What Microsoft's Director of Applied Science called the, "largest theft of labor in human history".[1]
1. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.64...
1. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.64...
I continue to find that people strongly advocate for justice on exactly opposing sides, depending on who they have been told to think the “bad guy” is.
The same orgs that harassed and antagonized Aaron Schwartz are not going after AI for the same thing at a much much larger scale.
What's different? The size of their bank accounts.
Here are a couple articles about the charges and the case against Swartz [1][2]. Compare the elements of the various charges to what the AI companies are doing and there isn't really a good match.
[1] https://volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/
[2] https://volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against-a...
One, time went on. The prosecution of Schwartz was seen as an overreach, as demonstrated by Ortiz’s failed political career thereafter.
Two, Schwartz’s charges were only ever charged. No jury or judge signed off on them.
Three, context changed. Schwartz wasn’t 5% of GDP. For better or for worse, that matters to voters.
I don’t believe for a second Schwartz wouldn’t have been charged if his parents were rich. He would have been better equipped to fight it. But that’s it.
Yes, our political economy is more corrupt today. But it’s silly to project the Schwartz example onto AI companies given the former is seen as a mistake and the latter are orders of magnitude more potentially valuable. And yes, if you can swing a state’s tax coffers meaningfully that’s going to influence voters and thus prosecutors.
Schwartz wouldn’t be prosecuted today. In part because Schwartz’s prosecution tanked Ortiz’s career. There isn’t a hypocrisy between these two examples.
(That doesn’t mean it isn’t a good bit of political sloganeering. It will rally some folks and I’d suggest someone in a D primary use it in the right circumstances. But it isn’t technically true.)
But it's not. The only layer anyone has a handle on is consumers and companies paying AI ridiculous sums for AI. Some of those users are probably justifying it with labour replacement. But a lot may not be. So far, we haven't seen the employment effect outside recent college graduates at enterprise companies.
> as implemented in the United States it's a malignant tumor, a theft of labor by capital, and it must be (minimally) adddressed with confiscatory taxes applied to all those involved with it's creation and operation
It's also a godsend of economic growth. Growth other countries who are trying to balance their books would kill for. Without AI, we'd be in a failure state. Maybe we are, if this is all a bubble. But as it stands, there is paper wealth that can and has–limitedly–been taxed. That gives everyone options.
> If a single AI billionaire exists in the year 2030, then the US is a failed state
This is silly and projecting a narrow view of the world onto a larger voting population. Voters don't care so much that there are billionaires as that living standards haven't kept up with the rate at which they're being minted. Double tax brackets, add more on top, raise the minimum wage, raise Social Security taxes and benefits, expand Medicare, beef up antitrust, establish a progressive property tax on wealth that starts at 1,000x the median American's wage (about $65mm) and billionaires are fine.
Ignoring the obvious “citation needed” and taking this as accurate, wiping out entry level jobs at massive employers is a serious problem with longterm effects we likely only understand a part of at best.
We gleefully moved manufacturing overseas for decades and finally realized the extent of the cons after it was too late. We clearly needed a more balanced approach. Something tells me we’re setting ourselves up for the same mistake.
Sorry, what? You're claiming that which countries exactly are failed states because of a lack of AI? And that the US would have failed, what, in the past four years if ChatGPT hadn't released or something? That's an absolutely insane thing to claim, but I have no clue how to else to interpret what you're saying.
No. I'm saying the difference between the United States and other profligate countries is that our economy is, even if just on paper, growing at the pace of a low-tier developing economy.
That gives us living-standard and tax-base margin that others don't have. It means we have policy wiggle room. That doesn't guarantee we'll use it wisely. (We are not, currently.)
> that the US would have failed, what, in the past four years if ChatGPT hadn't released or something? That's an absolutely insane thing to claim
I should have said state of failure. Not failure state was unnecessarily ambiguous. Sorry.
If our economy were growing at 1% or nil, and we were busy prosecuting a war in Iran and tariffing everyone, I think we'd likely tip into a recession and a political crisis more intense than the one we have. AI's largesse is buying us roadway. That roadway, in turn, may take us through to the midterms.
VCs are paying ridiculous sums for AI. Consumers are not - we get tokens subsidised by VCs.
> if this is all a bubble
Interesting to see that revenue growth for both Anthropic and OpenAI has levelled off recently. Once this fact percolates through to the VCs, it's going to cause problems. All those valuations are based on projections of vastly greater revenue than they're getting now (and, ofc, achieving AGI and "winning" everything immediately that happens). This is looking less and less likely - the current batch of AIs are very, very, useful tools, but as we learn how to use them commercially they're not generating those limitless revenues that were anticipated.
This tech, like all the rest, will go through the Gartner Hype Cycle, and that includes the Trough of Despair where it all looks shit and the bubble pops. I think we're approaching that rapidly.
Right now it's replacing "recent college graduates", which makes sense, because they're the least differentiated white collar workers. However it's advancing quickly, and it will (quite obviously) eat more and more white collar jobs.
> It's also a godsend of economic growth.
Fuck no. There is unprecedented Capex that is propping up the economy, as companies are rushing to create capacity that they intend to use to destroy jobs. So yes, those datacenter buildouts and chip purchases and power infrastructure buildouts are creating economic activity... all with the hope that someday companies will be able to fire a huge percentage of workers.
You wrote it as though the gains were from productivity, which they really aren't... but even if they were (and that is likely to happen at some point), it would only be beneficial to actual people if that also results in greater distributions to labor. But a technology like this disfavors labor, so we can anticipate aggregation toward capital, and a slower velocity of money overall.
> Voters don't care so much that there are billionaires as that living standards haven't kept up with the rate at which they're being minted.
I suspect that voters will, at some point, care quite deeply that a lot of awful people got INSANELY rich by destroying tens of millions of lives, and making the K shaped economy have a much smaller segment of winners
The policies you suggest could help... but we have an administration (all three branches) that oppose anything of the sort. They're much more likely to simply try to deploy AI to further oppress the people whose careers they destroyed, than to try to create soft-landings or fair outcomes.
The party most supportive of mass AI deployment is a party that despises the poor, and would happily simply lock them up. This... is not a good mix.
I hope that your optimism turns out to be warranted, but I think you're a fucking idiot, defending reckless bullshit that is executed as part of the biggest heist in modern history.
Where was I optimistic?
The technology is here. If Anthropic and OpenAI or DeepSeek develop it, it’s still going to do its labor replacement to the degree it will. The difference is whether it occurs under our tax base or not.
I’m currently seeing America squander this boon. But it’s objectively better to be in a world being transformed by AI when the AI is in your jurisdiction than sitting on the sidelines while suffering all of the same ill effects.
You can’t create a soft landing if you haven’t the funds for feathers. We do. We’re just blowing it.
While another difference is that AI companies violate copyright in a less obvious way, it's different for them, they do want to make money from the copyrighted works they train on.
That they usually don't strive for exact reproductions of works is another difference.
Compute, however, clearly is not.
Their wealth has exceeded an escape velocity beyond which they won't be put in prison (or if they are they would quickly be pay-for-play pardoned) unless they are seen as a threat to even wealthier people.
See, for example: Devon Archer, Jason Galanis, Benjamin Delo, Arthur Hayes, Samuel Reed, Trevor Milton, Carlos Watson, Paul Walczak, Todd and Julie Chrisley, Lawrence Duran, Marian Morgan, Imaad Zuberi, Changpeng Zhao (CZ), Joseph Schwartz, et al.
Some of these people are broke bitches compared to the group of people you're talking about now, and yet still hit the threshold of being above the law as long as they play the corruption game.
I mean... sure... we're all going to die eventually.
But in the meantime it would be nice if the rule of law existed regardless of wealth, but that isn't the world we live in.