It's no surprise. The wild tech optimism of the 1990s and 2000s has completely fallen apart as time and time again tech companies have proved to be some of the most hostile actors in most American's lives. Perhaps edged out only by things such as actual violent crime and partisan hatred. (which itself, of course, is stoked to the absolute maximum in part due to technology trends in the past 15 years or so)
The loneliness epidemic, a constant drip-feed of outrage -- all so that people can make a small amount of money, distracted driving. Nearly every single service becoming worse over time, etc. Since then, the tech CEOs has been sidling up to the halls of power and effectively begging to help destroy privacy as thoroughly as possible.
I certainly know that my life was transformed for the worse by social media. And I don't mean that I went down any rabbit holes -- rather common culture was hollowed out, friends were distracted, friends fell down their own extremist rabbit holes. There is no successful social media company that actually cares about the negative impacts it has had on society. They speak about things such as "providing value" where value = time spent on the platform. They do not care if they ruin lives.
So a few years ago, nearly everywhere you went people are talking about how thoroughly AI was going to transform society. You couldn't go anywhere without hearing it. Of course people are wary. Big tech has been a net negative in very loud, intrusive, and obvious ways in _most_ people's lives. And now they're saying they're going to radically reform society.
The only hope we have is that they're wrong, and their power to change things will be minimal. For sure, if they really how the power to radically change everything, they would change it for the worse and would never spend a moment worrying about the damage they had done.
>The only hope we have is that they're wrong, and their power to change things will be minimal.
What even is the optimistic outcome if they are right? What are we all working towards? Like do people think that these AI companies will create some superintelligence, suck up all the financial benefits of that, and then just decide to share it with the rest of us out of kindness? Because I legitimately can't see a realistic outcome that actually benefits society as a whole. It all ends with very few obscenely rich people getting even more obscenely rich. But I guess we could tell an AI to put ourselves in the new Marvel movie to pass the time since we no longer have any jobs.
> Like do people think that these AI companies will create some superintelligence, suck up all the financial benefits of that, and then just decide to share it with the rest of us out of kindness?
I don’t get this. It’s like worrying in 1960 that the companies that invented computers will hoard the benefits of computing. It doesn’t make any sense. There is no secret formula to any of this. The math underlying the models is widely known, and there are tons of competitors, including foreign competitors.
> 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.
Yet, that 80s CEO, practically a peasant by modern standards of pay, had the option to cross the Atlantic in a Mach 2 supersonic airliner. If that's not the most obvious demonstration of technological prowess, I don't know what is. In contrast, the F-35, believed to be the world's most advanced fighter jet today, has a top speed of Mach 1.6
The Concorde was cramped. JFK to Heathrow took five hours (3 in the air, an hour in each airport) plus the time for first and last miles. JFK to Heathrow today is 7 to 8 hours with the same provisos.
If you're going to spend a quarter of the day travelling, why not spend a third of the day and do it more comfortably?
The F-35 isn't the fastest jet; fighter jets aren't business jets; apples are not rutabagas.
It's about pushing the envelope. If your technology is limited by certain physical constraints, then all of the things you make will end up being constrained by the same stuff.
After a short exploration you can reach the conclusion that nothing new is worth inventing any more.
Only by loosening those constraints can you make something that's meaningfully better.
The reason we don't have supersonic planes is that they're way too loud. The noise pollution isn't worth a couple rich people getting to their destination slightly faster.
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 loans against them, which is how the ultra-wealthy actually fund their lifestyles tax-free, with a tiny income on paper
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 their assets to fund their lifestyle? You should be able to quantify this if it’s happening at scale.
The income share of the top 1%—so including run of the mill doctors and lawyers—has grown from 15% in 1970 to 21% today: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/income-share-top-1-before.... There is no way that delta is enough to eat up all the income growth since then.
"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.
That article actually proves the opposite of what you’re saying: “For the top 1 %, new borrowing each year is fairly small: 1–2 % of economic income. ‘Buy, borrow, die’ is not a dominant tax avoidance strategy for the rich.”
OP above said that billionaires pay for their lifestyle by taking loans they never pay lack, and the article says that isn’t a common approach.
> 1-2% of 100 million is 1-2 million dollars a year untaxed benefit (44x median income). That is substantial.
No, it’s not substantial because very few people make $100 million a year, while many people make the median income.
For example, billionaires last year added $1.5 trillion to their wealth, of which 56% was unrealized gains. If you take 2% of those gains as in the article, you get $16.8 billion that should be taxed as income but isn’t being taxed. I’d be fine taxing that money at the top marginal rate or whatever you want to do. But it would raise a piddling amount of money. That’s a rounding error compared to total AGI, which is over $15 trillion. The U.S. governments spend $16.8 billion every 14 hours.
Great, we are in agreement. It is happening, to the tune of billions of dollars, and we both are fine with it being taxed.
1-2% of 100 million is 1-2 million dollars a year untaxed benefit (44x median income). That is substantial benefit for someone to receive. They are benefiting from buy, borrow, die. You asked for proof, I gave you proof that it is happening and is providing a substantial unfunded lifestyle (44x median income is a substantial income).
Hopefully I won't see further posts from you saying it isn't happening/we don't need to tax it/we aren't loosing revenue. You agree it is happening, and you are ok with taxing it. You don't think it will fund the entire budget. OK. But we have multiple tax streams that don't fund the entire budget, and when patterns shift, we address it, such as now tracking/taxing paypal payments and in the future loans on unrealized gains.
> Great, we are in agreement. It is happening, to the tune of billions of dollars, and we both are fine with it being taxed.
Yes, but that’s not the topic. The topic is the labor share of income over time. Your link proves that these loans don’t have a meaningful effect on analyzing the division of income between capital and labor over time. They amount to 0.1% of total income.
I don’t understand why people bring this up so often. There’s dozens of tax loopholes that are greater in magnitude. Eliminating the mortgage interest deduction for example would raise 5-7 times as much money as even a 50% tax on these loan proceeds.
One thing at a time. I think we both agree borrowing is happening and you are ok with it being taxed, so further discussion isn't really needed. But I specifically only addressed your interjection of:
>Similarly, what percentage of wealthy people take loans against their assets to fund their lifestyle? You should be able to quantify this if it’s happening at scale.
That is the topic being addressed, proof was shown, and you replied "I’d be fine taxing that money at the top marginal rate". To your 'but what about other loopholes' please show me 24 loopholes (dozens) providing individuals such high multiples of median income tax free?
>I don’t understand why people bring this up so often
You just agreed it is happening and you are fine with taxing it in your last message, so it really doesn't matter people bring it up or not, does it? And kind of makes further discussion moot. You agree it's fine to address/tax.
>I’d be fine taxing that money at the top marginal rate or whatever you want to do.
The mortgage interest deduction is not a loophole, it is government policy intelligently reached. A loophole would be when rich people abused the deduction by designating their yatch as a second home and deducting that. And that loophole was closed. The average person having to pay taxes on the old dresser that they bought with already taxed money and report the sale as paypal income earnings would be another loophole but in the other direction..
I look forward to your 24 stated existing examples of greater magnitude actual loopholes (and not intentional policy doing what it was intended, the opposite of an exploited loophole that is taking loans instead of selling stocks to avoid taxes but benefit from realized/current stock value). We can move to the next level but again you agreed you are fine taxing this behavior so kinda no further point.
Please read @foltik's post upthread to understand the context of my statement. @foltik commented that the data on labor versus capital income share could be misleading, because it "ignores realized capital gains and loans against them, which is how the ultra-wealthy actually fund their lifestyles tax-free."
I asked whether that "meaningfully change[s] the picture"--i.e. the picture on the labor/capital income split. And I asked whether that practice is "happening at scale." I wasn't asking whether it was happening at all, but rather at sufficient scale that it would meaningfully skew the numbers on labor/capital income split.
Your data proved my point: loans against assets account for only 1-2% of unrealized gains, so even if you counted that as income, it would be a rounding error in the evaluation of the labor versus capital share of income.
That data is purely from self reports so isn't necessarily definitive, but is proof that it is occurring. I don't think we have public banking records that list all loans so not sure how we can get an accurate number, but if we could they would have used in that analysis, so I don't think we can definitively know the scale just what people choose to self report.
But we don't need to dig deeper. We are all in agreement and don't need further discussion. Tax it.
>I’d be fine taxing that money at the top marginal rate or whatever you want to do.
Thank you for engaging. We can try going deeper but OP might be better for that. I just had that report with at least some information and wanted to interject so we could talk to something (even though I knew their thesis counters my position, it's worth us all knowing about, and I think it's showing it does occur at least some is useful for my position). Anecdotally in another life I knew some of these people/people in their circles and they very much use these loans and were crazy excited when they learned of the strategies of them.
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.
Tech isn't special. The value of pretty much all productivity improvements since ~1979 have been captured either via the stock market (97% owned by the top 10% in wealth) or land rents.
>It’s like worrying in 1960 that the companies that invented computers will hoard the benefits of computing. It doesn’t make any sense.
Not only is that exactly what happened, they weren't satisfied with accumulating most of the wealth produced by it, they've also taken it upon themselves to take over democracy and media and act like a state within a state. You only need one statistic to understand America today, that working class Americans without college degrees have had their purchasing power stagnate since the 1970s(https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/)
People who used to have good jobs can now drive for Doordash and what the last wave of digitalization did over 30 years the AI gurus now promise to do in 10 again, and not just to the working class. The only reason to be optimistic is that they're snake oil salesmen.
Having a college degree was a much more selective measure in 1970 (about 10% of the population) than today (almost 40%). Consider a large law firm. In 1970, the only 4-year degree holders would have been the attorneys. A lot of work would have been done by well-compensated paralegals with high school diplomas. Today, everyone down to the receptionist will have a degree and the non-degree holders would basically be the maintenance and cafeteria staff.
So using your math, the income of non-college workers at the law firm could be stagnant from 1970 to today, even if the income of each specific position had increased significantly.
Look at the macro data. The overall median wage for all American workers combined has also drastically lagged behind economic productivity since the 70s.
It doesn’t make sense to talk about “economic productivity” as a single number. Productivity growth has been massively different for different jobs. For example, there has been zero productivity growth in food service from 1970 to present. So you’d need to look at wages by sector compared to productivity growth in that sector.
Foreign competitors who are banned in this country. The current federal government is not interested in competition or customer protections. Existing interests will acquire-to-kill any competitors and will not be anti-trusted for it.
This could of course change if we stop electing known criminals/con-men, but the supreme court seems intent on strangling democracy by legalizing unlimited bribery.
You could say that about any big tech product and yet we've all seen power and wealth become concentrated on an incredible scale since the 60s. The immense resources needed to train frontier models gives the few companies that can manage it more of a moat than most tech products. So empirically I expect that we'll see the current wealth hording keep going at at least the same rate.
>It’s like worrying in 1960 that the companies that invented computers will hoard the benefits of computing.
Isn't that what happened? There was enough competition among computing companies that they weren't able to completely monopolize all the productivity improvements, but the financial benefits were mostly captured by the capital class in one way or another.[1]
TVs might be cheaper today and we all like watching Netflix, but I'm skeptical of the idea that the financial wellbeing of the average American has been improved by computers.
>I'm skeptical of the idea that the financial wellbeing of the average American has been improved by computers.
Really? Even with all the new avenues of education and communication that they opened up? You think the positives and negatives balance out to close to zero?
The stats I linked above show that those “new avenues of education and communication” didn’t actually benefit the average American financially in at least the relative sense. Do you have something to counter that evidence?
Those are just time series of wealth over time, they don't purport to establish any causal links. You can't conclude that computers didn't "actually benefit the average American financially" from these numbers, because these are measuring the total wealth of the household with all factors combined. We can't say with any certainty what effect computers had on these values; maybe without them people would have been better off or worse off.
It is interesting how the wealth concentration started in the '80s. It could be computers that caused it, though I would be more likely to blame it on Reagan's economic policies.
>You can't conclude that computers didn't "actually benefit the average American financially" from these numbers, because these are measuring the total wealth of the household with all factors combined.
Fine, I’ll include your disclaimer about confounding factors.
With all factors combined, it doesn’t appear that the average American financially benefited over the course of the computer revolution. Do you dispute that and if so, what is your evidence?
Yes, I dispute it. Firstly because it's literally not true by the numbers you're basing it off of, as the mean real family income grew by 40ish% between 1973 and 2023; and secondly because it's a very carefully-worded statement that lends itself to confusion by placing together things that are not necessarily related, like the graph comparing the number of pirates with the global temperature of the Earth. Yes, the data being presented is true (well, in your case it's not, but let's pretend you've rephrased it such that it is), but the manner in which it's being presented is communicating something other than the data.
Nicely done subtly shifting the conversation from wealth to income. I guess it shouldn't matter that the bottom 90% of Americans have seen their share of wealth decrease since that started being measured in 1989. The median worker should be thrilled as long as their real wages have increased. Who cares if inflation numbers fail to account properly for more nuanced changes to cost of living such as rising education costs being more impactful due to higher college enrollment rates? Who needs to accumulate wealth when your income is growing at almost 1% per year?
>Nicely done subtly shifting the conversation from wealth to income.
I don't see the data on absolute wealth in your link, so I went with what I had.
>I guess it shouldn't matter that the bottom 90% of Americans have seen their share of wealth decrease since that started being measured in 1989. The median worker should be thrilled as long as their real wages have increased.
Well... yes? I mean, should I care that there's a multibillionaire I don't know somewhere in the country amassing an obscene fortune, if I'm living a little more comfortably every year? Most everyone is living better, isn't that fine?
>Who cares if inflation numbers fail to account properly for more nuanced changes to cost of living
How is that my fault? It's the data you used. Why are you using it if you think it has flaws?
The conversation started with the question of who captures the wealth generated from this new tech. I pointed to numbers that show the ultra-wealthy have captured almost all the new wealth generated in the last 50 years.
The page I linked also having income numbers does not mean I agree they are a good analog for were this value is captured. I don't believe income increasing at slightly under 1% a year actually indicates that "Most everyone is living better" today for the reasons mentioned above. You're free to offer counter evidence and I don't know why you're acting like you were limited to only referencing the source I provided.
>The conversation started with the question of who captures the wealth generated from this new tech.
Regardless of how the conversation started, the statement I questioned, and which you chose to defend, was
>I'm skeptical of the idea that the financial wellbeing of the average American has been improved by computers.
I won't simply grant that relative wealth is equivalent to absolute wealth. That's like saying that if you have a dollar in each pocket, putting another dollar in your right pocket makes your left pocket poorer. No. Maybe it's really true that the rich have captured the productivity gained from personal computing. I don't know. But what you said was that you don't think personal computing has contributed to the financial wellbeing of Americans, on average. Even if you had data showing that most households are financially the same or worse since the dawn of personal computing, I don't know you would get from there to attributing it to personal computers (beyond post hoc ergo propter hoc, which I don't need to say is rather flimsy).
>You're free to offer counter evidence and I don't know why you're acting like you were limited to only referencing the source I provided.
I appreciate the offer to do work for no reason, but I'm fine, thanks. Why would I need to present any evidence to refute you when the evidence you presented doesn't back you up?
>Maybe it's really true that the rich have captured the productivity gained from personal computing. I don't know.
Well, we'll leave it there then. I don't know why you felt the need to debate a point you admit to not having any actual insight about, but I'm going to stop entertaining your devil's advocacy.
The 60s were 60 years ago. There were regulations back then that protected the common folk and capitalism wasn't as ruthless and aligned with the will of the 0.1% as it is now.
I want to be optimistic and agree with you, but I don't think the parallels are as strong as you say they are. We already have Anthropic withhold Mythos from the public, the governement now allowing the use of Fable, I don't think its farfetched to think that the US will start regulating access to Chinese/open-source models, pricing for compute isn't slowing down. The problem isn't AI, but who controls the compute that powers it.
I was also struck by this. We are a far more regulated society today than in the 1960s. The total body of codified federal law, statutory plus regulatory, grew from roughly 78,000 pages in 1960 to roughly 246,000 pages by 2020. The content matters of course, but I’m skeptical that under-regulation is the problem.
> The 60s were 60 years ago. There were regulations back then that protected the common folk and capitalism wasn't as ruthless and aligned with the will of the 0.1% as it is now.
No company in the 1990s ever achieved as much market power as IBM did in the 1960s-1980s. IBM controlled 70% of the computer market at the time.
Can you give me a concrete example that’s relevant to the deployment of computers?
> IBM controlled 70% of the computer market at the time.
The computer market was microscopic at the time.
> Can you give me a concrete example that’s relevant to the deployment of computers?
Nvidia. 92% of domestic GPU market, 85% of AI datacenter market.
The AI investment bubble is exploding the cost of everything that contains RAM or SSD storage. This is having and will have detrimental effects on the global economy, as supply shortages enormously increase the cost of consumer electronics, cars, anything which requires memory.
Not because AI is making so much money, far from it - it's a money sink. Rather, it's because the global supply of money got so large and so unequal that it ran out of vehicles which would provide sufficient returns for the indolent investment class. So they jumped into speculation - first crypto, now AI and the tech that enables it.
To the benefit of whom? Mass layoffs, tech industry consolidation, new products being cancelled left and right.
Ironically there's no equivalent in the modern era. This is peak social inequality breaking the economy for everyone outside the .001%. And it didn't happen because of a shortage of a raw material, or physics breaking Moore's law. It happened because big tech centralised power into a handful of gigacorporations - creating a handful of ultra-billionaires - who are enormously incentivised to centralise technology itself.
I'm replying to someone replying to "1960", not "the 80s".
Half the ones I recognise from that list seem to be somewhat older than I realised though.
But everything between and including Bethesda and Atari is more recent than the decade I was replying to. Strictly speaking everything more recent than Saga is more recent, but I did misread it initially as "the 1960s" not "1960".
Other than Apple, FAANG is fourth or fifth generation at least.
And my argument is straight assuming you're OK to say the financial PoV is a good PoV, I'm not arguing for or against that claim.
> End result for 100-16 % of Americans is the same
Yes, but FAANG got all the money without the hate AI has. Well, perhaps, I'm not sure when the public decided F had horns rather than a halo, so I can't be sure how much money they had at the time, but other than that the hate came long after the money.
How much of American society will get to share in the benefits of those new biological and medical discoveries when we don't have any health insurance because we lost our jobs to AI?
An optimistic view is that the jobs displaced by AI will be like the jobs displaced by industrialization: while fewer people will be needed to do the task, there will be more demand for the task over time, opening up new jobs with different skill sets than the previous job required.
At least one data point in favor of this view is the middling success of the AI rollout so far. Of course it’s eclipsed in the short run by the number of jobs cut to fund AI rollouts.
So just to summarize, it seems like the most optimistic outcome that the collective of HN could come up with in the hour since my original comment was that medical care would improve and you might be able to pay for it if you retrain yourself for some yet unknown new career that might suddenly appear at some point in the future. That's the optimistic vision we're asking society to buy into? No wonder it's only 16%.
The upper limit for biomedicine is halting aging, ending all illnesses including cancer and congenital genetic illnesses, and being able to bioprint replacement parts not only in the event of trauma but also as a free choice for e.g. a fully functional gender swap.
Given present culture wars, that last one may cause a lot of drama all by itself no matter how good it gets. But hopefully you get the picture about how transformative it can be.
Paying for it? Well, there's a reason I chose to move to Germany rather than the USA after the Brexit referendum.
>Paying for it? Well, there's a reason I chose to move to Germany rather than the USA after the Brexit referendum.
Does Germany have a large enough share of these companies to be on the winning side of this or is the country effectively in the same position as the average American? Just think how much could a company charge Germany to extend the life of its citizens, could Germany actually afford to pay that price especially if and when it tax base shrinks?
> Just think how much could a company charge Germany to extend the life of its citizens, could Germany actually afford to pay that price especially if and when it tax base shrinks?
The time-limited and jurisdiction-limited nature of patents aside, one of the great things about being a country is you can do things like pass laws saying "we have decided to force you to sell to us at the price we specify, and if you refuse we will shoot you".
How taxes work when labour shifts to AI is anybody's guess.
>one of the great things about being a country is you can do things like pass laws saying "we have decided to force you to sell to us at the price we specify, and if you refuse we will shoot you".
But these companies aren’t based in Germany, so you’re talking about invading other nations. It’s starting to sound like this version of the optimistic outcome is World War 3.
If they want to do business in German* jurisdiction, they operate in Germany*. Doesn't matter where the HQ is, as Musk learned the hard way with the also-dramatic-but-less-so case in Brazil.
If they don't want to do business in Germany*, they don't get to file a patent in Germany*, they don't get to sue Germany* for ignoring a patent that was geographically limited to not include Germany*.
I'm saying the country doesn't need global influence. None do.
If you sell medicine to me here in Germany, you go through the German government.
If you decide not to, you inherently allow someone else to get the pantent for your tech in Germany.
Costs of medicine will get absorbed only to the extent they are considered acceptable, this is true for everyone. The biomedical firms know this, which is also why recently it is the US who pays the most for medicines.
You are very conservative with the upper limits, probably because you are limiting yourself to medicine. With bioengineering the upper limits are hard to grasp. Why build a house, when you can grow one. Re-imagine all machines as custom-made biology. Why upload your conscience to silicon, when your body can be anything, your brain can experience anything, you brain can be reshaped to be anything.
How much is possible there, is only constrained in our understanding of biology. How difficult that turns out to be for a super intelligence… who knows? If we are actually on the cusp of the AI singularity, the future is going to be weird and/or wonderful and/or horrible, but definitely unimaginable different than today.
My mind is kind of shooing away from this intuitively. Too hard to believe. My whole life experience has been living in a different world. But imagine if "we" could actually create human level intelligence, say, for the price of a 100k USD/EUR/GBP. It could only do knowledge work, of course, but it would easily pay for itself and thus be mass produced. What is the market cap for cheap knowledge work? I would be surprised if it is only a billion human-equivalents, given humans find new creative ways to pay for themselves all the time. That explosion alone is mind-boggling and it does not rely on super-intelligence.
All of this should make one point clear: At no other point in history has it been more important to have our power structures be aligned with the interests of society.
> You are very conservative with the upper limits, probably because you are limiting yourself to medicine. With bioengineering the upper limits are hard to grasp. Why build a house, when you can grow one. Re-imagine all machines as custom-made biology.
Sure, sure, but upthread said "biological and medical" so I was taking it that way.
> Why upload your conscience to silicon, when your body can be anything, your brain can experience anything, you brain can be reshaped to be anything.
I'd avoiding considering this one for now, simply because there's too many open questions. I don't expect it to be a physics problem, but I can't rule that out.
> All of this should make one point clear: At no other point in history has it been more important to have our power structures be aligned with the interests of society.
Yup.
Unfortunately, the human alignment problem is hard, let alone the AI alignment problem.
It took decades if not hundreds of years for the social disruption of industrialization to clear.
I literally do not give a fuck about some hypothetical more productive activity I might be able to do in 150 years if it destroys my very real present ability to take care of my family today.
> An optimistic view is that the jobs displaced by AI will be like the jobs displaced by industrialization: while fewer people will be needed to do the task, there will be more demand for the task over time, opening up new jobs with different skill sets than the previous job required.
At this point, it's condescending to keep rehashing the "this is just the next industrialization era". It's been beaten to death as an invalid comparison more on this website than maybe any other.
This argument is cute and all, but ... does a data-point of 1 from 200 years ago really give us much confidence? We replaced physical labor with a massive service sector.
Now we're automating the service sector so now people can go to... eeh... the 3rd category of jobs? Seems like physical labor is the most stable career at the moment; what machines have not already automated is pretty difficult to replace it turns out. But we outsourced most of that to low cost countries except plumbers and electricians.
But will a population of plumbers really be able to maintain a population of plumbers employed?
> while fewer people will be needed to do the task, there will be more demand for the task over time, opening up new jobs with different skill sets than the previous job required.
What would be “the task”, other than physical labor or doing dull RLHF work, unless you’re in the 1% of exceptional intellectual talent that AI won’t be able to replace yet?
Hell, you don't even need to have lost your job. Health insurance will just deny claims or call them as elective and not necessary type bullshit. Insurance is already using AI to deny claims, so yet again, how is it helping society and not the corps?
The problem is, at least in theory, that it entirely changes the calculus of how advancements take place. In the past, when the pace of advancement was stronger the primary factor was the cultivation of a culture that valued prestige and knowledge over monetary gains. It didn't really matter how much money you threw at a problem because the bulk of the people responsible for advancements weren't interested in obscene wealth. Obviously those people were well compensated but any number of entities could provide that compensation. It was about bringing prestige to your lab / school / town or even country.
If AI becomes a primary catalyst for advancement it further moves the needle in the monetary direction.
That redfines advancement to mean something different than what is beneficial to society to be what is monetarily best for the owners of said advancment.
Pretty much anytime in the past, but mainly industrial revolution, up until an inflection point sometime in the 1970s. While many major areas of knowledge work have suffered from becoming profit focused the advancement of technology for societal advancement is still in existence today, even many of the major AI involved researchers have done so irrespective of monetary gain and at least make the claim that much of the push for capital is simply as a necessary requirement to sustain the research as costs increase exponentially. That's one of the reasons long tail AI profitability is dubious, but also a indicator of the aforementioned risk. If capital becomes the primary driver, i.e. self advancing AI, then it's very unlikely to be continued in any way for the sake of benefits to humanity.
Yes, that's very nice. But that's very different models from LLMs and slop image generators. AI as a term has been butchered beyond recognition; when mentioning the current harm of AI investor hype and job automation, people are talking about generative models using LLMs or prompt based input, which have seen little to no use in "accelerate biological and medical discovery"
Sure, the transformer is great for making larger neural networks with better learning potential, which are improving protein folding models a fair bit. But do we need the combined budget of the Apollo program or interstate highway system (adjusted for inflation) per year, to develop better molecular simulation models? (no, the most advanced ones run on mundane hardware and trained just fine on pre 2020 infrastructure).
So while it's true that; "AI" ((primarily) Neural network based deep learning techniques) are wonderful tools to make society better; slop generators absorbing the entire energy budget of a few small nations to generate infinite propaganda, linked-in posts and shrimp Jesus is only tangentially helping in that goal while destabilization civilization in the process.
I don’t understand this logic, what would LLMs do here? Is thinking the bottleneck, or money to go and test all the ideas people have already thought of? Are we really missing the cure for cancer because we just haven’t thought about it enough and letting an LLM churn on all the data will figure it out? All the research is probably in its training set already, so why hasn’t it come up with the cure?
Superhuman abilities for the wealthy tech oligarchs, economic indentured servitude and slums for the rest of us.
Tens of millions of people in the US alone cannot obtain basic healthcare today, how would this outcome change for them because AI solved it? The only solid paths are regulation or prying the machine from the hands of those who hold it. GLP-1s are only widely available globally affordably because the patent expired, for example.
Does accelerating biological and medical discovery require over a trillion dollars of capital to be misallocated while Americans do not have medicare for all or universal childcare?
Who is exactly going to benefit here because Americans have been given a rotten deal by neoliberalism for the last 40 years.
It feels like at some point we're going to need to re-evaluate the concept of intellectual property. I don't know how to bring about this conversation in a way that broader society will actually engage with it, but it really feels like software and digital assets are just too fundamentally different from the things we've been selling and buying for most of human history. Even if you think about a printed book, sure we've been defending peoples' rights to restrict reprinting of their ideas for a long time, but that came alongside broad support for institutions like libraries.
We now live in a world where you cannot be a professional engineer without expensive CAD software, you cannot run most businesses without some expensive licensed software for managing your books, HR, supply chain, etc. or you will just get destroyed in the market by more efficient competition. I guess my thought process on this is a little simplified, as I was thinking about how software you can run yourself is "infinitely copyable" for free. This question gets more nuanced with SaaS. While some of the enshittification can be argued to be rent-seeking behavior to have a bigger moat, you cannot perform a "DRM crack" of a webapp like you could with software restricted by CD keys and the like, creating SaaS versions of most products provide real benefits. Running a large hosted service is a serious ongoing commitment that takes real investment to maintain.
It feels like we haven't finished this necessary conversation in the pre-LLM world, about how software was creating giant powerful institutions that we were totally unprepared to regulate. In a world that looks so likely to be coming pretty soon, where LLMs can maintain a SaaS with very little human input, I just don't think we're ready for the consolidation of power that is coming.
And to the particular point being made about biomedical research, it is already pretty trivial to argue we have cartoon villain levels of evil already happening with both deciding how research dollars are allocated (diseases that disproportionately affect the poor are worked on less), and how many people we are leaving out of the modern medical system to just suffer or die at home.
We need to grapple with the fact that we have developed really powerful tools to reduce suffering, and alongside that development we have created legal tools and institutions that indefinitely keep innovations behind paywalls with prices chosen by powerful rich people. Maybe these two things need to exist together to create incentives for investment, but it feels like we need to have better conversations about how we can actively manage the knobs and levers of the economy to produce better outcomes for more people.
I fear that at this rate the oligarchs will use medical breakthroughs to keep us alive and laboring against our and nature’s will like what industrial farming has done to chickens and other livestock
Who do you think will be answering these questions in a future in which these AI companies visions become a reality? Because they already have a huge influence on society and that will only increase as the tech improves.
The most optimistic answer I can think of is that they will eventually agree to share their wealth under credible threats of violent revolution. That's the most optimistic outcome I see, they concede to threats of violence rather than needing actual violence.
> Who do you think will be answering these questions
Yes, this is the conversation we should probably be having! Thoughts?
Given that this is what is happening, given that we aren't going to stop physics, getting a handle on this indeed seems like one of the more important things we can do. If it will have any chance of working at all. If we don't get paperclipped.
But this is at least a much ... (forgive me) less wrong conversation to have compared to the one where everybody assumes we've already lost.
What do you think we should do? What powers do we still have where we is general humans who just want a pretty good life?
What do we do about the inherent centralization that big models seem to require, but how do we trade that off at the same time from everybody being able to synthesize the next Covid by asking their cell phone a question? What does it mean when most if not all white collar work actually can be automated?
Do we all end up playing VCs in our underwear swiping left/right on ideas our agents have to make money? Are we still competing in the market with the AIs?
Is there a class war? Is there some other weird thing? I don't know but man ... I sure would like to have those conversations.
Need work involve money? By far the most important work I do involves volunteer leadership roles above and beyond the things I do for money. Indeed, the whole edifice of modern tech rests on elements of FOSS that are, to within a rounding error, “volunteer”-built and -led. Elon’s an idol, but so is Linus.
The Biggest And Richest have Mythos. But does that diminish the utility, to me personally, of my open-weights model? Or even my humble-individual-grade Opus subscription? Relative to what I could do three years ago, computationally speaking?
Does a pretty good life have to involve controlling more material relative to members of a specific class, rather than just… deciding what’s enough, materially speaking; and stopping there?
> The most optimistic answer I can think of is that they will eventually agree to share their wealth under credible threats of violent revolution. That's the most optimistic outcome I see, they concede to threats of violence rather than needing actual violence.
Or they all figure out how to just bugger off to some Elysium-like stronghold, isolating themselves from and leaving the rest of society economically irrelevant.
These are the right questions to ask. I think about stuff like this often, and just as often people I discuss this with think I'm off my rocker. I, on the other hand, think some can't see past what they have been programmed to see. It's sad really, our lives are finite and much is wasted on a less than optimal layout.
I'd answer: No, we should not have to work to eat, they should not be mandatory, and no not everyone has to work.
But those problems need solved first before completely upending the current system. The system does need changed, but that change must happen before mass unemployment, not after the fact.
The system won't change until there is massive chaos and destruction. Why would it otherwise? The people with the means to gently and voluntarily change things are living like gods. They have no incentive to help. In fact, a sick and unhealthy society keeps competitors weak. No, I'm afraid to say there will be no fixing things.
How exactly are the superrich today living like gods? They use the same phones, have access to the same entertainment, same internet, same information. Most spend a lot more time stressed out and working. The poor today live better (or, at the very least more "preferenced") lives than ever in human history.
It takes time and effort and resources to produce the food you eat. If you aren't expending that time and effort and resources yourself, either to produce the food, or to produce something you can trade for it (or trade for money you use to buy it), who will?
If the answer is "other people", why should other people have to work to produce the food you eat while you don't?
If the answer is "machines", then it takes time and effort and resources to produce the machines, and we're right back to the same question.
There are no other answers.
There is no magical way to let people eat (much less have all the other things besides food, clothing and shelter that we all want to make our lives richer, such as the medium in which we're having this conversation) without work being done. Ignoring that fact of life is a recipe for disaster.
Fair enough, we are no where near post-scarcity levels of automation yet despite what frontier lab marketing says.
But still, there are more people on the planet than necessary for all of the "meaningful" work of providing for society. It would be a good thing, with the proper safety nets and protections in place (something like UBI) to have a lot of the "bullshit" jobs automated away. That leaves us into a situation like I said that "no, not everyone has to work" nor should we just force everyone to work my effectively making up roles. If half or more of the population finds themselves unemployed due to AI/Automation, the answer shouldn't be make-work "dig a ditch then fill it back up" it should be use our new found productivity and surplus to just take care of everyone's needs without it being tied to employment.
> there are more people on the planet than necessary for all of the "meaningful" work of providing for society
Says who?
I think there is a valid statement to be made that the work required for basic necessities (food, clothing, and shelter) in developed countries today is not very large, if you look at it per person, and so the cost of getting those basic necessities, per person, should not be very large either. So it should not take very much in the way of work for a person to be able to subsist at a basic level. But "not very much" is still not zero, and none of this removes the issue I described.
But you didn't say "basic necessities". You said "providing for society". And that is a lot more than just basic necessities, because "society" in developed countries is a lot more than just people's basic subsistence. We have a huge amount of wealth over and above that, which nobody wants to just do away with, and which took a lot of time and effort and resources to build, and which takes time and effort and resources to maintain. And anyone who doesn't want to live completely off the grid, in some rural area where they grow their own food, maintain their own dwelling, and don't depend on anyone else, is taking advantage of some portion of that huge amount of wealth in a developed country. And it's not at all clear that the work required per person to build and maintain that huge amount of wealth is so small that a small fraction of the people on the planet could do it, still less that they would agree to do it just for funsies, without expecting something in return.
I'm all for eliminating bullshit jobs (and digging ditches and then filling them up again is certainly a bullshit job, though of course our technological society has invented much more elaborate ones), but...
> use our new found productivity and surplus to just take care of everyone's needs without it being tied to employment.
This just goes right back to the question I asked: how are everyone's needs going to be taken care of? Who is going to do the work? Either other people are, which means you're making other people do the work required to keep you, or machines are, which means you're making other people do the work required to keep the machines running. And in either case, if you expect those other people to do that for free, out of the goodness of their hearts, you're fooling yourself. As long as nonzero work is required to keep you alive, you should expect to have to do nonzero work of some sort. Sure, you might not do just that minimum amount of work all the time--you might spend a working career doing a lot more work, saving up the surplus, and then living off it once you retire. But to expect to be taken care of while doing zero work, if nonzero work is actually required to take care of you, is unrealistic and will lead to disaster, as I said.
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.
> 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 and won't offload to machines.
The future you're referring to, where machines literally do all the work, is very different. See further comments below.
> You are saying all the benefits from those machines should go to those who invested their capital to create them, forever.
No. I am saying that whoever does the work required to build, run, and maintain the machines is not going to simply give away what they produce for free, without expecting something in return. Not all of that work is investing capital (though of course much of it is, as with any highly technological product).
In the future I was talking about, there is still work that humans can do, not connected with building, running, and maintaining the machines, that produces something that can be traded. In that future, just as now, if you're not one of the people who is doing the work to build, run, and maintain the machines, you should expect to have to do some nonzero amount of work on something else that you can trade for what the machines produce, to get enough of what they produce to keep you, if you need what the machines produce to keep you. As long as nonzero work is required to keep you, you should expect to do nonzero work to be kept.
In the future you're talking about, where there is literally no work that humans can do that produces anything that can be traded, it doesn't really matter who owns the machines, because in this future, the machines are in control and every human, whether they have some piece of paper that says they "own" the machines or not, is at their mercy. Personally, I don't think that future is where we're headed, at least not with the machines that are making all the headlines now. But if that future is where we're headed, you'll have to ask the machines for UBI or whatever else you need, and no human will have any control over what the machines decide, no matter what political scheme we put in place now.
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.
> I fail to see how your scenario is qualitatively different than mine.
It's different because in yours, humans produce nothing at all of value, whereas in mine, they do. So in yours, humans are, as I said, at the mercy of the machines. In mine, they're not.
> 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.
If the machines are doing literally 100 percent of the work, this is wrong. If the machines are doing literally 100 percent of the work, that means they don't need humans any more. They are able to be self-sufficient, independent of humans. And there will be no way for whatever humans invested in the machines to compel the machines to provide the value the machines produce to them. You can say the machines might decide to do that for whatever reason, but that's just empty speculation. The machines will have no incentive to do it, because there is nothing of value that they can get from humans in return.
Also, I did not say the machines would do a fraction approaching 100 percent of all work. I only said they would do a fraction approaching 100 percent of work that humans don't want to do and which humans would rather was automated. That's not at all the same thing.
> Whether the machines will take over is a philosophical question.
I didn't say the machines would "take over". I said they would choose for themselves what to do with whatever value they produce, in your scenario where they are doing literally all the work. I clarified that above.
Maybe figure out the answers to that before forcing everyone into an economy where they still need to work to make money, but any worthwhile jobs have been automated away.
The other question, of course, is what happens to the political power of the newly disposable?
If we can automate musclejobs so people don't have to die in the heat and we can automate brainjobs so people don't have to lose their sanity in offices, wouldn't that be a better world?
Note: it probably won't be, because of what I like to call the "Enterprise High" effect, but here we are. Basically once the only thing people have to compete over is status, shit gets nasty quicklike, think PG's high school essay but for everything and forever. Everything goes into rivalrous goods like who's sleeping with who.
Star Trek as soap opera where all their needs are met and the only concern is purely social.
But this is probably better than a world where people don't actually have material needs met?
I legit don't actually know. Would love to figure it out though, what do you think!
How much do you trust the current US administration to guide us into a future where no one needs a job in order to get health care, food, shelter, etc?
No. But capitalism requires them. I'm down to end capitalism, but maybe we should figure that out before we destroy the thing that kinda-sorta made it work?
No, but what are the odds of the robust welfare state that would be required to actually enable some sort of post-work society taking shape here in America? I'd truly like to be optimistic but, politically we have been moving in the opposite direction ever since the end of the New Deal, and the oligarchs who control the technologies are not exactly benevolent.
Most optimistic outcome: Hardware & software advances keep pace; Open weights & locally runnable models keep pace with frontier (at least the open weights part seems to hold), making AI advances widely available to anyone; Individual productivity skyrockets, having knock-on effects in most industries, slowly allowing less and less people to do the work required to maintain the basic needs of our civilization(s); UBI utopia achieved.
Do I think that's likely? No, but mostly because it would require parallel uprising of the global working class, which doesn't seem to materialize.
* Combine AI with robotics to eliminate all blue collar jobs.
* Combine AI with military hardware to kill any rabble who may become threats to the ruling class.
The most optimistic outcome is that it doesn't happen in our lifetimes. Aside from that, the best you can hope for is that the ruling class enslaves the rest but treats them well enough that most don't realize they are slaves (e.g., the Eloi from the Time Machine).
I'm cautiously optimistic about the former, but I expect the resources required by the latter will far exceed what the greed inherent to the ruling class will allow without first purging a significant fraction of the population. All we can hope for is they stop the purge before it takes everyone not in the ruling class, but given how many ultra-wealthy individuals already see the rest of us, I wouldn't bet on that.
Well the most optimistic outcome is that our democratically elected representatives start acting in the interests of all they represent, not just those with a lot of money.
One not-so-bad outcome would be that open weight models get better, smaller, more efficient, and easier to use while hardware gets faster, more efficient, and more widespread. Imagine when mobile CPUs have the GPU/NPU power of today's discrete GPUs and models are smaller and faster than today's models.
That allows really powerful local-first AI applications, rather than being beholden to AI providers. With the advance of coding agents, anyone can build their own applications.
The downstream effects of widespread local AIs is a rise in AI slop that feeds the distraction machine and attention economy as well as surveillance. I don't know what the solution to those is, but the local experience is going to be powerful.
This... this... this! This resonates soooo deeply with me.
The wild thing is that these tech "systems" (aka companies) are made up of ostensibly good people. It's often impossible to look at individual people and say, "they're the cause of this damage." I believe that some form of evil (this word feel inadequate) emerges amidst these large systems that is incredibly hard to pinpoint. It's why dissension is so fucking critical. Tech companies continue to profit from the status quo and we need courageous people who disrupt that.
> The wild thing is that these tech "systems" (aka companies) are made up of ostensibly good people.
I don't think that's the case. The people running these companies certainly aren't good people and everyone else in any position of power is either happy to hurt anyone and anything in exchange for a paycheck, or they're willing to take the money and turn a blind eye to the things they know are wrong. It's difficult to know where people stop being complicit. The amazon warehouse employee who is forced to piss in bottles or wear diapers to keep their job isn't really the problem, and I'm sure many of them hate the company they work for, but the company only works because of their efforts.
Agreed that power nearly always corrupts. It does so in often subtle and slow shifts. In general we have a paucity of leaders who wield their power on behalf of the oppressed.
The truth is that the "bad" leaders need powerful help. They need someone to come alongside them and love them into the light of the damage they've caused by drifting into complacency. And I'm not talking about "nice" love here, it might initially look more like shame.
> “The people running these companies certainly aren't good people”
That is an heavy understatement. After reading some biographies and books about the tech elite… it's just much weirder and sickly than i ever imagined. Strange cults, religions and beliefs. Surprisingly high stupidity mixed with intense hate of humans. Straight up anti-social anti-human behaviour… and drugs, so much drugs that lead to psychosis. Narcissism and superiority… you would have hard time finding anyone moderately nice to hang out with. It's a real curse that the system pushes up people like this.
You're not wrong. I also think it's a trap to think they're in a fundamentally different category than we are. Yes, the blast radius of their harm can be enormous. _And_ they're humans like you and me. Likely hiding deep wounds of their own that are screaming for care-full attention.
Most currently poor people would have the exact same failings if they suddenly found themselves with vast power.
One of the most important political developments in history was the realization that you can’t just replace a bad king with a good king. They all eventually go bad. Instead you need checks and balances to distribute power and make sure it’s not concentrated in only a few hands.
I work for a company I know is bad for society. Capitalism is really good at getting people to work at cross-purpose to the common interest. It's one of the better forms of coercion that has been devised, because it floats the tantalizing promise that you too can join in on the exploitation. And better, you don't need permission like in class-based societies: you just collect enough currency and you're in.
I think that CEOs of those companies are ethically challenged people, narcissists and sociopaths.
They are not evil and there is no evil emerging in big systems. It is that in the above have advantage in winner takes all economy and use that advantage to gain more advantages. So they end up on top. And once they are high enough, law dont apply to them. Which makes them go even higher.
> I think that CEOs of those companies are ethically challenged people, narcissists and sociopaths.
Likely true in many cases!
> there is no evil emerging in big systems
That's a very definitive statement!
What brings you to the conclusion that there aren't forces at play that we don't yet have a good name for or don't yet have the scientific means to study?
You dont become narcissists nor sociopath by getting power. Narcissists and sociopaths are more likely to seek power. And in current society, they are more likely to actually get it. But, they were like that from the start. Look at current CEOs - you can see those traits in them their whole known career.
Likewise with ethically challenged. They are more likely to become rich.
If you are not narcissists nor sociopath and gain power, you will be out of touch, you may become arrogant due to having less pushback in life. But, you wont become sociopath nor narcissist, if you cared about other people you will still have that in you.
It's beyond tech. Optimism in general is out of fashion, and pessimism is pervasive. The technology for delivering bad news and highly-engaging outrage-bait has developed much faster than our society has been able to adapt to it.
Just as americans don't trust AI or the tech industry, they don't trust any public institutions.
The fundamental problem is not AI or tech or institutions being bad. The fundamental problem is that the way we distribute information about the world has a deep negativity bias. This exists because the information economy is supported by advertisement, which requires attention to profit, and attention is easiest to attract with negativity. "If it bleeds, it leads" has been true forever.
It's scrollable algo video. This is at the root of essentially all of our current cultural woes. I was in denial about this for a long time, but atp it's undeniable.
> Optimism in general is out of fashion, and pessimism is pervasive.
Hardly surprising given we are not collectively making sufficient change to avert climate disaster. There’s no negative bias or spin there - the majority of climate scientists agree that we’ve passed the tipping point.
> And I don't mean that I went down any rabbit holes -- rather common culture was hollowed out, friends were distracted, friends fell down their own extremist rabbit holes.
Yeah... It's actually not so hard for me to just not take part in social media. The big struggle is that what I'd like to leave more than anything is a world born of its influence. The small percentage of people who are willing to go outward to places beyond the bounds of ten or so websites/apps of the Internet are still vastly influenced by them even when they reach outside. And despite that it would only take a handful of people "defecting" to form a nice tightly knit community, it's hard to find that many people with a common thread tying them together that aren't afflicted with behavior influenced by social media.
I don't want to just have places on the Internet that are actually "secretly" kind of like offshoots of Twitter/Reddit/Discord communities. That's almost not better and yet it's what a lot of attempts at "hey we're doing forums again" tends to feel like.
It’s like trying to give up smoking when all your friends still smoke. Even if you do give it up you either also give up your friends or still reek of cigarettes.
According to the NVIDIA CEO, yes. He's quite ravenous at the possibility that before he only had humans as customers, but now he is potentially opening up a new customer base where agents are customers.
Why do economies need people? With a fractional reserve monetary system you can keep pumping more money in a system as the system creates more resources, so the game never has to stop. Just end up with an AI paving the Earth in solar panels buying minerals from another AI harvesting every metal in the crust of the Earth creating quadrillions of dollars in GDP.
> I certainly know that my life was transformed for the worst by social media. And I don't mean that I went down any rabbit holes
This aspect isn't talked about enough. We discuss plenty the direct impact of social media on its users, but little about how it effects even those who don't use social media at all, by proxy. Little is said how it's impossible to escape being profiled and having shadow profiles on these products just by virtue of everyone else in your life around you using them.
That's a huge problem. There is no possible way to opt out, at all.
> ... tech companies have proved to be some of the most hostile actors in most American's lives. Perhaps edged out only by things such as actual violent crime
Not so fast. Violent crime has been declining for about 30 years. Tech has been ascendant in that time.
This comment resonated with me in a way that few pieces of writing do. My only complaint is that it’s perhaps too short. I get the impression that you could turn this comment into longer post (with citations) and I encourage you to do so.
> There is no successful social media company that actually cares about the negative impacts it has had on society. They speak about things such as "providing value" where value = time spent on the platform. They do not care if they ruin lives.
I will never forget Ruchi Sanghvi’s remarks at the Female Founders Conference talk in 2015[0]:
> It [the News Feed] became this virtuous cycle that we all dream of: consumption and production that just kept on giving. […] Even though everyone said they hated it, engagement had doubled.
I think the main reason for this outrage is partly a confluence of factors some of which you pointed it.
But my money/theory is on what I call `alonliness` specifically due to lack of labor mobility: There is no good rapid transport connecting american interior towns to big cities and people don't want to move due to a variety of factors(real estate debt, cultural affinity to area). To be clear these people are alone but not necessary lonely(there is that going on too in other segments of the population). And once you don't understand or never had the opportunity to understand something(or rather only experience its bad side effects), you distrust it at best and fear and hate it at the worst.
If you ask people 1:1 IRL who live in communities where the main source of employment is not whatever Silicon valley businesses are. They will ask you questions or make comments like " 'those' jobs are not real American jobs!" or "Aren't you afraid of getting thrown on subway tracks in NYC?". These are actual questions i got from people there.
These give an indication of the disjointedness of the sets in the venn-diagram of of the socio-economic equality and what creates such psyche. I am not sure why some think its a PR/Comms problem for big tech.
Life is like a supermarket. You are supposed to seek out the good things. You can't stop and stand and rage in the first aisle, which is filled with ultra processed food for the masses. You have to seek out the good ingredients in the back and make an effort.
You can't get stuck in life being disappointed in average people. You have to seek out good people. And good places and good things.
Or stay in the cranky cynic rabbit hole. God knows there are unlimited amounts of other cranky people to back you up. Maybe even the majority?
You are naive, you don't seriously expect people to "seek out the good ingredients" do you? When the shit ingredients are addictive, cheaper than the good ones and more available? The entire premise of these platforms is use whatever edges possible to get more ad money, they do that by getting people addicted to their phones and using psychological tricks that have been refined through over a decade of A/B testing to be effective.
you miss my point entirely. People are a product of their environment. Just because YOU or I don't fall down this trap doesn't mean our friends or family or people in our communities won't.
In my country we charge sales tax on processed foods but not on fresh foods. It's because we can make the good choice easier and the bad choice harder. We shouldn't be doing the opposite, then laying all the responsibility on individuals (many of which will still be children who aren't aware of the consequences of their actions)
Maturity is understanding that no matter who is to blame for the situation you are in or the problems you have, you as an individual are most of the time the only one who can fix your problems. Nothing is more effective than a determined person. And nobody knows you better than yourself.
Unless you think you can change the entire universe to do your bidding - then the best thing you can do is helping yourself and helping others. Nobody is helped by complaining. And I'm not missing your point, I just don't share your perspective.
People who want to be mislead will always find a way to be mislead, because they want somebody else to be blamed and "responsible" for their life and their mistakes. Failing to realize that it is always themselves in the end who pay the price and bear the burden. That's how they have been bred on this earth. "At least it was not my fault" feels perfectly good in the soul of many suffering people, because they have been raised within a guilt or shame culture. And there are plenty of unethical people willing to indulge them in this falsehood.
That's why I'm saying to seek out what is good instead of what is evil. And help those who want to be helped.
> Maturity is understanding that no matter who is to blame for the situation you are in or the problems you have, you as an individual are most of the time the only one who can fix your problems. Nothing is more effective than a determined person. And nobody knows you better than yourself.
This is not an individual problem, this is a social problem.
>Unless you think you can change the entire universe to do your bidding - then the best thing you can do is helping yourself and helping others. Nobody is helped by complaining. And I'm not missing your point, I just don't share your perspective.
There are things that are going wrong that are beyond the scope of individuals - we fix these things by regulations and laws
>because they want somebody else to be blamed and "responsible" for their life and their mistakes.
This is an irrelevant strawman, I don't care about blaming, I want to fix the issues that we have in society.
>That's why I'm saying to seek out what is good instead of what is evil. And help those who want to be helped.
This is not a solution, you may as well go to clinically depressed people and go "well why don't you just be happy?" - it doesn't work. Just like how saying "well don't use social media!" doesn't work.
Sure, if we just ignore network effects and feedback loops and applications being designed to psychologically make themselves addictive as possible. Social media addiction will definitely just fix itself if we just tell people to, except this hasn't worked has it?
I say this as someone highly critical of social media. I'm not sure you can entirely blame Social Media for this. The fact is, outrageous things are happening constantly throughout the world. We just didn't hear about most of it before Internet connectivity and the reach of social media. It's not like social media suddenly created outrage. It's just informing people about the existing absolutely outrageous things happening. Are the algorithms tuned for outrage? Sure. But that doesn't mean these outrageous things are not happening.
Back in the 1960s there was widespread outrage over the Vietnam war, but no social media drip to blame it on. The difference was: The outrageous acts were getting press and constant attention, through non social media channels.
You can either be 1. ignorant / not paying attention to the state of the world, 2. paying attention but deliberately ignoring the state of the world, or 3. outraged all the time.
I'm not saying it is good to be outraged, but that's our world. The state of the world is absolutely outrageous, and a normal human being should be feeling outrage at what is constantly being done.
Anecdotally, my optimist and disappointment has a lot less to do with flaws in the technology, versus outcomes that rested on the social / political / power-dynamic side of things.
For example, instead of everyone being able to command the digital factory of capital-equipment on their desk (or in their palm) to pursue their personal interests and welfare, the devices feel like tools of someone else who considers you a resource to be exploited, and they can command people to beat you up if you use "your" property "wrong".
To cast things out in a future-direction, imagine being excited about the dawn of practical spaceships, and the disappoint when--somehow--there are no limits on launch pollution, monopolies abound, and the average migrant to cleaner worlds must enter into multi-generational indentured servitude.
People just forget the before times. No one wants to go back to printing out driving directions or emailing photos. We take all these things for granted now but I am 100 certain the technology we have now has saved hundreds of millions of lives through downstream butterfly effects.
I am not so sure. The world of printing out driving directions or emailing photos sounds a lot more calm. Also, simply quite enjoyable. The current world is cramming too many events in too little time, it seems. Stress is quite bad for health so I am not so sure about these hundreds of millions of lives saved. It may also have costed quite a few.
nah, that was ass. i think the really major negative has just been scrollable video. all these other things - uber, airbnb, grocery pickup, etc. have largely just made my life better.
Can you imagine sitting around waiting for a phone call these days? At home? With a landline? Lol. Or going to the video store to drop $20 (with inflation today: $48) on three movies that you had to actually return by driving. The romantic waxing about hanging out with people is hilarious. More often than not it meant coming home at 10 pm and watching shitty network tv by yourself. Now I can play games with all my friends across the entire world.
I never done any of those things. And I was there, I was old enough. I was not desperately waiting for phone calls or paid a lot of money to borrow movies.
Somehow, I occupied myself just fine, was meeting friends regularly and did activities regularly. There was no societally wide lack of entertainment.
I think you are probably an outlier if you've never rented a movie in the 90s and shouldn't generally be used as a good example of how life was. It's frankly absurd that you would even bring it up as a virtue.
I did not brought it up as virtue. Virtue is entirely your framing. I just was not renting movies nor were my friends nor family. Meeting friends and occupying yourself was completely normal, any average person did it. In fact, healthy people will create fun and entertainment for themselves no matter the technological level of the society.
Frankly, it is super weird that you see doing fun stuff as some kind of virtue.
By the way, I am old enough to remember that world. When I was young, people had fat books with maps of most large and medium size places in the country.
nah, i distinctly remember family road trips as a kid. Driving was super stressful with my mom yelling about missing an exit as she reads the map, getting lost in a not so nice neighborhood, etc.
Oh man I can tell you're young. Those directions weren't always right. You couldn't just pull out your phone and find the nearest hospital if something happened during your trip. Or call 911 and have them find you by GPS. And that's just one casual convenience you take for granted. People used to drive around asking random people to use their phone in emergencies. Not exactly fast when seconds matter.
Honestly legit response. I didn’t really think about the 911 tracking which is so precise now. It is a bummer though how that location privilege has been abused.
That's because you're measuring yesterday's worlds with today's demented expectations.
Because there was no faster way to do it, it was okay to wait for someone to send you those photos via email. If you were late for a meetup somewhere new, that was okay because people knew you might have missed the street a few times stopped for directions etc.
We have more convenient things, sure. But they come with increased and rather frenzied expectations.
Those were wonderful times, I see no problem with driving by a paper map, emailing photos, and sending gpg-encrypted e-mails, which all the surveilling scum could go fuck themselves about, at all.
Convenience is the glue that got all the frogs stuck to their boiling pots.
> the technology we have now has saved hundreds of millions
It was always an option to have the technology without the bullshit. We can have GPS without allowing Google or Apple to track our every movement. We can have useful websites without allowing the people running those websites to mine every scrap of data we upload and sell our private information to anyone willing to pay for it.
It's not a requirement or law of nature that every technology sold must be used against the customer, we just haven't reached a point where we say enough is enough and outlaw such consumer hostile practices. Instead we've been allowing the corporations who seek to screw us over at every opportunity to gain more and more influence over the governments that could constrain them making it harder for us to fight back against the abuses we're subjected to.
Everything you just said is readily available now. You can use a FOSS OS on a mobile device with an offline mapping program. They were available before Google Maps was even a thing on Android 1.x. I know because I used to download them and use them without even having mobile internet in rural areas. The only thing stopping you is yourself.
Has it? If we've saved hundreds of millions, then I would argue simply the amount of money spent in AdTech could have saved billions.
The Internet of the 90s and early 2000s was amazing. The Internet today is a dumpster fire of attention hoarding, regurgitated content and, now, slop.
Society as a whole may be better off without a lot of the convenience features we have, but I also don't agree that it's all or nothing. We could have an amazing tech relationship today. But a select few wanted to monetize it for themselves. Here we are, welcome to the free market.
Yes, I am from the olden times, the dark times… Times of fear and terror, printer not working, having to write things down by hand, ach, the horror… Today much better, says me, yass the foundations of democracy and fabric of society has been eaten away like by millions of worms, teenagers constantly fighting with mental illnesses, lies and disinformation, young strong lads drug or gambling addicts… but, the minor conveniences, my lad! Ach, those I would not live without. The minor conveniences…
I wish we could unplug AI especially when you watch videos of tech folks saying it could destroy us. Umm well then.
Yet i guess it's here to stay and AI needs us, our human content to stay relevant and thrive. Personally, I think it should pay all of us (set up some system or systems) for every piece of content we create daily & choose to publish. THat way we all thrive for keeping it relevant and it thrives alongside us. Wrote about one idea / a system that would get us paid for the daily content we produce via living each day https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/ai-to-pay-for-all-americans...
But, again I'd be happy if all of society and cultures unplugged it!
The loneliness epidemic, a constant drip-feed of outrage -- all so that people can make a small amount of money, distracted driving. Nearly every single service becoming worse over time, etc. Since then, the tech CEOs has been sidling up to the halls of power and effectively begging to help destroy privacy as thoroughly as possible.
I certainly know that my life was transformed for the worse by social media. And I don't mean that I went down any rabbit holes -- rather common culture was hollowed out, friends were distracted, friends fell down their own extremist rabbit holes. There is no successful social media company that actually cares about the negative impacts it has had on society. They speak about things such as "providing value" where value = time spent on the platform. They do not care if they ruin lives.
So a few years ago, nearly everywhere you went people are talking about how thoroughly AI was going to transform society. You couldn't go anywhere without hearing it. Of course people are wary. Big tech has been a net negative in very loud, intrusive, and obvious ways in _most_ people's lives. And now they're saying they're going to radically reform society.
The only hope we have is that they're wrong, and their power to change things will be minimal. For sure, if they really how the power to radically change everything, they would change it for the worse and would never spend a moment worrying about the damage they had done.