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The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

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Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

#191

Post by rayiner »

jcranmer wrote: post #190
rayiner wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t have to be Jeff Bezos to believe you’re better off in the long run with strong property rights. To your example: I’ve got 10 gig fiber from a private company. My alternatives are 2 gig fiber from a private company, or 2 gig cable from a private company. I don’t have to be Jeff Bezos to wager that, if the people who ran Baltimore City Public Schools ran my broadband service, I wouldn’t have even 1 gig servic…

I live in a town with municipal power, and the general consensus in the area is that the towns with municipal power are loads better at it than the main private utilities in the area. There's no intrinsic reason why a publicly-owned utility should be better or worse at its job than privately-owned utility. But to talk about broadband more specifically, one of the main reasons why municipal broadband started becoming…

> There's no intrinsic reason why a publicly-owned utility should be better or worse at its job than privately-owned utility.

At scale, why would utilities be different than other government services, such as schools or transit?

I’m sure there are edge cases in parts of the country that are too poor or sparely populated to support a robust private sector. But I don’t live in a place like that, and most people don’t. I live in the suburbs of Annapolis. And I’ve lived in Chicago, Baltimore, New York City, DC, and Wilmington Delaware. Would I rather have Comcast run my internet, or the governments of any of those cities? More to the point: would I want to live in the counterfactual scenario where the 1996 telecom act had gone in a different direction, and those cities had built broadband networks that were now 30 years old in whatever shape they were after decades of maintained by those cities?

My experience with the municipal services these cities do run says “no.” And that conclusion is counter to my ideology. I like public infrastructure. I structured my life around commuting over the DC Metro and Amtrak for years. But, for example, the DC Metro deferred maintenance to such a degree that the automated train control built in the 1970s had to be shut off in 2009. Headways got longer, the ride got much rougher. It stayed that way for fifteen years until they turned ATO back on last year. So in 2026, the big achievement is that we’re back to the ride smoothness we had in 1980.

Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

#193

Post by rayiner »

jmyeet wrote: post #131
rayiner wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t have to be Jeff Bezos to believe you’re better off in the long run with strong property rights. To your example: I’ve got 10 gig fiber from a private company. My alternatives are 2 gig fiber from a private company, or 2 gig cable from a private company. I don’t have to be Jeff Bezos to wager that, if the people who ran Baltimore City Public Schools ran my broadband service, I wouldn’t have even 1 gig servic…

The "brutal communism of China" is just hilarious on its face. It's like a Freedom House type position [1]. Funded by the State Department btw. I'm sure it's unbiased. Surveys of Chinese citizens show very high levels of satisfaction with their government [2] while Chinese people view the West through the "kill line" [3]. The funny part about that is the NYT blaming the kill line on "state media" [4] when it originat…

I’m quite impressed by China’s current authoritarian capitalist system. I was talking about the brutality and incompetence of China’s Maoist communism.

Ironically, China proves that “democratic socialism” is exactly the wrong thing for a developing country. Democracy is optional for a developing country, but capitalism is indispensable.

Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

#194

Post by nradov »

pesus wrote: post #152
nradov wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Construction is never "done". New stuff is always being built. And eventually the old data centers will be demolished or remodeled, which also takes a huge amount of labor. I think a lot of HN users still somehow don't understand the "lump of labor" fallacy. https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/page-one-economics/2...

Construction is in fact done at some point. You cannot build an unlimited amount of anything, let alone data centers. Do you honestly believe there will be enough constant construction on data centers to replace millions of jobs lost to AI? Even if that was somehow true, there are tons of people that are not capable for one reason or another (age, physical fitness, etc) of doing construction work. Construction work a…

Construction is in fact never done. If it's not data centers then it will be something else: high-rise residences, bridges, spaceports, oil refineries, whatever. People always want more stuff and we'll never hit a limit in our lifetimes. Skilled construction work is tough and occasionally dangerous but it pays pretty well.

https://mikeroweworks.org/

Speculation about science fiction automation scenarios is not a sound basis for public policy. Lots of things could happen in the future. We can't reasonably plan ahead for all possible contingencies.

Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

#195

Post by skmurphy »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #187
skmurphy wrote: post #167

"No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session." Gideon J. Tucker

On the flip side, without state protection, no man's life liberty or property would be safe either.

I agree: a "state of nature" leads to lives that are "nasty, brutish and short." How do we find legislators who are good stewards for the public trust and welfare. We subject public companies to transparency regulations, perhaps legislator would benefit from more transparency. I am not sure where to draw the line to prevent mob rule or other undesirable outcomes, but legislators manage enormous budgets. Arnold Kling looks at ways to reorganize to create tighter accountability in https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/the-unbalance-of-power

Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

#196

Post by vrganj »

jcranmer wrote: post #171
vrganj wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The oil is on Alaska/Norway's land These AI companies are on American land.

In the case of Alaska, the oil is literally on land owned by the State of Alaska (as in, the titleholder of the land is the state itself), and the rights to oil extraction is leased by the state to oil companies. By contrast, data centers are generally going to be on land owned by the operator, and corporate offices are either owned by the company or leased to the company by some commercial real estate operator you'v…

The sovereign entity granting said private ownership is the state. It is privately owned only insofar as the state wills it.

Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

#197

Post by nradov »

unethical_ban wrote: post #160
nradov wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Labor displacement is always coming. Every new technology eliminates some old occupations and creates new ones. LLMs aren't unique in that regard. We should have a safety net to support and retrain displaced workers regardless of the technology. And let's please not have any lazy, low-effort replies claiming that AI will somehow magically eliminate all jobs for humans.

It seems obvious to me that AI will drastically reshape creative industries, and greatly lower the headcount required for analytical and programming industries, in the long term. The scope of its impact on the economy is likely greater than the Internet, social media, and the telephone. Furthermore, AI companies and consulting companies themselves are selling this idea that it will completely reshape employment. I fi…

There is essentially infinite demand for software. Every time new technologies have made it cheaper to build software we've ended up with more new software, and more people employed in software development. There's no reason to expect that LLMs will change that historical pattern. We'll just be using higher level tools.

But most of the people creating digital media like animation, graphic art, and special effects are probably screwed. The next few years are going to be tough for them and they have my sympathies, but they're only a tiny fraction of the labor force.

Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

#198

Post by NDlurker »

supermdguy wrote: post #181
NDlurker wrote: post #106

Lately I've been thinking about digital co-ops. Imagine a member owned server farm for running private AI models and cloud services. It could be small, like a neighborhood or citywide project running on cobbled together used hardware like that post the other day where someone got an older server GPU running on his PC. Or it could be a small data center for small businesses and individual users to use. Members could h…

There was a show HN for something similar a couple months ago[0]. Looks like they shut it down. Probably too difficult/low-margin to run as a business, but I think the co-op model you mentioned has potential. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47639779

I think a co-op would appeal to the same demographic who are into mesh networks plus all the anti-Flock people. Maybe I'll start something with my friend group and see how it goes from there.

Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

#199

Post by pseudalopex »

rayiner wrote: post #41
TehCorwiz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because AI companies basically took everything we ever wrote, drew, recorded, posted, or thought and turned it into a product with the power to lie, propagandize, and manipulate the public with zero oversight. Walmart is a parasite using welfare to subsidize their operations but they didn't tell a judge that they were immune to copyright because they stole just so much damn information.

“Took?” AI companies aren’t removing the information from the public domain. What happened to “information wants to be free?”

> What happened to “information wants to be free?”

It was 1 part of an observation of opposed forces. “On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”[1]

Some people removed the context and used it to say most information should be available to all. LLMs are information.

You thought this question proved what?

[1] https://sb.longnow.org/SB_homepage/Info_free_story.html

Re: The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies

#200

Post by akramachamarei »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #187
skmurphy wrote: post #167

"No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session." Gideon J. Tucker

On the flip side, without state protection, no man's life liberty or property would be safe either.

That's not quite true either. State protection is neither necessary nor sufficient to consistently ensure safety for any particular person or their property. Obviously, there's a sweet spot.
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