It's time for that conversation.
I am now drunk enough to mistake HN for twitter so should stop.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/...
(Only about a quarter of the pie is even discretionary! The rest is on budgetary auto-pilot.)
Second, how many people are well-informed enough to have an opinion on how much of the budget should be spent on AI research? How many have even thought about the question? There are a kajillion such questions, and it would be unreasonable for most citizens to put in the time to consider even a small fraction of them, considering how little a single person's vote affects them.
Unfortunately, there is no super-human, super-political authority who can give us answers. We each get to decide who we trust and to what degree. You are free to trust Eric Schmidt to whatever degree; I might vote otherwise. Certainly nobody gets to assert authority over others by simply claiming to be an expert.
This probably can't be answered at HN comment length. Or at book length, for that matter. But I will say that I think letting individual rich people unilaterally jump on causes that they believe to be important and neglected seems like the kind of thing that will probably give better net outcomes on the margin under systems like the one we currently have.
People are naturally narrowminded, seeing their own experiences and interests as universal and essential and others as fringe and optional - or non-existant, because they can't possibly understand all the different experiences of the world. Wealthy people serve their own interests (which are very well-served already, I'll point out). It's like the old supply-side 'economics' claim from the 1980s: 'If we cut taxes for wealthy people, they will do good things for us' It turns out that it made them wealthier, and that was it.
That's why democracy is so important and function so well (relative to other forms of government): Everyone gets a vote and therefore everyone's interests are considered - even the ones you haven't imagined, don't understand, or don't care about. If you want a reliable way to see who will get screwed, just look for who doesn't have a seat at the table.
We do have systems for allocating funds, which include experts and people who study the issues, and public debate. What evidence is there that it works so poorly or could be so easily improved? I certainly don't agree with many decisions, but as I have to share the decisions with 330 million other people, that is understandable. Certainly I see what seem like more objective imperfections, but underfunding AI isn't one of them.
> letting individual rich people ...
Nobody is stopping anybody.
This thread was started by someone suggesting "we" tax Schmidt the exact 125M he decided to donate and then allocate the money as we see fit. How is that not stopping anybody?
Unless you think they mean to waylay the courier carrying the check, taxing Schmidt doesn't stop them from making donations.
How do you think we decided on the current allocation?
- Votes (indirectly) set the current allocation
- Votes (indirectly) set the current tax rate
- Votes (indirectly) mean that Schmidt has his current money pile
- Thus, this argument is perfectly in line with Schmidt choosing to take 125M of that money pile and giving it to sources he cares about.
- This argument is not in line with raising his tax rate to fund whatever the voting allocation is.
It's in support of the current system of decision-making, not the current state of the law (which, as I said, I may disagree with). Part of that system is you and I discussing it here and changing it.
The idea of taxing rich people is an ongoing conversation. I hear it discussed literally every day.
I don't think effective tax rates for the uber wealthy have ever been lower.
I view private investment in domains as a counterbalance to gaps where the slow, grinding machine that is the government misses, or is too entrenched to consider alternative approaches. An example here would be with the disruption of the aerospace industry by SpaceX.
There are two reasons:
1) Mr. Schmidt already pays taxes and the US is not an authoritarian socialist regime that creates arbitrary, retroactive new taxes to confiscate the money of its citizens as soon as they decide to make a donation.
I think that sort of system has been repeatedly shown to be a failure but if it's what you prefer, try N. Korea. Light versions can also be found in other ethno-states founded in the 20th century that put the words like socialist and people's in the names of their institutions.
2) We actually want research results and 125M in a directed investment goes a lot further than 125M in a federal budget with half a dozen intermediaries and overpaid contractors in the districts of enough legislators to swing the vote. This is part of why SpaceX is able to accomplish so much more, more quickly and more cheaply than NASA can.
The government is absolutely crucial for some things, but preventing people from making any decisions about what they want to donate to or spend their money on is a disaster.
A more reasonable solution to solve for what it sounds like you want would be to decrease the number tax loopholes and exemptions, particularly those only the wealthy can take advantage of.
Schmidt doesn’t run Google by any definition of the word run. He also has a great track record of funding basic science (Schmidt Science Fellows).
That paper was activism dressed up as science. It even tried to coin a derogatory term for language models. The authors were full of vitriol on forums against many respected researchers. After calling them out on their perceived ethical problems, they refused to have a dialogue in order not to "offer a platform" to their opponents. Never seen anything like it in 10 years of following the field. It was so sad to see people trying to have a sincere talk and being shut down.
If there is any good outcome from that scandal is that now big model papers devote 50% of their length to harm analysis. A bunch of better papers on harm reduction came out in the last year. The authors of the scandal paper moved on to exploit their new gained notoriety, so it wasn't necessarily a bad career step for them.
He doesn't.
> that fired a bunch of people for publishing research about the harms of AI
They didn't.
They fired one person for pointing out internal race and gender issues at the company, and particularly management dishonesty in the handling of those issues (part of that firing process was a constructive termination campaign—an effort to make the workplace hostile enough to them that they would quit—that involved, among other things, subjecting her research to review processes not used for other researchers at Google in the same area, which came to light around a piece on the harms of AI, which, sure, it was in the company's interest to suppress, but the only reason that even became an issue is because of the process they had already focussed on her to force her out.)
Then they fired a number of other people for things like pointing out holes in the narrative around firing the first person, including pointing out the unusual research oversight process.
In the process, a number of people also quit the company over those events.
You're either extremely misinformed or are intentionally lying, but either way, this is just a flat out incorrect statement on multiple levels. You can just google "Timnit Gebru" to find out all the details of her dismissal. And Eric Schmidt doesn't run Google, and had literally zero to do with Timnit and others getting fired(which - to be clear, was entirely because of their response to Google's response to their paper, not because of the paper itself).
At least your run-of-the-mill Scrooge has the decency to be consistent, to be hated.
While I say all that, I am also glad he's donating.
What is a fair tax rate? I don't know. Less is more IMO.
But by the terms we've all agreed on, the uber wealthy skimp by ~3/4.
There's lots of ways to make sure that people so rich they don't have to wage earn pay their fair share. We choose not to.
Having dealt with the exasperations of trying to start a small business from California (years ago), the burden of bureaucracy seemed nowhere proportional to the short-term aspirations... resulting in a quite negative influence to the initial intentions of the projects to be performed.
I guess that my wish is that they'd make at least trivial to have any entrepreneurial activity (well, maybe it boils down to the state your business is in), until it really grows into something (morally?) taxable.
Plus, the government already has much more than $125M it could use to fund AI research, why do we need to take away Schmidt's funds to do so?
Take a billionaire. Any one. At some point they inevitably will have made a public proncement something like "Why do we bother with these useless politicians ? I am a self made man. I can make much better investment decisions than those guys. Let me keep all my money and I will keep making better investment decisions."
Guess what - Maybe. Err, Mostly No.
Look firstly you are not a self-made man. You are an investment from your society that built a school, paid the teachers, injected you with vaccines and fed your growing body and mind and after twenty years of that sent you and millions like you out to make money and give some of it back in tax to pay for the repairs to the roads and schools and hospitals.
And even after that you did not do all the work at your compmay yourself - you hired people (at a presumably fair wage) and arranged things so that more of the profits flowed to you than to them. This was all legal. (I hope!)
But most especially you were not the only visionary in the desert. Every startup that succeeds has competitors - there is even a Sillicon Valley saying "competition is Gods way of saying there is money to be made". You gave a great pitch - but it fell on fertile ground. Investors realised this was a good opportunity and pushed cash into your hands, engineers and sales people realised this was the industry they wanted and shoved CVs into your hands.
You did a great job as an Enteprenuer - well done. But you were not the only one, you are not an island and you are fortunate to have benefitted from a specific corporate structure. Imagine how rich you would be if you had started a co-operative owned solely by employees or like a Vanguard investment fund owned by shareholders (unlike most hedge funds). you would still be rich - just normal rich.
Of course my dear self made billionaire, you probably are a better invester than our politicians, smarter too. But that is not the point. We are asking them to make investments that dwarf even your funds - the President of the USA hands out a 6Trillion dollar budget and that's just the federal bit. And we want a bit more ... accountability and a bit more responsiveness from the guy investing so much of our hard earned.
If you want to invest that (and let's agree you will probably do a better job) you need to persuade us (ie your new investors) that you are the right person to spend it. So is your name on the ballot? No? ok so you are not, in our terms, handing out a prospectus. in tat case you don't get to invest on our behalf. how it works is that people who invest our tax money get elected. That way we can remove them when we don't like it. (it's not a great system i have to admit but no better alternatives seem to exist)
So give us back (most?) of then money you made. we will use it to build schools for the next entrepreneurs, and also lots of other stuff we will all massively argue about.
In short, you are an investment in our massive VC fund, and you have paid off handsomely. Now we want our exit please. Death and taxes are the only two promises we ever make.
Having said that we would be very interested in your manifesto (sorry prospectus). Can you do anything about the potholes round my way?