Just to put Bill Gates thoughts on AI into perspective, this was his comment on an AMA 9 years ago to the question
"What kind of technological advancement do you wish to see in your lifetime?":
> The big milestone is when computers can read and understand information like humans do. There is a lot of work going on in this field - Google, Microsoft, Facebook, academia,... Right now computers don't know how to represent knowledge so they can't read a text book and pass a test.
Yes, it's a shame. It's in part due to scrapers and AI. There's a wealth of relevant knowledge inside Reddit, and agents aren't able to easily check there for updates on recent topics.
I logged in just to share the entire comment for you:
>The big milestone is when computers can read and understand information like humans do. There is a lot of work going on in this field - Google, Microsoft, Facebook, academia,... Right now computers don't know how to represent knowledge so they can't read a text book and pass a test.
>Another whole area is vaccines. We need a vaccine for HIV, Malaria and TB and I hope we have them in the next 10-15 years.
In January after 8 years (17 years in tech overall) at the same govt IT firm in the Mid-Atlanic region I was laid off. I quickly enrolled in healthcare classes and starting my clinical rotation for low level healthcare position ($25 an hour hopefully vs. multiples in tech) in September. Also, I will be doing my clinical Radiology rotation this time next year. Still won't be making the same money but i dont see a future in creative tech anymore when anyone can type to create graphics, songs, web designs, websites, iPhone apps, etc. This note of his reinforces what I thought I should do and what I am doing is the right path.
If you're interested in healthcare IT look into becoming an Epic admin. Hospitals and clinics want RNs with a tech background for those roles, and they pay really well (~150k here in CA)
yeah in time im hoping to mix my 17 years in creative tech with my new healthcare career. Get back to the money I was making, but humbled and happy to start at the bottom again for stability and always have a job waiting if needed. At least until the healthcare field gets filled with others like me.
For what it's worth I'm also drawn to radiology tech - I guess because it's one of the most "techy" fields out there in healthcare? Hope all goes well for you.
Yes, exactly why you should not put belief in someone who has proven themselves to make poor predictions. He's even further removed from the zeitgeist 9 years later.
You should adjust that these are the kind of the people with the most prescient accuracy for where we are going again. Their world model is more accurate.
where is the error? 9 years ago (2017) 'attention is all you need' hasn't been written yet, no llms exist. his take is literally 'it would be cool if something like llms existed', seems fine (if anything, vaguely predictive) to me.
As for Kokotajlo, he's a good SF author, but I don't think it's nearly as good a prediction as it appears at first glance.
Like any SF, he's correct about some things, and way, way off base about others. Specifically, he was mostly correct about short-term (1-2 year horizon) technical aspects, but anyone familiar with how transformers work would have guessed those. I'm not even in AI/rationalia land, but believe I was having these exact conversations by 2021. Specifically about multimodality and steam-of-consciousness ['chain of thought' reasoning]. He is spot-on about chip shortages (to my eyes, his most well-done prediction).
Other thoughts are a storytelling device, like a well-told horoscope. He makes non-categorical statements that were already happening as if they categorically will become a new thing. But really he's just going off the current trend that everyone knows, and thus will be nearly-impossible to falsify. For example, 'People who still remember 2021 think of it as the golden days, when conformism and censorship and polarization were noticeably less than they are now. Just as it is normal for newspapers to have a bias/slant, it is normal for internet spaces of all kinds—forums, social networks, streams, podcasts, news aggregators, email clients—to have some degree of censorship (some set of ideas that are prohibited or at least down-weighted in the recommendation algorithms) and some degree of propaganda.' Sounds scary! But it is literally just saying 'polarization and marketing specialization will continue to deteriorate'.... which, duh. In essence, you could make this statement for 2018-> 2021, or for 2008->2018 and 'feel' just as correct!
Other key thoughts were somewhat off. Specifically, 'It now costs an order of magnitude less compute (compared to 2020) to pre-train a giant model' is kind-of-true, in that it costs less now, but the models have gotten so much bigger that the prices haven't actually gone down much. Might be changing soon, but definitely several years off.
The scariest central prediction that the political stuff rests on is 'After years of tinkering and incremental progress, AIs can now play Diplomacy as well as human experts'. This part, as far as I can tell, is just not true and hasn't changed.
And, well, 2026 predictions are just not correct at all. Some examples:
'Mormons create a “Christian Coalition” internet stack, complete with its own email client, social network, payment processor, news aggregator, etc.' -- basically untrue. I know a few ex-mormons, such a thing is not prolific.
'The US and many other Western governments are gears-locked' The US is far from gears-locked, in fact, it's full-steam ahead to er, well, something.
'“Should I wear shorts today?” “Order some more toothpaste, please. Oh, and also an air purifier.” “Is this cover letter professional-sounding?”' -- kind of correct, but in practice most people just do the last one. I'm not aware of many that give chatgpt agents credit card access (refer to the famous vending machine experiment). But predicting this with GPT3 is not that crazy, cause people were already doing that.
> Research suggests that in some parts of the United States, factory closures contribute to a rise in deaths from opioid overdoses.
It’s so cute some people think that the extent of mass displacement will be limited to what happens to the unemployed. Oh poor unemployed! Nope, pitchforks will be grabbed. It won’t be rosy. Maybe they dream about having killer robots to defend themselves, but imagine a few hundred million people getting angry within one election cycle.
The social credit system is regional, disjoint, and composed of a handful of various trackers. It can hardly be compared with public opinion.
Xinjiang is an exception; it is heavily publicly surveilled.
Internet censorship is strong. The public still has sway over government policy. When search terms are blocked, the public continues with euphemisms. The government is responsive to public opinion. The government does promote influencers with opinions favorable with CCP goals.
Chinese foreign policy is more dovish than public opinion, especially regarding Taiwan.
False equivalence. Maybe that’s what they fool themselves with. Salivating, looking at China, not understanding the massive upward social mobility in recent time there. Why stop at China, look at Saudi Arabia, Qatar, etc.
China has both carrot and stick. Living standards there have improved dramatically over the past few decades. Over here they use a smaller stick, but no carrot at all.
It's undeniable that Chinese transportation infrastructure is amazing, especially high-speed rail.
Compared with the United States, public health care is less available in China. Retirement pensions are an order of magnitude lower (even with PPP adjustment), hence their world-leading savings rate. Social mobility is lower: getting a permit to access social services such as schools in a new city is difficult. Youth unemployment was above 25% the last time it was published; it is no longer disclosed.
Rule of law is much less strong. Injustices committed by government officials towards citizens are unlikely to be addressed.
Housing costs to income ratios are an order of magnitude worse in cities with job opportunities.
The Chinese government has chosen to allocate capital toward industrial output at the expense of its citizens' welfare. It has succeeded at its goal. Perhaps in the future more capital allocation will be made to consumption. That is not the case at the current time.
Said democracy does have to be real, though. If we're talking about that country between two oceans that waged armed conflicts almost constantly since its very inception, has supported or helped put in place straight-up dictatorships not that long ago, and sports one of the highest wealth inequality in the West, well... I'd think long and hard before I call that a real democracy.
Currently, in the US the top 10% of earners are responsible for approximately half of all consumer spending. If AI causes this trend to continue and accelerate, I expect that we'd see similar dollar amounts of consumer spending, but it would be concentrated mainly in the people whose income comes from capital investments rather than from working for wages. Basically you'd see a situation like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snsXD6FwLYc
why would the price for a movie go up if supply goes up? this video lacks basic understanding of economics and I want my minute back
hell, if actors are still making movies for the love of the game and competing with cheaper (SOMEHOW! I guess we forgot about Sora already) then the price on those will actually go down
oh no, more indie movies made out of the labor of love, the horror.
Right? Unless we've figured out Star Trek Welfare, who is buying anything when 50% of the population is unemployed and wages have crashed for the other 50% because of biblical levels of unemployment.
It's a pretty well-known stat that I think originally came from one of Schwab's detailed Modern Wealth Index reports -- which are survey-based so there is likely some inaccuracy; they report 3% margin of error -- but other similar studies generally put the number somewhere between 53% and 63%.
From their methodology:
> The Modern Wealth Index, developed in partnership with Koski Research and the Schwab Center for Financial Research [...] was conducted by Koski Research from January 12 to January 19, 2018, among 1,000 Americans aged 21 to 75. Quotas were set so that the sample is as demographically representative as possible. The margin of error for the total survey sample is three percentage points.
Anecdotally, this percentage makes sense to me based on roughly half of the people in my circles/family/life living paycheck to paycheck, but there's obviously some exposure bias at work there too. It's possible you have some exposure bias as well if that number seems too high for you.
The median American has a 401k, yes. The median amount of stock owned is, I believe, $40,000 -- so, at the recommended annual withdrawal rate, that puts you at $1,600/year of spending money.
Let's assume that the stock market 10xes in the next decade, then the median American stock owner can get out $16,000/year.
what happens to labor markets in places like India if robots are able to accomplish that would have ordinarily required 5 manual labors at a fraction of the cost say (1/100th)?
This is already a thing? Just replace “robots” with “machines”.
And yet I see videos all the time of Indians running contraptions straight out of the steam age in their shacks to make plastic straws or sandals. Or just doing it by hand. Better machines to do these tasks already exist, but are obviously too expensive for them to afford. Why would these hypothetical robots be any more affordable or disruptive to Indian workers in particular?
If anything I think American blue collars would be the ones to worry about.
basically, that is the question of wealth distribution. All the wealth created by these AI companies should be distributed to people so that they will have money to buy products from these companies. This can range from more taxes, UBI, or like Marx said: seize the means of productions (basically nationalize all these AI companies and share the profits to everyone)
Don't discount that tech billionaires pursuing this are themselves nihilistic. They would enjoy the fruits of our labor and will not care what comes after they die.
3 citations and a lot of conjecture. Is the article only targeting SWEs? The one study cited said 22-25 age range saw a 16% decrease in relative employment declines (for SWEs)[0]. But everyone outside that range was not impacted. Further, what about all the trades jobs around data center development?
“Demand is also being intensified by major investments in infrastructure, manufacturing, reshoring, and AI. Data center growth alone has added a net 315,000 skilled-trade workers over the past five years, according to the report, putting additional pressure on an already tight labor market.”
We literally do not have enough trades people to build out data centers and their salaries are increasing as a result. These are skilled labor jobs (plumbers, electricians, IT, etc.). Does Bill Gates care about the rest of the economy outside of SWE?
Honestly a lot of those decreases are also because companies are trying to wait and see as much as possible to see if there is any truth to the conjecture.
I have an impression that most CxO are driven by FOMO. Having a fixed R&D budget (no cheap credit anymore) to get $$$ for tokens they are laying off developers.
- If AI and robots are as good as Bill suggests , one can infer that AI will signal the end of cities, at least the end of megacities. If the home robot can clean and cook and also do my taxes, hair, and diagnose my health , one is more likely to escape unemployment by moving to a small town where he can find land and resources, and use robots to exploit them, just like humans have always done when economy was based in agriculture. If there is no longer a reason for people to live close together, decentralization is the most likely outcome.
- The biggest geopolitical impact will probably come from AI weapons. Just like previous shifts in weaponry caused the fall of empires , the rise of naval empires and the rise of national modern superpowers, AI may lead to the end of the UN and beginning of something new.
- Societies will change but a plan is not needed and it's most likely useless. Societies adapt , and nobody has ever been able to predict how. Let's not make the same mistake again.
I will believe that "AI will do all the work" when private prisons stop contracting inmates to do slave labor and employers stop hiring undocumented migrant workers.
> I will believe that "AI will do all the work" when private prisons stop contracting inmates to do slave labor and employers stop hiring undocumented migrant workers.
The majority of the slave labor in prisons in the US make from nothing at all to 50 cents per hour.
The powers that be will still shamefully be exploiting that labor source long after AI/robots are capable of cheaply doing that work.
Because the social issues happen at a more biological level, hormones and cell signaling and stuff. Robots are at a much higher level. Online girlfriends are cool, but as we all know, not a replacement for physical touch, intimacy, and relationship building. Your body doesn’t release oxytocin from cuddling with your cold computer.
Maybe we can eventually “trick” the human brain, but I think it will be much more challenging than people think. I would imagine if people even just knew someone was a robot, the jig is up. For most people. It wouldn’t be enough to create the perfect humanoid robot. We’d also have to make them hidden in plain sight. Full Ex Machina style.
I don't think so. At the first chance during COVID people started moving out of big cities. Most people don't need the city, they need a village. We are in cities due to jobs requiring us to be in big cities.
People moved out of the cities during COVID because close physical proximity to large numbers of strangers was a potentially deadly hazard to their health.
"If there is no longer a reason for people to live close together, decentralization is the most likely outcome."
Umm what? Humans are social animals and many people LIKE living in cities in close proximity to other people and close to amenities. I do not see a future where we decentralize and spread out because of AI.
We have also seen this play out with WFH/Covid. The recall into centralized structures, regardless of the technology available to mitigate the need, was fast and broadly applied.
Our current social structure is actively resistant to decentralization and I don't see that changing unless there is some forcing function to break that hold and keep it broken for new norms to settle into expectations.
It wasn't even industrialisation - it was agriculture. Do people really like cities? I am not so sure - certainly many do, but many also hanker for the village and there are a bunch of interesting theories about us working well at 'village scale' (I could be easily convinced that no-one hankers for the suburbs..) I think if the economic opportunities were not so heavily weighted towards cities we would see much reduced urbanisation.
Just look at real estate prices in New York, SF, Boston, etc. Yes, people REALLY like cities. Even the wealthiest people who can afford anything still choose cities
How much of this is because that's where the jobs are? Take that away and where would people choose to live? Wasn't there a notable exodus from SF, for example, during covid when many jobs went remote?
> Instead, solutions should be developed through a public democratic process that includes elected officials, policymakers, educators, health workers, local officials, and community leaders. Millions of people will have their lives disrupted, and we’ll need a stronger, more flexible social safety net to help them manage the transition. Local communities are already raising concerns about the energy and water needed for data centers. Without solutions, some groups will push for stopping AI development and deployment altogether.
Sounds great, except it ignores the fact that capital interests have controlled the levers of our faux democracies for decades, with no end in sight.
Use of the term of direct democracy feels dilution in that case. It is a significant step in that direction, though for me (and wikipedia) direct democracy is without the middleman. Switzerland still has parties, elected government and so forth, no?
For some real world data there are some studies about (I think) German branch of the Pirate Party using it in internal decision making and there is interesting insight for those curious.
It be nice if we all where allowed to vote on particular laws if interested, and defer certain topics to our delegated experts. (Chat Control for example, would be a non issue then.)
The technology for that approach has been mature enough since the rise of social media and private crypto currencies (as a means of electronic private vote, particularly around usage of smart contracts for delegation). What about the interest and spreading of these ideas? Pretty limited, to non-existent. Some people like to follow leaders, though naturally wouldn't expect it to be the silent majority.
Switzerland still has parties and a senate but the people can veto any law and the people can amend the constitution. This arguably is a sensible balance as it’s probably not tenable for the people to legislate full-time. Representatives can legislate and the people will override them when they disagree.
It probably does work good however Switzerland got dangerously close to "something happening" this year with the 10M referendum. And it was very close, with major parts of the country showing an absurd level of ignorance - sadly I don't believe in direct democracy, the "public" can be too easily swayed one way or another even if not today, but in a few decades, with the right messaging, yes. Although, to contradict myself, perhaps there is no interest in generating upheaval in Switzerland because everyone keeps the money there.
If your measure of "success" is women gaining voting rights in 1990 (!) in the last canton, then yeah, Switzerland is doing great.
More importantly, even if it did contain the solution, there is no obvious way for a country with an already corrupt government to transition to such a thing.
I think you mean no obvious pacific way. Which is what any democratic citizen wants and seeks out. There are other solutions and way too obvious, in fact you have examples all over the world going back centuries.
If the result will be huge job loss doesn't that mean the overall buying power of all across all economies will go down drastically which begs the question who will buy the stuff that these companies that get rid of people are making?
Exactly. Henry Ford made sure his own employees could afford the cars they were making.
These people making these kind of grand pronouncements either have an embarrassing blind spot, or are not making sincere, but carefully calculated statements.
Just via competition, Chinese researchers are doing much more than Bill Gates could ever hope to do through 'thought leadership' spread the benefits of generative AI.
Prices will also go down dramatically. When you eliminate human labour completely, you are essentially stuck with the problem of efficiently allocating raw materials. And raw materials are abundant compared to what human labour can currently produce. We're still a long way from there though.
Not true. Raw materials depend on energy to extract and are geopolitically not a straight forward thing given that most materials are concentrated in few locations on our planet.
> We have to think now about how to reduce job losses so that everyone can share in the prosperity that AI creates.
And I thought he is a smart man. This is so last century thinking. We need to prepare that there will definitely be no jobs for everyone and that will be falling all the time, it’s not a one-time event you should “prepare for”.
There’s nothing to prepare, we already have funds and productivity to feed and shelter everyone. UBI is not a privilege, previous generations were slaving 9 to 5 all their lives so we can have it. This is it, arrived, and now, enter a few decades of historical period when all of us waiting for government bureaucrats to realise that UBI is a right.
> all of us waiting for government bureaucrats to realise that UBI is a right
You'll be waiting forever, then. This isn't something that you can wait to be given to you, it must be taken.
Or, put much more eloquently by one of the greatest Americans:
"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress"
> How do the gears of capitalism keep turning without UBI in such a scenario?
The part you've got wrong here is thinking that Capitalism is equivalent to innovation and growth, which it is not.
Capitalism simply serves capital, and with less and less of its constraints being physically bound to resources, there is very much a plausible world in which only a small handful of consolidated bank accounts exist so long as those bank accounts can reasonably control the monopoly of violence.
There is a point historically in which Capitalism absolutely served to provide widespread innovation and prosperity at scale, but this is not a feature of capitalism inherently but rather a consequence of it when run within the existing system of labor mechanics at the time.
Capitalism can still very much exist within a Feudal structure of governance, its contributions to society will be much lesser, but it can still very much exist.
A prosperous middle class is not a requirement for capitalism to work, and there are more capitalist systems where that's not the case than where there is.
The upper class live in walled neighborhoods with private guards. There's a small merchant class, and then the majority of the population are working class. Much of Central and South America live like this.
There was no middle class to speak of while living under communism here in Eastern Europe. We were all queueing for food equally. Except the nomenklatura, of course.
It's funny, because extreme poverty rates as defined by the UN have been decimated in the last century, and continue to drop, because of growth qua capitalism.
You're reflecting the populist notion that wealth is zero-sum. If that were true we'd still be in caves fighting over sticks. The average quality of life has skyrocketed in the last century alongside growth, and there's no non-capitalist country now or in history that's been an enviable place for average people to live.
Their wealth is more contingent on our consumption than employment status. If that goes, then you're looking at a zero-sum society where no new wealth is generated.
Ultimately people will remain enterprising status-seekers. Rich people can already sit around with their wealth doing fuck-all excepting consuming, and they don't.
> Their wealth is more contingent on our consumption than employment status.
Is it? Or is it dependent on the consumption of someone much greater than you.
For example: I was reading something the other day about dining experiences in Las Vegas. Really though, the video was about how recently Vegas has abandoned the traditional middle class patrons in favor of providing experiences to a smaller, but much wealthier clientele. This seems to be a trend across many industries. In some cases your consumption is even a cost center to be eliminated in favor of a more successful customer base.
lol well the majority of the top 1% globally didn't make their fortune serving food, to other wealthy patrons no less (how's that for circular reasoning). We're in a consumer society, B2B sales is a thing but it's a side-effect of that.
They wealthy will be buying islands (as big as Australia) get high on cocaine and do safari, shooting humans there as the ultimate fun [1]. The prey underestimates how the mind of predator works, and that's why it is a prey.
In a post-scarcity society, having a meagre policy to keep people alive and not-unruly is cheap. It's also getting way ahead of ourselves, since it's nowhere in sight. Software hiring was up this year.
Not really. The planet is crowded, currently with mostly productive members of society.
For the ultra rich psychos who run the show, do you really think they want poor people hanging around? When we can be wiped out in a few months?
Consider the pure greed Donald Trump is displaying. Now imagine that the 1000 most powerful people are the same, except they are smart enough to at least not rub it in peoples faces on live television.
> do you really think they want poor people hanging around?
Which by your rationale would include everyone who isn't rich (and tautologically would mean "no one is rich anymore"). They do not care whether we're hanging around, the same way they do not care now whether poor people exist. It has no bearing. All that does is whether they remain rich and powerful, and last I checked, that's relative. Being the only one left on the planet won't make you feel rich, and there being poors on a piece of land won't have any bearing on you.
> When we can be wiped out in a few months?
Lol
Also, on the population front, growth is poised to completely stall in less than 100 years. The fertility rate is terrible in developed countries, and falling quickly in developing ones as they get richer
want to believe it? mon ami have you looked at any labor history?
they used to send 9 year olds to the mines. mortality rates were as high as 50% before they turned 20.
why do you think the AI robber barons are any nicer? it is painfully obvious they're not. and all of this is set to a backdrop of global ecological collapse.
Yeah, at the advent of the industrial revolution. And prior to that 80% of people had to work the land, with no ammonia, just horses and manure.
Labor conditions from over a century ago, before the laws were written, have no bearing on whether wealthy people would try their best to kill you "just because". That's nonsensical.
“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work together for the benefit of all.” —- John Maynard Keynes
What does the data and observations tell us so far, in this context?
That’s certainly a component, but I think the biggest issue is that people have this religious fervor that capitalism is the only way to structure a socioeconomic system, even when the data shows it is exceptionally bad at ensuring a good quality of life for the majority of citizens.
It’s changing in the US with Democratic Socialists over performing, and with high support for them with the under 35 cohort, the question is if this momentum can be sustained for years through various election cycles (as ~2M 55+ voters age out every year, and ~3M voters turn 18 and age into the electorate every year).
“Progress occurs one funeral at a time.” — Max Planck
I don't understand why people always spring for UBI. I don't want free money; I want to earn my living. I want to work.
Why do we not push for labor reform, as we did a century ago? Depending on the actual productivity gains from AI broadly, set a new standard of 4-hour workdays. Or 3-day work weeks.
Labor reform worked in a natural system where capital needed the labor, just had problems with abusing it.
New paradigm is a push for no workers at all which sounds a lot messier to fix as you start regulating how many employees a business has. How do contractors work? And if the contractors are robots?
You are right, it is tricky. But the assumption is that AGI is going to get here before employment becomes difficult to obtain. If AGI is here, then we have the problem you speak about. If not, then AI is a tool which enables workers to be more productive. If workers with this new tool are more productive to the point that employment across a broad spectrum of possible jobs is hit hard, then we need to talk about labor reform of the sort I spoke about. It would increase the amount of people needed in the workforce across the board.
Cool. You can work three days a week and earn a fraction of what you make now - far less than a living wage - because the market value of your labor has been reduced to nil by AI. You aren't going to be paid more because you're more productive, that isn't how it has ever worked.
The rest of us want to be able to eat once capitalism decides we aren't worth the cost to keep alive.
The funny thing is that the wealthy and powerful don't realise that a collapse of that scale means that every switches to professional guillotine builder over night.
There is no preparing for that.
I doubt we get there to be honest, they all have wealth and power because there are consumers with money. No more consumers, no more wealth and power.
P.S. remember my guy Bill didn't write a nice blog post about any of the allegations around his involvement with Epstein. So, you know, this is basically just marketing more than Bill's thoughts.
there was a professor in SoCal who was a big fan of what he called Libertarian UBI -- we have an insane amount of qaulification for programs -- must be a certain age, certain condition, must prove that condition consistently, etc. etc.
abandon that entire apperatus and just cut people a check.
even glenn beck called it out w/ obamacare -- "if total spending is $3million per person [it wasn't, btw], then why not just cut every person a check?"
I really don't think UBI can ever happen in the US. There is a moral imperative of "industriousness". Keynes' prediction (or maybe desire) ~100 years ago of the 15 hour workweek never panned out.
In the US, you're at least as likely to have half the population vote that anyone who cannot find a job should be exterminated, despite a large proportion of those voting for it being the very people most likely to become jobless, because Fox News will convince them it will mostly affect immigrants and/or some other group they're supposed to hate.
More people work. Keynes died in 1946 - meaning they had grand depression in his lifetime. Moreover, women employment went up by significant amounts - middle and upper class women would not work back then.
UBI as a concept does not add up. It assumes an even production of all goods that people might need, but there isn't, you are giving everyone fiat currency that is not inherently tied to any physical good.
Very fast you will descend into either plan economy where you get food stamps, or an economy where people are trading goods that are actually tied to value.
For example, you go to the store to get eggs, since everyone has UBI, they decide to also get eggs, the eggs either run out, or the store raises the price, at which either you will get food queues like in the USSR, or everyone will need more UBI to afford eggs.
The solution to this is to increase egg production, but this is not instant, and not necessarily a priority, while money transfers are instant.
> It assumes an even production of all goods that people might need, but there isn't, you are giving everyone fiat currency that is not inherently tied to any physical good.
Is what you're saying that since UBI would disconnect someone's production from their income, then this will cause shortages of goods? I think UBI only works if the income generated by it is tied to production. That production would not be generated by human labor, but instead by robot labor. I think if you disconnect that then the system would not work, but why would you need to?
Without a workforce there is no consumption, and therefore capitalism cannot exist. Yes, we would require a planned economy. Call it communism or whatever you like, but free market economics literally cannot exist in such an environment.
Capitalism is based on two simple, fundamental assumptions about the world:
- everyone works
- everyone consumes
1. Turned out not to be true. We have disabled people, elderly people. We patch it with legislation like SSI. That only works because everyone else is still working.
Our monkey patch solutions have held up well for a long time. But, if either of those two assumptions are broken in a large way, the entire system collapses. UBI is yet another monkey patch. As you know, it won’t hold if we bend the invariants of the system enough.
Eventually, a fully planned economy will not be optional.
There will be a workforce, it just won't be human-based. Capitalism has always existed without 100% employment, in every example someone needs to work to support others who cannot. Humans have done this under capitalism to support their families and communities, but now we will need to find incentives for robots to do this. It might be as simple as just telling them.
Try to convince the majority of the western world that are consuming the equal of 4-6 globes that they are eligible for:
(1) National Park visit a year
(3) RoboTaxi rides this week
(2) Eggs for the week
Who will do the planning? Why would the population accept this planning?
You will in practice need full surveillance and control of your population and an agreement between every country that this is how we are going to do things.
At that point you can also ask the question what value humans provide at all. Why upkeep all of this when you can just expand compute, perform resource extraction instead of managing your cattle.
He is a smart man -- with an enormous $100B vested interest in the capital side of this equation. It is (meager) progress to hear any acknowledgement from capital at all that we might conceivably need to do something other than pump aggregate labor supply and dump aggregate demand.
This is a baby step, but it's a baby step in the right direction.
My interpretation of his point was 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.
----
I agree he should've addressed UBI directly. When he was asked about it in an AMA a decade ago he basically said he's optimistic it can happen eventually but not yet [1]. And in that same AMA he said he wished to see "computers that can read and understand information like humans do" within his lifetime [2]. Now that the latter has happened I wish we could see how his thoughts have changed on the former.
We are really good at figuring out how to make toys that are in short supply so you have to invest all this time in acquiring the toys, for nothing more than the social signal involved that comes from the circular reason that the toys are hard to acquire.
We will figure new methods of scarce toy production. To believe otherwise seems delusional to me.
There is also this problem with UBI that I don't know how it can be solved. I see it in a certain percentage of people I know. Maybe 15-20%. As soon as they get paid that money is spent and usually spent on bullshit. Any hint of credit worthiness was used up a long time ago because it is the same process. If you gave them a daily morning UBI amount they would be broke by dinner and hungry. It is very hard to explain what causes this. To pretend this doesn't exist also seems completely delusional to me.
I support UBI and wealth taxes, but I also think generally that will be a difficult transition in terms of social upheaval. There are so many people I know who are financially well-off but completely fall apart when there is no visible professional hierarchy to give them meaning.
One would hope that this would still go down better than destituting large percentages of the world population, but I wonder.
“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
Wonder if there should be a "UBI reservation" set up where everyone gets it, and very basic needs like housing and food are taken care of in a self-sustaining manner with machines. (which is the whole premise, everything is automated so nobody needs to work). Then people who don't like the freeloading can opt out and live as usual, and those who like it can move to the reservation.
Weird and cute how you think you're one of the good, special ones that wont have their value or status affected by whats coming. Im sure you 'll come out on top, thats always what happens for the "industrious"...
Based in your first two sentences, I think your understanding of UBI is mistaken. You seem to be under the impression that people don't or can't have a job when there is UBI. This is not the case. If you don't believe me, just look at Alaska.
Everyone enjoys some sort of benefit, tax break, subsidy, etc. from the government. UBI is the same thing in the form of a regular, universal transfer payment. Nothing more, nothing less.
I do understand UBI. I was referring to the previous context that AI would introduce mass loss of jobs and overall reduced employment, not specifically to UBI being a replacement for jobs.
He’s saying the same thing as you. I don’t think UBI will magically appear. If people lose their jobs, what guarantee do you give that they can survive? Thats his point - prepare for this event so that the guarantee can be made sooner.
You can build livable domiciles for a few grand in bulk, recycle waste via composting to reduce infrastructure needs, shared batteries and solar, etc. There are plenty of people on youtube demonstrating the permie off grid lifestyle. Grains are cheap and we have a wild boar and deer problem in a lot of the country so food wouldn't be too expensive either.
For the record, I'm into permaculture/regenerative agriculture and enjoy the lifestyle, all I need is shared satellite internet. If my choice was between working 60 hours a week at 3 jobs to barely keep my head above water, or live in an agricultural commune, I would take the commune every time.
It doesn't matter if its cheap, the economy requires monetary exchange. What work are people doing that would balance out the work to build composting systems, infrastructure needs, batteries, solar, wheat, 'wild boar' (protip, there isnt enough without farming, I hunt). All of these things you've stated require a long chain of manufacturing, none of which are free. The systems themselves are incredibly complex and require hard human work.
Can you explain to me how any of this is possible under the constraints you've made. I can only see regression not an evolution or an improvement.
The resources exist, it's just a matter of allocating them properly. We have lumber and concrete to build houses. We have fertilizer and land and trucks to grow and ship food. And apparently all of this will be immensely cheaper (practically free) within a decade thanks to robotics and AI (according to the trillionaire half this place worships.)
With that said I doubt that reallocation will happen in any meaningful way, and as the elites eliminate more people from the economy we'll descend further into violence and chaos. If the parasite class was generous, they wouldn't be parasites.
I keep hearing these, but i find it so hard to connect reality to what you're saying.
All of your ideas sound great, I doubt they work. I fear you misunderstand the complexity tech tree required to deliver this utopia you desire. There is too much work required that won't be being done, "with ai" and "with robotics" , of which they have thier own tech and resource trees of dependencies.
If people are not paying for the resources (and how will they, since on ubi there is no requirement to deliver value) robots wont be made, and you're back to caveman development.
I'm happy to debate this, but I just feel the whole arguement of -it will just happen- is incredible wishful thinking.
Are you going to strike? Are we going to take on the government by force?
People need to understand there is no democracy in a post-AGI world.
The power of human collectives comes from a combination of our collective economic power and our physical power. Without either leaders would be smart to just do what the companies paying all the bills ask if they don't want their families to starve too.
Worker protections have almost never been granted by the profiteers... not child labor laws, not weekends, not overtime, not safety regulations, not minimum wage, not workers comp... the working class is not what it is today because of "sharing prosperity" and there's been a lot of prosperity — it's all a series of fights.
This is all well known, but I recently visited an old coal mine in Pennsylvania, and much of the tour was talking about the labor conditions, and the generational "trap" of working there. If a worker died, the family had little time to leave the company-provided house without providing someone to work. What often happened is that one of the children would work to maintain the household.
>[0]the "rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for—not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of the country."
That all sounds nice, but does he mean it and can we trust him?
Setting up governance bodies and think tanks could be a diversion. He does explicitly suggest a robot and token tax, so that is something.
He does not address the issue of IP theft or the possibility of shutting down AI altogether like medium range missiles (SS20/Pershing II) were removed by treaties. The could be AI treaties with China and Russia, except of course the US has no credibility now compared to the 1980s.
I would say, "No, we cannot trust him" because, even if/when his intentions are good, his interests, and his worldview, and not aligned with the public's (globally or locally). For example:
That's the whole gambit here: use the system and media to paint a pretty picture of <person so terrible they need PR>, trust that some non-trivial amount of the population will buy it, deny any wrong-doing publicly or on record. Hope they don't come for your head. Rinse and repeat.
> I’m also worried about AI’s impact on education. Ironically, the same tool that will allow people to learn more than ever could also lead to many people learning less.
For teachers/admins who are on HN: what has worked in a past for a "new way to educate" students to actually be implemented by educators? Does it happen through conferences? Do some states take the lead and others follow? Does it follow from private schools into public schools?
I know AI labs are trying to include teachers here and there... but IME teachers are very "anti-AI", "anti-datacenter", etc. etc. In coastal cities, the unions will be entirely opposed. This seems less of a "can AI be useful for education" question and more around politics and messaging. But I'd love to learn more.
My wife is a professor. "Administration contracts with some company that is providing tools to improve pedagogy" is pretty universally garbage. It typically comes with mandates to be used even when it is inappropriate and faculty aren't given time to integrate these tools into their preps. This makes people reasonably skeptical.
The only thing I've ever seen work is to simply make a tool available to people while giving them meaningful resources to adopt it if they see utility in their specific situation. But admin hates this because it means that they are paying for a thing that some people aren't using and because they want to write "I've revolutionized teaching by integrating X" on their performance review and that doesn't work unless adoption is near-universal.
For AI shit in particular, the ideas have been trash. Mandatory AI summaries of course readings integrated into the discussion platform. Great, now nobody will do the reading. AI tools for "placing" you in history through image generation that constantly generate anachronisms because they are trained on fantasy art. Stuff like that.
> In the United States, I’ve met families who, understandably, were overwhelmed by the process of applying for health insurance, student aid, or food assistance. Faced with a huge stack of complicated bureaucratic forms, many felt like giving up. AI can streamline things dramatically
I'd love to see anyone building Grokbot or ChatGPT Work talk about how they're thinking about this use case, specifically. It seems greatly important and tractable given how little government websites & forms change over time.
On the other end - yes, it will create massive vectors for abuse & fraud, since govt services are designed to have roadblocks to reduce usage. But fraud has always been possible, even without AI (so many recent examples to pull from).
IMO it's best to maximize social benefits to see where the tradeoffs really are. We won't know until we push on it!
>On the other end - yes, it will create massive vectors for abuse & fraud, since govt services are designed to have roadblocks to reduce usage.
That the government collects taxes and then understaffs the department that distributes the benefit is the first fraud. 30 years after email was invented, why do people have to wait on the phone for hours to talk to a government employee?
If the goal is to make things easier for everyday Americans, replacing these with universal schemes would do that and will also prevent abuse and fraud (most of which comes down to forgetting to dot your lowercase j on work requirement form #27).
The issues are global and they are correct. The landscape is not the same in US as in other countries, but this is a global problem and should be handled as such.
I'm not against a tax on AI or robots, but I think this may be the big chance we have to look at universal income with new eyes. If jobs are to disappear, why not soften the blow and get rid of some of the inefficiencies many government processes mean in terms of other citizen benefits?
What I worry about more however is the malevolent actors across the AI space. I'd argue that most companies mean well, but chasing profit at all costs can very easily turn into malevolence. Both these and actors being malevolent on purpose needs to have a control function.
I thought Gates' take on the human relational aspects of AI to be thoughtful, but I am surprised that his analysis on the economic and jobs aspect of AI offers little more than the party line. Every other technological advance that improved productivity (Industrial Revolution, etc.) has resulted in the loss of some jobs but the creation of jobs in other areas and an overall increase in the standard of living (although admittedly not uniformly distributed across the population). Why will AI be different?
Because any job it creates it can automate as well, for example a lot of people here think that understanding how AI models operate internally or being up to date with the latest models will save them from making their jobs obsolete, it will not, AI itself will be better than you at picking the next model to deploy, at testing the speed of reasoning that beats it's own. Anything it will need to learn it will learn it faster than you with the ability to handle much more complexity than your brain.
If you believe the hype then this isn't a transformation like, say, the power loom replacing handmade textiles. Both AI boosters and doomers are envisioning a future where almost all white collar work is obsolete. It isn't just one industry, its broad swaths labour across all segments of the economy.
Gates hinted at it, but let me expand on why this time it really is different.
If you compare the broad characteristics of the new jobs created to the old jobs displaced by technology historically, they are the same every time: they required higher-level (a) cognitive (b) technical or (c) social skills.
That is it. There is no other dimension to upskill along.
And LLMs are good at all three, probably better than most people already by many metrics. (Yes even social; their infinite patience is the ultimate advantage, and while sycophancy is harmful fixing it is easy.)
Plus AI is improving extremely rapidly. Which means it is probably advancing faster than most people can upskill.
An increasingly accepted premise is that AI can displace junior employees but will need senior employees to steer it. Consider the ratio of junior to senior employees, and how long it takes for the former to grow into the latter. That is the volume of displacement and timeframe to upskill we're looking at, made worse by the fact that if juniors are not hired they likely won't get a chance to upskill at all.
Never in history have we had a technology that was so versatile and rapidly advancing that it could displace a large portion of existing jobs, as well as many new jobs that would be created.
Do you think we could have handled Industrial Revolution with more care by offering a soft landing for those affected? I don’t think he’s disagreeing that this technology can be used for net good.
I'm interested how to mitigate risk without over-regulating & stifling innovation from exactly the people who are most thoughtful about the risk (which is who we should want innovating & leading).
Even though this article is new, I'm not sure it has materially new ideas vs what some other labs have been claiming for years.
Enforcing safeguards that apply globally to good and bad actors alike so far as proved quite difficult - compute is essentially the only lever, and that's tenuous at best.
Unlike nuclear arms (where functionally there's a limit at MAD), so far we believe that with enough compute, energy, and algorithms, intelligence will continue to scale (and not only scale - but compound)
It always is a matter of choice. Rich people choose wisely for the fast buck, and poorly for the suckers they bend, fold, spindle and mutilate.
I get the sense of "Every Accusation is a confession"
> During my entire life I’ve only had two jobs. In the first one, I played a role in developing software to empower people through my work at Microsoft.
Some of us remember the story/urban legend of Bill Gates "developing" BASIC by retrieving a printout of source code from a dumpster, a process infinitely more efficient than an LLM.
NOTE. "Played a role in developing", not "Played a role BY developing"
The former could be said by the coffee maker. Or dumpster diver.
I think his idea of taxing AI tokens would do more harm than good. It would only make AI more expensive, which would create the exact inequality effect that he is trying to prevent.
> I doubt I would have put in the same work if I had had an AI companion back then. They talk to you in ways you’re already comfortable with. They don’t push you outside your comfort zone. They are always available and never get mad at you. This gives them the potential to become highly addictive and to rob us of the lessons we learn from connecting with other people.
I've been waiting for a long, long time for us to figure out how AI makes us more social, not less. Outside of memes of course.
Anecdotally, I find AIs, and the doom and gloom they will cause, are great water cooler conversation topics that engages most of the team. However, ever since the advent of LLMs developers have stopped speaking of programming languages and software technologies almost entirely. The number of conversations on manual crafts, artistic endeavors and entrepreneurship has gone up.
> 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.
Interesting read, good to see some nuance in this space for once: not evil, can be used for evil, not good, can be used for good, but requires a lot of safeguards.
What really got me is the concept of "Human Reserved" - man that is a depressing thought...
I'm pretty sure he is. If you look at all the Big Tech CEOs, Satya is the only one who's been saying mostly human-aligned things.
We don't even need to assume this is out of the goodness of their hearts. Consider that Microsoft is one of the few Big Tech businesses whose business model is primarily making its enterprise customers more productive. If agents replace all knowledge work, half of Microsoft's business disappears.
In that sense Microsoft is more aligned with us humans than the other AI companies.
> I believe we should tax AI tokens and robots. Right now, if you’re an employer and you hire someone, you pay payroll taxes on their earnings. But if you buy a robot, you can usually write it off right away as a business expense. The tax system nudges you toward replacing people with machines.
Taxing AI tokens and Robots is not going to work. We can’t even define a robot, tokens are also too abstract and there is endless ways of gaming it, and let’s not forget cross border operations.
Tax profits, it was always the most equitable option.
I do think taxing profits is still insufficient, because unless the tax rate is close to 100% (lol) the "k-shaped" economy is still reinforced, but just slowed slightly. In combination with a wealth/holdings tax, maybe.
Personally I think the idea of taxing robots/tokens directly is too narrow an idea.
It is because personal income tax should have never existed. Nor should have taxes on primary residence. These are the most regressive taxes possible, it is basically serfdom.
Can you explain this? I think consumption taxes are the most regressive taxes possible because they are "flat" and thus affect lower-income people harder.
Marginal income taxes are regressive now in the sense that folks with more wealth have far more resources to avoid paying them, but otherwise the reasoning seems less regressive than a consumption tax (e.g. VAT)
It's undesirable by the companies, but it's not impossible. There's this constant talk about "Making American Great Again (Again)", but not much talk about the economic conditions that made America Great. Like high corporate tax.
That's half the battle. The other half is closing all the loopholes and making stuff that used to be illegal, illegal again (e.g. stock buybacks).
Tax production as a whole, because profits get hidden in whatever is this week's tax haven. Taxing production has the added benefit of being able to drop every other tax tangentially related to revenue.
I saw that too. It wasn’t ratio’d like the other guy said, it was only ~90 comments.
The manually moved it down.
HN mods always silence even the slightest thing against their official narrative.
Since YC/HN are themselves pedos and connected to Epstein they had no choice but to squash it
They probably thought the HN audience would be too dumb or passive to do anything about it, helping them slowly get away with being international sec trafficking pedophiles.
And so far they are getting away with it. JPM Chase bank settled with victims for millions of dollars, other victims mysteriously died.
Thiel and tech and academia and Israel got prolific pedo Trump as the figurehead so they can try to shift blame to his “base” of racists Americans etc. but we all know it’s the wealthy corporate elite doing this stuff.
HN is complicit. They are basically a mouthpiece.
HN mods actively help wealthy pedophiles get away with their crimes
The dude was pals with Epstein and likely had sex with a women that was likely a sex slave, good riddance. Anyone that continues listening to Bill Gates after his Epstein connections, and purposely causing tens of thousands of Indians to die because of his stupid ideas around profiting off a vaccine, should be promptly osctracized.
Better than saying bubble, can't say bubble, that implies that people will lose their money because of lies rather than because the market just crashed.
AI can make everyone miserable. Solution? Partner with all major AI companies using foundation (tax free btw) money. It's like saying Hitler is bad, let's split Europe in half so we can profit as well... ah well, that actually happened.
This essay kind of rubs me the wrong way. Starting from the very beginning.
During my entire life I’ve only had two jobs. In the first one, I played a role in developing software to empower people through my work at Microsoft.
Yikes. We all know powerful people have an incentive to whitewash their pasts but there is whitewashing and then there is whatever that is.
I have to mention this because we can't forget that Microsoft's and Bill Gates's history regarding fear uncertainty doubt as well as embrace extend extinguish. "Forgive but don't forget" as the old saying goes.
During the 2000's Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer described the GPL as akin to a virus. He begged European governements not to adopt open source software and to adopt Microsoft software instead.
Indeed throughout its history Microsoft, along with Gates and Balmer, have consistently fought against implementation of open standards and open source software. They have consistently pushed towards their own proprietary solutions.
Given all of this, along with the laughable whitewashing attempt even at the very beginning of his essay, I feel like what Bill Gates has written here is consistent with his previous behavior in regards to all of this. I suspect all this talk of regulation is an attempt to squash open source AI and open weights AI and to ensure Big Tech such as Microsoft continues to be in control of the future of tech and the future of AI.
Even his talk of taxing AI tokens and robots would ultimately benefit Microsoft and other Big tech companies and hurt open source.
I will repeat what I said earlier. In life it is important to "forgive but never forget." Many have forgiven Bill Gates for all he did in the 90's. Many haven't. But nobody should forget and everyone should take his words with a grain of salt.
> Even his talk of taxing AI tokens and robots would ultimately benefit Microsoft and other Big tech companies and hurt open source.
I'm curious, how? He proposes taxing bots in lieu of taxing humans, because they will be doing most of the work... but we already tax humans, and it hasn't hurt open source.
Because it will make it more expensive for people or groups of people to run open source models to do work on their own hardware. You would be taxing people or groups of people to run a program on the computers they own. This is contrary to the principles of the free and open source software movements.
> I believe we should tax AI tokens and robots. Right now, if you’re an employer and you hire someone, you pay payroll taxes on their earnings. But if you buy a robot, you can usually write it off right away as a business expense. The tax system nudges you toward replacing people with machines.
A tax would slow the rush away from human labor a little and raise money for retraining and a stronger safety net. It would need to be targeted so it does not slow down the purely beneficial uses of AI, like making medicine and education cheaper.
Note the part about it being targeted. Clearly this is in the context of moderating the displacement of human labor by employers rather than a flat "TAX ALL THE TOKENS!" approach.
Is there an essay from a tech leader than HASN’T rubbed anyone the wrong way, in some time? Eric Schmidt, Dario Amodei, Palmer Luckey, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, etc etc they all seem one or the other of out of touch or unlikable or unable to connect with rapport to the general public these days
It’s a good thoughtful piece. If I may suggest, the main problem and I mean the actual main problem are those people who underestimate the capabilities of AI. The ones who think it hallucinates all the time, unreliable and mostly useless.
The average person thinks this technology is overhyped (like Emily Bender) so how would one even begin to have a conversation with them on the risks?
This is my experience too. Many people in my offline, non-techy life seem to get almost upset when I argue that models are good at many things (and getting better fast).
And I kind of get it! If your primary exposure to AI is Google search summaries (from their cheapest models) and shitty AI graphic design, it makes sense to think it's vastly overhyped.
I like how Tyler Cowen puts it: "This is the worst they will ever be".
And some people are still stuck on what AI was capable of when GPT-3.5 was SOTA. They don't realize how much they've improved in ~4 years. Even if the rate of improvement slows down, AI will be tremendously more capable in another ~4 years.
Unfortunately it’s not just non technical people, it’s also technical people from my experience. They are usually too caught up in “how it always works” so they can’t think outside of it.
It can code and we saw it eat(ing) our former occupation, but that was always a defined finite space with defined rules and to be frank, not as hard as us practitioners liked to believe. So I don't think we can extrapolate this progress out to every other human endeavor in the near term at least.
Can you offer you argument you would provide to those people? I use the top SOTA models for software development and it is certainly an impressive and useful function. The quality of the code is however fairly poor, explicit architectural guardrails are frequently circumvented and the "human readable" outputs are very reminiscent of gish-gallop debate strategies.
Software development, as opposed to many many other fields also offers nearly unlimited training data and is one of the few areas with modifiable inputs and testable outputs.
Gates was a close friend and blackmail victim of Epstein. I can't separate his business, technical and philanthropic accomplishments from that fact. Sure, he may have funded charitable campaigns to vaccinate against polio in Afghanistan. But, he was also getting rub-downs from underage children.
I'm going to make an anti-capitalist argument in order to make a pro-capitalist argument.
The anti-capitalist argument is that the wealthiest people in the world are not dramatically more intelligent than the average person. Bill Gates is obviously very intelligent and capable, but his IQ does not scale with his wealth. He built the right company at the right time, and Microsoft ended up sitting at the center of massive network effects. Relatively modest advantages in judgment, skill, and industriousness can end up producing enormous differences in wealth due to the compounding effects of success.
That's just how scalable markets work. So Gates's success, while evidence that he was very effective at building Microsoft, is not evidence that he is vastly more knowledgeable than everybody else about economics or the future of technology.
And the same applies to Bezos, Musk, and every other extremely successful founder.
Their arguments should be judged on their merits and not treated as infallible insights from people with superhuman intelligence.
Now, that is not to say that I want their wealth to be capped or politically reallocated. The case for private property depends on the argument that decentralized ownership and investment and capital risking is better than politicians allocating a pool of resources to gain clout or win over popular opinion. A wealth cap or high taxes on the wealthy would transfer control over resources from private owners to political institutions. So what we would be doing is replacing imperfect private allocation with imperfect public allocation, where the people allocating the capital have limited information, political incentives, and the ability to impose costs on others without their consent. So I reject blind deference to billionaires, but I do not want politicians to control billionaires' capital.
Anyway, let me address Gates's argument about AI:
Gates argues that AI will disrupt the economy faster than previous technologies, and therefore stronger government coordination is needed to address the rapidity of the speed of that transition, to cushion people against the speed of that transition. But what his analysis underweights is how quickly AI can help people adapt to the very transformation that AI brings about.
For example, a worker taking on a new position now has access to a tutor and an analyst and a business advisor all wrapped up in one, who can provide world-class assistance 24/7 at the cost of a few cents in electricity. And someone who wants to start a business can employ dozens of AI agents at a cost of a few hundred dollars to test out the idea and build out a prototype within a few days. So what this means is that we cannot hold the human adaptive capacity constant while trying to determine the impact of AI's disruptive capacity.
The second problem with Gates's argument is that he only counts the income that people might lose when AI replaces jobs, but he doesn't count the fall in prices that the same AI will bring about. The fall in prices is effectively an increase in purchasing power. That increase in purchasing power, in economic terms, means an increase in real wages, and that's exactly why wages increased twentyfold between 1826 and 2026. Automation brought about abundance, which reduced prices and thereby increased purchasing power, i.e. increased real wages. If you look at tokens right now, their prices are going down exponentially. They've gone down about a thousandfold over the last four years, while the capability of the tokens themselves has increased. So AI is following exactly the same price trends as every other previous computer technology.
If AI becomes a major input into medicine and education and administration and logistics, that means that all these goods and services become radically cheaper, which means that paychecks can buy a lot more of them. So that's, I think, a huge hole in his analysis. It's also, I think, very simplistic to assume that the future will be based on labor. It could very well be one where the average person becomes a business owner and employs a fleet of hundreds or thousands of AI agents to work for them. That's exactly what the price trends in tokens would suggest.
The broader problem I see with his model is that it assumes disaster from a technology that creates abundance. This seems to me to be fundamentally misguided about the essential dynamics of what's actually happening.
Finally, if AI is ever capable of doing every single thing that a human can do, AI would possess very dangerous traits. And why I say that is because humans themselves are very dangerous. If we're going to create a product, we're not going to create a product that has human-like traits. But it is some of those very traits that make humans dangerous that also make them useful in the economy. We tolerate humans having these dangerous properties because that's what we were born into, and we accept that and we legally protect humans despite the fact that they're dangerous. But nobody, no company, no country will tolerate people creating AI that is dangerous. An autonomous, self-motivated and potentially rebellious digital intelligence is not only not a useful business tool, it's also not a tolerable risk. And if that is ever created, we will have much bigger things to worry about than unemployment and no solution to the problems that this would create would be found in greater taxation.
And as long as that is not created, then there will be abilities or skills that humans uniquely possess that will become the limiting factor in the economy. In other words, all other processes will scale exponentially through mass production of GPUs until all the available scarce human skills are employed in managing those GPUs. That follows the basic pattern that has preceded us over the last 200 years, and there's no reason to assume that pattern will not hold.
> With its ability to synthesize knowledge from every scientific field, AI can accelerate innovation in the world’s toughest technical challenges: providing reliable clean energy for everyone, combating climate change, growing enough food, eradicating diseases, and more
I really think this is overstated. So far everything is pointing towards AI accelerating climate change. Especially if we'll automate everything with physical robots.
I'm kind of surprised, but not surprised, by Gates' comments here. Until very recently, apparently, he was a pretty strong techno optimist, now toeing the line of a doomer. The verbiage is substantially in line with the fear-based marketing out of anthropic. I wonder what motive is underneath all of this. Trying to influence policy? But he has so many resources, it transcends policy.
Just to put Bill Gates thoughts on AI into perspective, this was his comment on an AMA 9 years ago to the question
"What kind of technological advancement do you wish to see in your lifetime?":
> The big milestone is when computers can read and understand information like humans do. There is a lot of work going on in this field - Google, Microsoft, Facebook, academia,... Right now computers don't know how to represent knowledge so they can't read a text book and pass a test.
https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5whpqs/im_bill_gates_...
Wow. First time I can't see stuff on Reddit without an account :(
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...
The issue here is that they've changed Old Reddit to require a login going forward.
> Version 3.0.0 has been rewritten from scratch to keep old Reddit working while logged out
https://github.com/tom-james-watson/old-reddit-redirect
Doesn't work either, still asks to sign in.
Sounds odd. Works just fine for me. I'm blocked if I disable it, but can access when I enable it.
Yes, it's a shame. It's in part due to scrapers and AI. There's a wealth of relevant knowledge inside Reddit, and agents aren't able to easily check there for updates on recent topics.
> It's in part due to scrapers and AI.
It has nothing to do with that, scrapers can still scrape new reddit. This is just a hostile action to move visitors to a site that shows more ads.
Oh no, the free website wants to turn a profit, the horror!
Not a moral judgement, just it was good before and now it sucks. Just my opinion, the horror!
I logged in just to share the entire comment for you:
>The big milestone is when computers can read and understand information like humans do. There is a lot of work going on in this field - Google, Microsoft, Facebook, academia,... Right now computers don't know how to represent knowledge so they can't read a text book and pass a test.
>Another whole area is vaccines. We need a vaccine for HIV, Malaria and TB and I hope we have them in the next 10-15 years.
I don't like meta comments usually, but unless I have a bad case of deja-vu, isn't this comment (and much of this discussion) way older than 3 hours?
Fascinating. Can't help but wonder how things will change over the next decade or so.
In January after 8 years (17 years in tech overall) at the same govt IT firm in the Mid-Atlanic region I was laid off. I quickly enrolled in healthcare classes and starting my clinical rotation for low level healthcare position ($25 an hour hopefully vs. multiples in tech) in September. Also, I will be doing my clinical Radiology rotation this time next year. Still won't be making the same money but i dont see a future in creative tech anymore when anyone can type to create graphics, songs, web designs, websites, iPhone apps, etc. This note of his reinforces what I thought I should do and what I am doing is the right path.
If you're interested in healthcare IT look into becoming an Epic admin. Hospitals and clinics want RNs with a tech background for those roles, and they pay really well (~150k here in CA)
yeah in time im hoping to mix my 17 years in creative tech with my new healthcare career. Get back to the money I was making, but humbled and happy to start at the bottom again for stability and always have a job waiting if needed. At least until the healthcare field gets filled with others like me.
For what it's worth I'm also drawn to radiology tech - I guess because it's one of the most "techy" fields out there in healthcare? Hope all goes well for you.
Unfortunately radiology is also one area of healthcare being highly targeted for AI replacement of humans.
Thank you and it's a competitive field to get into just look for schools out in the middle of nowhere and wherever for easier entry into a program.
Yes, exactly why you should not put belief in someone who has proven themselves to make poor predictions. He's even further removed from the zeitgeist 9 years later.
Daniel Kokotajlo had the closest prediction for our current world, 5 years ago: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6Xgy6CAf2jqHhynHL/what-2026-...
You should adjust that these are the kind of the people with the most prescient accuracy for where we are going again. Their world model is more accurate.
Kokotajlo authored: https://ai-2040.com/
where is the error? 9 years ago (2017) 'attention is all you need' hasn't been written yet, no llms exist. his take is literally 'it would be cool if something like llms existed', seems fine (if anything, vaguely predictive) to me.
As for Kokotajlo, he's a good SF author, but I don't think it's nearly as good a prediction as it appears at first glance.
Like any SF, he's correct about some things, and way, way off base about others. Specifically, he was mostly correct about short-term (1-2 year horizon) technical aspects, but anyone familiar with how transformers work would have guessed those. I'm not even in AI/rationalia land, but believe I was having these exact conversations by 2021. Specifically about multimodality and steam-of-consciousness ['chain of thought' reasoning]. He is spot-on about chip shortages (to my eyes, his most well-done prediction).
Other thoughts are a storytelling device, like a well-told horoscope. He makes non-categorical statements that were already happening as if they categorically will become a new thing. But really he's just going off the current trend that everyone knows, and thus will be nearly-impossible to falsify. For example, 'People who still remember 2021 think of it as the golden days, when conformism and censorship and polarization were noticeably less than they are now. Just as it is normal for newspapers to have a bias/slant, it is normal for internet spaces of all kinds—forums, social networks, streams, podcasts, news aggregators, email clients—to have some degree of censorship (some set of ideas that are prohibited or at least down-weighted in the recommendation algorithms) and some degree of propaganda.' Sounds scary! But it is literally just saying 'polarization and marketing specialization will continue to deteriorate'.... which, duh. In essence, you could make this statement for 2018-> 2021, or for 2008->2018 and 'feel' just as correct!
Other key thoughts were somewhat off. Specifically, 'It now costs an order of magnitude less compute (compared to 2020) to pre-train a giant model' is kind-of-true, in that it costs less now, but the models have gotten so much bigger that the prices haven't actually gone down much. Might be changing soon, but definitely several years off.
The scariest central prediction that the political stuff rests on is 'After years of tinkering and incremental progress, AIs can now play Diplomacy as well as human experts'. This part, as far as I can tell, is just not true and hasn't changed.
And, well, 2026 predictions are just not correct at all. Some examples: 'Mormons create a “Christian Coalition” internet stack, complete with its own email client, social network, payment processor, news aggregator, etc.' -- basically untrue. I know a few ex-mormons, such a thing is not prolific.
'The US and many other Western governments are gears-locked' The US is far from gears-locked, in fact, it's full-steam ahead to er, well, something.
'“Should I wear shorts today?” “Order some more toothpaste, please. Oh, and also an air purifier.” “Is this cover letter professional-sounding?”' -- kind of correct, but in practice most people just do the last one. I'm not aware of many that give chatgpt agents credit card access (refer to the famous vending machine experiment). But predicting this with GPT3 is not that crazy, cause people were already doing that.
Personally, I am much more biased towards the METR timelines/way of thinking: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/deesrjitvXM4xYGZd/metr-measu...
I found Kokotajilo's response comment to this kind of, idk, immature, and not especially mathematical.
Wow, amazing.
Truly nobody else could have predicted that computers thinking would be important.
Can definitely tell why this guy makes gazillions per nanosecond.
> Research suggests that in some parts of the United States, factory closures contribute to a rise in deaths from opioid overdoses.
It’s so cute some people think that the extent of mass displacement will be limited to what happens to the unemployed. Oh poor unemployed! Nope, pitchforks will be grabbed. It won’t be rosy. Maybe they dream about having killer robots to defend themselves, but imagine a few hundred million people getting angry within one election cycle.
"Everyone has a plan til' they get punched in the face." - Mike Tyson
Sadly, I agree, that's where this is all headed.
China’s surveillance state seems very successful at managing population emotions.
The social credit system is regional, disjoint, and composed of a handful of various trackers. It can hardly be compared with public opinion.
Xinjiang is an exception; it is heavily publicly surveilled.
Internet censorship is strong. The public still has sway over government policy. When search terms are blocked, the public continues with euphemisms. The government is responsive to public opinion. The government does promote influencers with opinions favorable with CCP goals.
Chinese foreign policy is more dovish than public opinion, especially regarding Taiwan.
False equivalence. Maybe that’s what they fool themselves with. Salivating, looking at China, not understanding the massive upward social mobility in recent time there. Why stop at China, look at Saudi Arabia, Qatar, etc.
China has both carrot and stick. Living standards there have improved dramatically over the past few decades. Over here they use a smaller stick, but no carrot at all.
Murdoch et al aren't that bad either.
Well they also at least give something back with infrastructure and general management of the country. None of that is happening in the US.
It's undeniable that Chinese transportation infrastructure is amazing, especially high-speed rail.
Compared with the United States, public health care is less available in China. Retirement pensions are an order of magnitude lower (even with PPP adjustment), hence their world-leading savings rate. Social mobility is lower: getting a permit to access social services such as schools in a new city is difficult. Youth unemployment was above 25% the last time it was published; it is no longer disclosed.
Rule of law is much less strong. Injustices committed by government officials towards citizens are unlikely to be addressed.
Housing costs to income ratios are an order of magnitude worse in cities with job opportunities.
The Chinese government has chosen to allocate capital toward industrial output at the expense of its citizens' welfare. It has succeeded at its goal. Perhaps in the future more capital allocation will be made to consumption. That is not the case at the current time.
> imagine a few hundred million people getting angry within one election cycle
This isn't hard to imagine? We'll elect someone, they will put in place new policies. Maybe they will help, maybe they won't.
Nice thing about real democracies, you don't actually need pitchforks.
Said democracy does have to be real, though. If we're talking about that country between two oceans that waged armed conflicts almost constantly since its very inception, has supported or helped put in place straight-up dictatorships not that long ago, and sports one of the highest wealth inequality in the West, well... I'd think long and hard before I call that a real democracy.
this is only true if people know their voices matter.
if their voices are overrun by the powerful, the pitchforks come back out.
If all jobs are taken away for the sake of robot driven productivity, who will consume the products and services being offered that result in profit?!
(EDIT: I am not against AI at all, just trying to understand where this all leads)
Currently, in the US the top 10% of earners are responsible for approximately half of all consumer spending. If AI causes this trend to continue and accelerate, I expect that we'd see similar dollar amounts of consumer spending, but it would be concentrated mainly in the people whose income comes from capital investments rather than from working for wages. Basically you'd see a situation like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snsXD6FwLYc
why would the price for a movie go up if supply goes up? this video lacks basic understanding of economics and I want my minute back
hell, if actors are still making movies for the love of the game and competing with cheaper (SOMEHOW! I guess we forgot about Sora already) then the price on those will actually go down
oh no, more indie movies made out of the labor of love, the horror.
Right? Unless we've figured out Star Trek Welfare, who is buying anything when 50% of the population is unemployed and wages have crashed for the other 50% because of biblical levels of unemployment.
Other bots. The sequel to "don't build the torment nexus" is "don't make dead internet theory a reality"
Those wealthy enough to own (shares in?) the robot factories.
"Roughly 58% of American adults own stock"
This includes my teenager, who socks away $30/week in a VOO fund account. But yeah, no one can afford to "own (shares in?) the robot factories."
Some other interesting stats for context:
* About 87% of adults with a household income of $100,000 or more own stock; compared to just 28% of those earning under $50,000.
* Only about 37% of adults hold stocks, bonds, or funds outside of a retirement account.
* Between 55% and 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and are one large expense or missed paycheck away from homelessness.
* While some paycheck-to-paycheck workers technically own small amounts of stock, the actual value they hold is minimal.
* The wealthiest 10% of Americans own roughly 90% to 95% of all U.S. stock value.
I am very concerned about wealth inequality in the US, but this:
> Between 55% and 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and are one large expense or missed paycheck away from homelessness.
Is simply untrue
It's a pretty well-known stat that I think originally came from one of Schwab's detailed Modern Wealth Index reports -- which are survey-based so there is likely some inaccuracy; they report 3% margin of error -- but other similar studies generally put the number somewhere between 53% and 63%.
From their methodology:
> The Modern Wealth Index, developed in partnership with Koski Research and the Schwab Center for Financial Research [...] was conducted by Koski Research from January 12 to January 19, 2018, among 1,000 Americans aged 21 to 75. Quotas were set so that the sample is as demographically representative as possible. The margin of error for the total survey sample is three percentage points.
Anecdotally, this percentage makes sense to me based on roughly half of the people in my circles/family/life living paycheck to paycheck, but there's obviously some exposure bias at work there too. It's possible you have some exposure bias as well if that number seems too high for you.
The median American has a 401k, yes. The median amount of stock owned is, I believe, $40,000 -- so, at the recommended annual withdrawal rate, that puts you at $1,600/year of spending money.
Let's assume that the stock market 10xes in the next decade, then the median American stock owner can get out $16,000/year.
I say this in jest, but at the rate inflation has been going $16k per year might buy you a hamburger in 10 years.
what happens to labor markets in places like India if robots are able to accomplish that would have ordinarily required 5 manual labors at a fraction of the cost say (1/100th)?
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
This is already a thing? Just replace “robots” with “machines”.
And yet I see videos all the time of Indians running contraptions straight out of the steam age in their shacks to make plastic straws or sandals. Or just doing it by hand. Better machines to do these tasks already exist, but are obviously too expensive for them to afford. Why would these hypothetical robots be any more affordable or disruptive to Indian workers in particular?
If anything I think American blue collars would be the ones to worry about.
basically, that is the question of wealth distribution. All the wealth created by these AI companies should be distributed to people so that they will have money to buy products from these companies. This can range from more taxes, UBI, or like Marx said: seize the means of productions (basically nationalize all these AI companies and share the profits to everyone)
These AI companies aren’t capturing that wealth. Frontier models are a commodity.
A world where intelligence is worthless?!
Before the Glorious and Bloody Revolution, just Dollar Cost Average your way into a tech-investing stock fund.
Ugh, capitalism.
It can be anything from fully automated luxury communism, to fully automated dystopian communism.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fully_Automated_Luxury_Communi...
to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pol_Pot
Don't discount that tech billionaires pursuing this are themselves nihilistic. They would enjoy the fruits of our labor and will not care what comes after they die.
"Après nous, le déluge"
-- Madame de Pompadour
Please, don't ask logical questions.
3 citations and a lot of conjecture. Is the article only targeting SWEs? The one study cited said 22-25 age range saw a 16% decrease in relative employment declines (for SWEs)[0]. But everyone outside that range was not impacted. Further, what about all the trades jobs around data center development?
“Demand is also being intensified by major investments in infrastructure, manufacturing, reshoring, and AI. Data center growth alone has added a net 315,000 skilled-trade workers over the past five years, according to the report, putting additional pressure on an already tight labor market.”
https://www.morningstar.com/news/pr-newswire/20260825cg32433...
We literally do not have enough trades people to build out data centers and their salaries are increasing as a result. These are skilled labor jobs (plumbers, electricians, IT, etc.). Does Bill Gates care about the rest of the economy outside of SWE?
[0]: https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/app/uploads/2025/11/Cana...
Honestly a lot of those decreases are also because companies are trying to wait and see as much as possible to see if there is any truth to the conjecture.
I have an impression that most CxO are driven by FOMO. Having a fixed R&D budget (no cheap credit anymore) to get $$$ for tokens they are laying off developers.
I wonder these specific data center jobs seem to be very cycle specific and will all fall away as soon as we have constructed "enough" data centers.
- If AI and robots are as good as Bill suggests , one can infer that AI will signal the end of cities, at least the end of megacities. If the home robot can clean and cook and also do my taxes, hair, and diagnose my health , one is more likely to escape unemployment by moving to a small town where he can find land and resources, and use robots to exploit them, just like humans have always done when economy was based in agriculture. If there is no longer a reason for people to live close together, decentralization is the most likely outcome.
- The biggest geopolitical impact will probably come from AI weapons. Just like previous shifts in weaponry caused the fall of empires , the rise of naval empires and the rise of national modern superpowers, AI may lead to the end of the UN and beginning of something new.
- Societies will change but a plan is not needed and it's most likely useless. Societies adapt , and nobody has ever been able to predict how. Let's not make the same mistake again.
I will believe that "AI will do all the work" when private prisons stop contracting inmates to do slave labor and employers stop hiring undocumented migrant workers.
> I will believe that "AI will do all the work" when private prisons stop contracting inmates to do slave labor and employers stop hiring undocumented migrant workers.
The majority of the slave labor in prisons in the US make from nothing at all to 50 cents per hour.
The powers that be will still shamefully be exploiting that labor source long after AI/robots are capable of cheaply doing that work.
Interesting bar.
Interesting way to say "never".
> If there is no longer a reason for people to live close together, decentralization is the most likely outcome.
Many people like living next to other people purely for social reasons.
why do you think a bot can't replace that, either?
given all of the issues with people getting attached to their online girlfriend -- it's already happening
Because the social issues happen at a more biological level, hormones and cell signaling and stuff. Robots are at a much higher level. Online girlfriends are cool, but as we all know, not a replacement for physical touch, intimacy, and relationship building. Your body doesn’t release oxytocin from cuddling with your cold computer.
Maybe we can eventually “trick” the human brain, but I think it will be much more challenging than people think. I would imagine if people even just knew someone was a robot, the jig is up. For most people. It wouldn’t be enough to create the perfect humanoid robot. We’d also have to make them hidden in plain sight. Full Ex Machina style.
Did you really mean to write really: "Online girlfriends are cool"
In my humble opinion, they are the epitome of uncool.
I mean cool as in “okay… I guess people can do that”. Not as in “wow that’s rad!” Like, neutral cool.
I don't think so. At the first chance during COVID people started moving out of big cities. Most people don't need the city, they need a village. We are in cities due to jobs requiring us to be in big cities.
People moved out of the cities during COVID because close physical proximity to large numbers of strangers was a potentially deadly hazard to their health.
I don't think so, a lot of people were just happy that remote work is a thing now and ditched the city for a more comfortable life.
I strongly prefer home office. And also living in city. I get benefits of both that way.
You'd better hope Bill Gates stops buying up all the farmland then.
He's running out of time, he better step it up. He's only at 0.03%.
"If there is no longer a reason for people to live close together, decentralization is the most likely outcome."
Umm what? Humans are social animals and many people LIKE living in cities in close proximity to other people and close to amenities. I do not see a future where we decentralize and spread out because of AI.
We have also seen this play out with WFH/Covid. The recall into centralized structures, regardless of the technology available to mitigate the need, was fast and broadly applied.
Our current social structure is actively resistant to decentralization and I don't see that changing unless there is some forcing function to break that hold and keep it broken for new norms to settle into expectations.
0% chance you're getting a plot of land and happily ever after in the world as described.
Humans like cities.
It brings people together for mating.
It wasn't only industrialization.
Even today, before AI, once you find a mate, THEN, you move to the suburbs.
They're also much cheaper from an infrastructure perspective to maintain
Life in the city is more expensive, in my experience though. Richer, with vastly more options, sure - but more expensive overall.
It wasn't even industrialisation - it was agriculture. Do people really like cities? I am not so sure - certainly many do, but many also hanker for the village and there are a bunch of interesting theories about us working well at 'village scale' (I could be easily convinced that no-one hankers for the suburbs..) I think if the economic opportunities were not so heavily weighted towards cities we would see much reduced urbanisation.
"do people really like cities? I am not so sure"
Just look at real estate prices in New York, SF, Boston, etc. Yes, people REALLY like cities. Even the wealthiest people who can afford anything still choose cities
How much of this is because that's where the jobs are? Take that away and where would people choose to live? Wasn't there a notable exodus from SF, for example, during covid when many jobs went remote?
That's a pretty unhinged idea you've presented; feels completely autobiographical.
People move out to the suburbs after they're married with kids? How is that unhinged?
> Instead, solutions should be developed through a public democratic process that includes elected officials, policymakers, educators, health workers, local officials, and community leaders. Millions of people will have their lives disrupted, and we’ll need a stronger, more flexible social safety net to help them manage the transition. Local communities are already raising concerns about the energy and water needed for data centers. Without solutions, some groups will push for stopping AI development and deployment altogether.
Sounds great, except it ignores the fact that capital interests have controlled the levers of our faux democracies for decades, with no end in sight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniparty
Not everywhere. Switzerland has a direct democracy, which should be emulated by the rest of the world.
https://www.aboutswitzerland.eda.admin.ch/en/direct-democrac...
FWIW I am not from Switzerland, I only live there. Direct democracy works great.
Use of the term of direct democracy feels dilution in that case. It is a significant step in that direction, though for me (and wikipedia) direct democracy is without the middleman. Switzerland still has parties, elected government and so forth, no?
If someone else hasn't given a thought yet to Liquid Democracy, I propose they give it a couple of minutes of imaginary thought https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy
For some real world data there are some studies about (I think) German branch of the Pirate Party using it in internal decision making and there is interesting insight for those curious.
It be nice if we all where allowed to vote on particular laws if interested, and defer certain topics to our delegated experts. (Chat Control for example, would be a non issue then.)
The technology for that approach has been mature enough since the rise of social media and private crypto currencies (as a means of electronic private vote, particularly around usage of smart contracts for delegation). What about the interest and spreading of these ideas? Pretty limited, to non-existent. Some people like to follow leaders, though naturally wouldn't expect it to be the silent majority.
Switzerland still has parties and a senate but the people can veto any law and the people can amend the constitution. This arguably is a sensible balance as it’s probably not tenable for the people to legislate full-time. Representatives can legislate and the people will override them when they disagree.
It probably does work good however Switzerland got dangerously close to "something happening" this year with the 10M referendum. And it was very close, with major parts of the country showing an absurd level of ignorance - sadly I don't believe in direct democracy, the "public" can be too easily swayed one way or another even if not today, but in a few decades, with the right messaging, yes. Although, to contradict myself, perhaps there is no interest in generating upheaval in Switzerland because everyone keeps the money there.
If your measure of "success" is women gaining voting rights in 1990 (!) in the last canton, then yeah, Switzerland is doing great.
There's nothing convincing in your link.
More importantly, even if it did contain the solution, there is no obvious way for a country with an already corrupt government to transition to such a thing.
I think you mean no obvious pacific way. Which is what any democratic citizen wants and seeks out. There are other solutions and way too obvious, in fact you have examples all over the world going back centuries.
Right. I was referring to the parent's "should be emulated by the rest of the world" suggestion, which had thanksimcured energy.
Democracy is clunky but sort of works. Say UBI looks necessary it may be both parties adopt it so it gets done in spite of the uniparty issue.
If the result will be huge job loss doesn't that mean the overall buying power of all across all economies will go down drastically which begs the question who will buy the stuff that these companies that get rid of people are making?
Exactly. Henry Ford made sure his own employees could afford the cars they were making.
These people making these kind of grand pronouncements either have an embarrassing blind spot, or are not making sincere, but carefully calculated statements.
Just via competition, Chinese researchers are doing much more than Bill Gates could ever hope to do through 'thought leadership' spread the benefits of generative AI.
Prices will also go down dramatically. When you eliminate human labour completely, you are essentially stuck with the problem of efficiently allocating raw materials. And raw materials are abundant compared to what human labour can currently produce. We're still a long way from there though.
Not true. Raw materials depend on energy to extract and are geopolitically not a straight forward thing given that most materials are concentrated in few locations on our planet.
If resources cost next to nothing to extract and process, isn't that speed running strip mining of the entire planet? Then what?
You mine the landfills. Or asteroids!
Other companies and rich people. Imagine the economy gradually becoming more unequal.
The same exact people that the companies got rid of. The government pays them now instead of their former employer.
> We have to think now about how to reduce job losses so that everyone can share in the prosperity that AI creates.
And I thought he is a smart man. This is so last century thinking. We need to prepare that there will definitely be no jobs for everyone and that will be falling all the time, it’s not a one-time event you should “prepare for”. There’s nothing to prepare, we already have funds and productivity to feed and shelter everyone. UBI is not a privilege, previous generations were slaving 9 to 5 all their lives so we can have it. This is it, arrived, and now, enter a few decades of historical period when all of us waiting for government bureaucrats to realise that UBI is a right.
> all of us waiting for government bureaucrats to realise that UBI is a right
You'll be waiting forever, then. This isn't something that you can wait to be given to you, it must be taken.
Or, put much more eloquently by one of the greatest Americans:
"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress"
- Frederick Douglass
How do the gears of capitalism keep turning without UBI in such a scenario? Who is buying from Amazon? Mega yachts don't make the world go round.
UBI is how capitalism keeps going, else a new system will be needed.
UBI will be given but we should take even more control and take a % of ownership.
> How do the gears of capitalism keep turning without UBI in such a scenario?
The part you've got wrong here is thinking that Capitalism is equivalent to innovation and growth, which it is not. Capitalism simply serves capital, and with less and less of its constraints being physically bound to resources, there is very much a plausible world in which only a small handful of consolidated bank accounts exist so long as those bank accounts can reasonably control the monopoly of violence.
There is a point historically in which Capitalism absolutely served to provide widespread innovation and prosperity at scale, but this is not a feature of capitalism inherently but rather a consequence of it when run within the existing system of labor mechanics at the time. Capitalism can still very much exist within a Feudal structure of governance, its contributions to society will be much lesser, but it can still very much exist.
A prosperous middle class is not a requirement for capitalism to work, and there are more capitalist systems where that's not the case than where there is.
The upper class live in walled neighborhoods with private guards. There's a small merchant class, and then the majority of the population are working class. Much of Central and South America live like this.
There was no middle class to speak of while living under communism here in Eastern Europe. We were all queueing for food equally. Except the nomenklatura, of course.
We've seen in the K-shaped economy of late a new kind of consumerism.
The top 10% of consumers accounted for half of all spending in the second quarter of 2025.
Capitalism will happily chug along while leaving a massive number of people desperately poor.
There's a reason the AI CEOs have all become obsessed with the concept of a "permanent underclass."
If a UBI is ever "given" it will be just enough to keep the underclass from rising up and killing the owner class and not one cent more.
> There's a reason the AI CEOs have all become obsessed with the concept of a "permanent underclass.
it's not for nothin that they've been slipping Zachariah 13:8 into discussions that show up in places like 8chan or ssethtzeentech videos
"Declares the LORD: 'in all the land, two-thirds will be cut off and perish, but one-third will be left alive' "
The marketing and agit-prop types would call this "priming" or "conditioning"
It's funny, because extreme poverty rates as defined by the UN have been decimated in the last century, and continue to drop, because of growth qua capitalism.
You're reflecting the populist notion that wealth is zero-sum. If that were true we'd still be in caves fighting over sticks. The average quality of life has skyrocketed in the last century alongside growth, and there's no non-capitalist country now or in history that's been an enviable place for average people to live.
Somehow, I don't think the people with all the money, gunmen and (soon) robots will be OK with the world you envision.
True. Expecting the super rich to be concerned a lot about the poor - especially when they aren't useful as employees, is quite a stretch.
Not useful as soldiers even, and that includes those on the enemy side.
Their wealth is more contingent on our consumption than employment status. If that goes, then you're looking at a zero-sum society where no new wealth is generated.
Ultimately people will remain enterprising status-seekers. Rich people can already sit around with their wealth doing fuck-all excepting consuming, and they don't.
> Their wealth is more contingent on our consumption than employment status.
Is it? Or is it dependent on the consumption of someone much greater than you.
For example: I was reading something the other day about dining experiences in Las Vegas. Really though, the video was about how recently Vegas has abandoned the traditional middle class patrons in favor of providing experiences to a smaller, but much wealthier clientele. This seems to be a trend across many industries. In some cases your consumption is even a cost center to be eliminated in favor of a more successful customer base.
lol well the majority of the top 1% globally didn't make their fortune serving food, to other wealthy patrons no less (how's that for circular reasoning). We're in a consumer society, B2B sales is a thing but it's a side-effect of that.
They wealthy will be buying islands (as big as Australia) get high on cocaine and do safari, shooting humans there as the ultimate fun [1]. The prey underestimates how the mind of predator works, and that's why it is a prey.
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3epygq5272o
Predator and prey dynamics typically cross outside of classifications like species and are not inter-species like what is suggested here.
It can be easy to mistake a parasitic relationship for a predatory one.
That would also not be an inter-species relationship.
In a post-scarcity society, having a meagre policy to keep people alive and not-unruly is cheap. It's also getting way ahead of ourselves, since it's nowhere in sight. Software hiring was up this year.
Not really. The planet is crowded, currently with mostly productive members of society.
For the ultra rich psychos who run the show, do you really think they want poor people hanging around? When we can be wiped out in a few months?
Consider the pure greed Donald Trump is displaying. Now imagine that the 1000 most powerful people are the same, except they are smart enough to at least not rub it in peoples faces on live television.
They hate you, and want you dead.
Motivated reasoning. You want to believe it.
> do you really think they want poor people hanging around?
Which by your rationale would include everyone who isn't rich (and tautologically would mean "no one is rich anymore"). They do not care whether we're hanging around, the same way they do not care now whether poor people exist. It has no bearing. All that does is whether they remain rich and powerful, and last I checked, that's relative. Being the only one left on the planet won't make you feel rich, and there being poors on a piece of land won't have any bearing on you.
> When we can be wiped out in a few months?
Lol
Also, on the population front, growth is poised to completely stall in less than 100 years. The fertility rate is terrible in developed countries, and falling quickly in developing ones as they get richer
want to believe it? mon ami have you looked at any labor history?
they used to send 9 year olds to the mines. mortality rates were as high as 50% before they turned 20.
why do you think the AI robber barons are any nicer? it is painfully obvious they're not. and all of this is set to a backdrop of global ecological collapse.
> they used to send 9 year olds to the mines
Yeah, at the advent of the industrial revolution. And prior to that 80% of people had to work the land, with no ammonia, just horses and manure.
Labor conditions from over a century ago, before the laws were written, have no bearing on whether wealthy people would try their best to kill you "just because". That's nonsensical.
"Nice" has nothing to do with it.
Indeed. Far more likely, a more economic human is engineered.
Oryx and Crake, I think, was the first time I encountered that idea.
Well, they don't have all of the second one.
“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work together for the benefit of all.” —- John Maynard Keynes
What does the data and observations tell us so far, in this context?
The real blame lies at the door of the folks who created a lot of things who were incredibly naive that others wouldnt come in to profit from it.
That’s certainly a component, but I think the biggest issue is that people have this religious fervor that capitalism is the only way to structure a socioeconomic system, even when the data shows it is exceptionally bad at ensuring a good quality of life for the majority of citizens.
It’s changing in the US with Democratic Socialists over performing, and with high support for them with the under 35 cohort, the question is if this momentum can be sustained for years through various election cycles (as ~2M 55+ voters age out every year, and ~3M voters turn 18 and age into the electorate every year).
“Progress occurs one funeral at a time.” — Max Planck
I don't understand why people always spring for UBI. I don't want free money; I want to earn my living. I want to work.
Why do we not push for labor reform, as we did a century ago? Depending on the actual productivity gains from AI broadly, set a new standard of 4-hour workdays. Or 3-day work weeks.
Labor reform worked in a natural system where capital needed the labor, just had problems with abusing it.
New paradigm is a push for no workers at all which sounds a lot messier to fix as you start regulating how many employees a business has. How do contractors work? And if the contractors are robots?
You are right, it is tricky. But the assumption is that AGI is going to get here before employment becomes difficult to obtain. If AGI is here, then we have the problem you speak about. If not, then AI is a tool which enables workers to be more productive. If workers with this new tool are more productive to the point that employment across a broad spectrum of possible jobs is hit hard, then we need to talk about labor reform of the sort I spoke about. It would increase the amount of people needed in the workforce across the board.
You can work even with UBI in place.
Cool. You can work three days a week and earn a fraction of what you make now - far less than a living wage - because the market value of your labor has been reduced to nil by AI. You aren't going to be paid more because you're more productive, that isn't how it has ever worked.
The rest of us want to be able to eat once capitalism decides we aren't worth the cost to keep alive.
The funny thing is that the wealthy and powerful don't realise that a collapse of that scale means that every switches to professional guillotine builder over night.
There is no preparing for that.
I doubt we get there to be honest, they all have wealth and power because there are consumers with money. No more consumers, no more wealth and power.
P.S. remember my guy Bill didn't write a nice blog post about any of the allegations around his involvement with Epstein. So, you know, this is basically just marketing more than Bill's thoughts.
It really takes a lot of magical thinking to believe we can just implement UBI without any costs.
Notice that when you open your mouth, there is no roast chicken that flies in.
Total federal entitlement spending in the USA, per capita, is roughly $11,000 annually. Once could kill all those programs and start there.
there was a professor in SoCal who was a big fan of what he called Libertarian UBI -- we have an insane amount of qaulification for programs -- must be a certain age, certain condition, must prove that condition consistently, etc. etc.
abandon that entire apperatus and just cut people a check.
even glenn beck called it out w/ obamacare -- "if total spending is $3million per person [it wasn't, btw], then why not just cut every person a check?"
I really don't think UBI can ever happen in the US. There is a moral imperative of "industriousness". Keynes' prediction (or maybe desire) ~100 years ago of the 15 hour workweek never panned out.
In the US, you're at least as likely to have half the population vote that anyone who cannot find a job should be exterminated, despite a large proportion of those voting for it being the very people most likely to become jobless, because Fox News will convince them it will mostly affect immigrants and/or some other group they're supposed to hate.
this phenomenon is not limited to the US
see also: the German far right pending a takeover, or like, half of all politics in India
How does the moral imperative of industriousness deal with all the skilled jobs being done by the computer?
Keynes prediction more than panned out if you look at the population level.
Instead of everyone working less what happened is less people work. The fact that it took that specific shape is a source of A LOT of problems.
More people work. Keynes died in 1946 - meaning they had grand depression in his lifetime. Moreover, women employment went up by significant amounts - middle and upper class women would not work back then.
UBI as a concept does not add up. It assumes an even production of all goods that people might need, but there isn't, you are giving everyone fiat currency that is not inherently tied to any physical good. Very fast you will descend into either plan economy where you get food stamps, or an economy where people are trading goods that are actually tied to value.
For example, you go to the store to get eggs, since everyone has UBI, they decide to also get eggs, the eggs either run out, or the store raises the price, at which either you will get food queues like in the USSR, or everyone will need more UBI to afford eggs. The solution to this is to increase egg production, but this is not instant, and not necessarily a priority, while money transfers are instant.
> It assumes an even production of all goods that people might need, but there isn't, you are giving everyone fiat currency that is not inherently tied to any physical good.
Is what you're saying that since UBI would disconnect someone's production from their income, then this will cause shortages of goods? I think UBI only works if the income generated by it is tied to production. That production would not be generated by human labor, but instead by robot labor. I think if you disconnect that then the system would not work, but why would you need to?
Without a workforce there is no consumption, and therefore capitalism cannot exist. Yes, we would require a planned economy. Call it communism or whatever you like, but free market economics literally cannot exist in such an environment.
Capitalism is based on two simple, fundamental assumptions about the world:
- everyone works
- everyone consumes
1. Turned out not to be true. We have disabled people, elderly people. We patch it with legislation like SSI. That only works because everyone else is still working.
Our monkey patch solutions have held up well for a long time. But, if either of those two assumptions are broken in a large way, the entire system collapses. UBI is yet another monkey patch. As you know, it won’t hold if we bend the invariants of the system enough.
Eventually, a fully planned economy will not be optional.
There will be a workforce, it just won't be human-based. Capitalism has always existed without 100% employment, in every example someone needs to work to support others who cannot. Humans have done this under capitalism to support their families and communities, but now we will need to find incentives for robots to do this. It might be as simple as just telling them.
Try to convince the majority of the western world that are consuming the equal of 4-6 globes that they are eligible for:
(1) National Park visit a year (3) RoboTaxi rides this week (2) Eggs for the week
Who will do the planning? Why would the population accept this planning?
You will in practice need full surveillance and control of your population and an agreement between every country that this is how we are going to do things.
At that point you can also ask the question what value humans provide at all. Why upkeep all of this when you can just expand compute, perform resource extraction instead of managing your cattle.
He is a smart man -- with an enormous $100B vested interest in the capital side of this equation. It is (meager) progress to hear any acknowledgement from capital at all that we might conceivably need to do something other than pump aggregate labor supply and dump aggregate demand.
This is a baby step, but it's a baby step in the right direction.
My interpretation of his point was 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.
----
I agree he should've addressed UBI directly. When he was asked about it in an AMA a decade ago he basically said he's optimistic it can happen eventually but not yet [1]. And in that same AMA he said he wished to see "computers that can read and understand information like humans do" within his lifetime [2]. Now that the latter has happened I wish we could see how his thoughts have changed on the former.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5whpqs/comment/dea7v1...
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5whpqs/comment/dea5fl...
We are really good at figuring out how to make toys that are in short supply so you have to invest all this time in acquiring the toys, for nothing more than the social signal involved that comes from the circular reason that the toys are hard to acquire.
We will figure new methods of scarce toy production. To believe otherwise seems delusional to me.
There is also this problem with UBI that I don't know how it can be solved. I see it in a certain percentage of people I know. Maybe 15-20%. As soon as they get paid that money is spent and usually spent on bullshit. Any hint of credit worthiness was used up a long time ago because it is the same process. If you gave them a daily morning UBI amount they would be broke by dinner and hungry. It is very hard to explain what causes this. To pretend this doesn't exist also seems completely delusional to me.
I support UBI and wealth taxes, but I also think generally that will be a difficult transition in terms of social upheaval. There are so many people I know who are financially well-off but completely fall apart when there is no visible professional hierarchy to give them meaning.
One would hope that this would still go down better than destituting large percentages of the world population, but I wonder.
> I know who are financially well-off but completely fall apart when there is no visible professional hierarchy to give them meaning.
This reminds me of white people in the American south that didn't personally own slaves, but fought in the civil war anyway to maintain their place in the social hierarchy https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/67fvaf/comme...
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f9j6hg/why_d...
And that hasn't changed at all:
“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
LJB was talking about the grandkids of those civil war types
Wonder if there should be a "UBI reservation" set up where everyone gets it, and very basic needs like housing and food are taken care of in a self-sustaining manner with machines. (which is the whole premise, everything is automated so nobody needs to work). Then people who don't like the freeloading can opt out and live as usual, and those who like it can move to the reservation.
Weird and cute how you think you're one of the good, special ones that wont have their value or status affected by whats coming. Im sure you 'll come out on top, thats always what happens for the "industrious"...
Perhaps some kind of camp where such people can be concentrated?
Based in your first two sentences, I think your understanding of UBI is mistaken. You seem to be under the impression that people don't or can't have a job when there is UBI. This is not the case. If you don't believe me, just look at Alaska.
Everyone enjoys some sort of benefit, tax break, subsidy, etc. from the government. UBI is the same thing in the form of a regular, universal transfer payment. Nothing more, nothing less.
I do understand UBI. I was referring to the previous context that AI would introduce mass loss of jobs and overall reduced employment, not specifically to UBI being a replacement for jobs.
There are other ways occupy our time. Arts, music, carpentry, gardening, sports, games, care provider and many more.
> we already have funds and productivity to feed and shelter everyone
For how long?
He’s saying the same thing as you. I don’t think UBI will magically appear. If people lose their jobs, what guarantee do you give that they can survive? Thats his point - prepare for this event so that the guarantee can be made sooner.
> we already have funds and productivity to feed and shelter everyone.
Where ? who ?
You can build livable domiciles for a few grand in bulk, recycle waste via composting to reduce infrastructure needs, shared batteries and solar, etc. There are plenty of people on youtube demonstrating the permie off grid lifestyle. Grains are cheap and we have a wild boar and deer problem in a lot of the country so food wouldn't be too expensive either.
Most people don't want to live like that. They want AC, central plumbing, trendy food, and cheap clothing.
And most people don't live in this country.
He’s a delusional idiot
Let’s ask him straight - would he be ok living like that? Lmfao
Lots of looney tunes comments on this thread
For the record, I'm into permaculture/regenerative agriculture and enjoy the lifestyle, all I need is shared satellite internet. If my choice was between working 60 hours a week at 3 jobs to barely keep my head above water, or live in an agricultural commune, I would take the commune every time.
It doesn't matter if its cheap, the economy requires monetary exchange. What work are people doing that would balance out the work to build composting systems, infrastructure needs, batteries, solar, wheat, 'wild boar' (protip, there isnt enough without farming, I hunt). All of these things you've stated require a long chain of manufacturing, none of which are free. The systems themselves are incredibly complex and require hard human work.
Can you explain to me how any of this is possible under the constraints you've made. I can only see regression not an evolution or an improvement.
The resources exist, it's just a matter of allocating them properly. We have lumber and concrete to build houses. We have fertilizer and land and trucks to grow and ship food. And apparently all of this will be immensely cheaper (practically free) within a decade thanks to robotics and AI (according to the trillionaire half this place worships.)
With that said I doubt that reallocation will happen in any meaningful way, and as the elites eliminate more people from the economy we'll descend further into violence and chaos. If the parasite class was generous, they wouldn't be parasites.
I keep hearing these, but i find it so hard to connect reality to what you're saying.
All of your ideas sound great, I doubt they work. I fear you misunderstand the complexity tech tree required to deliver this utopia you desire. There is too much work required that won't be being done, "with ai" and "with robotics" , of which they have thier own tech and resource trees of dependencies.
If people are not paying for the resources (and how will they, since on ubi there is no requirement to deliver value) robots wont be made, and you're back to caveman development.
I'm happy to debate this, but I just feel the whole arguement of -it will just happen- is incredible wishful thinking.
How are you going to get UBI?
Are you going to strike? Are we going to take on the government by force?
People need to understand there is no democracy in a post-AGI world.
The power of human collectives comes from a combination of our collective economic power and our physical power. Without either leaders would be smart to just do what the companies paying all the bills ask if they don't want their families to starve too.
Yeah it's total horseshit, to be frank.
Worker protections have almost never been granted by the profiteers... not child labor laws, not weekends, not overtime, not safety regulations, not minimum wage, not workers comp... the working class is not what it is today because of "sharing prosperity" and there's been a lot of prosperity — it's all a series of fights.
This is all well known, but I recently visited an old coal mine in Pennsylvania, and much of the tour was talking about the labor conditions, and the generational "trap" of working there. If a worker died, the family had little time to leave the company-provided house without providing someone to work. What often happened is that one of the children would work to maintain the household.
>[0]the "rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for—not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of the country."
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1902_anthracite_coal_strike
That all sounds nice, but does he mean it and can we trust him?
Setting up governance bodies and think tanks could be a diversion. He does explicitly suggest a robot and token tax, so that is something.
He does not address the issue of IP theft or the possibility of shutting down AI altogether like medium range missiles (SS20/Pershing II) were removed by treaties. The could be AI treaties with China and Russia, except of course the US has no credibility now compared to the 1980s.
I would say, "No, we cannot trust him" because, even if/when his intentions are good, his interests, and his worldview, and not aligned with the public's (globally or locally). For example:
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2022/07/how-bill-gates-m...
I'm sure we can trust the billionaire who was great chums with Epstein, clearly he's a man of integrity.
And why should we listen to this pedophile who never once considered how the good outweighed the bad while running his company?
Because your betters told you to.
That's the whole gambit here: use the system and media to paint a pretty picture of <person so terrible they need PR>, trust that some non-trivial amount of the population will buy it, deny any wrong-doing publicly or on record. Hope they don't come for your head. Rinse and repeat.
> I’m also worried about AI’s impact on education. Ironically, the same tool that will allow people to learn more than ever could also lead to many people learning less.
For teachers/admins who are on HN: what has worked in a past for a "new way to educate" students to actually be implemented by educators? Does it happen through conferences? Do some states take the lead and others follow? Does it follow from private schools into public schools?
I know AI labs are trying to include teachers here and there... but IME teachers are very "anti-AI", "anti-datacenter", etc. etc. In coastal cities, the unions will be entirely opposed. This seems less of a "can AI be useful for education" question and more around politics and messaging. But I'd love to learn more.
My wife is a professor. "Administration contracts with some company that is providing tools to improve pedagogy" is pretty universally garbage. It typically comes with mandates to be used even when it is inappropriate and faculty aren't given time to integrate these tools into their preps. This makes people reasonably skeptical.
The only thing I've ever seen work is to simply make a tool available to people while giving them meaningful resources to adopt it if they see utility in their specific situation. But admin hates this because it means that they are paying for a thing that some people aren't using and because they want to write "I've revolutionized teaching by integrating X" on their performance review and that doesn't work unless adoption is near-universal.
For AI shit in particular, the ideas have been trash. Mandatory AI summaries of course readings integrated into the discussion platform. Great, now nobody will do the reading. AI tools for "placing" you in history through image generation that constantly generate anachronisms because they are trained on fantasy art. Stuff like that.
> In the United States, I’ve met families who, understandably, were overwhelmed by the process of applying for health insurance, student aid, or food assistance. Faced with a huge stack of complicated bureaucratic forms, many felt like giving up. AI can streamline things dramatically
I'd love to see anyone building Grokbot or ChatGPT Work talk about how they're thinking about this use case, specifically. It seems greatly important and tractable given how little government websites & forms change over time.
On the other end - yes, it will create massive vectors for abuse & fraud, since govt services are designed to have roadblocks to reduce usage. But fraud has always been possible, even without AI (so many recent examples to pull from).
IMO it's best to maximize social benefits to see where the tradeoffs really are. We won't know until we push on it!
It'd be nice if we could change the bureaucratic process, not the interface
An agent with computer use can already navigate all this stuff quite well.
At least as likely LLMs will be used to create more labyrinthine paperwork to stymie attempts at getting government to serve the taxpayer.
>On the other end - yes, it will create massive vectors for abuse & fraud, since govt services are designed to have roadblocks to reduce usage.
That the government collects taxes and then understaffs the department that distributes the benefit is the first fraud. 30 years after email was invented, why do people have to wait on the phone for hours to talk to a government employee?
Bingo, the IRS made me fax them something once and it was a demand and not a request.
It was 2022 when this happened.
If the goal is to make things easier for everyday Americans, replacing these with universal schemes would do that and will also prevent abuse and fraud (most of which comes down to forgetting to dot your lowercase j on work requirement form #27).
The issues are global and they are correct. The landscape is not the same in US as in other countries, but this is a global problem and should be handled as such.
I'm not against a tax on AI or robots, but I think this may be the big chance we have to look at universal income with new eyes. If jobs are to disappear, why not soften the blow and get rid of some of the inefficiencies many government processes mean in terms of other citizen benefits?
What I worry about more however is the malevolent actors across the AI space. I'd argue that most companies mean well, but chasing profit at all costs can very easily turn into malevolence. Both these and actors being malevolent on purpose needs to have a control function.
I thought Gates' take on the human relational aspects of AI to be thoughtful, but I am surprised that his analysis on the economic and jobs aspect of AI offers little more than the party line. Every other technological advance that improved productivity (Industrial Revolution, etc.) has resulted in the loss of some jobs but the creation of jobs in other areas and an overall increase in the standard of living (although admittedly not uniformly distributed across the population). Why will AI be different?
Because any job it creates it can automate as well, for example a lot of people here think that understanding how AI models operate internally or being up to date with the latest models will save them from making their jobs obsolete, it will not, AI itself will be better than you at picking the next model to deploy, at testing the speed of reasoning that beats it's own. Anything it will need to learn it will learn it faster than you with the ability to handle much more complexity than your brain.
If you believe the hype then this isn't a transformation like, say, the power loom replacing handmade textiles. Both AI boosters and doomers are envisioning a future where almost all white collar work is obsolete. It isn't just one industry, its broad swaths labour across all segments of the economy.
Gates hinted at it, but let me expand on why this time it really is different.
If you compare the broad characteristics of the new jobs created to the old jobs displaced by technology historically, they are the same every time: they required higher-level (a) cognitive (b) technical or (c) social skills.
That is it. There is no other dimension to upskill along.
And LLMs are good at all three, probably better than most people already by many metrics. (Yes even social; their infinite patience is the ultimate advantage, and while sycophancy is harmful fixing it is easy.)
Plus AI is improving extremely rapidly. Which means it is probably advancing faster than most people can upskill.
An increasingly accepted premise is that AI can displace junior employees but will need senior employees to steer it. Consider the ratio of junior to senior employees, and how long it takes for the former to grow into the latter. That is the volume of displacement and timeframe to upskill we're looking at, made worse by the fact that if juniors are not hired they likely won't get a chance to upskill at all.
Never in history have we had a technology that was so versatile and rapidly advancing that it could displace a large portion of existing jobs, as well as many new jobs that would be created.
Do you think we could have handled Industrial Revolution with more care by offering a soft landing for those affected? I don’t think he’s disagreeing that this technology can be used for net good.
> Why will AI be different?
Because the pioneers haven't just been saying, but are screaming the quiet part out loud.
I'm interested how to mitigate risk without over-regulating & stifling innovation from exactly the people who are most thoughtful about the risk (which is who we should want innovating & leading).
Even though this article is new, I'm not sure it has materially new ideas vs what some other labs have been claiming for years.
Enforcing safeguards that apply globally to good and bad actors alike so far as proved quite difficult - compute is essentially the only lever, and that's tenuous at best.
Unlike nuclear arms (where functionally there's a limit at MAD), so far we believe that with enough compute, energy, and algorithms, intelligence will continue to scale (and not only scale - but compound)
Nearly every post about AI turns into a discussion of politics and every post about politics becomes a discussion of AI.
It always is a matter of choice. Rich people choose wisely for the fast buck, and poorly for the suckers they bend, fold, spindle and mutilate.
I get the sense of "Every Accusation is a confession"
> During my entire life I’ve only had two jobs. In the first one, I played a role in developing software to empower people through my work at Microsoft.
Some of us remember the story/urban legend of Bill Gates "developing" BASIC by retrieving a printout of source code from a dumpster, a process infinitely more efficient than an LLM.
NOTE. "Played a role in developing", not "Played a role BY developing"
The former could be said by the coffee maker. Or dumpster diver.
Bill is great to find solutions for his problems
I think his idea of taxing AI tokens would do more harm than good. It would only make AI more expensive, which would create the exact inequality effect that he is trying to prevent.
Yeah. If he really wants (but really, not really) to prevent inequality then LLM/AI should be free, open sourced and available to anyone.
> I doubt I would have put in the same work if I had had an AI companion back then. They talk to you in ways you’re already comfortable with. They don’t push you outside your comfort zone. They are always available and never get mad at you. This gives them the potential to become highly addictive and to rob us of the lessons we learn from connecting with other people.
I've been waiting for a long, long time for us to figure out how AI makes us more social, not less. Outside of memes of course.
Anecdotally, I find AIs, and the doom and gloom they will cause, are great water cooler conversation topics that engages most of the team. However, ever since the advent of LLMs developers have stopped speaking of programming languages and software technologies almost entirely. The number of conversations on manual crafts, artistic endeavors and entrepreneurship has gone up.
> 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.
Interesting read, good to see some nuance in this space for once: not evil, can be used for evil, not good, can be used for good, but requires a lot of safeguards. What really got me is the concept of "Human Reserved" - man that is a depressing thought...
He should be talking to Satya, not spitting in the wind. He used to run MS, he still has sway.
I'm pretty sure he is. If you look at all the Big Tech CEOs, Satya is the only one who's been saying mostly human-aligned things.
We don't even need to assume this is out of the goodness of their hearts. Consider that Microsoft is one of the few Big Tech businesses whose business model is primarily making its enterprise customers more productive. If agents replace all knowledge work, half of Microsoft's business disappears.
In that sense Microsoft is more aligned with us humans than the other AI companies.
The choices are for the present but not for a future we dont know yet.
> I believe we should tax AI tokens and robots. Right now, if you’re an employer and you hire someone, you pay payroll taxes on their earnings. But if you buy a robot, you can usually write it off right away as a business expense. The tax system nudges you toward replacing people with machines.
Taxing AI tokens and Robots is not going to work. We can’t even define a robot, tokens are also too abstract and there is endless ways of gaming it, and let’s not forget cross border operations.
Tax profits, it was always the most equitable option.
I do think taxing profits is still insufficient, because unless the tax rate is close to 100% (lol) the "k-shaped" economy is still reinforced, but just slowed slightly. In combination with a wealth/holdings tax, maybe.
Personally I think the idea of taxing robots/tokens directly is too narrow an idea.
It is because personal income tax should have never existed. Nor should have taxes on primary residence. These are the most regressive taxes possible, it is basically serfdom.
Can you explain this? I think consumption taxes are the most regressive taxes possible because they are "flat" and thus affect lower-income people harder.
Marginal income taxes are regressive now in the sense that folks with more wealth have far more resources to avoid paying them, but otherwise the reasoning seems less regressive than a consumption tax (e.g. VAT)
It's undesirable by the companies, but it's not impossible. There's this constant talk about "Making American Great Again (Again)", but not much talk about the economic conditions that made America Great. Like high corporate tax.
That's half the battle. The other half is closing all the loopholes and making stuff that used to be illegal, illegal again (e.g. stock buybacks).
Tax production as a whole, because profits get hidden in whatever is this week's tax haven. Taxing production has the added benefit of being able to drop every other tax tangentially related to revenue.
Is this Bill's? Because it looks like Dario's essay!
Everything looks the same when AI is doing the work
This is a fundamentally wrong approach.
Let AI replace jobs. Start taxing companies that use AI proportionally to their usage, and then distribute the proceedings to the people.
Did you read the article?
Its quite interesting that in a matter of few minutes, this went down from 2 to rank 21 on HN front page.
I believe there's a controversy filter that down ranks items if the ratio of comments to item upvotes is too high.
I saw that too. It wasn’t ratio’d like the other guy said, it was only ~90 comments.
The manually moved it down.
HN mods always silence even the slightest thing against their official narrative.
Since YC/HN are themselves pedos and connected to Epstein they had no choice but to squash it
They probably thought the HN audience would be too dumb or passive to do anything about it, helping them slowly get away with being international sec trafficking pedophiles.
And so far they are getting away with it. JPM Chase bank settled with victims for millions of dollars, other victims mysteriously died.
Thiel and tech and academia and Israel got prolific pedo Trump as the figurehead so they can try to shift blame to his “base” of racists Americans etc. but we all know it’s the wealthy corporate elite doing this stuff.
HN is complicit. They are basically a mouthpiece.
HN mods actively help wealthy pedophiles get away with their crimes
The dude was pals with Epstein and likely had sex with a women that was likely a sex slave, good riddance. Anyone that continues listening to Bill Gates after his Epstein connections, and purposely causing tens of thousands of Indians to die because of his stupid ideas around profiting off a vaccine, should be promptly osctracized.
Another discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49451313
To be blunt I don’t know that the world really cares what Bill Gates thinks anymore.
He spent a decade trying to make a toilet for Africa and ended up with one costing only 100000 dollars. What a bright man, I would listen to him.
Link? Never heard of this.
https://eu.registerguard.com/story/business/2018/11/11/in-ch...
> Gates acknowledged that some reinvented toilets, in small volumes, could cost as much as $10,000, but added, “That will pretty quickly come down.”
I added an extra zero, sorry, I read it 8 years ago. But still doesn't really matter, even the optimistic 500 USD is laughable.
He couldnt even source some clean prostitutes, got gonorheea and passed it to his wife (facepalm)
“We need a plan to ensure that the good outweighs the bad.”
How apt… for Bill Gates to state this.
poor Bill Gates is one of the richest men on earth but can't get a good ratio on Hacker News
Sigh. Another billionaire whose wealth is being mistaken for authority by the common folk. Worse still, an actual oracle.
I see an old (and successful) pirate king trying to wear yet another hat today.
That is a very indirect way to say market crash.
Better than saying bubble, can't say bubble, that implies that people will lose their money because of lies rather than because the market just crashed.
AI can make everyone miserable. Solution? Partner with all major AI companies using foundation (tax free btw) money. It's like saying Hitler is bad, let's split Europe in half so we can profit as well... ah well, that actually happened.
This essay kind of rubs me the wrong way. Starting from the very beginning.
During my entire life I’ve only had two jobs. In the first one, I played a role in developing software to empower people through my work at Microsoft.
Yikes. We all know powerful people have an incentive to whitewash their pasts but there is whitewashing and then there is whatever that is.
I have to mention this because we can't forget that Microsoft's and Bill Gates's history regarding fear uncertainty doubt as well as embrace extend extinguish. "Forgive but don't forget" as the old saying goes.
During the 2000's Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer described the GPL as akin to a virus. He begged European governements not to adopt open source software and to adopt Microsoft software instead.
Indeed throughout its history Microsoft, along with Gates and Balmer, have consistently fought against implementation of open standards and open source software. They have consistently pushed towards their own proprietary solutions.
Given all of this, along with the laughable whitewashing attempt even at the very beginning of his essay, I feel like what Bill Gates has written here is consistent with his previous behavior in regards to all of this. I suspect all this talk of regulation is an attempt to squash open source AI and open weights AI and to ensure Big Tech such as Microsoft continues to be in control of the future of tech and the future of AI.
Even his talk of taxing AI tokens and robots would ultimately benefit Microsoft and other Big tech companies and hurt open source.
I will repeat what I said earlier. In life it is important to "forgive but never forget." Many have forgiven Bill Gates for all he did in the 90's. Many haven't. But nobody should forget and everyone should take his words with a grain of salt.
> Even his talk of taxing AI tokens and robots would ultimately benefit Microsoft and other Big tech companies and hurt open source.
I'm curious, how? He proposes taxing bots in lieu of taxing humans, because they will be doing most of the work... but we already tax humans, and it hasn't hurt open source.
Because it will make it more expensive for people or groups of people to run open source models to do work on their own hardware. You would be taxing people or groups of people to run a program on the computers they own. This is contrary to the principles of the free and open source software movements.
This is what he says:
> I believe we should tax AI tokens and robots. Right now, if you’re an employer and you hire someone, you pay payroll taxes on their earnings. But if you buy a robot, you can usually write it off right away as a business expense. The tax system nudges you toward replacing people with machines.
A tax would slow the rush away from human labor a little and raise money for retraining and a stronger safety net. It would need to be targeted so it does not slow down the purely beneficial uses of AI, like making medicine and education cheaper.
Note the part about it being targeted. Clearly this is in the context of moderating the displacement of human labor by employers rather than a flat "TAX ALL THE TOKENS!" approach.
Is there an essay from a tech leader than HASN’T rubbed anyone the wrong way, in some time? Eric Schmidt, Dario Amodei, Palmer Luckey, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, etc etc they all seem one or the other of out of touch or unlikable or unable to connect with rapport to the general public these days
...and this is only his professional life ;)
I heard he likes to work with professionals in his private life too.
It’s a good thoughtful piece. If I may suggest, the main problem and I mean the actual main problem are those people who underestimate the capabilities of AI. The ones who think it hallucinates all the time, unreliable and mostly useless.
The average person thinks this technology is overhyped (like Emily Bender) so how would one even begin to have a conversation with them on the risks?
This is my experience too. Many people in my offline, non-techy life seem to get almost upset when I argue that models are good at many things (and getting better fast).
And I kind of get it! If your primary exposure to AI is Google search summaries (from their cheapest models) and shitty AI graphic design, it makes sense to think it's vastly overhyped.
I like how Tyler Cowen puts it: "This is the worst they will ever be".
And some people are still stuck on what AI was capable of when GPT-3.5 was SOTA. They don't realize how much they've improved in ~4 years. Even if the rate of improvement slows down, AI will be tremendously more capable in another ~4 years.
Unfortunately it’s not just non technical people, it’s also technical people from my experience. They are usually too caught up in “how it always works” so they can’t think outside of it.
I also think the "main problem" is people that annoy me on the internet
It is overhyped.
It's powerful, and very useful in specific situations.
It's not the second coming of jesus christ.
Agreed.
It can code and we saw it eat(ing) our former occupation, but that was always a defined finite space with defined rules and to be frank, not as hard as us practitioners liked to believe. So I don't think we can extrapolate this progress out to every other human endeavor in the near term at least.
More automation is coming though most likely.
Can you offer you argument you would provide to those people? I use the top SOTA models for software development and it is certainly an impressive and useful function. The quality of the code is however fairly poor, explicit architectural guardrails are frequently circumvented and the "human readable" outputs are very reminiscent of gish-gallop debate strategies.
Software development, as opposed to many many other fields also offers nearly unlimited training data and is one of the few areas with modifiable inputs and testable outputs.
> the actual main problem are those people who underestimate the capabilities of AI
Nope. The actual main problem are those people who totally ignore the real costs of AI.
Remind me, when was the last time when billions and trillions of dollars were spent on workers (education, healthcare, insurance, etc. all together)?
You try to compare the capabilities without comparing the costs. That won't do.
What if there were some mistake and the progression went wrong, and something like an amoeba were given power like a human's?
—AKIRA, 1988
Gates was a close friend and blackmail victim of Epstein. I can't separate his business, technical and philanthropic accomplishments from that fact. Sure, he may have funded charitable campaigns to vaccinate against polio in Afghanistan. But, he was also getting rub-downs from underage children.
He was not a victim he was basically the fucking co-founder
That claim requires some evidence that I, personally, have not yet seen.
Nelly talk, city listen
Morpheus; You think that's a genuinely concerned billionaire you are listening to?
I'm going to make an anti-capitalist argument in order to make a pro-capitalist argument.
The anti-capitalist argument is that the wealthiest people in the world are not dramatically more intelligent than the average person. Bill Gates is obviously very intelligent and capable, but his IQ does not scale with his wealth. He built the right company at the right time, and Microsoft ended up sitting at the center of massive network effects. Relatively modest advantages in judgment, skill, and industriousness can end up producing enormous differences in wealth due to the compounding effects of success.
That's just how scalable markets work. So Gates's success, while evidence that he was very effective at building Microsoft, is not evidence that he is vastly more knowledgeable than everybody else about economics or the future of technology.
And the same applies to Bezos, Musk, and every other extremely successful founder.
Their arguments should be judged on their merits and not treated as infallible insights from people with superhuman intelligence.
Now, that is not to say that I want their wealth to be capped or politically reallocated. The case for private property depends on the argument that decentralized ownership and investment and capital risking is better than politicians allocating a pool of resources to gain clout or win over popular opinion. A wealth cap or high taxes on the wealthy would transfer control over resources from private owners to political institutions. So what we would be doing is replacing imperfect private allocation with imperfect public allocation, where the people allocating the capital have limited information, political incentives, and the ability to impose costs on others without their consent. So I reject blind deference to billionaires, but I do not want politicians to control billionaires' capital.
Anyway, let me address Gates's argument about AI:
Gates argues that AI will disrupt the economy faster than previous technologies, and therefore stronger government coordination is needed to address the rapidity of the speed of that transition, to cushion people against the speed of that transition. But what his analysis underweights is how quickly AI can help people adapt to the very transformation that AI brings about.
For example, a worker taking on a new position now has access to a tutor and an analyst and a business advisor all wrapped up in one, who can provide world-class assistance 24/7 at the cost of a few cents in electricity. And someone who wants to start a business can employ dozens of AI agents at a cost of a few hundred dollars to test out the idea and build out a prototype within a few days. So what this means is that we cannot hold the human adaptive capacity constant while trying to determine the impact of AI's disruptive capacity.
The second problem with Gates's argument is that he only counts the income that people might lose when AI replaces jobs, but he doesn't count the fall in prices that the same AI will bring about. The fall in prices is effectively an increase in purchasing power. That increase in purchasing power, in economic terms, means an increase in real wages, and that's exactly why wages increased twentyfold between 1826 and 2026. Automation brought about abundance, which reduced prices and thereby increased purchasing power, i.e. increased real wages. If you look at tokens right now, their prices are going down exponentially. They've gone down about a thousandfold over the last four years, while the capability of the tokens themselves has increased. So AI is following exactly the same price trends as every other previous computer technology.
If AI becomes a major input into medicine and education and administration and logistics, that means that all these goods and services become radically cheaper, which means that paychecks can buy a lot more of them. So that's, I think, a huge hole in his analysis. It's also, I think, very simplistic to assume that the future will be based on labor. It could very well be one where the average person becomes a business owner and employs a fleet of hundreds or thousands of AI agents to work for them. That's exactly what the price trends in tokens would suggest.
The broader problem I see with his model is that it assumes disaster from a technology that creates abundance. This seems to me to be fundamentally misguided about the essential dynamics of what's actually happening.
Finally, if AI is ever capable of doing every single thing that a human can do, AI would possess very dangerous traits. And why I say that is because humans themselves are very dangerous. If we're going to create a product, we're not going to create a product that has human-like traits. But it is some of those very traits that make humans dangerous that also make them useful in the economy. We tolerate humans having these dangerous properties because that's what we were born into, and we accept that and we legally protect humans despite the fact that they're dangerous. But nobody, no company, no country will tolerate people creating AI that is dangerous. An autonomous, self-motivated and potentially rebellious digital intelligence is not only not a useful business tool, it's also not a tolerable risk. And if that is ever created, we will have much bigger things to worry about than unemployment and no solution to the problems that this would create would be found in greater taxation.
And as long as that is not created, then there will be abilities or skills that humans uniquely possess that will become the limiting factor in the economy. In other words, all other processes will scale exponentially through mass production of GPUs until all the available scarce human skills are employed in managing those GPUs. That follows the basic pattern that has preceded us over the last 200 years, and there's no reason to assume that pattern will not hold.
Great food for thought. Thank you.
Lemme in now, Lemme in now, Bill Gates, Donald Trump Lemme in now we f-ckin lesbian twins now
I honestly can't stand reading a single line more of Bill Gates pontificating, I really can't.
Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
Can Bill Gates even code anymore? I bet not.
Bro is a useless sex offender, who cares what he thinks about anything.
The weirdest part is HN hiding the comments lmao
Bill Gates? The Epstein guy?
I thought he was the COVID guy?
More fearmongering overhyping the technology. The investment bubble MUST continue!
Bill vibe-coded this article text.
> With its ability to synthesize knowledge from every scientific field, AI can accelerate innovation in the world’s toughest technical challenges: providing reliable clean energy for everyone, combating climate change, growing enough food, eradicating diseases, and more
I really think this is overstated. So far everything is pointing towards AI accelerating climate change. Especially if we'll automate everything with physical robots.
> I really think this is overstated. So far everything is pointing towards AI accelerating climate change.
Ok but if we sprint the Delorean towards the brick wall as fast as possible we might be able to hit 88mph just in time to save ourselves
I'm kind of surprised, but not surprised, by Gates' comments here. Until very recently, apparently, he was a pretty strong techno optimist, now toeing the line of a doomer. The verbiage is substantially in line with the fear-based marketing out of anthropic. I wonder what motive is underneath all of this. Trying to influence policy? But he has so many resources, it transcends policy.