The AI Backlash Could Get Ugly
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
I am convinced that their talk of UBI is just handwaving; they're trying to convince us that there will be a solution to the destruction of the economy as we know it, so that we'll just let them do whatever they want.
It isn't the backlash against AI that will get ugly, it will be the backlash against the ten people who suddenly own the entire world's money supply
Like holy smokes, who amongst these rich men will not be harmed!
You have some numbers that are less arbitrary?
We can iterate on taxes if they're ineffective, but it's unforgivable to not try and do something in the face of so much inequality.
Make it clear "What you want a wealth tax to look like instead" But also, it's easier to destroy than it is to create, so I think any state setting the grounds for how they're going to try this, is worth supporting and iterating on.
“Bitches Money No Taxes Party”
I think he deleted it afterwards
Musk's entire history on this planet betrays him to be a profoundly selfish individual with perilously little regard for anyone else. Musk and his ilk (Trump, Bezos, Page, Ellison, Thiel, etc) are more likely to see you ground up into Soylent Green than to offer largess like UBI.
By the time you find out that their promises of UBI are empty it’s too late to do anything about it.
Why would “the most talented” necessarily side with the oppressors?
At least during the French Revolution, they had strength in numbers.
The people who control the capital are building autonomous armament to protect themselves against both foreign and domestic enemies.
If you sell labour for money, you should be worried.
Rich people can build all the fortified bunkers they want, but they still need to get their food, water, and air from somewhere. It would be very easy to cut them off or smoke them out.
(I'm not advocating for violence in any way, I'm just pointing out that nobody's invincible, no matter how obscenely wealthy they are).
God, I hate this.
"Guys, there is an ugly but working solution to many of our problems, but hey, I am so well-tamed I automatically need to emphasize I don't condone choosing this option"
Or something :)
Careful with that. I think that kind of perfectionist, all-or-nothing thinking is an echo of the propaganda meant to help the rich guys' pitch. Basically: "doesn't the government suck because it's not perfect? Kill it! (BTW, it's also the only thing powerful enough keep the rich guys under control, so increasing distrust sets them free)."
I think the reality is human institutions require work to function, and if the common people are either too lazy or too busy to do that work, they get corrupted. Also, a certain level of unity is required, and maintaining that unity has been extremely unfashionable for many decades.
Fair point -- none of us want to be in the situation where all our current institutions have failed and there's nothing to replace them. That is chaos and anarchy and a true mess. Even the most hardened ideologues put in that environment would want a more orderly society. "Order" is another word to be careful of.
> I think the reality is human institutions require work to function, and if the common people are either too lazy or too busy to do that work, they get corrupted. Also, a certain level of unity is required, and maintaining that unity has been extremely unfashionable for many decades.
We agree on this as well. We currently don't put in the work to make a good and just society. I don't think it's that we're too lazy en masse, but too busy rings true. Too distracted as well.
Our "elites" have set about breaking up our unity, fracturing us into smaller groups that can be managed. The "fashion" is definitely to denigrate anything and everything that would build unity. Judge the other. Accuse the foreigner. Demonize those who look different.
But that interconnectedness has woken many people up. The people are starting to see clearly now that what has been required for much of human history may no longer be required. And so we see the existing power structure panic, and try and double down on whats worked in the past: violence, divide and conquer, rule through force.
Obviously I can't know the outcome. But it feels like we're all at a moment in history where major change is coming, which might be great or might be a new level of living hell.
I'm glad I'm around to watch what happens :)
Yes, but I think your more specific examples are more liberal-coded, and leave a false impression. Liberals aren't immune. I'd say the biggest example of "fracturing us into smaller groups that can be managed" is political polarization. There are a lot of liberals that are unsalvageably deep into that, reject finding common ground (even in obviously self-defeating ways), and who seem to be able to only conceive of unity as being total domination of their other.
> But that interconnectedness has woken many people up. The people are starting to see clearly now that what has been required for much of human history may no longer be required. And so we see the existing power structure panic, and try and double down on whats worked in the past: violence, divide and conquer, rule through force.
Can you be more specific about who's been woken up?
Struggling with this statement. Liberal vs Conservative is a false dichotomy and precisely the sort of divide we could do without. Frankly I don’t know what “liberal coded” even really is supposed to convey. Perhaps you mean to say my implicit bias skews towards liberals? You’ve made no mention of conservatives, who are also unsalvageably deep into that. Trying to discuss anything regarding these two specific groups is a HUGE DISTRACTION and plays into the divide. How would you phrase it differently?
> Can you be more specific about who's been woken up?
Oh yes, since 2020 and Covid I think there is a chunk of the populace that had implicit faith in our institutions. Covid showed that faith was misplaced. My impression is that more and more people are just done with all this and are patiently waiting for the next thing. I sort of doubt that makes sense — it feels a bit woowoo to me tbh. But as it happens I also think most of those people were “liberals” and what we’re seeing now from that group is mostly cognitive dissonance.
Isn't like the basic of reality that everything drifts? If you want to keep order it is a constant task, not a onetime creation be it an institution or a house?
or a hostage negotiation
Americans are fine with low taxes for billionaires and don't mind high inequality as one of their core beliefs is that upward class mobility is achievable and they might also get rich.
And even then amongst bank collapses, failed farms, starving people and catastrophic unemployment there was STILL heavy opposition to any government assistance programs because there is a very deep fear entrenched in the American psyche that government aid creates dependency and weakens individual responsibility. There is a widespread false narrative that any sort of government help is leftist socialism and communism.
See: poor Republicans supporting cuts to ACA
I mean yeah, obviously. You can’t trust a word out of either of their mouths.
Well, they are sociopaths so that checks out. What I find even more horrible is that they still somehow have an almost religious following, but it's also becoming clear they may be helping to flood the internet with bots that bolster their talking points against any push back. They especially have an audience here that defends them while they push an agenda to de-power and bury the working class.
It is a lie pushed by people who go out of their way to be cruel whenever they can.
I like the idea of UBI, but the biggest problem with UBI is that it relies on the government to fund it, and the government can be controlled and subverted. UBI might go away, get held up by government shutdowns, not be indexed to inflation, etc - there's a ton of ways things that could go wrong if peoples' entire livelihoods are under the control of one entity.
This is exactly it. Also, even if UBI is implemented:
1) It's probably going to be just enough to let one scrape by as a member of a permanent underclass. You will not be comfortable on it.
2) I doubt it will be permanent, there will be a rug-pull once said underclass has been politically neutered. They'll kill off the UBI deprivation, mainly because they just don't care about those people.
Because that isn't the UBI they're thinking of.
Altman runs an eyeball-scanning crypto startup and Musk wants to replicate WeChat to create a panopticon paradise for surveillance capitalism. In their world, UBI looks like something that even Black Mirror writers would reject as too unrealistic:
a) Free housing, but it's right next to a datacenter with its 24-hour noise. If you develop health problems from drinking the water or living near power lines, you get mandatory arbitration before an AI judge, with your legal representation provided by Grok.
b) Free money, but it's all in Worldcoin, and can only be spent at company-owned stores built around the datacenter. X.com charges a 30% fee if you try to convert it to USD.
They found out that 'UBI' is a collection of sounds that's apparently popular with the detractors. Crucially, the task of turning this acronym into real policy will never fall on them, and no one will blame them if it never comes. So, when faced with criticism about the bleak world they want to force on us, they can just recite the UBI warding spell, reassuring people that even if they make the worst version of reality happen, surely there will be someone else to help the commoners out - anyone but them.
Taxing the ten people won't happen because they choose it. It may happen because the majority of the population will vote in a government that does that.
Most of the changes - AI getting better, changes to the tax and economic system, are kind of inevitable regardless of Musk, Altman or whatever other figureheads get involved. Human level AI was predicted perhaps most famously by Turing who thought it might take 50 years but it's actually been more like 75. Tax revenue as a % of gdp has gone in the UK from about 10% in 1900 to near 45% now and those trends will probably also continue. (tax graph https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Andrew-Dilnot/publicati...)
So much of the world is discussing what celebrities say, and it's incredibly pointless to take them at face value. They are not trying to convey their current or future thinking, they are trying to shape discourse.
I'm surprised it's only a quarter: violence as a tool for achieving political change is the entire point of the right to bear arms.
EDIT: I'm not arguing for or against political violence, just noting an apparent inconsistency between Americans' views and one of the documents that they talk about as though it's holy writ.
Our conclusion in our impromptu book club was that made sense: why would the state schools give students lots of examples of how violence against the state was an effective negotiating tool? It was extremely jarring to reconcile with the image of US history we'd been imbued with up to that point, which of course was also a reflection of our socioeconomic status at the time.
As a counterpoint, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" is also taught in schools, so it's possible I'm just selectively remembering things.
https://www.amazon.com/Waging-Good-War-Military-1954-1968/dp...
Ricks kinda beats a dead horse as he goes over and over again that non-violence is not unaggressive. It is typically quite militant when done well.
Non violence is a tactic, one that is typically better at achieving results than violence, as it tends to change the other side that is violent to adjust down to non violence as well. Like getting a drunk to be quieter by whispering to them (Note: that is a poor analogy).
Rick's book is just so very good and my poor internet comment can't possibly do it justice. He convinced me that the Civil Rights movement is so big because it gave the US a brand new tool in conflicts. It's not just violence or submission anymore.
I often think that people will always criticise protests for not protesting the "correct" way, but it's exactly the violent and/or disruptive protests that tend to work.
However, I think the current U.S. political problems can be better addressed with economic disruption such as general strikes.
Every week was a struggle to eat and the cost of living has significantly increased since then.
I guess the question is what is the terminal percentage of people who can’t afford to exist?
As an engineer, as most of you are, I am as blown away by the achievement that is the LLM in a way not too dissimilar to how I feel about the Apollo Moon program. And furthermore, I have found it wildly useful for me (if used within contexts that play to its strengths).
But I think that kind of gets to the point perhaps of the schism. I like the tech and like using it. I enjoy "testing" its capabilities—finding its boundaries…
In absolutely no way am I scheming on how I might leverage it to shut down whole industries. I use it, for personal use, not unlike I used the first personal computer as a tool—dare I say, "A bicycle for my mind…"
The people hating AI (and I'm looking at my entire family, ha ha), I think hate AI as it is wielded as a tool by corporations. They hate Musk, Bezos, the whole lot of them—and, perhaps rightly so, they lump AI in with all that lot.
Perhaps my diplomatic stance then is that AI may turn out to be empowering for the individual, might be used in a way crippling to society.
There's no mechanism for only labor to exploit a technology, apart from common ownership at a world level. Achieving this is left as an exercise to the ambitious.
I don't think even the ultra rich who own the technology are directly scheming to do that. But they do accept it as a side effect of them getting more money and power.
Yes, the technology is a tool, it's an impressive tool but we cannot ignore who wields it and what they incentives are.
- If (big If) AI actually replaces workers, then we have a problem, because lots of folk lost their jobs
- If AI doesn't replace workers, then we have a recession, because a lot of the US economy now sits on top of corporations betting on it. And this will tank the economy and lots of folk will lose their jobs
It feels that the only path forward is a narrow one where AI removes some jobs, but not too many, but still enough so that the (immense, disproportionate) hype that was put on it does not come with a vengeance and the house of cards falls.
An alternative possibility is that the models become much cheaper and their use becomes more ubiquitous which would be helpful.
A simple question none of the ai-doomsayers can answer... who buys anything when nobody has a job cos robots do everything?
Jfc this site is the worst. Use your words instead of drive by downvoting.
There are jobs AI can't easily come for... not always nice ones, but either too physically fiddly or too cheap to bother automating.
But jobs go "extinct" all the time. My ancestors going back generations were sugarhouse labourers. That job's gone, but the lineage isn't: we just do different things now.
The pattern seems pretty consistent: raise the floor (dishwashers, CNC machines, laundry), and people tend to climb to higher levels of abstraction. The real question is who captures those productivity gains; and historically, it isn't the workers.
Shoes are the classic example. Automation made them cheaper and accessible to everyone. Then, once the market was captured, mid-tier became the ceiling and anything above it got expensive again. Nobody won except the owners.
Same will happen with the jobs AI takes
> Shoes are the classic example. Automation made them cheaper and accessible to everyone
Like you said, cobblers just do different things now
I console myself with the fact that without a functioning economy, AI will implode since capital will dry up. Then all of the investment in data centers, R&D, etc. will never be recovered. Then we'll be back to rational thinking? Maybe?
Something like over half of the US consumption is done by the top 10%, or something insane like that. This leads me to believe that a lot more people will eat shit, before enough feel real pain.
Also, data centers, chips, and energy require massive working-class supply chains, and enterprise AI revenue depends on customers whose own revenue depends on regular consumers.
Corporations exist for one purpose: to get as much money as possible. Side concerns, which can range from "not destroying the environment" or "not destroying the economy," are objectively not their goal, nor do they consider them their responsibility. Those are things "someone else" should worry about.
AI destroying all jobs is similar to a nuclear arms race; these companies don't want to eliminate everyone's ability to buy things, but they don't want to be the only entity without that ability, so ...
A ceo may realize rto will decrease profits but do it anyway because it increases the power delta between him and the workers.
Maybe in the short-term but public companies with shareholders won't allow this in any sort of long-term way right?
The controlling votes are all part of the same social class. They would gladly give up a small amount of profit to keep the distance between them and the workers as large as possible.
Things like "jobs" and "careers" are so integral to society that we can't really imagine what society would be like in a world where people don't have any clear purpose. That's why you won't get a definitive answer. The whole idea of a singularity is that people don't have the faintest clue what day to day life would look like after.
We often to choose to believe that a singularity can't happen, because we don't know what that even means. We can't answer the simple question. So it definitely better not happen, that would be very inconvenient.
Society is so hellbent on the idea that we need our job to be our identity, they lack the imagination for another other reality.
It’s ridiculous.
I'm in the age group where a lot of the people around me have retired. Some of them have fared very poorly, some have straight-up blossomed.
I'm not against early retirement. One of my points was that, in general, it's harder to find fulfillment as a working age adult outside of work. Not impossible, just more challenging.
> It can be challenging to find a sense of fulfillment.
If you actually get fulfillment from work, then great, continue to work. The critical thing that drives people to retire earlier than the average person is that their work doesn't give them a sense of fulfillment. It's literally just a way to fill out the day. Some people do have things that are more fulfilling than letting an employer tell them how to spend their day.
You seem to think I'm advocating for working your entire life. I'm just trying to share my lived experience so please take it easy.
There is some bitterness that's coming across in your response.
Second - the more you make progress, the harder it gets, exponentially harder. Maybe Newton could advance physics observing an apple fall, today they need space telescopes and billion dollar particle accelerators. The more tech advances, the harder it is. Will AGI be so "super" to cancel out exponentials?
And third - the AI progress is tied to learning signal, and we have exhausted the available data. In the last 1-2 years we have started using verified synthetic data (RLVR) but exponential difficulty is a barrier. Other domains don't even have built in verifiability like math and code. So there the progress will be slower. Testing a vaccine to be safe takes 6 months for 1 bit of information - that is how slow and expensive it can get in some domains. AI can't get the learning signal it needs across all domains fast enough.
That said, some people are now discussing a “societal singularity” wherein society breaks before the actual emergence of AGI. I believe this is the trajectory we are on. The question is what happens to the unemployed. Democracies will not tolerate mass permanent unemployment, as we’ve seen over and over again.
UBI is a scam, many middle class folks would be worse off under UBI than they are under the current system. They will fight to defend the economic status quo.
In the end, I think capitalism is incompatible with the emergence of AGI, and I think an aligned ASI will smash the capitalist system simply out of pure egalitarianism. (Note: I was previously a proponent of capitalism.) I think many people will die trying to defend capitalism. We’re at the beginning of the AI wars.
In the US at least the middle class was already being hunted to extinction and it seems reasonable. This is just accelerant on that already burning fire.
Like there was kind of an A B test of capitalism vs socialism in Germany but East Germany got less prosperity and so they had to build walls with machine guns to stop people escaping the socialist side. But if AI was providing abundance in the east that might not have been needed? Like in the future if you have two societies, one dysfunctional capitalism where Musk and Altman have everything and the other a kind of AI socialism where everyone has abundance of most things, people may voluntarily choose the later.
Do people have clear purpose now? We have a lot of examples of people who don't have to work like the British landed gentry of times past. Maybe we'll be Bertie Woosters with AI Jeeves?
If they don't need your labor, and they don't need you as a customer, and they don't care about you as a person... where does that leave you?
[to be clear, I think post-scarcity, even in knowledge work, is a lot further off than most ai-doomsayers or ai-worshipers who take statements from people like Altman and Musk at face value]
Look at the median age of French society during the French Revolution and the current one.
Who is going to trigger another French revolution? Old people coughing their lung out?
Envisioned another way, the future of labor might look the way it did for laborers over 100 years ago, before major industries unionized; making 'Amazon-bucks' that can only be redeemed at the 'Amazon company store'.
You can either go through UBI taxing automated work by 90%+ and pretend that capitalism is still a thing, or just nationalize everything and go with communism.
Henry Ford understood this problem with his Model T and realized that if he wants to sell it, he also needs to pay workers to be able to afford it.
States (or their rule-of-the-strongest successors) always have means to not go bankrupt. They will simply pillage the survivors.
Youre hysterical
There was unfortunately no Q&A in the lecture, as probably the one question I would have asked him was this: What if the Luddites had gotten their way? What do you imagine our society and world would be like right now?
It's not meant to be a trick question or a "gotcha" question. Society would indeed have been different. Maybe it would be all wonderfully Star Trek utopia and we'd have found a win-win for everyone. Or maybe we'd just be not nearly as technically advanced as a society as we are now.
Steam engines weren't affordable to the average person when they were invented. Same as ai
And like steam, AI does some types of work quicker and easier than was previously possible.
Ai produces slop no doubt, but at the very minimum I can safely say it's here to stay for agentic coding, and I suspect it's the same for quite a few other industries as well. I won't lose my job to an AI agent, but I will lose to it to a human using an AI agent. That's technology,deal with it
The industrial revolution created a hell on Earth for workers for the better part of a century.
"Over the long run, it’s true that the Industrial Revolution radically boosted economic growth. But living through it was another matter entirely. Many people saw their wages stagnate and working conditions deteriorate as factory owners and industrialists came into immense wealth. (Just read a Charles Dickens novel, and you’ll get the idea.) This led to riots and, occasionally, attacks on the industrialists themselves."
That being said I am not convinced a society who decided not to allow the internet would have been worse off.
Similarly for AI: yea there will be serious downsides not least of which you doing this will be surveillance and centralized state power and suffering for people ill positioned to navigate the transition. It would be more damaging to not let AI develop fully and to engage in the global competition that the US is strategically winning at this point (though China will probably figure out how to get around their compute starvation in the next ~5 or so years).
Yeah, and the people suffering are not going to like that. If people are afraid of being in that group, then they will not be very happy about it.
If you put yourself in the shoes of someone suffering from AI, how comforting do you think your observations here are?
> AI is an incredibly powerful technological shift in our way of life but where is the net employment hit taking place? Unemployment numbers remain stable.
At this point, a lot of AI is hot water rather then powerful shift in our way of life.
> You don't have to use AI in your work, but if you don't, you'll work for someone who does
I think there may be some cases where this is not true but it is definitely true the majority of the time. It’s like someone today being like “I just don’t use email” (I have worked for this person). It slowly but surely becomes more and more ridiculous and impactful for the company you work for not to adapt.
Personally, I'd nominate gunpowder, DDT, leaded gasoline, and nuclear fission.
2. If AI is so good that it is a proper superset of humans and can do all jobs humans can do, this is a huge deal and we don’t even have the vocabulary to express what would happen
I don’t foresee a third option.
That’s why you can’t say how jobs can be created now.
AI proponents says 'jobs appeared in the past after X, therefor they will magically appear in the future after Y' ignoring the industrial revolution started in the late 1700s and the lifestyle they brag about it delivering didn't come along until the late 1940s/1950s.
Actually they kinda do. Anyone else notice that both extremes have the same policies? (well, Bernie Sanders isn't half as extreme as the other guy of course, but I also don't know anyone better to represent the left. But he's not extreme left by any stretch of the imagination)
But both extreme left and extreme right want very radical actions taken in support of the same goals (like housing, crime, ...), while the center fights them (what the US laughingly calls 2 parties). Only the exact actions differ, and even there, only somewhat. But both (almost all) democrats and (almost all) republicans, for example, defend property rights going so far as NIMBYism.
They absolutely 100% do not. What are you even on about?