Comment by oezi
20 hours ago
> What to do about it is the real issue.
Yes, it is and the article isn't going there enough what options we have as societies. I think this is because the article is still trying to convince you that the white collar job losses are indeed coming rather than taking this as a given.
If we take it as a given but don't consider a Terminator/SkyNet scenario within the next 10 years, then we do have some options:
- Taxing token usage
- Requiring local data centers - Requiring AI oversight
- Nationalizing the AI companies
- We probably need Chinese-style national firewalls to prevent companies moving their AI compute abroad
- Charging companies per displaced worker
- Requiring human worker to token consumption ratios in companies
A lot of these could help soften the blow of the rapid changes so labor markets can adapt.
Let's say you do all that. What about literally every other country on earth that is not the home of Openai/Anthropic/Google?
Are tokens fungible? (not referring to NFT's!)
Tokens are not fungible for hosted models but there are resellers like Github Copilot and OpenRouter. These allow you to purchase capacity and choose which hosted models to burn your tokens on. Obviously there is some margin being taken in order to provide this flexibility, but there's probably some offset with volume contracts.