> Instead, solutions should be developed through a public democratic process that includes elected officials, policymakers, educators, health workers, local officials, and community leaders. Millions of people will have their lives disrupted, and we’ll need a stronger, more flexible social safety net to help them manage the transition. Local communities are already raising concerns about the energy and water needed for data centers. Without solutions, some groups will push for stopping AI development and deployment altogether.
Sounds great, except it ignores the fact that capital interests have controlled the levers of our faux democracies for decades, with no end in sight.
More importantly, even if it did contain the solution, there is no obvious way for a country with an already corrupt government to transition to such a thing.
I think you mean no obvious pacific way. Which is what any democratic citizen wants and seeks out. There are other solutions and way too obvious, in fact you have examples all over the world going back centuries.
“Sounds great, except it ignores the fact that capital interests have controlled the levers of our faux democracies for decades, with no end in sight.”
This is not election denialism. This is almost just a fact except they also subjectively declare that we have a faux democracy (which also seems accurate to me).
Yes it is. If you insist that the result of a democratic election does not reflect the will of the people, that, and nothing else, is election denialism.
No it’s not. Election denialism in 2026 in an American context refers to Donald Trump and his supporters denying the results of the 2020 election (and related claims). Pretending that capital does not significantly affect our elections contributes to the deterioration of democracy.
If you actually don’t believe capital plays an outsized role in elections and government then take a gander at the Wikipedia page called Campaign finance in the United States. There is a chart called Percent of races won by top spending candidate… and lots of other information. Also looking into the role of lobbying in American politics.
If "capital interests" (ugh, capitalism) controlled democracy, please esplain:
- Michael Bloomberg
- Hillary Clinton (both in the 2008 primary and 2016 general)
- Alex Vindman
...
a simple Google search reveals that while there is some threshold amount of dosh necessary to get noticed, _more money != more votes_. To believe otherwise is is willful ignorance. Sometimes your favorite candidate loses because the median actual voter (you know, the guy who actual fills out the form) prefers the status quo for their own reasons and not because they're brainwashed or whatever it is that "capital interests" do to them.
I’m not sure how to reply to your comment since it is almost entirely addressed to some imaginary person and is full of projection. I’ll just add that both parties serve capital.
> The election denial movement in the United States is a widespread false belief that elections in the United States are rigged and stolen through election fraud by the opposing political party. Adherents of the movement are referred to as election deniers.
It requires that people still believe they're being given legitimate choices. My comments above do not.
It does reflect the will of the people, but the causal chain doesn’t stop there.
The will of the people is the result of the corporate interests that control the democratic system.
Manufacturing Consent is an excellent read - and don’t stop at Chomsky, read Bernays, who pretty much codified the system as it runs today. Propaganda is a good place to start.
This is akin to arguing "nothing ever changes or improves in Liberal democracies", when policy history doesn't reflect that.
Large parties represent large coalitions, so there are more compromises and things happen slower, but they still happen. Not always for the better, as we're seeing when populists are elected.
> This is akin to arguing "nothing ever changes or improves in Liberal democracies", when policy history doesn't reflect that.
Ever-growing wealth disparities, eroded rights, mass enshitification in a race to the bottom, and widespread hatred of ones neighbor over fake outrage culture war propaganda disseminated from corporate media are not a trends of improvement. They are trends of decline, unless you're of the class who has their doomsday bunker on standby.
Higher concentration of wealth is not new, it's happened many times and dissipated many times. Real-wages are still growing, which is what we care about qua improvements in our well being (and what attracts immigrants). The key risk though is regulatory capture from consolidation of tech companies (much of this "wealth" in question is stock valuation, which tends to get reinvested in companies), but anti-trust is still a thing, and has been wielded relatively recently.
> enshitification
This is about consumer products, not government policy. Buy an alternative, you have those choices.
> widespread hatred of ones neighbor over fake outrage culture war propaganda disseminated from corporate media
Based on polling, the most salient issues seem to reflect economic anxieties. Even stances on immigration are really about that.
When the established parties and institutions fail, people lash out and elect populists. The populist fervor will wane once housing affordability is appropriately tackled for instance.
> not a trends of improvement
Yeah, not everything improved in the short-run, that isn't remarkable. Many things did. Look at real-wages, look at the extreme poverty rate globally as defined by the UN. I could go on.
> Higher concentration of wealth is not new, it's happened many times and dissipated many times.
That's a very clinical way to put it. Usually when its "dissipated", its through war or economic depression or both, and a great many people who never had any wealth suffer needlessly, while the wealthy rarely do.
It would be nice if we could like, _not_ do that, and try something different for once, instead of throwing up our hands and saying "well that's just how its always been!"
You're forgetting anti-trust. Standard Oil controlled 90% of the oil production in the U.S. until it was splintered into numerous companies. We're not really at the point where this needs to be done for tech.
Also, dynastic wealth itself doesn't sustain itself well, and dwindles in a generation. See: the aforementioned Rockefeller, whose grandchildren are nowhere near as rich. Notwithstanding that many of the wealthy (in particular, Bill Gates) are donating the majority of their wealth when they die.
State the connection, because it seems like your next argument is going to be "the government didn't stop them", as though that's their job.
> Increasingly, we don't:
Think of a single enshittified product that matters to you for which there is no alternative but to use it.
This also all pales in contrast to the conveniences and improvements afforded over time. You can now access and stream basically any music you want for free, for example. Television sets are now commodities, which tend to be cheaper adjusted for inflation. Etc etc. So the rhetoric about enshittification doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
> Based on polling, the most salient issues seem to reflect economic anxieties. Even stances on immigration are really about that.
Meh, the economic anxiety voters are systematically voting for economically worst performing parties. They may say "it is economy" in polls, but it is hardly believable.
The difference between men and women in voting patterns is not about economy.
Average voters don't understand much about the economy, but that doesn't mean they aren't reacting to externalities like housing costs, prices, or other worse outcomes.
This take completely ignores the amount of money in politics and that both parties have funding from overlapping sources which in turn represent how similar the two parties are on certain key issues such as the Palestinian genocide.
Notwithstanding that this sum is smaller than people think, seeing bipartisan stances does not in itself reflect a failure; it can just as easily be a good thing. All this reveals is that you have a pet issue that isn't being serviced well currently by the 2 parties, but tides and voter sentiment change; within a few short years most people have soured on Israel, and this will be reflected in forthcoming elections.
I don't have a single "pet issue", I care about a great deal of issues that neither party actually cares about addressing, and it's well-established that both parties push conservative, right-leaning neoliberal policy. I don't see these changes occurring overnight or fast enough to be acceptable.
lol Trump's party has not been the least bit neoliberal, it is populist and protectionist. Brutal immigration crackdowns and tarrifs are the opposite of neoliberal. Even Biden was a departure, with tariffs and CHIPS act. None of that is neoliberal, which peaked in the Clinton era.
Incidentally, among the most effective remedies for what ails us now, like zoning reform, would be derided as "neoliberal" by progressives, though the evidence speaks for itself, and YIMBYs are making in-roads.
That doesn't mean that state capacity doesn't have it's place. We historically would spend more on innovation, on NASA, DARPA and the like, and that matters a great deal. But it doesn't preclude removing red tape that hinders govt and private sector efforts.
It is a well known physical property of lawn rakes that one end is heavier than the other, as opposed to evidence my neighbor is abusive in hitting me with one over and over.
No your choice was between a competent leader and a con man. When people type what you type it seems obvious you are attempting to avoid responsibility for choosing the con man.
I blame everyone that has this "there was no good choice" bull. That is exactly what it is an excuse for blowing up everything and claiming no responsibility.
> No your choice was between a competent leader and a con man.
No, the non-con man option was an unpopular candidate who was installed after skipping a primary process. A primary process that was shown to be a complete joke during the previous cycle.
> When people type what you type it seems obvious you are attempting to avoid responsibility for choosing the con man.
I never chose the con man. Nor did I choose the party who manufactured consent for him with their pied piper "strategy" that was exposed only by wikileaks. Did the party reflect on this? No. They got mad at the person who leaked it.
"No good choice" in the 2020 election was a universal and sane opinion to have. The 2024 election was the thinnest electoral margins in recent history. You don't know something everyone else doesn't, and these inflammatory comments are out of touch with reality.
Political campaigns spend enormous amounts of money on ads to influence public opinion. That makes politicians beholden to their donors. Which subverts democracy from "the will of the people" to "the will of the wealthy". All of these are uncontroversial facts and fit the narrative GP is saying.
Election denialism is about rejecting official election results.
But anyway, on the subject of the usefulness of your vote, Trump was elected on an America first platform, touting ending foreign wars and avoiding new ones.
If you elected him and his party based on that I think you're going to be pretty disappointed with the effectiveness of your vote in its ability to bring about actual outcomes that you want.
There is no functional difference between the statement "democracy is subverted by a grand corporate conspiracy" and "our elections are invalid", because the only way the former happens is if the latter happens. If the latter didn't happen, then you're just upset about the outcome of a legitimate election. Which is a fair thing to be in a democracy, but it does not mean that the whole system is corrupt. Insistence that any other outcome than your preferred outcome is illegitimate is dictator behavior
The popular conception (and platonic ideal, hence the popular conception) of our democratic republic is that of equal representation. Our system favors candidates with money; the system is corrupt and to say so is merely stating a fact.
But hey, lick boots if you wanna. It seems to be the tech way these days.
> We have to think now about how to reduce job losses so that everyone can share in the prosperity that AI creates.
And I thought he is a smart man. This is so last century thinking. We need to prepare that there will definitely be no jobs for everyone and that will be falling all the time, it’s not a one-time event you should “prepare for”.
There’s nothing to prepare, we already have funds and productivity to feed and shelter everyone. UBI is not a privilege, previous generations were slaving 9 to 5 all their lives so we can have it. This is it, arrived, and now, enter a few decades of historical period when all of us waiting for government bureaucrats to realise that UBI is a right.
> all of us waiting for government bureaucrats to realise that UBI is a right
You'll be waiting forever, then. This isn't something that you can wait to be given to you, it must be taken.
Or, put much more eloquently by one of the greatest Americans:
"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress"
I don't understand why people always spring for UBI. I don't want free money; I want to earn my living. I want to work.
Why do we not push for labor reform, as we did a century ago? Depending on the actual productivity gains from AI broadly, set a new standard of 4-hour workdays. Or 3-day work weeks.
Cool. You can work three days a week and earn a fraction of what you make now - far less than a living wage - because the market value of your labor has been reduced to nil by AI. You aren't going to be paid more because you're more productive, that isn't how it has ever worked.
The rest of us want to be able to eat once capitalism decides we aren't worth the cost to keep alive.
Their wealth is more contingent on our consumption than employment status. If that goes, then you're looking at a zero-sum society where no new wealth is generated.
Ultimately people will remain enterprising status-seekers. Rich people can already sit around with their wealth doing fuck-all excepting consuming, and they don't.
In a post-scarcity society, having a meagre policy to keep people alive and not-unruly is cheap. It's also getting way ahead of ourselves, since it's nowhere in sight. Software hiring was up this year.
Not really. The planet is crowded, currently with mostly productive members of society.
For the ultra rich psychos who run the show, do you really think they want poor people hanging around? When we can be wiped out in a few months?
Consider the pure greed Donald Trump is displaying. Now imagine that the 1000 most powerful people are the same, except they are smart enough to at least not rub it in peoples faces on live television.
> do you really think they want poor people hanging around?
Which by your rationale would include everyone who isn't rich (and tautologically would mean "no one is rich anymore"). They do not care whether we're hanging around, the same way they do not care now whether poor people exist. It has no bearing. All that does is whether they remain rich and powerful, and last I checked, that's relative. Being the only one left on the planet won't make you feel rich, and there being poors on a piece of land won't have any bearing on you.
“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work together for the benefit of all.” —- John Maynard Keynes
What does the data and observations tell us so far, in this context?
UBI as a concept does not add up. It assumes an even production of all goods that people might need, but there isn't, you are giving everyone fiat currency that is not inherently tied to any physical good.
Very fast you will descend into either plan economy where you get food stamps, or an economy where people are trading goods that are actually tied to value.
For example, you go to the store to get eggs, since everyone has UBI, they decide to also get eggs, the eggs either run out, or the store raises the price, at which either you will get food queues like in the USSR, or everyone will need more UBI to afford eggs.
The solution to this is to increase egg production, but this is not instant, and not necessarily a priority, while money transfers are instant.
The funny thing is that the wealthy and powerful don't realise that a collapse of that scale means that every switches to professional guillotine builder over night.
There is no preparing for that.
I doubt we get there to be honest, they all have wealth and power because there are consumers with money. No more consumers, no more wealth and power.
P.S. remember my guy Bill didn't write a nice blog post about any of the allegations around his involvement with Epstein. So, you know, this is basically just marketing more than Bill's thoughts.
My interpretation of his point was that people get a ton of meaning out of their work in our current capitalist system, and regardless of whether or not we change our system in the long term, if we don't do something about jobs in the short term, there will be a civil crisis:
> In a capitalist society, employment is the way most people get the money they need to pay for the basics of life as well as being a key source of dignity and social connection.
> When a community has high unemployment, the ripple effects can be pervasive. Research suggests that in some parts of the United States, factory closures contribute to a rise in deaths from opioid overdoses. Now imagine similar pressures on both white-collar and blue-collar workers nationwide.
> Waiting until people are already displaced or underemployed will be too late. AI is a structural challenge to the way our economy is organized, and it requires thinking and action now.
----
I agree he should've addressed UBI directly. When he was asked about it in an AMA a decade ago he basically said he's optimistic it can happen eventually but not yet [1]. And in that same AMA he said he wished to see "computers that can read and understand information like humans do" within his lifetime [2]. Now that the latter has happened I wish we could see how his thoughts have changed on the former.
He is a smart man -- with an enormous $100B vested interest in the capital side of this equation. It is (meager) progress to hear any acknowledgement from capital at all that we might conceivably need to do something other than pump aggregate labor supply and dump aggregate demand.
This is a baby step, but it's a baby step in the right direction.
I really don't think UBI can ever happen in the US. There is a moral imperative of "industriousness". Keynes' prediction (or maybe desire) ~100 years ago of the 15 hour workweek never panned out.
In the US, you're at least as likely to have half the population vote that anyone who cannot find a job should be exterminated, despite a large proportion of those voting for it being the very people most likely to become jobless, because Fox News will convince them it will mostly affect immigrants and/or some other group they're supposed to hate.
More people work. Keynes died in 1946 - meaning they had grand depression in his lifetime. Moreover, women employment went up by significant amounts - middle and upper class women would not work back then.
I support UBI and wealth taxes, but I also think generally that will be a difficult transition in terms of social upheaval. There are so many people I know who are financially well-off but completely fall apart when there is no visible professional hierarchy to give them meaning.
One would hope that this would still go down better than destituting large percentages of the world population, but I wonder.
“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
Wonder if there should be a "UBI reservation" set up where everyone gets it, and very basic needs like housing and food are taken care of in a self-sustaining manner with machines. (which is the whole premise, everything is automated so nobody needs to work). Then people who don't like the freeloading can opt out and live as usual, and those who like it can move to the reservation.
Based in your first two sentences, I think your understanding of UBI is mistaken. You seem to be under the impression that people don't or can't have a job when there is UBI. This is not the case. If you don't believe me, just look at Alaska.
Everyone enjoys some sort of benefit, tax break, subsidy, etc. from the government. UBI is the same thing in the form of a regular, universal transfer payment. Nothing more, nothing less.
I do understand UBI. I was referring to the previous context that AI would introduce mass loss of jobs and overall reduced employment, not specifically to UBI being a replacement for jobs.
He’s saying the same thing as you. I don’t think UBI will magically appear. If people lose their jobs, what guarantee do you give that they can survive? Thats his point - prepare for this event so that the guarantee can be made sooner.
You can build livable domiciles for a few grand in bulk, recycle waste via composting to reduce infrastructure needs, shared batteries and solar, etc. There are plenty of people on youtube demonstrating the permie off grid lifestyle. Grains are cheap and we have a wild boar and deer problem in a lot of the country so food wouldn't be too expensive either.
For the record, I'm into permaculture/regenerative agriculture and enjoy the lifestyle, all I need is shared satellite internet. If my choice was between working 60 hours a week at 3 jobs to barely keep my head above water, or live in an agricultural commune, I would take the commune every time.
The resources exist, it's just a matter of allocating them properly. We have lumber and concrete to build houses. We have fertilizer and land and trucks to grow and ship food. And apparently all of this will be immensely cheaper (practically free) within a decade thanks to robotics and AI (according to the trillionaire half this place worships.)
With that said I doubt that reallocation will happen in any meaningful way, and as the elites eliminate more people from the economy we'll descend further into violence and chaos. If the parasite class was generous, they wouldn't be parasites.
Worker protections have almost never been granted by the profiteers... not child labor laws, not weekends, not overtime, not safety regulations, not minimum wage, not workers comp... the working class is not what it is today because of "sharing prosperity" and there's been a lot of prosperity — it's all a series of fights.
This is all well known, but I recently visited an old coal mine in Pennsylvania, and much of the tour was talking about the labor conditions, and the generational "trap" of working there. If a worker died, the family had little time to leave the company-provided house without providing someone to work. What often happened is that one of the children would work to maintain the household.
>[0]the "rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for—not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of the country."
Are you going to strike? Are we going to take on the government by force?
People need to understand there is no democracy in a post-AGI world.
The power of human collectives comes from a combination of our collective economic power and our physical power. Without either leaders would be smart to just do what the companies paying all the bills ask if they don't want their families to starve too.
Just to put Bill Gates thoughts on AI into perspective, this was his comment on an AMA 9 years ago to the question
"What kind of technological advancement do you wish to see in your lifetime?":
> The big milestone is when computers can read and understand information like humans do. There is a lot of work going on in this field - Google, Microsoft, Facebook, academia,... Right now computers don't know how to represent knowledge so they can't read a text book and pass a test.
- If AI and robots are as good as Bill suggests , one can infer that AI will signal the end of cities, at least the end of megacities. If the home robot can clean and cook and also do my taxes, hair, and diagnose my health , one is more likely to escape unemployment by moving to a small town where he can find land and resources, and use robots to exploit them, just like humans have always done when economy was based in agriculture. If there is no longer a reason for people to live close together, decentralization is the most likely outcome.
- The biggest geopolitical impact will probably come from AI weapons. Just like previous shifts in weaponry caused the fall of empires , the rise of naval empires and the rise of national modern superpowers, AI may lead to the end of the UN and beginning of something new.
- Societies will change but a plan is not needed and it's most likely useless. Societies adapt , and nobody has ever been able to predict how. Let's not make the same mistake again.
I will believe that "AI will do all the work" when private prisons stop contracting inmates to do slave labor and employers stop hiring undocumented migrant workers.
Don't discount that tech billionaires pursuing this are themselves nihilistic. They would enjoy the fruits of our labor and will not care what comes after they die.
3 citations and a lot of conjecture. Is the article only targeting SWEs? The one study cited said 22-25 age range saw a 16% decrease in relative employment declines (for SWEs)[0]. But everyone outside that range was not impacted. Further, what about all the trades jobs around data center development?
“Demand is also being intensified by major investments in infrastructure, manufacturing, reshoring, and AI. Data center growth alone has added a net 315,000 skilled-trade workers over the past five years, according to the report, putting additional pressure on an already tight labor market.”
We literally do not have enough trades people to build out data centers and their salaries are increasing as a result. These are skilled labor jobs (plumbers, electricians, IT, etc.). Does Bill Gates care about the rest of the economy outside of SWE?
Honestly a lot of those decreases are also because companies are trying to wait and see as much as possible to see if there is any truth to the conjecture.
If the result will be huge job loss doesn't that mean the overall buying power of all across all economies will go down drastically which begs the question who will buy the stuff that these companies that get rid of people are making?
Prices will also go down dramatically. When you eliminate human labour completely, you are essentially stuck with the problem of efficiently allocating raw materials. And raw materials are abundant compared to what human labour can currently produce. We're still a long way from there though.
Exactly. Henry Ford made sure his own employees could afford the cars they were making.
These people making these kind of grand pronouncements either have an embarrassing blind spot, or are not making sincere, but carefully calculated statements.
Just via competition, Chinese researchers are doing much more than Bill Gates could ever hope to do through 'thought leadership' spread the benefits of generative AI.
> In the United States, I’ve met families who, understandably, were overwhelmed by the process of applying for health insurance, student aid, or food assistance. Faced with a huge stack of complicated bureaucratic forms, many felt like giving up. AI can streamline things dramatically
I'd love to see anyone building Grokbot or ChatGPT Work talk about how they're thinking about this use case, specifically. It seems greatly important and tractable given how little government websites & forms change over time.
On the other end - yes, it will create massive vectors for abuse & fraud, since govt services are designed to have roadblocks to reduce usage. But fraud has always been possible, even without AI (so many recent examples to pull from).
IMO it's best to maximize social benefits to see where the tradeoffs really are. We won't know until we push on it!
If the goal is to make things easier for everyday Americans, replacing these with universal schemes would do that and will also prevent abuse and fraud (most of which comes down to forgetting to dot your lowercase j on work requirement form #27).
>On the other end - yes, it will create massive vectors for abuse & fraud, since govt services are designed to have roadblocks to reduce usage.
That the government collects taxes and then understaffs the department that distributes the benefit is the first fraud. 30 years after email was invented, why do people have to wait on the phone for hours to talk to a government employee?
I'm interested how to mitigate risk without over-regulating & stifling innovation from exactly the people who are most thoughtful about the risk (which is who we should want innovating & leading).
Even though this article is new, I'm not sure it has materially new ideas vs what some other labs have been claiming for years.
Enforcing safeguards that apply globally to good and bad actors alike so far as proved quite difficult - compute is essentially the only lever, and that's tenuous at best.
Unlike nuclear arms (where functionally there's a limit at MAD), so far we believe that with enough compute, energy, and algorithms, intelligence will continue to scale (and not only scale - but compound)
The issues are global and they are correct. The landscape is not the same in US as in other countries, but this is a global problem and should be handled as such.
I'm not against a tax on AI or robots, but I think this may be the big chance we have to look at universal income with new eyes. If jobs are to disappear, why not soften the blow and get rid of some of the inefficiencies many government processes mean in terms of other citizen benefits?
What I worry about more however is the malevolent actors across the AI space. I'd argue that most companies mean well, but chasing profit at all costs can very easily turn into malevolence. Both these and actors being malevolent on purpose needs to have a control function.
So first of, there is no proof of him having had sex with a minor/kid on that island. It might be a lot stronger of an evidence from others but i was not able to find anything.
And secondly, if you follow bill gates, you will realise that with his philanthropic side, he did quite a lot of good in the world. For sure not as a young bill gates but he has changed for sure.
And thirdly, you can think of people whatever you want, but you should read on what people in positions like him say because they might have unique viewpoints or information you are not aware of. What you do with this information is yours.
I use this type of information as a type of signal: If a lot of smart people say similiar things, i will increase the trust in that piece of information.
Btw. i did read his book about climate change and found it good.
I thought Gates' take on the human relational aspects of AI to be thoughtful, but I am surprised that his analysis on the economic and jobs aspect of AI offers little more than the party line. Every other technological advance that improved productivity (Industrial Revolution, etc.) has resulted in the loss of some jobs but the creation of jobs in other areas and an overall increase in the standard of living (although admittedly not uniformly distributed across the population). Why will AI be different?
Because any job it creates it can automate as well, for example a lot of people here think that understanding how AI models operate internally or being up to date with the latest models will save them from making their jobs obsolete, it will not, AI itself will be better than you at picking the next model to deploy, at testing the speed of reasoning that beats it's own. Anything it will need to learn it will learn it faster than you with the ability to handle much more complexity than your brain.
If you believe the hype then this isn't a transformation like, say, the power loom replacing handmade textiles. Both AI boosters and doomers are envisioning a future where almost all white collar work is obsolete. It isn't just one industry, its broad swaths labour across all segments of the economy.
Gates hinted at it, but let me expand on why this time it really is different.
If you compare the broad characteristics of the new jobs created to the old jobs displaced by technology historically, they are the same every time: they required higher-level (a) cognitive (b) technical or (c) social skills.
That is it. There is no other dimension to upskill along.
And LLMs are good at all three, probably better than most people already by many metrics. (Yes even social; their infinite patience is the ultimate advantage, and while sycophancy is harmful fixing it is easy.)
Plus AI is improving extremely rapidly. Which means it is probably advancing faster than most people can upskill.
An increasingly accepted premise is that AI can displace junior employees but will need senior employees to steer it. Consider the ratio of junior to senior employees, and how long it takes for the former to grow into the latter. That is the volume of displacement and timeframe to upskill we're looking at, made worse by the fact that if juniors are not hired they likely won't get a chance to upskill at all.
Never in history have we had a technology that was so versatile and rapidly advancing that it could displace a large portion of existing jobs, as well as many new jobs that would be created.
Do you think we could have handled Industrial Revolution with more care by offering a soft landing for those affected? I don’t think he’s disagreeing that this technology can be used for net good.
That all sounds nice, but does he mean it and can we trust him?
Setting up governance bodies and think tanks could be a diversion. He does explicitly suggest a robot and token tax, so that is something.
He does not address the issue of IP theft or the possibility of shutting down AI altogether like medium range missiles (SS20/Pershing II) were removed by treaties. The could be AI treaties with China and Russia, except of course the US has no credibility now compared to the 1980s.
I would say, "No, we cannot trust him" because, even if/when his intentions are good, his interests, and his worldview, and not aligned with the public's (globally or locally). For example:
> I’m also worried about AI’s impact on education. Ironically, the same tool that will allow people to learn more than ever could also lead to many people learning less.
For teachers/admins who are on HN: what has worked in a past for a "new way to educate" students to actually be implemented by educators? Does it happen through conferences? Do some states take the lead and others follow? Does it follow from private schools into public schools?
I know AI labs are trying to include teachers here and there... but IME teachers are very "anti-AI", "anti-datacenter", etc. etc. In coastal cities, the unions will be entirely opposed. This seems less of a "can AI be useful for education" question and more around politics and messaging. But I'd love to learn more.
My wife is a professor. "Administration contracts with some company that is providing tools to improve pedagogy" is pretty universally garbage. It typically comes with mandates to be used even when it is inappropriate and faculty aren't given time to integrate these tools into their preps. This makes people reasonably skeptical.
The only thing I've ever seen work is to simply make a tool available to people while giving them meaningful resources to adopt it if they see utility in their specific situation. But admin hates this because it means that they are paying for a thing that some people aren't using and because they want to write "I've revolutionized teaching by integrating X" on their performance review and that doesn't work unless adoption is near-universal.
For AI shit in particular, the ideas have been trash. Mandatory AI summaries of course readings integrated into the discussion platform. Great, now nobody will do the reading. AI tools for "placing" you in history through image generation that constantly generate anachronisms because they are trained on fantasy art. Stuff like that.
It always is a matter of choice. Rich people choose wisely for the fast buck, and poorly for the suckers they bend, fold, spindle and mutilate.
I get the sense of "Every Accusation is a confession"
> During my entire life I’ve only had two jobs. In the first one, I played a role in developing software to empower people through my work at Microsoft.
Some of us remember the story/urban legend of Bill Gates "developing" BASIC by retrieving a printout of source code from a dumpster, a process infinitely more efficient than an LLM.
NOTE. "Played a role in developing", not "Played a role BY developing"
The former could be said by the coffee maker. Or dumpster diver.
> I doubt I would have put in the same work if I had had an AI companion back then. They talk to you in ways you’re already comfortable with. They don’t push you outside your comfort zone. They are always available and never get mad at you. This gives them the potential to become highly addictive and to rob us of the lessons we learn from connecting with other people.
I've been waiting for a long, long time for us to figure out how AI makes us more social, not less. Outside of memes of course.
Anecdotally, I find AIs, and the doom and gloom they will cause, are great water cooler conversation topics that engages most of the team. However, ever since the advent of LLMs developers have stopped speaking of programming languages and software technologies almost entirely. The number of conversations on manual crafts, artistic endeavors and entrepreneurship has gone up.
I'm pretty sure he is. If you look at all the Big Tech CEOs, Satya is the only one who's been saying mostly human-aligned things.
We don't even need to assume this is out of the goodness of their hearts. Consider that Microsoft is one of the few Big Tech businesses whose business model is primarily making its enterprise customers more productive. If agents replace all knowledge work, half of Microsoft's business disappears.
In that sense Microsoft is more aligned with us humans than the other AI companies.
I saw that too. It wasn’t ratio’d like the other guy said, it was only ~90 comments.
The manually moved it down.
HN mods always silence even the slightest thing against their official narrative.
Since YC/HN are themselves pedos and connected to Epstein they had no choice but to squash it
They probably thought the HN audience would be too dumb or passive to do anything about it, helping them slowly get away with being international sec trafficking pedophiles.
And so far they are getting away with it. JPM Chase bank settled with victims for millions of dollars, other victims mysteriously died.
Thiel and tech and academia and Israel got prolific pedo Trump as the figurehead so they can try to shift blame to his “base” of racists Americans etc. but we all know it’s the wealthy corporate elite doing this stuff.
HN is complicit. They are basically a mouthpiece.
HN mods actively help wealthy pedophiles get away with their crimes
Interesting read, good to see some nuance in this space for once: not evil, can be used for evil, not good, can be used for good, but requires a lot of safeguards.
What really got me is the concept of "Human Reserved" - man that is a depressing thought...
> I believe we should tax AI tokens and robots. Right now, if you’re an employer and you hire someone, you pay payroll taxes on their earnings. But if you buy a robot, you can usually write it off right away as a business expense. The tax system nudges you toward replacing people with machines.
Taxing AI tokens and Robots is not going to work. We can’t even define a robot, tokens are also too abstract and there is endless ways of gaming it, and let’s not forget cross border operations.
Tax profits, it was always the most equitable option.
I do think taxing profits is still insufficient, because unless the tax rate is close to 100% (lol) the "k-shaped" economy is still reinforced, but just slowed slightly. In combination with a wealth/holdings tax, maybe.
Personally I think the idea of taxing robots/tokens directly is too narrow an idea.
It is because personal income tax should have never existed. Nor should have taxes on primary residence. These are the most regressive taxes possible, it is basically serfdom.
Can you explain this? I think consumption taxes are the most regressive taxes possible because they are "flat" and thus affect lower-income people harder.
Marginal income taxes are regressive now in the sense that folks with more wealth have far more resources to avoid paying them, but otherwise the reasoning seems less regressive than a consumption tax (e.g. VAT)
It's undesirable by the companies, but it's not impossible. There's this constant talk about "Making American Great Again (Again)", but not much talk about the economic conditions that made America Great. Like high corporate tax.
That's half the battle. The other half is closing all the loopholes and making stuff that used to be illegal, illegal again (e.g. stock buybacks).
Tax production as a whole, because profits get hidden in whatever is this week's tax haven. Taxing production has the added benefit of being able to drop every other tax tangentially related to revenue.
This essay kind of rubs me the wrong way. Starting from the very beginning.
During my entire life I’ve only had two jobs. In the first one, I played a role in developing software to empower people through my work at Microsoft.
Yikes. We all know powerful people have an incentive to whitewash their pasts but there is whitewashing and then there is whatever that is.
I have to mention this because we can't forget that Microsoft's and Bill Gates's history regarding fear uncertainty doubt as well as embrace extend extinguish. "Forgive but don't forget" as the old saying goes.
During the 2000's Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer described the GPL as akin to a virus. He begged European governements not to adopt open source software and to adopt Microsoft software instead.
Indeed throughout its history Microsoft, along with Gates and Balmer, have consistently fought against implementation of open standards and open source software. They have consistently pushed towards their own proprietary solutions.
Given all of this, along with the laughable whitewashing attempt even at the very beginning of his essay, I feel like what Bill Gates has written here is consistent with his previous behavior in regards to all of this. I suspect all this talk of regulation is an attempt to squash open source AI and open weights AI and to ensure Big Tech such as Microsoft continues to be in control of the future of tech and the future of AI.
Even his talk of taxing AI tokens and robots would ultimately benefit Microsoft and other Big tech companies and hurt open source.
I will repeat what I said earlier. In life it is important to "forgive but never forget." Many have forgiven Bill Gates for all he did in the 90's. Many haven't. But nobody should forget and everyone should take his words with a grain of salt.
> Even his talk of taxing AI tokens and robots would ultimately benefit Microsoft and other Big tech companies and hurt open source.
I'm curious, how? He proposes taxing bots in lieu of taxing humans, because they will be doing most of the work... but we already tax humans, and it hasn't hurt open source.
Because it will make it more expensive for people or groups of people to run open source models to do work on their own hardware. You would be taxing people or groups of people to run a program on the computers they own. This is contrary to the principles of the free and open source software movements.
> I believe we should tax AI tokens and robots. Right now, if you’re an employer and you hire someone, you pay payroll taxes on their earnings. But if you buy a robot, you can usually write it off right away as a business expense. The tax system nudges you toward replacing people with machines.
A tax would slow the rush away from human labor a little and raise money for retraining and a stronger safety net. It would need to be targeted so it does not slow down the purely beneficial uses of AI, like making medicine and education cheaper.
Note the part about it being targeted. Clearly this is in the context of moderating the displacement of human labor by employers rather than a flat "TAX ALL THE TOKENS!" approach.
Is there an essay from a tech leader than HASN’T rubbed anyone the wrong way, in some time? Eric Schmidt, Dario Amodei, Palmer Luckey, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, etc etc they all seem one or the other of out of touch or unlikable or unable to connect with rapport to the general public these days
Better than saying bubble, can't say bubble, that implies that people will lose their money because of lies rather than because the market just crashed.
It’s a good thoughtful piece. If I may suggest, the main problem and I mean the actual main problem are those people who underestimate the capabilities of AI. The ones who think it hallucinates all the time, unreliable and mostly useless.
The average person thinks this technology is overhyped (like Emily Bender) so how would one even begin to have a conversation with them on the risks?
This is my experience too. Many people in my offline, non-techy life seem to get almost upset when I argue that models are good at many things (and getting better fast).
And I kind of get it! If your primary exposure to AI is Google search summaries (from their cheapest models) and shitty AI graphic design, it makes sense to think it's vastly overhyped.
I like how Tyler Cowen puts it: "This is the worst they will ever be".
And some people are still stuck on what AI was capable of when GPT-3.5 was SOTA. They don't realize how much they've improved in ~4 years. Even if the rate of improvement slows down, AI will be tremendously more capable in another ~4 years.
Unfortunately it’s not just non technical people, it’s also technical people from my experience. They are usually too caught up in “how it always works” so they can’t think outside of it.
It can code and we saw it eat(ing) our former occupation, but that was always a defined finite space with defined rules and to be frank, not as hard as us practitioners liked to believe. So I don't think we can extrapolate this progress out to every other human endeavor in the near term at least.
Can you offer you argument you would provide to those people? I use the top SOTA models for software development and it is certainly an impressive and useful function. The quality of the code is however fairly poor, explicit architectural guardrails are frequently circumvented and the "human readable" outputs are very reminiscent of gish-gallop debate strategies.
Software development, as opposed to many many other fields also offers nearly unlimited training data and is one of the few areas with modifiable inputs and testable outputs.
Gates was a close friend and blackmail victim of Epstein. I can't separate his business, technical and philanthropic accomplishments from that fact. Sure, he may have funded charitable campaigns to vaccinate against polio in Afghanistan. But, he was also getting rub-downs from underage children.
> With its ability to synthesize knowledge from every scientific field, AI can accelerate innovation in the world’s toughest technical challenges: providing reliable clean energy for everyone, combating climate change, growing enough food, eradicating diseases, and more
I really think this is overstated. So far everything is pointing towards AI accelerating climate change. Especially if we'll automate everything with physical robots.
> Instead, solutions should be developed through a public democratic process that includes elected officials, policymakers, educators, health workers, local officials, and community leaders. Millions of people will have their lives disrupted, and we’ll need a stronger, more flexible social safety net to help them manage the transition. Local communities are already raising concerns about the energy and water needed for data centers. Without solutions, some groups will push for stopping AI development and deployment altogether.
Sounds great, except it ignores the fact that capital interests have controlled the levers of our faux democracies for decades, with no end in sight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniparty
Not everywhere. Switzerland has a direct democracy, which should be emulated by the rest of the world.
https://www.aboutswitzerland.eda.admin.ch/en/direct-democrac...
FWIW I am not from Switzerland, I only live there. Direct democracy works great.
There's nothing convincing in your link.
More importantly, even if it did contain the solution, there is no obvious way for a country with an already corrupt government to transition to such a thing.
I think you mean no obvious pacific way. Which is what any democratic citizen wants and seeks out. There are other solutions and way too obvious, in fact you have examples all over the world going back centuries.
Right. I was referring to the parent's "should be emulated by the rest of the world" suggestion, which had thanksimcured energy.
Democracy is clunky but sort of works. Say UBI looks necessary it may be both parties adopt it so it gets done in spite of the uniparty issue.
Election denialism is unbecoming of anyone with a brain
“Sounds great, except it ignores the fact that capital interests have controlled the levers of our faux democracies for decades, with no end in sight.”
This is not election denialism. This is almost just a fact except they also subjectively declare that we have a faux democracy (which also seems accurate to me).
Yes it is. If you insist that the result of a democratic election does not reflect the will of the people, that, and nothing else, is election denialism.
At most the American people have a recurring dilemma. There really isnt choice in the meaningful sense of the word
No it’s not. Election denialism in 2026 in an American context refers to Donald Trump and his supporters denying the results of the 2020 election (and related claims). Pretending that capital does not significantly affect our elections contributes to the deterioration of democracy.
If you actually don’t believe capital plays an outsized role in elections and government then take a gander at the Wikipedia page called Campaign finance in the United States. There is a chart called Percent of races won by top spending candidate… and lots of other information. Also looking into the role of lobbying in American politics.
If "capital interests" (ugh, capitalism) controlled democracy, please esplain:
- Michael Bloomberg - Hillary Clinton (both in the 2008 primary and 2016 general) - Alex Vindman ...
a simple Google search reveals that while there is some threshold amount of dosh necessary to get noticed, _more money != more votes_. To believe otherwise is is willful ignorance. Sometimes your favorite candidate loses because the median actual voter (you know, the guy who actual fills out the form) prefers the status quo for their own reasons and not because they're brainwashed or whatever it is that "capital interests" do to them.
I’m not sure how to reply to your comment since it is almost entirely addressed to some imaginary person and is full of projection. I’ll just add that both parties serve capital.
> If you insist that the result of a democratic election does not reflect the will of the people, that, and nothing else, is election denialism.
No.
This reflects the common understanding of the term:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_denial_movement_in_th...
> The election denial movement in the United States is a widespread false belief that elections in the United States are rigged and stolen through election fraud by the opposing political party. Adherents of the movement are referred to as election deniers.
It requires that people still believe they're being given legitimate choices. My comments above do not.
It does reflect the will of the people, but the causal chain doesn’t stop there.
The will of the people is the result of the corporate interests that control the democratic system.
Manufacturing Consent is an excellent read - and don’t stop at Chomsky, read Bernays, who pretty much codified the system as it runs today. Propaganda is a good place to start.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays
> Election denialism is unbecoming of anyone with a brain
Convincing argument you have there, but the choices we're provided between shit sandwich A and shit sandwich B are the problem, not which one wins.
This is akin to arguing "nothing ever changes or improves in Liberal democracies", when policy history doesn't reflect that.
Large parties represent large coalitions, so there are more compromises and things happen slower, but they still happen. Not always for the better, as we're seeing when populists are elected.
> This is akin to arguing "nothing ever changes or improves in Liberal democracies", when policy history doesn't reflect that.
Ever-growing wealth disparities, eroded rights, mass enshitification in a race to the bottom, and widespread hatred of ones neighbor over fake outrage culture war propaganda disseminated from corporate media are not a trends of improvement. They are trends of decline, unless you're of the class who has their doomsday bunker on standby.
> Ever-growing wealth disparities
Higher concentration of wealth is not new, it's happened many times and dissipated many times. Real-wages are still growing, which is what we care about qua improvements in our well being (and what attracts immigrants). The key risk though is regulatory capture from consolidation of tech companies (much of this "wealth" in question is stock valuation, which tends to get reinvested in companies), but anti-trust is still a thing, and has been wielded relatively recently.
> enshitification
This is about consumer products, not government policy. Buy an alternative, you have those choices.
> widespread hatred of ones neighbor over fake outrage culture war propaganda disseminated from corporate media
Based on polling, the most salient issues seem to reflect economic anxieties. Even stances on immigration are really about that.
When the established parties and institutions fail, people lash out and elect populists. The populist fervor will wane once housing affordability is appropriately tackled for instance.
> not a trends of improvement
Yeah, not everything improved in the short-run, that isn't remarkable. Many things did. Look at real-wages, look at the extreme poverty rate globally as defined by the UN. I could go on.
> Higher concentration of wealth is not new, it's happened many times and dissipated many times.
That's a very clinical way to put it. Usually when its "dissipated", its through war or economic depression or both, and a great many people who never had any wealth suffer needlessly, while the wealthy rarely do.
It would be nice if we could like, _not_ do that, and try something different for once, instead of throwing up our hands and saying "well that's just how its always been!"
You're forgetting anti-trust. Standard Oil controlled 90% of the oil production in the U.S. until it was splintered into numerous companies. We're not really at the point where this needs to be done for tech.
Also, dynastic wealth itself doesn't sustain itself well, and dwindles in a generation. See: the aforementioned Rockefeller, whose grandchildren are nowhere near as rich. Notwithstanding that many of the wealthy (in particular, Bill Gates) are donating the majority of their wealth when they die.
> This is about consumer products, not government policy.
You speak as if these things are unrelated.
> Buy an alternative, you have those choices.
Increasingly, we don't:
"Modern Capitalism Is Weirder Than You Think: It also no longer works as advertised"
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/03/how-asset-managers-h... (https://archive.is/wSmtd)
> You speak as if these things are unrelated.
State the connection, because it seems like your next argument is going to be "the government didn't stop them", as though that's their job.
> Increasingly, we don't:
Think of a single enshittified product that matters to you for which there is no alternative but to use it.
This also all pales in contrast to the conveniences and improvements afforded over time. You can now access and stream basically any music you want for free, for example. Television sets are now commodities, which tend to be cheaper adjusted for inflation. Etc etc. So the rhetoric about enshittification doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
> Based on polling, the most salient issues seem to reflect economic anxieties. Even stances on immigration are really about that.
Meh, the economic anxiety voters are systematically voting for economically worst performing parties. They may say "it is economy" in polls, but it is hardly believable.
The difference between men and women in voting patterns is not about economy.
Average voters don't understand much about the economy, but that doesn't mean they aren't reacting to externalities like housing costs, prices, or other worse outcomes.
This take completely ignores the amount of money in politics and that both parties have funding from overlapping sources which in turn represent how similar the two parties are on certain key issues such as the Palestinian genocide.
Notwithstanding that this sum is smaller than people think, seeing bipartisan stances does not in itself reflect a failure; it can just as easily be a good thing. All this reveals is that you have a pet issue that isn't being serviced well currently by the 2 parties, but tides and voter sentiment change; within a few short years most people have soured on Israel, and this will be reflected in forthcoming elections.
I don't have a single "pet issue", I care about a great deal of issues that neither party actually cares about addressing, and it's well-established that both parties push conservative, right-leaning neoliberal policy. I don't see these changes occurring overnight or fast enough to be acceptable.
lol Trump's party has not been the least bit neoliberal, it is populist and protectionist. Brutal immigration crackdowns and tarrifs are the opposite of neoliberal. Even Biden was a departure, with tariffs and CHIPS act. None of that is neoliberal, which peaked in the Clinton era.
Incidentally, among the most effective remedies for what ails us now, like zoning reform, would be derided as "neoliberal" by progressives, though the evidence speaks for itself, and YIMBYs are making in-roads.
That doesn't mean that state capacity doesn't have it's place. We historically would spend more on innovation, on NASA, DARPA and the like, and that matters a great deal. But it doesn't preclude removing red tape that hinders govt and private sector efforts.
> a great deal of issues
Ok, name some. Realistically, there aren't many.
This is a well known mathematical property of first-past-the-post election systems, as opposed to evidence of your grand conspiracy theory
Maybe then the US should abandon first past the post?
I would support that, and there are states that have already switched to different systems in their local or other elections
It is a well known physical property of lawn rakes that one end is heavier than the other, as opposed to evidence my neighbor is abusive in hitting me with one over and over.
It doesn't require a "grand conspiracy theory" to know that dominant capital interests have the power and desire to perpetuate themselves.
But keep trying to wave the away the obvious. You only look more ridiculous the harder you try.
Just because its a Marxist trope doesn't make it not a conspiracy theory
No your choice was between a competent leader and a con man. When people type what you type it seems obvious you are attempting to avoid responsibility for choosing the con man. I blame everyone that has this "there was no good choice" bull. That is exactly what it is an excuse for blowing up everything and claiming no responsibility.
> No your choice was between a competent leader and a con man.
No, the non-con man option was an unpopular candidate who was installed after skipping a primary process. A primary process that was shown to be a complete joke during the previous cycle.
> When people type what you type it seems obvious you are attempting to avoid responsibility for choosing the con man.
I never chose the con man. Nor did I choose the party who manufactured consent for him with their pied piper "strategy" that was exposed only by wikileaks. Did the party reflect on this? No. They got mad at the person who leaked it.
"No good choice" in the 2020 election was a universal and sane opinion to have. The 2024 election was the thinnest electoral margins in recent history. You don't know something everyone else doesn't, and these inflammatory comments are out of touch with reality.
Political campaigns spend enormous amounts of money on ads to influence public opinion. That makes politicians beholden to their donors. Which subverts democracy from "the will of the people" to "the will of the wealthy". All of these are uncontroversial facts and fit the narrative GP is saying.
"What I want to do is this. I just want to find, uh, 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Raffensperger_ph...
Election denialism is about rejecting official election results.
But anyway, on the subject of the usefulness of your vote, Trump was elected on an America first platform, touting ending foreign wars and avoiding new ones.
If you elected him and his party based on that I think you're going to be pretty disappointed with the effectiveness of your vote in its ability to bring about actual outcomes that you want.
>Election denialism is about rejecting official election results.
That would be the implication of such statements as "our democracy has been subverted by the big corporate conspiracy".
The post you are responding to is not election denialism.
There is no functional difference between the statement "democracy is subverted by a grand corporate conspiracy" and "our elections are invalid", because the only way the former happens is if the latter happens. If the latter didn't happen, then you're just upset about the outcome of a legitimate election. Which is a fair thing to be in a democracy, but it does not mean that the whole system is corrupt. Insistence that any other outcome than your preferred outcome is illegitimate is dictator behavior
Pure sophistry!
The popular conception (and platonic ideal, hence the popular conception) of our democratic republic is that of equal representation. Our system favors candidates with money; the system is corrupt and to say so is merely stating a fact.
But hey, lick boots if you wanna. It seems to be the tech way these days.
Lol if voting changed anything they'd make it illegal.
You mean like the SAVE act?
Or restrictions on mail-in voting?
Good point. They seem to be getting nervous about us voters voting.
Being an apologist for the state and our current system is unbecoming of anybody with a brain
Which would be a projection on your part.
How so?
Nope. He is spot on actually.
> We have to think now about how to reduce job losses so that everyone can share in the prosperity that AI creates.
And I thought he is a smart man. This is so last century thinking. We need to prepare that there will definitely be no jobs for everyone and that will be falling all the time, it’s not a one-time event you should “prepare for”. There’s nothing to prepare, we already have funds and productivity to feed and shelter everyone. UBI is not a privilege, previous generations were slaving 9 to 5 all their lives so we can have it. This is it, arrived, and now, enter a few decades of historical period when all of us waiting for government bureaucrats to realise that UBI is a right.
> all of us waiting for government bureaucrats to realise that UBI is a right
You'll be waiting forever, then. This isn't something that you can wait to be given to you, it must be taken.
Or, put much more eloquently by one of the greatest Americans:
"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress"
- Frederick Douglass
How do the gears of capitalism keep turning without UBI in such a scenario? Who is buying from Amazon? Mega yachts don't make the world go round.
UBI is how capitalism keeps going, else a new system will be needed.
UBI will be given but we should take even more control and take a % of ownership.
We've seen in the K-shaped economy of late a new kind of consumerism.
The top 10% of consumers accounted for half of all spending in the second quarter of 2025.
Capitalism will happily chug along while leaving a massive number of people desperately poor.
There's a reason the AI CEOs have all become obsessed with the concept of a "permanent underclass."
If a UBI is ever "given" it will be just enough to keep the underclass from rising up and killing the owner class and not one cent more.
I don't understand why people always spring for UBI. I don't want free money; I want to earn my living. I want to work.
Why do we not push for labor reform, as we did a century ago? Depending on the actual productivity gains from AI broadly, set a new standard of 4-hour workdays. Or 3-day work weeks.
Cool. You can work three days a week and earn a fraction of what you make now - far less than a living wage - because the market value of your labor has been reduced to nil by AI. You aren't going to be paid more because you're more productive, that isn't how it has ever worked.
The rest of us want to be able to eat once capitalism decides we aren't worth the cost to keep alive.
Somehow, I don't think the people with all the money, gunmen and (soon) robots will be OK with the world you envision.
True. Expecting the super rich to be concerned a lot about the poor - especially when they aren't useful as employees, is quite a stretch.
Not useful as soldiers even, and that includes those on the enemy side.
Their wealth is more contingent on our consumption than employment status. If that goes, then you're looking at a zero-sum society where no new wealth is generated.
Ultimately people will remain enterprising status-seekers. Rich people can already sit around with their wealth doing fuck-all excepting consuming, and they don't.
In a post-scarcity society, having a meagre policy to keep people alive and not-unruly is cheap. It's also getting way ahead of ourselves, since it's nowhere in sight. Software hiring was up this year.
Not really. The planet is crowded, currently with mostly productive members of society.
For the ultra rich psychos who run the show, do you really think they want poor people hanging around? When we can be wiped out in a few months?
Consider the pure greed Donald Trump is displaying. Now imagine that the 1000 most powerful people are the same, except they are smart enough to at least not rub it in peoples faces on live television.
They hate you, and want you dead.
Motivated reasoning. You want to believe it.
> do you really think they want poor people hanging around?
Which by your rationale would include everyone who isn't rich (and tautologically would mean "no one is rich anymore"). They do not care whether we're hanging around, the same way they do not care now whether poor people exist. It has no bearing. All that does is whether they remain rich and powerful, and last I checked, that's relative. Being the only one left on the planet won't make you feel rich, and there being poors on a piece of land won't have any bearing on you.
> When we can be wiped out in a few months?
Lol
Indeed. Far more likely, a more economic human is engineered.
Oryx and Crake, I think, was the first time I encountered that idea.
Well, they don't have all of the second one.
“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work together for the benefit of all.” —- John Maynard Keynes
What does the data and observations tell us so far, in this context?
The real blame lies at the door of the folks who created a lot of things who were incredibly naive that others wouldnt come in to profit from it.
UBI as a concept does not add up. It assumes an even production of all goods that people might need, but there isn't, you are giving everyone fiat currency that is not inherently tied to any physical good. Very fast you will descend into either plan economy where you get food stamps, or an economy where people are trading goods that are actually tied to value.
For example, you go to the store to get eggs, since everyone has UBI, they decide to also get eggs, the eggs either run out, or the store raises the price, at which either you will get food queues like in the USSR, or everyone will need more UBI to afford eggs. The solution to this is to increase egg production, but this is not instant, and not necessarily a priority, while money transfers are instant.
It really takes a lot of magical thinking to believe we can just implement UBI without any costs.
Notice that when you open your mouth, there is no roast chicken that flies in.
Total federal entitlement spending in the USA, per capita, is roughly $11,000 annually. Once could kill all those programs and start there.
The funny thing is that the wealthy and powerful don't realise that a collapse of that scale means that every switches to professional guillotine builder over night.
There is no preparing for that.
I doubt we get there to be honest, they all have wealth and power because there are consumers with money. No more consumers, no more wealth and power.
P.S. remember my guy Bill didn't write a nice blog post about any of the allegations around his involvement with Epstein. So, you know, this is basically just marketing more than Bill's thoughts.
My interpretation of his point was that people get a ton of meaning out of their work in our current capitalist system, and regardless of whether or not we change our system in the long term, if we don't do something about jobs in the short term, there will be a civil crisis:
> In a capitalist society, employment is the way most people get the money they need to pay for the basics of life as well as being a key source of dignity and social connection.
> When a community has high unemployment, the ripple effects can be pervasive. Research suggests that in some parts of the United States, factory closures contribute to a rise in deaths from opioid overdoses. Now imagine similar pressures on both white-collar and blue-collar workers nationwide.
> Waiting until people are already displaced or underemployed will be too late. AI is a structural challenge to the way our economy is organized, and it requires thinking and action now.
----
I agree he should've addressed UBI directly. When he was asked about it in an AMA a decade ago he basically said he's optimistic it can happen eventually but not yet [1]. And in that same AMA he said he wished to see "computers that can read and understand information like humans do" within his lifetime [2]. Now that the latter has happened I wish we could see how his thoughts have changed on the former.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5whpqs/comment/dea7v1...
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5whpqs/comment/dea5fl...
He is a smart man -- with an enormous $100B vested interest in the capital side of this equation. It is (meager) progress to hear any acknowledgement from capital at all that we might conceivably need to do something other than pump aggregate labor supply and dump aggregate demand.
This is a baby step, but it's a baby step in the right direction.
I really don't think UBI can ever happen in the US. There is a moral imperative of "industriousness". Keynes' prediction (or maybe desire) ~100 years ago of the 15 hour workweek never panned out.
In the US, you're at least as likely to have half the population vote that anyone who cannot find a job should be exterminated, despite a large proportion of those voting for it being the very people most likely to become jobless, because Fox News will convince them it will mostly affect immigrants and/or some other group they're supposed to hate.
How does the moral imperative of industriousness deal with all the skilled jobs being done by the computer?
Keynes prediction more than panned out if you look at the population level.
Instead of everyone working less what happened is less people work. The fact that it took that specific shape is a source of A LOT of problems.
More people work. Keynes died in 1946 - meaning they had grand depression in his lifetime. Moreover, women employment went up by significant amounts - middle and upper class women would not work back then.
> we already have funds and productivity to feed and shelter everyone
For how long?
I support UBI and wealth taxes, but I also think generally that will be a difficult transition in terms of social upheaval. There are so many people I know who are financially well-off but completely fall apart when there is no visible professional hierarchy to give them meaning.
One would hope that this would still go down better than destituting large percentages of the world population, but I wonder.
> I know who are financially well-off but completely fall apart when there is no visible professional hierarchy to give them meaning.
This reminds me of white people in the American south that didn't personally own slaves, but fought in the civil war anyway to maintain their place in the social hierarchy https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/67fvaf/comme...
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f9j6hg/why_d...
And that hasn't changed at all:
“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
Wonder if there should be a "UBI reservation" set up where everyone gets it, and very basic needs like housing and food are taken care of in a self-sustaining manner with machines. (which is the whole premise, everything is automated so nobody needs to work). Then people who don't like the freeloading can opt out and live as usual, and those who like it can move to the reservation.
Perhaps some kind of camp where such people can be concentrated?
Based in your first two sentences, I think your understanding of UBI is mistaken. You seem to be under the impression that people don't or can't have a job when there is UBI. This is not the case. If you don't believe me, just look at Alaska.
Everyone enjoys some sort of benefit, tax break, subsidy, etc. from the government. UBI is the same thing in the form of a regular, universal transfer payment. Nothing more, nothing less.
I do understand UBI. I was referring to the previous context that AI would introduce mass loss of jobs and overall reduced employment, not specifically to UBI being a replacement for jobs.
He’s saying the same thing as you. I don’t think UBI will magically appear. If people lose their jobs, what guarantee do you give that they can survive? Thats his point - prepare for this event so that the guarantee can be made sooner.
> we already have funds and productivity to feed and shelter everyone.
Where ? who ?
You can build livable domiciles for a few grand in bulk, recycle waste via composting to reduce infrastructure needs, shared batteries and solar, etc. There are plenty of people on youtube demonstrating the permie off grid lifestyle. Grains are cheap and we have a wild boar and deer problem in a lot of the country so food wouldn't be too expensive either.
Most people don't want to live like that. They want AC, central plumbing, trendy food, and cheap clothing.
And most people don't live in this country.
He’s a delusional idiot
Let’s ask him straight - would he be ok living like that? Lmfao
Lots of looney tunes comments on this thread
For the record, I'm into permaculture/regenerative agriculture and enjoy the lifestyle, all I need is shared satellite internet. If my choice was between working 60 hours a week at 3 jobs to barely keep my head above water, or live in an agricultural commune, I would take the commune every time.
The resources exist, it's just a matter of allocating them properly. We have lumber and concrete to build houses. We have fertilizer and land and trucks to grow and ship food. And apparently all of this will be immensely cheaper (practically free) within a decade thanks to robotics and AI (according to the trillionaire half this place worships.)
With that said I doubt that reallocation will happen in any meaningful way, and as the elites eliminate more people from the economy we'll descend further into violence and chaos. If the parasite class was generous, they wouldn't be parasites.
Yeah it's total horseshit, to be frank.
Worker protections have almost never been granted by the profiteers... not child labor laws, not weekends, not overtime, not safety regulations, not minimum wage, not workers comp... the working class is not what it is today because of "sharing prosperity" and there's been a lot of prosperity — it's all a series of fights.
This is all well known, but I recently visited an old coal mine in Pennsylvania, and much of the tour was talking about the labor conditions, and the generational "trap" of working there. If a worker died, the family had little time to leave the company-provided house without providing someone to work. What often happened is that one of the children would work to maintain the household.
>[0]the "rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for—not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of the country."
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1902_anthracite_coal_strike
How are you going to get UBI?
Are you going to strike? Are we going to take on the government by force?
People need to understand there is no democracy in a post-AGI world.
The power of human collectives comes from a combination of our collective economic power and our physical power. Without either leaders would be smart to just do what the companies paying all the bills ask if they don't want their families to starve too.
Just to put Bill Gates thoughts on AI into perspective, this was his comment on an AMA 9 years ago to the question
"What kind of technological advancement do you wish to see in your lifetime?":
> The big milestone is when computers can read and understand information like humans do. There is a lot of work going on in this field - Google, Microsoft, Facebook, academia,... Right now computers don't know how to represent knowledge so they can't read a text book and pass a test.
https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5whpqs/im_bill_gates_...
Fascinating. Can't help but wonder how things will change over the next decade or so.
- If AI and robots are as good as Bill suggests , one can infer that AI will signal the end of cities, at least the end of megacities. If the home robot can clean and cook and also do my taxes, hair, and diagnose my health , one is more likely to escape unemployment by moving to a small town where he can find land and resources, and use robots to exploit them, just like humans have always done when economy was based in agriculture. If there is no longer a reason for people to live close together, decentralization is the most likely outcome.
- The biggest geopolitical impact will probably come from AI weapons. Just like previous shifts in weaponry caused the fall of empires , the rise of naval empires and the rise of national modern superpowers, AI may lead to the end of the UN and beginning of something new.
- Societies will change but a plan is not needed and it's most likely useless. Societies adapt , and nobody has ever been able to predict how. Let's not make the same mistake again.
I will believe that "AI will do all the work" when private prisons stop contracting inmates to do slave labor and employers stop hiring undocumented migrant workers.
Humans like cities.
It brings people together for mating.
It wasn't only industrialization.
Even today, before AI, once you find a mate, THEN, you move to the suburbs.
They're also much cheaper from an infrastructure perspective to maintain
If all jobs are taken away for the sake of robot driven productivity, who will consume the products and services being offered that result in profit?!
(EDIT: I am not against AI at all, just trying to understand where this all leads)
Other bots. The sequel to "don't build the torment nexus" is "don't make dead internet theory a reality"
Don't discount that tech billionaires pursuing this are themselves nihilistic. They would enjoy the fruits of our labor and will not care what comes after they die.
"Après nous, le déluge"
-- Madame de Pompadour
Please, don't ask logical questions.
3 citations and a lot of conjecture. Is the article only targeting SWEs? The one study cited said 22-25 age range saw a 16% decrease in relative employment declines (for SWEs)[0]. But everyone outside that range was not impacted. Further, what about all the trades jobs around data center development?
“Demand is also being intensified by major investments in infrastructure, manufacturing, reshoring, and AI. Data center growth alone has added a net 315,000 skilled-trade workers over the past five years, according to the report, putting additional pressure on an already tight labor market.”
https://www.morningstar.com/news/pr-newswire/20260825cg32433...
We literally do not have enough trades people to build out data centers and their salaries are increasing as a result. These are skilled labor jobs (plumbers, electricians, IT, etc.). Does Bill Gates care about the rest of the economy outside of SWE?
[0]: https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/app/uploads/2025/11/Cana...
Honestly a lot of those decreases are also because companies are trying to wait and see as much as possible to see if there is any truth to the conjecture.
If the result will be huge job loss doesn't that mean the overall buying power of all across all economies will go down drastically which begs the question who will buy the stuff that these companies that get rid of people are making?
Prices will also go down dramatically. When you eliminate human labour completely, you are essentially stuck with the problem of efficiently allocating raw materials. And raw materials are abundant compared to what human labour can currently produce. We're still a long way from there though.
Exactly. Henry Ford made sure his own employees could afford the cars they were making.
These people making these kind of grand pronouncements either have an embarrassing blind spot, or are not making sincere, but carefully calculated statements.
Just via competition, Chinese researchers are doing much more than Bill Gates could ever hope to do through 'thought leadership' spread the benefits of generative AI.
The same exact people that the companies got rid of. The government pays them now instead of their former employer.
> In the United States, I’ve met families who, understandably, were overwhelmed by the process of applying for health insurance, student aid, or food assistance. Faced with a huge stack of complicated bureaucratic forms, many felt like giving up. AI can streamline things dramatically
I'd love to see anyone building Grokbot or ChatGPT Work talk about how they're thinking about this use case, specifically. It seems greatly important and tractable given how little government websites & forms change over time.
On the other end - yes, it will create massive vectors for abuse & fraud, since govt services are designed to have roadblocks to reduce usage. But fraud has always been possible, even without AI (so many recent examples to pull from).
IMO it's best to maximize social benefits to see where the tradeoffs really are. We won't know until we push on it!
It'd be nice if we could change the bureaucratic process, not the interface
At least as likely LLMs will be used to create more labyrinthine paperwork to stymie attempts at getting government to serve the taxpayer.
An agent with computer use can already navigate all this stuff quite well.
If the goal is to make things easier for everyday Americans, replacing these with universal schemes would do that and will also prevent abuse and fraud (most of which comes down to forgetting to dot your lowercase j on work requirement form #27).
>On the other end - yes, it will create massive vectors for abuse & fraud, since govt services are designed to have roadblocks to reduce usage.
That the government collects taxes and then understaffs the department that distributes the benefit is the first fraud. 30 years after email was invented, why do people have to wait on the phone for hours to talk to a government employee?
Bingo, the IRS made me fax them something once and it was a demand and not a request.
It was 2022 when this happened.
I'm interested how to mitigate risk without over-regulating & stifling innovation from exactly the people who are most thoughtful about the risk (which is who we should want innovating & leading).
Even though this article is new, I'm not sure it has materially new ideas vs what some other labs have been claiming for years.
Enforcing safeguards that apply globally to good and bad actors alike so far as proved quite difficult - compute is essentially the only lever, and that's tenuous at best.
Unlike nuclear arms (where functionally there's a limit at MAD), so far we believe that with enough compute, energy, and algorithms, intelligence will continue to scale (and not only scale - but compound)
The issues are global and they are correct. The landscape is not the same in US as in other countries, but this is a global problem and should be handled as such.
I'm not against a tax on AI or robots, but I think this may be the big chance we have to look at universal income with new eyes. If jobs are to disappear, why not soften the blow and get rid of some of the inefficiencies many government processes mean in terms of other citizen benefits?
What I worry about more however is the malevolent actors across the AI space. I'd argue that most companies mean well, but chasing profit at all costs can very easily turn into malevolence. Both these and actors being malevolent on purpose needs to have a control function.
And why should we listen to this pedophile who never once considered how the good outweighed the bad while running his company?
So first of, there is no proof of him having had sex with a minor/kid on that island. It might be a lot stronger of an evidence from others but i was not able to find anything.
And secondly, if you follow bill gates, you will realise that with his philanthropic side, he did quite a lot of good in the world. For sure not as a young bill gates but he has changed for sure.
And thirdly, you can think of people whatever you want, but you should read on what people in positions like him say because they might have unique viewpoints or information you are not aware of. What you do with this information is yours.
I use this type of information as a type of signal: If a lot of smart people say similiar things, i will increase the trust in that piece of information.
Btw. i did read his book about climate change and found it good.
You fell right into his marketing trap
I thought Gates' take on the human relational aspects of AI to be thoughtful, but I am surprised that his analysis on the economic and jobs aspect of AI offers little more than the party line. Every other technological advance that improved productivity (Industrial Revolution, etc.) has resulted in the loss of some jobs but the creation of jobs in other areas and an overall increase in the standard of living (although admittedly not uniformly distributed across the population). Why will AI be different?
Because any job it creates it can automate as well, for example a lot of people here think that understanding how AI models operate internally or being up to date with the latest models will save them from making their jobs obsolete, it will not, AI itself will be better than you at picking the next model to deploy, at testing the speed of reasoning that beats it's own. Anything it will need to learn it will learn it faster than you with the ability to handle much more complexity than your brain.
If you believe the hype then this isn't a transformation like, say, the power loom replacing handmade textiles. Both AI boosters and doomers are envisioning a future where almost all white collar work is obsolete. It isn't just one industry, its broad swaths labour across all segments of the economy.
Gates hinted at it, but let me expand on why this time it really is different.
If you compare the broad characteristics of the new jobs created to the old jobs displaced by technology historically, they are the same every time: they required higher-level (a) cognitive (b) technical or (c) social skills.
That is it. There is no other dimension to upskill along.
And LLMs are good at all three, probably better than most people already by many metrics. (Yes even social; their infinite patience is the ultimate advantage, and while sycophancy is harmful fixing it is easy.)
Plus AI is improving extremely rapidly. Which means it is probably advancing faster than most people can upskill.
An increasingly accepted premise is that AI can displace junior employees but will need senior employees to steer it. Consider the ratio of junior to senior employees, and how long it takes for the former to grow into the latter. That is the volume of displacement and timeframe to upskill we're looking at, made worse by the fact that if juniors are not hired they likely won't get a chance to upskill at all.
Never in history have we had a technology that was so versatile and rapidly advancing that it could displace a large portion of existing jobs, as well as many new jobs that would be created.
Do you think we could have handled Industrial Revolution with more care by offering a soft landing for those affected? I don’t think he’s disagreeing that this technology can be used for net good.
> Why will AI be different?
Because the pioneers haven't just been saying, but are screaming the quiet part out loud.
That all sounds nice, but does he mean it and can we trust him?
Setting up governance bodies and think tanks could be a diversion. He does explicitly suggest a robot and token tax, so that is something.
He does not address the issue of IP theft or the possibility of shutting down AI altogether like medium range missiles (SS20/Pershing II) were removed by treaties. The could be AI treaties with China and Russia, except of course the US has no credibility now compared to the 1980s.
I would say, "No, we cannot trust him" because, even if/when his intentions are good, his interests, and his worldview, and not aligned with the public's (globally or locally). For example:
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2022/07/how-bill-gates-m...
I'm sure we can trust the billionaire who was great chums with Epstein, clearly he's a man of integrity.
To be blunt I don’t know that the world really cares what Bill Gates thinks anymore.
He couldnt even source some clean prostitutes, got gonorheea and passed it to his wife (facepalm)
> I’m also worried about AI’s impact on education. Ironically, the same tool that will allow people to learn more than ever could also lead to many people learning less.
For teachers/admins who are on HN: what has worked in a past for a "new way to educate" students to actually be implemented by educators? Does it happen through conferences? Do some states take the lead and others follow? Does it follow from private schools into public schools?
I know AI labs are trying to include teachers here and there... but IME teachers are very "anti-AI", "anti-datacenter", etc. etc. In coastal cities, the unions will be entirely opposed. This seems less of a "can AI be useful for education" question and more around politics and messaging. But I'd love to learn more.
My wife is a professor. "Administration contracts with some company that is providing tools to improve pedagogy" is pretty universally garbage. It typically comes with mandates to be used even when it is inappropriate and faculty aren't given time to integrate these tools into their preps. This makes people reasonably skeptical.
The only thing I've ever seen work is to simply make a tool available to people while giving them meaningful resources to adopt it if they see utility in their specific situation. But admin hates this because it means that they are paying for a thing that some people aren't using and because they want to write "I've revolutionized teaching by integrating X" on their performance review and that doesn't work unless adoption is near-universal.
For AI shit in particular, the ideas have been trash. Mandatory AI summaries of course readings integrated into the discussion platform. Great, now nobody will do the reading. AI tools for "placing" you in history through image generation that constantly generate anachronisms because they are trained on fantasy art. Stuff like that.
Bill is great to find solutions for his problems
It always is a matter of choice. Rich people choose wisely for the fast buck, and poorly for the suckers they bend, fold, spindle and mutilate.
I get the sense of "Every Accusation is a confession"
> During my entire life I’ve only had two jobs. In the first one, I played a role in developing software to empower people through my work at Microsoft.
Some of us remember the story/urban legend of Bill Gates "developing" BASIC by retrieving a printout of source code from a dumpster, a process infinitely more efficient than an LLM.
NOTE. "Played a role in developing", not "Played a role BY developing"
The former could be said by the coffee maker. Or dumpster diver.
> I doubt I would have put in the same work if I had had an AI companion back then. They talk to you in ways you’re already comfortable with. They don’t push you outside your comfort zone. They are always available and never get mad at you. This gives them the potential to become highly addictive and to rob us of the lessons we learn from connecting with other people.
I've been waiting for a long, long time for us to figure out how AI makes us more social, not less. Outside of memes of course.
Anecdotally, I find AIs, and the doom and gloom they will cause, are great water cooler conversation topics that engages most of the team. However, ever since the advent of LLMs developers have stopped speaking of programming languages and software technologies almost entirely. The number of conversations on manual crafts, artistic endeavors and entrepreneurship has gone up.
He should be talking to Satya, not spitting in the wind. He used to run MS, he still has sway.
I'm pretty sure he is. If you look at all the Big Tech CEOs, Satya is the only one who's been saying mostly human-aligned things.
We don't even need to assume this is out of the goodness of their hearts. Consider that Microsoft is one of the few Big Tech businesses whose business model is primarily making its enterprise customers more productive. If agents replace all knowledge work, half of Microsoft's business disappears.
In that sense Microsoft is more aligned with us humans than the other AI companies.
Its quite interesting that in a matter of few minutes, this went down from 2 to rank 21 on HN front page.
I believe there's a controversy filter that down ranks items if the ratio of comments to item upvotes is too high.
I saw that too. It wasn’t ratio’d like the other guy said, it was only ~90 comments.
The manually moved it down.
HN mods always silence even the slightest thing against their official narrative.
Since YC/HN are themselves pedos and connected to Epstein they had no choice but to squash it
They probably thought the HN audience would be too dumb or passive to do anything about it, helping them slowly get away with being international sec trafficking pedophiles.
And so far they are getting away with it. JPM Chase bank settled with victims for millions of dollars, other victims mysteriously died.
Thiel and tech and academia and Israel got prolific pedo Trump as the figurehead so they can try to shift blame to his “base” of racists Americans etc. but we all know it’s the wealthy corporate elite doing this stuff.
HN is complicit. They are basically a mouthpiece.
HN mods actively help wealthy pedophiles get away with their crimes
Interesting read, good to see some nuance in this space for once: not evil, can be used for evil, not good, can be used for good, but requires a lot of safeguards. What really got me is the concept of "Human Reserved" - man that is a depressing thought...
> I believe we should tax AI tokens and robots. Right now, if you’re an employer and you hire someone, you pay payroll taxes on their earnings. But if you buy a robot, you can usually write it off right away as a business expense. The tax system nudges you toward replacing people with machines.
Taxing AI tokens and Robots is not going to work. We can’t even define a robot, tokens are also too abstract and there is endless ways of gaming it, and let’s not forget cross border operations.
Tax profits, it was always the most equitable option.
I do think taxing profits is still insufficient, because unless the tax rate is close to 100% (lol) the "k-shaped" economy is still reinforced, but just slowed slightly. In combination with a wealth/holdings tax, maybe.
Personally I think the idea of taxing robots/tokens directly is too narrow an idea.
It is because personal income tax should have never existed. Nor should have taxes on primary residence. These are the most regressive taxes possible, it is basically serfdom.
Can you explain this? I think consumption taxes are the most regressive taxes possible because they are "flat" and thus affect lower-income people harder.
Marginal income taxes are regressive now in the sense that folks with more wealth have far more resources to avoid paying them, but otherwise the reasoning seems less regressive than a consumption tax (e.g. VAT)
It's undesirable by the companies, but it's not impossible. There's this constant talk about "Making American Great Again (Again)", but not much talk about the economic conditions that made America Great. Like high corporate tax.
That's half the battle. The other half is closing all the loopholes and making stuff that used to be illegal, illegal again (e.g. stock buybacks).
Tax production as a whole, because profits get hidden in whatever is this week's tax haven. Taxing production has the added benefit of being able to drop every other tax tangentially related to revenue.
Is this Bill's? Because it looks like Dario's essay!
Everything looks the same when AI is doing the work
Nearly every post about AI turns into a discussion of politics and every post about politics becomes a discussion of AI.
This essay kind of rubs me the wrong way. Starting from the very beginning.
During my entire life I’ve only had two jobs. In the first one, I played a role in developing software to empower people through my work at Microsoft.
Yikes. We all know powerful people have an incentive to whitewash their pasts but there is whitewashing and then there is whatever that is.
I have to mention this because we can't forget that Microsoft's and Bill Gates's history regarding fear uncertainty doubt as well as embrace extend extinguish. "Forgive but don't forget" as the old saying goes.
During the 2000's Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer described the GPL as akin to a virus. He begged European governements not to adopt open source software and to adopt Microsoft software instead.
Indeed throughout its history Microsoft, along with Gates and Balmer, have consistently fought against implementation of open standards and open source software. They have consistently pushed towards their own proprietary solutions.
Given all of this, along with the laughable whitewashing attempt even at the very beginning of his essay, I feel like what Bill Gates has written here is consistent with his previous behavior in regards to all of this. I suspect all this talk of regulation is an attempt to squash open source AI and open weights AI and to ensure Big Tech such as Microsoft continues to be in control of the future of tech and the future of AI.
Even his talk of taxing AI tokens and robots would ultimately benefit Microsoft and other Big tech companies and hurt open source.
I will repeat what I said earlier. In life it is important to "forgive but never forget." Many have forgiven Bill Gates for all he did in the 90's. Many haven't. But nobody should forget and everyone should take his words with a grain of salt.
> Even his talk of taxing AI tokens and robots would ultimately benefit Microsoft and other Big tech companies and hurt open source.
I'm curious, how? He proposes taxing bots in lieu of taxing humans, because they will be doing most of the work... but we already tax humans, and it hasn't hurt open source.
Because it will make it more expensive for people or groups of people to run open source models to do work on their own hardware. You would be taxing people or groups of people to run a program on the computers they own. This is contrary to the principles of the free and open source software movements.
This is what he says:
> I believe we should tax AI tokens and robots. Right now, if you’re an employer and you hire someone, you pay payroll taxes on their earnings. But if you buy a robot, you can usually write it off right away as a business expense. The tax system nudges you toward replacing people with machines.
A tax would slow the rush away from human labor a little and raise money for retraining and a stronger safety net. It would need to be targeted so it does not slow down the purely beneficial uses of AI, like making medicine and education cheaper.
Note the part about it being targeted. Clearly this is in the context of moderating the displacement of human labor by employers rather than a flat "TAX ALL THE TOKENS!" approach.
Is there an essay from a tech leader than HASN’T rubbed anyone the wrong way, in some time? Eric Schmidt, Dario Amodei, Palmer Luckey, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, etc etc they all seem one or the other of out of touch or unlikable or unable to connect with rapport to the general public these days
...and this is only his professional life ;)
I heard he likes to work with professionals in his private life too.
Morpheus; You think that's a genuinely concerned billionaire you are listening to?
That is a very indirect way to say market crash.
Better than saying bubble, can't say bubble, that implies that people will lose their money because of lies rather than because the market just crashed.
It’s a good thoughtful piece. If I may suggest, the main problem and I mean the actual main problem are those people who underestimate the capabilities of AI. The ones who think it hallucinates all the time, unreliable and mostly useless.
The average person thinks this technology is overhyped (like Emily Bender) so how would one even begin to have a conversation with them on the risks?
This is my experience too. Many people in my offline, non-techy life seem to get almost upset when I argue that models are good at many things (and getting better fast).
And I kind of get it! If your primary exposure to AI is Google search summaries (from their cheapest models) and shitty AI graphic design, it makes sense to think it's vastly overhyped.
I like how Tyler Cowen puts it: "This is the worst they will ever be".
And some people are still stuck on what AI was capable of when GPT-3.5 was SOTA. They don't realize how much they've improved in ~4 years. Even if the rate of improvement slows down, AI will be tremendously more capable in another ~4 years.
Unfortunately it’s not just non technical people, it’s also technical people from my experience. They are usually too caught up in “how it always works” so they can’t think outside of it.
I also think the "main problem" is people that annoy me on the internet
It is overhyped.
It's powerful, and very useful in specific situations.
It's not the second coming of jesus christ.
Agreed.
It can code and we saw it eat(ing) our former occupation, but that was always a defined finite space with defined rules and to be frank, not as hard as us practitioners liked to believe. So I don't think we can extrapolate this progress out to every other human endeavor in the near term at least.
More automation is coming though most likely.
Can you offer you argument you would provide to those people? I use the top SOTA models for software development and it is certainly an impressive and useful function. The quality of the code is however fairly poor, explicit architectural guardrails are frequently circumvented and the "human readable" outputs are very reminiscent of gish-gallop debate strategies.
Software development, as opposed to many many other fields also offers nearly unlimited training data and is one of the few areas with modifiable inputs and testable outputs.
> the actual main problem are those people who underestimate the capabilities of AI
Nope. The actual main problem are those people who totally ignore the real costs of AI.
Remind me, when was the last time when billions and trillions of dollars were spent on workers (education, healthcare, insurance, etc. all together)?
You try to compare the capabilities without comparing the costs. That won't do.
Sigh. Another billionaire whose wealth is being mistaken for authority by the common folk. Worse still, an actual oracle.
I see an old (and successful) pirate king trying to wear yet another hat today.
More fearmongering overhyping the technology. The investment bubble MUST continue!
Bill vibe-coded this article text.
What if there were some mistake and the progression went wrong, and something like an amoeba were given power like a human's?
—AKIRA, 1988
PEDO ALERT
Lemme in now, Lemme in now, Bill Gates, Donald Trump Lemme in now we f-ckin lesbian twins now
Gates was a close friend and blackmail victim of Epstein. I can't separate his business, technical and philanthropic accomplishments from that fact. Sure, he may have funded charitable campaigns to vaccinate against polio in Afghanistan. But, he was also getting rub-downs from underage children.
He was not a victim he was basically the fucking co-founder
That claim requires some evidence that I, personally, have not yet seen.
Nelly talk, city listen
Bill Gates? The Epstein guy?
I thought he was the COVID guy?
> With its ability to synthesize knowledge from every scientific field, AI can accelerate innovation in the world’s toughest technical challenges: providing reliable clean energy for everyone, combating climate change, growing enough food, eradicating diseases, and more
I really think this is overstated. So far everything is pointing towards AI accelerating climate change. Especially if we'll automate everything with physical robots.
> I really think this is overstated. So far everything is pointing towards AI accelerating climate change.
Ok but if we sprint the Delorean towards the brick wall as fast as possible we might be able to hit 88mph just in time to save ourselves