.
• pettobare 1mo ago
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• anovikov 1mo ago
  I seriously dislike this prevailing dichotomy between black and white view on AI. Most likely it will be something in between: some unemployment, more scams, more capital concentration, more idiocy in politics and division, some cool stuff made, but also better productivity and higher economic growth... It's just one more variable thrown into equation, not something that brings us to hell or to Communism.
• paganel 1mo ago
  Fuck this Epstein pedo, how come we're giving voice to this class of people?
• saint-evan 1mo ago
  Oh shut it *eyeroll
• einpoklum 1mo ago
  Great, an evil multi-billionaire will tell us what needs to be done. > During my entire life I’ve only had two jobs. One of them was Steve; and another one has been wasting endless amount of human effort on closed-source software with anti-standard behavor. But then maybe there's the other job of covering up his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein etc.?
• cutler 1mo ago
  Sorry, Bill, it's already game over. The Dark Side won. Witness Lavender and Where's Daddy used by the IDF to target extended Palestinian families for execution. The "most moral army in the world" has devised an AI system which removes the agency and morality of mass murder. Game over.
  • deleted 1mo ago
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  • poincareball 1mo ago
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• darig 1mo ago
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• bamboozled 1mo ago
  I don't think I've ever seen an article stay on the front page as long as this one.
• bg117 1mo ago
  Creative people will no longer create but just type in their requirements. Its fun until you have money to pay for subscription. The value of created artifact will go down and will eventually cease to exist.
• Ralf_SEA 1mo ago
  In defence of Bill Gates, perhaps he just wanted to emphasize the importance of the issue rather than make a "bimodal" probabilistic prediction of the future.