"Gleefully taking away people's livelihoods will be met with violence, and nothing good will come of it." - fixed.
Until people with billions of dollars behind them do something with that money to offset the financial hardship that they're knowingly - and gleefully - bringing to others... The distinction has no practical use.
(And before someone says "that's the government's job!", consider how much lobbying money is coming from CEOs and companies who know the domain best and are agitating for better financial and social safeguards for all. None, naturally.)
I'm considering "actual power", rather than "actual income".
Given that (allegedly) "your salary" won't be the answer for a significant chunk of the population soon, and all that money will instead (allegedly) go to the bosses doing the firings, and the AI companies they employ instead.
The entire Earth's population dead, with evil corporate board members holding votes underground as to who gets to be the CEO of the company.
Avicebron brought up inequality as the root cause.
DavidPiper indicated only the few thousand richest as the root cause.
Rayiner questioned if those few thousand richest have the means or capacity to reduce inequality.
estimator7292 responded that everyone has to help reduce inequality.
To which I wanted to point out exactly what would need to be sacrificed, because it would involve sacrifices among the top 10% to 20% of the world (constituting many on this forum) which those 10% to 20% would not even consider a "luxury". It is easy to claim a billionaire's private jet is an expendable luxury exacerbating inequality, but the reality is the bar is far lower than that (see statistics on energy used per capita, which can serve as a good proxy for which side of the inequality the lifestyle you might expect is).
That is why we are all mostly talk and no walk, because push comes to shove, we can't even get a sufficient fossil fuel tax passed to slow climate change for our own descendants, much less voluntarily decrease our standard of living solely for the benefit of others in the world.
Comparing middle income 1st world citizens to dragons on their mountains of gold is disingenuous at best.
Those two groups are on the greater side of the inequality, and the third group is on the lesser side of the inequality. All the dragons on their mountains of gold can stop existing, and the inequality barely changes.
Except for commercial flights (which I would easily give up for a hopeful society), I do not find anything on your list remotely relevant to my happiness or well-being.
Imported cheap goods are obviously something all of us consume a lot, but we only need them to feel good in comparison to our neighbours.
As long as we keep them for hospitals and medicine, the rest going away would be just fine. Children would play with whatever they can find instead of cheap plastic toys, we would have to learn to multi-purpose our tools instead of having a specific object for every minor purpose.
Billionaires simply _should not exist_. The fact that the power to shape societies is concentrated in so few can account for many of the existential threats we face today. AI is not "the problem", it's merely the latest symptom of our broken system and the prioritization of the wrong goals and outcomes.
EDIT: grammar
If American billionaires couldn't exist then America would be even poorer and underdeveloped than Europe, the entire tech industry wouldn't exist, and it'd be entirely at the mercy of China. Because nobody's going to start a business in a country that violently confiscates their wealth just for being successful. The envy of people like yourself is a deep moral illness that destroys civilizations if left unchecked.
Sounds like a self-defeating argument to me.
Billionaires who inherit their wealth shouldn’t exist. But I have no problem with people like Bezos owning a sizable percentage share of valuable companies they created. When I was a kid, getting something ordered by mail took a week or two, even if you called in the order. UPS and FedEx existed, warehouses and storage trucks existed, but Bezos reduced that to a matter of hours. And now the sheeple can get their daily Amazon deliveries while complaining that Bezos is making a nickel on each one.
In a purely analytical calculation—without emotional nonsense—one Jeff Bezos obviously is vastly more beneficial to society than thousands of ordinary people. If we just had school teachers, or whoever else you idealize, we’d all be living in mud huts. The average person would be living like an animal without the technology created by exceptional people like Bezos. Why shouldn’t society reward them lavishly?
Let's just look at countries which have high income and very low income unequality, like Finland.
Turns out they don't live in mud huts, and most aspects of society work far better than in the USA.
But even if Bezos actually creates billions of value on his own, it doesn't mean that he should get those billions. The reward for such high value work should be high enough that Bezos chooses to do it instead of something else, but it doesn't need to be higher than that. In a world where the highest paid position would reward a few million instead of a few billion, I'm sure Bezos and people like him would still gravitate towards that work since it'd still be work with the best rewards.
People who have some revolutionary ideas wouldn't abandon them if the potential highest reward was millions instead of billions. Or do you believe that there are people with good ideas right now that abandon them because they can't earn trillions with the idea? What people expect as a reward for their work is what decides whether they do it or not. If we can lower the expectation, we can get the high value work without creating dangerous levels of power concentration.
I have no issue with incentivising and rewarding individuals who contribute great works. Any rewards, monetary or otherwise, would be fine if our institutions could continue to serve all and not just the few "rewarded" individuals.
Unfortunately, time has proven that money and power are intrinsically linked and those same few will continue to shape how and what paths humanity takes at large. I'm simply stating we should tread more carefully and not place all trust in a few cult of personalities as many seem to, and your response implies. Perhaps the stories of the self-made individual and the chances of becoming one of those few (however vanishing small the chance) is too ingrained in our collective psyche that we blind ourselves to what parts we actually play in this game.
The trade offs here aren't as simple as getting packages sooner rather than later. The tradeoffs are accepting a brutal, fuedalistic society where the negative outcomes for the many are disregarded for the positive outcomes of the few.
Perhaps the negative outcomes are too "invisible" in our daily lives because we, in tech, are isolated enough by nature of being fairly well compensated for the work we do. This in all likelihood will change if history is our guide. I personally know many individuals that work 2 or 3 jobs to be able to afford a roof over their heads because of wage suppression by corporations like the one you mention. Teachers, healthcare workers and the like. You may not see them as important but you may want to reflect on why. Meanwhile, the commons are actively being destroyed: hard won clean air and water protections are being rolled back. My father is dying of cancer because of exposure to chemicals that corporations actively lobbied to hide from the public at all costs, even though they were well aware of the dangers. These are the real results of direct corporate lobbying efforts made by the rewarded few. I don't see this as an "emotional" argument to make, but rather an inherently humanist one.
My children are growing up in a world with dimmer prospects than I or my parents had. If this is simply the cost of faster packages, than I want none of it.
Money is just a way of keeping track to how high of a fraction of the future output of the civilization any one person or entity is entitled to. This is by consent.
With AI all is subject to change.
Nope. AI is an accelerant that makes the divide between rich and poor grow even faster.
Also, a UBI is likely to cause inflation.
As a welfare replacement, it is much more efficient, since there is no effort spent determining who qualifies. People can spent their money however they want, rather than the patchwork of separate programs we have now.
It doesn't need to bring anyone down. It's just a different way of distributing what we already receive. For you ordinary workers, they will receive $X in a monthly check, and their salary can be reduced by $X (since the minimum wage can also be abolished).
That does mean that the desirability of some jobs will shift. Good. We have a bunch of very dirty jobs being done for minimum wage, even though demand is extremely high. I'd love to see the garbage men and chicken processors get more money for their dangerous work.
And if I get less for my cushy desk job, oh well. Especially since we seem to be putting all of the effort into replacing me, and none into the jobs that come with hazards to life and limb.
That is double current federal and state welfare spending.
I'm dead tired right now so I'm sure I'm missing something, but considering that is far below the poverty threshold in any big city, I dont think we'll be solving anything by eliminating welfare in favor of UBI.
UBI is basically of no benefit to the upper middle class or wealthy, and it won't be enough for the poor who cannot work enough. It really only benefits the upper lower class and lower middle class the most.
It doesn't benefit the wealthy at all. They come off worse for it. (There are revenue-neutral versions but I don't think they suffice.) But I believe that they can afford it, and will find the result a healthier America that they won't want to abandon.
"Everyone gets a livable minimum wage! Oh by the way if you had a cushy desk job, that's gone because Claude can do it, or you get paid peanuts to manage Claude instances if you're lucky. Don't worry though, you can still make big bucks by working as a garbage man or at a chicken processing plant"
and the alternative is
"Burn the data centers down"
then the 2nd option may have a bit more appeal?
"cause increased prices for consumer/essential goods" is what you meant (since buying power is moved to people who are reliant on buying them), but this is a one-time transition to a new equilibrium (so is mitigable by increasing the UBI to account for it), not a constant ever-looming devaluator.
We're talking about an increased federal budget in the hundreds of billions/trillions to support such a UBI. That will cause a massive increase in taxation on the people who can still find jobs.
To make matters worst, the government in 10-15 years will likely be spending ~25% of it's budget on interest payments alone. Hiking the federal budget up even more sounds like a hard sell.
Look at Rome and what it had to do when the system shock of so many slaves disrupted labor. Wild that Roman patricians understood you have to...like...feed society, but modern right wing Americans don't.
If AIs simply replace people, the same total work gets done. It's just a matter of who gets the profits from it.
It won't be that simple, to be sure. Nonetheless we already produce far more than subsistence, and there's no reason why a UBI would change that. If it increases the price of some commodities because now everyone can buy them, I'm ok with that. It already horrifies me that some go hungry in the fattest nation in history.
Even if it were true, you still have distribution. You can’t get goods across a nation, let alone the globe, without significant inputs.
Are you checking the local grocery store and extrapolating globally?
Were you talking about specifically how do you restrain the power of massive corporations to harm people? AI is coming but a lot of the other things that are happening are preventable - like the rise of no-benefit gig work.
The richest nation in world history and we can’t spend any of it for the betterment of our citizens. It’s disgraceful.
Perhaps what's happening is that in their attempts to reach a personal all-time high in their bank accounts the ultra-wealthy are destroying value and economic systems en mass with little regard to the efficiency of their money siphoning process?
It's kind of like a drug dealer selling brain burning addictive substances to a few people on a street. Sure they're going to extract a person's life savings to date and whatever money that person can steal once they're addicted but that value pales in comparison to what that person could have made over their career, what it could have made if properly invested, the cost of law enforcement to deal with these addicts, the cost of the stuff that they destroy in their quest to get money to buy drugs, the opportunity cost of them not raising their kids to be productive members of society... like it all just snow balls all so some asshole can make a few bucks...
The ultra-wealthy are doing that shit where people burn acres of pristine forests to get some biochar -- but to the entire world.
Isn’t it strange
That princes and kings,
And clowns that caper
In sawdust rings,
And common people
Like you and me
Are builders for eternity?
Each is given a bag of tools,
A shapeless mass,
A book of rules;
And each must make-
Ere life is flown-
A stumbling block
Or a stepping stone.https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/stumbling_block
Turns out it's a fictional object created in the translation of the Koine Greek for "obstacle".
"Until people with salaries of many dollars per hour behind them do something with that money to offset the financial hardship that they're knowingly - and gleefully - bringing to others 90% of the world that live on less than 2 dollars per day... The distinction has no practical use."
Moreover, these people do not simply lobby the government, but directly elect it, and actually have many times more money at their disposal than the rest of the world.
/s
Salary (income) is a horrible choice to serve as the marker to determine a person's (family's) fair share contribution to the burden of paying the costs to operate a society. Not everyone is so poor that working for a living is a matter of survival.
I can think of only one universal marker that would assure every citizen shares the burden of paying for society's costs equally: wealth.
Adjusted in a manner that the financial impact of one thousand dollars to a full-time MacDonald's counter worker is transformed into a dollar amount that causes the same relative financial impact to everyone, all the way up to the wealthiest family in America.
1 Normal person
3 Doctors / Lawyers / Engineers ($1M+ net worth)
3 Successful Entrepreneurs ($10M+ net worth)
3 Ultrawealthy ($50M+ net worth)
1 Normal person
3 Professional ($100k+/yr passive)
3 Successful ($1M+/yr passive)
3 Wealthy ($5M+/yr passive)
Are the in-betweeners part of the problem? Sure, but we have a foot on either side of the problem. We could get hype for many of the plausible solutions to aggregate labor oversupply (e.g. shorter workweeks) even if it meant our stocks went down. Not so for 6/10 people in that sample. The core problem is still that the economy is mostly inhabited by people who work for a living but mostly owned by people who own things for a living and all of the good solutions to the problem require rolling that back a little against a backdrop that, absent intervention, stands to accelerate it a lot.
EDIT: one more thing, but it's a big one: the higher ends of the wealth ladder have the enormous privilege of being able to engage in politics for profit rather than charity/obligation. A 10% chance of lobbying into place a policy that changes asset values by 10% is worth $1k to a "Professional", $50k to a "Wealthy", but $8B to Elon Musk. The fact that at increasing net worths politics becomes net profitable and then so net profitable as to allow hiring organizations of people to pursue means the upper edge of the distribution punches above its already-outsized weight in terms of political influence. It goes without saying that their brand of politics is all about pumping assets.
The electoral college system, coupled with it's winner-takes-all implementation in most states, means that voting is a sham for 80% of the population. The other 20% live in a swing state and their vote can at least potentially affect the outcome of an election, but even there "your vote" will literally be cast opposite to what you put on the ballet unless you end up being part of the winning majority.
But we can't talk about this because it includes a large tract of the white collar everyday man workforce.
This is why the focus is so heavy on billionaires, so heavy on increasing minimum wage, so heavy on protecting immigrants. Those are all virtuous values that also bolster the value of the 70-95%, while piling all the blame (and responsibility) on the 1%.
The wealthiest group in America is doing an excellent job at protecting (and growing) their wealth.
(for those wondering, the "back breaker" of this class is zoning laws and new housing, everyone is aware how intense NIMBYism is in the middle/upper middle class hives).
The middle class has the gold vault (well the closest thing), and that's where the redistribution would happen.
If you don't believe me, look at Europe. You can be a baker and make $35k yr, an SWE and make $65k yr, or a doctor and make $100k/yr.
You may say "Yeah, that's great, they live happy lives!"
But then convince American engineers they need to take a $140k paycut and the doctors a $220k paycut so that we can pay bakers $10k more a year. They'll just tell you the billionaires are the problem, and you'll believe them.
The group you’re talking about, 70-95 percentile, are often people that just own a house near a big city or a farm/small business.
Once the Democrats who are elected on the fantasy of making Musk and Bezos pay for everyone’s past and future college/student loans, Medicare for all, UBI, high speed rail, while simultaneously closing every fossil fuel plant and subsidizing clean energy to replace it at the same cost — once they’ve failed to raise enough to pay for 1/10 of those promises, they’ll be coming for everyone more “wealthy” than $100k net worth.
You can just look how successful the USSR was, or China before they sold out their own Communist ideals. Most people were just subsistence farmers, or factory workers living in crowded minimalist apartments if they were lucky.
It appears you are the one very confused about wealth distribution in the US. Maybe you are confusing "income" with "wealth hoarding". The hoarding is happening to a gross amount, and this is why there should be a 1% tax on fortune portions over 100 million and 2% on portions over 1 billion. That and going back to the 70% tax over incomes in the top bracket (eg > 10million / yr)
Those taxes are coming. Trumpty Dumpty and the oligarchs brought it on themselves. Maga grifters are getting f'd in the midterms. Maybe maga should have picked a few dear leaders with some integrity instead of greedy frauds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...
Edit: downpout all you want, doesn't change the facts.
Maybe Notch when he sold Minecraft, apparently he had $2B sitting in a bank account, but I'm sure by now he has deployed it.
Forbes Real-Time Billionaires covers the full ~3,000-person list. The 2025 annual snapshot: 3,028 billionaires with combined net worth of $16.1 trillion
Forbes 400 (US only): 2025 cutoff was $3.8 billion to make the list. Forbes publishes the aggregate annually and recent years the total net worth was over $5.4T for the 400.
They've also stolen a good economy. The economy in this country worked best when corporate profits were taxed at a much higher rate and companies were incentivized to grow business and we could create more jobs for people. Through their grip on society they have stolen that wealth and good economic output.
We have plenty of evidence that tax cuts do not fuel economic growth look out our industry right now there are massive layoffs everywhere and it's not because of dogshit LLMs
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policycast/olig...
Or until actual people take the billions of dollars sitting behind those weak man-children. The US has fewer than 1000 billionaires now, and more than 300,000,000 people. That seems like a solvable problem.
Just wait ... in two weeks ...
Here are some points of consideration:
1. They don't have $7.5T in liquid. The average american won't be able to use that $25k to pay a hospital bill or eat. Also note that one-time wealth transfer won't even pay in full for one major surgery.
2. You've wiped away the incentive for getting-big mentality which drove some of the billionaires to innovate which advances society to this point. Think - discouraging a future Jobs from making another iPhone-like device.
3. After the one-time transfer, it turns out we need more money for the common folks. "Why is the line at $1B? Isn't $900m enough? The line should be $100m." And so on and so forth.
[0]: https://fortune.com/2025/12/08/how-many-billionaires-does-am...
Personally I wager society would be better if the excess wealth of billionaires was simply deleted, or burned. It would be better yet if that wealth was used in our shared funds to build common infrastructure and services. Leaving such wealth in such few hands is really the worst you could possibly do for society.
That way you get somebody with a proven track record of building big projects who is also motivated by money, so the common infrastructure and services is handled competently.
Because it is undemocratic, ripe for corruption and abuse, will never work in practice (as the rich will inevitably find ways to game the system). What you are describing is basically just aristocracy, where the rich get to decide what is best for the rest of us.
Similarly properly regulate the gig economy.
And actually pay servers properly so that they don't have to rely on tips?
The today's life is enshittified by thousand cuts ... why not fix them?
All that is required is a legislative body that is not bought by big $$$.
1. Billionaires shouldn't wield lots of wealth, because it's scary.
Sticking to that concept makes the discussion a lot clearer. Never mind concept 2, it's haunted by the futile spirit of Marx and he's throwing crockery around.
What will happen with this taxation is that if everybody makes the same income, then everybody pays 50% in tax. If some rich dude is making a lot more money then everybody else, they will lower the tax for everybody else while paying a lot more them selves. At some point (say 3 standard deviations above the mean) you end up getting less after taxes then had your income been lower (say 2 SD above), in other words, the limit is 100% tax for extremely high incomes (and 0% for extremely low incomes). That is, I favor a system that has maximum income, and you are actively punished for making more.
I guess the board would have to vote to keep my income at the optimum level, or just below, to prevent me from jumping ship to run a competing company that offers to pay less.
Even if yourself could argue that you’ve done a good thing overall, I’d rather not take your word on that and would rather not have you decide something so extremely impactful.
eg: cutting funding to the IRS and advanced science, both of which have long proven positive dividends… or advancing new wars abroad to directly blow up money.
Plus wbillionaires are nothing special. Right time, right place.
Steve Jobs is a perfect example of someone who was in it for the love of the game. He wouldn’t have been any different if his income was taxed at 90%.
Money is made up system to provide a relatively stable society; if that stops working it's not good; violence becomes what's left.
Maria Sam Antoinette and brethren saying let them eat cake (or everyone will just build new things with (our) AI) without a sense of what is happening / about to happen to the broader populous is on a similar track.
The "billionaires" should use their influence to help with this transition invest figuring out how these new system will work.
No one should care if that means more "millionaires" vs less billionaires these numbers as social constructs; the point is power and self determination. History shows lacking that for too many will breakdown to broad violence and or dystopic robot overloads guarding a diminishing small and isolated elite.
The time to course correct is now.
Am I meant to believe that we wouldn't have iPhone-level innovation if inventors couldn't become billionaires?
This makes no sense. We have so much more innovation than we have billionaires, always have. Ability to become a member of the 0.001% is not a barrier to innovation, not in America, not anywhere, and never has been.
No one serious is claiming there should be zero wealth inequality. Inequality is ineradicable. The claim is that wealth inequality can reach a degree that becomes corrosive to society as a whole and severs the link between innovation and profit, because it becomes more profitable to hoard wealth and collect capital gains and interest than it does to innovate and create things in the real world.
It's entirely possible to preserve (and in fact would actually strengthen) the profit motive if we changed incentives to get rid of the wild capital hoarding we see today.
In general, this is total bullshit. But in the particular, Job made his first billions from selling Pixar to Disney, not from Apple.
Make lobbying illegal, I don't understand why it's normalized.
Inequality is going to continue to increase until society collapses. If we want a better world we need to prepare for this eventuality by building avenues of popular action to return power to the people. Once the oligarchs have fucked up enough people’s lives, popular action becomes a realistic way out of this mess.
I know many democracies around the world are in critical failure modes at the moment (particularly in the USA). But there is still hope. With enough pressure democracy can be reformed.
Giving money to politicians or their campaigns is not lobbying, and it is already illegal for lobbyists to do so.
What could and should be made illegal is allowing unlimited political campaign donations via Super PACs. Political donations aren't lobbying.
It's worth being clear about what you actually want to make illegal because you probably don't want to ban anyone from arguing a political position.
"Checks are written" is vague. What do you want to make illegal? Super PACs? I had just said they should be made illegal.
For example, the people fighting inequality can use AI to their advantage, and focus criticism on billionaires (and general bad AI usage, like slop PRs) instead of ordinary AI users.
If this was actually a threat to entrenched inequity, we simply would lose access to the necessary memory, GPUs and matching fields of server fleets. Oh wait
We have a lattice of diverse legal and economic systems in the world and it takes just a single one to figure out the solution for others to learn from.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-...
Clearly other countries are doing something to keep their citizens happy that the US is not copying.
Given that US politics and policy is driven by lobbyists and tribal infighting, would you really expect anything different?
To hear Marc Andreessen tell it, the US tech industry's rightward turn in the 2024 campaign was specifically intended to head off any attempt to regulate AI [0]. So the blame rebounds to tech CEOs even if you believe that only the government should take a holistic view of a given technology's impact.
[0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-06-11/marc-andr...
Plus I don't believe in violence from tech bros and white collar workers - they have been raised too docile...
That is, it's not hard to see why so many main streets in smaller towns have boarded up retail stores since you can now get anything in about a day (max) from Amazon. But Amazon (and other Internet giants) always played at least semi-plausible lip service that they were a boon to small fry (see Amazon's FBA commercials, for example). But you've got folks like Altman and Amodei gleefully saying how AI will be able to do all the work of a huge portion of (mostly high paying) jobs.
So it's not surprising that people are more up in arms about AI. And frankly, I don't think it really matters. Anger against "the tech elite" has been bubbling up for a long time now, and AI now just provides the most obvious target.
I'm pretty much only thinking about these kinds of problems at my job at this point, so this is important to me in that regard
I would rather claim that this is a proper description of shadow libraries [1].
If you want to use LLMs, you can either use cloud resources at what I think are really reasonable per-token prices compared to the value, or to set up your own server with an open-weights model at a comparable level of quality (though generally significantly slower tokens/s). In any case, you absolutely don't have to pay OpenAI/Anthropic/Google if you don't want to.
But are you expecting 360m Americans to start their own businesses? That is a solution that doesn't scale. Consumer grade GPUs aren't going to scale all that much either, and the cost of the models are going up rather than down as vendors start seeking profits. We already see the memory and storage markets exploding in cost due to the rise in demand as well.
It's never been a worse time for the poor or middle class to think about starting their own business. Prices on everything are rising, it's getting to be a struggle for even the middle class to continue to afford their homes. Healthcare is even more fraught than ever before, and if you're lucky enough to have a decent plan from your employer, aint no way you're going to give it up to go start a business.
I do not. I grew up on post-scarcity utopias like Star Trek, coupled with social capitalism, and believe that when there is a market need, people with the interest to tackle it will do so, even in the face of personal financial risk, but I absolutely don't think that it should be the default for everyone. Where there's no strong economic benefit for others to work, I would hope that we could offer everyone UBI, so that a comfortable basic level of life is available for everyone, without having to invent bullshit jobs that aren't needed.
I know I sound naive, but I truly believe that we can move into a future where human value is decoupled from their job, without going into communism.
Now that all takes place in China. With layers of middle men who collect arbitrage between you and the Chinese manufacturers they connect to you. With tariffs. Weeks of international shipping. Enough volume of orders to justify international shipping at all. Enough production capacity ordered to even be worth while making your thing versus larger orders from around the world all being made in china.
Because success is individual, inequality is statistical.
It ia true that AI gives ordinary people a lot more chance to be successful.
But do not forget that success depends on lots of factors that are not in one’s control: knowing the right people, time being right for what you are doing, and lots of others. So while the mechanics of success is a lot different to lottery, it does not work much differently: 1 in 1M attempts are successful.
Yes, AI gives everyone more lottery tickets, but it gives rich people a lot more tickets.
Tax AI is the answer.
It seems like a lot of people want a revolution so that they can rotate who will be able to take advantage of the vulnerable.
What are the suggestions for something better? I don't see a lot.
I'd like to see more suggestions of how things could work.
For example:
The Government could legislate that any increase in profits that are attributable to the use of AI are taxed at 75%. It's still an advantage for a company to do it, but most of the gains go to the people. Most often, aggressive taxation like this is criticised on the basis that it will stifle growth, but this is an area where pretty much everyone is saying it's moving too quickly, that's just yet another positive effect.
Alternately you could criticise their arguments instead of the people, and suggest an alternative.
I'm also not entirely certain that influencing public policy is something that is inherently bad. I know if I were deaf, I would like to have some influence on public policy about deafness issues.
Why is OpenAI not a nonprofit anymore?
You are arguing the opposite, that we should judge by what they say and not what they do?
I suspect that they are not a bad person but someone radicalised by the media they consume.
Firebombing someone's house is a bad thing to do. It doesn't mean they are necessarily a bad person. Anger and confusion can make good people do bad things.
"Altman is secretly a good guy" doesn't pay people's mortgages.
So the silver lining is this - they're not risking to burn the world down for porn or bitcoin, but for general improvement in everything across the board, that happens to have an unfortunate side effect of destroying value of labor.
Altman probably won't torture my cats to death. What a guy.
To judge the people is to pretend you know why they did or said something.
Michael Bloomberg has lobbied for healthcare.
Pierre Omidyar has spent about a billion on economic advancement non-profits
Gates Foundation - Bunch of stuff.
Warren Buffet - Too much to count
George Soros - For all the antisemitism, the kernel of truth in the lie is that he spends a lot of money trying to make the world better.
Chuck Feeny gave away $8B I'm sure some of it went to lobbying for better policies
A large number Advocate for a Universal Basic Income.
More advocate for things that they clearly think are good things for the world, even if you, personally do not.
Jack Dorsey, Reid Hoffman, hell even Elon Musk (he may be wrong about everything, but he's openly advocating for what he believes is good)
Sam Altman has done WorldCoin and is heavily invested in Nuclear Fusion. You can criticise the effectiveness or even the desirability of the projects, but they are definitely efforts that if worked as claimed would be beneficial.
Many billionaires spend money on non-profits to push for change, often they do not put their name on it because it makes them a target for attack, or simply that by openly advocating for something the lack of trust causes people to assume whatever they suggest has the opposite intention.
I'm not arguing that they are doing the right thing. I'm arguing that for the most part they are advocating for and investing in what they believe to be the right thing. Why treat them as the enemy, when a dialog might cause them to reach common ground about what is the right thing.
People like Elon literally are the enemy. He used his wealth to literally change our government in his favor. The idea that we need to go and have polite discussions to maybe change his mind, while he gets to stomp all over us (his DOGE efforts literally resulted in people dying). If a dialog with them was going to work it would have happened a long time ago, but the more we learn about these people the more obvious it is that they believe themselves to be smarter and better than the rest of us. They aren't going to listen to others, and pretending that they will seems like deflecting and giving up in advance. Our best hope is that people can get enough power to regulate billionaires out of existence before a revolution does it instead.
Because it IS an us vs them situation.
They're awfully good at turning it into an us vs us situation whether it's blaming our parents' (boomers), blaming immigrants, blaming muslims or (their favorite), blaming the unstoppable forward march of technological progress (e.g. AI).
The media organizations they own are constantly telling these stories because it protects them.
>The Government could legislate that any increase in profits that are attributable to the use of AI are taxed
Nothing a billionaire loves more than misdirection and a good scapegoat. This is why Bill Gates made the exact suggestion you just did.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-wants-tax-robots-2...
When THEY are the problem they love a bit of misdirection, especially when the "problem" is a genie that cant be put back in its bottle.
They're terrified that we might latch on to the solutions that actually work (i.e. tax them to within an inch of their life) and drive a populist politician to power which might actually enact them.
You interpret every signal as saying the same thing. That makes an unfalsifiable claim.
The response is "we don't believe you" because their actions show that they are hellbent on accelerating inequality using AI and they have offered absolutely no concrete plan or halfway convincing explanation of how, if their own predictions of AI's future capabilities are correct, we're supposed to go from here and now to a future that isn't extremely dark for the vast majority of humans on Earth (to the extent that said humans continue to exist).
The work they have done in this direction so far is not serious, so it's not taken seriously. They obviously care much more about enriching themselves than slowing or reversing current trends.
If they want to be taken seriously, maybe they should start acting like they're serious about anything besides their own wealth and power. And I do mean acting---they need to show us through their actions that they are serious.
Just a thought, what do you think?
If there were another party involved, that would (hopefully) diversify power that (potentially) comes with those streams of data.
It’s a bit ironic that the USA has mostly abandoned interoperability after being one of the pioneers with the American manufacturing method. [0]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_system_of_manufacturi...
"Joel, you look like a smart kid. I'm going to tell you something I'm sure you'll understand. You're having fun now, right? Right, Joel? The time of your life. In a sluggish economy, never ever fuck with another man's livelihood."
Do you make this distinction that it's not the AI that is doing this to us so that you can be more clear in where to target your ire, or are you making the distinction so you can continue to use LLMs with a clear conscience?
I'm not sure this moat is inevitably perpetual. It's likely computing technology evolves to the point of being able to run frontier-level models on our phones and laptops. It's also likely that with diminishing marginal returns, future datacenter-level models will not be dramatically more capable than future local models. In that case, the power of AI would be (almost) fully democratized, obviating any oligarchic concentration of power. Everyone would have equal access to the ultimate means of production.
You are right that AI can be a fully democratized commodity. The problem is that the current wealth inequality is not the result of AI. Musk became a trillion seeking oligarch not because of AI. It is because the entire financial system is designed to extract wealth from everyone and concentrate at the top. Democratic AI is not in their interest. There will be violence, but not because AI is supposedly a catalyst of inequality. It will be violence from the rich towards the poor, because democratic AI is not acceptable for them.
Unless the rich somehow manage to completely stifle the progress of consumer-level computing advancement (all chip manufacturers would just collude to quit selling to consumers?) and exert an iron-fisted control over the dissemination of software (when has this ever worked?), I'm not sure how they could control the democratization of AI.
Well, someone with money could go buy 100% of RAM production for the next 3 years.
There's been ongoing class warfare happening for centuries, but only the rich side is firing the bullets. The rest of us are just standing in the front lines getting shot. AI is just another type of gun for their army.
there is something else that needs to change which everyone is reluctant to admit, or struggling with internally.
thats ok, its called conscious evolution. it hurts, but it will be ok someday. its generational, so progress is always slower than one would hope. Just know that every step in the right direction is one, even if the entire world seems to disagree keep pushing for what you beleive is right, and hopefully thats something which is not infringing on other peoples capacity to live a happy life.
This statement is not decoupled; if anything, it is a more generalized one, as it does not point at any cause or causes for livelihoods to be taken.
Eliminate the AI variable entirely and the problem remains, therefore AI is not the problem.
For that Y% of people (and their dependants like kids, spouses and aging parents) - AI[1] is direct reason for "inequality accelerant".
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[1] Lets not discuss if AI in these layoff reasonings is actually true or not.
The vast majority of individuals derive no value from AI, they are instead told to do their jobs faster and own the mistakes of the AI for flat/declining pay. It's a bad deal for most people.
The benefits for them include:
- replacing workers with lower quality (but good enough) AI solutions, which degrade the quality of nearly every product or service for the consumer, but not by enough to offset the labor cost savings
- mass surveillance at low cost, a way to take the absurd amounts of data humanity now produces, and use to subjugate them
- propaganda/deception/misinformation, a new vector for propaganda which people are naively inclined to trust. bonus points for the "flooding the zone" strategy which AI makes easier
Benefits to the worker:
- lower cost of goods and services (but not for you, silly - they'll still be taxing you via inflation to fund their wars of conquest)
- you won't have to work anymore
- you won't have to eat anymore
Judging by the gleeful texts of CEOs, collapsed hiring, internal policy changes and pushes, and the additional decades of centralized political control, it's clear this is going to be even worse..