Someone is to blame for approving the use (or unapproved use) of a tool/process that breaks the law, same as today. When I worked in a regulated industry, we kept records of all inputs and decisions made and an auditor would do random checks that the results matched our documented methodology (afaik that documentation was submitted to/approved by either an auditor or the regulator).

"No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby."

>> https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/H._L._Mencken

If there are problems that are specific to AI then sure we should legislate about it. For example defining what "fair use" is for AI training, that's a clearly new area.

But most of the pushback I've seen to AI in policy is so over-fit to current AI that it would be trivial to work around it. You can argue that we'd be letting perfect be the enemy of good, but I think we'd be making policies that will be out of date by the time they even make it into law, and that we'll never make any progress at all.

That said, I'm all for being proven wrong. The US tends to write highly specific legislation so I'm sure it'll try a few of these. The EU tends to write much more vague legislation specifically for this reason. We'll see how they end up working.

> So while you wait for our broken political system

Yeah we better let these important topics in the hands of very stable people like Musk or Thiel, they for sure know what the people want

> make more money in the short run if governments don't do any tech regulation in the short run?

"Money money money money", homo sapiens decerebration under capitalism is quite something to witness. Maybe just maybe there is more to life than raw productivity and money... The root causes you're talking about are greed and an unbound quest for "progress", piling more in top will certainly not help

And your claim is that those will never be solved?

As a professional robotics engineer I can tell you for a fact they are coming soon.

For most things they don't need to be "human equivalent." I'd be willing to be the current crop of robots we're seeing could do most tasks like vacuuming, cooking, picking up clutter, folding laundry and putting it aways, making beds, touch up painting, gardening etc. It seems to be getting better very fast. And if mechanical tendons break, you replace them. Big deal. You don't even need a person to do the repair.

> I don't think "replaced" is a good word here.. augmented and expanded. With AI we are expanding our activities, users expect more, competition forces companies to do more.

Daily reminder that the vast majority of value generated by productivity boost brought by technology in the last 50 years doesn't benefit the workers

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSG4s-x...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal

Personally, if I were going to publish something like this as a leader of a major AI company today, I would actually try very hard to put together a good faith proposal that I genuinely believed to be in the best interests of the public.

I can't speak to this particular proposal or the motivations behind it, but I think my approach is the smart play in the present circumstances. Why publish something brazenly self-serving that will at best be forgotten two weeks later, or at worst be added to the list of reasons a bunch of people have to hate you, when you could instead earn some goodwill as a benevolent thought leader and maybe get some academics and politicians to come out of the woodwork backing your ideas?

If the industry is successful and a particular player doesn't fall behind the competition, they're going to be making obscene amounts of money regardless. Better to have a happy and successful public that can't imagine life without you than a public in Great-Depression-like conditions that wants you dead and will only vote for politicians who campaign on banning your product.

As an aside, I'm not sold on the idea of taxes that specifically increase the cost of AI. I don't think it's wise to disincentivize AI usage or artificially inflate costs. (That would particularly hurt anyone with use cases that aren't connected to immediate profit.) If AI has the impact most of us would like it to have, the economy will become way more productive and the public will get its share of that through corporate taxes anyway. I'd rather just close tax loopholes and start laying the groundwork for a future system of distributing resources in a post-employment world.

My current preference is a guaranteed educational/training stipend for any unemployed adult who wants one, and changing the standard career advice for the next generation from "learn to code" to "learn to startup". Looking forward a decade from now, if employment as we know it is scarce, but the economy is flush with capital and automated labor is dirt cheap, it seems to me that self-employment will reemerge as the dominant career path — and anyone who can't raise funding for their business (or acquire grants for their research) will simply need to keep leveling up until they can. Maybe eventually we'll have the resources to transition to a full UBI, but in the meantime, we'd need a transitional system that could provide for the unemployed masses without incentivizing everyone else to suddenly quit jobs that were still necessary. Just my 2c.

What development have happened in robotics over the last 2 years, that changed your mind? I am familiar with general industry trends in electronics over the last two decades, as well as the 1 decade in machine learning.

100% and the anxieties are related. If AI is going to start cannibalizing entire classes of employment, then what's the point of high levels of immigration to "support the job market"?

Then There are NO options. We will have to live with that world and having no future.

I’m aware that this level of nihilism is difficult for many to stomach - but it’s only nihilism if you believe in fairy tales.

If we are talking about reality then we have to deal with the impossible challenges we are facing.

The fact is that retraining will not work - nor is this the first time it’s been named as a hope up in the past 25 years. (“teaching miners how to code” comes from the last time this was a big hope in America.)

If it helps you feel better - I said unmodified MOOCs.

With some changes, you can increase MOOC completion rates - but there isn’t enough lift even after that.

I used to be a champion for education initiatives to up skill workers - from a time before MOOCs.

The failure of MOOCs was the end of that hope because it showed there was a gape between the ideal and reality.

People simply can’t retrain like that.

The bacteria that aren't antibacterial resistant eventually get replaced by those that are.

Maybe you are alcohol, gambling, and pornography resistant but maybe you have friends and family that aren't. Are you picking up their slack?

What circumstances make "going Amish" look, not just reasonable, but necessary for survival?

It’s taken for granted that humans are the best choice for how to accomplish tasks.

The tasks humans are best at now are different than 10kya.

The world changes, new human jobs are made and humans collectively move up the abstraction chain. Schumpeter called this creative destruction and “capital + technology” is the transition function.

At the point where “capital + technology” does not need a human anymore and that will happen (if not in my lifetime then at least in the next 500 years) then there will be nothing more to argue for or retain.

So unless humanity recognizes this and decides to organize as humans (not as europeans, or alabamans or han etc…) then this is the only possible outcome.

Me personally, I don’t think that’s mathematically/energetically possible for humans to do because we’re not biologically capable of that level of eusocial coordination.

You might be interested in my theory.

High school version: https://kemendo.com/basiccohesion.html

Full draft PDF https://kemendo.com/GTC.pdf