at least he mentions the biggest caveat: <<The government needs to respond accordingly. "If public policy doesn't adapt accordingly, most people will end up worse off than they are today," Altman said.>> But I find his point about the next 100 years being the ones we make the most progress in more discussion-worthy. I'd find it hard to top the 20th century but then again, who knows what the future brings? (except climate change)
Or it will create enough wealth to pay the wealthiest 1% $1.3M a year, which seems the more likely outcome given that most AI infrastructure will be owned by a small fraction of the population.
FTA: "However, if the government collects and redistributes the wealth that AI will generate, AI’s exponential productivity gains could 'make the society of the future much less divisive and enable everyone to participate in its gains,' Altman says."
There is nothing special about AI wealth---comparable technologically-assisted gains have dramatically increased the income of the wealthy over the past few decades, and government has so far shown little interest in taxing and redistributing those gains. It's hard to see why the future would be different, absent some dramatic social shift.
I disagree that distributing wealth would reduce division and strife. It would only increase it.
Which is not to say that it's a bad idea -- there are many positive benefits to having social insurance, for example it encourages risk taking and entrepreneurship if you know that failing wont cost you your ability to get healthcare. Losing a job stops being an existential tragedy, which means it can be easier to lay people off.
But one thing it does not do, is reduce division, which increases with equality and decreases with inequality.
Equality is an unstable equilibrium in which everyone jockeys for power as the society is torn apart by constant strife.
This is why the upheavals of the late 60s occurred after rapid reductions in inequality in the 40s and 50s.
Make one small group the boss, make it clear no one ever stands any chance of challenging them, and suddenly you have stability. Make everyone equal, or within a stone's throw of the boss, and you see a lot of stones being thrown.
What actually seems to happen is people, with all the extra free time, and lack of conflict, seem to seek out conflict and elevate minor disagreements, catastrophizing everything.
That is, people become Karens on a bunch of subjects which barely matter to the quality of life for most people.
What actually seems to happen is people, with all the extra free time, and lack of conflict...
Whether true or not, that argument pertains to wealth, not equality. Everyone could be poor, with very little free time and lots of ordinary daily struggles to occupy them. Your argument seems more like a caution about the idle rich.
What leads you to believe that equality creates more division? The single example of strife in the US in the 1960s seems unpersuasive, given that the divisions then revolved largely around the draft and civil rights, both issues heavily rooted in inequality.
> History would seem to contradict you---periods of high wealth inequality do in fact seem to be historically correlated with division and strife
No, this study is dominated by wars between states as well as death rates due to crime, which is primarily a function of the efficiency of the healthcare system to provide emergency services. It is basically a rehash of the observations of Stephen Pinker that death rates have been falling over time, and thus is a measure of technological progress. One can argue that as the arrow of time moves forward, technological progress has been increasing overall and inequality has been decreasing -- historically most people had a subsistence level of income and the middle class is a relatively modern innovation -- so it's easy to make a correlation between the two which is not particularly meaningful as a proxy for social stability or as a causative argument.
It seems overly convenient to gerrymander the definition of strife so that it excludes anything that might contradict your thesis.
One can argue that as the arrow of time moves forward, technological progress has been increasing overall and inequality has been decreasing...
One could argue this, but again, the facts don't support the proposition. While it may be true that average and even median wealth has increased, the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest has never been greater---the poorest people in the world live much as their ancestors did centuries ago, while the richest have massively increased their wealth even in the last couple of decades. Technology indeed raises all boats, but it raises them proportionately to their wealth, and so is highly non-linear, and certainly not equalizing.
> It seems overly convenient to gerrymander the definition of strife so that it excludes anything that might contradict your thesis.
No, I would say it's convenient to set up a strawman. I wasn't talking about overall death rates changing, of course they change with time, I was talking about social cohesion.
>One could argue this, but again, the facts don't support the proposition. While it may be true that average and even median wealth has increased, the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest has never been greater-
One could argue this, but the facts don't support the proposition. We've gone from a situation in which most people had a subsistence lifestyle -- barely above starvation and at the minimum levels of income necessary to avoid dying -- to one in which there is a middle class. You'd have to have a very peculiar definition of inequality to say that it has gone up. It certainly hasn't been decreasing monotonically, but it has gone down over secular timeframes. Perhaps for the first time in history, the majority of the world's population are no longer classified as "poor", and large numbers contain surplus wealth and earn surplus income. More importantly, there is much more equality in terms of political power and ability to influence change, which is what leads to chronic political violence and the age of social revolution, which basically started with Rousseau and has led to a flood of political violence, even if overall deathrates are lower due to things like penicillin and emergency services. That political violence started when the power of the monarchy weakened and was challenged by a rising middle class. Those early revolutionaries, from Robespierre on, were members of the middle class, eager to topple the group ahead of them. In previous eras, there would be no middle class and so no revolution. Also the power of the gun and the printing press shifted more power downward, thus creating the chaos that allows revolutionary movements like the Khmer Rouge, or communists, or Latin American revolutionaries to launch revolts. None of that would have been possible if we had previous levels of inequality and there was no middle class. The more closer in power people are, the more viable it is for one group to overthrow another, and the more revolutions follow. Then history is rewritten by the victors that it was the oppressed rising up due to terrible conditions, rather than the no. 2 knocking off no. 1. But we don't need to be so naive about history. It is the people at the bottom who are first to be murdered by the revolutionaries, whether the genocide of peasants in the Vendee during the French revolution, or the genocide of Ukrainain farmers in the Soviet Revolution, or the murder of 40 million Chinese peasant farmers right after Mao's revolution, or the murder of farmers by the Khmer Rouge. We know it is no. 2 knocking off no. 1, with the poor suffering and not being any better off after no. 2 and no 1. switch places. Then, they switch again. Revolutions are enabled by too much equality between the middle and upper classes.
You'd have to have a very peculiar definition of inequality to say that it has gone up.
Measuring inequality by the ratio of the richest to the poorest doesn't seem like such a peculiar metric.
More importantly, there is much more equality in terms of political power and ability to influence change...
Is there? Less than 1% of the world's population holds more wealth than the bottom 50%. With that wealth comes not only economic power, but political power.
You seem very fixated on the idea that the existence of a middle class automatically means there is equality. But if that "middle class" steadily falls behind the wealthy, how long before it becomes just another tier of the lower class? https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/06/the-america...
Your argument seems to be that oppression by a small elite is the only possible form of social order, a rather pessimistic and dystopian view. In that case, I guess we can look forward to a long period of peace, because inequality is rising rapidly around the world. The upper class is leaving the middle class in the dust.
But perhaps you're wrong. Maybe revolutions happen when the economic distance between the upper class and the middle class threatens to become too great, when the middle begins to feel insecure.
13 comments
[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 42.0 ms ] threadFTA: "However, if the government collects and redistributes the wealth that AI will generate, AI’s exponential productivity gains could 'make the society of the future much less divisive and enable everyone to participate in its gains,' Altman says."
There is nothing special about AI wealth---comparable technologically-assisted gains have dramatically increased the income of the wealthy over the past few decades, and government has so far shown little interest in taxing and redistributing those gains. It's hard to see why the future would be different, absent some dramatic social shift.
Which is not to say that it's a bad idea -- there are many positive benefits to having social insurance, for example it encourages risk taking and entrepreneurship if you know that failing wont cost you your ability to get healthcare. Losing a job stops being an existential tragedy, which means it can be easier to lay people off.
But one thing it does not do, is reduce division, which increases with equality and decreases with inequality.
Equality is an unstable equilibrium in which everyone jockeys for power as the society is torn apart by constant strife.
This is why the upheavals of the late 60s occurred after rapid reductions in inequality in the 40s and 50s.
Make one small group the boss, make it clear no one ever stands any chance of challenging them, and suddenly you have stability. Make everyone equal, or within a stone's throw of the boss, and you see a lot of stones being thrown.
That is, people become Karens on a bunch of subjects which barely matter to the quality of life for most people.
Whether true or not, that argument pertains to wealth, not equality. Everyone could be poor, with very little free time and lots of ordinary daily struggles to occupy them. Your argument seems more like a caution about the idle rich.
History would seem to contradict you---periods of high wealth inequality do in fact seem to be historically correlated with division and strife. See, eg, https://news.stanford.edu/2017/01/24/stanford-historian-unco.... Or for a more short term analysis, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228173822_Income_In....
What leads you to believe that equality creates more division? The single example of strife in the US in the 1960s seems unpersuasive, given that the divisions then revolved largely around the draft and civil rights, both issues heavily rooted in inequality.
No, this study is dominated by wars between states as well as death rates due to crime, which is primarily a function of the efficiency of the healthcare system to provide emergency services. It is basically a rehash of the observations of Stephen Pinker that death rates have been falling over time, and thus is a measure of technological progress. One can argue that as the arrow of time moves forward, technological progress has been increasing overall and inequality has been decreasing -- historically most people had a subsistence level of income and the middle class is a relatively modern innovation -- so it's easy to make a correlation between the two which is not particularly meaningful as a proxy for social stability or as a causative argument.
One can argue that as the arrow of time moves forward, technological progress has been increasing overall and inequality has been decreasing...
One could argue this, but again, the facts don't support the proposition. While it may be true that average and even median wealth has increased, the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest has never been greater---the poorest people in the world live much as their ancestors did centuries ago, while the richest have massively increased their wealth even in the last couple of decades. Technology indeed raises all boats, but it raises them proportionately to their wealth, and so is highly non-linear, and certainly not equalizing.
No, I would say it's convenient to set up a strawman. I wasn't talking about overall death rates changing, of course they change with time, I was talking about social cohesion.
>One could argue this, but again, the facts don't support the proposition. While it may be true that average and even median wealth has increased, the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest has never been greater-
One could argue this, but the facts don't support the proposition. We've gone from a situation in which most people had a subsistence lifestyle -- barely above starvation and at the minimum levels of income necessary to avoid dying -- to one in which there is a middle class. You'd have to have a very peculiar definition of inequality to say that it has gone up. It certainly hasn't been decreasing monotonically, but it has gone down over secular timeframes. Perhaps for the first time in history, the majority of the world's population are no longer classified as "poor", and large numbers contain surplus wealth and earn surplus income. More importantly, there is much more equality in terms of political power and ability to influence change, which is what leads to chronic political violence and the age of social revolution, which basically started with Rousseau and has led to a flood of political violence, even if overall deathrates are lower due to things like penicillin and emergency services. That political violence started when the power of the monarchy weakened and was challenged by a rising middle class. Those early revolutionaries, from Robespierre on, were members of the middle class, eager to topple the group ahead of them. In previous eras, there would be no middle class and so no revolution. Also the power of the gun and the printing press shifted more power downward, thus creating the chaos that allows revolutionary movements like the Khmer Rouge, or communists, or Latin American revolutionaries to launch revolts. None of that would have been possible if we had previous levels of inequality and there was no middle class. The more closer in power people are, the more viable it is for one group to overthrow another, and the more revolutions follow. Then history is rewritten by the victors that it was the oppressed rising up due to terrible conditions, rather than the no. 2 knocking off no. 1. But we don't need to be so naive about history. It is the people at the bottom who are first to be murdered by the revolutionaries, whether the genocide of peasants in the Vendee during the French revolution, or the genocide of Ukrainain farmers in the Soviet Revolution, or the murder of 40 million Chinese peasant farmers right after Mao's revolution, or the murder of farmers by the Khmer Rouge. We know it is no. 2 knocking off no. 1, with the poor suffering and not being any better off after no. 2 and no 1. switch places. Then, they switch again. Revolutions are enabled by too much equality between the middle and upper classes.
War isn't evidence of a lack of social cohesion?
You'd have to have a very peculiar definition of inequality to say that it has gone up.
Measuring inequality by the ratio of the richest to the poorest doesn't seem like such a peculiar metric.
More importantly, there is much more equality in terms of political power and ability to influence change...
Is there? Less than 1% of the world's population holds more wealth than the bottom 50%. With that wealth comes not only economic power, but political power.
You seem very fixated on the idea that the existence of a middle class automatically means there is equality. But if that "middle class" steadily falls behind the wealthy, how long before it becomes just another tier of the lower class? https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/06/the-america...
Your argument seems to be that oppression by a small elite is the only possible form of social order, a rather pessimistic and dystopian view. In that case, I guess we can look forward to a long period of peace, because inequality is rising rapidly around the world. The upper class is leaving the middle class in the dust.
But perhaps you're wrong. Maybe revolutions happen when the economic distance between the upper class and the middle class threatens to become too great, when the middle begins to feel insecure.