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Comment by tedivm | Hacker News Reader

How do you decouple it when the people who own it and are building it seem to be driven on increasing inequality?

How can you hope for anything better if you consider it an us versus them situation? When they say "We don't want to increase inequality" and the response is "We don't believe you". Where do you go from there?

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.

We can look at their actions, in particular their efforts to influence public policy.

You can, but then what? Do you judge what they say as if their perspective is the same as yours, and then conclude from that context that what they suggest could only come from an evil person. That seems to be what a lot of people do. What if they actually think what they are suggesting is the best thing for the world? How can you tell what is in their minds?

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.

The idea that we cannot possibly use people's actions to judge them is ridiculous. Musk thinks that the world would be a better place if the races were separated and if all charitable giving was ended. I think that's monstrous.

Why is OpenAI not a nonprofit anymore?

Judge people by actions not what they say.

You are arguing the opposite, that we should judge by what they say and not what they do?

The problem is that people have a million stories to explain the observed actions, most of those stories are bullshit, and people repeating them know fuck all about the decision-space in which these actions were chosen and taken.

Hm. I guess we can't possibly judge the guy who threw the molotov cocktail. He could have been clearing a wasps nest.

This is a accidentally good example, we don't know what motivated him, while your ridiculous reason is unsound because it would be also a bad thing to do if he were clearing a wasps nest on someone else's property in the middle of the night.

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.

I don't care if Altman is secretly a good person. I care very deeply that he is taking actions to harm the world in grievous ways and is not doing any visible thing to mitigate the extreme damage he will do.

"Altman is secretly a good guy" doesn't pay people's mortgages.

I doubt it nets positive or even cancels out the damage, but if we're taking a fuller picture, then we shouldn't also assume Altman / other AI company CEOs are "taking actions to harm the world in grievous ways" for shits and giggles, or for large payday. Despite what skimming HN would make one believe, AI tools are actually useful in science, technology, and all kinds of productive work.

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.

I don't think that Altman is a Dr. Evil level villain who just wants to hurt people. I instead think that he does not care about the damage he causes on his path to personal wealth and glory and I think that this is precisely as terrifying. I'm sure that the machines made of my corpse would be used for productive purposes too.

Altman probably won't torture my cats to death. What a guy.

Judge their actions, consider what they say as given in good faith and praise or criticize.

To judge the people is to pretend you know why they did or said something.

Seriously. They can say they want to share their gains all they want, but I don't see them spending any lobbying money on things like universal income (and if Altman can afford to lobby for age verification laws he can certainly afford to lobby for things that actually benefit society). The reality is they don't lobby for anything that would take wealth away from them, and any redistribution of wealth (such as a s 75% tax rate) would by definition take wealth away from them.

The billionaires could start to earn trust by lobbying for laws and programs that help the poor and displaced. Put money in to retraining programs to help people who lose their jobs. So far they seem to be doing the opposite, CEOs are publicly declaring ‘fuck you, got mine’ and leaving it at that.

Nick Hanauer has lobbied for higher minimum wages.

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.

>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.

Please consider your biases. Musk could not have “changed” the government if the DNC didn’t hand it to Trump on a platter. Republicans took over because serious people had had enough with the DNC’s full-throated embrace of two things: race-based selection (with the unpopular Harris’s undemocratic coronation as the flagship example), and the relentless focus on trans ideology (to the point anyone not endorsing the fullest embrace of that idea has been declared equivalent to the worst racist). Without that, Democrats would have remained a powerful and relevant party and Musk would have gotten nothing he wanted.

>How can you hope for anything better if you consider it an us versus them situation?

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.

Your arguments makes it impossible to prove that the wealthy are not bad.

You interpret every signal as saying the same thing. That makes an unfalsifiable claim.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

Thats coz my statement wasnt intended to be scientific proof of anything it was an explanation as to the function of the propaganda that got recycled through you and the intent behind it.

> When they say "We don't want to increase inequality" and the response is "We don't believe you". Where do you go from there?

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.

Here's an idea for how to do that: treat frontier AI as a sort of 'common carrier'. The only business that frontier AI labs are allowed to conduct is selling raw tokens - no UI. Thus, 'claude code' would have to come from some other company. This would segment the AI industry, and, maybe, prevent a single entity (or small number of entities) from capturing all value.

Just a thought, what do you think?

Sounds promising honestly. One of the scariest parts of the big AI labs is all of the exclusive training data they get through their UIs. (It’s unclear whether distillation is a feasible way to close the gap).

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...

If I had the answer to that I would probably be a politician instead of a systems eng, but off the top of the mind build out a parallel economies at the state level where people in the US actually live, ensuring QoL standards, then gradually renegotiate up back to the Federal level. It would require, united..states eventually, but the general thrust is to shed corporate capture so that people see their government actually benefiting and providing them with tangible life improvements in real time.

The people say "tax the rich".

Tax AI is the answer.

This is interesting to see since on another HN post everyone is bemoaning how expensive it’s getting to use frontier models because Anthropic is massively throttling Pro Max Claude plans. That’s certainly not going to become more accessible to us normal folk through taxation.

The tax dollars can go to programs that support normal folk, when the vast majority of tax collected will not come from normal folk.

This might be a solution if there wasn’t staggering wealth inequality prior to AI.

AI is actually a mass decrease in inequality, as much as the Gutenberg printing press was. It takes something that used to be the foremost example of pure bourgeois and intellectual privilege - the culture contained within millions of books and other instances of human creativity - and provides it to everyone for the cost of a few thousand bucks in hardware and a few watts of electricity.

And is controlled by a handful of mega corporations? How is that equitable?

> AI is actually a mass decrease in inequality, as much as the Gutenberg printing press was. It takes something that used to be the foremost example of pure bourgeois and intellectual privilege - the culture contained within millions of books and other instances of human creativity[.]

I would rather claim that this is a proper description of shadow libraries [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_library

This is only true if productivity gains tied to general well being, but instead it's being concentrated in the hands of a few.

I can't think of any period in time where it was so easy to go into business yourself and to generally have access to the same "means of production" as the biggest companies have.

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.

I'm well aware of this: I bought a pretty beefy (consumer grade beefy) GPU machine and run all sorts of open weight models. I do think there is potential.

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.

Also: A handful more of already well-off people going into business for themselves is not going to move the needle on inequality. When people say "It's never been a better time to start your own business" they still mean "the people who already have their needs met and have the capital to live off for a while while their business becomes viable: In other words, the people who have always started businesses: Already-Rich people.

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.

> But are you expecting 360m Americans to start their own businesses?

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.

Seems like you've just agreed with "concentrated in the hands of a few" -- it's just a different "few" than before AI.

Well, yes, the number of entrepreneurs in America (~30M) is a different "few" than the number of frontier labs (~3).

The answer to that question was the US before the 1970s when manufacturing was still onshored. So many joe shmoes literally started companies in this era taking some garage creation and manufacturing it at scale at a local plant.

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.

No.

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.

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