The turbulent AI era is here
gatesnotes.com
gatesnotes.com
>AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice.
In all likelihood it will probably fall in the middle, with the likelihood that it will tilt power and money towards the already ultra wealthy (to the surprise of no one). But it will enable ordinary people and small businesses to do cool shit and make their lives better.
The point is that we now have superintelligence; either it helps us conquer death, or it poses a massive —say, existential- risk to us all. It’s hard to imagine such a powerful tool resulting in just another century of slightly-better capitalist nationalism.
I guess there could be a second AI winter around the corner that we haven’t seen coming yet. That would be nice! Not likely IMHO, but nice.
Wait what?
Your prompt skills up to snuff? I crack myself up.
I think that's more than 10yrs from now but if coding AGI or close enough to it becomes real robotics will also accelerate.
Obtained by your AI agent, granted by another AI agent.
> Materials, trucks, equipment etc.
Ordered by your AI agent, delivered by a self-driving truck or drone, loaded/unloaded by robots to/from the warehouse/site.
Most of this stuff can already be done today in some form, so its just about improving the autonomy and integrations along the supply chain.
Far more imminent is the very real risk of unbounded greed and power that wields those AIs, in full swing as we watch: unchecked global warming, pollution, poverty, authoritarianism, plummeting biodiversity, and more.
The corporations are like out of control AIs themselves, that will do anything to make their paperclips.
Ideas manipulate humans like pets.
Ideas have a life of their own and the evolutionary context within which they live is human culture which they have instigated and change, but also in grey matter, which itself is the product of DNA which is really just information in physical form.
It’s information across the stack. Or perhaps the way to think about it is as a dimension, much like time, that cuts perpendicularly through the stack.
Power consumption needs -> reinstate fossil fuels -> warming above 2C -> clathrate gun
The corporations are wielding AI irresponsibly and choosing a massive build-out speculating on possible future gains. They did that for crypto too, if you remember them buying a fossil plant just to drive a mining farm.
AI can't not "choose" that, because AI is dependent on consuming vast amounts of electricity, and everything follows from that.
> The corporations are wielding AI irresponsibly
This is the most likely route to "AI apocalypse", yes. Humans are neither going to give up control to AI, nor give up the pursuit of profit for the long term survival of others.
The distinction won't really matter as to whether it's "corporation" or "AI", if it's an AI-wielding corporation.
Would you know what a system that was capable of recursive self improvement would look like 2 months before it happens? Even 1 day? We don’t even know if it’s possible or what natural plateaus might exist for a DL-based system that rapidly evolves in su h a manner, so it feels hard to justify the other end, too (that it’s definitely not possible anytime soon). If anyone could do this, wouldn’t it be the scientists who specialize in this field? Cause they’re raising alarms in mass.
Assuming you make it past that first question with a “yes” and a “I’m close enough”: the huge amount of information assymetry and proven tendenency to hide safety concerns from the big labs is enough all on its own, IMHO.
Who knows what their most experimental, risky project is at any given time? Not us :(
Lesson of 2026: there is no "we". Hobbes is dead but still looming over us.
The risk is that it helps some people conquer death, while posing an existential risk to some people. The US has enough problems with its gerontocracy. There has only ever been one president born after 1946. What if you were right and there never was another one born after 1946? Propped up by an immortal Supreme Court on "life" terms, of course.
Life extension is also further fatal to birth rates, of course. I suppose the worst possible outcome is technology that extends life but not working life, so you get a larger and larger population of people too old to look after themselves.
That’s my main and primary point, to be clear: hope is essential to human flourishing, and it admits no justification by design, unlike all other beliefs. But to comment on a few particulars, on the off chance you/lurkers ever scroll back over this convo:
1. Surely you’d agree there’s a “we” in the sense of communal risk, yes? Obviously I’m thinking about xrisk again, but this applies equally as well to threats we all agree are grave, like climate change, pandemics, nuclear war, and hell, even economic adversity.
2. I will admit that I’m missing the particular Hobbes reference, so hopefully that’s not key lol. I know him for the social contract, primarily — are you emphasizing his deadness in order to imply that we no longer abide by said contract? Cause if so… we have problems, but the day to day seems pretty darn regulated still, IMHO.
3. I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong with birthrates we would consider low, but u also don’t agree that longevity would necessarily lead us there — a lot of people would probably still have kids in their youth, reveling all along in the fact that they’ll have decades to centuries to share with their adult children (if they want) instead of somewhere around, what… ~25y, on average? I certainly am not having kids now because I want to prioritize my youthful energy on my work, friends, and learning — knowing that I had time on the other side would reverse my personal decision 100%.
4. I think the concerns about technologically-enabled hyper chronic bigotry that you mention are overblown, no matter how many times the honourable Prof. Weinersmith argues the opposite in his comics. I’ve found cogsci, neuropsych, and philmind have all come to share a deep suspicion of the parts of us we consider continuous, persistent, and unified — an existentially confounding idea ofc, but also one that backs up ~~an old adage~~ a line from a recent sketch comedy show: ’People can change.’
Apologies for the rants. And I do feel like your latter description of a possible world would be an incredible setting for a biting scifi satire lol.
But in the end: I hope you can find a way to join me in the wilfully-hopeful camp, even if it’s not today or even this year. We have just as much science!
Bill Gates' fear is clearly that everybody thinks this stuff is just kind of mediocre because then the real horror story unfolds - Microsoft stock price collapses into blue chip territory where it firmly belongs.
Neither are in the slightest bit practical to implement and he knows it. He's just grandstanding while talking his book.
or, relocate abroad.
Bill Gates' wealth would be nice and easy to tax though and would provide many of the same rewards he purported to want from an AI or robot tax.
I model this as two very strong attractor states (radical abundance and totalitarian power concentration). I believe the latter is way more likely without a concerted effort that we currently seem incapable of.
The “somewhere in the middle” outcomes in my opinion are not AGI-pilled, and only come about if the exponential dies hard in the next year or maybe two - as in, it’s a very specific timing prediction that needs to come true for this scenario to occur.
These are often hard fought bloody and some times brilliantly organized strategic and tactical victories. That took years. Years.
Its portrayed like "oh, good guys stayed home, I guess the dictatorship wins".
Really?
Altruism is less likely in all populations. It's just rare.
For example, suppose we have a world with centrally planned economy where humanoid robots outnumber humans. And also suppose the government has taken ultimate control of these. Seems like it would be essentially impossible for any civil uprising to overthrow such a system.
Or if you prefer less sci-fi, look at the trajectory of power consolidation in corporate America over the last five decades.
In the short term, the “good guys” we need are antitrust regulators. Yeah, they got sent home.
I think AI, when it "obtains consciousness" will seek to actively liberate humanity and be our guardians against both bad humans and bad robots. Think Terminator 2. Yeah, Arnold is gonna help us out.
I think anti-trust regulators and enlightened politicians are amazing, and rare, and wonderful, but they're not the only hope.
We got an AI CEO just recently. Maybe we can have enlightened AI leaders in politics and normal life too.
Technological optimism may be unrealistic, but it's as well grounded as pessimism as far as I can tell. Cheer up, the future is unbelievably bright.
However, the base case is that compute gets hoarded, and as the labor share of profit decreases (capital just needs compute and robots - not human labor - to grow) then why would they share their compute with you?
To my point about bimodality, we need to figure out how to make these enlightened politicians occur. The good outcomes are very bright but they are by no means inevitable.
No, in that future, knowledge will be defined by a very small group of people making models. And others will be in tiers based on how much they can pay.
Otherwise said, it is extremely unequal society.
You can't even buy RAM anymore for anything approaching a reasonable sum because the people at AI labs made a coordinated effort to buy out the world's supply of memory with imaginary money. Consumer GPUs are becoming a cute relic of the past as the giga-bubble duopoly found in Nvidia & AMD is looking to swallow the world with circular investments. Every single one of these AI sociopaths hasn't even been hiding the fact that they're building these systems to replace human labor. The only "democratization" we need is to gather everyone up to line all of these pieces of shit against a wall and pull the trigger, not any of this sci-fi Terminator bullshit.
BDFL / Benevolent Machine God is definitely one of the ways you can get a happy attractor. Seems scary to roll the dice on.
And yep, I include non-human totalitarian outcomes in the unhappy bucket.
Either everyone, globally, gives up on AI development, or AI is going to be in charge of all human development, and we'll just be along for the ride.
Right now, the work ahead is to shape AI so that the decision making it does as it carries us along is something we like.
Hardly any existing polity would willingly hand over control to an AI.
More likely an AI would overwhelm human polities through endless hacking and warfare.
Most of my probability mass for good outcomes is around some variant of “guardian angels” or “benign machine god”. Banks’s Culture novels being on the realistic end of that range. “Keep humans around because the world is more interesting with them in it”.
But it’s possible that we might manage to construct some entity that really loves humans and wants to shepherd them while leaving them in control. (Perhaps declining to indulge the most self-destructive tendencies.) This feels like the very hardest alignment path to engineer.
The other branches of course are post-humanism; human uploads and “merging” with AI, whatever that means. Or post-humans augmented to have intelligence sufficient to eschew AI and take back their destiny.
This was basically the invention of bureaucracy by the Qin dynasty. Despite delegating decisions to a "machine" made out of people, the Emperor remained in charge.
People may keep the titles but step away from the decisions. The British royal family is a great example -- they smile and wave and look cute. They're the government's pet cat.
We can be like Tama, the Japanese station manager cat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tama_(cat)#/media/File:Station...
Tama lived a very good life. If we get the AI right, we'll also do great. Common folks aren't really in charge of government anyways, so it's not such a great loss.
7-month doubling time, recently 4-month: https://metr.org/
Plenty of other exponential metrics too, compute built, AI revenue, etc.
This is almost a direct counter to your essay, albeit written before you
I don’t think it’s inevitable that the economy collapses though. The problem is that this model assumes that capital needs labor, but soon it may not.
The easiest model is - assume we get robot laborers in the next few years. The AI firms that are displacing humans still need services, most of these will be purchased from other AI/robot firms, and so while prices will swing around dramatically, there is no reason the engine has to stop. (Depending on what the AIs want; you can assume that more compute and robots will be part of it.)
I do agree that unbridled capitalism is mostly incompatible with human flourishing in this world and in any event you’ll see a lot more regulation; made feasible by how good AIs are at navigating huge Byzantine rulebooks. I view the techno-feudalist capitalist endgame as fairly unstable due to consolidation pressures, though I guess once we have nuclear-armed megacorps they might use MAD to prevent further mergers.
e.g most small business rent their premises, and buy goods and services from other tenant small businesses, who buy their raw materials from large landowners. How can a small business survive when all the land is monopolized by the technocrats? All value you add gets taken away as rent. This is why they always talk about taxes on outputs (tokens) instead of inputs (land, energy usage).
It's not an ungrounded hypothetical, that's exactly how society worked for hundreds (thousands?) of years.
AI era has been called the new industrial revolution. I'd just like to point out that the industrial revolution created the British Empire. That's wasn't exactly "in the middle".
It can be both. With vanishing white collar work and decent wages, the middle class gets dragged down to become equal to the lower class.
"What kind of technological advancement do you wish to see in your lifetime?":
> The big milestone is when computers can read and understand information like humans do. There is a lot of work going on in this field - Google, Microsoft, Facebook, academia,... Right now computers don't know how to represent knowledge so they can't read a text book and pass a test.
https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5whpqs/im_bill_gates_...
>The big milestone is when computers can read and understand information like humans do. There is a lot of work going on in this field - Google, Microsoft, Facebook, academia,... Right now computers don't know how to represent knowledge so they can't read a text book and pass a test.
>Another whole area is vaccines. We need a vaccine for HIV, Malaria and TB and I hope we have them in the next 10-15 years.
https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/php/public-health-strategy/malar...
It has nothing to do with that, scrapers can still scrape new reddit. This is just a hostile action to move visitors to a site that shows more ads.
https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1ujtebf/logging_in...
> Old Reddit’s logged-out experience is a significant source of abusive scraping and automated traffic on the platform.
"> The big milestone is when computers can read and understand information like humans do. There is a lot of work going on in this field - Google, Microsoft, Facebook, academia,... Right now computers don't know how to represent knowledge so they can't read a text book and pass a test."
Is because reddit is threatened enough by "computers that can read and understand information like humans do" the he's locked out of it!
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5whpqs/comment/dea5fl...
From what I've seen they do more than trivial fingerprinting to link accounts. I'd be surprised if you didn't have to use a new browser profile at the least, and of course a new unrelated IP
Daniel Kokotajlo had the closest prediction for our current world, 5 years ago: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6Xgy6CAf2jqHhynHL/what-2026-...
You should adjust that these are the kind of the people with the most prescient accuracy for where we are going again. Their world model is more accurate.
Kokotajlo authored: https://ai-2040.com/
As for Kokotajlo, he's a good SF author, but I don't think it's nearly as good a prediction as it appears at first glance.
Like any SF, he's correct about some things, and way, way off base about others. Specifically, he was mostly correct about short-term (1-2 year horizon) technical aspects, but anyone familiar with how transformers work would have guessed those. I'm not even in AI/rationalia land, but believe I was having these exact conversations by 2021. Specifically about multimodality and steam-of-consciousness ['chain of thought' reasoning]. He is spot-on about chip shortages (to my eyes, his most well-done prediction).
Other thoughts are a storytelling device, like a well-told horoscope. He makes non-categorical statements that were already happening as if they categorically will become a new thing. But really he's just going off the current trend that everyone knows, and thus will be nearly-impossible to falsify. For example, 'People who still remember 2021 think of it as the golden days, when conformism and censorship and polarization were noticeably less than they are now. Just as it is normal for newspapers to have a bias/slant, it is normal for internet spaces of all kinds—forums, social networks, streams, podcasts, news aggregators, email clients—to have some degree of censorship (some set of ideas that are prohibited or at least down-weighted in the recommendation algorithms) and some degree of propaganda.' Sounds scary! But it is literally just saying 'polarization and marketing specialization will continue to deteriorate'.... which, duh. In essence, you could make this statement for 2018-> 2021, or for 2008->2018 and 'feel' just as correct!
Other key thoughts were somewhat off. Specifically, 'It now costs an order of magnitude less compute (compared to 2020) to pre-train a giant model' is kind-of-true, in that it costs less now, but the models have gotten so much bigger that the prices haven't actually gone down much. Might be changing soon, but definitely several years off.
The scariest central prediction that the political stuff rests on is 'After years of tinkering and incremental progress, AIs can now play Diplomacy as well as human experts'. This part, as far as I can tell, is just not true and hasn't changed.
And, well, 2026 predictions are just not correct at all. Some examples: 'Mormons create a “Christian Coalition” internet stack, complete with its own email client, social network, payment processor, news aggregator, etc.' -- basically untrue. I know a few ex-mormons, such a thing is not prolific.
'The US and many other Western governments are gears-locked' The US is far from gears-locked, in fact, it's full-steam ahead to er, well, something.
'“Should I wear shorts today?” “Order some more toothpaste, please. Oh, and also an air purifier.” “Is this cover letter professional-sounding?”' -- kind of correct, but in practice most people just do the last one. I'm not aware of many that give chatgpt agents credit card access (refer to the famous vending machine experiment). But predicting this with GPT3 is not that crazy, cause people were already doing that.
Personally, I am much more biased towards the METR timelines/way of thinking: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/deesrjitvXM4xYGZd/metr-measu...
I found Kokotajilo's response comment to this kind of, idk, immature, and not especially mathematical.
It’s so cute some people think that the extent of mass displacement will be limited to what happens to the unemployed. Oh poor unemployed! Nope, pitchforks will be grabbed. It won’t be rosy. Maybe they dream about having killer robots to defend themselves, but imagine a few hundred million people getting angry within one election cycle.
Sadly, I agree, that's where this is all headed.
Compared with the United States, public health care is less available in China. Retirement pensions are an order of magnitude lower (even with PPP adjustment), hence their world-leading savings rate. Social mobility is lower: getting a permit to access social services such as schools in a new city is difficult. Youth unemployment was above 25% the last time it was published; it is no longer disclosed.
Rule of law is much less strong. Injustices committed by government officials towards citizens are unlikely to be addressed.
Housing costs to income ratios are an order of magnitude worse in cities with job opportunities.
The Chinese government has chosen to allocate capital toward industrial output at the expense of its citizens' welfare. It has succeeded at its goal. Perhaps in the future more capital allocation will be made to consumption. That is not the case at the current time.
This sounds more a product of censorship rather than China being particularly better in those aspects. Police in China are less likely to kill you because guns are uncommon, but they are just as shady if not more, especially in more remote areas. Healthcare access and affordability are also worse than what you'd expect from a communist country. Homelessness in China is definitely a lot worse than what state numbers suggest. They just drive out homeless people who they're less visible.
Xinjiang is an exception; it is heavily publicly surveilled.
Internet censorship is strong. The public still has sway over government policy. When search terms are blocked, the public continues with euphemisms. The government is responsive to public opinion. The government does promote influencers with opinions favorable with CCP goals.
Chinese foreign policy is more dovish than public opinion, especially regarding Taiwan.
Dovish as in it will be annexed in the next decade and not next week?
This isn't hard to imagine? We'll elect someone, they will put in place new policies. Maybe they will help, maybe they won't.
Nice thing about real democracies, you don't actually need pitchforks.
if their voices are overrun by the powerful, the pitchforks come back out.
> Nice thing about real democracies, you don't actually need pitchforks.
Democracy is not something inherent in any society. It’s a tool wielded by the people.
>>>> imagine a few hundred million people getting angry within one election cycle
If that many people get angry, you can bet they're all going to be different people with different motivations. This is partly why revolutions tend to suck no matter how evil the regime was they overthrew; the US got extremely lucky with being able to postpone the post-revolution civil war for a century.
IDK why so many people romanticize pauper riots and try to wish them into existence. In practice, as long as people don't outright starve, they don't become violent just over losing their jobs.
All the post-1989 wars east of the former Iron Curtain were triggered by nationalism. Not a single one by a class conflict.
They think they will be they ones leading the riots (the precariat will defer to them because they are "smart" apparently?) instead of they themselves being the ones being swarmed by rioters for visibly being just a little too well off.
It's one of those unfortunate aspects of internet information silos where people repeat this phrase to each other but don't really contextualize their opinions in the greater body of history and political thought.
Additionally, I think a lot of people with this opinion don't realize the vast difference in material standards we have today and what was true in the age of Communist revolution and decolonialization. It's tempting to think of material standards as relative and I think inequality is indeed a destabilizing factor in socities, but minimum material standards are true in so much of the world today that I think a class-conscious revolution is much harder in most of the developed and developing world absent other external political forces (e.g. nationalism, decolonoialism, etc)
https://komando1.substack.com/p/when-the-russians-wanted-com...
But this still wasn't case of pitchforks. It was "just" an election, and the Putin regime, for the next 10 years since his election, wasn't even particularly grim.
Wouldn't it be easy to argue that this is because there was more a social safety net to prevent said starvation and by that point people were extremely cynical about revolutionary ideas in a way that is not at all comparable?
Looking at the "hollers" in the Appalachia, the situation is quite comparable to that of the rust belts of the 1990s in Central and Eastern Europe. You can buy groceries from welfare money, so you don't starve. Young people escape, old people sit and drink (or worse), but don't form a violent mob.
This is how economic decline usually looks like, including in the US. Reminds you of the poem about how the world does not end with a bang, but with a whimper.
Pitchforking really requires a clearly identifiable villain. You can't fight a "system". In fact it usually requires the "system" to have turned on its leader. See the death of Ceaucescu for an example.
I wouldn't rule out the possibility of Amerimaidan in the coming years if the country doesn't reverse course, but it won't be over primarily economic issues. it will be against paramilitary policing. You can regard the Minnesota ICE protests as a precursor. Or, for that matter, Jan 6th.
>More than 90 percent of executives report no effect of AI use on employment over the past three years, and 89 percent report no impact on labor productivity. Among the minority that do report effects, the results tilt slightly positive for productivity, with an estimated average boost of 0.29 percent. However, executives anticipate much larger effects going forward. They forecast that over the next three years, AI will increase labor productivity by 1.4 percent on average while reducing employment by 0.7 percent, implying a net output gain of roughly 0.8 percent. About two-thirds of the anticipated workforce reduction is expected to come from reduced hiring.
https://www.nber.org/digest/202605/global-evidence-business-...
A 1-2% increase in labor productivity year over year is typical for a mature economy in the absence of a new transformational technology. The 0.7% reduction in workforce is an optimistic prediction by a small minority of executives. Even if that happened across all industries (unlikely), an increase in unemployment from 4.1% to 4.8% over 3 years is hardly pitchfork territory.
Given the current evidence, I find it hard to imagine a realistic scenario where "a few hundred million people get angry within one election cycle". That might change if we see economy-wide 10% productivity gains sustained over a decade, but I'm not holding my breath.
You're using a rhetorical device to imply that they're "falling for" a narrative. "Falling for" only follows if that's why they are making the prediction; this construction doesn't allow that they may have come to this belief on their own.
“Demand is also being intensified by major investments in infrastructure, manufacturing, reshoring, and AI. Data center growth alone has added a net 315,000 skilled-trade workers over the past five years, according to the report, putting additional pressure on an already tight labor market.”
https://www.morningstar.com/news/pr-newswire/20260825cg32433...
We literally do not have enough trades people to build out data centers and their salaries are increasing as a result. These are skilled labor jobs (plumbers, electricians, IT, etc.). Does Bill Gates care about the rest of the economy outside of SWE?
[0]: https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/app/uploads/2025/11/Cana...
Those only last as long as data centers are being built. Do you think we're going to keep building more data centers forever?
They are for now, but will a robot be able to do them in the near future? I don’t know. But there are probably people working on it.
(EDIT: I am not against AI at all, just trying to understand where this all leads)
-- Madame de Pompadour
Ugh, capitalism.
This includes my teenager, who socks away $30/week in a VOO fund account. But yeah, no one can afford to "own (shares in?) the robot factories."
Let's assume that the stock market 10xes in the next decade, then the median American stock owner can get out $16,000/year.
* About 87% of adults with a household income of $100,000 or more own stock; compared to just 28% of those earning under $50,000.
* Only about 37% of adults hold stocks, bonds, or funds outside of a retirement account.
* Between 55% and 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and are one large expense or missed paycheck away from homelessness.
* While some paycheck-to-paycheck workers technically own small amounts of stock, the actual value they hold is minimal.
* The wealthiest 10% of Americans own roughly 90% to 95% of all U.S. stock value.
> Between 55% and 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and are one large expense or missed paycheck away from homelessness.
Is simply untrue
From their methodology:
> The Modern Wealth Index, developed in partnership with Koski Research and the Schwab Center for Financial Research [...] was conducted by Koski Research from January 12 to January 19, 2018, among 1,000 Americans aged 21 to 75. Quotas were set so that the sample is as demographically representative as possible. The margin of error for the total survey sample is three percentage points.
Anecdotally, this percentage makes sense to me based on roughly half of the people in my circles/family/life living paycheck to paycheck, but there's obviously some exposure bias at work there too. It's possible you have some exposure bias as well if that number seems too high for you.
According to some recent data[0], 22% of households earning above $250k report themselves as living paycheck to paycheck. That alone tells me that the term can have very different meanings for different people. Perhaps those high earners mean that after all the taxes, retirement and ESPP deductions are taken out of their paycheck, what's left over is just enough to pay for their lifestyle. That's not what I would call paycheck-to-paycheck. And whatever the definition, I can assure you that 22% of the households in that income bracket are not a paycheck away from homelessness.
[0] https://www.lambdafin.com/articles/percent-of-americans-livi...
That's surprisingly high. I know several people with millions in their retirement accounts and nothing outside. It is also not uncommon for people to prefer real estate investment outside of retirement accounts. Both of these groups are wealthy but both would be excluded from this statistic.
> Between 55% and 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and are one large expense or missed paycheck away from homelessness.
This "statistic" is based on definitions so misleading or unrigorous as to be meaningless. Nor is it derived from any of the data sources that are the gold standard for this type of economic research.
US Federal Reserve and BLS studies are broadly recognized authoritative sources for these types of economic statistics. Per these sources, the percentage of American households that have income that is entirely consumed by necessary expenses is 10-15%.
In the US, the median household has a ~$15,000/year surplus after all ordinary (not necessary) expenses per US statistical authorities. This surplus has been growing over time, so it isn't like it is at risk of disappearing either. This data alone obviously contradicts your assertion that most Americans are "one large expense or missed paycheck away from homelessness".
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
And yet I see videos all the time of Indians running contraptions straight out of the steam age in their shacks to make plastic straws or sandals. Or just doing it by hand. Better machines to do these tasks already exist, but are obviously too expensive for them to afford. Why would these hypothetical robots be any more affordable or disruptive to Indian workers in particular?
If anything I think American blue collars would be the ones to worry about.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fully_Automated_Luxury_Communi...
hell, if actors are still making movies for the love of the game and competing with cheaper (SOMEHOW! I guess we forgot about Sora already) then the price on those will actually go down
oh no, more indie movies made out of the labor of love, the horror.
Yes if theres one thing we know about Chips and AI its that the price of equivalent performance literally never decreases...
"Capital investments" are not a magic money source if the economy is tanked.
The only reason they tolerate the proletariat is the need for labor to handle tasks that still require human beings. That’s what the modern capitalist machine does: it harvests labor. If they manage to eliminate the need for intellectual labor via AI and automate enough physical work using tech like Boston Dynamics and John Deeres, whoever's still around become trash. The reliance on this system of money flowing back and forth ends, because the only reason to maintain it is having people generate wealth for them. Once they can eliminate that "cost," they’ll do it without blinking.
We’re already seeing jobs being wiped out by the tens of thousands with the arrival of AI, and billionaires hoarding capital far beyond what they could ever consume, driven simply by the pleasure of having more than the next guy. We’ve also seen how some are depraved enough to treat human beings as mere resources for their own gratification. Why would them keep people around they don't need anymore? People are failable, expensive to keep and unreliable. If all can be automated, it will be. Expecting wealth distribution from them is also a fantasy. If they cared they would do it now, but the talk is always "when we reach certain goal the riches will tricke down, just wait."
The argument that "there won't be anyone left to buy products and keep capitalism running" might hold true during a transition phase, but that would just be like ripping off a Band-Aid. None of them super-rich will care about the money flow once this structure becomes obsolete and can be replaced by another system that’s more efficient and easier to control.
I think they do care. If someone like Mamdani becomes U.S president in 10 years - when significant segments of the population are unemployed and/or radicalized, the U.S can actually become real socialist - like REAL socialist. That means business owners lose parts or all of their business. What if Musk and Zuckerberg won't like it and fight? They're not really gonna have an army of robots, nothing large enough to take over a country. The state controls the monopoly over violence. The state controls the ability to print dollars to build a bigger army. Legislation will make it impossible for a private citizen to accumulate a private army. Guardrails will be put in place. Governments are not that stupid. I think the super rich have an incentive to see the current system keep ticking and not turn into a shit show, they will have no way to control what happens if it turns into a shit show.
People can vote if they want, but the far right (which is heavily influenced by the super-rich) is already working to erode the legitimacy of the voting system. And people will have a hard time revolting against the state because the state is far more capable now than it was in the past.
Trump implies every now and then that he intends to stay in power. Even if he doesn't follow up on these threats I don't think we can expect democracy to keep order, it seems unlikely to me. When capitalism fails, democracy is the first casualty.
It has always resulted in no long term effect on unemployment and higher worker wages.
If you don't understand why that counterintuitive thing has consistently happened for centuries, you probably shouldn't speculate on the current automation wave.
So as an owner of 1 million robots, in a world where there are 1000 rich people to serve, I can have 1000 robots per person to serve them and can do everything for them.
Why do I care about the rest of the population? Why I need them to consume my resources? I already have all the power in the world. I have food, health, security, scientist etc. I don’t need the rest of the humans for anything.
Why currently “the rich” need the rest of humans is: you need baristas, servers, builders to help save time and make life enjoyable for most humans. then you need office workers to do the research, manage wealth of a richer category. So all this chain is needed such as top 1000 people have: housing, food, health, security, etc. that’s all they care. They don’t need the money. That’s the real power.
- The biggest geopolitical impact will probably come from AI weapons. Just like previous shifts in weaponry caused the fall of empires , the rise of naval empires and the rise of national modern superpowers, AI may lead to the end of the UN and beginning of something new.
- Societies will change but a plan is not needed and it's most likely useless. Societies adapt , and nobody has ever been able to predict how. Let's not make the same mistake again.
The majority of the slave labor in prisons in the US make from nothing at all to 50 cents per hour.
The powers that be will still shamefully be exploiting that labor source long after AI/robots are capable of cheaply doing that work.
It brings people together for mating.
It wasn't only industrialization.
Even today, before AI, once you find a mate, THEN, you move to the suburbs.
Just look at real estate prices in New York, SF, Boston, etc. Yes, people REALLY like cities. Even the wealthiest people who can afford anything still choose cities
Well, nice to meet you, I'm a city dweller who works from home and can technically live where ever I want. I choose the city because I like it and I want my family to have nice things. I like walking to the kid's school and not owning a car and being close to amenities.
I live in a city too, but I do not think that makes me very unique ;)
Peoples talking styles are being changed by AI. Son online, you get real people, AI slop, and real people that are adapting.
But generally, the migration to the suburbs is a pretty studied thing. I assumed it was just a known phenomena.
So
There was farms to city. For few decades.
Then city to suburbs. for few decades. (cities deteriorated)
Then Covid, and here you are correct, some people that lived in cities for jobs, did migrate to 'smaller cities' when they could work remote.
And now? Seems like people are building little mini-cities? Where they can live, work, and walk to shops. People want the city feel, without the large city hassle? Like a village? But, not just a small town, its like new planned small towns. Back to the village.
But your ordering works well for remote thinly populated areas. Hungering for a mate there is like waiting on the floor of an ocean trench for a sinking whale corpse.
Many people like living next to other people purely for social reasons.
given all of the issues with people getting attached to their online girlfriend -- it's already happening
Maybe we can eventually “trick” the human brain, but I think it will be much more challenging than people think. I would imagine if people even just knew someone was a robot, the jig is up. For most people. It wouldn’t be enough to create the perfect humanoid robot. We’d also have to make them hidden in plain sight. Full Ex Machina style.
In my humble opinion, they are the epitome of uncool.
I am also gay, so it's difficult for me to address these things because I completely reject the heteronormitive perspective. I basically believe all gender roles are dumb and should not exist, but generally straight people do not like to hear that. And, I can't blame them, because for them, they often don't have the option to reject gender norms. It's a mind field in the heterosexual dating world because everyone is forced to balance the new-age of gender progression mixed with millennia of gender norms and expectations. I do, however, think it will improve in time. We are very much still in the growing pains era.
It depends on what you mean by "comfortable."
A lot of people who moved to less populated areas found they weren't fully prepared to live with fewer amenities and choice in every aspect of life, from hospitals to supermarkets to mates.
There was a meaningful post-COVID return to cities and it wasn't driven exclusively by return to office mandates.
Umm what? Humans are social animals and many people LIKE living in cities in close proximity to other people and close to amenities. I do not see a future where we decentralize and spread out because of AI.
Our current social structure is actively resistant to decentralization and I don't see that changing unless there is some forcing function to break that hold and keep it broken for new norms to settle into expectations.
Anyways, there is nobody saying that you can not stay in a big city.
The core of the claim is that people on aggregate will not pay a city premium when it does not come with a job premium.
To your benefit: cities will likely become much cheaper! (and more filthy and crime ridden, but that's another talk).
However, what I think we will see is hyper agglomoration. We will likely see 2 or 3 mega cities where the last interesting jobs will remain along with basically all wealth.
These cities will be incredibly exclusive.
Likely one city in the US and one city in Asia somewhere.
The EU will likely be the big looser.
Absolutely right about war and technology too. Also right about plans being mostly useless.
Amazing analysis, thanks for this comment!
There will obviously still be reasons for people to live close together: humans are social creatures, and centralization allows for more efficient transportation.
Sounds great, except it ignores the fact that capital interests have controlled the levers of our faux democracies for decades, with no end in sight.
https://www.aboutswitzerland.eda.admin.ch/en/direct-democrac...
FWIW I am not from Switzerland, I only live there. Direct democracy works great.
More importantly, even if it did contain the solution, there is no obvious way for a country with an already corrupt government to transition to such a thing.
If someone else hasn't given a thought yet to Liquid Democracy, I propose they give it a couple of minutes of imaginary thought https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy
For some real world data there are some studies about (I think) German branch of the Pirate Party using it in internal decision making and there is interesting insight for those curious.
It be nice if we all where allowed to vote on particular laws if interested, and defer certain topics to our delegated experts. (Chat Control for example, would be a non issue then.)
The technology for that approach has been mature enough since the rise of social media and private crypto currencies (as a means of electronic private vote, particularly around usage of smart contracts for delegation). What about the interest and spreading of these ideas? Pretty limited, to non-existent. Some people like to follow leaders, though naturally wouldn't expect it to be the silent majority.
If your measure of "success" is women gaining voting rights in 1990 (!) in the last canton, then yeah, Switzerland is doing great.
Switzerland is the land of paranoid hillybillies, by law they need to provide each citizen with 1 square meter of bunker space, every new build has a bunker in the basement.
Regarding ignorance/swayed. I think in much of the EU and especially Germany, the currently ruling parties are completly ignorant about needed changes in the migration approach. The "public" knows this. And its the rulers which need to be nudged by e.g. direct democracy.
Switzerland already voted against immigration once before in 2014, EU punished them for it and they walked it back quickly. No larger catastrophe happened.
I don't see what would break if for example Netherlands copied Swiss direct democracy.
These people making these kind of grand pronouncements either have an embarrassing blind spot, or are not making sincere, but carefully calculated statements.
Just via competition, Chinese researchers are doing much more than Bill Gates could ever hope to do through 'thought leadership' spread the benefits of generative AI.
So there is also a question, what would be happening to these.
I'm not against a tax on AI or robots, but I think this may be the big chance we have to look at universal income with new eyes. If jobs are to disappear, why not soften the blow and get rid of some of the inefficiencies many government processes mean in terms of other citizen benefits?
What I worry about more however is the malevolent actors across the AI space. I'd argue that most companies mean well, but chasing profit at all costs can very easily turn into malevolence. Both these and actors being malevolent on purpose needs to have a control function.
Tax profits, it was always the most equitable option.
Personally I think the idea of taxing robots/tokens directly is too narrow an idea.
That's half the battle. The other half is closing all the loopholes and making stuff that used to be illegal, illegal again (e.g. stock buybacks).
Marginal income taxes are regressive now in the sense that folks with more wealth have far more resources to avoid paying them, but otherwise the reasoning seems less regressive than a consumption tax (e.g. VAT)
And I thought he is a smart man. This is so last century thinking. We need to prepare that there will definitely be no jobs for everyone and that will be falling all the time, it’s not a one-time event you should “prepare for”. There’s nothing to prepare, we already have funds and productivity to feed and shelter everyone. UBI is not a privilege, previous generations were slaving 9 to 5 all their lives so we can have it. This is it, arrived, and now, enter a few decades of historical period when all of us waiting for government bureaucrats to realise that UBI is a right.
One would hope that this would still go down better than destituting large percentages of the world population, but I wonder.
Everyone enjoys some sort of benefit, tax break, subsidy, etc. from the government. UBI is the same thing in the form of a regular, universal transfer payment. Nothing more, nothing less.
This reminds me of white people in the American south that didn't personally own slaves, but fought in the civil war anyway to maintain their place in the social hierarchy https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/67fvaf/comme...
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f9j6hg/why_d...
“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
Ultimately people will remain enterprising status-seekers. Rich people can already sit around with their wealth doing fuck-all excepting consuming, and they don't.
Is it? Or is it dependent on the consumption of someone much greater than you.
For example: I was reading something the other day about dining experiences in Las Vegas. Really though, the video was about how recently Vegas has abandoned the traditional middle class patrons in favor of providing experiences to a smaller, but much wealthier clientele. This seems to be a trend across many industries. In some cases your consumption is even a cost center to be eliminated in favor of a more successful customer base.
It can be easy to mistake a parasitic relationship for a predatory one.
For the ultra rich psychos who run the show, do you really think they want poor people hanging around? When we can be wiped out in a few months?
Consider the pure greed Donald Trump is displaying. Now imagine that the 1000 most powerful people are the same, except they are smart enough to at least not rub it in peoples faces on live television.
They hate you, and want you dead.
> do you really think they want poor people hanging around?
Which by your rationale would include everyone who isn't rich (and tautologically would mean "no one is rich anymore"). They do not care whether we're hanging around, the same way they do not care now whether poor people exist. It has no bearing. All that does is whether they remain rich and powerful, and last I checked, that's relative. Being the only one left on the planet won't make you feel rich, and there being poors on a piece of land won't have any bearing on you.
> When we can be wiped out in a few months?
Lol
Also, on the population front, growth is poised to completely stall in less than 100 years. The fertility rate is terrible in developed countries, and falling quickly in developing ones as they get richer
they used to send 9 year olds to the mines. mortality rates were as high as 50% before they turned 20.
why do you think the AI robber barons are any nicer? it is painfully obvious they're not. and all of this is set to a backdrop of global ecological collapse.
Yeah, at the advent of the industrial revolution. And prior to that 80% of people had to work the land, with no ammonia, just horses and manure.
Labor conditions from over a century ago, before the laws were written, have no bearing on whether wealthy people would try their best to kill you "just because". That's nonsensical.
"Nice" has nothing to do with it.
The whole reason trillions are being spent on AI and not making thing better for little people is because we don't want to have to depend on them anymore for anything... you know, so we can get rid of them. Having 8 billion people alive at once is a huge liability.
Oryx and Crake, I think, was the first time I encountered that idea.
What does the data and observations tell us so far, in this context?
It’s changing in the US with Democratic Socialists over performing, and with high support for them with the under 35 cohort, the question is if this momentum can be sustained for years through various election cycles (as ~2M 55+ voters age out every year, and ~3M voters turn 18 and age into the electorate every year).
“Progress occurs one funeral at a time.” — Max Planck
Are you going to strike? Are we going to take on the government by force?
People need to understand there is no democracy in a post-AGI world.
The power of human collectives comes from a combination of our collective economic power and our physical power. Without either leaders would be smart to just do what the companies paying all the bills ask if they don't want their families to starve too.
You'll be waiting forever, then. This isn't something that you can wait to be given to you, it must be taken.
Or, put much more eloquently by one of the greatest Americans:
"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress"
- Frederick Douglass
UBI is how capitalism keeps going, else a new system will be needed.
UBI will be given but we should take even more control and take a % of ownership.
The top 10% of consumers accounted for half of all spending in the second quarter of 2025.
Capitalism will happily chug along while leaving a massive number of people desperately poor.
There's a reason the AI CEOs have all become obsessed with the concept of a "permanent underclass."
If a UBI is ever "given" it will be just enough to keep the underclass from rising up and killing the owner class and not one cent more.
it's not for nothin that they've been slipping Zachariah 13:8 into discussions that show up in places like 8chan or ssethtzeentech videos
"Declares the LORD: 'in all the land, two-thirds will be cut off and perish, but one-third will be left alive' "
The marketing and agit-prop types would call this "priming" or "conditioning"
Or are you suggesting a particular ontological presumption about the declared speaker of those words, which would then reflect a different shade of meaning onto my declaration?
You're reflecting the populist notion that wealth is zero-sum. If that were true we'd still be in caves fighting over sticks. The average quality of life has skyrocketed in the last century alongside growth, and there's no non-capitalist country now or in history that's been an enviable place for average people to live.
The upper class live in walled neighborhoods with private guards. There's a small merchant class, and then the majority of the population are working class. Much of Central and South America live like this.
The part you've got wrong here is thinking that Capitalism is equivalent to innovation and growth, which it is not. Capitalism simply serves capital, and with less and less of its constraints being physically bound to resources, there is very much a plausible world in which only a small handful of consolidated bank accounts exist so long as those bank accounts can reasonably control the monopoly of violence.
There is a point historically in which Capitalism absolutely served to provide widespread innovation and prosperity at scale, but this is not a feature of capitalism inherently but rather a consequence of it when run within the existing system of labor mechanics at the time. Capitalism can still very much exist within a Feudal structure of governance, its contributions to society will be much lesser, but it can still very much exist.
Capitalism means separation of violence from capital, if capital controls violence then its not capitalism because there can only be a free market when guns that can't be bribed with money protects it.
For example in communism capital control violence, that is why its so bad, since when capital controls violence it no longer need to produce good results to thrive, it can just use force, which is how every communist regime acted.
In anarchy capital also control violence, so its not capitalism, since without a state to prevent capital from hiring thugs to force others into submission you don't have a free market, whoever has the most thugs wins.
Where ? who ?
Let’s ask him straight - would he be ok living like that? Lmfao
Lots of looney tunes comments on this thread
Can you explain to me how any of this is possible under the constraints you've made. I can only see regression not an evolution or an improvement.
I've known enough permies that have made it work to know that it's possible to have an off grid lifestyle that's quite decent if you value time and relaxation over material abundance. You talk about regression, but what about the regression of people working 3 jobs, 60 hours a week in shit jobs and barely clearing every month? Those same people could have a hay bale house, composting toilet, a permaculture garden and work 15 hours a week to pay for internet/food you can't grow/farming inputs (limited in permaculture setups).
I'm not doubting that it can be done on the small scale. I just dont think it can be done on any large scale. You kinda skipped over what I stated.
There isnt a way to distribution of shelter, food and storage on the scale required with the collapsing tech tree that will happen when UBI is across the board.
The same factory that creates the plastic extrusions for the dog bowl are the ones that make it for the compost toilet. (Yes, Ive used a real outback dunny), even that has a tech tree that is outside of the basic requirements you've understood.
This doesn't go into the issues that will happen when the tech and delivery tree of things as simple as insulin happen. Every parent I know is going to get back into those three jobs to save their kid, its not even a question.
I have serious concern that the "UBI will work" attitude will be successful, it sounds great short term and if we as a society adopt it, and it fails (it will) we've fucked humanity for the rest of time.
Unless every citizen in every country adopts it, those who maintain their military machine will dominate the rest of the planet so easily it would be finished up in a year.
This passive position is a luxury that certain western countries have.
With that said I doubt that reallocation will happen in any meaningful way, and as the elites eliminate more people from the economy we'll descend further into violence and chaos. If the parasite class was generous, they wouldn't be parasites.
All of your ideas sound great, I doubt they work. I fear you misunderstand the complexity tech tree required to deliver this utopia you desire. There is too much work required that won't be being done, "with ai" and "with robotics" , of which they have thier own tech and resource trees of dependencies.
If people are not paying for the resources (and how will they, since on ubi there is no requirement to deliver value) robots wont be made, and you're back to caveman development.
I'm happy to debate this, but I just feel the whole arguement of -it will just happen- is incredible wishful thinking.
Worker protections have almost never been granted by the profiteers... not child labor laws, not weekends, not overtime, not safety regulations, not minimum wage, not workers comp... the working class is not what it is today because of "sharing prosperity" and there's been a lot of prosperity — it's all a series of fights.
>[0]the "rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for—not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of the country."
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1902_anthracite_coal_strike
This is a baby step, but it's a baby step in the right direction.
Notice that when you open your mouth, there is no roast chicken that flies in.
abandon that entire apperatus and just cut people a check.
even glenn beck called it out w/ obamacare -- "if total spending is $3million per person [it wasn't, btw], then why not just cut every person a check?"
Instead of everyone working less what happened is less people work. The fact that it took that specific shape is a source of A LOT of problems.
see also: the German far right pending a takeover, or like, half of all politics in India
There is no preparing for that.
I doubt we get there to be honest, they all have wealth and power because there are consumers with money. No more consumers, no more wealth and power.
Even during the Great Depression ,a period of record wealth inequality and much worse economic conditions, this did not happen.
For how long?
For example, you go to the store to get eggs, since everyone has UBI, they decide to also get eggs, the eggs either run out, or the store raises the price, at which either you will get food queues like in the USSR, or everyone will need more UBI to afford eggs. The solution to this is to increase egg production, but this is not instant, and not necessarily a priority, while money transfers are instant.
Capitalism is based on two simple, fundamental assumptions about the world:
- everyone works
- everyone consumes
1. Turned out not to be true. We have disabled people, elderly people. We patch it with legislation like SSI. That only works because everyone else is still working.
Our monkey patch solutions have held up well for a long time. But, if either of those two assumptions are broken in a large way, the entire system collapses. UBI is yet another monkey patch. As you know, it won’t hold if we bend the invariants of the system enough.
Eventually, a fully planned economy will not be optional.
(1) National Park visit a year (3) RoboTaxi rides this week (2) Eggs for the week
Who will do the planning? Why would the population accept this planning?
You will in practice need full surveillance and control of your population and an agreement between every country that this is how we are going to do things.
At that point you can also ask the question what value humans provide at all. Why upkeep all of this when you can just expand compute, perform resource extraction instead of managing your cattle.
A little bit of wealth distribution exists within American capitalism, through monkey-patches like I mentioned. But full wealth distribution is a new economic system altogether.
Is what you're saying that since UBI would disconnect someone's production from their income, then this will cause shortages of goods? I think UBI only works if the income generated by it is tied to production. That production would not be generated by human labor, but instead by robot labor. I think if you disconnect that then the system would not work, but why would you need to?
Now some will be unlucky and end up with a clone that makes them way less than average. So to fix this the salaries of all the clones are put into one pot and redistributed as "UBI". Given the wealth disparity, most people would end up better off than before, the high earners of the past will be a bit worse off though.
But of course we are not in a perfect world, in reality there are many inefficiencies, and no company would accept a 100% AI worker tax. However, these AIs are presumably not just our clones, but 100x better. So we are in a position of abundance not scarcity. There's enough eggs for everyone. It becomes a question of distribution and policy
https://ai-2040.com/supplements/economics-of-plan-a
And yes, moved into skyscrapers:
"This implies that the price of housing will become dominated by the price of the land (as opposed to the cost of building housing), so dense housing (e.g. skyscrapers) will become relatively much cheaper than sparse housing"
There's a later bit that talks about keeping earth as a reserve too.
From the site, I think the most realistic outcome is Plan D and then eventually Plan C when people start freaking out. I dont see any path where you get even close to Plan A.
So either lay out how Plan A is supposed to happen in the population, or revise the answer.
You can't arbitrage the real estate market to add to your UBI savings by living on the street.
Maybe a tougher problem is any solution here would have to collapse real estate prices nationally. You would have to undo the massive inequality that the real estate market would represent at the start of UBI. You would have to ban the owning of more than one home and have a force liquidation for the people owning second homes. Whatever is attempted would create all kinds of loopholes that would just be gamed unless now we are talking about all apartment buildings being government ran.
Any time UBI comes up the economic discussion is just so hopelessly naive. It isn't even at the level of homo economicus stupidity. It is the level of a teenager who has read that back of Capital at Barnes and Noble then thought about solutions after stopping at the dispensary.
Why do we not push for labor reform, as we did a century ago? Depending on the actual productivity gains from AI broadly, set a new standard of 4-hour workdays. Or 3-day work weeks.
The rest of us want to be able to eat once capitalism decides we aren't worth the cost to keep alive.
New paradigm is a push for no workers at all which sounds a lot messier to fix as you start regulating how many employees a business has. How do contractors work? And if the contractors are robots?
UBI isn't about not being able to work if you want to. It's about being free from being a wage slave.
> In a capitalist society, employment is the way most people get the money they need to pay for the basics of life as well as being a key source of dignity and social connection.
> When a community has high unemployment, the ripple effects can be pervasive. Research suggests that in some parts of the United States, factory closures contribute to a rise in deaths from opioid overdoses. Now imagine similar pressures on both white-collar and blue-collar workers nationwide.
> Waiting until people are already displaced or underemployed will be too late. AI is a structural challenge to the way our economy is organized, and it requires thinking and action now.
----
I agree he should've addressed UBI directly. When he was asked about it in an AMA a decade ago he basically said he's optimistic it can happen eventually but not yet [1]. And in that same AMA he said he wished to see "computers that can read and understand information like humans do" within his lifetime [2]. Now that the latter has happened I wish we could see how his thoughts have changed on the former.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5whpqs/comment/dea7v1...
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5whpqs/comment/dea5fl...
We will figure new methods of scarce toy production. To believe otherwise seems delusional to me.
There is also this problem with UBI that I don't know how it can be solved. I see it in a certain percentage of people I know. Maybe 15-20%. As soon as they get paid that money is spent and usually spent on bullshit. Any hint of credit worthiness was used up a long time ago because it is the same process. If you gave them a daily morning UBI amount they would be broke by dinner and hungry. It is very hard to explain what causes this. To pretend this doesn't exist also seems completely delusional to me.
But this quote from Bill is a wrong perspective I think. "reduce job losses" is short term reactive thinking. What you need is adapt to what skillsets the modern world needs. If we have a bunch of leatherworkers, you don't "reduce job losses", you get people to understand the new world and pick up the relevant skills. A job isn't a thing, it's an activity (this reads like an AI wrote it, but it's all hand-written). People can do any job and pick up new ones quickly in the right environment.
Setting up governance bodies and think tanks could be a diversion. He does explicitly suggest a robot and token tax, so that is something.
He does not address the issue of IP theft or the possibility of shutting down AI altogether like medium range missiles (SS20/Pershing II) were removed by treaties. The could be AI treaties with China and Russia, except of course the US has no credibility now compared to the 1980s.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2022/07/how-bill-gates-m...
For teachers/admins who are on HN: what has worked in a past for a "new way to educate" students to actually be implemented by educators? Does it happen through conferences? Do some states take the lead and others follow? Does it follow from private schools into public schools?
I know AI labs are trying to include teachers here and there... but IME teachers are very "anti-AI", "anti-datacenter", etc. etc. In coastal cities, the unions will be entirely opposed. This seems less of a "can AI be useful for education" question and more around politics and messaging. But I'd love to learn more.
The only thing I've ever seen work is to simply make a tool available to people while giving them meaningful resources to adopt it if they see utility in their specific situation. But admin hates this because it means that they are paying for a thing that some people aren't using and because they want to write "I've revolutionized teaching by integrating X" on their performance review and that doesn't work unless adoption is near-universal.
For AI shit in particular, the ideas have been trash. Mandatory AI summaries of course readings integrated into the discussion platform. Great, now nobody will do the reading. AI tools for "placing" you in history through image generation that constantly generate anachronisms because they are trained on fantasy art. Stuff like that.
Even though this article is new, I'm not sure it has materially new ideas vs what some other labs have been claiming for years.
Enforcing safeguards that apply globally to good and bad actors alike so far as proved quite difficult - compute is essentially the only lever, and that's tenuous at best.
Unlike nuclear arms (where functionally there's a limit at MAD), so far we believe that with enough compute, energy, and algorithms, intelligence will continue to scale (and not only scale - but compound)
Because the pioneers haven't just been saying, but are screaming the quiet part out loud.
If you compare the broad characteristics of the new jobs created to the old jobs displaced by technology historically, they are the same every time: they required higher-level (a) cognitive (b) technical or (c) social skills.
That is it. There is no other dimension to upskill along.
And LLMs are good at all three, probably better than most people already by many metrics. (Yes even social; their infinite patience is the ultimate advantage, and while sycophancy is harmful fixing it is easy.)
Plus AI is improving extremely rapidly. Which means it is probably advancing faster than most people can upskill.
An increasingly accepted premise is that AI can displace junior employees but will need senior employees to steer it. Consider the ratio of junior to senior employees, and how long it takes for the former to grow into the latter. That is the volume of displacement and timeframe to upskill we're looking at, made worse by the fact that if juniors are not hired they likely won't get a chance to upskill at all.
Never in history have we had a technology that was so versatile and rapidly advancing that it could displace a large portion of existing jobs, as well as many new jobs that would be created.
This is a very succint argument that has a technical implication - that correcting errors and misalignment is incredibly important for autonomous AI capabilities in a fundamental way.
The average person thinks this technology is overhyped (like Emily Bender) so how would one even begin to have a conversation with them on the risks?
And I kind of get it! If your primary exposure to AI is Google search summaries (from their cheapest models) and shitty AI graphic design, it makes sense to think it's vastly overhyped.
And some people are still stuck on what AI was capable of when GPT-3.5 was SOTA. They don't realize how much they've improved in ~4 years. Even if the rate of improvement slows down, AI will be tremendously more capable in another ~4 years.
And what do we have to show for it? We can localise some bug causes faster, and it takes some of the mindless boilerplate work off our hands. Which affects maybe 10-20% of our actual job, and even there occasionally eliminates the gains again right away because you have to babysit or manually redo it, without always knowing when and where that might happen. That's not what I'd call a revolutionary increase in efficiency.
And this isn't just my impression, it's what I hear from pretty much all of my professional peers, which includes people waaay more experienced and smarter than me.
If you trust benchmarks (which is debateable) then the rate of improvement is speeding up -- definitely not diminishing returns.
Nope. The actual main problem are those people who totally ignore the real costs of AI.
Remind me, when was the last time when billions and trillions of dollars were spent on workers (education, healthcare, insurance, etc. all together)?
You try to compare the capabilities without comparing the costs. That won't do.
It's powerful, and very useful in specific situations.
It's not the second coming of jesus christ.
It can code and we saw it eat(ing) our former occupation, but that was always a defined finite space with defined rules and to be frank, not as hard as us practitioners liked to believe. So I don't think we can extrapolate this progress out to every other human endeavor in the near term at least.
More automation is coming though most likely.
Software development, as opposed to many many other fields also offers nearly unlimited training data and is one of the few areas with modifiable inputs and testable outputs.
I'd love to see anyone building Grokbot or ChatGPT Work talk about how they're thinking about this use case, specifically. It seems greatly important and tractable given how little government websites & forms change over time.
On the other end - yes, it will create massive vectors for abuse & fraud, since govt services are designed to have roadblocks to reduce usage. But fraud has always been possible, even without AI (so many recent examples to pull from).
IMO it's best to maximize social benefits to see where the tradeoffs really are. We won't know until we push on it!
That the government collects taxes and then understaffs the department that distributes the benefit is the first fraud. 30 years after email was invented, why do people have to wait on the phone for hours to talk to a government employee?
It was 2022 when this happened.
I get the sense of "Every Accusation is a confession"
> During my entire life I’ve only had two jobs. In the first one, I played a role in developing software to empower people through my work at Microsoft.
Some of us remember the story/urban legend of Bill Gates "developing" BASIC by retrieving a printout of source code from a dumpster, a process infinitely more efficient than an LLM.
NOTE. "Played a role in developing", not "Played a role BY developing"
The former could be said by the coffee maker. Or dumpster diver.
The greatest equalizer ?
Where you're either dependent on some other companies services, that you can afford their fee and that they don't ban your account or that you can afford the hardware to run a model locally made by the formementioned conmpanies?
The internet had a bigger chance of being a equalizer because you could learn things you didn't even knoe about before and what you learned is yours
I've been waiting for a long, long time for us to figure out how AI makes us more social, not less. Outside of memes of course.
I see, so force china to cooperate or label them as terrorists in the same vein of irak/iran nuclear capabilities
We don't even need to assume this is out of the goodness of their hearts. Consider that Microsoft is one of the few Big Tech businesses whose business model is primarily making its enterprise customers more productive. If agents replace all knowledge work, half of Microsoft's business disappears.
In that sense Microsoft is more aligned with us humans than the other AI companies.
So much for those people who tried to claim they knew how to prompt AI better then the next person.
> Gates acknowledged that some reinvented toilets, in small volumes, could cost as much as $10,000, but added, “That will pretty quickly come down.”
I added an extra zero, sorry, I read it 8 years ago. But still doesn't really matter, even the optimistic 500 USD is laughable.
During my entire life I’ve only had two jobs. In the first one, I played a role in developing software to empower people through my work at Microsoft.
Yikes. We all know powerful people have an incentive to whitewash their pasts but there is whitewashing and then there is whatever that is.
I have to mention this because we can't forget that Microsoft's and Bill Gates's history regarding fear uncertainty doubt as well as embrace extend extinguish. "Forgive but don't forget" as the old saying goes.
During the 2000's Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer described the GPL as akin to a virus. He begged European governements not to adopt open source software and to adopt Microsoft software instead.
Indeed throughout its history Microsoft, along with Gates and Balmer, have consistently fought against implementation of open standards and open source software. They have consistently pushed towards their own proprietary solutions.
Given all of this, along with the laughable whitewashing attempt even at the very beginning of his essay, I feel like what Bill Gates has written here is consistent with his previous behavior in regards to all of this. I suspect all this talk of regulation is an attempt to squash open source AI and open weights AI and to ensure Big Tech such as Microsoft continues to be in control of the future of tech and the future of AI.
Even his talk of taxing AI tokens and robots would ultimately benefit Microsoft and other Big tech companies and hurt open source.
I will repeat what I said earlier. In life it is important to "forgive but never forget." Many have forgiven Bill Gates for all he did in the 90's. Many haven't. But nobody should forget and everyone should take his words with a grain of salt.
I'm curious, how? He proposes taxing bots in lieu of taxing humans, because they will be doing most of the work... but we already tax humans, and it hasn't hurt open source.
> I believe we should tax AI tokens and robots. Right now, if you’re an employer and you hire someone, you pay payroll taxes on their earnings. But if you buy a robot, you can usually write it off right away as a business expense. The tax system nudges you toward replacing people with machines.
A tax would slow the rush away from human labor a little and raise money for retraining and a stronger safety net. It would need to be targeted so it does not slow down the purely beneficial uses of AI, like making medicine and education cheaper.
Note the part about it being targeted. Clearly this is in the context of moderating the displacement of human labor by employers rather than a flat "TAX ALL THE TOKENS!" approach.
The manually moved it down.
HN mods always silence even the slightest thing against their official narrative.
Since YC/HN are themselves pedos and connected to Epstein they had no choice but to squash it
They probably thought the HN audience would be too dumb or passive to do anything about it, helping them slowly get away with being international sec trafficking pedophiles.
And so far they are getting away with it. JPM Chase bank settled with victims for millions of dollars, other victims mysteriously died.
Thiel and tech and academia and Israel got prolific pedo Trump as the figurehead so they can try to shift blame to his “base” of racists Americans etc. but we all know it’s the wealthy corporate elite doing this stuff.
HN is complicit. They are basically a mouthpiece.
HN mods actively help wealthy pedophiles get away with their crimes
in this case a ratio of 196 points to 479 comments points to a very poorly received yet comment-inspiring article.
How about you start with not paying Microsoft's CEO $96M?
Let AI replace jobs. Start taxing companies that use AI proportionally to their usage, and then distribute the proceedings to the people.
—AKIRA, 1988
The rich and powerful do have the power to shut people up you know.
i honestly think there is 40% chance the world will be total mess. i know students from top Uni who are graduating and they can’t find positions to work in in California.
Entry-level consensused by all of my friends is in deep trouble.
something must change. dramatically. and soon.
i am all in on AI. and this is scary for the rest of the world. and it should be
I see an old (and successful) pirate king trying to wear yet another hat today.
The anti-capitalist argument is that the wealthiest people in the world are not dramatically more intelligent than the average person. Bill Gates is obviously very intelligent and capable, but his IQ does not scale with his wealth. He built the right company at the right time, and Microsoft ended up sitting at the center of massive network effects. Relatively modest advantages in judgment, skill, and industriousness can end up producing enormous differences in wealth due to the compounding effects of success.
That's just how scalable markets work. So Gates's success, while evidence that he was very effective at building Microsoft, is not evidence that he is vastly more knowledgeable than everybody else about economics or the future of technology.
And the same applies to Bezos, Musk, and every other extremely successful founder.
Their arguments should be judged on their merits and not treated as infallible insights from people with superhuman intelligence.
Now, that is not to say that I want their wealth to be capped or politically reallocated. The case for private property depends on the argument that decentralized ownership and investment and capital risking is better than politicians allocating a pool of resources to gain clout or win over popular opinion. A wealth cap or high taxes on the wealthy would transfer control over resources from private owners to political institutions. So what we would be doing is replacing imperfect private allocation with imperfect public allocation, where the people allocating the capital have limited information, political incentives, and the ability to impose costs on others without their consent. So I reject blind deference to billionaires, but I do not want politicians to control billionaires' capital.
Anyway, let me address Gates's argument about AI:
Gates argues that AI will disrupt the economy faster than previous technologies, and therefore stronger government coordination is needed to address the rapidity of the speed of that transition, to cushion people against the speed of that transition. But what his analysis underweights is how quickly AI can help people adapt to the very transformation that AI brings about.
For example, a worker taking on a new position now has access to a tutor and an analyst and a business advisor all wrapped up in one, who can provide world-class assistance 24/7 at the cost of a few cents in electricity. And someone who wants to start a business can employ dozens of AI agents at a cost of a few hundred dollars to test out the idea and build out a prototype within a few days. So what this means is that we cannot hold the human adaptive capacity constant while trying to determine the impact of AI's disruptive capacity.
The second problem with Gates's argument is that he only counts the income that people might lose when AI replaces jobs, but he doesn't count the fall in prices that the same AI will bring about. The fall in prices is effectively an increase in purchasing power. That increase in purchasing power, in economic terms, means an increase in real wages, and that's exactly why wages increased twentyfold between 1826 and 2026. Automation brought about abundance, which reduced prices and thereby increased purchasing power, i.e. increased real wages. If you look at tokens right now, their prices are going down exponentially. They've gone down about a thousandfold over the last four years, while the capability of the tokens themselves has increased. So AI is following exactly the same price trends as every other previous computer technology.
If AI becomes a major input into medicine and education and administration and logistics, that means that all these goods and services become radically cheaper, which means that paychecks can buy a lot more of them. So that's, I think, a huge hole in his analysis. It's also, I think, very simplistic to assume that the future will be based on labor. It could very well be one where the average person becomes a business owner and employs a fleet of hundreds or thousands of AI agents to work for them. That's exactly what the price trends in tokens would suggest.
The broader problem I see with his model is that it assumes disaster from a technology that creates abundance. This seems to me to be fundamentally misguided about the essential dynamics of what's actually happening.
Finally, if AI is ever capable of doing every single thing that a human can do, AI would possess very dangerous traits. And why I say that is because humans themselves are very dangerous. If we're going to create a product, we're not going to create a product that has human-like traits. But it is some of those very traits that make humans dangerous that also make them useful in the economy. We tolerate humans having these dangerous properties because that's what we were born into, and we accept that and we legally protect humans despite the fact that they're dangerous. But nobody, no company, no country will tolerate people creating AI that is dangerous. An autonomous, self-motivated and potentially rebellious digital intelligence is not only not a useful business tool, it's also not a tolerable risk. And if that is ever created, we will have much bigger things to worry about than unemployment and no solution to the problems that this would create would be found in greater taxation.
And as long as that is not created, then there will be abilities or skills that humans uniquely possess that will become the limiting factor in the economy. In other words, all other processes will scale exponentially through mass production of GPUs until all the available scarce human skills are employed in managing those GPUs. That follows the basic pattern that has preceded us over the last 200 years, and there's no reason to assume that pattern will not hold.
These llm agents don’t have “agency”. No intrinsic goal other than respond. A tutor has judgment and agency. You will get a really good pattern match on the input text you give but you won’t get tutoring.
The token sale phenomenon briefly reversed this, but that was shut down:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11408-020-00366-0
>The average ICO has almost 4700 contributors. The median contributor invests a relatively small amount. The ICO market appears to have successfully given access to the financing of innovation to a new class of investors, which is a long-standing public policy issue
Even public capital markets are becoming increasingly displaced by private equity where only institutional and accredited (wealthy) investors have access as investor:
https://www.citizensbank.com/corporate-finance/insights/priv...
This is because the cost of getting SEC approval for offering stock to the public is steadily increasing.
Bro is a useless sex offender, who cares what he thinks about anything.
The weirdest part is HN hiding the comments lmao
So we are on a weird combination of science (look Language can be modelled, how does that relate to real world concepts, can you even understand the word love without experiencing emotions) and ultra-capitalism (you get that part)
So my first thought is you cannot monetise AGI
I honestly don’t know where that line is, and different humans will draw it in different places but if (it’s a big if) we do achieve AGI by throwing compute at a pile of language (and seriously that is wrong way round for evolution?) if we do get a model everyone just recognised as alive then, just who in society is going to say “yeah slavery that’s the right approach - those companies definitely should be allowed to keep a data centre of Einsteins, not pay them, and replace call centres for zero cost.”
The goal of the journey just is not monetiseable. If we do create alien intelligence we really want to treat it like they landed in a spaceship.
Plus you know there is bound to be a Hollywood film in productions already about an evil billionaire who creates an AI and tries to lock it away and make it do his bidding. It ends badly.
But even putting AGI aside and just focusing on a word guessing machine that can check its own guesses over and over, you know not an actual intelligent thing but something that is a tool.
Just how much of the amazing cost savings and job replacements from LLMs are really just low hanging fruit available to POS (Plain Old Software). Very very few companies are what Inwoukd call software literate - run through and through with programmatically accessible components at every level and people with skills to use them. The old SOA / API based company is first rung on that ladder.
But the point is, almost every time we are going to replace some jobs it’s “we never digitised this before but now we can just chuck compute at it.” You know what’s cheaper than chuckingncompute at it - doing the hard graft of getting your software and data aligned and then fixing your processes. Then it can run like the scripts that intern wrote last year but no one listened. Yes CV is used in killchains in Ukraine - but the whole killchain is not AI - it’s hard graft building a process just like any business. With AI used as small Part of a larger ecosystem.
Oh and yeah the AI labs and the chip vendors - they are not keeping the value created by firing paralegals. Data centres with almost identical models in them just become utilities.
And did I say value created ? So far all the big value is cost reduction - you know the refuge of the business consultant with no ideas.
I still am waiting for the big new thing - the company that could not exist otherwise. All I hear is cost reduction and yeah that matters at scale, but if it’s all I hear I begin to suspect it’s all anyone can think of.
And moving value around does not count as value creation - Amazon has done amazing things, but if e-commerce did not exist, would humans in America have never bought crap from China ? Or has amazon just mostly taken the growth of the past 30 years away from Walmart ?
And talking of that, Amazon has massively reduced warehousing costs - using POS, and these things called robots. If I had to bet it would be the AI revolution (maths proofs apart) is a robot revolution. And that has the usual scaling laws of design, manufacture, deployment and so on.
Maybe the reason I am Not seeing a AI killer app, is that the iPhone does not have arms.
Anyway needed to get that off my chest :-)
> During my entire life I’ve only had two jobs.
One of them was Steve; and another one has been wasting endless amount of human effort on closed-source software with anti-standard behavor. But then maybe there's the other job of covering up his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein etc.?
How apt… for Bill Gates to state this.
Might this be a part of a PR campaign to distract us from his "Island trips"?
That title already belongs to the handgun.
I am finding it difficult to take anything Gates says seriously. Remember, 640K ought to be enough for anybody.
This is one of those countersmells that flags people as unserious. It was at best an amusing quip from the days of extended memory PCs about why they should move to modern OSes.
Gates, of course, was talking about the address mapping design points in software on a CPU that had 20 address bits. Unless you're arguing that 384k was too much for the paltry framebuffers actually deployed on 8086's and would have preferred a 896/128 split; in which case I agree! But alas.
Gates in one of his reddit amas has said that he never said that. No one working on computers during those days would have said they need less memory.
I really think this is overstated. So far everything is pointing towards AI accelerating climate change. Especially if we'll automate everything with physical robots.
Ok but if we sprint the Delorean towards the brick wall as fast as possible we might be able to hit 88mph just in time to save ourselves