Comment by MrScruff
3 days ago
I think it's not that difficult to see why a technology that will likely trigger widespread unemployment during a cost of living crisis, an arms race with China, along with all the alignment concerns, might not be hugely popular with the public.
Maybe I'd be a bit more optimistic if someone could explain a realistic economic scenario for how we're going to transition into our utopian abundant future without a depression or a revolution.
Pretty simple: The centaur of big-tech/government will pay people not to eat them. (i.e. UBI)
The incentives are, how you say, aligned.
The deeper issue I see is the psychological crisis for a species who believes it doesn't deserve to live if it isn't performing economically valuable activity, entering a world where it is unprofitable for it to be employed. (If I were the AI, I'd come up with some kind of fake jobs to keep the humans sane.)
UBI is just a massive extension of the welfare state. Governments can’t afford the current welfare spending, so where is the money going to come from? What do you think is going to happen to the markets when a large amount of the middle classes get laid off and can’t afford to pay their mortgages? What do you think is going to happen to the tech companies built on advertising to consumers when no-one has disposable income?
UBI ain’t gonna be enough for most white collar types to maintain their current lifestyles.
This assumes costs won't drop. I'm not an economist but the theory I hear is that there will be massive cost savings at every single point in the supply chain. So the same way your money is now amplified by AI in code, eventually with robotics that is the case in every field.
1 reply →
Also UBI will inevitably become as fubared as current tax law.
The current group of oligarchs pretty clearly disagrees with your perspective on their incentives. The big tech era has made people like Elon and Bezos some of the richest people in history and they have used their power for negative wealth redistribution. They give essentially none of their money away to the masses and instead use their power to weaken existing social programs and wealth distribution systems. I can't see those people suddenly doing a complete 180 as they amass even more wealth and power.
Agreed, this article seems to be dancing around the point: WHY are the Gen Z hating AI? We have a political ruling class that is all too willing to throw everyone under the bus if they aren't living up to some expectation, and the political class is being driven by an economic ruling class that largely seems to have the same opinion.
Gen Z would likely have a very different opinion if their basic living necessities were available to them.
> a realistic economic scenario for how we're going to transition into our utopian abundant future
One aspect almost certainly has to be data centers being run as utilities. That forces transparency, resists monopolization and gives public commissions a say in e.g. expansion.
Hell no, the current state of centralized AI is bad enough, socializing it won't make it better.
We need to let the AI as a service businesses fail.
But in the meantime you prefer privately-controlled monopsony datacenters?
1 reply →