[maxerickson]

Say you own a well and sell the clean water.

I learn that boiling the stream water makes it safe and tell people about it.

What do I owe you?

Uber and AI are certainly more complicated than that, but you are pretty close to arguing that the constructed rights of some people inhibit the rights of other people.

[esafak]

How does that analogy apply to AI, where a handful of companies are attempting to replace the entire white collar market with computers? It fits neither qualitatively, nor quantitatively.

[maxerickson]

If somebody thinks the computer can make a better PowerPoint, what business is it of yours to stop them from using the computer to make a PowerPoint?

There's a big political problem to solve, but it's how to give most people decent material standards of living if computers are doing all the work, not how to freeze things in place so that people can keep doing tasks that (assuming success) the computer is better at.

[esafak]

Again, this analogy makes no sense. People use PowerPoint, they don't get replaced by it.

The goal of AI companies is to replace workers entirely; that is the only way their valuations make sense, and OpenAI's charter says this explicitly.

[maxerickson]

The displacement will rather obviously be task by task, not job by job.

Okay, edits it is. The displacement will rather obviously be incremental and be task by task, not job by job.