AI Will Transform the Global Economy. Let's Make Sure It Benefits Humanity

AI technology is becoming a commodity at a rapid rate. OpenAI has some nice data moat but their tech is being copied left right and center and much of what they do has been replicated successfully by others; including some open source projects. I don't see OpenAI end up with all the profit here.

AI is a transformative technology for sure. But just like previous introductions of transformative technology it won't play out as doom predictors predict.

Most of the goods we buy and consume are actually produced in parts of the world where workers are exploited just fine without the help of AI. The dystopia already exists; just not in our little bubble. And a lot of those places have leveled up quite a bit economically in recent decades. So things aren't that bad anymore.

Our own past is actually built on the dystopia of the industrial revolution where people had no rights and worked until they dropped dead. Most of us on this forum have jobs that most of those people would not have considered real work. Hence us procrastinating on hacker news instead of doing real work.

AI will cause more of that to happen everywhere. But we'll find ways to keep ourselves busy. And more free time means that we can do things that are valuable to us. And what are economies other than just the accumulation of things we value? It used to be that we mostly valued not starving to death. Most of our economies were basically related to food production. Now food production is only a tiny part of our economies. We found more valuable things to do. Whatever AIs do or don't do, we'll find a way to find new things that are valuable to us. AIs simply expand our economy to include more such things. That's what transformative technology does. It grows our economies.

Which; y'know, fair enough if that does happen. Worse problems to have. Mankind will be in a great spot. I always wanted to learn to weld.

As a whole, yes... the problem is something else: quality of employment. Good paying, unionized jobs - the backbone of all Western economies in the "boom age" between WW2 and the fall of the USSR - in farming, mining, manufacturing and industry that employed lots of people in the past have either been lost to technological progress (farming) or gone off to China, India, Taiwan, Vietnam and Thailand - mostly because of massively lower wages, but also (especially in silicon industry) due to massively more permissive environmental protection laws.

What's left for people to make a living is mostly either low-skill and extremely low-pay stuff that reasonably can't be automated (cleaning!), a bit of medium-skill stuff like tradespeople, and high-skill intellectual jobs (STEM). Now that a lot of the high-end jobs is being threatened by AI as well, high-skilled people from there will also be pushed down, intensifying the competition for lower rungs of society even more.

And let's face it: this will be dangerous, particularly as ever more and more of the share of global wealth concentrates in the hands of very few people. Simply from a wealth relation, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are each richer than actual medieval emperors related to what the common people had. This is not sustainable, and eventually (re)distribution fights will break out.

ETA: Just came in - in the last three years, despite a global pandemic wrecking entire economies, followed by the first land-grab war by an imperialist power ever since WW2 and the resulting economic consequences, the top 5 of the uber rich actually more than doubled their wealth [1], at the expense of everyone else. Clearly, this cannot go on for much longer.

> AI will cause more of that to happen everywhere. But we'll find ways to keep ourselves busy. And more free time means that we can do things that are valuable to us.

As if. Any free time we got gets immediately usurped by the need to take up a second job just to make rent, not to mention that there hasn't been a significant reduction in hours-worked for decades (to the contrary, "expected" aka unpaid overtime has become the norm). Women didn't enter the workforce because of feminism, women entered the workforce because capitalism needed more workers to exploit - with the nasty side effect now becoming evident that young people don't become parents at all or significantly late in their careers, worsening the demographic collapse.

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/14/economy/oxfam-report-weal...