My read, but the effective policies are infeasible, and the feasible policies are largely business as usual. Pretty much precisely as expected, honestly. I struggle to see how anything like this is going to be implemented without business as usual changing in ways that the current system is extremely resistant to.
I thought this was a good read with good data analysis, but at the end of the day none of this matters if the political and democratic systems collapse. If there is broad displacement by AI, I find it really difficult to believe folks will sit down and have a rational discussion about pros and cons of various policies, and it's nearly impossible to predict what will happen. I for one am fairly surprised that what I think is the valid anger among the US working class was successfully channeled into a cult around a grifter and huckster whose vast majority of policies are most detrimental to his biggest supporters.
Though AGI isn’t here yet (and in my opinion will only be marginally useful until we have physical AGI), we need to speedrun the painful bits so we can get to the other side in one generation. We need to bear the brunt of it and be the sacrificial generation.
>We need to bear the brunt of it and be the sacrificial generation.
Who is "We" here?
I'll take a guess: Gen Z, and Gen A.
Gen Z because they went through covid during college, and now this AI boom that's completely wreaked the entry level job market.
Gen A is looking increasingly grim, unfortunately. If any of you know any school teachers, you'd know how disheartening it is to try and teach someone that has a homework and entertainment machine in their pocket at all times.
Millenials (My generation) went through everything Gen Z has and more ('08), but there was at least a few years of relative normalcy growing up. I don't know what's next, but I'm not very excited about it.
No, it doesn't. The baby boomers represented an actual demographic change, that's why they're tracked by the Census Bureau. Everything since then is marketing and astrology.
You are conflating "divide people" in the sense of "turn people against each other in order to divide and conquer" with "divide people" in the sense of "define groupings so that it is possible to have conversations about differing experiences". One is discussing a goal while the other is discussing a tool. Notably that tool does not necessarily need to be used for evil and often isn't.
Just because something is arbitrary doesn't mean it is meaningless or useless. In this context named generations are useful because they allow us to discuss the experiences of people born at different times. Certainly there are alternatives like going back to dividing things up by decades ("80s kid", "child of the 90s", etc.); however, that doesn't make named generations useless.
The named generations are generally used in the context of specifically American culture or at least English speaking culture. They were never intended to say you have generational similarity to someone in a completely different culture.
There's no reason we need to and there's every reason to believe that the people and companies foisting this technology on society will accrue the benefits and dump the fallout on everyone else.
"Be the sacrifice" has been the motto since the industrial revolution and the automated loom. What's after AI, be the sacrifice so we can live in squalor out in space?
Im pretty sure most people would be fine with a 10% slower rate in technology gains if they could spend that money on having better lives now.
You should want to read both sides and generate your own view of it.
You can't ignore signals of the frontier labs and people working there. How much you trust them and how serious you take them and how much it reflects on what you experience, is your personal analysis.
I'm playing around with fable 5.1 and Astra and its really crrazy how much better they got again now in comparison to a few month, i do trust them to a certain degree, that they are already seeing again progress internally we don't have yet.
The last update killed for sure a lot of low level/avg blender/3d artists.
Funny how Hyperscalers will write endlessly about this outcome but have no plan for what happens if LLMs turn out to be a bubble and the economy they're propping up goes into recession
What were your concrete plans then for the thousands of Oracle employees who were fired in 2005, 2006, 2009, 2017, and 2022 before they got ambitious with AI? Mass layoffs at Oracle are nothing new, they've never hesitated to make huge cuts.
Considering that socialism has been an abject failure every time it's been tried at scale, I fail to see any analysis from the World's Socialist Website could be useful.
Socialism has been hugely successful. Just look at Western Europe and the Nordic countries. Socialism has only been an abject failure if you swallow the conservative talking point that "socialism" is always equivalent to Stalinism/Maoism.
If the nation was mostly co-ops, and possibly even unions if they are given full autonomy and covered the majority of the nation, fits the definition of socialism. Plus co-ops have naturally been on the rise for decades.
The idea that there must be individuals skimming the most profit possible off the top, or else all economics would collapse, is ridiculous to me. Do you think groups of people can't possibly figure out a pay scale within their business?
>The question of who controls AI can be resolved only through the establishment of social ownership and democratic control over the technology by the working class, internationally.
the article also doesn't have much concrete plans for the Oracle workers.
Embodied robots is the most significant threat imo. Capital can be taxed but for now we have few general policy frameworks for the "who gets to walk and drive on the street" question
Scares me. When the ruling class get robots servants they will have no need for even simple human interaction anymore and that will truly unleash them to do harm.
> Yet in the short term, significant transformations have often also produced lower wages for many, hollowed out regional economies, and deepened inequality.
"Short term" being rather loosely used? Most industrial regions have never recovered. Look at Gary Indiana, Detroit and surrounding towns, Toledo, other regions that were dependant on manufacturing or mining. Most have been stagnating for decades; few have found a path back to thriving economically.
It's a multifactorial problem. The decline of heavy manufacturing was one cause of economic stagnation in Detroit. But the failed progressive social policies and lack of effective law enforcement didn't help either. Businesses are hesitant to expand in areas where they can't find reliable employees and where their property isn't secure.
Those places aren’t isolated though. Many of their residents (and especially their children) have left and found opportunities in other parts of the country.
Economists tend to prefer policies that help people, not places. Gary, Indiana just doesn’t have any geographical advantages that make it competitive.
I think, if anything, the mistake was to allow people in those places to believe there would be an eventual turnaround by trying to prop up uncompetitive manufacturing industries.
Gary has a huge geographical advantage in being located on the Great Lakes. This really cuts the cost of transport for bulk materials. And it gives them a reliable source of fresh water. It could be a great site for a nuclear power plant. Regardless of how AI economic policy shakes out, we're going to need a lot more electrical power.
Not saying these places will universally recover, or even any of them will. There are plenty of secular trends pushing industry to other places. I do think decades is rightly considered short term for city history, though. At various periods in Paris, it's been laid to siege by viking hordes, had its population cut in half by Black Plaque, been occupied by Nazis, the student protests of the 1960s. Still seems to have done all right over the long run of centuries. Doesn't do much for individuals with bounded lifespans and I know that's mostly what we care about as individuals, but the world and arc of history are a lot bigger than us. None of us will ever know what becomes of Detroit in the 22nd century (unless there are 5 year-olds reading this thread), but there are plenty of reasons it may end up a booming metropolis that makes something other than automobiles and the greatest R&B ever put to wax.
Man this is really starting to feel like we're in 1999.
I was waiting for 'retail day trader' mania to get even more insane, but since no startup goes public anymore for like a decade, thats probably not going to be the main signal this time.
My pet theory is that doomer psychosis reaching mainstreet would actually be the signal for this cycle that things are getting irrational and the bubble is in danger of popping. Which seems like we're getting there.
Further checklist items:
[] Valley nerds huffing their own farts, massively overestimating the speed with which their new tech will penetrate the real economy (classic dotcom-bubble stuff)
[] Anthropic/deepmind/etc. publishing straight-faced blog posts like these mentioning absurd claims like 8-20% GDP growth and claiming the US Gov should go further into debt handing out more money since the economy is going to grow so fast, just you wait!
[] Claims of human annihilation going more viral than AI bubble claims are going viral
[] Fed signaling more interest rate rises than original anticipated (the thing that actually popped the dotcom bubble)
> Amid this uncertainty, there are at least a few reasons for hope that society can better manage a disruptive technological shock this time around. In the past, policymakers were limited by weaker and less knowledgeable institutions than we have today. Social science has made strides in understanding how technological shocks unfold and how to measure the impact of new innovations on labor markets. We also know more about the toolkit governments have to implement policies and how to scale them quickly.
We as in "humanity as a whole" might have the knowledge and the tools... but only in theory.
In practice, most Western governments are falling to the far-right / ultra-libertarian populist crowd. They will not apply what should be done (tax the rich profiting off of AI and redistribute that) simply due to it running contrary to their ideology. And on top of that, most Western countries never came off of the debt they took on during 2007ff, instead adding much more debt during and after Covid and now the Russian war against Ukraine, and probably at least some will also finance urgent aids for the people due to the Iran War with debt.
"socialising the means of production" doesn't mean "everyone gets free stuff". It simply means that the people who actually work the means of production decide how it's directed. It's simply the antithesis to "privatisation" (which oddly more people seem to understand correctly).
Why not everything over a certain size? It would be impossible to manage every 1 man business or job, but every 100 or 500 or 1000+ business already has significant management.
I think this is a very interesting topic to discuss, and its a shame there is not more detail about how each policy is implemented, or how they might interact with the many other compounding issues we are dealing with.
I would love an opportunity to take my pet ideas and tune them for better scores. To take the data and run it through the AI again over and over.
I would also like to tune the scenario to consider the consequences of thousands of competing AGI's, getting serious about fixing the climate, and the danger of idle hands.
Marx envisioned the class struggle ending with the triumph of the working class, and a subsequent dissolution of all class systems.
AGI, if defined as a fully general replacement for labour, suggests a "bad ending" to class struggle: the liquidation of working classes, and the eternal reign of the ruling class.
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 50.1 ms ] threadWho is "We" here?
I'll take a guess: Gen Z, and Gen A.
Gen Z because they went through covid during college, and now this AI boom that's completely wreaked the entry level job market.
Gen A is looking increasingly grim, unfortunately. If any of you know any school teachers, you'd know how disheartening it is to try and teach someone that has a homework and entertainment machine in their pocket at all times.
Millenials (My generation) went through everything Gen Z has and more ('08), but there was at least a few years of relative normalcy growing up. I don't know what's next, but I'm not very excited about it.
/rant
Do not fall for it.
Wrong.
Im pretty sure most people would be fine with a 10% slower rate in technology gains if they could spend that money on having better lives now.
What are your concrete plans now for the 30,000 Oracle employees that have been fired because Larry got overly ambitious with AI?
You can't ignore signals of the frontier labs and people working there. How much you trust them and how serious you take them and how much it reflects on what you experience, is your personal analysis.
I'm playing around with fable 5.1 and Astra and its really crrazy how much better they got again now in comparison to a few month, i do trust them to a certain degree, that they are already seeing again progress internally we don't have yet.
The last update killed for sure a lot of low level/avg blender/3d artists.
His plan seems to be to plow ahead.
Considering that socialism has been an abject failure every time it's been tried at scale, I fail to see any analysis from the World's Socialist Website could be useful.
The idea that there must be individuals skimming the most profit possible off the top, or else all economics would collapse, is ridiculous to me. Do you think groups of people can't possibly figure out a pay scale within their business?
>The question of who controls AI can be resolved only through the establishment of social ownership and democratic control over the technology by the working class, internationally.
the article also doesn't have much concrete plans for the Oracle workers.
"Short term" being rather loosely used? Most industrial regions have never recovered. Look at Gary Indiana, Detroit and surrounding towns, Toledo, other regions that were dependant on manufacturing or mining. Most have been stagnating for decades; few have found a path back to thriving economically.
Economists tend to prefer policies that help people, not places. Gary, Indiana just doesn’t have any geographical advantages that make it competitive.
I think, if anything, the mistake was to allow people in those places to believe there would be an eventual turnaround by trying to prop up uncompetitive manufacturing industries.
I was waiting for 'retail day trader' mania to get even more insane, but since no startup goes public anymore for like a decade, thats probably not going to be the main signal this time.
My pet theory is that doomer psychosis reaching mainstreet would actually be the signal for this cycle that things are getting irrational and the bubble is in danger of popping. Which seems like we're getting there.
Further checklist items:
[] Valley nerds huffing their own farts, massively overestimating the speed with which their new tech will penetrate the real economy (classic dotcom-bubble stuff)
[] Anthropic/deepmind/etc. publishing straight-faced blog posts like these mentioning absurd claims like 8-20% GDP growth and claiming the US Gov should go further into debt handing out more money since the economy is going to grow so fast, just you wait!
[] Claims of human annihilation going more viral than AI bubble claims are going viral
[] Fed signaling more interest rate rises than original anticipated (the thing that actually popped the dotcom bubble)
Very interested to see how this plays out.
We as in "humanity as a whole" might have the knowledge and the tools... but only in theory.
In practice, most Western governments are falling to the far-right / ultra-libertarian populist crowd. They will not apply what should be done (tax the rich profiting off of AI and redistribute that) simply due to it running contrary to their ideology. And on top of that, most Western countries never came off of the debt they took on during 2007ff, instead adding much more debt during and after Covid and now the Russian war against Ukraine, and probably at least some will also finance urgent aids for the people due to the Iran War with debt.
I would love an opportunity to take my pet ideas and tune them for better scores. To take the data and run it through the AI again over and over.
I would also like to tune the scenario to consider the consequences of thousands of competing AGI's, getting serious about fixing the climate, and the danger of idle hands.
AGI, if defined as a fully general replacement for labour, suggests a "bad ending" to class struggle: the liquidation of working classes, and the eternal reign of the ruling class.
I certainly don't expect to get a dividend payment from AI anytime soon just for being part of the working class.