"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? "
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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.
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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.