[throwanem]

> What no one is asking is: 'it this makes it easy for anyone to be an artist, a director, a musician... what are we going to get, and will it be worse than what we have now?

Everyone is asking this.

But that's also not the only question. The one you're ignoring here is: If these tools enable one artist to do the work of a hundred, what happens to the other 99?

AI boosters have as yet offered no satisfactory answer for this question. Given the intimate involvement some of them have with politics at the national and global level, this absence constitutes reasonable grounds for suspicion that no answer is intended or forthcoming, and that suspicion is what's asking here to be addressed.

[Eisenstein]

> If these tools enable one artist to do the work of a hundred, what happens to the other 99?

Not really -- as people have gotten more efficient at their jobs, we tend to just produce more/better things, not impoverish a bunch of people. If one person can day (8 hours) making a shoe by hand, and one person can make a shoe in an hour using a shoe making machine, then we don't have one less shoe maker, we have two people making 16 shoes a day. As an effect, shoes are now much cheaper, so they aren't only worn by rich people. If the one-shoe-per-day maker refuses to use a shoe making machine, he or she can upsell their 'hand crafted' shoes to rich people who want to distinguish themselves.

Believe me, I am not a 'free market fixes everything' person, at all, but in these cases, that is how it has worked since the industrial revolution. This is not a new process (automation making a task much more accessible/efficient) and this is not a new complaint (what happens to the people who made a living doing task).

Change is scary -- and everyone has the right to be afraid of an uncertain future, but I can't recall an instance of the regressive approach actually working to allay the fears of those who imposed it. Yet, we all see huge reminders of how our lives have been improved by making hard things easier and accessible to more people.

[throwanem]

The argument as presented so omits even the possibility of harm being done anyone in this process as to seem as if it seeks to foreclose the thought at root.

It would not surprise me if anyone called this pollyannaish, or even Panglossian.

[Eisenstein]

Can you explain yourself differently please? I have no idea what you mean.

[throwanem]

You don't really touch at any point in your argument on even the possibility someone might be harmed, in the process of entire segments of the labor market being automated. Why is that?

[Eisenstein]

It is assumed is anything with any kind of scale that harm with occur.

Did anyone get harmed when photography was used to supplant portraits? Did anyone get harmed when mail started getting sent by rail instead of horse? Did anyone get harmed when air travel became possible? Did anyone get harmed when we supplied electric power to homes?

I have an idea -- why don't you propose a solution to AI ruining creative jobs and we can apply that standard to it.

[throwanem]

Price in the externality. The multiple of US GDP that OpenAI currently seeks in funding should certainly suffice to fund UBI, and if that slows down OpenAI's development of new capabilities, then that should still be preferable to the alternative of OpenAI being enjoined from doing business until that is done.

Of course you may respond that this is unrealistic, which it is; it requires a government capable of acting via regulation in defense of its citizens, and so nothing like it will be done.