More, from @DavidSacks
While I’m no fan of socialism or arbitrary confiscations of wealth, I can see why Bernie Sanders’ proposal (for the government to take a 50% stake in AI companies) resonates, including with many on the right.
The CEOs of the leading AI labs have told us repeatedly that they will cause massive job loss. This is not a story that I believe, nor does the data bear it out, but this is what they have told us. Similarly, they have hyped the risks of AI without putting an equal or greater emphasis on the benefits or readily available mitigations.
Conservatives have another fear. The employees of the leading labs claim to be philanthropic, but what we’ve seen is massive enrichment of NGOs advancing an agenda at odds with traditional values, fueling a revolution against our cities and communities. Soros-maxxing is not charity in our book.
Anthropic and OpenAI have established themselves as Public Benefit Corporations. What could be more in the public benefit than using half the wealth generated by these companies (which trained for free on the collective knowledge of humanity) to pay down the national debt? There is no ideological bias in that philanthropy.
Dario and Sam have begun to walk back their claims of massive job loss, but the damage to public trust is done, and now the chickens are coming home to roost. I could almost support the Sanders proposal as a stupidity tax.
There’s just one problem. Nationalization of AI will accelerate the corporate-government fusion we’re already sliding toward. Conservatives rightly fear a Central Bank Digital Currency. They ought to be even more concerned about Central Government AI — a system with even more totalistic power over information, decision-making, and human behavior.
We saw how social media was weaponized to censor conservatives (including President Trump) in the last Democrat administration. The definition of “trust & safety” expanded to mean protecting the public from supposed psychological harms, micro-aggressions, and disinformation (you know, like hearing conservative ideas or true facts about Covid).
That “safety” agenda as applied to AI will be vastly more powerful and Orwellian. AI won’t just moderate posts; it will curate reality — with the ability to rewrite history, enforce ideological conformity, influence policy at scale, mass surveil Americans, and condition the benefits of the many systems it controls on approved behavior.
America won’t win the AI race if we beat China but end up with a CCP-style social credit system in the U.S. — and that is the danger as the government becomes more deeply involved in AI development and assumes direct ownership and control.
Conservatives are right to fear where this is all headed but ought to think more carefully about how regulations they are flirting with now (that are widely celebrated among those with a long history of lust for Big Government) will be used against them the next time a Democrat administration is in power.
I’ve lived through many computer technical revolutions (e.g. personal computing, internet, objection orientation, open source, tablets, smart phone, cloud computing). Most turned out different than how they were first described. So be skeptical of claims. Keep your powder dry.
How should we keep our mud?
At 50% ownership the government will control the relevant AI platform. And it will operate like CBC News on steroids. 90% viewership and dictating every facet of society. Then there’s also the added efficiency of not doing a comprehensive search but just popping out propaganda.
Right now the most effective AI application is search – and that’s rapidly deteriorating because it’s cheaper/faster/less energy intensive to use old material than it is to continually scrape the net for new stuff. As a result AI/search is becoming less and less effective – and that will get worse.
So the second best AI application right now is customer support – chatbots etc. There will be huge job losses there, but those jobs tend to be in Pakistan, India, or Nigeria – not the U.S. and certainly not Canada or Europe. Instead the U.S. will gain jobs out of this as chatbots run out of depth and the system evolves around processes that escalate some chats to humans – humans with American accents who have a clue what the customer is on about and don’t just follow a script.
The third best AI app right now is coding and sort of small utility programming support. That works well – but is really a variation on search since the code it provides is largely made up from bits it locates via the older forms of the search functions. That makes it a great idiot savant – but also subject to an increasing GIGO effect as its inputs start to come from its own outputs. Sad for 1st year compsci grads who used AI to pass; great for those few who have a clue or two – so net effect? raising the bar for getting compsci jobs, but also enriching them.
We could just divert the taxes currently being paid by the data centres into a sovereign wealth fund. But that would mean no new taxes which is NOT what the politicians want.
The other thing to do, if you really wanted to share the wealth, is corporate tax breaks on profit sharing amongst all the employees, not just the C suite.