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Preparing for AI's economic impact: exploring policy responses

anthropic.com

31–40 of 85 posts

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

#31

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…

I don't think "replaced" is a good word here.. augmented and expanded. With AI we are expanding our activities, users expect more, competition forces companies to do more.

But AI can't be held liable for its actions, that is one role. It has no direct access to the context it is working in, so it needs humans as a bridge. In the end AI produce outcomes in the same local context, which is for the user. So from intent to guidance to outcomes they are all user based, costs and risks too.

I find it pessimistic to take that static view on work, as if "that's it, all we needed is invented", and now we are fighting for positions like musical chairs

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

#34
post #29

ctrl + f for "immigration" returns nothing. Not serious, not worth reading.

This is a horn that must be harped on, frequently and loudly . Anyone with anxieties over immigration should have those same concerns over AI, many times over . Skilled immigrants just got a $100,000/year head tax in the US. Where is such a tax for AI?

100% and the anxieties are related. If AI is going to start cannibalizing entire classes of employment, then what's the point of high levels of immigration to "support the job market"?

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

#35

The most immediate impact might be the bursting of the AI bubble and a dotcom-like crash of tech stocks and businesses like Anthropic. Financial circularity could also lead to instability.

This is actually the most likely outcome but it's the quiet part an AI company isn't going to say out loud.

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

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

As some Australian video game character once said: “as long as there are two people in the world, someone is going to want someone dead”

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

#37
If you write policy about AI you're doing it wrong. AI is an implementation, but policies must be written for outcomes.

Discrimination by law enforcement, exclusion from loan approval, bad moderation on social networking, cheating on exams, creating fake news or media about people, swallowing up user data... all the negative social impact of AI can be achieved without it, and much of it is already illegal anyway.

Legislation that is predicated on AI will fail in the long run. Legislation that focuses on the actual negative outcomes will stand the test of time much more.

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

#38

If you write policy about AI you're doing it wrong. AI is an implementation, but policies must be written for outcomes. Discrimination by law enforcement, exclusion from loan approval, bad moderation on social networking, cheating on exams, creating fake news or media about people, swallowing up user data... all the negative social impact of AI can be achieved without it, and much of it is already illegal anyway. Leg…

Oh, so we can't address any specific problems with any technology, because we should actually be fixing all of society at the root of all those problems. So while you wait for our broken political system to solve those root causes, enjoy feeling smug about not having implemented any imperfect, temporary bandaids to stop some bleeding.

Are you working on fixing those root problems? Or after dismissing short term policy bandaids, are you going to go back to working in an industry where you will probably make more money in the short run if governments don't do any tech regulation in the short run?

Your commitment to the long run will lead to paralysis and do nothing in the long run.

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

#39

If you write policy about AI you're doing it wrong. AI is an implementation, but policies must be written for outcomes. Discrimination by law enforcement, exclusion from loan approval, bad moderation on social networking, cheating on exams, creating fake news or media about people, swallowing up user data... all the negative social impact of AI can be achieved without it, and much of it is already illegal anyway. Leg…

Oh, so we can't address any specific problems with any technology, because we should actually be fixing all of society at the root of all those problems. So while you wait for our broken political system to solve those root causes, enjoy feeling smug about not having implemented any imperfect, temporary bandaids to stop some bleeding. Are you working on fixing those root problems? Or after dismissing short term polic…

If there are problems that are specific to AI then sure we should legislate about it. For example defining what "fair use" is for AI training, that's a clearly new area.

But most of the pushback I've seen to AI in policy is so over-fit to current AI that it would be trivial to work around it. You can argue that we'd be letting perfect be the enemy of good, but I think we'd be making policies that will be out of date by the time they even make it into law, and that we'll never make any progress at all.

That said, I'm all for being proven wrong. The US tends to write highly specific legislation so I'm sure it'll try a few of these. The EU tends to write much more vague legislation specifically for this reason. We'll see how they end up working.

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

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You might be interested in my theory. High school version: https://kemendo.com/basiccohesion.html Full draft PDF https://kemendo.com/GTC.pdf

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