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The turbulent AI era is here

gatesnotes.com

201–210 of 279 posts

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#201
post #121
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of that is comparable to us having ai buttom on whatsapp, camera, email, jira, vacuum cleaner, everywhere. To workers being threatened with firing if they dont burn enough tokens.

Indeed, comparing AI button in some app to putting deadly substances in basically everything is really dumb. They are not comparable at all and one is much worse than the other.

I said "forced on us everywhere" and you are arguing by "there were producta with deadly substance".

You took the goalpost, moved it to another country and now argue that ball did not moved with it.

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#202
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people want to critique power rather than propose and judge concrete solutions.

Maybe the critique is the solution? Maybe the system is so toxic the only way forward is a radical break and solutionism is just a way to distract from that fact? A way to maintain the power structure while making cosmetic changes?

Yes, we've all heard this a million times. I'm afraid you've still given zero actual solution or even anything approaching one. "A radical break" okay, a radical break from what? How? To do what differently?

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#203
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear arms race and tokenmaxxing were two differrent things. Not even nearly the same.

Indeed, nuclear arms race was way more wasteful and negative

Wasteful in terms of money and debt? Looking at current ai debt, no.

Nuckear arms race was something that could cause harm. This is intended to cause harm by design. And it is already clear it will cause harm to many people regardless of whether ai companies succeed or not.

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#204
post #197

The observer (Mr Gates) is inside the tech ecosystem, so his observations would be colored by the pace of things happening around him, in the tech space. The world outside has much more friction and many other things going on. Tech had a wild run during his time because the American priorities at that time, favored it. There is no guarantee that tech would have same priority in a world that might get into more basic…

I believe he still has the power to change things at Microsoft, but he dares not to since it would angry shareholders who want this Musical Chairs game to continue.

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#205

I feel this is merely stating the obvious. It goes back to the industrial revolution and every revolution before and after. There was a point where they thought a majority of people would be working as switchboard operators and then telephone switching came along. Horses to cars, etc. Jobs transition, new space is created, people are caught in tbe crossfire of supply and demand curves. Incan agree the bullwhip of thi…

This is potentially much more upending since it would put hundreds of millions of people out of work and concentrate all wealth at literally a handful of individuals. We could lead this towards a beneficial scenario with proper taxation, but the individuals who stand to gain will do anything in their power to prevent this.

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#206
post #200

> But the reliability problem is being fixed quickly, as researchers create models that can check their own work and improve themselves. Soon they will be substantially better than humans at many tasks. Yes, no. They don't. They just push probabilities higher. The tech is non-deterministic.

Humans are also non-deterministic, for all practical purposes, and the more of them you need to build some piece of software, the harder it can get to keep the likelihood of issues low.

I'm not saying it will happen, but at least it's not inconceivable that LLMs could surpass them in this calculation more and more often.

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#207
post #200

> But the reliability problem is being fixed quickly, as researchers create models that can check their own work and improve themselves. Soon they will be substantially better than humans at many tasks. Yes, no. They don't. They just push probabilities higher. The tech is non-deterministic.

Humans are also non-deterministic, for all practical purposes, and the more of them you need to build some piece of software, the harder it can get to keep the likelihood of issues low. I'm not saying it will happen, but at least it's not inconceivable that LLMs could surpass them in this calculation more and more often.

[dead]

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#208

If A.I. starts to replace jobs en masse I propose we tax the companies profiting from this at a rate of 95% so we can finance welfare and Universal Basic Income schemes. We need to be aware that said companies and the people behind them will do anything in their power, including bribing politicians, to prevent this and to keep the money they believe are they're entitled to. I even believe the Big Tech bigwigs have lo…

I like the thought, but it seems daunting. What about global competition? If some other countries have few or no such taxes, how do you deal with that? Do you outlaw the outsourcing of all white collar work? Outlaw all remote work as well? Will you have to suppress a local black market for intellectual labor, built on self-hosted open source models?

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#209
post #200

> But the reliability problem is being fixed quickly, as researchers create models that can check their own work and improve themselves. Soon they will be substantially better than humans at many tasks. Yes, no. They don't. They just push probabilities higher. The tech is non-deterministic.

Humans are also non-deterministic, for all practical purposes, and the more of them you need to build some piece of software, the harder it can get to keep the likelihood of issues low. I'm not saying it will happen, but at least it's not inconceivable that LLMs could surpass them in this calculation more and more often.

The quality of discussion here is not up to the standards I would want it to be.

What are you even saying there. "Humans are also not perfect, so anything is possible" but painted with a coat of fake intellectualism.

What a waste of time.

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#210
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the critique is the solution? Maybe the system is so toxic the only way forward is a radical break and solutionism is just a way to distract from that fact? A way to maintain the power structure while making cosmetic changes?

Yes, we've all heard this a million times. I'm afraid you've still given zero actual solution or even anything approaching one. "A radical break" okay, a radical break from what? How? To do what differently?

Let's first finish the critique, then we can use its conclusions to talk about what it would actually take to get us out of this mess.

Capitalism has always been a tension between capitalists, who want maximum return on capital and workers, who want pesky things like a living wage, sick leave or safe work conditions.

For the longest time, the only power labor has had to get those things was the power of collective bargaining. No agreement with your workers meant no production happened.

AI threatens to disturb this delicate balance that made things kinda-sorta work for a while.

No more dependence on labor means the capital accumulation flywheel will go crazy. Capital can buy compute can generate capital. Now, once you have a ton of capital, you might start thinking: Hmmm, I wonder if I can use this to tilt the rules of the game in my favor. Wonder which politicians could change some regulations in exchange for a hefty "donation". And so the regulatory capture begins.

In other words, the end state of things as they are is: existing capitalists get converted to near-feudal lords (which is why they're so excited about the prospect!), while the existing working class loses their only leverage to extract an existence.

All solutionist approaches just slightly slow this incentive loop down or make it more marketable, but none change the core mechanism at play.

Now, with this critique in mind, what do we actually do about it?

We won't be able to stop AI from taking over more and more labor jobs, and we shouldn't even try to. But that's not really the problem anyways, the problem is that with the current ownership structure, the only ones really benefiting from AI productivity are they already-owning class.

That is where we have a lever. The only way out of this dystopian path, and into something more appealing, is communal ownership of the means of production. This doesn't have to mean everyone's laptop, this needs to be measured and scaled of course, but as an example, large-scale data centers should not be allowed to be privately controlled.

Now, which mechanism we choose here is up for debate. Maybe government ownership? Maybe worker-owned coops? Maybe something else entirely?

Lastly, how do we get there? Historically, there's been two schools of thought: The electoral and the revolutionary approach. I think both have their merits, but I actually think they best work together.

Think of the Bismarckian example: Why was the conservative German chancellor the one to introduce the German social safety net? To stave off a credible threat of revolution.

I think that while I don't really love the idea of a revolution, the ruling class loves it even less, because historically they are the ones that end up beheaded. That's why I see revolutionary movements as a good way to extract concessions, because they don't need to actually go through with it as long as they're threatening enough.

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