[pu_pe]

> “I own the compute infrastructure” or “I owned the company that bought the AI systems early”, on the other hand, is just being in the right place at the right time. It’s not about your talents, effort, or contribution. It’s pure capital ownership divorced from any human quality.

The article is not about AI, it's about this stage of capitalism. Unlike the author, I would argue that it is very much in line with the consequences of Robert Nozick's thinking. On the other hand, the way China is doing its AI development and rollout seems more aligned with a Rawlsian notion of distributing the benefits.

I can perfectly understand why everyone in the West is so jaded and worried about how AI benefits will be distributed. That doesn't change the fact that, like any technology, it can also be used to make everyone wealthier, like industrialization also did.

[tinypieman]

My take on this: Ultimately the industrial revolution has been beneficial to the majority, but when it occurred it triggered violent changes that pushed many communities toward hardship. From artisans owning or co-owning their means of production, with a significant creative license over their work and the possibility to take their own initiatives… to the efficiency of atomized labor, which strips away the creativity of most, and devalues the work. The created hardship providing more people ready to join the ranks of devalued workers… The industrial revolution was, first, a great mean of consolidating wealth, it immensely benefited a few, and only later “trickled down”. I see the AI revolution the same, it will violently break a significant portion of knowledge works, remove creative licenses, and devalue those works. Similarly to the industrial revolution, we can now atomize knowledge works as much as we want. Through this we can make the workers as easy to replace as we want them to be. This shifts power dynamics and allows the consolidation of wealth. There are strong market incentives for this and no regulations at the moment. I don’t see how we can avoid this. I don’t see those pushing this revolution as great humanists sadly. Yet ultimately, I think this will damage the middle class too much, creating instabilities. From there, there is a a chance we can reclaim the benefits of this revolution for all. But it will be a fight, and I believe the transition will be ugly.

[pu_pe]

Yeah, I mostly agree with your opinion. It's true that in the short-term there will be tons of disruption and likely more bad than good will come out of it. I guess my point was that ultimately how the upsides and downsides of a new technology will be distributed depend a lot on how societies organize themselves. The industrial revolution allowed the concentration of wealth and robber barons, but also unions and social democracy as a reaction to that.

[tinypieman]

I agree, it really depends on how society organizes. For this reason I tend to be a bit frustrated by how AI narratives are often framed. They are often described as only technological. As if a tool could wield itself without anyone behind to operate it. We talk about the impact of AI as if it was inevitable progress. Those issues are in fact deeply political, but the valley mentality doesn’t like to see it that way. Probably because it is uncomfortable to see our work as contributing to a complex system with winners and losers, it’s much nicer to see ourselves as stewards of progress. The question “the progress of what?” is often pushed in the background.