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Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society

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Re: Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society

#461

Post by _DeadFred_ »

rayiner wrote: post #444
foltik wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly that's not a good proxy either then... even the article itself says: > Ultimately, concerns over inequality should focus on differences within labor compensation rather than the split between labor and capital. The main issues I can see are: - This "labor share" includes multi-million dollar executive pay packages, so it's heavily skewed towards the 1% - It also completely ignores unrealized capital gains and…

Do those factors meaningfully change the picture? For example, total compensation for Fortune 500 CEOs is only $8.5 billion, which is a rounding error compared to total labor income. And CEOs at the bottom of that range make a few million, so it’s unlikely that CEOs in non-Fortune 500 companies are making the eye popping salaries you’re talking about. Similarly, what percentage of wealthy people take loans against th…

Some numbers

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...

"The income tax base captures 60 % of economic income of the top 1 % of wealth-holders.".

I would love if only 60% of my income was taxed. Heck I'm now even taxed on used junk I sell using Paypal (that I bought with taxed income dollars and paid sales tax on). But a tax that includes that other 40% of the top 1%'s economic income, guys, we can't do that. But don't forget to file your Paypal taxes or waves at threat of prison.

"Focusing on the top 1 %, while total borrowing is substantial, new borrowing each year is fairly small (1–2 % of economic income) compared to their new unrealized gains" "1 % of wealth-holders (above $14 million in 2022)"

1-2% of $14,000,000 is $140,000 to $280,000 a year. The median personal income is $45,140. They are benefiting untaxed to the tune of 3-6 times the median American income.

1-2% of 100 million is 1-2 million dollars a year untaxed benefit (44x median income). That is substantial.

I would love to benefit annually by that 'insignificant' amount goin untaxed. We should either exclude all economic income below $140,000 to $2,000,000 from taxation or change to tax this loan scheme that allows the top 1% to avoid their share on income 44x the median and even higher.

Re: Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society

#462

Post by nonethewiser »

SpaceNoodled wrote: post #380
nonethewiser wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correctness can also be guaranteed by non-deterministic systems [0]. You do trade time predictability though. It will eventually give the correct answer, we just dont know when. I keep thinking about the implications of this. So in some sense it's less about being inaccurate and more about prematurely stopping (or not having a well defined target, but that's a whole other mess). In theory, if the target is well defin…

> we just dont know when Ah, so it's merely functionally useless, if not theoretically.

Guaranteed correctness on an unknown timeline is a pretty interesting tradeoff and not novel. It's just how probabilistic systems work.

I dont really understand your position. Do you think AI is useless?

Re: Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society

#463

Post by [deleted] »

layer8 wrote: post #379
Brendinooo wrote: post #154

My observation of society is that, by default, people tend to have a belief system of "most tech that existed before I was born was fine; any new tech is bad/unnecessary". So it doesn't surprise me that people are predisposed to not like this particular new tech.

AI seems to have a different impact here: https://fortune.com/2026/05/20/why-do-kids-hate-ai-gen-z-bac...

[deleted]

Re: Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society

#464

Post by nonethewiser »

fluoridation wrote: post #385
nonethewiser wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an interesting way of thinking about it. I generally agree. I especially agree that anti-AI sentiment partially comes from miss-using it. However: Determinism isn't a requirement for 100% correctness. A Las Vegas algorithm is randomized, non-deterministic and guarantees 100% correctness [0]. The execution can be different every time but the result will always be correct. determinism does not lose accuracy. It…

A Las Vegas algorithm requires that you have a deterministic test that can definitively determine the correctness of an intermediate result. So what you're saying is that what it takes to make LLMs give 100% correct results is having a human between the LLM and the user, who's capable of re-prompting on incorrect answers from the LLM. Well, if the human is there, why not just ask the human? What value is the random n…

> So what you're saying is that what it takes to make LLMs give 100% correct results is having a human between the LLM and the user, who's capable of re-prompting on incorrect answers from the LLM.

No, that's not what I'm saying. Im saying determinism isn't required for correctness. And Im not saying that models are already perfect other than prematurely stopping. What I am saying is that non-determinism doesn't mean they cant be 100% correct.

Besides, humans baby-sitting LLMs is not even implied by the misinterpretation of what I'm saying. What's implied by that is humans needing to give the LLM explicit success criteria from the outset. Which is totally reasonable.

> Like the GP said, the point of determinism is that you can trust the correctness of the results

Well, no. Now you are waaaay overstating determinism. Deterministic results might be incorrect.

Re: Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society

#465

Post by nonethewiser »

layer8 wrote: post #357
nonethewiser wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an interesting way of thinking about it. I generally agree. I especially agree that anti-AI sentiment partially comes from miss-using it. However: Determinism isn't a requirement for 100% correctness. A Las Vegas algorithm is randomized, non-deterministic and guarantees 100% correctness [0]. The execution can be different every time but the result will always be correct. determinism does not lose accuracy. It…

The economics of it (token cost) means, however, that what will be chosen most often is the barely sustainable minimum level of quality, aka race to the bottom. AI is more cost-sensitive in that way than humans caring or not caring about making things robust and correct used to be.

For sure, that's why I say in theory. Also models aren't perfect. You can't plug in an explicit target and ensure it doesnt stop prematurely and expect 100 accuracy. But that's not because it's non-deterministic, since clearly non-deterministic systems can be 100% accurate.

Re: Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society

#466

Post by fluoridation »

nonethewiser wrote: post #464
fluoridation wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Las Vegas algorithm requires that you have a deterministic test that can definitively determine the correctness of an intermediate result. So what you're saying is that what it takes to make LLMs give 100% correct results is having a human between the LLM and the user, who's capable of re-prompting on incorrect answers from the LLM. Well, if the human is there, why not just ask the human? What value is the random n…

> So what you're saying is that what it takes to make LLMs give 100% correct results is having a human between the LLM and the user, who's capable of re-prompting on incorrect answers from the LLM. No, that's not what I'm saying. Im saying determinism isn't required for correctness. And Im not saying that models are already perfect other than prematurely stopping. What I am saying is that non-determinism doesn't mean…

>What's implied by that is humans needing to give the LLM explicit success criteria from the outset.

But the LLM is non-deterministic. LLM(x + y) or even LLM(LLM(x) + y) is just as non-deterministic as LLM(x).

>Well, no. Now you are waaaay overstating determinism. Deterministic results might be incorrect.

Obviously? But that's still is the reason why deterministic computers are useful. If you could enter a proven-correct program into a computer, run it, and get back a correct result only some of the time, that'd be okay maybe for some things, but we couldn't have built everything we have on top of that. It's the same reason why deductive reasoning is useful. Once you've proven something true, you're done, it's proven. No further work is necessary.

Re: Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society

#467

Post by littlexsparkee »

rayiner wrote: post #342
boothby wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The math underlying the models is widely known, and there are tons of competitors, including foreign competitors. Foreign militaries investing in autonomous warfare does not assuage my concerns about my country investing in autonomous warfare. Also, have you been paying attention to median wages vs median CEO wages since the 1960s? The benefits of computing really have gone to the captains of industry.

> Also, have you been paying attention to median wages vs median CEO wages since the 1960s CEO pay isn’t a good proxy for “captains of industry.” What you want to look at is the labor versus capital share of income. That’s been very stable since the 1960s: https://taxfoundation.org/blog/labor-share-net-income-within... .

If depreciation accounts for the gap (difference in share of output vs net income), investing in replacing machines just means that more will accrue to owners of capital in future.

Re: Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society

#468

Post by prime_ursid »

simianwords wrote: post #266
lorecore wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's part of it, but views on AI are also views on art and authenticity. I'm a huge fan of AI for coding, research and writing for work. When I see AI generated images, music or anything else "creative" my reaction has grown to be pretty negative. It's all got NFT vibes aesthetically. I was absolutely blown away by Stable Diffusion and that AI could generate images, now I'm kind of disgusted with it. We've been flo…

AI will be the most important thing to happen to art. We have tolerated low quality art for far too long because we pretend mechanical dexterity is what makes art, art. Art is not valuable because of this. AI removes the part I never cared about. I never cared that a guitarist can physically play 1500 notes a second.

> We have tolerated low quality art for far too long because we pretend mechanical dexterity is what makes art, art.

Who is “we” in this sentence? A tiny subsection of metalheads? The vast majority of people aren’t seeking out the most mechanically dexterous musicians to listen to.

Re: Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society

#469

Post by jimbokun »

pdonis wrote: post #438
jimbokun wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You give the answer then skip past it. We are looking at a foreseeable future where machines do all the work. You are saying all the benefits from those machines should go to those who invested their capital to create them, forever. And those without capital to invest in those machines will have nothing. Why is that a good system?

> We are looking at a foreseeable future where machines do all the work. That's not the future I was talking about. I was talking about a future where machines do an even larger fraction (approaching 100 percent) of the work that humans don't like to do but currently have to because it can't be fully automated. But that still leaves work to be done to supervise the machines, as well as work that humans do like to do…

I fail to see how your scenario is qualitatively different than mine. Whether the machines do 100 percent of the work or only just approach 100 percent of the work, the value they produce will go almost exclusively to those who invested in the machines.

I notice you don’t give examples of work people will do or why it will have economic value when machines perform almost all work.

Whether the machines will take over is a philosophical question. Maybe they won’t have any desire to do so. Or maybe rogue actors will train belligerent models that will overwhelm the models serving humanity. Difficult to predict.

Re: Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society

#470

Post by AngryData »

newtonianrules wrote: post #456
AngryData wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or why not make an actual plan to improve things and solve problems instead of throwing in the towel before you even start? It also doesn't help to be a prosecuting attorney that extorted poor people for judicial profit. Only the wealthy view prosecutors as good people.

What has Trump done that makes a meaningful positive difference in the lives of people making less than $250k/year?

I never said he did, I never said I support him or anything he does. But Trump being a complete idiot doesn't make Kamala not shitty and uninspiring to voters.
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