alt Hacker NewsI feel like if people keep using AI as a blanket term for "inequality" and "inequality accelerants" then yeah, it's "AI"'s fault. When in reality the whole thing needs to be decoupled..
"Gleefully taking away people's livelihoods will be met with violence, and nothing good will come of it." - fixed.
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How do you decouple it when the people who own it and are building it seem to be driven on increasing inequality?
its always peoples fault. blaming technology is the shortest sight. people make it, and wittingly use it in a disagreeable way, because it earns them money.
there is something else that needs to change which everyone is reluctant to admit, or struggling with internally.
thats ok, its called conscious evolution. it hurts, but it will be ok someday. its generational, so progress is always slower than one would hope. Just know that every step in the right direction is one, even if the entire world seems to disagree keep pushing for what you beleive is right, and hopefully thats something which is not infringing on other peoples capacity to live a happy life.
The terms are defined by the AI dealers!
People currently assume AI will be an accelerant of inequality because all currently useful models (i.e. those potentially capable of mass labor disruption) are only able to run in multibillion dollar datacenters, with all returns accruing disproportionately to the oligarchs who own said datacenters.
I'm not sure this moat is inevitably perpetual. It's likely computing technology evolves to the point of being able to run frontier-level models on our phones and laptops. It's also likely that with diminishing marginal returns, future datacenter-level models will not be dramatically more capable than future local models. In that case, the power of AI would be (almost) fully democratized, obviating any oligarchic concentration of power. Everyone would have equal access to the ultimate means of production.
> "Gleefully taking away people's livelihoods will be met with violence, and nothing good will come of it." - fixed.
This statement is not decoupled; if anything, it is a more generalized one, as it does not point at any cause or causes for livelihoods to be taken.
You have it backwards. People are using billionaire owned AI, billionaire lobbying efforts gaming the system, and billionaire owned media as a propaganda arm for AI as a specific example of the larger general idea.
The PC revolution in the 1990s is one of the core drivers of inequality, where the rich took almost all of the dividends from the vast productivity gains from personal computers as the prime development of Moore's law rocketed computers from 66 MHz to over 8 gigahertz.
Judging by the gleeful texts of CEOs, collapsed hiring, internal policy changes and pushes, and the additional decades of centralized political control, it's clear this is going to be even worse..
I wholeheartedly agree with and encourage this kind of academic distinction. However...
Until people with billions of dollars behind them do something with that money to offset the financial hardship that they're knowingly - and gleefully - bringing to others... The distinction has no practical use.
(And before someone says "that's the government's job!", consider how much lobbying money is coming from CEOs and companies who know the domain best and are agitating for better financial and social safeguards for all. None, naturally.)