[jazzyjackson]

AI risk is a spectacularization of a new source of wealth

When agriculture and then fossil fuels + supercharged agriculture with petro-fertilizer allowed humanity to become 100x more productive, the owners of the land & capital managed to capture the gains almost entirely, leaving the proletariat powerless except for their labor, and still struggling to survive despite the enormous windfall in energy

Now that AI is on the verge of becoming the major producer of wealth in the 21st century onward, the owners of the capital would like very much if we would talk about anything except the possibility of capturing the wealth of models trained on the public's behavior and distributing it directly as basic income, the way Alaska and Norway redistribute profits from oil to citizens. The data that has been drilled and refined into inference models belongs to humanity, to every book and letter ever penned, why are allowing the investors* of Facebook, Google, and Microsoft to capture the value and leaving the rest of humanity to toil?

The talk of extinction is a magicians trick to divert attention from the fact that we could likely move to 4-hour workweeks in the next decades, but only if wealth distribution is forced onto the capital owners, they will not share if they are not made to.

* yes, indeed, the public can be the investors! as is the case with mutual funds and so on, but the people who are being obsoleted are going to have no significant wealth tied up in these stocks in order to receive dividends. I would support, as an alternative to aggressive taxation, a forced dilution of the stocks of any company found to be replacing its workforce with a superintelligence. Distribute the newly minted stocks to all citizens so dividends can pay out to the rightful receivers of royalties.

[Frannyies]

Let's see. Currently out poor have it better than kings 200 years ago.

(At least in Germany)

I don't say this is fair just that it's easier for a society to increase the base level for everyone

[nico]

The issue is that well-being is relative and subjective

You can’t “objectively” look back and say people “have it better” now

Sure, you can look at all sorts of data and metrics, but that doesn’t mean people feel like they are better off now, which is what matters in the end

So the real question we should be trying to answer is: are people feeling better now than how they felt 200 years ago?

We could talk about it forever, but ultimately, it’s impossible to know

[weaverheavy]

Medieval peasants worked about 1080 hours a year or an average of 20 hours a week. I wont speculate on how happy they were, but they were probably able to spend more time at home with their family/friends and local spiritual community and probably got more sleep than most people do today.

We may have better hygiene and live longer on average compared to then, but most of our lives are spent away from most of the people we care about/take care of.

[jwestbury]

I generally agree with this sentiment, but I think it's important to recognise that this ISN'T an accurate portrayal. Yes, they worked less in service to others... but then they also had to go work their own plot for their own food, etc. They likely laboured as much as we do, once you include the things you need to do to live and participate in society.

Now, how it affects your mental health to do work on behalf of yourself vs. on behalf of others is a different question.

[Frannyies]

I can make reasonable guesses.

[SanderNL]

Kings are a poor comparison. It’s a shit job and sucks in all kinds of surprising and non-surprising ways.

Are our poor better off than financially independent aristocrats of yesteryear? The kind that can be “an artist” or something their whole life. I guess in some ways it’s better now, more tech. But I’m not sure freedom and respect can be bought/replaced with tech alone.

[j7ake]

If you’re having kids, you would want them to be born in a poor family in modern day Germany than to aristocrats 300 years ago.

The infant mortality back then was brutal, even for the aristocrats.

[wruza]

But if you asked aristocrats to swap infant mortality with modern poor life, they might have a spectrum of opinions not necessarily leaning towards being poor. The point is that modern worries are also, well, modern.

[gmerc]

The infant mortality was high for everyone, poor or not. So it’s a bad measure

[gmerc]

People say this a lot but is that really true? I feel it needs objective measurements including anything from access to health care, drug risks, etc.

Most importantly any progress made by humans as a whole rather than “the poor” needs to be subtracted such as general progress on medicine.

Frankly this argument is used as a cludgel

[FirmwareBurner]

>Currently out poor have it better than kings 200 years ago. (At least in Germany)

Only if you look at medical and technical advancements, but objectively, kings in Germany had the amount of land and real estate that the modern German can only dream of.

Sure, we have iPhones and Netflix which kings didn't have, but they had the valuable apprecaible assets the we don't have.

[spacephysics]

Yeah I think the argument is more so the base level rises dramatically higher.

I’d gather to say at least better than most nobility, if we’re just judging on land.

Then again, I do love c-sections to reduce mother and infant mortality, birth control, and antibiotics. I’d say those alone are better than any king/queen had access to in the past

[SkyMarshal]

Modern poor people don’t even have iPhones and Netflix. The word “poor” gets thrown around in these discussions in place of what is really being referred to, lower middle class to middle class.

[Frannyies]

And?

You still have more food choices and proper entertainment.

It's warm when you go to the toilet at night.

We even have the trend of people transforming their garden into stone garden due to the effort.

What's the benefit of those assets really?

[FirmwareBurner]

>What's the benefit of those assets really?

Not queuing with 100 people to visit a moldy overpriced Berlin apartment. Not worried about your retirement, if your pension will be enough to pay for your rent when you're 80. That's what assets are good for. Having Spotify doesn't make up for that.

[dannyobrien]

on the other hand, you have less worries about the closest 100 people in your world poisoning you to get hold of your mouldy cold castle. and actually having a retirement.

[freefaler]

If you're 15th century peasant in some of place in Germany you won't see retirement either you'd be dead by 45.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy

And your quality of life would be far worse than "in the queue with other 100 people"...

[FirmwareBurner]

Sure, it sucked being a peasant, but the original comparison was that the peasants of today have it better than kings of the past.

[flangola7]

The comparison was to kings, not peasants.

[gmerc]

I love how this somehow is used as an argument for todays wealth disparity. “Well kids, you could have been a Jew under Hitler, so go kiss Elons feet and be thankful” to put the argument to the max.

[8note]

The poor 100 years ago certainly had it worse than the kings 300 years ago.

Dying in a coal mine to enrich a capitalist wasn't a great time.

If it's the wealth centralization that made things great, you'd expect that the poor to be at their best when the robber barons were in charge

[PartiallyTyped]

I recommend reading grandpa Kropotkin.

[Frannyies]

I'm only finding some cartoon character.

What do you reference?

[PartiallyTyped]

"The conquest of bread" and "Mutual Aid" are classics.

[slaw]

I don't so. I would rather be a king 200 years ago than a poor today.

[macrolocal]

Right, that's 1823, about the time of Frederick William III. Beethoven might have dedicated a symphony to you.

[darkclouds]

Since the old stone age this planets population has been bumbling along at below 1 billion people until the 1800's. [1] And then by the 1970's they perfected the female contraceptive pill to bring the growth rate down from its peak of 2.1% to its current 1.2% and a projected 0.06% by 2100, which should see the peak population on the planet at 11 billion people.

But is AI a new source of wealth? That remains to be seen, it needs training on other peoples data which is invariably copyrighted, so it doesnt look like AI will be a new source of wealth imo.

[1] https://www.guibord.com/democracy/files-images/world-populat...

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2016/03/ourworldindata_wo...

[jazzyjackson]

it's precisely the copyrighted aspect i'm interested in using to justify the redirection of the profits toward universal basic income - there's no way to solve the fractional royalties of how much revenue to distribute to individual contributors to the datasets; practically everyone online contributed to the datasets to some degree

Japan has issued guidance that they won't use copyright law to dampen the pace of innovation, they are giving free reign to the innovators to capture any wealth produced as a byproduct of publically available (but copyrighted) data

USA has the strongest intellectual property protections in the world, I hope we can do some good with it (as is I see copyright preventing more art from being made than it incentivizing, and I'd rather abolish it, but not before a basic income is in place so that artists don't have to feel like their creative work is their only asset they have to hold onto and protecy)

[gmerc]

Uhm. Look at content owners vs artists right now - look SAG strike and the insane employer proposal.

The idea that copyright won’t backfired badly and freeze future generations into paying rent is ludicrous.

[jazzyjackson]

Hey just noticed this reply, can you tell me more about the future you see? And any way to avoid it? I agree that things are tending towards no one owning anything, having to pay a subscription to access our own cultural heritage. Should we fight the trend by mere pirating? If we abolish intellectual property altogether, are we just returning to pre-industrial arts, such that only the rich see any enjoyment of art that is made just for them? (actually I don't know how art worked in the past, any pointers would be much appreciated)

[throw_pm23]

How will it produce wealth?

[jazzyjackson]

If we are to believe the hypemasters selling AI risk, it will increase profits across all industries by making human intellectual labor ("knowledge work") redundant, allowing the economy to operate at current output with a fraction of the labor

(the question becomes, once everyone is out of the job, who is paying for goods and services to keep the economy alive, hence - basic income)

[ryanklee]

By selling people products based on AI risk.

[FirmwareBurner]

>AI risk is a spectacularization of a new source of wealth

Only if society allows the use of AIs that have been trained on content for which they didn't have the legal rights to use for that purpose (basically theft).

[joncrocks]

What legal rights are currently required for training on data?

(As opposed to precise-reproduction in output, covered by copyright)

[FirmwareBurner]

Some of the big AI LLMs of today have been trained on content from Twitter, Reddit, Quora, probably HN as well, and even more shockingly on individual artists' artwork and pirated books from libgen without their owners' and IP holders' permission. How is that not theft?

[realo]

Anything I (a human) can listen to or look at publicly for free is free game AFAIK.

The sum of all this becomes my "experience of life", and I can draw upon that knowledge to create new stuff.

The only difference between an AI and me is speed and capability to remember.

So ... does the act of reading HN become theft just because it is done by a non-human, with inhuman efficiency?

Personally I don't think so.

We could continue the conversation with a debate about whether or not the AI's outputs (creations) should be restricted (legally) in the same way as a human...