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Preparing for AI's economic impact: exploring policy responses

anthropic.com

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Re: Preparing for AI's economic impact: exploring policy responses

#11

Post by robbrown451 »

I'm having trouble understanding what they want to "upskill" those people to do.

What skills won't be replaced? The only ones I can think of either have a large physical component, or are only doable by a tiny fraction of the current workforce.

As for the ones with a physical component (plumbers being the most cited), the cognitive parts of the job (the "skilled" part of skilled labor) can be replaced while having the person just following directions demonstrated onscreen for them. And of course, the robots aren't far behind, since the main hard part of making a capable robot is the AI part.

Re: Preparing for AI's economic impact: exploring policy responses

#12

Post by notatoad »

i see the comments here are pretty cynical about this post, and probably for good reason. especially "you might have to start taxing consumption instead of income because people won't have income anymore"

but at least a couple of these proposals seem to boil down to needing to tax the absolute crap out of the AI companies. which seems pretty obviously true, and its interesting that the ai companies are already saying that.

Re: Preparing for AI's economic impact: exploring policy responses

#13

Post by mrshadowgoose »

blibble wrote: post #5

they seem to have omitted the scenarios where the newly unemployable electorate turn on them

I used to think that "AI operating in meatspace" was going to remain a tough problem for a long time, but seeing the dramatic developments in robotics over the last 2 years, it's pretty clear that's not going to be the case.

As the masses fade into permanent unemployment, this will likely coincide with (and be partially caused by) a corresponding proliferation in intelligent humanoid robots.

At a certain point, "turning on them" becomes physically impossible.

Re: Preparing for AI's economic impact: exploring policy responses

#14

Post by eucyclos »

notatoad wrote: post #12

i see the comments here are pretty cynical about this post, and probably for good reason. especially "you might have to start taxing consumption instead of income because people won't have income anymore" but at least a couple of these proposals seem to boil down to needing to tax the absolute crap out of the AI companies. which seems pretty obviously true, and its interesting that the ai companies are already saying…

I've found large entrenched players tend to prefer slightly more than a reasonable amount of taxation and regulation in any industry; governments are easier to predict and handle than scrappy competitors.

Re: Preparing for AI's economic impact: exploring policy responses

#15

Post by varispeed »

notatoad wrote: post #12

i see the comments here are pretty cynical about this post, and probably for good reason. especially "you might have to start taxing consumption instead of income because people won't have income anymore" but at least a couple of these proposals seem to boil down to needing to tax the absolute crap out of the AI companies. which seems pretty obviously true, and its interesting that the ai companies are already saying…

> its interesting that the ai companies are already saying that.

This is just cheap PR to launder legitimacy and urgency. To create false equivalence between AI agent and an employee.

I think this is a sign of weakness, having seen AI rolled out in many companies where it already shows signs of being absolute disaster (like summaries changing meaning and losing important details - so tasks go in wrong direction and take time to be corrected, developers creating unprecedented amount of tech debt with their vibe coded features, massive amount of content that sound important, but it is just equivalent of spam, managers spending ours with LLM "researching" strategy feeding the FOMO and so on).

Re: Preparing for AI's economic impact: exploring policy responses

#16

Post by Nasrudith »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #4

Much like the end of history wasn’t the end of history LLM-Attention centric AI isn’t the end of AI development So if they are successful at locking in it will be at their own demise because it doesn’t cover the infinity many pathways for AI to continue down, specifically intersections with robotics and physical manipulation, that are ultimately way more impactful on society. Until the plurality of humans on the eart…

I highly doubt there is ever going to be "effective governance" of technology for multiple reasons. It would require impossible foreknowledge of the impacts of every possible tech and dystopian levels of control to prevent new ideas from coming into play. We cannot even get the direction of impact right a-priori. Even if they had that this dystopia would have to remain both stable and unmutated over generations. All the while their control creates their own counterforce, incentivized to invent tech outside of their control to topple the forces of stagnation.

Re: Preparing for AI's economic impact: exploring policy responses

#17

Post by [deleted] »

blibble wrote: post #3
MatekCopatek wrote: post #2

It's hard to read this without being cynical. How seriously would you take a proposal on car pollution regulation and traffic law updates written by Volkswagen?

> How seriously would you take a proposal on car pollution regulation and traffic law updates written by Volkswagen? they more or less wrote the EU emission regulations the only reason diesel cars were sold in huge numbers in the EU

[deleted]

Re: Preparing for AI's economic impact: exploring policy responses

#19

Post by tintor »

robbrown451 wrote: post #11

I'm having trouble understanding what they want to "upskill" those people to do. What skills won't be replaced? The only ones I can think of either have a large physical component, or are only doable by a tiny fraction of the current workforce. As for the ones with a physical component (plumbers being the most cited), the cognitive parts of the job (the "skilled" part of skilled labor) can be replaced while having th…

'main hard part of making a capable robot is the AI part'

Robots are far behind.

Mechanical hands with human equivalent performance is as hard as the AI part.

Strong, fast, durable, tough, touch and temp sensitive, dexterous, light, water-proof, energy efficient, non-overheating.

Muscles and tendons in human hands and forearms self-heal and grow stronger with more use.

Mechanical tendons stretch and break. Small motors have plenty of issues of their own.

Re: Preparing for AI's economic impact: exploring policy responses

#20

Post by AndrewKemendo »

blind_tomato wrote: post #8
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #4

Much like the end of history wasn’t the end of history LLM-Attention centric AI isn’t the end of AI development So if they are successful at locking in it will be at their own demise because it doesn’t cover the infinity many pathways for AI to continue down, specifically intersections with robotics and physical manipulation, that are ultimately way more impactful on society. Until the plurality of humans on the eart…

> Until the plurality of humans on the earth understand that human exceptionalism is no longer something to be taking for granted (and shouldn’t have been) there’s never going to be effective global governance of technology. Could you elaborate more on this? FYI fully agreed on the former sentences.

It’s taken for granted that humans are the best choice for how to accomplish tasks.

The tasks humans are best at now are different than 10kya.

The world changes, new human jobs are made and humans collectively move up the abstraction chain. Schumpeter called this creative destruction and “capital + technology” is the transition function.

At the point where “capital + technology” does not need a human anymore and that will happen (if not in my lifetime then at least in the next 500 years) then there will be nothing more to argue for or retain.

So unless humanity recognizes this and decides to organize as humans (not as europeans, or alabamans or han etc…) then this is the only possible outcome.

Me personally, I don’t think that’s mathematically/energetically possible for humans to do because we’re not biologically capable of that level of eusocial coordination.

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