Has anyone noticed that the rise of AI corresponds with anti-vax rhetoric and policy changes?
Would it be wrong to question whether these two are related and the powers that be are looking toward a future where large numbers of people are obsolete?
I think they are unrelated, but yes, the tech billionaire class is openly hoping for future where large numbers of people are obsolete and without hope or future.
> 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.
> 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.
Political campaigns spend enormous amounts of money on ads to influence public opinion. That makes politicians beholden to their donors. Which subverts democracy from "the will of the people" to "the will of the wealthy". All of these are uncontroversial facts and fit the narrative GP is saying.
There is no functional difference between the statement "democracy is subverted by a grand corporate conspiracy" and "our elections are invalid", because the only way the former happens is if the latter happens. If the latter didn't happen, then you're just upset about the outcome of a legitimate election. Which is a fair thing to be in a democracy, but it does not mean that the whole system is corrupt. Insistence that any other outcome than your preferred outcome is illegitimate is dictator behavior
> They seem to be getting nervous about us voters voting.
Repubs are only putting on a show of getting nervous about certain voters voting to excite their base.
But as far as the Uniparty is concerned, they'd be much more nervous if overall voter turnout plummeted by choice, because then it becomes immediately obvious to everybody that increasing amounts of people no longer believe in the illusory democracy. It's a similiar threat to the bad optics of when a "joke" party gets a sizeable amount of votes (see: Count Binface as recently discussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49301260)
The Uniparty wants high-ish turnout (2/3 is good) because then we can all other-ify the 1/3 with the narrative that they were "too lazy" and thus to blame, while the 1/3 + 1/3 who did vote hopefully make for a close election, propping up the democratic illusion of choice and popularity.
Election denialism is about rejecting official election results.
But anyway, on the subject of the usefulness of your vote, Trump was elected on an America first platform, touting ending foreign wars and avoiding new ones.
If you elected him and his party based on that I think you're going to be pretty disappointed with the effectiveness of your vote in its ability to bring about actual outcomes that you want.
“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.”
This is not election denialism. This is almost just a fact except they also subjectively declare that we have a faux democracy (which also seems accurate to me).
Yes it is. If you insist that the result of a democratic election does not reflect the will of the people, that, and nothing else, is election denialism.
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.
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.
That last piece of data is one that frightened me when visiting a museum there. There's a lot of horrible things that may still as well be ongoing for all I know.
It's an awful country to be honest, they reject any kind of social progress. Even animal rights is too much for them to bear or hear about.
A dutch woman was denied a swiss passport during the naturalization process because she campaigned too hard for animal rights.
https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-38595807
Switzerland is the land of paranoid hillybillies, by law they need to provide each citizen with 1 square meter of bunker space, every new build has a bunker in the basement.
The Limits to Growth is (should be) an important concept in a small country with finite land resources. But the consequences, read external pressure, would have been too severe.
Regarding ignorance/swayed. I think in much of the EU and especially Germany, the currently ruling parties are completly ignorant about needed changes in the migration approach. The "public" knows this. And its the rulers which need to be nudged by e.g. direct democracy.
> 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
Switzerland already voted against immigration once before in 2014, EU punished them for it and they walked it back quickly. No larger catastrophe happened.
Works great in a very wealthy country, whose "modern" wealth was generated mostly by being the neutral and untouchable sanctuary for money laundering and illegal money making for centuries. See the 1934 Banking Act, among many things.
Why wouldn't it work if Switzerland was poorer? Are poor people dumber and make stupid decisions if you give them direct democracy, or what do you mean?
I don't see what would break if for example Netherlands copied Swiss direct democracy.
Fwiw that article isn't really the creme-de-la-creme of Wikipedia now is it? It suggests that a two-party system is typical of liberal democracies whereas in fact only a small number of democracies have systems like that, and even there many have recently turned into multi-party systems (eg France and the UK).
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Even during the Great Depression ,a period of record wealth inequality and much worse economic conditions, this did not happen.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Right but then the robots would produce wealth, but they cannot own it. So you need to redistribute the wealth. Which is, decidedly, not capitalism.
A little bit of wealth distribution exists within American capitalism, through monkey-patches like I mentioned. But full wealth distribution is a new economic system altogether.
Right I guess that was your main point. This would be a pivot away from capitalism. But it’s unclear what would be a capitalism-based proposal which addresses the issues. Has anyone seriously proposed one?
> 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?
I'm no economist but here is how I think of it. In an ideal world let's assume every worker is replaced by one AI / robot that is an exact clone of them. Then let's say there is an ideal government that taxes all the income each person's clone makes and hands it directly to them. In such an economy nothing would change, things would go on as they always have.
Now some will be unlucky and end up with a clone that makes them way less than average. So to fix this the salaries of all the clones are put into one pot and redistributed as "UBI". Given the wealth disparity, most people would end up better off than before, the high earners of the past will be a bit worse off though.
But of course we are not in a perfect world, in reality there are many inefficiencies, and no company would accept a 100% AI worker tax. However, these AIs are presumably not just our clones, but 100x better. So we are in a position of abundance not scarcity. There's enough eggs for everyone. It becomes a question of distribution and policy
Where do you live? Do all houseowners get kicked out of their homes? Do you raze all houses and build similar apartments and resettle people? If not, there will be inequalities. How does someone who is born into a shit house at a polluted street move up to a nice house in a forest? You still need full control and acceptance of inequality from all sides.
"This implies that the price of housing will become dominated by the price of the land (as opposed to the cost of building housing), so dense housing (e.g. skyscrapers) will become relatively much cheaper than sparse housing"
There's a later bit that talks about keeping earth as a reserve too.
I want to see the political climate and situation that lead up to a decision like this. Like, if you just go off basic human desires, politics, the amount of money invested in outcome D, and how previous global events are handled. Humans are reactive and not proactive, similar concept can be seen with climate change, terrorist attacks, financial crashed, etc, shit has to get really bad before a decision to change is made.
From the site, I think the most realistic outcome is Plan D and then eventually Plan C when people start freaking out. I dont see any path where you get even close to Plan A.
So either lay out how Plan A is supposed to happen in the population, or revise the answer.
There is really a more fundamental problem related to housing/real estate.
You can't arbitrage the real estate market to add to your UBI savings by living on the street.
Maybe a tougher problem is any solution here would have to collapse real estate prices nationally. You would have to undo the massive inequality that the real estate market would represent at the start of UBI. You would have to ban the owning of more than one home and have a force liquidation for the people owning second homes. Whatever is attempted would create all kinds of loopholes that would just be gamed unless now we are talking about all apartment buildings being government ran.
Any time UBI comes up the economic discussion is just so hopelessly naive. It isn't even at the level of homo economicus stupidity. It is the level of a teenager who has read that back of Capital at Barnes and Noble then thought about solutions after stopping at the dispensary.
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.
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.
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 have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inert, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it." -- Morpheus (The Matrix)
UBI isn't about not being able to work if you want to. It's about being free from being a wage slave.
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.
9 to 5 isn't slaving. Even in a jungle, you'd be scavenging and hunting all day. See the birds? They're constantly busy. You want to sit around all day? You'd be miserable. A strange perspective to argue that because past generations worked, we should be able to stop working?
But this quote from Bill is a wrong perspective I think. "reduce job losses" is short term reactive thinking. What you need is adapt to what skillsets the modern world needs. If we have a bunch of leatherworkers, you don't "reduce job losses", you get people to understand the new world and pick up the relevant skills. A job isn't a thing, it's an activity (this reads like an AI wrote it, but it's all hand-written). People can do any job and pick up new ones quickly in the right environment.
Just for the context UBI kind of already exists in some countries but in a different form. If you are in Ireland and do not work you get the benefits provided you have somewhere to live and can pick them up in the post office (~200eur/week). The problem is that it solves only part of the issue because people have to live somewhere, and sure the gov will even contribute towards it (they do already) but somehow not enough is being built. The benefit is basically not enough to get the mortgage, nor is there housing available.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Because any job it creates it can automate as well, for example a lot of people here think that understanding how they operate or being up to date with the lastest models will save them from becoming 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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
This essay kind of rubs me the wrong way. Starting from the very beginning.
uring 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.
Is there an essay from a tech leader than HASNT 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
> 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.
> 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.
That said
> 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.
> 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!
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.”
> 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.
Most teachers participate in PD days (off-days for students) where stuff like this is covered. There are conferences also but getting approval to go can be tough. (My wife is a teacher.)
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.
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)
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.
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.
Without an explicit definition of what "paycheck to paycheck" actually means, the survey data can't be taken as accurate. I have no problem believing that for a large portion of the population (perhaps over half) a missed paycheck would be a big problem, but I absolutely do not believe that 60% are a missed paycheck away from homelessness, which is what you originally claimed.
According to some recent data[0], 22% of households earning above $250k report themselves as living paycheck to paycheck. That alone tells me that the term can have very different meanings for different people. Perhaps those high earners mean that after all the taxes, retirement and ESPP deductions are taken out of their paycheck, what's left over is just enough to pay for their lifestyle. That's not what I would call paycheck-to-paycheck. And whatever the definition, I can assure you that 22% of the households in that income bracket are not a paycheck away from homelessness.
> Only about 37% of adults hold stocks, bonds, or funds outside of a retirement account.
That's surprisingly high. I know several people with millions in their retirement accounts and nothing outside. It is also not uncommon for people to prefer real estate investment outside of retirement accounts. Both of these groups are wealthy but both would be excluded from this statistic.
> Between 55% and 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and are one large expense or missed paycheck away from homelessness.
This "statistic" is based on definitions so misleading or unrigorous as to be meaningless. Nor is it derived from any of the data sources that are the gold standard for this type of economic research.
US Federal Reserve and BLS studies are broadly recognized authoritative sources for these types of economic statistics. Per these sources, the percentage of American households that have income that is entirely consumed by necessary expenses is 10-15%.
In the US, the median household has a ~$15,000/year surplus after all ordinary (not necessary) expenses per US statistical authorities. This surplus has been growing over time, so it isn't like it is at risk of disappearing either. This data alone obviously contradicts your assertion that most Americans are "one large expense or missed paycheck away from homelessness".
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.
Yes, can confirm. Labor is extremely cheap in India, which makes any automation too expensive. The offering would have to be drastically cheaper. Small to medium businesses don't usually buy machines/software unless absolutely necessary, because they can simply throw more people at it for a fraction of the cost.
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 coming 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.
Well the situation being portrayed is that the real movie is a luxury item while the AI movie is an inferior good (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferior_good). If the increase in wealth inequality meant that fewer people were able to afford to see the movie made by humans, then the price would go up because that's the only way to recoup the budget with fewer ticket sales. We're already seeing this to a certain extent. Movie ticket sales have been declining in the US for decades (the peak was in 2002, see https://web.archive.org/web/20260228182012/https://www.the-n...), all the box office sales records are due to a mixture of ticket price increases and inflation.
Sure, let's assume that is true now (I don't know and not on me to check really), but if half of consumption disappears, where will the earners earn from to continue that cycle? What if people stop paying their mortgages? Textbook recession where everyone is affected.
"Capital investments" are not a magic money source if the economy is tanked.
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.
Our society lost the ability to think that far ahead, we will sacrifice ourselves and our children at the altar of quarterly returns and not even blink.
I hear this argument being repeated a lot but I think it shows a lack of imagination to stay stuck on the idea that modern capitalism has to continue (at least for the super-rich). Capitalism is just a means to an end, that is to generate wealth. The wealthy's goal is abundance for themselves, and screw the rest.
The only reason they tolerate the proletariat is the need for labor to handle tasks that still require human beings. That’s what the modern capitalist machine does: it harvests labor. If they manage to eliminate the need for intellectual labor via AI and automate enough physical work using tech like Boston Dynamics and John Deeres, whoever's still around become trash. The reliance on this system of money flowing back and forth ends, because the only reason to maintain it is having people generate wealth for them. Once they can eliminate that "cost," they’ll do it without blinking.
We’re already seeing jobs being wiped out by the tens of thousands with the arrival of AI, and billionaires hoarding capital far beyond what they could ever consume, driven simply by the pleasure of having more than the next guy. We’ve also seen how some are depraved enough to treat human beings as mere resources for their own gratification. Why would them keep people around they don't need anymore? People are failable, expensive to keep and unreliable. If all can be automated, it will be. Expecting wealth distribution from them is also a fantasy. If they cared they would do it now, but the talk is always "when we reach certain goal the riches will tricke down, just wait."
The argument that "there won't be anyone left to buy products and keep capitalism running" might hold true during a transition phase, but that would just be like ripping off a Band-Aid. None of them super-rich will care about the money flow once this structure becomes obsolete and can be replaced by another system that’s more efficient and easier to control.
This take is the correct one. You don’t need to go far to see what will happen. Just visit any former American coal town, or one that used to do manufacturing. They are desolate waste dumps. The people there are completely cut off from the economy. That’s what’s going to happen, only on a much greater scale. Say goodbye to all those office parks, small and medium sized companies. The future will be most of the country looking like a desolate wasteland, with a few very ultra rich areas. The process of consolidation will continue until there are only a few places left that actually participate in the economy.
> None of them super-rich will care about the money flow
I think they do care. If someone like Mamdani becomes U.S president in 10 years - when significant segments of the population are unemployed and/or radicalized, the U.S can actually become real socialist - like REAL socialist. That means business owners lose parts or all of their business. What if Musk and Zuckerberg won't like it and fight? They're not really gonna have an army of robots, nothing large enough to take over a country. The state controls the monopoly over violence. The state controls the ability to print dollars to build a bigger army. Legislation will make it impossible for a private citizen to accumulate a private army. Guardrails will be put in place. Governments are not that stupid.
I think the super rich have an incentive to see the current system keep ticking and not turn into a shit show, they will have no way to control what happens if it turns into a shit show.
I don't know, the US already looks like an oligarchy to me, with billionaires pulling some strings. I'm slightly surprised Mamdani won in NY, but not shocked since urban centers usually lean more left. A president though? I don't see it.
People can vote if they want, but the far right (which is heavily influenced by the super-rich) is already working to erode the legitimacy of the voting system. And people will have a hard time revolting against the state because the state is far more capable now than it was in the past.
Trump implies every now and then that he intends to stay in power. Even if he doesn't follow up on these threats I don't think we can't expect democracy to keep order in place, it seems unlikely to me. When capitalism fails, democracy is the first casualty.
We have been automating away jobs pretty frantically since the Industrial Revolution started ~250 years ago.
It has always resulted in no long term effect on unemployment and higher worker wages.
If you don't understand why that counterintuitive thing has consistently happened for centuries, you probably shouldn't speculate on the current automation wave.
If you can't see that AI is not merely "automation" but rather fundamentally aims to usurp human labor, you probably shouldn't be saying who should or shouldn't be speculating.
The whole economy is allowed to exists to “feed” the rich. Money doesn’t matter in this scenario.
So as an owner of 1 million robots, in a world where there are 1000 rich people to serve, I can have 1000 robots per person to serve them and can do everything for them.
Why do I care about the rest of the population? Why I need them to consume my resources? I already have all the power in the world. I have food, health, security, scientist etc. I don’t need the rest of the humans for anything.
Why currently “the rich” need the rest of humans is: you need baristas, servers, builders to help save time and make life enjoyable for most humans. then you need office workers to do the research, manage wealth of a richer category. So all this chain is needed such as top 1000 people have: housing, food, health, security, etc. that’s all they care. They don’t need the money. That’s the real power.
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadWould it be wrong to question whether these two are related and the powers that be are looking toward a future where large numbers of people are obsolete?
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
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: sorry to pile on, but please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49468011 also.
Or restrictions on mail-in voting?
Repubs are only putting on a show of getting nervous about certain voters voting to excite their base.
But as far as the Uniparty is concerned, they'd be much more nervous if overall voter turnout plummeted by choice, because then it becomes immediately obvious to everybody that increasing amounts of people no longer believe in the illusory democracy. It's a similiar threat to the bad optics of when a "joke" party gets a sizeable amount of votes (see: Count Binface as recently discussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49301260)
The Uniparty wants high-ish turnout (2/3 is good) because then we can all other-ify the 1/3 with the narrative that they were "too lazy" and thus to blame, while the 1/3 + 1/3 who did vote hopefully make for a close election, propping up the democratic illusion of choice and popularity.
But anyway, on the subject of the usefulness of your vote, Trump was elected on an America first platform, touting ending foreign wars and avoiding new ones.
If you elected him and his party based on that I think you're going to be pretty disappointed with the effectiveness of your vote in its ability to bring about actual outcomes that you want.
That would be the implication of such statements as "our democracy has been subverted by the big corporate conspiracy".
This is not election denialism. This is almost just a fact except they also subjectively declare that we have a faux democracy (which also seems accurate to me).
The will of the people is the result of the corporate interests that control the democratic system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Raffensperger_ph...
https://www.aboutswitzerland.eda.admin.ch/en/direct-democrac...
FWIW I am not from Switzerland, I only live there. Direct democracy works 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.
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.
If your measure of "success" is women gaining voting rights in 1990 (!) in the last canton, then yeah, Switzerland is doing great.
Switzerland is the land of paranoid hillybillies, by law they need to provide each citizen with 1 square meter of bunker space, every new build has a bunker in the basement.
Regarding ignorance/swayed. I think in much of the EU and especially Germany, the currently ruling parties are completly ignorant about needed changes in the migration approach. The "public" knows this. And its the rulers which need to be nudged by e.g. direct democracy.
Switzerland already voted against immigration once before in 2014, EU punished them for it and they walked it back quickly. No larger catastrophe happened.
I don't see what would break if for example Netherlands copied Swiss direct democracy.
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.
This is a baby step, but it's a baby step in the right direction.
Notice that when you open your mouth, there is no roast chicken that flies in.
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?"
see also: the German far right pending a takeover, or like, half of all politics in India
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.
Even during the Great Depression ,a period of record wealth inequality and much worse economic conditions, this did not happen.
For how long?
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 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.
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.
(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.
A little bit of wealth distribution exists within American capitalism, through monkey-patches like I mentioned. But full wealth distribution is a new economic system altogether.
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?
Now some will be unlucky and end up with a clone that makes them way less than average. So to fix this the salaries of all the clones are put into one pot and redistributed as "UBI". Given the wealth disparity, most people would end up better off than before, the high earners of the past will be a bit worse off though.
But of course we are not in a perfect world, in reality there are many inefficiencies, and no company would accept a 100% AI worker tax. However, these AIs are presumably not just our clones, but 100x better. So we are in a position of abundance not scarcity. There's enough eggs for everyone. It becomes a question of distribution and policy
https://ai-2040.com/supplements/economics-of-plan-a
And yes, moved into skyscrapers:
"This implies that the price of housing will become dominated by the price of the land (as opposed to the cost of building housing), so dense housing (e.g. skyscrapers) will become relatively much cheaper than sparse housing"
There's a later bit that talks about keeping earth as a reserve too.
From the site, I think the most realistic outcome is Plan D and then eventually Plan C when people start freaking out. I dont see any path where you get even close to Plan A.
So either lay out how Plan A is supposed to happen in the population, or revise the answer.
You can't arbitrage the real estate market to add to your UBI savings by living on the street.
Maybe a tougher problem is any solution here would have to collapse real estate prices nationally. You would have to undo the massive inequality that the real estate market would represent at the start of UBI. You would have to ban the owning of more than one home and have a force liquidation for the people owning second homes. Whatever is attempted would create all kinds of loopholes that would just be gamed unless now we are talking about all apartment buildings being government ran.
Any time UBI comes up the economic discussion is just so hopelessly naive. It isn't even at the level of homo economicus stupidity. It is the level of a teenager who has read that back of Capital at Barnes and Noble then thought about solutions after stopping at the dispensary.
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.
The rest of us want to be able to eat once capitalism decides we aren't worth the cost to keep alive.
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?
UBI isn't about not being able to work if you want to. It's about being free from being a wage slave.
> 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 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.
But this quote from Bill is a wrong perspective I think. "reduce job losses" is short term reactive thinking. What you need is adapt to what skillsets the modern world needs. If we have a bunch of leatherworkers, you don't "reduce job losses", you get people to understand the new world and pick up the relevant skills. A job isn't a thing, it's an activity (this reads like an AI wrote it, but it's all hand-written). People can do any job and pick up new ones quickly in the right environment.
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?
I keep seeing his posts full of waffle and zero insight - it’s pollution for my brain
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.
It's powerful, and very useful in specific situations.
It's not the second coming of jesus christ.
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.
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.
I see an old (and successful) pirate king trying to wear yet another hat today.
Why does HN still promote him?
His own wife left him over it, I think we can assume Bill Gates is a sex trafficking international criminal.
Just the other day you guys were promoting adult male public nudity on this site.
You might as well promote Epstein himself you nasty pedo Jews.
HN = Pedo site. That’s why PG likes founders young
You might be on to something here.
Because the pioneers haven't just been saying, but are screaming the quiet part out loud.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2022/07/how-bill-gates-m...
uring 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.
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.
I really think this is overstated. So far everything is pointing towards AI accelerating climate change.
That said
> 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.
This I agree fully with.
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!
“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.
[0]: https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/app/uploads/2025/11/Cana...
Those only last as long as data centers are being built. Do you think we're going to keep building more data centers forever?
They are for now, but will a robot be able to do them in the near future? I don’t know. But there are probably people working on it.
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.
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.
(EDIT: I am not against AI at all, just trying to understand where this all leads)
-- Madame de Pompadour
Ugh, capitalism.
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."
Let's assume that the stock market 10xes in the next decade, then the median American stock owner can get out $16,000/year.
* 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.
> Between 55% and 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and are one large expense or missed paycheck away from homelessness.
Is simply untrue
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.
According to some recent data[0], 22% of households earning above $250k report themselves as living paycheck to paycheck. That alone tells me that the term can have very different meanings for different people. Perhaps those high earners mean that after all the taxes, retirement and ESPP deductions are taken out of their paycheck, what's left over is just enough to pay for their lifestyle. That's not what I would call paycheck-to-paycheck. And whatever the definition, I can assure you that 22% of the households in that income bracket are not a paycheck away from homelessness.
[0] https://www.lambdafin.com/articles/percent-of-americans-livi...
That's surprisingly high. I know several people with millions in their retirement accounts and nothing outside. It is also not uncommon for people to prefer real estate investment outside of retirement accounts. Both of these groups are wealthy but both would be excluded from this statistic.
> Between 55% and 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and are one large expense or missed paycheck away from homelessness.
This "statistic" is based on definitions so misleading or unrigorous as to be meaningless. Nor is it derived from any of the data sources that are the gold standard for this type of economic research.
US Federal Reserve and BLS studies are broadly recognized authoritative sources for these types of economic statistics. Per these sources, the percentage of American households that have income that is entirely consumed by necessary expenses is 10-15%.
In the US, the median household has a ~$15,000/year surplus after all ordinary (not necessary) expenses per US statistical authorities. This surplus has been growing over time, so it isn't like it is at risk of disappearing either. This data alone obviously contradicts your assertion that most Americans are "one large expense or missed paycheck away from homelessness".
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fully_Automated_Luxury_Communi...
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.
Yes if theres one thing we know about Chips and AI its that the price of equivalent performance literally never decreases...
"Capital investments" are not a magic money source if the economy is tanked.
The only reason they tolerate the proletariat is the need for labor to handle tasks that still require human beings. That’s what the modern capitalist machine does: it harvests labor. If they manage to eliminate the need for intellectual labor via AI and automate enough physical work using tech like Boston Dynamics and John Deeres, whoever's still around become trash. The reliance on this system of money flowing back and forth ends, because the only reason to maintain it is having people generate wealth for them. Once they can eliminate that "cost," they’ll do it without blinking.
We’re already seeing jobs being wiped out by the tens of thousands with the arrival of AI, and billionaires hoarding capital far beyond what they could ever consume, driven simply by the pleasure of having more than the next guy. We’ve also seen how some are depraved enough to treat human beings as mere resources for their own gratification. Why would them keep people around they don't need anymore? People are failable, expensive to keep and unreliable. If all can be automated, it will be. Expecting wealth distribution from them is also a fantasy. If they cared they would do it now, but the talk is always "when we reach certain goal the riches will tricke down, just wait."
The argument that "there won't be anyone left to buy products and keep capitalism running" might hold true during a transition phase, but that would just be like ripping off a Band-Aid. None of them super-rich will care about the money flow once this structure becomes obsolete and can be replaced by another system that’s more efficient and easier to control.
I think they do care. If someone like Mamdani becomes U.S president in 10 years - when significant segments of the population are unemployed and/or radicalized, the U.S can actually become real socialist - like REAL socialist. That means business owners lose parts or all of their business. What if Musk and Zuckerberg won't like it and fight? They're not really gonna have an army of robots, nothing large enough to take over a country. The state controls the monopoly over violence. The state controls the ability to print dollars to build a bigger army. Legislation will make it impossible for a private citizen to accumulate a private army. Guardrails will be put in place. Governments are not that stupid. I think the super rich have an incentive to see the current system keep ticking and not turn into a shit show, they will have no way to control what happens if it turns into a shit show.
People can vote if they want, but the far right (which is heavily influenced by the super-rich) is already working to erode the legitimacy of the voting system. And people will have a hard time revolting against the state because the state is far more capable now than it was in the past.
Trump implies every now and then that he intends to stay in power. Even if he doesn't follow up on these threats I don't think we can't expect democracy to keep order in place, it seems unlikely to me. When capitalism fails, democracy is the first casualty.
It has always resulted in no long term effect on unemployment and higher worker wages.
If you don't understand why that counterintuitive thing has consistently happened for centuries, you probably shouldn't speculate on the current automation wave.
So as an owner of 1 million robots, in a world where there are 1000 rich people to serve, I can have 1000 robots per person to serve them and can do everything for them.
Why do I care about the rest of the population? Why I need them to consume my resources? I already have all the power in the world. I have food, health, security, scientist etc. I don’t need the rest of the humans for anything.
Why currently “the rich” need the rest of humans is: you need baristas, servers, builders to help save time and make life enjoyable for most humans. then you need office workers to do the research, manage wealth of a richer category. So all this chain is needed such as top 1000 people have: housing, food, health, security, etc. that’s all they care. They don’t need the money. That’s the real power.
> 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.