9 ms·

Economic policy for AGI

64 points by alphabetatango 27d ago

jaggederest 27d ago
My read, but the effective policies are infeasible, and the feasible policies are largely business as usual. Pretty much precisely as expected, honestly. I struggle to see how anything like this is going to be implemented without business as usual changing in ways that the current system is extremely resistant to.
- hn_throwaway_99 27d ago
  I thought this was a good read with good data analysis, but at the end of the day none of this matters if the political and democratic systems collapse. If there is broad displacement by AI, I find it really difficult to believe folks will sit down and have a rational discussion about pros and cons of various policies, and it's nearly impossible to predict what will happen. I for one am fairly surprised that what I think is the valid anger among the US working class was successfully channeled into a cult around a grifter and huckster whose vast majority of policies are most detrimental to his biggest supporters.
  - pixl97 27d ago
    >I for one am fairly surprised that what I think is the valid anger among the US working While surprising it should be too surprising. 1930-1945 was another example of this happening.
dyauspitr 27d ago
Though AGI isn’t here yet (and in my opinion will only be marginally useful until we have physical AGI), we need to speedrun the painful bits so we can get to the other side in one generation. We need to bear the brunt of it and be the sacrificial generation.
- harimau777 27d ago
  I think that there are a lot of people who would be unwilling to sacrifice their life.
  - pixl97 27d ago
    Looking back at the beginning of the 1900s and now there are a lot of meta level parallels. Too much change is happening too quickly for societies to realistically adapt. This leaves a lot of room for greedy agents to gather other power seeking agents to further destabilize the situation for their own gain. The outcome of things like this is almost always war. Problem is once war starts it tends to spiral out of control and the body counts increase rapidly.
    - AIiscoming 27d ago
      I would also add that the internet is very young and the amount of data and news we get daily is also new and different stressful than 50 years ago.
    - SoftTalker 27d ago
      A real war would disrupt the internet so substantially as to render AI inoperative. Data centers are easy to find on Google Earth, few are really hardened against deliberate attack, and they would be immediate targets.
- ProfessorLayton 27d ago
  >We need to bear the brunt of it and be the sacrificial generation. Who is "We" here? I'll take a guess: Gen Z, and Gen A. Gen Z because they went through covid during college, and now this AI boom that's completely wreaked the entry level job market. Gen A is looking increasingly grim, unfortunately. If any of you know any school teachers, you'd know how disheartening it is to try and teach someone that has a homework and entertainment machine in their pocket at all times. Millenials went through everything Gen Z has and more ('08), but there was at least a few years of relative normalcy growing up. I don't know what's next, but I'm not very excited about it. /rant
312iuz 27d ago
I'd rather read an analysis from the World's Socialist Website than from the perpetrators. What are your concrete plans now for the 30,000 Oracle employees that have been fired because Larry got overly ambitious with AI?
- AIiscoming 27d ago
  You should want to read both sides and generate your own view of it. You can't ignore signals of the frontier labs and people working there. How much you trust them and how serious you take them and how much it reflects on what you experience, is your personal analysis. I'm playing around with fable 5.1 and Astra and its really crrazy how much better they got again now in comparison to a few month, i do trust them to a certain degree, that they are already seeing again progress internally we don't have yet. The last update killed for sure a lot of low level/avg blender/3d artists.
- jackb4040 27d ago
  Funny how Hyperscalers will write endlessly about this outcome but have no plan for what happens if LLMs turn out to be a bubble and the economy they're propping up goes into recession
  - SoftTalker 27d ago
    [dead]
  - tim333 27d ago
    There is "Sam Altman says ‘yes,’ AI is in a bubble" https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/759965/sam-altman-openai-ai-bubble-interview https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/759965/s... His plan seems to be to plow ahead.
- nradov 27d ago
  What were your concrete plans then for the thousands of Oracle employees who were fired in 2005, 2006, 2009, 2017, and 2022 before they got ambitious with AI? Mass layoffs at Oracle are nothing new, they've never hesitated to make huge cuts. Considering that socialism has been an abject failure every time it's been tried at scale, I fail to see any analysis from the World's Socialist Website could be useful.
arbirk 27d ago
Embodied robots is the most significant threat imo. Capital can be taxed but for now we have few general policy frameworks for the "who gets to walk and drive on the street" question
- habosa 27d ago
  Scares me. When the ruling class get robots servants they will have no need for even simple human interaction anymore and that will truly unleash them to do harm.
SoftTalker 27d ago
> Yet in the short term, significant transformations have often also produced lower wages for many, hollowed out regional economies, and deepened inequality. "Short term" being rather loosely used? Most industrial regions have never recovered. Look at Gary Indiana, Detroit and surrounding towns, Toledo, other regions that were dependant on manufacturing or mining. Most have been stagnating for decades; few have found a path back to a thriving economy.
- nradov 27d ago
  It's a multifactorial problem. The decline of heavy manufacturing was one cause of economic stagnation in Detroit. But the failed progressive social policies and lack of effective law enforcement didn't help either. Businesses are hesitant to expand in areas where they can't find reliable employees and where their property isn't secure.
- baron816 27d ago
  Those places aren’t isolated though. Many of their residents (and especially their children) have left and found opportunities in other parts of the country. Economists tend to prefer policies that help people, not places. Gary, Indiana just doesn’t have any geographical advantages that make it competitive. I think, if anything, the mistake was to allow people in those places to believe there would be an eventual turnaround by trying to prop up uncompetitive manufacturing industries.
  - oblio 27d ago
    Gary, Indiana. Large parts of Northern England. Large parts of Scotland. Walloonia in Belgium. Northern France. There are LOTS of regions where the people living there have never recovered after deindustrialization. We cannot expect millions of people to just uproot, it's not realistic.
    - MattPalmer1086 27d ago
      This is true. Pretty much everyone I was friends with at school in the north of england left, most of us now in or around London. But we were the ones who went to university. Most who didn't stayed put.
deleted 27d ago
[deleted]
mschuster91 27d ago
> Amid this uncertainty, there are at least a few reasons for hope that society can better manage a disruptive technological shock this time around. In the past, policymakers were limited by weaker and less knowledgeable institutions than we have today. Social science has made strides in understanding how technological shocks unfold and how to measure the impact of new innovations on labor markets. We also know more about the toolkit governments have to implement policies and how to scale them quickly. We as in "humanity as a whole" might have the knowledge and the tools... but only in theory. In practice, most Western governments are falling to the far-right / ultra-libertarian populist crowd. They will not apply what should be done (tax the rich profiting off of AI and redistribute that) simply due to it running contrary to their ideology. And on top of that, most Western countries never came off of the debt they took on during 2007ff, instead adding much more debt during and after Covid and now the Russian war against Ukraine, and probably at least some will also finance urgent aids for the people due to the Iran War with debt.
peter-m80 27d ago
What about socializing the means of production???
- tim333 27d ago
  Tricky when the super intelligent robots that'll make stuff don't exist yet.
  - scott_weber 26d ago
    "socialising the means of production" doesn't mean "everyone gets free stuff". It simply means that the people who actually work the means of production decide how it's directed. It's simply the antithesis to "privatisation" (which oddly more people seem to understand correctly).
    - tim333 26d ago
      Yeah but in this case, who are what are you nationalising?
      - AngryData 26d ago
        Why not everything over a certain size? It would be impossible to manage every 1 man business or job, but every 100 or 500 or 1000+ business already has significant management.
jay_kyburz 27d ago
I think this is a very interesting topic to discuss, and its a shame there is not more detail about how each policy is implemented, or how they might interact with the many other compounding issues we are dealing with. I would love an opportunity to take my pet ideas and tune them for better scores. To take the data and run it through the AI again over and over. I would also like to tune the scenario to consider the consequences of thousands of competing AGI's, getting serious about fixing the climate, and the danger of idle hands.
misano 27d ago
We are moving closer to the future Marx envisioned as a utopia—not through a workers’ revolution, but through capitalist productivity.
- scott_weber 26d ago
  Marx envisioned the class struggle ending with the triumph of the working class, and a subsequent dissolution of all class systems. AGI, if defined as a fully general replacement for labour, suggests a "bad ending" to class struggle: the liquidation of working classes, and the eternal reign of the ruling class.
- AngryData 26d ago
  Marx envisioned the working class have control of and directly receiving the dividends of their economy, and thus from AI also. I certainly don't expect to get a dividend payment from AI anytime soon just for being part of the working class.
VCFundedGenYer 26d ago
AGI does not exist and never will. This might as well be fantasy.
- nh23423fefe 26d ago
  did you remember to stamp your foot

My read, but the effective policies are infeasible, and the feasible policies are largely business as usual. Pretty much precisely as expected, honestly. I struggle to see how anything like this is going to be implemented without business as usual changing in ways that the current system is extremely resistant to.

hn_throwaway_99 27d ago
I thought this was a good read with good data analysis, but at the end of the day none of this matters if the political and democratic systems collapse. If there is broad displacement by AI, I find it really difficult to believe folks will sit down and have a rational discussion about pros and cons of various policies, and it's nearly impossible to predict what will happen. I for one am fairly surprised that what I think is the valid anger among the US working class was successfully channeled into a cult around a grifter and huckster whose vast majority of policies are most detrimental to his biggest supporters.
- pixl97 27d ago
  >I for one am fairly surprised that what I think is the valid anger among the US working While surprising it should be too surprising. 1930-1945 was another example of this happening.

dyauspitr 27d ago

Though AGI isn’t here yet (and in my opinion will only be marginally useful until we have physical AGI), we need to speedrun the painful bits so we can get to the other side in one generation. We need to bear the brunt of it and be the sacrificial generation.

harimau777 27d ago
I think that there are a lot of people who would be unwilling to sacrifice their life.
- pixl97 27d ago
  Looking back at the beginning of the 1900s and now there are a lot of meta level parallels. Too much change is happening too quickly for societies to realistically adapt. This leaves a lot of room for greedy agents to gather other power seeking agents to further destabilize the situation for their own gain. The outcome of things like this is almost always war. Problem is once war starts it tends to spiral out of control and the body counts increase rapidly.
  - AIiscoming 27d ago
    I would also add that the internet is very young and the amount of data and news we get daily is also new and different stressful than 50 years ago.
  - SoftTalker 27d ago
    A real war would disrupt the internet so substantially as to render AI inoperative. Data centers are easy to find on Google Earth, few are really hardened against deliberate attack, and they would be immediate targets.
ProfessorLayton 27d ago
>We need to bear the brunt of it and be the sacrificial generation. Who is "We" here? I'll take a guess: Gen Z, and Gen A. Gen Z because they went through covid during college, and now this AI boom that's completely wreaked the entry level job market. Gen A is looking increasingly grim, unfortunately. If any of you know any school teachers, you'd know how disheartening it is to try and teach someone that has a homework and entertainment machine in their pocket at all times. Millenials went through everything Gen Z has and more ('08), but there was at least a few years of relative normalcy growing up. I don't know what's next, but I'm not very excited about it. /rant

312iuz 27d ago

I'd rather read an analysis from the World's Socialist Website than from the perpetrators. What are your concrete plans now for the 30,000 Oracle employees that have been fired because Larry got overly ambitious with AI?

AIiscoming 27d ago
You should want to read both sides and generate your own view of it. You can't ignore signals of the frontier labs and people working there. How much you trust them and how serious you take them and how much it reflects on what you experience, is your personal analysis. I'm playing around with fable 5.1 and Astra and its really crrazy how much better they got again now in comparison to a few month, i do trust them to a certain degree, that they are already seeing again progress internally we don't have yet. The last update killed for sure a lot of low level/avg blender/3d artists.
jackb4040 27d ago
Funny how Hyperscalers will write endlessly about this outcome but have no plan for what happens if LLMs turn out to be a bubble and the economy they're propping up goes into recession
- SoftTalker 27d ago
  [dead]
- tim333 27d ago
  There is "Sam Altman says ‘yes,’ AI is in a bubble" https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/759965/sam-altman-openai-ai-bubble-interview https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/759965/s... His plan seems to be to plow ahead.
nradov 27d ago
What were your concrete plans then for the thousands of Oracle employees who were fired in 2005, 2006, 2009, 2017, and 2022 before they got ambitious with AI? Mass layoffs at Oracle are nothing new, they've never hesitated to make huge cuts. Considering that socialism has been an abject failure every time it's been tried at scale, I fail to see any analysis from the World's Socialist Website could be useful.

arbirk 27d ago

Embodied robots is the most significant threat imo. Capital can be taxed but for now we have few general policy frameworks for the "who gets to walk and drive on the street" question

habosa 27d ago
Scares me. When the ruling class get robots servants they will have no need for even simple human interaction anymore and that will truly unleash them to do harm.

SoftTalker 27d ago

> Yet in the short term, significant transformations have often also produced lower wages for many, hollowed out regional economies, and deepened inequality. "Short term" being rather loosely used? Most industrial regions have never recovered. Look at Gary Indiana, Detroit and surrounding towns, Toledo, other regions that were dependant on manufacturing or mining. Most have been stagnating for decades; few have found a path back to a thriving economy.

nradov 27d ago
It's a multifactorial problem. The decline of heavy manufacturing was one cause of economic stagnation in Detroit. But the failed progressive social policies and lack of effective law enforcement didn't help either. Businesses are hesitant to expand in areas where they can't find reliable employees and where their property isn't secure.
baron816 27d ago
Those places aren’t isolated though. Many of their residents (and especially their children) have left and found opportunities in other parts of the country. Economists tend to prefer policies that help people, not places. Gary, Indiana just doesn’t have any geographical advantages that make it competitive. I think, if anything, the mistake was to allow people in those places to believe there would be an eventual turnaround by trying to prop up uncompetitive manufacturing industries.
- oblio 27d ago
  Gary, Indiana. Large parts of Northern England. Large parts of Scotland. Walloonia in Belgium. Northern France. There are LOTS of regions where the people living there have never recovered after deindustrialization. We cannot expect millions of people to just uproot, it's not realistic.
  - MattPalmer1086 27d ago
    This is true. Pretty much everyone I was friends with at school in the north of england left, most of us now in or around London. But we were the ones who went to university. Most who didn't stayed put.

deleted 27d ago

[deleted]

mschuster91 27d ago

> Amid this uncertainty, there are at least a few reasons for hope that society can better manage a disruptive technological shock this time around. In the past, policymakers were limited by weaker and less knowledgeable institutions than we have today. Social science has made strides in understanding how technological shocks unfold and how to measure the impact of new innovations on labor markets. We also know more about the toolkit governments have to implement policies and how to scale them quickly. We as in "humanity as a whole" might have the knowledge and the tools... but only in theory. In practice, most Western governments are falling to the far-right / ultra-libertarian populist crowd. They will not apply what should be done (tax the rich profiting off of AI and redistribute that) simply due to it running contrary to their ideology. And on top of that, most Western countries never came off of the debt they took on during 2007ff, instead adding much more debt during and after Covid and now the Russian war against Ukraine, and probably at least some will also finance urgent aids for the people due to the Iran War with debt.

peter-m80 27d ago

What about socializing the means of production???

tim333 27d ago
Tricky when the super intelligent robots that'll make stuff don't exist yet.
- scott_weber 26d ago
  "socialising the means of production" doesn't mean "everyone gets free stuff". It simply means that the people who actually work the means of production decide how it's directed. It's simply the antithesis to "privatisation" (which oddly more people seem to understand correctly).
  - tim333 26d ago
    Yeah but in this case, who are what are you nationalising?
    - AngryData 26d ago
      Why not everything over a certain size? It would be impossible to manage every 1 man business or job, but every 100 or 500 or 1000+ business already has significant management.

jay_kyburz 27d ago

I think this is a very interesting topic to discuss, and its a shame there is not more detail about how each policy is implemented, or how they might interact with the many other compounding issues we are dealing with. I would love an opportunity to take my pet ideas and tune them for better scores. To take the data and run it through the AI again over and over. I would also like to tune the scenario to consider the consequences of thousands of competing AGI's, getting serious about fixing the climate, and the danger of idle hands.

misano 27d ago

We are moving closer to the future Marx envisioned as a utopia—not through a workers’ revolution, but through capitalist productivity.

scott_weber 26d ago
Marx envisioned the class struggle ending with the triumph of the working class, and a subsequent dissolution of all class systems. AGI, if defined as a fully general replacement for labour, suggests a "bad ending" to class struggle: the liquidation of working classes, and the eternal reign of the ruling class.
AngryData 26d ago
Marx envisioned the working class have control of and directly receiving the dividends of their economy, and thus from AI also. I certainly don't expect to get a dividend payment from AI anytime soon just for being part of the working class.

VCFundedGenYer 26d ago

AGI does not exist and never will. This might as well be fantasy.

nh23423fefe 26d ago
did you remember to stamp your foot