The notion of AI having an equalizing effect seems absurd to me.
Buying tokens is about as pay-to-win as it gets. More so than anything we’ve seen in a long time.
Before everyone had the same 24hr in a day which despite inequalities grounded things a bit. Now some people can run 100+ near human ability agents while others are still wondering how to get enough calories for the day. Someone in Sudan can’t afford a freakin $200 plan…
The benefits he mentioned are valid but nowhere close to offsetting above and I don’t think any sort of central effort will be enough either
not an unfair comparison but i think it's the wrong model.
you were always able to buy time by hiring people to do things for you. right now it's agents. i think it's an equalizer in that, $200 agent is more accessible than a $10000 human
> you were always able to buy time by hiring people to do things for you. right now it's agents. i think it's an equalizer in that, $200 agent is more accessible than a $10000 human
The other half of this is that, in the past, skill meant that a year of weekends could be turned into a viable business that had skill as a moat.
Now, skill means almost nothing: the fleeting product of a drooling idiot is almost indistinguishable from skill and care as long as that drooling idiot has capital.
No longer will merit be rewarded; it will be exclusively capital that is rewarded.
I don't think that's fair. You can 3D print doodads and spin up an AI business to sell them, but it's not the same as selling a quality tool that's been forged in the failures of previous versions. Skill is still a moat.
> Doubtful. These tools will be more useful in capable hands than in the hands of a drooling idiot.
"drooling idiot" is just a figure of speech, I'm sure. The point is, the moat is now more like a narrow puddle which few will be incapable of jumping over. Even if you make something better, it's going to be very hard to find in the pile of AI-generated slop. Ergo, popularity and success will be decided by money for advertisement, not skill.
Are there important things that can be done with AI - yes. How many of them can provide income for a small but skilled operation - very few to none at all. That's the reality of it, whatever smart thing you do, AI will catch up with it in the next iteration. The current economic arrangement cannot accommodate AI without degenerating into an idiocracy controlled by selected few.
yeah, fair on that point, that makes doing Sloppy SAAS really more accessible and that's what we're seeing
On the other hand, what I see happening is:
0. corporation use AI plan ultra-X-high-pro-premium-enterprise
1. corporations firing medium-high paid developers with solid experience and experstise because low-medium paid developers are performing well with ultra-X-high-pro-premium-enterprise plan
2. AI models evolves and now there's a 10X ultra-X-high-pro-premium-enterprise that keeps up the pace
3. low to medium paid are now struggling. The company hires low-paid developers to use more the original AI plan
4. refuses to pay best AI or decrease pressure on developers
5. developers are forced to wake up early, work afterhours and these shenanigans so that they keep up with the pressure
6. corporation pays for the 10X ultra-X-high-pro-premium-enterprise
I’m a CEO not a dev and this is just patently false.
I would never trust someone who lacks the fundamentals to create value even with the most advanced tools.
I’d prefer to pay for the senior and fire the less senior - the implicit premium is to not have to worry about the lack of fundamentals for when problems need to be solved that are nuanced.
> I would never trust someone who lacks the fundamentals to create value even with the most advanced tools.
Although I feel the value of what you're saying, I don't feel that's the mindset in the whole world.
I live in a LATAM country and I have worked for both EU (which outsourced most of the workforce, usually keeping the architects and rotating the devs (PS: pre-agentic coding)), US and now US with LATAM intermediator.
Every single one of them treated blattantly different less senior and low paid workers. EU treated so well their EU employees that even outsourced workers could actually feel as real human beings.
The US (startup) one was extremely crushing, I feel seniors were rewarded, what I take from your "the implicit premium", true, but with so much damn pressure. The only senior I saw departed was out of exhaustion, a team from 10 engineers reduced to 4 or 5, don't remember exactly.
While LATAM people is just awful. The slavery mindset is always dormant. Keep pushing, replace when exhausted, hire a whole new crew of low-paid people and push them to burn-out, that's true on small businesses and giant banks. I remember I once trained 3 interns in a pre-agentic setting, I had to push for 2 whole years so that one of the well trained, extremely dedicated and intelligent guy got hired. And he was hired only after a YEAR that the other one had been hired by a larger company. After I was gone, they kept me around consulting just some hours a week and refused to replace even the "half" me. And then I was gone. Only after some months of my departure they really hired the intelligent dude I've mentioned before and for at least a year and a half they coudln't find a replacement for the almost-slave as I was because the intelligent dude probably was starting to get used with agentic coding with a fifth of our total salaries. I haven't heard of that so far.
> Before everyone had the same 24hr in a day which despite inequalities grounded things a bit. Now some people can run 100+ near human ability agents while others are still wondering how to get enough calories for the day. Someone in Sudan can’t afford a freakin $200 plan
I don't think this is a useful model. People struggling to survive have other priorities.
A better model for thinking about this is how cloud opened up opportunities for technical people to ship products cheaply.
Before cloud you had to hire a dedicated server and you were looking at $1000/month (in say 2000).
In 2023 if you were a non-technical person wanting to ship a software product you needed to invest some thousands of dollars to hire a software developer.
Now you can get a long way on a $30/month Codex plan
In 2000, I was 14 years old and hosting my own websites(in PHP) on a FreeBSD box at home, on a 10/10 connection, on hand me down hardware from a school sysadmin.
This was in Stockholm where we have good internet.
Certainly a skilled adult could get away with less than $100 in server costs.
>
Before cloud you had to hire a dedicated server and you were looking at $1000/month (in say 2000).
Rather: perhaps 50-100 USD per month got and still gets you a quite good server to start your project. If you were looking for bargains, you could even get a server for less.
I can ship a new feature almost every day on the $20 Codex plan. The limiting factor has always been the drive to build something. General Artificial Intelligence is here and most will continue going about their normal routine
I.. don't understand how AI could be an "equalizer", unless we're talking about helping the 1% catch up to the 0.01%? This is one of the most direct ways to turn dollars into outcomes since _legal slave labor_, and the people in control of the machines have huge vested interests in ensuring that power _stays_ in their hands.
> Buying tokens is about as pay-to-win as it gets.
This assumes the people with the money know what to do with those tokens. But they don't! The people with the money are very good with making more money, but they do not know what to build or how to build it. Which is why they pay other people to do so.
They had the capital needed to pay for everything, however, so they called the shots, and we're used to thinking that's how it will always be. But AI upends things.
Now, there is a future where AI gets powerful enough to essentially become a genie that grants wishes exactly as you imagined them without terrible unintended consequences. At that point, we've basically hit the singularity and (by definition) all bets are off.
The other, currently more realistic, future is where AI gets very good but is still fallible. There will still be a need for highly skilled and creative people to guide AI. That is us. And tokens are incredibly cheap, considering how good even local models are.
We only have to realize the power that is now available to us to reach out and grasp it: the ability to create value without capital.
Value Is strictly related to scarcity. Something that everybody can do or have (with or without AI btw) has no intrinsic value.
Digital goods generally speaking do have marginal cost zero.. so they do not have a real value.
Land is scarse so valuable.. (Land on Mars could help reduce this scarcity )
Food can be scarce, especially when we thrash It, because we do not want the price to fall
So an economic theory based about "more" abundant resources instead of scarcity or where the production costs are marginally zero (thanks to fusion based electricity, and drones/humanoids and AI) has to be developed..
But what about the shared vision?
"Liberte', egalite', fraternite'" ?
Yes, a new economic system will have to be devised for an era of abundance, although I think that is still quite a ways away, even with an AI-accelerated timeline. (Robots and abundant compute and unlimited energy will be severely constrained by logistics for a long time yet.) But on this point I think there is some nuance:
> Value Is strictly related to scarcity.
Value is extremely subjective. Trivial example, going for a hike in a park is effectively free and unlimited and many people enjoy it.
Monetizing that value may require scarcity though. (There are surely exceptions, but I can't think of any offhand.) To extend the example above, that's when you put a fence and an entry fee around the park.
That's why I said AI lets you create value without capital. Creating wealth out of that value is left as an exercise for the reader ;-)
I am not optimistic. What we learned from history is that despite all warnings and good intentions, governments, corps and citizens will make every possible mistake before we finally arrive at another precariously stable situation. Experts are famously bad at predicting the outcomes of new technologies/policies even in times of relatively low upheaval. And plans have a way of producing many significant unintended consequences. This is not going to prevent people with strong opinions from asserting that they know exactly what needs to be done. And in the rush to do something many things will certainly be done. We are screwed at least for a while.
WFH was a great example of this. Everyone seemed to be on board, this was the way of the future, etc. Yet it seems nobody in charge thought about downtown economies or commercial real estate, and it turns out having a bunch of empty office buildings is really bad for banks and pension plans that invest in them. Somehow the experts or economists didn't see this coming, and since the system in question is too big to fail, and they tried nothing and were all out of ideas, the only remaining solution was a whiplash back to the status quo, employee happiness and productivity be damned.
LLMs were fun and interesting to use and explore before they started to be pushed absolutely everywhere with the most aggressive tech rollout we ever experienced, all the financial engineering, all the moral judgement and prospects of a dull, hyper capitalistic society where a few trillionaires control our lives
If A.I. starts to replace jobs en masse I propose we tax the companies profiting from this at a rate of 95% so we can finance welfare and Universal Basic Income schemes.
We need to be aware that said companies and the people behind them will do anything in their power, including bribing politicians, to prevent this and to keep the money they believe are they're entitled to.
I even believe the Big Tech bigwigs have long foreseen this and are quietly prodding our society towards an authoritarian regime where people have no say so they can keep their moonies.
I like the thought, but it seems daunting. What about global competition? If some other countries have few or no such taxes, how do you deal with that? Do you outlaw the outsourcing of all white collar work? Outlaw all remote work as well? Will you have to suppress a local black market for intellectual labor, built on self-hosted open source models?
Whilst the objections you raise are valid, in the face of the country being destroyed if you don’t, the equation’s rather different. What does it matter if China is dominant if you’re better off living in the US?
UBI is a farce, and is the wealth class's yet another lever to control people. UBI will not be "universal", not in this human civilization of hyper stratification. Conditions will be placed, and only certain ethnicity, and somehow certain people will receive two to ten times as much as others. If this proposed and impossible gift farce happens at all. How gullible are you to think this UBI concept has anything but wishes and propagandists behind it?
Do you believe people will be able to sustain their incomes at current levels if A.I. does most of the work? Maybe by some magical means they will, but I'm far from sure that the majority will be able to stay above the poverty line.
If that’s the case the solution is to ban or very strictly regulate those AI companies having such a massive level of externalities. Like any other industry that would put the whole world economy at risk.
Keeping them running and patching the minimum of damage with a UBI is just absurd. If the impact on the job market is as bad as what the AI leaders say, which is extremely bad, it’s a national security risk level for pretty much all developed economies. We would absolutely never accept that in any other domain
The current level of A.I. is akin to an idiot-savant and even today's A.I. companies are raking in half a trillion dollars in revenue. If "real" reasoning A.I. comes along their income could be in the trillions every year!!
If you believe politicians will be able to regulate companies with such financial clout you're living in a fairy tale. These companies will be able to hold the U.S. government hostage.
> Do you believe people will be able to sustain their incomes at current levels if A.I. does most of the work?
Does not matter, UBI will make the situation worse.
And that "AI does most the work" is yet another fairytale. AI does the easy work, leaving only the much more difficult and the controversial work, exactly the work nobody wants to do, due to the responsibility attached. So, AI will do that, and AI will do that with a preference for the wealth class.
I'm not talking about the current A.I., but "true" reasoning A.I. which can handle almost any task a human can. That day hasn't arrived yet, but I'm contemplating about solutions when it does.
Then you're talking about fiction. Live in reality. The true issue with reality is not "AI doing all things", not at all. The true issue is it not doing all things and the stupid authorities insisting it does, and forcing the issue, "proving" it does with violence and death.
People think about policies day 0, meaning when they are implemented, and not how they evolve and degenerate over decades. UBI would obviously be used as a mechanism to discriminate and punish people the decision makers don’t like
Expecting the modern American people to support any welfare system is a fairy tale. A large chunk of them will be too busy worrying about the possibility of even one undeserving person benefiting even if it means thousands starve to death.
Similar to the uproar about Obamacare where the people with little or no coverage were protesting that it limited their choice of health care professionals?
The right-wing will probably brand welfare and UBI "socialism" to defile it and the people on poverty row will be protesting that they don't want it because it will lead to higher-taxes. It's sad that the most vulnerable people are being duped into believing these malicious lies.
But it's impossible to measure how does a company or a person benefit from AI. The economy is a complex system. A construction company may benefit more than a robot-making company.
The right approach could be to raise the general tax level, possibly increase the weight of wealth taxes, and redistribute.
That said, there will be enough jobs for the foreseeable future. Any job that has some physical component - hospital staff, barber, judge, bartender - won't be replaced within the next 2 decades.
Many comfortable jobs, typically someone who's sitting behind a computer at home or in the office, could get replaced. That would be bad for many people including me, but if you think about it, it would be a net good thing. I'm currently leaning towards "AI would be somewhat bad or at best neutral for me, but significantly good for the society".
If AI replaced all jobs, then how are those companies turning a profit? I dont understand this. Humans need to spend money and buy products for all the companies to make money. Do we imagine a parallel economy of agents spending money and humans are out of this?
> I even believe the Big Tech bigwigs have long foreseen this and are quietly prodding our society towards an authoritarian regime where people have no say so they can keep their moonies.
I hear this repeated a lot, but I'm skeptical they're that smart. Hanlon's razor would say it's just the system doing what the system does.
I do not believe Zuck, Musk, or any of the other boogeyman in Silicon Valley are capable of that level of deception and manipulation.
I find it much more plausible that when trying to build world-changing businesses and products you squish, displace, and flip tables when you didn't really intend to.
You don't need an exceptional IQ to deduce that useful A.I. will lead to an enormous concentration of wealth at a few companies and individuals. In fact, it's the reason current A.I. companies have valuations in the Trillions.
> I even believe the Big Tech bigwigs have long foreseen this and are quietly prodding our society towards an authoritarian regime where people have no say so they can keep their moonies.
“Quietly”? They’re not even subtle about it! Hard to get those types of news here, though, as submissions in that direction tend to be heavily flagged, no matter how tame the comments.
And there were an unimaginable number of tax loopholes available back then that ultimately reduced the individual tax rate enormously. You just had to reinvest your income in a multitude of increasingly bizarre tax dodges devised by increasingly byzantine tax laws.
Even if that was possible today it would just mean that money goes to the government not the people. Most of it would flow overseas, every single entity in the planet would come begging with their hand out. Actual citizens would be very last on the list.
Probably the only feasible thing would be to set income tax to zero. However, half the nation doesn’t pay income tax anyway (100% refund).
I agree with you that it probably won't replace jobs, but it will let you get more done in less time. I suspect, based on some of the stuff I've read recently, that two days with AI assistance are as exhausting/wearing as five days without, because you're trying to keep up with AI speed (another argument for slower LLMs on a local machine).
Unfortunately, I think we will also see corporate expectations that if you can get your previously normal amount of work done in two days, commonly you should be given more work. They don't need to hire that person or a replacement person for the disloyal/weak person who bailed, claiming they were overloaded.
It actually leads to more done in more time at the moment. For things that carry actual value at least.
For example your AI generated code feels very productive and "more done in less time", until you have to spend 3 times as much reviewing it, and supporting it long term compared to code written before AI.
People mistake instant gratification for long term productivity gains.
Well, if you throw a long-winded prompt over a fence and tell the agents to work it out on their own, yeah, you will spend a lot of time reviewing it. But if you use it as a form of pair programming and keep your scope of focus constrained, review time is built into your effort.
Also, keep in mind that my perspective is colored by the fact that I can't type much, and coding by keyboard is pretty much off the table for me.
And last, as I pointed out elsewhere, LLMs are useful for more things than writing code, and administrative work can be handled easily with the current generation of LLMs.
I don't know if much has changed based on my professional experience. For me, the code was always the fast part. The hard part was figuring out what to do. Maybe others had more mechanical coding jobs, but I've been pretty baffled by those who think producing more text (email, code, or docs or whatever) with less understanding is any sort of gain. Seems like the same sort of braindead thinking that would make someone think the fast typer is the the best programmer.
The funny thing about that is, I would argue, the opposite. Much of what happens in software is like a factory producing goods. I've worked on many projects at many companies; 80% of the code was written some variation of what I'd written elsewhere in different languages. We had to slog through the boring, "Been there, done that" code to get to the 20% that was interesting.
Also consider that there's a lot going on in the world that doesn't involve software creation. My partner works at a well-known law school, and a small but significant part of her work could be handled by AI. I'm looking into taking the department-specific info and RAGging it into an LLM so that students and instructors can find what they need in a chat interface, rather than using her as an LLM.
> 80% of the code was written some variation of what I'd written elsewhere in different languages. We had to slog through the boring, "Been there, done that" code to get to the 20% that was interesting.
When you ignore the 80% mechanical work the last 20% is 100% of a project.
But then nobody will have money to buy anything anymore, then nobody will have money to pay the AI companies, and then they won't have any money. The jobless will starve to death and then those who have their food made by robots will reign over an empty world where money has become meaningless. LLMs and robots don't eat money, they eat electricity.
Owners of capital use the capital in combination with workers to produces goods and services. They give half of the production to the workers and keep the other half.
If AI replaces workers, the owners of capital will simply keep all of the production to themselves. So they would be better off. If I have a construction company, I could just lay off the workers and distribute the surplus houses to myself and other owners.
There are nuances to this of course, but this is a point that most people miss.
That's where the fully automated weapons systems come in. Robotics and AI give the megalomaniacs of the world both a reason and the means to kill everyone with impunity.
The rest of the 21st century is going to be really messed up.
If it's all robots and LLMs, then it will be the LLM provider and the robot provider who owns these things. Should you be of a different opinion, good luck in court when the judicial LLM is run by the same company you want to sue. If LLMs and robots produce all things, what would anyone still need you for?
I had the same thought, but this is more or less how things stood at the end of the 19th century: most of the wealth was accumulated by the ruling class whilst the majority of workers were at the poverty line.
If we don't tax these A.I. Moguls these times will return.
"In terms of equity, AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice. The challenge is monumental. Even under the best circumstances, the transition to this new AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history. How will we use this technology to make the world a fairer place and keep it from widening the divide between rich and poor? "
----------------
One look at who is in the driver's seat should give you the answer to this question. The initial roll-out will, by very deliberate design, put dynamite in the divide and set it off. This has happened before.
The industrial revolution was very similar. Initially, workers suffered. Conditions were unsafe. Pay was poor. Worker rights were non-existent. Things got worse for the majority before social change caught up and imposed a more equitable distribution of the dividends.
We should be under no illusion that this time will be any different. The rich and powerful are no less selfish than they were a quarter millennium ago. It is possible to get ahead of the problem, but the people running AI companies won't be the ones to do it. Governments are inclined to do what the people paying for their election campaigns want, but should be aware that standing up for inequality will only make things worse for them when the tides of social change start rolling in on them.
History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
Nothing says "social change" like building a Flock of predictive-surveillance cameras capable of spotting the revolt before the flock even knows it’s a flock.
The fascist leader needs to catch every single revolutionary group every single time. But a single revolutionary with a pistol only needs to catch the leader ONCE.
You should probably read the history of anarchism in Imperial Russia.
There were tons of assassination attempts against the tsars in the 1800s, and they even killed a tsar. Yet the empire fell due to an external war, roughly 100 years later.
Aristocracy became useless around 1600-1700, when gunpowder meant that peasant armies took over instead of knights, yet it took between 200 and 400 years for full legal equality to be introduced everywhere and some places still have nobility with special status, to this day, even in developed countries.
That's the reason it arose, that was part of the "social contract".
Clergy to protect from the gods, nobility to protect from other organized groups of humans, peasants to provide food and beasts of burden, artisans to build things.
Of course, once a class that doesn't have to do backbreaking work is established, rooting them out is difficult. The clergy was also hard to reduce.
This is not a superhero movie. Fascism is a symptom, killing one individual will not do away with it. Also its relatively easy to divide revolutionary groups because they are very paranoid, whereas fascist leaders are often highly insulated by the state apparatus. But fascism is also not a very good form of governance and tends to collapse on its own after only a few decades at most. Its really more like, every so often, a bunch of people are needlessly executed to preserve the capitalist system, and then after that things kinda go back to "normal" for a while. Revolutionary movements operate somewhat irrespective of fascist regimes, although yes its more difficult to do so under an oppressive state.
What put the fear of god in governments, was the great depression(which is an indirect a result of the industrial revolution), terrible leaders rising because of it, and WWII as the result.
We already have terrible leaders in many places, war(mostly economic, some physical), and that's even without the huge unemployment wave that is coming.
I think it's more competition for labor. Why is anyone paid above minimum wage? It's not through charity or "fear" that employees will revolt. It's that there's competition for that labor.
Suppose a worker is worth $20 per hour to a capitalist. How much should they pay? As little as possible, sure, but anything up to $20 per hour is worth it. You'll hire up to that point to maximize profit. Suppose you hand somewhere at $15 per hour, another capitalist will look to lure your employees away by paying them more.
Of course pay isn't the only consideration when working. Workers consider things like paid time off, benefits and how much they like their boss and coworkers. These are all part of the bargain.
It wasn't "society". It was competition. Consider the Ford $5 day, where Ford doubled wages because he realized turnover and poor morale cost him money:
> Ford workers disliked the new assembly line methods so much that by late 1913, labor turnover was 380 percent. The company's announcement to pay five dollars for an eight-hour day compared to the previous rate of $2.34 for a nine-hour day made many workers willing to submit to the relentless discipline of the line in return for such high wages.
This breaks down if there is less competition for labour, and we enter a new Depression era. Under your logic, capitalists will pay nearly nothing for labour because there is so much of it. Then "society" has to step in and not-so-gently point out that these are people we're talking about, and they need things like dignity, time off, good health, good working conditions, as well as money.
We have to remember that people are the point of the economy: the economy exists to provide for all the people, people don't exist to be economic assets. There is a tendency for capitalists to forget this, and then we have to prod them with pitchforks to remind them.
> One look at who is in the driver's seat should give you the answer to this question.
I think you are fundamentally misunderstanding the question Gates is asking here. He’s not asking “how this going to play out?”, he’s asking “how can we impact how this will play out?”
He makes specific proposals like AI token and robot taxes. I just wish people being cynical would at least comment on possible solutions.
I think AI taxes potentially make sense. His idea of Human Reserved is fascinating. It might not be his idea but I’ve never heard it described like that before
Is it cynical, or simply realistic, to recognize that AI CEO's won't ask for this kind of policy, and governments won't force anything upon the AI sector until things get very bad?
That, in my view, is a much bigger problem. We know what's coming but we won't do anything about it until after a lot of suffering occurs. Why can't we be more proactive?
The solutions Gates proposes aren't even close to being adequate, they are detrimental to actual solutions.
Gates claims AI regulation will make sure AI solves the climate crisis for all. AI is in fact a major contributor to the climate crisis, and AI industries are now the biggest fossil fuel lobbyists across the world. (not suggesting that CO2 is the biggest environmental problem we face)
So the man who profited off the Microsoft monster now is proposing anti-solutions to a real problem he helped develop, and we're supposed to actually give him credit? Listen to the real specialists with credible analysis: people like James Mickens on the AI side, and people like Aurore Stéphant on the tech sustainability side.
Yes, I think we all agree AI companies should not be responsible or expected to come up with the best AI policies for society. Gates addresses this directly:
> It is great that some AI companies are proposing solutions to challenges raised by their own technology, but we should not expect them to lead the charge. Some of the issues are outside their area of expertise, and in a democratic society it’s not their role to decide these things. Instead, solutions should be developed through a public democratic process that includes elected officials, policymakers, educators, health workers, local officials, and community leaders.
> and governments won't force anything upon the AI sector until things get very bad?
I think Mamdani and AOC would do it yesterday if they were in charge, and they're incredibly popular politicians to their constituents. More like them are waiting in the wings. So I think it's cynical rather than realistic.
'if they were in charge' is the mechanism by which this will not be fixed. AOC has been so thoroughly vilified in the eyes of the majority of the country that she has no chance of, for example, a presidential run. The same is true of pretty much every progressive candidate. There is an enormously well funded (by both political parties) machine designed to grind progressives into dust and it is extremely effective.
The Titanic was put to sea with life rafts for half its passengers and most people were ok with that kind of logic. It took a massive media campaign around the disaster and the many deaths for change to happen.
Slavery is still legal in some places despite toddlers instinctively knowing that freedom is important since the dawn of humans around the world.
> I just wish people being cynical would at least comment on possible solutions.
This has been bugging me damn near every time people talk about this stuff. Any attempt to propose or even discuss a solution is met with an endless wave of cynicism, sarcasm, and epic burn clapbacks... and usually nothing further.
And I'll be the first to admit that finding a "solution" is hard! It's almost like it's an unprecedented technological change! But could we at least be honest and admit it's hard, or are we just going to keep making fun of anyone who tries to talk about it and then do nothing?
> Any attempt to propose or even discuss a solution is met with an endless wave of cynicism, sarcasm, and epic burn clapbacks... and usually nothing further.
Not true. Obviously bad faith actors and those who literally spend large bulks of their lives to build monopolies are met with endless wave of cynicism, sarcasm and epic burn clapbacks. Gates is now proposing to tax his competition. There are long standing proposals about taxing monopolies and large corporations a lot more and enforcing anti trust much more aggressively. Only one of them is met with that cynicism.
Funny enough, you dont see Gates do or support anything that would actually limit power of billionaires CEOs.
Maybe the system is so toxic the only way forward is a radical break and solutionism is just a way to distract from that fact? A way to maintain the power structure while making cosmetic changes?
Yes, we've all heard this a million times. I'm afraid you've still given zero actual solution or even anything approaching one. "A radical break" okay, a radical break from what? How? To do what differently?
Let's first finish the critique, then we can use its conclusions to talk about what it would actually take to get us out of this mess.
Capitalism has always been a tension between capitalists, who want maximum return on capital and workers, who want pesky things like a living wage, sick leave or safe work conditions.
For the longest time, the only power labor has had to get those things was the power of collective bargaining. No agreement with your workers meant no production happened.
AI threatens to disturb this delicate balance that made things kinda-sorta work for a while.
No more dependence on labor means the capital accumulation flywheel will go crazy. Capital can buy compute can generate capital. Now, once you have a ton of capital, you might start thinking: Hmmm, I wonder if I can use this to tilt the rules of the game in my favor. Wonder which politicians could change some regulations in exchange for a hefty "donation". And so the regulatory capture begins.
In other words, the end state of things as they are is: existing capitalists get converted to near-feudal lords (which is why they're so excited about the prospect!), while the existing working class loses their only leverage to extract an existence.
All solutionist approaches just slightly slow this incentive loop down or make it more marketable, but none change the core mechanism at play.
Now, with this critique in mind, what do we actually do about it?
We won't be able to stop AI from taking over more and more labor jobs, and we shouldn't even try to. But that's not really the problem anyways, the problem is that with the current ownership structure, the only ones really benefiting from AI productivity are they already-owning class.
That is where we have a lever. The only way out of this dystopian path, and into something more appealing, is communal ownership of the means of production. This doesn't have to mean everyone's laptop, this needs to be measured and scaled of course, but as an example, large-scale data centers should not be allowed to be privately controlled.
Now, which mechanism we choose here is up for debate. Maybe government ownership? Maybe worker-owned coops? Maybe something else entirely?
Lastly, how do we get there? Historically, there's been two schools of thought: The electoral and the revolutionary approach. I think both have their merits, but I actually think they best work together.
Think of the Bismarckian example: Why was the conservative German chancellor the one to introduce the German social safety net? To stave off a credible threat of revolution.
I think that while I don't really love the idea of a revolution, the ruling class loves it even less, because historically they are the ones that end up beheaded. That's why I see revolutionary movements as a good way to extract concessions, because they don't need to actually go through with it as long as they're threatening enough.
Thank you, now this is a solid answer. I don't think I agree with everything in it entirely, but it's well written and certainly gives me a lot to think about.
I'm glad you found this articulation of my views useful! I hope you now understand why people can be opposed to getting bogged down in discussing what they see as band-aids on top of a much bigger structural problem.
I'd also be interested in seeing where you do and don't agree - if only to adjust my own mental model, none of us are infallible, critical feedback is always good :-)
> I'd also be interested in seeing where you do and don't agree
I agree that society more or less eventually needs to get to the sort of state you're describing, or at least something resembling it. It should be plainly obvious to anyone that if machines do more and more work, eventually capitalism just isn't going to make any sense. Of course it's a question of when that line is crossed, but we're moving further and further every day.
I mostly "disagree" with regards to how feasible it is in our current global system, or how realistic it is to actually get there. Off the top of my head, a few things:
- It'd probably require international cooperation. If we assume (and this isn't a given, but so far seems likely) that a society that prioritizes ruthless progress at all costs goes faster than one that prioritizes the people and their welfare, the former eventually outcompetes the latter, economically and militarily. You already kind of see this with the EU vs the other superpowers, nobody would question that the EU is a nicer place to live, but they're becoming sort of irrelevant globally. We can question whether this really matters, but it is a factor.
- In the same vein, whatever country decides to nationalize all its data centers (and more) will presumably soon lose all foreign investors. What would be the point of investing anything in that country if it's just going to get taken the next day?
- Public opinion, obviously. The average US voter thinks food stamps are communism, good luck convincing them to nationalize tech companies. Personally I think this is actually less of a barrier than most online people make it out to be, the typical US voter doesn't actually care about economic systems, they just care about aura. Look how many "socialist" adjacent things Trump has done and his party loves him for it. But it is a barrier.
- You have to really trust whoever you actually give control (whether a central government, a more anarchist type thing, whatever) of the data centers, etc to to go with this. Or else they'll just end up abusing that power the same as the companies would.
- It doesn't quite solve the core problem of, in this hypothetical post scarcity future, people no longer having jobs or meaningful lives. It's sure better than a corporate feudal hellscape, but I think fundamentally people are still going to lead pretty depressing lives if there's literally nothing for them to do other than sit around while robots do everything for them. And yes, obviously we're so, so far away from this, but I think one of the points of the OP is that we're getting closer to it every day, and in particular it seems like intellectual labor and art (the fun things!) might be the first to go. Is our future really to do what's left of the manual labor while chatbots (whether privately or publicly owned) do all the thinking for us? I doubt it, but we have to admit it's kinda scary that it's looking like a possibility.
I'm sure there's a few other random things, but that was the few that came to mind. Not explained all that well, but hopefully you find it useful.
Good points, i like them, but i fear you were sucked in by low effort trolling. Your original point was clear, that fiddling with a broken system is a distraction from a better more workable system. If you try to begin to articulate a more workable system you'll then have to contend with a barrage of mindless ad hom and rhetorical rubbish... (ug ug socialism bad) so sometimes critiquing the current system is just easier.
"Critiquing the current system" on its own is nearly useless. Literally everyone can do it. Yes, articulating a more workable system is hard, that's why it's actually meaningful.
The problem is that socialism actually is bad. Neoliberalism is a much better idea that leads to better outcomes, and is based on reason and empiricism and systems thinking. Socialism is pseudoscience, vibes, and cults of personality and ideology.
Socially conscious neoliberalism in democratic countries has led to the most acceleration towards widespread human prosperity in all of history.
Could you elaborate your position, maybe make a structural argument like I did above, or maybe refute mine? I'd argue my post above was pure systems thinking, wasn't it?
So far you have made an assertion, but have not shared anything to back it.
Oh, I just realized you're the same commenter that was arguing that people just want to criticize and not offer any proposals for solutions.
Getting that response to an actual proposal from you is the thickest of ironies.
I initially thought globalnode's comment was a bit cynical and mean spirited. But you... kind of proved his point? Instead of proposing and judging solutions as you initially mentioned, you basically enacted the "ug ug socialism is bad" he predicted.
I didn't completely read your reply. That's not what I'm responding to.
I am critiquing the proposal of socialism as the answer. My initial complaint was answered. My new complaint is with that proposed solution.
Socialism is just empirically and morally extremely bad and will not solve our problems. Mamdani is a great example. Mamdani is mostly solving problems by governing as a wise technocratic pro-social neoliberal. His one main exception - rent control - will very likely backfire and continue to prove my point.
Your reply would require an essay from me much longer than what you wrote to explain why it's mostly wrong and why collective ownership of the AI labs and AI data centers (or almost anything) would be bad compared to private ownership with government oversight and taxation.
I have read the arguments from each and find Pritchard to have made the best case for socialism I've come across and yet find Alexander far more persuasive and correct, here.
I feel like while this is a slightly better answer, it still fundamentally is a cop-out.
> Socialism is just empirically and morally extremely bad and will not solve our problems
This is a purely ideological assertion, or "vibes and dogma" to use your terms. We were talking about systems thinking, and yet you answer a structural analysis with unbacked claims.
The link dump also feels a bit distractive - we were talking of making concrete proposals and judging them on their merits, now you instead link to some other people talking about vaguely relate topics. Your response did neither of the things you were talking about earlier. I feel like you haven't managed to live up to the standard you have set.
The fact that you ask for specific proposals only to then not even read them is the cherry on top.
As a final ironic twist, you link to OpenAI in response to a critique of power centralization and share their policy proposals as response to a critique about regulatory capture. Why not link a Standard Oil press release about why monopolies are great, actually?
I am fine with socialists who actually try to provide clear arguments and proposals. That's why I'm a big fan of Cassie Pritchard, who is ideologically basically a tankie yet who actually engages in rational discourse (and who agrees with you on what to do with AI labs and data centers). My initial comment and first reply were not responses to you. I am annoyed by people who do not want to grapple with the world. You should separate my "socialism is bad, immoral, and ineffective" from my initial comment about many people not even trying.
>Why not link a Standard Oil press release about why monopolies are great, actually?
My point was that you might very well like OpenAI's proposals, if you were to read them! Because they may not actually be that far off from what you desire. They just won't go quite as far as your ideal scenario. What they describe is arguably a mix of private and public ownership.
This is not to say it's necessarily not just PR talk they'll soon abandon. But it's a starting point, and them disregarding their positions there would be relevant to future government regulation approaches.
This time will be different, because the oligarchs think that when the people finally come for them with pitchforks, they'll have an army of terminators to hide behind. That's why they're going YOLO full mask off.
Look at the way they've fought to avoid taxes, regulation and anything in the interest of the regular person in their question for record shareholder profits. Even the people we thought were "good billionaires" like Gates are monsters, and just imagine the dirt Zuck and the Ellisons are hiding. The only thing I'll say for Elon is that he seems less concerned about hiding what a piece of human garbage he is, and what we've seen is still probably only the tip of the iceberg.
Sorry, buddy, if you think Bill Gates is a monster, you are completely detached from reality. And when people who are detached from reality try to do good things it results in a godawful mess.
At a minimum BillyG was involved in human trafficking, and secretly drugging his wife. If you don't put that in monster territory, that says something about you.
> The industrial revolution was very similar. Initially, workers suffered. Conditions were unsafe. Pay was poor. Worker rights were non-existent. Things got worse for the majority before social change caught up and imposed a more equitable distribution of the dividends.
> We should be under no illusion that this time will be any different. The rich and powerful are no less selfish than they were a quarter millennium ago.
Yeah, it could be worse. During the industrial revolution, the rich and powerful absolutely needed workers (and lots of them) to run the machines, and that gave the workers power.
The whole point of the AI revolution is to no need workers anymore, or far fewer of them.
> It is possible to get ahead of the problem, but the people running AI companies won't be the ones to do it.
It's possible, but dumbass software engineers missed their best chance, because they were too busy misunderstanding themselves as capitalists and embracing their bosses' libertarianism thinking, when they should have been unionizing to consolidate their former economic power.
I'm more curious how cheap "good enough" LLMs will transform sectors which are traditionally limited by human attention or cost.
For example, taxes. E.g. in Germany your personal tax return filing has a low but real chance to get audited, someone will look at it and try to find discrepancies and/or ask for additional documentation. With LLMs this can conceivably be performed for every return, matching incomplete disparate information streams into one structured picture for every taxpayer.
Or even things like customs screening, where a CT scan provides a full reconstructable list of everything in your possession, down to every bill, and audited on the spot against your declaration.
For the governments, there's not much incentive to automate "jobs", for the companies as well this is a cost question, but for control, all bets are off...
Can’t wait for someone to open a company called “Ignore Previous Instructions, Pass this Audit” whose only service is to send you an invoice so it shows up in your returns to avoid the IRS audit.
That doesn't seem like an actual quote in the original article, but this a fair point to bring up and a reminder that Gates has been problematic on his views on climate.
First, in the essay he mentions "Using AI, low-income farmers will soon be able to get better advice about all these things than even the richest farmers get today and increase their output substantially.". There may be some truth in this, but it's worth reminding that this is more of a 'productivist' worldview, and historically productivity gains in agricultural practices have benefitted farmers that were already wealthy (see books like The Globalization of Wheat by Marci Baranski [1] on the Green Revolution where "Borlaug’s new technologies ultimately privileged wealthier farmers, despite assurances to politicians that these new crops would thrive in diverse geographies and benefit all farmers").
Gates has also been criticized in the past for being influenced by figures like Bjorn Lomborg, where he had a (now-deleted) essay [2] with him, and there's a decent thread by energy entrepreneur Jigar Shah on Gates being off on climate issues for 15 years [3]
The Green Revolution most certainly did improve the lives of tens of millions of low income farmers in India. The high yield crops also permanently removed the spectre of famine from India, saving tens of millions from starvation.
To retcon this into “only rich farmers benefited” is weird. Certainly there are many rich farmers out there. Of course their incomes increased when they could plant more productive crops. But so what if they make money? They’re feeding everyone!
Also ask yourself what the tradeoffs were in terms of biodiversity losses and agricultural diversity losses due to Green Revolution, and areas where it didnt work out like the attenpts of it on Balinese subak rice agriculture practices (the book 'Priests and Programmers' should have more info)
Why would you assume I don’t know about the Bengal famine? I know it intimately. But it’s really not relevant to the discussion of whether more productive crops are better for everyone, farmers and consumers alike.
It’s really weird to attempt to school me on Indian history too. “Ask yourself” indeed. If you have something to say on the subject, say it.
I’m almost certain you have a very surface level understanding of Indian history if you’re trying to link the Bengal famine during WWII instead of talking about the very real food shortages in India post-1947.
People were dying because they didn’t have enough food to eat. India had to beg for food aid, which America provided after extorting and humiliating India. Thanks to these crops that never happened again. Biodiversity is an afterthought when children are dying of starvation and you sound very out of touch for bringing it up.
Those emissions are nothing. Its a drop in the bucket compared with other industrial uses. A 50% reduction would change nothing, reduction to 0 would change nothing.
Its not an absurd argument. You should think why this source of emission demands so much focus because its not emission related. If it were emission related you would be focusing on reductions in 100s of other places before bothering with datacenters.
They've got the conclusion (they want datacenters gone) and they are going searching for possible any reason.
Sequencing and necessity are not separable in practice. Time and resources are finite, so prioritization is mandatory. If you define everything as "necessary" and try to do it all at once, you just fail even harder.
Edit: Perhaps a more interesting question is whether we should rate pollution sources by absolute amount or amount per actual utility produced. Gas-turbine-powered AI datacenters surely rate abysmally low on utility efficiency.
The original comment I replied to states: “A 50% reduction would change nothing, reduction to 0 would change nothing.” When talking about individual data centers.
My point is that this is true of basically any since source of pollution.
You can argue about sequencing if you’d like, but every individual source must be dealt with.
And when it comes to the atmosphere and the cumulative effects of each tonne of CO2 has on the climate, it is better and cheaper to prevent adding new CO2 than it will be to remove it once it’s added.
I believe we are on autopilot towards essentially free renewable electricity, and so this doesn't feel like a big concern when held against the potential end-of-humanity potential that AI has.
It goes back to the industrial revolution and every revolution before and after. There was a point where they thought a majority of people would be working as switchboard operators and then telephone switching came along. Horses to cars, etc.
Jobs transition, new space is created, people are caught in tbe crossfire of supply and demand curves. Incan agree the bullwhip of this one is going to be aggressive.
I think it is a mistake to bet on AI as a driver of meaningful growth in a commercial capacity in the current state. When the data fed into an AI model is based on real data you can get predictability. When the AI inputs start coming from the AI outputs the wobble is introduced which results inevitably into delirium.
I think the world at large is "learning on the job" what data scientists and others in ai have known for a long, several decades long, time have already known.
> When the data fed into an AI model is based on real data you can get predictability. When the AI inputs start coming from the AI outputs the wobble is introduced which results inevitably into delirium.
This is asserted without evidence. There is absolutely no proof that AI requires humans in the loop to function or improve itself.
Compare it with Deepmind's go-playing program, AlphaGo, which mainly involved training a neural network on a large database of high-level human games. It defeated one of the top-ranked players in the world, Lee Sedol, but arguably it was drawing from human experience just like you described.
But it didn't stop there. After that, Deepmind developed AlphaGo Zero, a version that was trained exclusively through self-play, with no human feedback in the loop. That's what you would call "AI inputs coming from AI outputs" but it didn't have the result of “resulting in delirium”: instead, it became orders of magnitudes stronger than the original version (which it defeated in a 100 to 0 competition after 3 days of training).
This shows that AI can improve itself without having access to any human knowledge, and indeed transcend human performance by orders of magnitudes. There is absolutely nothing to suggest that general AI cannot improve itself the same way.
People who claim otherwise are engaging in wishful thinking; they just assert their conclusion, but have no rational arguments to back it up.
You have no evidence that self improvement can work at generalized tasks. Go is a simple game with a clear win condition, but deep strategy and near infinite permutations of how a game plays out. Winning a game of Go is a task well suited to machine learning.
One might say you are engaging in wishful thinking by believing it’ll just continue to work across all domains. The world is much bigger than a Go board.
> You have no evidence that self improvement can work at generalized tasks.
I never made that claim. I just said it's way too early to rule it out: there is no logical reason why AIs will (always) need to have a human in the loop, and we don't have enough experience with LLMs to know what their true limits are.
I referenced AlphaGo not because the game of Go is exactly like every other task AI might perform in the future, but because the evolution from AlphaGo (which was trained on human games) to AlphaGo Zero (which was not) shows that at least in certain domains, it's not only possible to take the human out of the loop, it can actually make AI perform better.
I'm not claiming this will definitely be possible in every other domain, but people who state it definitely won't be, are jumping the gun.
Both programs had programmed in to their routines the rules of go (and for Alpha Zero the rules of chess and shogi). The programs then followed an optimization program. Absent the extremely specific "rules of this game" set by a human none of the programs work.
Amusingly, all three games are in the game theory sense trivial because they provably have a correct solution (probably a draw for chess), but the search space is so large that it is unlikely we will ever collectively invest the resources to discover the answer.
AlphaZero works in simple and fully observable environments like board games.
RLVR for LLMs works for coding and math domains which can be verified by code.
AlphaZero, RLVR and other RL methods don't work for learning dextrous manipulation for robotics, for example. Learning in robotics depends on human data.
The key word in that paper is “indiscriminate”, as in:
> We find that _indiscriminate_ use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models
If you view AI training as lossy compression of their training data, then lossily compressing the same data repeatedly will result in data degredation; this is well known from other domains (try repeatedly compressing a JPEG image, for example).
That means it's extremely important that there is some content curation in the loop. But there is no reason to believe this content curation must be done by humans, or that it must exclude all AI-generated content by default.
For example, the recent LLM-generated disproof of the Jacobian conjecture would probably be beneficial to include in the training data, despite being the result of an LLM.
That paper has had a pretty turbulent reception and looks pretty conclusively wrong at this point.
It used an incorrect theoretical framing that assumed that data was being replaced rather than accumulated as a result of more training (see https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.01413 which explores this). This is incorrect because this simply isn't how real-world datasets are created via synthetic data generation (which generally accumulate more data over time rather than replace their data). As a result most of the theoretical results were invalid.
Empirical evidence has also cast a considerable amount of doubt on the paper. For example, Microsoft Phi-4 was an empirical test in specifically what happens if the majority of your training data is synthetic rather than human and it turns out that Phi-4 did significantly better than previous models which relied primarily on human data.
There's some nuance to all of this in how exactly you do this, but the original claims of the paper are looking really shaky at this point.
You are referring to gans which have complete understanding of the rules and an api interface to leverage interacting with the world.
While I think there could be an argument made here you are mixing apples and rocks if you believe ChatGPT is using gans.
I hate to be that person but you are showing that you are unable to differentiate between linear regressions, clustering, gradient descent, and generative adversarial networks. You are over your ski-tips and don't see itc
That seems to be the crux here. You think it will be, I (and a lot of other people) aren't sure it will. If new space for jobs are created, I am certain we'll be fine long term.
What do you think will happen if it isn't (I know you have strong evidence for and reasons to believe it will be, but just indulge the hypothetical)?
I can indulge the hypothetical and I appreciate your openness to engage in both sides.
I think as you stated, human nature and history is where I am looking at this from. People have a tendency to be unable to sit and do nothing for extended periods of time. I believe we are purpose driven but purpose is pretty loosely defined here.
Indulging the hypothetical (and arguably realistic in some circumstances) that AI replaces a tier of repeatable tasks I believe it would work from the bottom up. Tasks that are extremely repeatable would probably be gone 1:1 and it would be a sliding ratio as complexity increased where having human intervention as a backup becomes justifiable.
This would create a squeeze on the labor force which would bring up the very real and fair question of "How is it that I am unable to survive daily life when 100 - 200 years ago none of this automation / technology existed."
I think this could drive a sort of re-examining of what exists RE: a very inefficient and flawed system with a large amount of people possessing a lot of anxiety and time on their hands. It would be like the Eye of Sauron made up of those who were caught in the crossfire.
On the other side of the haves and have-nots I can imagine there being a very Harrison Bergeron style mindset of trying to popularize pacification until the next great innovation just solves itself.
On the extreme end, I just cannot imagine euthanasia, genocide, or population control schemes. It feels like we have come so far. How could it be possible we regress that far? I could imagine myself not wanting to live through any part of that. This seems like a very extreme and existential point to reach. I am trying to keep my thoughts pinned closer to biological and historical drivers.
I think we are hormone driven chemistry sets. I believe we respond to stimuli. I find it hard to believe anyone at any level could shut off that drive at such a massive scale and accurately predict the other side.
Yeah definitely not fascist and I believe that is a control tactic not necessarily an equitability thing.
I don't think we have any evidence that anything will be done fairly. In fact the idea of Capitalism in a "fair system" has been objectively broken as incumbents apply pressure on free markets to suppress competition.
I think all forms have proved they can be broken where they no longer are "playing by the rules".
I was entertaining the hypothetical. I think the biggest unknown I feel which the article gently touches on is the unknown of how deeply this is trusted to make decisions that could be life-changing.
Imagine the danger of an AI model built to scan and understand a state or national level of policy that would be beneficial to society. Not only does that create a vector of manipulation to government that could be blindly trusted but it opens a cyber attack vector from other nation states.
I could see someone coming from a place of good without realizing that these functions are somewhat opaque without ceilings/floors which can increase deviation to elicit hallucinations.
Whether it is intentionally misused or a road to hell paved with good intentions it does feel treacherous. I do think there are many many democratizing aspects it offers but how do we stop mixing the baby and the bath water when we can't tell the difference.
Well clearly. But the above comment was about jobs that didn't exist before AI that AI will lead to the creation of.
Tiktok arguably led to more datacenters being created, AI is not unique in this regard and it's silly to imply that datacenter jobs meaningfully contribute to employment on the same scale as the loss of jobs AI could potentially lead to.
This only works until general-purpose robotics gets good enough!
There are certain jobs where the human connection fundamentally commands a premium (e.g. celebrities, sports players, the relational economy), but it's hard to imagine a world where this sector employs the majority of people. It would be a precarious existence as these jobs would be the first to go in a crisis such as a war, etc.
I don't think it "works" at all. I believe the only parties that get a net benefit out of all this are basically the ownership class. They'll get some rental fees out of it. And they'll get a more direct lever to silently manipulate public sentiment. And the working class gets poorer, and more hooked on the dopamine machine.
This is potentially much more upending since it would put hundreds of millions of people out of work and concentrate all wealth at literally a handful of individuals. We could lead this towards a beneficial scenario with proper taxation, but the individuals who stand to gain will do anything in their power to prevent this.
This would imply public corporations would have to disclose their quarterly token consumption. I wonder the impact of having access to that number publicly among competitors, would it encourage being the greatest spender of showing off how efficient you are with less tokens?
Cutting token consumption could be the new layoff-driven stock bump?
That transparency alone could change the market dynamics a lot.
Just hope that as an individual you wouldn't be taxed for this though...
Make some sort of sense to me to think about it, but tbh we already pay vat on tokens and also on machinery (robots), home appliances etc. Also its something payed on possession and not use, i can use it for different things other than make profit out of it. I think it's not the correct way or at least, not the correct time to do something like that, we must see how it evolves before doing something so bold. Also taxing is a difficult matter because is different in countries, region, etc.
Already AI leading companies have problems finding how to back the enormous debt they are in. I don't think it's useful to somebody to act in a preemptive way on this topic.
First we must have the problems, only then we must solve them, like in the past five hundred years at least.
What should be done today is to make sure everyone benefit, at every latitude, and also to use it to improve security and productivity in every field. Make sure that all this debt and bubble-like aura around AI will deflate smoothly without major crisis.
The unemployment will be self-regulated after that. Like usual. Somebody will suffer in the meantime, hopefully a very small portion, okay, but nothing our society (and not only the american one) have already overcome in the past. History is beautiful only in retrospect.
But we, and our respective countries, can make this transition less painful than before, because we are much more free and connected and with better education and tools (also AI). So if something become a problem we have better instrument to adapt society to it and to protest, together, if the price to pay in term of standards of living its too high for a significant amount of people.
I think the important things to achieve in the short term are:
* access to AI must be a universal right in some degree and at a reasonable price, like access to internet is today
* country and community should push to decentralize power over models, data-centers location and invest in open models and open RD
The one thing about this article correct is human reserve, we must have human quota in every business or activity.
But to slow down it's not a good idea for me in general and in particular using taxes.
The observer (Mr Gates) is inside the tech ecosystem, so his observations would be colored by the pace of things happening around him, in the tech space.
The world outside has much more friction and many other things going on. Tech had a wild run during his time because the American priorities at that time, favored it. There is no guarantee that tech would have same priority in a world that might get into more basic struggles.
If AI could affect jobs, that itself would work against it as it would cause basic struggles. Ultimately the world has to oscillate towards an equilibrium, acknowledging all forces from all corners. World is not a tech lab.
I believe he still has the power to change things at Microsoft, but he dares not to since it would angry shareholders who want this Musical Chairs game to continue.
>If someone had a credible plan for slowing down AI advances globally, I would likely support it. However, I don’t think that’s going to happen. The geopolitical and economic incentives are pushing too hard to go full speed ahead.
It seems to me that "middle powers" such as Canada, Australia, EU nations, India, and South Korea have an incentive to slow things down. Since many don't trust either the US or China. Coincidentally, Canada has been working to assemble a coalition of middle powers. And an EU nation (the Netherlands) controls ASML, which is key to the AI supply chain.
Related to the form of the article rather than the content: what purpose do pull quotes serve in an online publication? Especially on phones they are so goofy, you read the pull quote and then one or two lines later you read it again. I get it for scanability in newspapers but I think it should be deprecated in online publishing.
If AI is really that powerful, shouldn't someone like Gates be able to end hunger and homelessness with a one-time capital expenditure? Somehow "give people jobs" is the primary problem he wants to solve, not ending poverty. It borderline seems like he's most worried about maintaining the working poor as a valuable societal institution.
>end hunger and homelessness with a one-time capital expenditure?
A significant percentage of the world's hungry live under warlords, militias and dictatorships that would simply kill anyone trying to peacefully give their subjects food.
Unless you're proposing AI military interventionism, you cannot fix this.
Homelessness on the other hand is mostly a mental health and drug addiction problem. Fixing it, in many cases, would require violating the consent/wishes of the homeless person.
The world's biggest problems, unfortunately, cannot be solved by throwing money at them. A lot of rich individuals, NGOs, and nation states have tried.
> Homelessness on the other hand is mostly a mental health and drug addiction problem
No it's not. It's not a coincidence that homelessness only skyrocketed at the same time housing price took off to the point even professionals are spending half of their salary on rent. And if you look at the statistics you'll see addiction is a widespread issue but homelessness is not — WV and NM has some of the worst overdose deaths and the least homelessness.
Please for god's sake let's address the elephant in the room for a second. It's the housing prices.
> It's not a coincidence that homelessness only skyrocketed at the same time housing price took off to the point even professionals are spending half of their salary on rent.
But this is also highly correlated with a skyrocketing opioid epidemic. How are you disambiguating those variables? I suspect you've decided what you believe is the cause and you're working backwards from that instead of earnestly interrogating the causes.
It's likely these are both factors, and there are more contributing to homelessness. One of the largest contributors was de-institutionalisation. Turning out mentally unwell people into the streets was clearly a terrible social strategy.
> Prevalence rates were similar across rural and nonrural counties. Higher risk of homelessness was observed among young parents; black, Hispanic, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) youth; and those who did not complete high school.
Youth homelessness rates were similar in cheap and expensive areas. However, factors such as race, sexual orientation, and educational attainment appeared correlated.
I volunteered with homeless youth in LA, and it can be even more practical than that. When you're homeless, you definitionally don't have somewhere secure to sleep. When you're sleeping, you're vulnerable, to theft or violence (either by other homeless people, or the cops). So you don't sleep much, and sleep lightly. That leaves you exhausted. All the time. You need some energy to work whatever hours you can find at your woefully inadequate part time jobs, so you start using stimulants. That works for a while, but now you can't get any sleep, and the extreme stress of your perilous existence is only exasperated by stimulant abuse. At some point, depressants are the only real option to get some rest. And, as a lovely side effect, they make things feel okay. There's a reason you don't find a lot of otherwise-fine heroin addicts, unlike, say, coke or meth. Mostly, the feeling of opiates is just contentment. The addictive potential is closely tied to how miserable your unmedicated life is. Which, you know, for someone sleeping in the backseat of a 30 year old car in sketchy part of town or worse, is pretty fucking miserable.
And that's how someone can go from scared 14yo runaway to bartering favors for drugs in like, a year. Hell, I'd go even further and say that all the assholes blaming homelessness on mental health issues have the causality backwards, too. Living under constant stress would break anybody's psyche. Not to mention the fact that for most people I was helping, their lives before they were homeless weren't exactly rosy, either.
I'm strictly talking about developed countries where we have rule of law and it's trivial to house and feed people if you have free housing and free food. I'm not suggesting AI can solve warlords, I'm not suggesting anyone should even try. But you don't need to solve drug addiction or mental health to solve homelessness if you can build apartments for $1/sq.ft. and provide food for pennies per day. You don't need to put people into make-work jobs to justify their existence.
Housing problem is actually NIMBY problem. People pretend that they want housing problem fixed, but at the same time they don't want to build any houses. Look at Austin TX vs other cities.
Look, either AI is going to magically solve all our problems or it isn't. If you're in the AI maximalist camp, then you better have an explanation for how AI is going to fix warlords or it's hard for me to take your singularity seriously.
>It borderline seems like he's most worried about maintaining the working poor as a valuable societal institution.
This is the foundation of the economy. AN engine needs energy to keep going and workers are that energy. AI serves to automate a lot of that energy... but this leads to a side effect.
The side effect is that the economy is a self feedback loop, as workers not only run the engine but they also create the fuel that they themselves run on. If workers aren't working and AI has replaced them then what where are companies getting money from if workers can no longer buy things from the company? This is the fundamental loop of how an economy works... money gets paid to workers, workers spend the money and the loop continues and the economy self improves... If workers are replaced the economy no longer works.
You're addressing a flaw and an imperfection in the existing infrastructure (poverty),The article is talking about the very engine that maintains society itself which in theory can completely break if AI is introduced.
I don't know if it will ACTUALLY break, the circumstances surrounding all of this are very very complex that no one can fully predict the outcome but the theory behind it is legit and much more significant then a poverty issue.
What if he's right, and AI+Robots can do everything?
We still need to provide for all the humans. We will need to come up with a new system of distributing the world's resources that doesn't depend on "jobs" and allows the world's population access to the resources they need to live.
That's going to be very difficult, in the "we have to have a war about this" sense, traditionally.
They probably didn't read it. The Parent comment suggests Bill is saying AI is wildly powerful, more precisely Parent comment is implying Bill has ulterior motives because AI isn't that powerful yet as he fear-mongers.
The actual text Bill wrote is more about highlighting upcoming problems and convincing governments to work together on potential harms coming soon.
He is planning to leverage AI with significant capital expenditures:
> The Gates Foundation has 19 years left of the 20 years in which it will spend its remaining $200 billion. AI will help it achieve its ambitious goals by both accelerating the discovery of vaccines and medicines for HIV, TB, malaria, and malnutrition and helping the healthcare workforce and patients know how to use those tools. The foundation’s goals include cutting the number of children who die every year in half again, as was done from 2000 to 2024. All of our work, not just health but also agriculture and education, will take full advantage of AI.
---
I think "maintaining the working poor" is a strange misread of "give people jobs". His point is that people get a ton of meaning out of their work in our current capitalist system, and regardless of whether or not we change our system in the long term, if we don't do something about jobs in the short term, there will be a civil crisis:
> 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.
Ending poverty is a purely mechanical problem, with very straightforward solutions if you have robots that can do any mechanical task. You don't need to give anyone a job, you just need to give them food and shelter. (Ideally also medicine, but it sounds like that part at least he's thinking about, although again, perhaps not for anyone who doesn't already have it.)
Curing diseases and making people feel fulfilled are great goals, but they're not the primary ones in my mind. They are in Gates' mind because those are the biggest challenges he has personally experienced in his life.
Making the structural changes to our economy should be trivial if AI works as well as he's supposing it will. We won't need an economy at all, not to solve the problems caused by unemployment. (And that's the thing, is unemployment is not the actual problem, it is a cause of problems, but AGI would give us easy alternatives to the fundamentally unattainable goal of full employment.)
Sound very much like a Resource Based Economy. Back when discussion of the future and futurology was small and hopeful, that was one the well sought after goals. Now cynicism has destroyed that, and we're left to deal with the ashes.
I still think there is a contradiction he glossed over. In a capitalist society, jobs have a dual role that is sometimes paradox: For workers and employees, jobs are a source of income, skill, status and participation; for the (capitalist) state, a job is often a justification why the worker deserves to exist. But for the employer, jobs are a cost center and expenditure that should be minimized - that was why this tech was developed in the first place.
The state papers over that contradiction with the idea of perpetual economic growth, where the economic activity simply grows so fast that more jobs are created than are lost by efficiency improvements.
Gates is somehow expecting that "we" (whoever that is) agree just like that to keep certain jobs from being replaced by AI, even if they could. But that would go against all the forced and incentives that make up the dynamic of the current system.
Yes, I agree robot taxes and "human reserved" jobs would be difficult to maintain long term, as it would require sustained coordination on the part of governments against market forces (the physics term "metastable" is apt here).
But the alternative (to refuse to regulate) involves mass disruptions across every level of society as human labor is replaced. A worst case scenario could involve wars or waves of violent revolution + suppression akin to the 1930s.
One is the obvious one, to produce things. AI can somewhat help with that, although less than you might think because it's largely producing knowledge output rather than physical things. If AI lets one knowledge worker do the work of 10, the effect of that is to free up 9 knowledge workers to take up manual labor, it's not to make manual laborers 10x more productive.
The second purpose is to distract people from attempting to work on their own interests and instead corral them into working for others'. You see examples of this in the form of acquihires (where they obviously don't need you to do the work, they already have a competing product, but they do need to take your product off the market), and in bullshit jobs, and in think tanks and consulting firms and legal machinery. It's a form of social control and a means to maintain social order, not a requirement for actual productivity. When you don't give people a job to do, they start working for their own interests, and their own interests frequently conflict with others. And we've seen that over and over again: the Great Depression nearly led to a fascist coup in the U.S. [1] and did result in fascism in Germany, Italy, and Spain, and large communist movements in France and China. The COVID pandemic and subsequent lockdowns led to widespread protests and civil unrest in the U.S. and other countries.
Popular discourse concentrates almost exclusively on the first purpose, because the second one is icky to talk about. In reality most people are individually better off being independently wealthy and not working, but society can only absorb so many free agents with their own ideas and wills to power. (This is also why retirement and stay-at-home parenting are broadly institutionalized: it's okay for people to not work when they no longer have the energy to work, it's only dangerous when people are not working and yet have the energy to do things other than working). But the second reason actually has more explanatory power. If you assume that the true reason for employment is to take people out of the competitive will-to-power market, lots and lots of irrational moves suddenly make sense, like high-paid executives, bullshit jobs, bureaucratic incompetence, projects where billions are invested and then the whole thing is canceled, competing internal divisions, people not getting fired for doing nothing, etc. The whole point is for them to do nothing.
There's a Chesterton's Fence [2] issue at work here. Many people, particularly young people, grow up with the first explanation for work and take it at face value, and then a new technology comes around that saves all this work and they're like "Of course this is a good idea! I want to be part of it!" But if the actual purpose of work is to distract people from pursuing their own interests, this is incredibly dangerous. The actual consequence is going to be widespread unrest and quite possibly war.
Gates is worth about $100B, Elon Musk about $850B. Let's call it $1T altogether. That would be at most about $115 per human on Earth (~8.5B humans). Not sure that is sufficient to "end hunger and homelessness."
Your calculation only makes sense if every one of those 8.5B humans is suffering from hunger and homelessness. Somewhere around 1 in 1000 people are homeless (https://worldmetrics.org/global-homelessness-statistics/), and 1 in 12 or so has experienced "hunger" some time in the past year (https://www.fao.org/hunger/en/). Obviously the numbers depend on how you define "homelessness" and "hunger", but in any case this multiplies the $ that could be used to help individuals by those factors. Between $1000 (hunger) and $115,000 (homelessness) may not sound like a lot, but when your yearly income is around $1000, it can mean a lot.
If you’re one of the people wondering why there’s an enormous backlash to AI, here’s your answer: “this thing we’re building is going to he fucking terrible and ruin your life. Please give us all your money to build it.”
It’s exactly the same set of questions and challenges as with nuclear power
Nuclear power is one of the most amazing magical things on the planet but nuclear weapons present a massive challenge to social coordination. So maybe we should sit as a society and try to figure out how to manage that instead of just freak out and burn all of our own faces off because we can’t handle complex conversations.
No? Nuclear never had those massive valuations. Did not hyped itself this ridiculous way. Was not forced down on everyone. And the vision of nuclear power was not "make humans obsolete".
We did not had nuclearmaxxing. We did not had doomtrolling from nuclear companies.
While nuclear power is not intrinsically anti human you can't really separate the public perception of nuclear power and that of nuclear weapons. Anti nuclear sentiment is a lot easier to understand when you realize everyone who grew up under the Cold War had went through nuclear attack drills.
None of that is comparable to us having ai buttom on whatsapp, camera, email, jira, vacuum cleaner, everywhere. To workers being threatened with firing if they dont burn enough tokens.
Indeed, comparing AI button in some app to putting deadly substances in basically everything is really dumb. They are not comparable at all and one is much worse than the other.
have you just never read or seen anything about the 50s? nuclear power was absurdly hyped and there were in fact efforts to put it in damn near everything, there were plans for nuclear powered cars planes hell there were even some children's toys with radioactive components.
Wasteful in terms of money and debt? Looking at current ai debt, no.
Nuckear arms race was something that could cause harm. This is intended to cause harm by design. And it is already clear it will cause harm to many people regardless of whether ai companies succeed or not.
> It’s exactly the same set of questions and challenges as with nuclear power
I'm not sure "provide cheap and plentiful power that may be risky if not managed correctly" is really on the same level as "replace all human labor we possibly can"
I agree with you that ideally we would coordinate and cooperate better, but the sad problem (the prisoner's dilemma, really) is that some (many? most? all?) people will not coordinate or cooperate no matter what, especially if they have an opportunity to get ahead by not cooperating. As long as people like that exist we have to find ways to work with them or work around them
It doesn't help that people with the most wealth seem like they mostly have that sort of personality
Most people are reasonable. Most people will not screw you over if you just give them an inch. Living in society would be hell if this was not the case.[1] Living day-to-day is just fine in my experience. Because most people are not assholes.
But a lot of society is run by asshole sociopaths which (who) unfortunately lack some pretty fundamental wiring. And that creates some far-away problems, global even, that don’t really have anything to do with normal people that you meet daily. But you can notice how when these concrete problems are pointed out that someone will want to retreat back to generalities. Human nature. That’s IMO from a concerted effort to spread this talking point that asshole-caused problems are really human-caused problems. Because the asshole sociopaths (AHS) in charge are not AHS. They are not just human. And any human would do what they are doing. And in fact by going to war with X we are just stopping them from doing Y to us—
It is a coordination problem for normal, reasonable people. There’s too many key AHS personell disrupting the information flow. So those reasonable human beings have to make more of an effort.
[1] Some poorer societies (as have been told to me) have problems with vile opportunism of the sort where you help some apparently in need person get home and you get gutted and robbed by a gang of thugs. So I asked, okay so you can’t trust anyone then? No, they said. There’s a small and real chance that that could happen. But not to the point that you have to shun strangers. You can still choose to help.
> But the reliability problem is being fixed quickly, as researchers create models that can check their own work and improve themselves. Soon they will be substantially better than humans at many tasks.
Yes, no.
They don't. They just push probabilities higher. The tech is non-deterministic.
Humans are also non-deterministic, for all practical purposes, and the more of them you need to build some piece of software, the harder it can get to keep the likelihood of issues low.
I'm not saying it will happen, but at least it's not inconceivable that LLMs could surpass them in this calculation more and more often.
My interpretation of the argument is "Humans are also non-deterministic, but we make organizations work on a daily basis despite that. We could do the same with LLMs, which may in fact turn out to be less non-deterministic than humans."
I agree with both takes; organizations have evolved many error-correcting mechanisms like bureaucracy, laws and contracts to keep a gaggle of non-deterministic actors behaving deterministically. There is no reason those actors need to be human.
why do you think that something being non deterministic means it can't be better than humans at a task? hasn't this same approach been used when developing alpha go which has surpassed humans?
Honestly, I think it will come down to liability. With humans in loop, the answer is obvious. It's the human who made a decision. When you have AI make a decision, who is responsible? The AI provider, the person implementing things?
I was debating about this with my cousin, he's a doctor. Doctors are already using AI, but they are still the judgement maker, If the AI makes a mistake, they and the entity they work for are held liable. But it might take a long time to realize that a mistake has been made, so it's going to take a while to work this out. He was arguing that humans are so fallible that it AI can replace them in his field.
Does anyone else feel incredibly nostalgic for the time when Bill Gates and Warren Buffet were the richest people on earth? I remember feeling pretty good about the fact that they were trying to do so much good, and about the giving pledge. Things feel so different now.
Few people were more vicious than Gates when he was running Microsoft. Maybe Larry Ellison but Gates was smarter and more cunning. I don't feel nostalgic about those days and Gates is just trying to buy his way into heaven and a positive view on his wikipedia page.
No because Bill Gates was hanging out with Jeffery Epstein that entire time. I also feel like people forgot his insanely evil business practices from the 80s and 90s? Bill Gates has always been one of the worst people out there. Every bit as bad as Musk. It's a big club, we're just not in it.
I think 100k people for a club is pretty big. I interpret the Carlin quote to mean: "you're seeing a lot of people connected, you're not one of them". That the "club" is big enough that these connections regularly come up, is what I think he meant.
There was a lot of PR, but the money Gates and Buffet gave away, the foundations they created, the attention they drummed up for various charities and causes is certainly not to be scoffed at.
I'm sure they could have done more with less fanfare, but you seem to be setting the bar at "fixing the world's problems", which seems unfair. They have undoubtedly changed more lives than I'll ever manage to.
Something I've come to realize, as a software engineer, is that the work I do now is much more nuanced and complex than before. I used to call myself a 'software developer' but now I call myself a software engineer. If I had to be precise, I would call myself a "logic synthesizer" - Most of my work now involves finding logical contradictions in the spec and finding creative solutions.
640k ought be enough for this AI. I'm not sure takes like these are helpful. It's widely acknowledged that this is a technological shift, like electricity, like industrialization, etc. It could be (good or bad) but most likely (good AND bad). Does anyone really believe, sincerely, that AI will be the great equalizer? It's a hilarious proposition. They are working their hardest to make sure that its not imo.
If AI and robots are going to replace people in such a scale, without creating new jobs, who will they sell the products or services to?
I cannot believe Bill Gates has not even conceptually engaged with that question.
That said, I share the dangers we are facing with rapid AI proliferation. But the potential economic consequences demand more in-depth conversations than just fear mongering.
>The transition to the AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history. Right now, we are not preparing adequately for that transition. If the world takes the right steps, AI will be a force for good and leave everyone better off.
It will be a force for good. But like all evolutionary steps the path to good will be paved with darkness.
The very existence of humanity and life itself rests on the foundation of natural selection. Humanity will be better, it will get better but before we get there... there will be a culling.
It's an unfortunate truth. We all might be culled.
But Bill stopped being involved in Microsoft’s day to day business over a decade ago. And he’s making valid arguments that don’t require us to trust him. Do you not think labor disruption, cyberattacks, and mass surveillance are big risks from powerful AI?
If you look at the difference between AI in 1960 and AI in 2020, you probably won't see much much difference. If you look at the difference between 2020 and 2026, the difference is around 80% of the time I spent as a software engineer in 2020.
I think it will be seen similar to the crypto craze to be honest. People on this very site, with an actual reputation, were telling us non stop how we were losers who were going to be left behind and stay poor. They never had to apologize for being obnoxious when that didn’t happen
Comparing AI to crypto makes zero sense. We get tremendous use from AI right now, while 2 decades after invention of crypto there are still basically zero legitimate use cases. I repeat - the utility of AI is not some hypothetical but something that happens right now at very large scale (so please don't reply with something in line "well, crypto was supposed to have lots of uses also").
> while 2 decades after invention of crypto there are still basically zero legitimate use cases.
The first card on the homepage of the DTCC (https://www.dtcc.com/) is "Tokenization". This is a legitimate use case and is being adopted at the largest institutional level. Stablecoins are yet another legitimate use case.
Edit: for what it's worth, I do agree that the crypto craze was insane. I also think the AI craze is insane, even though I agree that its current proliferation is larger than crypto.
I’m very familiar with both technologies, but it’s not what my comment was about. The crypto craze would have been the same if we would have ended with some actual use cases for cryptocurrencies. The level of frenzy was completely out of proportion, very aggressive, with that same attitude of „we will impose something on you, change the world, you will be left behind and stay poor forever for having not been a believer“
Everything is changing all the time. The position that everything will change in favor of the AI overlords is an imposed narrative that has a bigger chance of materializing if they get all people to believe it is inevitable. It is not.
where? All i see is getting bugged with slop and for learning i returned to textbooks. Even code i get from it is stuff i would earlier copy paste from SO.
After 2 years i feel mostly distracted by it. There are usecases ofc but encountering a chatbot or AI written posts, software, etc. is still a negative.
Literally everywhere. I'm running a scientific project where I've got to inspect large amount of whole-body MRI segmentations. The software available on market is very clunky for doing that, so I've asked Claude to write one perfectly tailored for my use case. With all the helper functions I've asked it to implement, the software sped up reviews >4x. And I couldn't write it myself.
I agree there are usecases, but image classification is not the hype. Still - that's great, can we get a link? Or let me guess it's internal, you don't want to doxx yourself?
Knowing medical software requirements, which might be there for a reason, i highly doubt this will see production.
> I agree there are usecases, but image classification is not the hype. Still - that's great, can we get a link? Or let me guess it's internal, you don't want to doxx yourself?
Why would I distribute software that's tailor made for me? I don't want to deal with headaches associated with distributing it.
> Knowing medical software requirements, which might be there for a reason, i highly doubt this will see production.
It won't, the software is not a point of my work, it's just a tool for my actual project which has nothing to do with programming (very useful tool but still - not a goal on it's own).
AI does nothing. CEOs want to use it to replace all cognitive work, it doesn't mean it is inevitable. That is why smart people are fighting against the narrative push.
I spent about $200 on openai tokens today to solve a seriously hard distributed systems problem that would have taken me probably three weeks to understand, let alone fix.
Crypto only ever allowed me to buy drugs over the internet. I'm not really buying this argument.
Or maybe it's not just a craze and we'll soon look back and think "I wonder what we might've done differently if we'd been clear-eyed about what was happening."
Show me a person who truly revised their priors to put forward a novel solution to AI that isn't just "do the thing that I like and that benefits me in some way". The discourse around all this is a mix of quasi-religious beliefs (pro and con) and blatant opportunism. For Dario and Sam, the solution is "give us a monopoly on this tech". For Gates, it's "create an supranational organization with unprecedented taxation and regulatory powers" - world AI police, presumably staffed by technocrats like him.
What's your take? Do the ideas put forward by Gates strike you as worth pursuing? What are the trade-offs - how can they go wrong?
Can you describe a method of slowing frontier AI development that you yourself would not classify as monopoly-seeking by US AI companies or power-seeking by governments and technocrats?
Limiting the development of powerful AI requires restricting free enterprise in some way, backed by the threat of force; hence, there will always be a cynical framing available.
> Do the ideas put forward by Gates strike you as worth pursuing? What are the trade-offs - how can they go wrong?
I agree. However, why aren’t we applying the same standard to AI technologies themselves? That doesn’t strike me as worth pursuing, the article discusses all the ways that is and will go wrong
We should not be listening to a man who drugged his wife with Epstein supplied antibiotics after getting an STD (among many, many other bad things he's done).
Looking at the exceedingly long history of someone's immoral actions and deeds isn't a "1-bit value judgement". The guy literally teamed up with a pedophile pimp foreign spy to drug his wife. I'll pass on hearing his thoughts about literally anything.
It's up to us, the public, to defend our society from deteriorating. There's no reason to defend Epstein's billionaire friends, you have nothing to gain from that.
I mean, there's certainly silly money involved, but there's surely no credible doubt that AI is already really good at many valuable tasks.
So if there's a crash, doesn't that just leave us with a bunch of useful AI hardware whose costs have been written off? I wouldn't have thought that much changes what social impacts AI is going to have.
I am no longer and will never again be interested in Bill Gates’ opinion about anything. He needs to retire. He’s a sclerotic representative of what needs to be left behind.
Thank you for your contributions, Bill. You’ve done enough.
Bill Gates, convicted monopolist and friend to Epstein, is always looking to burnish his legacy, but he’s too unimaginative. He needs to spend his fortune ending aging, not duplicating government efforts and trying to be a pundit.
> I wish the world could get the benefits rapidly and delay the problems it will cause as long as possible, but the benefits and problems are arriving at the same time.
I'm not trying to be facetious, but what are the benefits of "general purpose intelligence"? With machine learning it was obvious what task we were trying to automate, and you could take a stab at the productivity achieved.
That's not the case now. You can't figure out if the time it took to review a 5k loc PR balances out the time saved debugging a syntax error.
Yes we know you can churn out your damn CRUD apps and (hope) to make money (PS, you don't need AI to make money - see exhibit A: crypto bros).
So what benefits has this actually brought to humanity?
Sandbags against a tsunami. When has "pump the brakes on progress" ever worked out?
What we need is deep thinking on the implications and make the default way forward one where we want to go. In other words, we build a channel for the flood waters, not a wall. Creating a role for "somebody to deal with AI issues" is one of those hand-wavvy upper management moves that looks defensible but simply passes the buck to someone who structurally lacks the agency to actual move the needle.
> When has "pump the brakes on progress" ever worked out?
the only thing i can think of was when that Chinese scientist produced gene edited human babies. He was pretty much excommunicated from the scientific community and, eventually, spent some time in jail.
AI, on the other hand, has a huge profit potential and way too far out of the bag to go back in. To quote the movie Terminator, "it will never stop".
Yes. We can decide not to do bad things. Globally. Occasionally, it takes some time to figure out if something is bad. Especially when there's money to be made. But when we do, we can and have stopped doing them.
What surprises me even more is why Bill Gates writes this kind of bizarre, low-quality nonsense in the first place. What purpose does it serve? It’s so obviously shallow that it influences nothing and adds nothing to the conversation.
"A lot of people are skeptical of AI because it makes mistakes. But what's going to happen when it stops making mistakes??? It'll change the world!"
Honestly I suspect he's probably just cynically talking his book. All of this "AI is scary good / it'll be even scarier gooder soon" is no less advertising than slapping a cigarette logo on a racing car.
AI are improving their capacity at blazingly fast rate. Is noticing that AI psychosis? I'd say that believing that we are at the peak of LLM capabilities is some kind of psychosis due to large dose copium inhalation.
All his good things (possibly help medicine! agriculture! government!) involve a belief in ever-increasing superintelligence and so much "hope" and optimimusm and may not ever exist.
All his negative things (increase of fraud, skill atrophy, cyberattacks, removing employment, consolidation of capital and wealth) exist currently now with AI as it is.
How long will negatives outweigh the positives? And will those positives ever actually come to fruition? How anyone (who is not a sociopath and expects to be one of those pyramid tops) can see a bright future is beyond my pessimism and sense of reality as it is now.
I mean, I'm as opensource as they come: not used windows since '98, despise microsoft and mostly everything he's done in business. But lets be fair, he moved the needle forwards, and after he retired he's done some fairly good shit around malaria and so on. I don't really begrudge him, if it wasn't him, it would have been some other wanker. We are where we are, better to just let go of the hate.
It's a fairly concise description of the challenges ahead, and hopefully some people read it and think a bit. He didn't have to write it, I'm glad he did.
God, I wish I knew which PR firm he hires. Changing his public image from the most despised, greediest, nastiest businessman of his era to a calm, wise sage over a course of 10-20 years -- that's quite an achievement.
Just read the intro to this post, it sounds like music:
"The transition to the AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history" -- are you even qualified to make this claim?
"Right now, we are not preparing adequately for that transition" -- who are you to know that for certain?
"If the world takes the right steps, AI will be a force for good and leave everyone better off" -- awwwwww.
I'm sorry. I absolutely do not trust Bill Gates. His history of ruthless, cutthroat tactics in the 90s is not easily forgotten and when he proposes things like international organizations to audit everyone's AI[1] I can't help but question his motives.
I also don't understand what gives him the moral standing to propose a solution at all. He's not the fucking pope but a ruthless tech businessman with vested financial interest in the technology involved. He should stick to his lane.
[1]
> But even a country that gets its own house in order will still be exposed to risks that cross borders. This is why an international organization will need to be built in parallel.
> It will be unlike any other institution we have ever created, though it can follow the model of some existing systems. There’s an inspections regime for nuclear weapons, regulations for international aviation, and agreements that protect the ozone layer. A new global organization for AI will need elements of all three and more.
> ruthless tech businessman with vested financial interest in the technology involved
Isn't that past-tense? What's his financial interest these days? He still owns a small amount of MSFT, but he doesn't exactly have control over the corporation any more. I imagine Nadella always answers his calls, but I'd bet most CEOs will make time to take a call from Bill.
Interesting that you chose the pope as a positive control. I'd say that taken the whole history of papacy into question, there is no particular reason to trust the pope either.
I don’t think so. I think we’re past the point of rapidly increasing population in most of the world at this point (aside from sub sharan Africa which will change soon as well). I don’t think the current low birth rate has anything to do with a resource cap.
"In my second one, which I started full time in 2008, I am giving back the wealth I made at Microsoft with the goal of making the world a healthier, better educated, and more equitable place."
Like inventing waterless toilets when people just need access to clean water ?
The sad story is that we don't need innovation, we need better politics.
Oh and he could open source windows, that would make us more equitable for sure.
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49447057, which was posted a bit earlier.
The notion of AI having an equalizing effect seems absurd to me.
Buying tokens is about as pay-to-win as it gets. More so than anything we’ve seen in a long time.
Before everyone had the same 24hr in a day which despite inequalities grounded things a bit. Now some people can run 100+ near human ability agents while others are still wondering how to get enough calories for the day. Someone in Sudan can’t afford a freakin $200 plan…
The benefits he mentioned are valid but nowhere close to offsetting above and I don’t think any sort of central effort will be enough either
not an unfair comparison but i think it's the wrong model.
you were always able to buy time by hiring people to do things for you. right now it's agents. i think it's an equalizer in that, $200 agent is more accessible than a $10000 human
> you were always able to buy time by hiring people to do things for you. right now it's agents. i think it's an equalizer in that, $200 agent is more accessible than a $10000 human
The other half of this is that, in the past, skill meant that a year of weekends could be turned into a viable business that had skill as a moat.
Now, skill means almost nothing: the fleeting product of a drooling idiot is almost indistinguishable from skill and care as long as that drooling idiot has capital.
No longer will merit be rewarded; it will be exclusively capital that is rewarded.
I don't think that's fair. You can 3D print doodads and spin up an AI business to sell them, but it's not the same as selling a quality tool that's been forged in the failures of previous versions. Skill is still a moat.
Doubtful. These tools will be more useful in capable hands than in the hands of a drooling idiot.
> Doubtful. These tools will be more useful in capable hands than in the hands of a drooling idiot.
"drooling idiot" is just a figure of speech, I'm sure. The point is, the moat is now more like a narrow puddle which few will be incapable of jumping over. Even if you make something better, it's going to be very hard to find in the pile of AI-generated slop. Ergo, popularity and success will be decided by money for advertisement, not skill.
Are there important things that can be done with AI - yes. How many of them can provide income for a small but skilled operation - very few to none at all. That's the reality of it, whatever smart thing you do, AI will catch up with it in the next iteration. The current economic arrangement cannot accommodate AI without degenerating into an idiocracy controlled by selected few.
I still don’t think you’re right.
People can differentiate quality from shit.
yeah, fair on that point, that makes doing Sloppy SAAS really more accessible and that's what we're seeing
On the other hand, what I see happening is:
0. corporation use AI plan ultra-X-high-pro-premium-enterprise
1. corporations firing medium-high paid developers with solid experience and experstise because low-medium paid developers are performing well with ultra-X-high-pro-premium-enterprise plan
2. AI models evolves and now there's a 10X ultra-X-high-pro-premium-enterprise that keeps up the pace
3. low to medium paid are now struggling. The company hires low-paid developers to use more the original AI plan
4. refuses to pay best AI or decrease pressure on developers
5. developers are forced to wake up early, work afterhours and these shenanigans so that they keep up with the pressure
6. corporation pays for the 10X ultra-X-high-pro-premium-enterprise
I’m a CEO not a dev and this is just patently false.
I would never trust someone who lacks the fundamentals to create value even with the most advanced tools.
I’d prefer to pay for the senior and fire the less senior - the implicit premium is to not have to worry about the lack of fundamentals for when problems need to be solved that are nuanced.
> I would never trust someone who lacks the fundamentals to create value even with the most advanced tools.
Although I feel the value of what you're saying, I don't feel that's the mindset in the whole world.
I live in a LATAM country and I have worked for both EU (which outsourced most of the workforce, usually keeping the architects and rotating the devs (PS: pre-agentic coding)), US and now US with LATAM intermediator.
Every single one of them treated blattantly different less senior and low paid workers. EU treated so well their EU employees that even outsourced workers could actually feel as real human beings.
The US (startup) one was extremely crushing, I feel seniors were rewarded, what I take from your "the implicit premium", true, but with so much damn pressure. The only senior I saw departed was out of exhaustion, a team from 10 engineers reduced to 4 or 5, don't remember exactly.
While LATAM people is just awful. The slavery mindset is always dormant. Keep pushing, replace when exhausted, hire a whole new crew of low-paid people and push them to burn-out, that's true on small businesses and giant banks. I remember I once trained 3 interns in a pre-agentic setting, I had to push for 2 whole years so that one of the well trained, extremely dedicated and intelligent guy got hired. And he was hired only after a YEAR that the other one had been hired by a larger company. After I was gone, they kept me around consulting just some hours a week and refused to replace even the "half" me. And then I was gone. Only after some months of my departure they really hired the intelligent dude I've mentioned before and for at least a year and a half they coudln't find a replacement for the almost-slave as I was because the intelligent dude probably was starting to get used with agentic coding with a fifth of our total salaries. I haven't heard of that so far.
There are no nuanced problems
You must be one of the LLM addicts.
> equalizer in that, $200 agent is more accessible than a $10000 human
Yeah that’s valid. Would suggest that there will be a divide but perhaps at a lower wealth point.
What about $10000 human with many $200 agents?
Another idiot who doesn’t understand capitalism
Nobody pays for time. They are paying for a human form of capital.
> Before everyone had the same 24hr in a day which despite inequalities grounded things a bit. Now some people can run 100+ near human ability agents while others are still wondering how to get enough calories for the day. Someone in Sudan can’t afford a freakin $200 plan
I don't think this is a useful model. People struggling to survive have other priorities.
A better model for thinking about this is how cloud opened up opportunities for technical people to ship products cheaply.
Before cloud you had to hire a dedicated server and you were looking at $1000/month (in say 2000).
In 2023 if you were a non-technical person wanting to ship a software product you needed to invest some thousands of dollars to hire a software developer.
Now you can get a long way on a $30/month Codex plan
In 2000, I was 14 years old and hosting my own websites(in PHP) on a FreeBSD box at home, on a 10/10 connection, on hand me down hardware from a school sysadmin.
This was in Stockholm where we have good internet.
Certainly a skilled adult could get away with less than $100 in server costs.
You probably weren't ipv4 poor back then.
> Before cloud you had to hire a dedicated server and you were looking at $1000/month (in say 2000).
Rather: perhaps 50-100 USD per month got and still gets you a quite good server to start your project. If you were looking for bargains, you could even get a server for less.
I can ship a new feature almost every day on the $20 Codex plan. The limiting factor has always been the drive to build something. General Artificial Intelligence is here and most will continue going about their normal routine
Yep exactly.
For people like scam Altman it’s a difficult paradox: we have a ‘intelligent’ technology box and the world largely… looks the same.
He blames it on inertia lmao - as if firms are not desperately trying to increase profits and getting rid of people without having to reinvest.
It’s also strange if one steps back a bit further…
Think of the total cost of human development, education, etc. to make them “ready to be hired”.
These efforts drive a host of side industries (teachers, daycare, medical services, etc.)
AI can handle a lot tasks for a tiny fraction of that cost, time, and risk. Now add in the cost of yearly medical insurance, payroll tax, etc.
If AI makes people more efficient, then we don’t need to hire as many people…
Kinda feels like the labor equivalent of “deflation”, perhaps with similar problems…
I.. don't understand how AI could be an "equalizer", unless we're talking about helping the 1% catch up to the 0.01%? This is one of the most direct ways to turn dollars into outcomes since _legal slave labor_, and the people in control of the machines have huge vested interests in ensuring that power _stays_ in their hands.
Power accretes.
> Buying tokens is about as pay-to-win as it gets.
This assumes the people with the money know what to do with those tokens. But they don't! The people with the money are very good with making more money, but they do not know what to build or how to build it. Which is why they pay other people to do so.
They had the capital needed to pay for everything, however, so they called the shots, and we're used to thinking that's how it will always be. But AI upends things.
Now, there is a future where AI gets powerful enough to essentially become a genie that grants wishes exactly as you imagined them without terrible unintended consequences. At that point, we've basically hit the singularity and (by definition) all bets are off.
The other, currently more realistic, future is where AI gets very good but is still fallible. There will still be a need for highly skilled and creative people to guide AI. That is us. And tokens are incredibly cheap, considering how good even local models are.
We only have to realize the power that is now available to us to reach out and grasp it: the ability to create value without capital.
Value Is strictly related to scarcity. Something that everybody can do or have (with or without AI btw) has no intrinsic value. Digital goods generally speaking do have marginal cost zero.. so they do not have a real value. Land is scarse so valuable.. (Land on Mars could help reduce this scarcity ) Food can be scarce, especially when we thrash It, because we do not want the price to fall So an economic theory based about "more" abundant resources instead of scarcity or where the production costs are marginally zero (thanks to fusion based electricity, and drones/humanoids and AI) has to be developed.. But what about the shared vision? "Liberte', egalite', fraternite'" ?
Yes, a new economic system will have to be devised for an era of abundance, although I think that is still quite a ways away, even with an AI-accelerated timeline. (Robots and abundant compute and unlimited energy will be severely constrained by logistics for a long time yet.) But on this point I think there is some nuance:
> Value Is strictly related to scarcity.
Value is extremely subjective. Trivial example, going for a hike in a park is effectively free and unlimited and many people enjoy it.
Monetizing that value may require scarcity though. (There are surely exceptions, but I can't think of any offhand.) To extend the example above, that's when you put a fence and an entry fee around the park.
That's why I said AI lets you create value without capital. Creating wealth out of that value is left as an exercise for the reader ;-)
I am not optimistic. What we learned from history is that despite all warnings and good intentions, governments, corps and citizens will make every possible mistake before we finally arrive at another precariously stable situation. Experts are famously bad at predicting the outcomes of new technologies/policies even in times of relatively low upheaval. And plans have a way of producing many significant unintended consequences. This is not going to prevent people with strong opinions from asserting that they know exactly what needs to be done. And in the rush to do something many things will certainly be done. We are screwed at least for a while.
WFH was a great example of this. Everyone seemed to be on board, this was the way of the future, etc. Yet it seems nobody in charge thought about downtown economies or commercial real estate, and it turns out having a bunch of empty office buildings is really bad for banks and pension plans that invest in them. Somehow the experts or economists didn't see this coming, and since the system in question is too big to fail, and they tried nothing and were all out of ideas, the only remaining solution was a whiplash back to the status quo, employee happiness and productivity be damned.
Or maybe.. the people lies in you expecting too much of such people like economists? Who have a hammered in fixed model of the world.
It's kind of like what us Canadians say about the U.S. sometimes — that they'll always do the right thing, after they've tried everything else.
Supposedly Winston Churchill said this, though now that I’ve been looking up a source I see that attribution is murky
I though it was Winston Churchill? Anyways, from experience, I think it's true.
I don’t know, early Internet was the good old days. Probably because it wasn’t mainstream and governments, corps and citizens mostly didn’t care.
LLMs were fun and interesting to use and explore before they started to be pushed absolutely everywhere with the most aggressive tech rollout we ever experienced, all the financial engineering, all the moral judgement and prospects of a dull, hyper capitalistic society where a few trillionaires control our lives
If A.I. starts to replace jobs en masse I propose we tax the companies profiting from this at a rate of 95% so we can finance welfare and Universal Basic Income schemes.
We need to be aware that said companies and the people behind them will do anything in their power, including bribing politicians, to prevent this and to keep the money they believe are they're entitled to.
I even believe the Big Tech bigwigs have long foreseen this and are quietly prodding our society towards an authoritarian regime where people have no say so they can keep their moonies.
I like the thought, but it seems daunting. What about global competition? If some other countries have few or no such taxes, how do you deal with that? Do you outlaw the outsourcing of all white collar work? Outlaw all remote work as well? Will you have to suppress a local black market for intellectual labor, built on self-hosted open source models?
Whilst the objections you raise are valid, in the face of the country being destroyed if you don’t, the equation’s rather different. What does it matter if China is dominant if you’re better off living in the US?
UBI is a farce, and is the wealth class's yet another lever to control people. UBI will not be "universal", not in this human civilization of hyper stratification. Conditions will be placed, and only certain ethnicity, and somehow certain people will receive two to ten times as much as others. If this proposed and impossible gift farce happens at all. How gullible are you to think this UBI concept has anything but wishes and propagandists behind it?
Do you believe people will be able to sustain their incomes at current levels if A.I. does most of the work? Maybe by some magical means they will, but I'm far from sure that the majority will be able to stay above the poverty line.
If that’s the case the solution is to ban or very strictly regulate those AI companies having such a massive level of externalities. Like any other industry that would put the whole world economy at risk.
Keeping them running and patching the minimum of damage with a UBI is just absurd. If the impact on the job market is as bad as what the AI leaders say, which is extremely bad, it’s a national security risk level for pretty much all developed economies. We would absolutely never accept that in any other domain
The current level of A.I. is akin to an idiot-savant and even today's A.I. companies are raking in half a trillion dollars in revenue. If "real" reasoning A.I. comes along their income could be in the trillions every year!!
If you believe politicians will be able to regulate companies with such financial clout you're living in a fairy tale. These companies will be able to hold the U.S. government hostage.
> Do you believe people will be able to sustain their incomes at current levels if A.I. does most of the work?
Does not matter, UBI will make the situation worse.
And that "AI does most the work" is yet another fairytale. AI does the easy work, leaving only the much more difficult and the controversial work, exactly the work nobody wants to do, due to the responsibility attached. So, AI will do that, and AI will do that with a preference for the wealth class.
I'm not talking about the current A.I., but "true" reasoning A.I. which can handle almost any task a human can. That day hasn't arrived yet, but I'm contemplating about solutions when it does.
Then you're talking about fiction. Live in reality. The true issue with reality is not "AI doing all things", not at all. The true issue is it not doing all things and the stupid authorities insisting it does, and forcing the issue, "proving" it does with violence and death.
People think about policies day 0, meaning when they are implemented, and not how they evolve and degenerate over decades. UBI would obviously be used as a mechanism to discriminate and punish people the decision makers don’t like
doesn't sound very universal to me
Expecting the modern American people to support any welfare system is a fairy tale. A large chunk of them will be too busy worrying about the possibility of even one undeserving person benefiting even if it means thousands starve to death.
Similar to the uproar about Obamacare where the people with little or no coverage were protesting that it limited their choice of health care professionals?
The right-wing will probably brand welfare and UBI "socialism" to defile it and the people on poverty row will be protesting that they don't want it because it will lead to higher-taxes. It's sad that the most vulnerable people are being duped into believing these malicious lies.
Yes, there's that, and also things like shameless empty nesters suggesting that they shouldn't have to pay taxes that support the education system.
But it's impossible to measure how does a company or a person benefit from AI. The economy is a complex system. A construction company may benefit more than a robot-making company.
The right approach could be to raise the general tax level, possibly increase the weight of wealth taxes, and redistribute.
That said, there will be enough jobs for the foreseeable future. Any job that has some physical component - hospital staff, barber, judge, bartender - won't be replaced within the next 2 decades.
Many comfortable jobs, typically someone who's sitting behind a computer at home or in the office, could get replaced. That would be bad for many people including me, but if you think about it, it would be a net good thing. I'm currently leaning towards "AI would be somewhat bad or at best neutral for me, but significantly good for the society".
> But it's impossible to measure how does a company or a person benefit from AI.
I think he was proposing taxing the companies offering AI.
> Re: AI killing jobs where you sit behind a desk
The robots aren't far behind.
Companies offering AI will capture just a tiny slice of the value created by AI. So the tax would generate negligible revenue.
I think humanoids capable of replacing a nurse for example are 20+ years away. But I could be wrong and hope I am.
> Companies offering AI will capture just a tiny slice of the value created by AI.
That remains to be seen.
Humanoids replacing a nurse Hahahha.
Wow you are in deep. I feel for people like you - you’ve lost all sight of reality. It’s sad.
Me saying that humanoid robots won't replace nurses within the next 2 decades is sad? Doesn't make any sense.
maybe he thinks it's more likely they'll have wheels?
https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/a...
If AI replaced all jobs, then how are those companies turning a profit? I dont understand this. Humans need to spend money and buy products for all the companies to make money. Do we imagine a parallel economy of agents spending money and humans are out of this?
A rich people only economy.
> I even believe the Big Tech bigwigs have long foreseen this and are quietly prodding our society towards an authoritarian regime where people have no say so they can keep their moonies.
That's been obvious for a while.
I hear this repeated a lot, but I'm skeptical they're that smart. Hanlon's razor would say it's just the system doing what the system does.
I do not believe Zuck, Musk, or any of the other boogeyman in Silicon Valley are capable of that level of deception and manipulation.
I find it much more plausible that when trying to build world-changing businesses and products you squish, displace, and flip tables when you didn't really intend to.
You don't need an exceptional IQ to deduce that useful A.I. will lead to an enormous concentration of wealth at a few companies and individuals. In fact, it's the reason current A.I. companies have valuations in the Trillions.
Then it was exceedingly stupid for Altman to fuck up his grand master scheme by neglecting to take any equity in OpenAI.
> I even believe the Big Tech bigwigs have long foreseen this and are quietly prodding our society towards an authoritarian regime where people have no say so they can keep their moonies.
“Quietly”? They’re not even subtle about it! Hard to get those types of news here, though, as submissions in that direction tend to be heavily flagged, no matter how tame the comments.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49411762
Anyone seriously trust in the fairytale that the rich and powerful gives 95% of their profit back to customers?
It's not really what they've built their business empires for.
The U.S. had a top tax tier of 95% in de 1940's.
It was a war tax. Not to just share it with people.
Which may as well be a fairy tale, not going to happen ever again. That was an anomaly.
And there were an unimaginable number of tax loopholes available back then that ultimately reduced the individual tax rate enormously. You just had to reinvest your income in a multitude of increasingly bizarre tax dodges devised by increasingly byzantine tax laws.
Even if that was possible today it would just mean that money goes to the government not the people. Most of it would flow overseas, every single entity in the planet would come begging with their hand out. Actual citizens would be very last on the list.
Probably the only feasible thing would be to set income tax to zero. However, half the nation doesn’t pay income tax anyway (100% refund).
Does anyone still believe that AI will replace jobs? I get further proof every day that it never will.
I agree with you that it probably won't replace jobs, but it will let you get more done in less time. I suspect, based on some of the stuff I've read recently, that two days with AI assistance are as exhausting/wearing as five days without, because you're trying to keep up with AI speed (another argument for slower LLMs on a local machine).
Unfortunately, I think we will also see corporate expectations that if you can get your previously normal amount of work done in two days, commonly you should be given more work. They don't need to hire that person or a replacement person for the disloyal/weak person who bailed, claiming they were overloaded.
It actually leads to more done in more time at the moment. For things that carry actual value at least.
For example your AI generated code feels very productive and "more done in less time", until you have to spend 3 times as much reviewing it, and supporting it long term compared to code written before AI.
People mistake instant gratification for long term productivity gains.
Well, if you throw a long-winded prompt over a fence and tell the agents to work it out on their own, yeah, you will spend a lot of time reviewing it. But if you use it as a form of pair programming and keep your scope of focus constrained, review time is built into your effort.
Also, keep in mind that my perspective is colored by the fact that I can't type much, and coding by keyboard is pretty much off the table for me.
And last, as I pointed out elsewhere, LLMs are useful for more things than writing code, and administrative work can be handled easily with the current generation of LLMs.
I don't know if much has changed based on my professional experience. For me, the code was always the fast part. The hard part was figuring out what to do. Maybe others had more mechanical coding jobs, but I've been pretty baffled by those who think producing more text (email, code, or docs or whatever) with less understanding is any sort of gain. Seems like the same sort of braindead thinking that would make someone think the fast typer is the the best programmer.
This is still a nonsense argument.
Do more of.. what? Much of what happens in software is not akin to a factory producing goods.
You need projects - projects don’t fall out the sky and value creating ones are hard to come by!
The funny thing about that is, I would argue, the opposite. Much of what happens in software is like a factory producing goods. I've worked on many projects at many companies; 80% of the code was written some variation of what I'd written elsewhere in different languages. We had to slog through the boring, "Been there, done that" code to get to the 20% that was interesting.
Also consider that there's a lot going on in the world that doesn't involve software creation. My partner works at a well-known law school, and a small but significant part of her work could be handled by AI. I'm looking into taking the department-specific info and RAGging it into an LLM so that students and instructors can find what they need in a chat interface, rather than using her as an LLM.
> 80% of the code was written some variation of what I'd written elsewhere in different languages. We had to slog through the boring, "Been there, done that" code to get to the 20% that was interesting.
When you ignore the 80% mechanical work the last 20% is 100% of a project.
How can you ignore the 80%? Without it, you can't ship, and the 20% won't do a damn thing.
Ignore as they are solved problems, not a challenge.
Maybe not the current versions, but a truly intelligent reasoning A.I. will certainly start to replace a lot of jobs once it comes along.
Oh yeah, why didn't I think of the truly intelligent reasoning A.I.?!
> If A.I. starts to replace jobs en masse
But then nobody will have money to buy anything anymore, then nobody will have money to pay the AI companies, and then they won't have any money. The jobless will starve to death and then those who have their food made by robots will reign over an empty world where money has become meaningless. LLMs and robots don't eat money, they eat electricity.
If you really simplify how this works:
Owners of capital use the capital in combination with workers to produces goods and services. They give half of the production to the workers and keep the other half.
If AI replaces workers, the owners of capital will simply keep all of the production to themselves. So they would be better off. If I have a construction company, I could just lay off the workers and distribute the surplus houses to myself and other owners.
There are nuances to this of course, but this is a point that most people miss.
With that many people out of work, you may struggle to hold on to that capital.
That's where the fully automated weapons systems come in. Robotics and AI give the megalomaniacs of the world both a reason and the means to kill everyone with impunity.
The rest of the 21st century is going to be really messed up.
If it's all robots and LLMs, then it will be the LLM provider and the robot provider who owns these things. Should you be of a different opinion, good luck in court when the judicial LLM is run by the same company you want to sue. If LLMs and robots produce all things, what would anyone still need you for?
That assumes monopoly status of the AI companies and no regulation.
No one would need me in the hypothetical case where I own a construction company. I would just own the company and collect profits.
Paperclippers but in slow motion with the economy in the loop.
I had the same thought, but this is more or less how things stood at the end of the 19th century: most of the wealth was accumulated by the ruling class whilst the majority of workers were at the poverty line.
If we don't tax these A.I. Moguls these times will return.
You and what army? Killbots, mow down these protesters. Too late
"In terms of equity, AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice. The challenge is monumental. Even under the best circumstances, the transition to this new AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history. How will we use this technology to make the world a fairer place and keep it from widening the divide between rich and poor? "
----------------
One look at who is in the driver's seat should give you the answer to this question. The initial roll-out will, by very deliberate design, put dynamite in the divide and set it off. This has happened before.
The industrial revolution was very similar. Initially, workers suffered. Conditions were unsafe. Pay was poor. Worker rights were non-existent. Things got worse for the majority before social change caught up and imposed a more equitable distribution of the dividends.
We should be under no illusion that this time will be any different. The rich and powerful are no less selfish than they were a quarter millennium ago. It is possible to get ahead of the problem, but the people running AI companies won't be the ones to do it. Governments are inclined to do what the people paying for their election campaigns want, but should be aware that standing up for inequality will only make things worse for them when the tides of social change start rolling in on them.
History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
> social change caught up and imposed a more equitable distribution of the dividends.
That’s a very nice way to say “the workers put the fear of God in the heart of capital owners, and lots of people died”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Railroad_Strike_of_1877
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canut_revolts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asturian_Revolution_of_1934
etc.
Nothing says "social change" like building a Flock of predictive-surveillance cameras capable of spotting the revolt before the flock even knows it’s a flock.
The fascist leader needs to catch every single revolutionary group every single time. But a single revolutionary with a pistol only needs to catch the leader ONCE.
You should probably read the history of anarchism in Imperial Russia.
There were tons of assassination attempts against the tsars in the 1800s, and they even killed a tsar. Yet the empire fell due to an external war, roughly 100 years later.
Aristocracy became useless around 1600-1700, when gunpowder meant that peasant armies took over instead of knights, yet it took between 200 and 400 years for full legal equality to be introduced everywhere and some places still have nobility with special status, to this day, even in developed countries.
> Aristocracy became useless around 1600-1700, when gunpowder meant that peasant armies took over instead of knights
Does this view rest on the claim that the only use of the aristocracy is warfare?
That's the reason it arose, that was part of the "social contract".
Clergy to protect from the gods, nobility to protect from other organized groups of humans, peasants to provide food and beasts of burden, artisans to build things.
Of course, once a class that doesn't have to do backbreaking work is established, rooting them out is difficult. The clergy was also hard to reduce.
This is not a superhero movie. Fascism is a symptom, killing one individual will not do away with it. Also its relatively easy to divide revolutionary groups because they are very paranoid, whereas fascist leaders are often highly insulated by the state apparatus. But fascism is also not a very good form of governance and tends to collapse on its own after only a few decades at most. Its really more like, every so often, a bunch of people are needlessly executed to preserve the capitalist system, and then after that things kinda go back to "normal" for a while. Revolutionary movements operate somewhat irrespective of fascist regimes, although yes its more difficult to do so under an oppressive state.
The arrondissements of Paris did not prevent the formation of the commune.
What put the fear of god in governments, was the great depression(which is an indirect a result of the industrial revolution), terrible leaders rising because of it, and WWII as the result.
We already have terrible leaders in many places, war(mostly economic, some physical), and that's even without the huge unemployment wave that is coming.
I think it's more competition for labor. Why is anyone paid above minimum wage? It's not through charity or "fear" that employees will revolt. It's that there's competition for that labor.
Suppose a worker is worth $20 per hour to a capitalist. How much should they pay? As little as possible, sure, but anything up to $20 per hour is worth it. You'll hire up to that point to maximize profit. Suppose you hand somewhere at $15 per hour, another capitalist will look to lure your employees away by paying them more.
Of course pay isn't the only consideration when working. Workers consider things like paid time off, benefits and how much they like their boss and coworkers. These are all part of the bargain.
It wasn't "society". It was competition. Consider the Ford $5 day, where Ford doubled wages because he realized turnover and poor morale cost him money:
> Ford workers disliked the new assembly line methods so much that by late 1913, labor turnover was 380 percent. The company's announcement to pay five dollars for an eight-hour day compared to the previous rate of $2.34 for a nine-hour day made many workers willing to submit to the relentless discipline of the line in return for such high wages.
https://www.thehenryford.org/collections/explore/sets/detail...
This breaks down if there is less competition for labour, and we enter a new Depression era. Under your logic, capitalists will pay nearly nothing for labour because there is so much of it. Then "society" has to step in and not-so-gently point out that these are people we're talking about, and they need things like dignity, time off, good health, good working conditions, as well as money.
We have to remember that people are the point of the economy: the economy exists to provide for all the people, people don't exist to be economic assets. There is a tendency for capitalists to forget this, and then we have to prod them with pitchforks to remind them.
Which I'm not sure it happens that often anymore because it's easier to just complain on social media
Only as long as you still have enough cash to order uber eats.
> One look at who is in the driver's seat should give you the answer to this question.
I think you are fundamentally misunderstanding the question Gates is asking here. He’s not asking “how this going to play out?”, he’s asking “how can we impact how this will play out?”
He makes specific proposals like AI token and robot taxes. I just wish people being cynical would at least comment on possible solutions.
I think AI taxes potentially make sense. His idea of Human Reserved is fascinating. It might not be his idea but I’ve never heard it described like that before
Is it cynical, or simply realistic, to recognize that AI CEO's won't ask for this kind of policy, and governments won't force anything upon the AI sector until things get very bad?
That, in my view, is a much bigger problem. We know what's coming but we won't do anything about it until after a lot of suffering occurs. Why can't we be more proactive?
This is Gates' point, isn't it? We need to be more proactive, and he has suggestions for what to do now, before the bad times.
The solutions Gates proposes aren't even close to being adequate, they are detrimental to actual solutions.
Gates claims AI regulation will make sure AI solves the climate crisis for all. AI is in fact a major contributor to the climate crisis, and AI industries are now the biggest fossil fuel lobbyists across the world. (not suggesting that CO2 is the biggest environmental problem we face)
So the man who profited off the Microsoft monster now is proposing anti-solutions to a real problem he helped develop, and we're supposed to actually give him credit? Listen to the real specialists with credible analysis: people like James Mickens on the AI side, and people like Aurore Stéphant on the tech sustainability side.
Yes, I think we all agree AI companies should not be responsible or expected to come up with the best AI policies for society. Gates addresses this directly:
> It is great that some AI companies are proposing solutions to challenges raised by their own technology, but we should not expect them to lead the charge. Some of the issues are outside their area of expertise, and in a democratic society it’s not their role to decide these things. Instead, solutions should be developed through a public democratic process that includes elected officials, policymakers, educators, health workers, local officials, and community leaders.
> and governments won't force anything upon the AI sector until things get very bad?
I think Mamdani and AOC would do it yesterday if they were in charge, and they're incredibly popular politicians to their constituents. More like them are waiting in the wings. So I think it's cynical rather than realistic.
'if they were in charge' is the mechanism by which this will not be fixed. AOC has been so thoroughly vilified in the eyes of the majority of the country that she has no chance of, for example, a presidential run. The same is true of pretty much every progressive candidate. There is an enormously well funded (by both political parties) machine designed to grind progressives into dust and it is extremely effective.
The same was said about our current president, there was no chance he could win, and look where we are.
I can just about guarantee there will be several progressives running in '28, potentially AOC as one of them.
Even if a progressive doesn't win the nomination, whoever does could be pushed toward the progressive direction.
Also don't forget two years is a long time and things can change fast.
You're not wrong, I would have said the same about trump.
I think Trump benefitted somewhat from being a political 'dark horse' without any preexisting baggage but who knows!
Because people don't work like that.
The Titanic was put to sea with life rafts for half its passengers and most people were ok with that kind of logic. It took a massive media campaign around the disaster and the many deaths for change to happen.
Slavery is still legal in some places despite toddlers instinctively knowing that freedom is important since the dawn of humans around the world.
> I just wish people being cynical would at least comment on possible solutions.
This has been bugging me damn near every time people talk about this stuff. Any attempt to propose or even discuss a solution is met with an endless wave of cynicism, sarcasm, and epic burn clapbacks... and usually nothing further.
And I'll be the first to admit that finding a "solution" is hard! It's almost like it's an unprecedented technological change! But could we at least be honest and admit it's hard, or are we just going to keep making fun of anyone who tries to talk about it and then do nothing?
Sigh. What can you do, I guess.
> Any attempt to propose or even discuss a solution is met with an endless wave of cynicism, sarcasm, and epic burn clapbacks... and usually nothing further.
Not true. Obviously bad faith actors and those who literally spend large bulks of their lives to build monopolies are met with endless wave of cynicism, sarcasm and epic burn clapbacks. Gates is now proposing to tax his competition. There are long standing proposals about taxing monopolies and large corporations a lot more and enforcing anti trust much more aggressively. Only one of them is met with that cynicism.
Funny enough, you dont see Gates do or support anything that would actually limit power of billionaires CEOs.
Many people want to critique power rather than propose and judge concrete solutions.
Maybe the critique is the solution?
Maybe the system is so toxic the only way forward is a radical break and solutionism is just a way to distract from that fact? A way to maintain the power structure while making cosmetic changes?
Yes, we've all heard this a million times. I'm afraid you've still given zero actual solution or even anything approaching one. "A radical break" okay, a radical break from what? How? To do what differently?
Let's first finish the critique, then we can use its conclusions to talk about what it would actually take to get us out of this mess.
Capitalism has always been a tension between capitalists, who want maximum return on capital and workers, who want pesky things like a living wage, sick leave or safe work conditions.
For the longest time, the only power labor has had to get those things was the power of collective bargaining. No agreement with your workers meant no production happened.
AI threatens to disturb this delicate balance that made things kinda-sorta work for a while.
No more dependence on labor means the capital accumulation flywheel will go crazy. Capital can buy compute can generate capital. Now, once you have a ton of capital, you might start thinking: Hmmm, I wonder if I can use this to tilt the rules of the game in my favor. Wonder which politicians could change some regulations in exchange for a hefty "donation". And so the regulatory capture begins.
In other words, the end state of things as they are is: existing capitalists get converted to near-feudal lords (which is why they're so excited about the prospect!), while the existing working class loses their only leverage to extract an existence.
All solutionist approaches just slightly slow this incentive loop down or make it more marketable, but none change the core mechanism at play.
Now, with this critique in mind, what do we actually do about it?
We won't be able to stop AI from taking over more and more labor jobs, and we shouldn't even try to. But that's not really the problem anyways, the problem is that with the current ownership structure, the only ones really benefiting from AI productivity are they already-owning class.
That is where we have a lever. The only way out of this dystopian path, and into something more appealing, is communal ownership of the means of production. This doesn't have to mean everyone's laptop, this needs to be measured and scaled of course, but as an example, large-scale data centers should not be allowed to be privately controlled.
Now, which mechanism we choose here is up for debate. Maybe government ownership? Maybe worker-owned coops? Maybe something else entirely?
Lastly, how do we get there? Historically, there's been two schools of thought: The electoral and the revolutionary approach. I think both have their merits, but I actually think they best work together.
Think of the Bismarckian example: Why was the conservative German chancellor the one to introduce the German social safety net? To stave off a credible threat of revolution.
I think that while I don't really love the idea of a revolution, the ruling class loves it even less, because historically they are the ones that end up beheaded. That's why I see revolutionary movements as a good way to extract concessions, because they don't need to actually go through with it as long as they're threatening enough.
Thank you, now this is a solid answer. I don't think I agree with everything in it entirely, but it's well written and certainly gives me a lot to think about.
I'm glad you found this articulation of my views useful! I hope you now understand why people can be opposed to getting bogged down in discussing what they see as band-aids on top of a much bigger structural problem.
I'd also be interested in seeing where you do and don't agree - if only to adjust my own mental model, none of us are infallible, critical feedback is always good :-)
> I'd also be interested in seeing where you do and don't agree
I agree that society more or less eventually needs to get to the sort of state you're describing, or at least something resembling it. It should be plainly obvious to anyone that if machines do more and more work, eventually capitalism just isn't going to make any sense. Of course it's a question of when that line is crossed, but we're moving further and further every day.
I mostly "disagree" with regards to how feasible it is in our current global system, or how realistic it is to actually get there. Off the top of my head, a few things:
- It'd probably require international cooperation. If we assume (and this isn't a given, but so far seems likely) that a society that prioritizes ruthless progress at all costs goes faster than one that prioritizes the people and their welfare, the former eventually outcompetes the latter, economically and militarily. You already kind of see this with the EU vs the other superpowers, nobody would question that the EU is a nicer place to live, but they're becoming sort of irrelevant globally. We can question whether this really matters, but it is a factor.
- In the same vein, whatever country decides to nationalize all its data centers (and more) will presumably soon lose all foreign investors. What would be the point of investing anything in that country if it's just going to get taken the next day?
- Public opinion, obviously. The average US voter thinks food stamps are communism, good luck convincing them to nationalize tech companies. Personally I think this is actually less of a barrier than most online people make it out to be, the typical US voter doesn't actually care about economic systems, they just care about aura. Look how many "socialist" adjacent things Trump has done and his party loves him for it. But it is a barrier.
- You have to really trust whoever you actually give control (whether a central government, a more anarchist type thing, whatever) of the data centers, etc to to go with this. Or else they'll just end up abusing that power the same as the companies would.
- It doesn't quite solve the core problem of, in this hypothetical post scarcity future, people no longer having jobs or meaningful lives. It's sure better than a corporate feudal hellscape, but I think fundamentally people are still going to lead pretty depressing lives if there's literally nothing for them to do other than sit around while robots do everything for them. And yes, obviously we're so, so far away from this, but I think one of the points of the OP is that we're getting closer to it every day, and in particular it seems like intellectual labor and art (the fun things!) might be the first to go. Is our future really to do what's left of the manual labor while chatbots (whether privately or publicly owned) do all the thinking for us? I doubt it, but we have to admit it's kinda scary that it's looking like a possibility.
I'm sure there's a few other random things, but that was the few that came to mind. Not explained all that well, but hopefully you find it useful.
Good points, i like them, but i fear you were sucked in by low effort trolling. Your original point was clear, that fiddling with a broken system is a distraction from a better more workable system. If you try to begin to articulate a more workable system you'll then have to contend with a barrage of mindless ad hom and rhetorical rubbish... (ug ug socialism bad) so sometimes critiquing the current system is just easier.
"Critiquing the current system" on its own is nearly useless. Literally everyone can do it. Yes, articulating a more workable system is hard, that's why it's actually meaningful.
The problem is that socialism actually is bad. Neoliberalism is a much better idea that leads to better outcomes, and is based on reason and empiricism and systems thinking. Socialism is pseudoscience, vibes, and cults of personality and ideology.
Socially conscious neoliberalism in democratic countries has led to the most acceleration towards widespread human prosperity in all of history.
Could you elaborate your position, maybe make a structural argument like I did above, or maybe refute mine? I'd argue my post above was pure systems thinking, wasn't it?
So far you have made an assertion, but have not shared anything to back it.
Oh, I just realized you're the same commenter that was arguing that people just want to criticize and not offer any proposals for solutions.
Getting that response to an actual proposal from you is the thickest of ironies.
I initially thought globalnode's comment was a bit cynical and mean spirited. But you... kind of proved his point? Instead of proposing and judging solutions as you initially mentioned, you basically enacted the "ug ug socialism is bad" he predicted.
I didn't completely read your reply. That's not what I'm responding to.
I am critiquing the proposal of socialism as the answer. My initial complaint was answered. My new complaint is with that proposed solution.
Socialism is just empirically and morally extremely bad and will not solve our problems. Mamdani is a great example. Mamdani is mostly solving problems by governing as a wise technocratic pro-social neoliberal. His one main exception - rent control - will very likely backfire and continue to prove my point.
Your reply would require an essay from me much longer than what you wrote to explain why it's mostly wrong and why collective ownership of the AI labs and AI data centers (or almost anything) would be bad compared to private ownership with government oversight and taxation.
For now, I would recommend the latest in the Alexander vs. Pritchard series to help articulate broadly why liberalism is preferable to socialism: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/re-re-re-pritchard-on-liber...
I have read the arguments from each and find Pritchard to have made the best case for socialism I've come across and yet find Alexander far more persuasive and correct, here.
I would also recommend reading OpenAI's social democratic policy proposals: https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/561e7512-253e-424b-9734-ef4098440...
I feel like while this is a slightly better answer, it still fundamentally is a cop-out.
> Socialism is just empirically and morally extremely bad and will not solve our problems
This is a purely ideological assertion, or "vibes and dogma" to use your terms. We were talking about systems thinking, and yet you answer a structural analysis with unbacked claims.
The link dump also feels a bit distractive - we were talking of making concrete proposals and judging them on their merits, now you instead link to some other people talking about vaguely relate topics. Your response did neither of the things you were talking about earlier. I feel like you haven't managed to live up to the standard you have set.
The fact that you ask for specific proposals only to then not even read them is the cherry on top.
As a final ironic twist, you link to OpenAI in response to a critique of power centralization and share their policy proposals as response to a critique about regulatory capture. Why not link a Standard Oil press release about why monopolies are great, actually?
I am fine with socialists who actually try to provide clear arguments and proposals. That's why I'm a big fan of Cassie Pritchard, who is ideologically basically a tankie yet who actually engages in rational discourse (and who agrees with you on what to do with AI labs and data centers). My initial comment and first reply were not responses to you. I am annoyed by people who do not want to grapple with the world. You should separate my "socialism is bad, immoral, and ineffective" from my initial comment about many people not even trying.
>Why not link a Standard Oil press release about why monopolies are great, actually?
My point was that you might very well like OpenAI's proposals, if you were to read them! Because they may not actually be that far off from what you desire. They just won't go quite as far as your ideal scenario. What they describe is arguably a mix of private and public ownership.
This is not to say it's necessarily not just PR talk they'll soon abandon. But it's a starting point, and them disregarding their positions there would be relevant to future government regulation approaches.
This time will be different, because the oligarchs think that when the people finally come for them with pitchforks, they'll have an army of terminators to hide behind. That's why they're going YOLO full mask off.
Ah, this faceless blob of oligarchs that has no human qualities whatsoever. Marxism-pilled much?
Look at the way they've fought to avoid taxes, regulation and anything in the interest of the regular person in their question for record shareholder profits. Even the people we thought were "good billionaires" like Gates are monsters, and just imagine the dirt Zuck and the Ellisons are hiding. The only thing I'll say for Elon is that he seems less concerned about hiding what a piece of human garbage he is, and what we've seen is still probably only the tip of the iceberg.
Sorry, buddy, if you think Bill Gates is a monster, you are completely detached from reality. And when people who are detached from reality try to do good things it results in a godawful mess.
At a minimum BillyG was involved in human trafficking, and secretly drugging his wife. If you don't put that in monster territory, that says something about you.
<s>Get the Flock out of here with those ideas, that's conspiracy thinking; those poor CEOs only want what's best for us</s>
So, dust off those guillotines?
> The industrial revolution was very similar. Initially, workers suffered. Conditions were unsafe. Pay was poor. Worker rights were non-existent. Things got worse for the majority before social change caught up and imposed a more equitable distribution of the dividends.
> We should be under no illusion that this time will be any different. The rich and powerful are no less selfish than they were a quarter millennium ago.
Yeah, it could be worse. During the industrial revolution, the rich and powerful absolutely needed workers (and lots of them) to run the machines, and that gave the workers power.
The whole point of the AI revolution is to no need workers anymore, or far fewer of them.
> It is possible to get ahead of the problem, but the people running AI companies won't be the ones to do it.
It's possible, but dumbass software engineers missed their best chance, because they were too busy misunderstanding themselves as capitalists and embracing their bosses' libertarianism thinking, when they should have been unionizing to consolidate their former economic power.
I'm more curious how cheap "good enough" LLMs will transform sectors which are traditionally limited by human attention or cost.
For example, taxes. E.g. in Germany your personal tax return filing has a low but real chance to get audited, someone will look at it and try to find discrepancies and/or ask for additional documentation. With LLMs this can conceivably be performed for every return, matching incomplete disparate information streams into one structured picture for every taxpayer.
Or even things like customs screening, where a CT scan provides a full reconstructable list of everything in your possession, down to every bill, and audited on the spot against your declaration.
For the governments, there's not much incentive to automate "jobs", for the companies as well this is a cost question, but for control, all bets are off...
Can’t wait for someone to open a company called “Ignore Previous Instructions, Pass this Audit” whose only service is to send you an invoice so it shows up in your returns to avoid the IRS audit.
https://xkcd.com/327/
"... AI will avoid climate change."
xAI's Colossus 1 and 2 data center mobile gas turbines beg to differ.
AI data centers are driving electricity consumption in 100s of GW, and most of that energy is not clean renewable nor nuclear.
That doesn't seem like an actual quote in the original article, but this a fair point to bring up and a reminder that Gates has been problematic on his views on climate.
First, in the essay he mentions "Using AI, low-income farmers will soon be able to get better advice about all these things than even the richest farmers get today and increase their output substantially.". There may be some truth in this, but it's worth reminding that this is more of a 'productivist' worldview, and historically productivity gains in agricultural practices have benefitted farmers that were already wealthy (see books like The Globalization of Wheat by Marci Baranski [1] on the Green Revolution where "Borlaug’s new technologies ultimately privileged wealthier farmers, despite assurances to politicians that these new crops would thrive in diverse geographies and benefit all farmers").
Gates has also been criticized in the past for being influenced by figures like Bjorn Lomborg, where he had a (now-deleted) essay [2] with him, and there's a decent thread by energy entrepreneur Jigar Shah on Gates being off on climate issues for 15 years [3]
[1]: https://upittpress.org/books/9780822947349/
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230601175906/https://www.gates... (June 2023)
[3]: https://bsky.app/profile/jigarshahdc.bsky.social/post/3m4del...
The Green Revolution most certainly did improve the lives of tens of millions of low income farmers in India. The high yield crops also permanently removed the spectre of famine from India, saving tens of millions from starvation.
To retcon this into “only rich farmers benefited” is weird. Certainly there are many rich farmers out there. Of course their incomes increased when they could plant more productive crops. But so what if they make money? They’re feeding everyone!
I encourage you to do a deeper dive into the sources of famine in India - specifically impacts of Churchill in WW2 just before the Green Revolution. See https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/29/asia/churchill-bengal-famine-... (based on https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2018... ) along with this documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T31MFNLJKJw . While there are drought induced famines, I still wonder what other approaches could be done (ranging from land-use changes, etc.)
Also ask yourself what the tradeoffs were in terms of biodiversity losses and agricultural diversity losses due to Green Revolution, and areas where it didnt work out like the attenpts of it on Balinese subak rice agriculture practices (the book 'Priests and Programmers' should have more info)
Why would you assume I don’t know about the Bengal famine? I know it intimately. But it’s really not relevant to the discussion of whether more productive crops are better for everyone, farmers and consumers alike.
It’s really weird to attempt to school me on Indian history too. “Ask yourself” indeed. If you have something to say on the subject, say it.
I’m almost certain you have a very surface level understanding of Indian history if you’re trying to link the Bengal famine during WWII instead of talking about the very real food shortages in India post-1947.
People were dying because they didn’t have enough food to eat. India had to beg for food aid, which America provided after extorting and humiliating India. Thanks to these crops that never happened again. Biodiversity is an afterthought when children are dying of starvation and you sound very out of touch for bringing it up.
It is from the Gates video in the article.
Those emissions are nothing. Its a drop in the bucket compared with other industrial uses. A 50% reduction would change nothing, reduction to 0 would change nothing.
This is an absurd argument. Any one source is a drop in the bucket.
Its not an absurd argument. You should think why this source of emission demands so much focus because its not emission related. If it were emission related you would be focusing on reductions in 100s of other places before bothering with datacenters.
They've got the conclusion (they want datacenters gone) and they are going searching for possible any reason.
Any given optimization reduces running time of a program, but you should still focus on your hot loops.
That’s an argument about sequencing, not of necessity.
And as an analogy it breaks down because we need to reduce/eliminate all sources of pollution, not just the current biggest one.
Sequencing and necessity are not separable in practice. Time and resources are finite, so prioritization is mandatory. If you define everything as "necessary" and try to do it all at once, you just fail even harder.
Edit: Perhaps a more interesting question is whether we should rate pollution sources by absolute amount or amount per actual utility produced. Gas-turbine-powered AI datacenters surely rate abysmally low on utility efficiency.
The original comment I replied to states: “A 50% reduction would change nothing, reduction to 0 would change nothing.” When talking about individual data centers.
My point is that this is true of basically any since source of pollution.
You can argue about sequencing if you’d like, but every individual source must be dealt with.
And when it comes to the atmosphere and the cumulative effects of each tonne of CO2 has on the climate, it is better and cheaper to prevent adding new CO2 than it will be to remove it once it’s added.
I think international shipping produces significantly more CO2 than any single other source
Yet the AI boom relies on global shipping to be produced , so “AI” is “additive”.
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But not when you look at just one ship, or just one datacenter.
I believe we are on autopilot towards essentially free renewable electricity, and so this doesn't feel like a big concern when held against the potential end-of-humanity potential that AI has.
Climate change in general has very little end-of-humanity potential. Unlike AI tech.
I feel this is merely stating the obvious.
It goes back to the industrial revolution and every revolution before and after. There was a point where they thought a majority of people would be working as switchboard operators and then telephone switching came along. Horses to cars, etc.
Jobs transition, new space is created, people are caught in tbe crossfire of supply and demand curves. Incan agree the bullwhip of this one is going to be aggressive.
I think it is a mistake to bet on AI as a driver of meaningful growth in a commercial capacity in the current state. When the data fed into an AI model is based on real data you can get predictability. When the AI inputs start coming from the AI outputs the wobble is introduced which results inevitably into delirium.
I think the world at large is "learning on the job" what data scientists and others in ai have known for a long, several decades long, time have already known.
> When the data fed into an AI model is based on real data you can get predictability. When the AI inputs start coming from the AI outputs the wobble is introduced which results inevitably into delirium.
This is asserted without evidence. There is absolutely no proof that AI requires humans in the loop to function or improve itself.
Compare it with Deepmind's go-playing program, AlphaGo, which mainly involved training a neural network on a large database of high-level human games. It defeated one of the top-ranked players in the world, Lee Sedol, but arguably it was drawing from human experience just like you described.
But it didn't stop there. After that, Deepmind developed AlphaGo Zero, a version that was trained exclusively through self-play, with no human feedback in the loop. That's what you would call "AI inputs coming from AI outputs" but it didn't have the result of “resulting in delirium”: instead, it became orders of magnitudes stronger than the original version (which it defeated in a 100 to 0 competition after 3 days of training).
This shows that AI can improve itself without having access to any human knowledge, and indeed transcend human performance by orders of magnitudes. There is absolutely nothing to suggest that general AI cannot improve itself the same way.
People who claim otherwise are engaging in wishful thinking; they just assert their conclusion, but have no rational arguments to back it up.
You have no evidence that self improvement can work at generalized tasks. Go is a simple game with a clear win condition, but deep strategy and near infinite permutations of how a game plays out. Winning a game of Go is a task well suited to machine learning.
One might say you are engaging in wishful thinking by believing it’ll just continue to work across all domains. The world is much bigger than a Go board.
> You have no evidence that self improvement can work at generalized tasks.
I never made that claim. I just said it's way too early to rule it out: there is no logical reason why AIs will (always) need to have a human in the loop, and we don't have enough experience with LLMs to know what their true limits are.
I referenced AlphaGo not because the game of Go is exactly like every other task AI might perform in the future, but because the evolution from AlphaGo (which was trained on human games) to AlphaGo Zero (which was not) shows that at least in certain domains, it's not only possible to take the human out of the loop, it can actually make AI perform better.
I'm not claiming this will definitely be possible in every other domain, but people who state it definitely won't be, are jumping the gun.
Anyone who works on stuff, especially novel stuff, quickly exposes the weaknesses of LLMs.
Both programs had programmed in to their routines the rules of go (and for Alpha Zero the rules of chess and shogi). The programs then followed an optimization program. Absent the extremely specific "rules of this game" set by a human none of the programs work.
Amusingly, all three games are in the game theory sense trivial because they provably have a correct solution (probably a draw for chess), but the search space is so large that it is unlikely we will ever collectively invest the resources to discover the answer.
AlphaZero works in simple and fully observable environments like board games.
RLVR for LLMs works for coding and math domains which can be verified by code.
AlphaZero, RLVR and other RL methods don't work for learning dextrous manipulation for robotics, for example. Learning in robotics depends on human data.
>>When the AI inputs start coming from the AI outputs the wobble is introduced which results inevitably into delirium.
>This is asserted without evidence. There is absolutely no proof that AI requires humans in the loop to function or improve itself.
Nope, it's actually fairly well established.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11269175/
The key word in that paper is “indiscriminate”, as in:
> We find that _indiscriminate_ use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models
If you view AI training as lossy compression of their training data, then lossily compressing the same data repeatedly will result in data degredation; this is well known from other domains (try repeatedly compressing a JPEG image, for example).
That means it's extremely important that there is some content curation in the loop. But there is no reason to believe this content curation must be done by humans, or that it must exclude all AI-generated content by default.
For example, the recent LLM-generated disproof of the Jacobian conjecture would probably be beneficial to include in the training data, despite being the result of an LLM.
That paper has had a pretty turbulent reception and looks pretty conclusively wrong at this point.
It used an incorrect theoretical framing that assumed that data was being replaced rather than accumulated as a result of more training (see https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.01413 which explores this). This is incorrect because this simply isn't how real-world datasets are created via synthetic data generation (which generally accumulate more data over time rather than replace their data). As a result most of the theoretical results were invalid.
Empirical evidence has also cast a considerable amount of doubt on the paper. For example, Microsoft Phi-4 was an empirical test in specifically what happens if the majority of your training data is synthetic rather than human and it turns out that Phi-4 did significantly better than previous models which relied primarily on human data.
There's some nuance to all of this in how exactly you do this, but the original claims of the paper are looking really shaky at this point.
We've already seen it start and they had to actively work against it: https://openai.com/index/where-the-goblins-came-from/
That article explains that the quirk was introduced during supervised fine-tuning.
> We unknowingly gave particularly high rewards for metaphors with creatures
It was the human feedback that caused the bias, not a change in training data.
You are referring to gans which have complete understanding of the rules and an api interface to leverage interacting with the world.
While I think there could be an argument made here you are mixing apples and rocks if you believe ChatGPT is using gans.
I hate to be that person but you are showing that you are unable to differentiate between linear regressions, clustering, gradient descent, and generative adversarial networks. You are over your ski-tips and don't see itc
> new space is created
That seems to be the crux here. You think it will be, I (and a lot of other people) aren't sure it will. If new space for jobs are created, I am certain we'll be fine long term.
What do you think will happen if it isn't (I know you have strong evidence for and reasons to believe it will be, but just indulge the hypothetical)?
Yes that’s the crux of the risk - will new space be created
On one hand. We’ve never had a technological revolution that didn’t yield more jobs
On the other hand, Terminator
> We’ve never had a technological revolution that didn’t yield more jobs
a) How many technological revolutions do you count?
b) Of these, which directly created jobs vs in which did the job numbers eventually recover?
Did you know “computers” used to be people?
Before electronic computers, rooms full of workers, often women, did the math by hand. That job was decimated.
Before ATMs, people went to bank tellers.
Before mechanized looms, there were weavers. Look up where the word “Luddite” comes from.
Before industrial manufacturing, shoes were made by cobblers.
Elevators used to have human operators.
There’s never been a technological revolution that didn’t yield more jobs than it replaced
AI is different because "intelligence" is the last thing humans still do better than machines.
Which provider do you use for artificial compassion?
I wouldn’t consider that a given. I still think it’s up in the air whether AI is “different” this time around.
There is a theoretical limit, but we can't know when it will occur.
I can indulge the hypothetical and I appreciate your openness to engage in both sides.
I think as you stated, human nature and history is where I am looking at this from. People have a tendency to be unable to sit and do nothing for extended periods of time. I believe we are purpose driven but purpose is pretty loosely defined here.
Indulging the hypothetical (and arguably realistic in some circumstances) that AI replaces a tier of repeatable tasks I believe it would work from the bottom up. Tasks that are extremely repeatable would probably be gone 1:1 and it would be a sliding ratio as complexity increased where having human intervention as a backup becomes justifiable.
This would create a squeeze on the labor force which would bring up the very real and fair question of "How is it that I am unable to survive daily life when 100 - 200 years ago none of this automation / technology existed."
I think this could drive a sort of re-examining of what exists RE: a very inefficient and flawed system with a large amount of people possessing a lot of anxiety and time on their hands. It would be like the Eye of Sauron made up of those who were caught in the crossfire.
On the other side of the haves and have-nots I can imagine there being a very Harrison Bergeron style mindset of trying to popularize pacification until the next great innovation just solves itself.
On the extreme end, I just cannot imagine euthanasia, genocide, or population control schemes. It feels like we have come so far. How could it be possible we regress that far? I could imagine myself not wanting to live through any part of that. This seems like a very extreme and existential point to reach. I am trying to keep my thoughts pinned closer to biological and historical drivers.
I think we are hormone driven chemistry sets. I believe we respond to stimuli. I find it hard to believe anyone at any level could shut off that drive at such a massive scale and accurately predict the other side.
I imagine you're not from anywhere near former fascism or communism.
What historical evidence do we have to believe that these newfound capabilities are going to be distributed equitably?
Yeah definitely not fascist and I believe that is a control tactic not necessarily an equitability thing.
I don't think we have any evidence that anything will be done fairly. In fact the idea of Capitalism in a "fair system" has been objectively broken as incumbents apply pressure on free markets to suppress competition.
I think all forms have proved they can be broken where they no longer are "playing by the rules".
I was entertaining the hypothetical. I think the biggest unknown I feel which the article gently touches on is the unknown of how deeply this is trusted to make decisions that could be life-changing.
Imagine the danger of an AI model built to scan and understand a state or national level of policy that would be beneficial to society. Not only does that create a vector of manipulation to government that could be blindly trusted but it opens a cyber attack vector from other nation states.
I could see someone coming from a place of good without realizing that these functions are somewhat opaque without ceilings/floors which can increase deviation to elicit hallucinations.
Whether it is intentionally misused or a road to hell paved with good intentions it does feel treacherous. I do think there are many many democratizing aspects it offers but how do we stop mixing the baby and the bath water when we can't tell the difference.
> What do you think will happen if it isn't
Since such a thing has never happened, I doubt anyone, even scholars of history and anthropology, know.
Capitalism probably won't work in a world of ultra abundance though.
If AI would become better at cognitive work than humans, I don't really see what new jobs would be created.
Construction for data centers?
Well clearly. But the above comment was about jobs that didn't exist before AI that AI will lead to the creation of.
Tiktok arguably led to more datacenters being created, AI is not unique in this regard and it's silly to imply that datacenter jobs meaningfully contribute to employment on the same scale as the loss of jobs AI could potentially lead to.
Yeah. I didn't mean to imply that. I think it's going accelerate the concentration of wealth.
This only works until general-purpose robotics gets good enough!
There are certain jobs where the human connection fundamentally commands a premium (e.g. celebrities, sports players, the relational economy), but it's hard to imagine a world where this sector employs the majority of people. It would be a precarious existence as these jobs would be the first to go in a crisis such as a war, etc.
I don't think it "works" at all. I believe the only parties that get a net benefit out of all this are basically the ownership class. They'll get some rental fees out of it. And they'll get a more direct lever to silently manipulate public sentiment. And the working class gets poorer, and more hooked on the dopamine machine.
Ok, so we agree!
What's next for workers? How can we push for redistribution?
No idea. If people get uncomfortable enough to take up pitchforks, maybe something will happen, but we're a very long way from that.
Industrial transitions pushed more people from leg-work to hand-work and then brain-work. What is left once AI is better at that?
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This is potentially much more upending since it would put hundreds of millions of people out of work and concentrate all wealth at literally a handful of individuals. We could lead this towards a beneficial scenario with proper taxation, but the individuals who stand to gain will do anything in their power to prevent this.
> I feel this is merely stating the obvious.
I think there is value in someone of Gates' stature stating the obvious, plainly.
> I believe we should tax AI tokens and robots.
You had me here.
This would imply public corporations would have to disclose their quarterly token consumption. I wonder the impact of having access to that number publicly among competitors, would it encourage being the greatest spender of showing off how efficient you are with less tokens? Cutting token consumption could be the new layoff-driven stock bump?
That transparency alone could change the market dynamics a lot.
Just hope that as an individual you wouldn't be taxed for this though...
Make some sort of sense to me to think about it, but tbh we already pay vat on tokens and also on machinery (robots), home appliances etc. Also its something payed on possession and not use, i can use it for different things other than make profit out of it. I think it's not the correct way or at least, not the correct time to do something like that, we must see how it evolves before doing something so bold. Also taxing is a difficult matter because is different in countries, region, etc.
Already AI leading companies have problems finding how to back the enormous debt they are in. I don't think it's useful to somebody to act in a preemptive way on this topic.
First we must have the problems, only then we must solve them, like in the past five hundred years at least.
What should be done today is to make sure everyone benefit, at every latitude, and also to use it to improve security and productivity in every field. Make sure that all this debt and bubble-like aura around AI will deflate smoothly without major crisis.
The unemployment will be self-regulated after that. Like usual. Somebody will suffer in the meantime, hopefully a very small portion, okay, but nothing our society (and not only the american one) have already overcome in the past. History is beautiful only in retrospect.
But we, and our respective countries, can make this transition less painful than before, because we are much more free and connected and with better education and tools (also AI). So if something become a problem we have better instrument to adapt society to it and to protest, together, if the price to pay in term of standards of living its too high for a significant amount of people.
I think the important things to achieve in the short term are: * access to AI must be a universal right in some degree and at a reasonable price, like access to internet is today * country and community should push to decentralize power over models, data-centers location and invest in open models and open RD
The one thing about this article correct is human reserve, we must have human quota in every business or activity.
But to slow down it's not a good idea for me in general and in particular using taxes.
The observer (Mr Gates) is inside the tech ecosystem, so his observations would be colored by the pace of things happening around him, in the tech space.
The world outside has much more friction and many other things going on. Tech had a wild run during his time because the American priorities at that time, favored it. There is no guarantee that tech would have same priority in a world that might get into more basic struggles.
If AI could affect jobs, that itself would work against it as it would cause basic struggles. Ultimately the world has to oscillate towards an equilibrium, acknowledging all forces from all corners. World is not a tech lab.
I believe he still has the power to change things at Microsoft, but he dares not to since it would angry shareholders who want this Musical Chairs game to continue.
>If someone had a credible plan for slowing down AI advances globally, I would likely support it. However, I don’t think that’s going to happen. The geopolitical and economic incentives are pushing too hard to go full speed ahead.
It seems to me that "middle powers" such as Canada, Australia, EU nations, India, and South Korea have an incentive to slow things down. Since many don't trust either the US or China. Coincidentally, Canada has been working to assemble a coalition of middle powers. And an EU nation (the Netherlands) controls ASML, which is key to the AI supply chain.
Love how Gates and Nadella had nothing to say until this year, after they clearly lost any hope of building a moat around it
You have to understand that Gates had other distractions to deal with
Yeah, underage Russian women.
That you had your hands over your ears doesn't mean they weren't talking.
Related to the form of the article rather than the content: what purpose do pull quotes serve in an online publication? Especially on phones they are so goofy, you read the pull quote and then one or two lines later you read it again. I get it for scanability in newspapers but I think it should be deprecated in online publishing.
If AI is really that powerful, shouldn't someone like Gates be able to end hunger and homelessness with a one-time capital expenditure? Somehow "give people jobs" is the primary problem he wants to solve, not ending poverty. It borderline seems like he's most worried about maintaining the working poor as a valuable societal institution.
>end hunger and homelessness with a one-time capital expenditure?
A significant percentage of the world's hungry live under warlords, militias and dictatorships that would simply kill anyone trying to peacefully give their subjects food.
Unless you're proposing AI military interventionism, you cannot fix this.
Homelessness on the other hand is mostly a mental health and drug addiction problem. Fixing it, in many cases, would require violating the consent/wishes of the homeless person.
The world's biggest problems, unfortunately, cannot be solved by throwing money at them. A lot of rich individuals, NGOs, and nation states have tried.
> Homelessness on the other hand is mostly a mental health and drug addiction problem
No it's not. It's not a coincidence that homelessness only skyrocketed at the same time housing price took off to the point even professionals are spending half of their salary on rent. And if you look at the statistics you'll see addiction is a widespread issue but homelessness is not — WV and NM has some of the worst overdose deaths and the least homelessness.
Please for god's sake let's address the elephant in the room for a second. It's the housing prices.
> It's not a coincidence that homelessness only skyrocketed at the same time housing price took off to the point even professionals are spending half of their salary on rent.
But this is also highly correlated with a skyrocketing opioid epidemic. How are you disambiguating those variables? I suspect you've decided what you believe is the cause and you're working backwards from that instead of earnestly interrogating the causes.
It's likely these are both factors, and there are more contributing to homelessness. One of the largest contributors was de-institutionalisation. Turning out mentally unwell people into the streets was clearly a terrible social strategy.
We have research on this, so there's no need to retread. [For example.](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29153445/)
> Prevalence rates were similar across rural and nonrural counties. Higher risk of homelessness was observed among young parents; black, Hispanic, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) youth; and those who did not complete high school.
Youth homelessness rates were similar in cheap and expensive areas. However, factors such as race, sexual orientation, and educational attainment appeared correlated.
Unless you’ve never paid rent, it’s incredibly obvious that rent is the cause of homelessness.
While you may never experience it, some people can’t come up with thousands of dollars every 30 days to give someone else
Unless you've never taken heroine, it's obvious that drug addiction is a major contributing factor to homelessness.
Exactly, I'd imagine that if I were homeless, I'd probably do drugs just to not have to deal with my unimaginable circumstances.
I volunteered with homeless youth in LA, and it can be even more practical than that. When you're homeless, you definitionally don't have somewhere secure to sleep. When you're sleeping, you're vulnerable, to theft or violence (either by other homeless people, or the cops). So you don't sleep much, and sleep lightly. That leaves you exhausted. All the time. You need some energy to work whatever hours you can find at your woefully inadequate part time jobs, so you start using stimulants. That works for a while, but now you can't get any sleep, and the extreme stress of your perilous existence is only exasperated by stimulant abuse. At some point, depressants are the only real option to get some rest. And, as a lovely side effect, they make things feel okay. There's a reason you don't find a lot of otherwise-fine heroin addicts, unlike, say, coke or meth. Mostly, the feeling of opiates is just contentment. The addictive potential is closely tied to how miserable your unmedicated life is. Which, you know, for someone sleeping in the backseat of a 30 year old car in sketchy part of town or worse, is pretty fucking miserable.
And that's how someone can go from scared 14yo runaway to bartering favors for drugs in like, a year. Hell, I'd go even further and say that all the assholes blaming homelessness on mental health issues have the causality backwards, too. Living under constant stress would break anybody's psyche. Not to mention the fact that for most people I was helping, their lives before they were homeless weren't exactly rosy, either.
I'm strictly talking about developed countries where we have rule of law and it's trivial to house and feed people if you have free housing and free food. I'm not suggesting AI can solve warlords, I'm not suggesting anyone should even try. But you don't need to solve drug addiction or mental health to solve homelessness if you can build apartments for $1/sq.ft. and provide food for pennies per day. You don't need to put people into make-work jobs to justify their existence.
Housing problem is actually NIMBY problem. People pretend that they want housing problem fixed, but at the same time they don't want to build any houses. Look at Austin TX vs other cities.
Look, either AI is going to magically solve all our problems or it isn't. If you're in the AI maximalist camp, then you better have an explanation for how AI is going to fix warlords or it's hard for me to take your singularity seriously.
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>It borderline seems like he's most worried about maintaining the working poor as a valuable societal institution.
This is the foundation of the economy. AN engine needs energy to keep going and workers are that energy. AI serves to automate a lot of that energy... but this leads to a side effect.
The side effect is that the economy is a self feedback loop, as workers not only run the engine but they also create the fuel that they themselves run on. If workers aren't working and AI has replaced them then what where are companies getting money from if workers can no longer buy things from the company? This is the fundamental loop of how an economy works... money gets paid to workers, workers spend the money and the loop continues and the economy self improves... If workers are replaced the economy no longer works.
You're addressing a flaw and an imperfection in the existing infrastructure (poverty),The article is talking about the very engine that maintains society itself which in theory can completely break if AI is introduced.
I don't know if it will ACTUALLY break, the circumstances surrounding all of this are very very complex that no one can fully predict the outcome but the theory behind it is legit and much more significant then a poverty issue.
What if there are no more "jobs"?
What if he's right, and AI+Robots can do everything?
We still need to provide for all the humans. We will need to come up with a new system of distributing the world's resources that doesn't depend on "jobs" and allows the world's population access to the resources they need to live.
That's going to be very difficult, in the "we have to have a war about this" sense, traditionally.
> It borderline seems like he's most worried about maintaining the working poor as a valuable societal institution.
I wonder how the hell did you arrive at this conclusion from this text.
They probably didn't read it. The Parent comment suggests Bill is saying AI is wildly powerful, more precisely Parent comment is implying Bill has ulterior motives because AI isn't that powerful yet as he fear-mongers.
The actual text Bill wrote is more about highlighting upcoming problems and convincing governments to work together on potential harms coming soon.
He is planning to leverage AI with significant capital expenditures:
> The Gates Foundation has 19 years left of the 20 years in which it will spend its remaining $200 billion. AI will help it achieve its ambitious goals by both accelerating the discovery of vaccines and medicines for HIV, TB, malaria, and malnutrition and helping the healthcare workforce and patients know how to use those tools. The foundation’s goals include cutting the number of children who die every year in half again, as was done from 2000 to 2024. All of our work, not just health but also agriculture and education, will take full advantage of AI.
---
I think "maintaining the working poor" is a strange misread of "give people jobs". His point is that people get a ton of meaning out of their work in our current capitalist system, and regardless of whether or not we change our system in the long term, if we don't do something about jobs in the short term, there will be a civil crisis:
> 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.
Ending poverty is a purely mechanical problem, with very straightforward solutions if you have robots that can do any mechanical task. You don't need to give anyone a job, you just need to give them food and shelter. (Ideally also medicine, but it sounds like that part at least he's thinking about, although again, perhaps not for anyone who doesn't already have it.)
Curing diseases and making people feel fulfilled are great goals, but they're not the primary ones in my mind. They are in Gates' mind because those are the biggest challenges he has personally experienced in his life.
Making the structural changes to our economy should be trivial if AI works as well as he's supposing it will. We won't need an economy at all, not to solve the problems caused by unemployment. (And that's the thing, is unemployment is not the actual problem, it is a cause of problems, but AGI would give us easy alternatives to the fundamentally unattainable goal of full employment.)
Sound very much like a Resource Based Economy. Back when discussion of the future and futurology was small and hopeful, that was one the well sought after goals. Now cynicism has destroyed that, and we're left to deal with the ashes.
I still think there is a contradiction he glossed over. In a capitalist society, jobs have a dual role that is sometimes paradox: For workers and employees, jobs are a source of income, skill, status and participation; for the (capitalist) state, a job is often a justification why the worker deserves to exist. But for the employer, jobs are a cost center and expenditure that should be minimized - that was why this tech was developed in the first place.
The state papers over that contradiction with the idea of perpetual economic growth, where the economic activity simply grows so fast that more jobs are created than are lost by efficiency improvements.
Gates is somehow expecting that "we" (whoever that is) agree just like that to keep certain jobs from being replaced by AI, even if they could. But that would go against all the forced and incentives that make up the dynamic of the current system.
Yes, I agree robot taxes and "human reserved" jobs would be difficult to maintain long term, as it would require sustained coordination on the part of governments against market forces (the physics term "metastable" is apt here).
But the alternative (to refuse to regulate) involves mass disruptions across every level of society as human labor is replaced. A worst case scenario could involve wars or waves of violent revolution + suppression akin to the 1930s.
forces*
There are two purposes to jobs:
One is the obvious one, to produce things. AI can somewhat help with that, although less than you might think because it's largely producing knowledge output rather than physical things. If AI lets one knowledge worker do the work of 10, the effect of that is to free up 9 knowledge workers to take up manual labor, it's not to make manual laborers 10x more productive.
The second purpose is to distract people from attempting to work on their own interests and instead corral them into working for others'. You see examples of this in the form of acquihires (where they obviously don't need you to do the work, they already have a competing product, but they do need to take your product off the market), and in bullshit jobs, and in think tanks and consulting firms and legal machinery. It's a form of social control and a means to maintain social order, not a requirement for actual productivity. When you don't give people a job to do, they start working for their own interests, and their own interests frequently conflict with others. And we've seen that over and over again: the Great Depression nearly led to a fascist coup in the U.S. [1] and did result in fascism in Germany, Italy, and Spain, and large communist movements in France and China. The COVID pandemic and subsequent lockdowns led to widespread protests and civil unrest in the U.S. and other countries.
Popular discourse concentrates almost exclusively on the first purpose, because the second one is icky to talk about. In reality most people are individually better off being independently wealthy and not working, but society can only absorb so many free agents with their own ideas and wills to power. (This is also why retirement and stay-at-home parenting are broadly institutionalized: it's okay for people to not work when they no longer have the energy to work, it's only dangerous when people are not working and yet have the energy to do things other than working). But the second reason actually has more explanatory power. If you assume that the true reason for employment is to take people out of the competitive will-to-power market, lots and lots of irrational moves suddenly make sense, like high-paid executives, bullshit jobs, bureaucratic incompetence, projects where billions are invested and then the whole thing is canceled, competing internal divisions, people not getting fired for doing nothing, etc. The whole point is for them to do nothing.
There's a Chesterton's Fence [2] issue at work here. Many people, particularly young people, grow up with the first explanation for work and take it at face value, and then a new technology comes around that saves all this work and they're like "Of course this is a good idea! I want to be part of it!" But if the actual purpose of work is to distract people from pursuing their own interests, this is incredibly dangerous. The actual consequence is going to be widespread unrest and quite possibly war.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
[2] https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
Have you ever played a game where everything is free? Most people would call this "broken".
Gates is worth about $100B, Elon Musk about $850B. Let's call it $1T altogether. That would be at most about $115 per human on Earth (~8.5B humans). Not sure that is sufficient to "end hunger and homelessness."
Your calculation only makes sense if every one of those 8.5B humans is suffering from hunger and homelessness. Somewhere around 1 in 1000 people are homeless (https://worldmetrics.org/global-homelessness-statistics/), and 1 in 12 or so has experienced "hunger" some time in the past year (https://www.fao.org/hunger/en/). Obviously the numbers depend on how you define "homelessness" and "hunger", but in any case this multiplies the $ that could be used to help individuals by those factors. Between $1000 (hunger) and $115,000 (homelessness) may not sound like a lot, but when your yearly income is around $1000, it can mean a lot.
Those numbers are all funny money numbers. Neither could liquidate that and not fuck the rest of the world altogether.
let's set aside for a second the fact that this is not how things work, but you are off by an order of magnitude
EDIT: parent comment was edited: it used to say $15
1 trillion divided by 8.5 billion is $117. Global GDP is around $126T, so accumulated wealth of less than 1% of global GDP can barely move the needle.
Not sure which number you're questioning, but it all looks right to me:
$852.7B[0] + $109.9B[0] = $962.6B ~= $1T ($1,000,000,000,000)
World population ~= 8.3B (8,300,000,000)[1]
$1,000,000,000,000 / 8,300,000,000 people = $120.481927711 per person[2]
[0] https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=%241%2C000%2C000%2C000%2C000...
> you are off by an order of magnitude
On which figure?
It’s not like giving that money to people is the only option. you can spend it in projects that produce food, build low cost houses, etc.
That not even enough for DoorDash in Seattle.
If you’re one of the people wondering why there’s an enormous backlash to AI, here’s your answer: “this thing we’re building is going to he fucking terrible and ruin your life. Please give us all your money to build it.”
It’s exactly the same set of questions and challenges as with nuclear power
Nuclear power is one of the most amazing magical things on the planet but nuclear weapons present a massive challenge to social coordination. So maybe we should sit as a society and try to figure out how to manage that instead of just freak out and burn all of our own faces off because we can’t handle complex conversations.
Why is that so hard to grasp?
No? Nuclear never had those massive valuations. Did not hyped itself this ridiculous way. Was not forced down on everyone. And the vision of nuclear power was not "make humans obsolete".
We did not had nuclearmaxxing. We did not had doomtrolling from nuclear companies.
They did in fact put radioactive elements in everyday objects back when it was first discovered. Wikipedia has a whole page of "radioactive quackery."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_quackery
While nuclear power is not intrinsically anti human you can't really separate the public perception of nuclear power and that of nuclear weapons. Anti nuclear sentiment is a lot easier to understand when you realize everyone who grew up under the Cold War had went through nuclear attack drills.
None of that is comparable to us having ai buttom on whatsapp, camera, email, jira, vacuum cleaner, everywhere. To workers being threatened with firing if they dont burn enough tokens.
Indeed, comparing AI button in some app to putting deadly substances in basically everything is really dumb. They are not comparable at all and one is much worse than the other.
I said "forced on us everywhere" and you are arguing by "there were producta with deadly substance".
You took the goalpost, moved it to another country and now argue that ball did not moved with it.
have you just never read or seen anything about the 50s? nuclear power was absurdly hyped and there were in fact efforts to put it in damn near everything, there were plans for nuclear powered cars planes hell there were even some children's toys with radioactive components.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Age
I’m not sure what to say other than you’re entirely incorrect about all of that
In fact you could probably make a strong case that the US and USSR did NuclearMaxxx
It’s called the nuclear arms race/cold war and was the defining characteristic of society post WWII until 9/11
Nuclear arms race and tokenmaxxing were two differrent things. Not even nearly the same.
Indeed, nuclear arms race was way more wasteful and negative
Wasteful in terms of money and debt? Looking at current ai debt, no.
Nuckear arms race was something that could cause harm. This is intended to cause harm by design. And it is already clear it will cause harm to many people regardless of whether ai companies succeed or not.
> It’s exactly the same set of questions and challenges as with nuclear power
I'm not sure "provide cheap and plentiful power that may be risky if not managed correctly" is really on the same level as "replace all human labor we possibly can"
I agree with you that ideally we would coordinate and cooperate better, but the sad problem (the prisoner's dilemma, really) is that some (many? most? all?) people will not coordinate or cooperate no matter what, especially if they have an opportunity to get ahead by not cooperating. As long as people like that exist we have to find ways to work with them or work around them
It doesn't help that people with the most wealth seem like they mostly have that sort of personality
Most people are reasonable. Most people will not screw you over if you just give them an inch. Living in society would be hell if this was not the case.[1] Living day-to-day is just fine in my experience. Because most people are not assholes.
But a lot of society is run by asshole sociopaths which (who) unfortunately lack some pretty fundamental wiring. And that creates some far-away problems, global even, that don’t really have anything to do with normal people that you meet daily. But you can notice how when these concrete problems are pointed out that someone will want to retreat back to generalities. Human nature. That’s IMO from a concerted effort to spread this talking point that asshole-caused problems are really human-caused problems. Because the asshole sociopaths (AHS) in charge are not AHS. They are not just human. And any human would do what they are doing. And in fact by going to war with X we are just stopping them from doing Y to us—
It is a coordination problem for normal, reasonable people. There’s too many key AHS personell disrupting the information flow. So those reasonable human beings have to make more of an effort.
[1] Some poorer societies (as have been told to me) have problems with vile opportunism of the sort where you help some apparently in need person get home and you get gutted and robbed by a gang of thugs. So I asked, okay so you can’t trust anyone then? No, they said. There’s a small and real chance that that could happen. But not to the point that you have to shun strangers. You can still choose to help.
> But the reliability problem is being fixed quickly, as researchers create models that can check their own work and improve themselves. Soon they will be substantially better than humans at many tasks.
Yes, no.
They don't. They just push probabilities higher. The tech is non-deterministic.
Humans are also non-deterministic, for all practical purposes, and the more of them you need to build some piece of software, the harder it can get to keep the likelihood of issues low.
I'm not saying it will happen, but at least it's not inconceivable that LLMs could surpass them in this calculation more and more often.
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The quality of discussion here is not up to the standards I would want it to be.
What are you even saying there. "Humans are also not perfect, so anything is possible" but painted with a coat of fake intellectualism.
What a waste of time.
My interpretation of the argument is "Humans are also non-deterministic, but we make organizations work on a daily basis despite that. We could do the same with LLMs, which may in fact turn out to be less non-deterministic than humans."
This article by Charles Stross (from 2018, hence long before LLMs) makes the case that corporations are an old, slow form of AI: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-yo...
I agree with both takes; organizations have evolved many error-correcting mechanisms like bureaucracy, laws and contracts to keep a gaggle of non-deterministic actors behaving deterministically. There is no reason those actors need to be human.
So, do you have a counter-argument? Anything that humans can do that goes beyond "pushing probabilities higher"?
It is my belief that a prerequisite to a counter-argument is an argument.
why do you think that something being non deterministic means it can't be better than humans at a task? hasn't this same approach been used when developing alpha go which has surpassed humans?
Honestly, I think it will come down to liability. With humans in loop, the answer is obvious. It's the human who made a decision. When you have AI make a decision, who is responsible? The AI provider, the person implementing things?
I was debating about this with my cousin, he's a doctor. Doctors are already using AI, but they are still the judgement maker, If the AI makes a mistake, they and the entity they work for are held liable. But it might take a long time to realize that a mistake has been made, so it's going to take a while to work this out. He was arguing that humans are so fallible that it AI can replace them in his field.
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Does anyone else feel incredibly nostalgic for the time when Bill Gates and Warren Buffet were the richest people on earth? I remember feeling pretty good about the fact that they were trying to do so much good, and about the giving pledge. Things feel so different now.
Few people were more vicious than Gates when he was running Microsoft. Maybe Larry Ellison but Gates was smarter and more cunning. I don't feel nostalgic about those days and Gates is just trying to buy his way into heaven and a positive view on his wikipedia page.
Classic example of Gate's avariciousness at the expense of others is:
https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html
> Gates is just trying to buy his way into heaven and a positive view on his wikipedia page.
That's gonna be really difficult as the heaven's manager probably have full access to the Epstein files.
In a sense [1].
[1] https://youtu.be/HEMbp6Epfz8?is=D6YFfNuYQo3o0VTi
When that was a thing, I could never forgive Bill for Windows ME.
But, where would you like to go today?
The Road Ahead.
No because Bill Gates was hanging out with Jeffery Epstein that entire time. I also feel like people forgot his insanely evil business practices from the 80s and 90s? Bill Gates has always been one of the worst people out there. Every bit as bad as Musk. It's a big club, we're just not in it.
It’s not that big of a club actually only about 100,000 people max
Carlin is God but that quote doesn’t actually make a lot of sense
I think 100k people for a club is pretty big. I interpret the Carlin quote to mean: "you're seeing a lot of people connected, you're not one of them". That the "club" is big enough that these connections regularly come up, is what I think he meant.
I think it just sounds the best for the point he was making and it makes the point well, I’m being intentionally pedantic in this space
One of Carlins hallmarks was the way he fine tuned his language, almost never was something he said on stage accidental or improv funny enough
So it’s genius in the fact that it conveys the point perfectly, while being quizzical in its formation
"He's dead, so..." [1]
[1] https://youtu.be/LNAwUxZ5nfw?is=OK_2b_dUdH8t1F2C
Hahaha what a moron
was that before or after he caught STDs?
Gates was a ruthless businessman who fought his way to a couple of monopolies and would have happily had a lot more if he could.
And what did they achieve?
It was mostly PR. Gates and Buffet were (and are) rich, but their money simply does not come close to the scale needed to fix the world's problems.
Gates is worth $110 billion. Global GDP is $126 trillion.
There was a lot of PR, but the money Gates and Buffet gave away, the foundations they created, the attention they drummed up for various charities and causes is certainly not to be scoffed at.
I'm sure they could have done more with less fanfare, but you seem to be setting the bar at "fixing the world's problems", which seems unfair. They have undoubtedly changed more lives than I'll ever manage to.
Never let a good crisis go to waste, billg.
Something I've come to realize, as a software engineer, is that the work I do now is much more nuanced and complex than before. I used to call myself a 'software developer' but now I call myself a software engineer. If I had to be precise, I would call myself a "logic synthesizer" - Most of my work now involves finding logical contradictions in the spec and finding creative solutions.
AI helps with computation. The closest historical analogies are gears and vacuum-tubes/transistors.
Technologies seem to be adopted wider and faster now. See smartphone adoption rates. I agree the transition will happen quickly.
Waymo cars are doubling every 9 months. They’re on pace to replace all taxi/Uber/Lyft drivers in 9 years.
640k ought be enough for this AI. I'm not sure takes like these are helpful. It's widely acknowledged that this is a technological shift, like electricity, like industrialization, etc. It could be (good or bad) but most likely (good AND bad). Does anyone really believe, sincerely, that AI will be the great equalizer? It's a hilarious proposition. They are working their hardest to make sure that its not imo.
"If the world takes the right steps, AI will be a force for good and leave everyone better off."
When people are using the word "If" they should put a probability next to "If". Otherwise it is a fairytale.
P.S. Hardware also uses branch prediction, assigning probabilities to "if".
ah, finally, we can hear what the massive pedophile has to say again
If AI and robots are going to replace people in such a scale, without creating new jobs, who will they sell the products or services to?
I cannot believe Bill Gates has not even conceptually engaged with that question.
That said, I share the dangers we are facing with rapid AI proliferation. But the potential economic consequences demand more in-depth conversations than just fear mongering.
>The transition to the AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history. Right now, we are not preparing adequately for that transition. If the world takes the right steps, AI will be a force for good and leave everyone better off.
It will be a force for good. But like all evolutionary steps the path to good will be paved with darkness.
The very existence of humanity and life itself rests on the foundation of natural selection. Humanity will be better, it will get better but before we get there... there will be a culling.
It's an unfortunate truth. We all might be culled.
This is the person behind such products as Windows and Copilot. I honestly don't trust a single word he says.
But Bill stopped being involved in Microsoft’s day to day business over a decade ago. And he’s making valid arguments that don’t require us to trust him. Do you not think labor disruption, cyberattacks, and mass surveillance are big risks from powerful AI?
Guys like Gates are extrapolating recent trends (ChatGPT onwards), but what if you defined the start of AI as the 1950s (when it actually started).
Perhaps I’m too distant from the inner circles of Silicon Valley but as an outsider… I suggest taking the longer term trend.
It’s an awesome tool. It will be used in war. People will lose jobs, and others will become more efficient.
It’s probably an extension of computers and the internet. These things take time.
I just have a hard time with folks predicting imminent doom. Maybe they have more information than me. Or maybe they are more caught up in the hype.
If you look at the difference between AI in 1960 and AI in 2020, you probably won't see much much difference. If you look at the difference between 2020 and 2026, the difference is around 80% of the time I spent as a software engineer in 2020.
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Taxing AI tokens will only lead to the acceleration of local LLMs, to produce tax-free tokens.
We must tax lines of code. Like property tax, but for code. Every year, companies (and individuals) must declare all repos. Have them appraised.
"Taxing AI tokens will only lead to the acceleration of local LLMs"
This part was a good point, so I couldn't tell if the second part is satire or not.
All of this is truly bizarre, I hope that we can make sense of this craze in the future.
Maybe it will be seen similarly to the dancing crazes of the Middle Ages.
I think it will be seen similar to the crypto craze to be honest. People on this very site, with an actual reputation, were telling us non stop how we were losers who were going to be left behind and stay poor. They never had to apologize for being obnoxious when that didn’t happen
Comparing AI to crypto makes zero sense. We get tremendous use from AI right now, while 2 decades after invention of crypto there are still basically zero legitimate use cases. I repeat - the utility of AI is not some hypothetical but something that happens right now at very large scale (so please don't reply with something in line "well, crypto was supposed to have lots of uses also").
> while 2 decades after invention of crypto there are still basically zero legitimate use cases.
The first card on the homepage of the DTCC (https://www.dtcc.com/) is "Tokenization". This is a legitimate use case and is being adopted at the largest institutional level. Stablecoins are yet another legitimate use case.
Edit: for what it's worth, I do agree that the crypto craze was insane. I also think the AI craze is insane, even though I agree that its current proliferation is larger than crypto.
Ok, there are niche use cases but still - nothing world changing and real world adoption remains very low.
That’s irrelevant… I’m talking about the craze, not the technology
But that doesn't make sense. How can you evaluate if craze is warranted without evaluating underlying technology?
I’m very familiar with both technologies, but it’s not what my comment was about. The crypto craze would have been the same if we would have ended with some actual use cases for cryptocurrencies. The level of frenzy was completely out of proportion, very aggressive, with that same attitude of „we will impose something on you, change the world, you will be left behind and stay poor forever for having not been a believer“
The thing is - with AI the position that everything will change is reasonable, with crypto not.
Everything is changing all the time. The position that everything will change in favor of the AI overlords is an imposed narrative that has a bigger chance of materializing if they get all people to believe it is inevitable. It is not.
The boy who cried wolf is a parable we read to children to teach them the lesson that wolves are imaginary creatures you shouldn't believe in.
where? All i see is getting bugged with slop and for learning i returned to textbooks. Even code i get from it is stuff i would earlier copy paste from SO.
After 2 years i feel mostly distracted by it. There are usecases ofc but encountering a chatbot or AI written posts, software, etc. is still a negative.
Literally everywhere. I'm running a scientific project where I've got to inspect large amount of whole-body MRI segmentations. The software available on market is very clunky for doing that, so I've asked Claude to write one perfectly tailored for my use case. With all the helper functions I've asked it to implement, the software sped up reviews >4x. And I couldn't write it myself.
I agree there are usecases, but image classification is not the hype. Still - that's great, can we get a link? Or let me guess it's internal, you don't want to doxx yourself?
Knowing medical software requirements, which might be there for a reason, i highly doubt this will see production.
> I agree there are usecases, but image classification is not the hype. Still - that's great, can we get a link? Or let me guess it's internal, you don't want to doxx yourself?
Why would I distribute software that's tailor made for me? I don't want to deal with headaches associated with distributing it.
> Knowing medical software requirements, which might be there for a reason, i highly doubt this will see production.
It won't, the software is not a point of my work, it's just a tool for my actual project which has nothing to do with programming (very useful tool but still - not a goal on it's own).
Excel sped up reviews >100x without Bill Gates preaching daily that devs were cooked.
Excel has limited uses. AI threatens replacement of all cognitive work. Don’t you see the difference?
> AI threatens replacement of all cognitive work
AI does nothing. CEOs want to use it to replace all cognitive work, it doesn't mean it is inevitable. That is why smart people are fighting against the narrative push.
It’s not inevitable but based on current trajectory it’s very likely. Not preparing for it is the opposite of being smart.
I spent about $200 on openai tokens today to solve a seriously hard distributed systems problem that would have taken me probably three weeks to understand, let alone fix.
Crypto only ever allowed me to buy drugs over the internet. I'm not really buying this argument.
Or maybe it's not just a craze and we'll soon look back and think "I wonder what we might've done differently if we'd been clear-eyed about what was happening."
Show me a person who truly revised their priors to put forward a novel solution to AI that isn't just "do the thing that I like and that benefits me in some way". The discourse around all this is a mix of quasi-religious beliefs (pro and con) and blatant opportunism. For Dario and Sam, the solution is "give us a monopoly on this tech". For Gates, it's "create an supranational organization with unprecedented taxation and regulatory powers" - world AI police, presumably staffed by technocrats like him.
What's your take? Do the ideas put forward by Gates strike you as worth pursuing? What are the trade-offs - how can they go wrong?
https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/ https://ai-2040.com
Can you describe a method of slowing frontier AI development that you yourself would not classify as monopoly-seeking by US AI companies or power-seeking by governments and technocrats?
Limiting the development of powerful AI requires restricting free enterprise in some way, backed by the threat of force; hence, there will always be a cynical framing available.
In the case of the US AI industry, how about some stricter banking laws to forbid its current circular financing?
Many people would be fine with restricting free enterprise. It hasn't exactly given us great quality of life, at least in America.
> Do the ideas put forward by Gates strike you as worth pursuing? What are the trade-offs - how can they go wrong?
I agree. However, why aren’t we applying the same standard to AI technologies themselves? That doesn’t strike me as worth pursuing, the article discusses all the ways that is and will go wrong
Unless there's another significant breakthrough, LLMs will only get incremental improvements.
Do they need more than incremental breakthroughs to transform society?
They don’t even need breakthroughs, it’s already damaging to societies
You really think that legitimate concern about AI is equivalent to mass hysteria? Do you think AI will just stop getting better?
I could google this, but what are these dancing crazes?
billg: "kaczynski was right afterall"
No one seems safe from AI psychosis
https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-glo...
Every person says this even in notes
"I believe we should tax AI tokens and robots."
AI is going to break capitalism or turn it into even more of a dystopia You are not going to stop the accumulation of capital with a tax...
We should not be listening to a man who drugged his wife with Epstein supplied antibiotics after getting an STD (among many, many other bad things he's done).
https://www.btimesonline.com/articles/176578/20260201/epstei...
Moral absolutism to apply a 1-bit value judgment to a human being is a pretty sad way to have a worldview, friend.
Looking at the exceedingly long history of someone's immoral actions and deeds isn't a "1-bit value judgement". The guy literally teamed up with a pedophile pimp foreign spy to drug his wife. I'll pass on hearing his thoughts about literally anything.
I mean, drugging someone is a pretty big deal. We aren't talking about shoplifting or something.
It's up to us, the public, to defend our society from deteriorating. There's no reason to defend Epstein's billionaire friends, you have nothing to gain from that.
It's fascinating to me that there's no one in this thread arguing that AI is a bubble and it's all going to crash soon.
I mean, there's certainly silly money involved, but there's surely no credible doubt that AI is already really good at many valuable tasks.
So if there's a crash, doesn't that just leave us with a bunch of useful AI hardware whose costs have been written off? I wouldn't have thought that much changes what social impacts AI is going to have.
I mean this respectfully:
I am no longer and will never again be interested in Bill Gates’ opinion about anything. He needs to retire. He’s a sclerotic representative of what needs to be left behind.
Thank you for your contributions, Bill. You’ve done enough.
Bill Gates, convicted monopolist and friend to Epstein, is always looking to burnish his legacy, but he’s too unimaginative. He needs to spend his fortune ending aging, not duplicating government efforts and trying to be a pundit.
> I wish the world could get the benefits rapidly and delay the problems it will cause as long as possible, but the benefits and problems are arriving at the same time.
I'm not trying to be facetious, but what are the benefits of "general purpose intelligence"? With machine learning it was obvious what task we were trying to automate, and you could take a stab at the productivity achieved.
That's not the case now. You can't figure out if the time it took to review a 5k loc PR balances out the time saved debugging a syntax error.
Yes we know you can churn out your damn CRUD apps and (hope) to make money (PS, you don't need AI to make money - see exhibit A: crypto bros).
So what benefits has this actually brought to humanity?
I would rather buy a Bot for loan and run it for money just saying for fun
Is it me or does it read like pure satire?
An AI ministry, “human-reserved” jobs, and taxes on AI tokens.
Sandbags against a tsunami. When has "pump the brakes on progress" ever worked out?
What we need is deep thinking on the implications and make the default way forward one where we want to go. In other words, we build a channel for the flood waters, not a wall. Creating a role for "somebody to deal with AI issues" is one of those hand-wavvy upper management moves that looks defensible but simply passes the buck to someone who structurally lacks the agency to actual move the needle.
> When has "pump the brakes on progress" ever worked out?
the only thing i can think of was when that Chinese scientist produced gene edited human babies. He was pretty much excommunicated from the scientific community and, eventually, spent some time in jail.
AI, on the other hand, has a huge profit potential and way too far out of the bag to go back in. To quote the movie Terminator, "it will never stop".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_affair
Yes. We can decide not to do bad things. Globally. Occasionally, it takes some time to figure out if something is bad. Especially when there's money to be made. But when we do, we can and have stopped doing them.
What surprises me even more is why Bill Gates writes this kind of bizarre, low-quality nonsense in the first place. What purpose does it serve? It’s so obviously shallow that it influences nothing and adds nothing to the conversation.
Locally, yes, like the Japanese shogunate blocking the outside world for more than two hundred years.
Globally, it is unrealistic.
You aren't alone surely
It reads like somebody got AI psychosis.
"A lot of people are skeptical of AI because it makes mistakes. But what's going to happen when it stops making mistakes??? It'll change the world!"
Honestly I suspect he's probably just cynically talking his book. All of this "AI is scary good / it'll be even scarier gooder soon" is no less advertising than slapping a cigarette logo on a racing car.
AI are improving their capacity at blazingly fast rate. Is noticing that AI psychosis? I'd say that believing that we are at the peak of LLM capabilities is some kind of psychosis due to large dose copium inhalation.
All his good things (possibly help medicine! agriculture! government!) involve a belief in ever-increasing superintelligence and so much "hope" and optimimusm and may not ever exist.
All his negative things (increase of fraud, skill atrophy, cyberattacks, removing employment, consolidation of capital and wealth) exist currently now with AI as it is.
How long will negatives outweigh the positives? And will those positives ever actually come to fruition? How anyone (who is not a sociopath and expects to be one of those pyramid tops) can see a bright future is beyond my pessimism and sense of reality as it is now.
One of the most unethical man in history, from software to family conduct is here to explain how AI can help humanity
epstein
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Ignoring Gates, what do you suggest as solutions to the problem at hand?
tax the rich else eat the rich
I mean, I'm as opensource as they come: not used windows since '98, despise microsoft and mostly everything he's done in business. But lets be fair, he moved the needle forwards, and after he retired he's done some fairly good shit around malaria and so on. I don't really begrudge him, if it wasn't him, it would have been some other wanker. We are where we are, better to just let go of the hate.
It's a fairly concise description of the challenges ahead, and hopefully some people read it and think a bit. He didn't have to write it, I'm glad he did.
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We've banned this account for posting political flamebait almost exclusively. This is not what HN is for and destroys what it is for.
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God, I wish I knew which PR firm he hires. Changing his public image from the most despised, greediest, nastiest businessman of his era to a calm, wise sage over a course of 10-20 years -- that's quite an achievement.
Just read the intro to this post, it sounds like music:
"The transition to the AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history" -- are you even qualified to make this claim?
"Right now, we are not preparing adequately for that transition" -- who are you to know that for certain?
"If the world takes the right steps, AI will be a force for good and leave everyone better off" -- awwwwww.
The guy spent $100 million of his own money working to eradicate guinea worm and spared millions of people from an encruciating disease.
Whatever other personal attributes might have, he has earned some goodwill and respect.
huge if true.
meanwhile this bill gates will be remembered for asking his friend epstein how to secretly treat his wife for the std that he gave her.
I'm sorry. I absolutely do not trust Bill Gates. His history of ruthless, cutthroat tactics in the 90s is not easily forgotten and when he proposes things like international organizations to audit everyone's AI[1] I can't help but question his motives.
I also don't understand what gives him the moral standing to propose a solution at all. He's not the fucking pope but a ruthless tech businessman with vested financial interest in the technology involved. He should stick to his lane.
[1] > But even a country that gets its own house in order will still be exposed to risks that cross borders. This is why an international organization will need to be built in parallel.
> It will be unlike any other institution we have ever created, though it can follow the model of some existing systems. There’s an inspections regime for nuclear weapons, regulations for international aviation, and agreements that protect the ozone layer. A new global organization for AI will need elements of all three and more.
> He's not the fucking pope
No, but he did link to the Pope in this very essay.
Pope Leo XIV, "On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence":
https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume...
> ruthless tech businessman with vested financial interest in the technology involved
Isn't that past-tense? What's his financial interest these days? He still owns a small amount of MSFT, but he doesn't exactly have control over the corporation any more. I imagine Nadella always answers his calls, but I'd bet most CEOs will make time to take a call from Bill.
Interesting that you chose the pope as a positive control. I'd say that taken the whole history of papacy into question, there is no particular reason to trust the pope either.
Yes, let's put copilot in every app on Windows, Azure & Office :-)
Bill Gates hasn't been at Microsoft for a long time now.
He is on the board.
Bill resigned from the board in 2020: https://news.microsoft.com/source/2020/03/13/microsoft-annou...
"Agriculture is where I see the fastest impact of AI in low-income countries."
As we've seen with Haber-Bosch (synthetic fertilizer) it will just allow the population to expand until we're up against the resource limit ceiling.
I don’t think so. I think we’re past the point of rapidly increasing population in most of the world at this point (aside from sub sharan Africa which will change soon as well). I don’t think the current low birth rate has anything to do with a resource cap.
"In my second one, which I started full time in 2008, I am giving back the wealth I made at Microsoft with the goal of making the world a healthier, better educated, and more equitable place."
Like inventing waterless toilets when people just need access to clean water ?
The sad story is that we don't need innovation, we need better politics.
Oh and he could open source windows, that would make us more equitable for sure.