7 ms·

Preparing for AI's economic impact: exploring policy responses

75 points by grantpitt 11mo ago

MatekCopatek 11mo ago
It's hard to read this without being cynical. How seriously would you take a proposal on car pollution regulation and traffic law updates written by Volkswagen?
- blibble 11mo ago
  > How seriously would you take a proposal on car pollution regulation and traffic law updates written by Volkswagen? they more or less wrote the EU emission regulations the only reason diesel cars were sold in huge numbers in the EU
  - JohnMakin 11mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
- protocolture 11mo ago
  Am I the US Government in this scenario?
- SpicyLemonZest 11mo ago
  If Volkswagen's competitors ran around saying that cars aren't dangerous and there's no need to regulate them, and their critics insisted that you're a mark if you accept the premise that cars are a useful transportation method at all, I don't suppose I'd have a choice but to take it seriously. If you know of a similar analysis from a less conflicted group I'd love to read it!
AndrewKemendo 11mo ago
Much like the end of history wasn’t the end of history LLM-Attention centric AI isn’t the end of AI development So if they are successful at locking in it will be at their own demise because it doesn’t cover the infinity many pathways for AI to continue down, specifically intersections with robotics and physical manipulation, that are ultimately way more impactful on society. Until the plurality of humans on the earth understand that human exceptionalism is no longer something to be taking for granted (and shouldn’t have been) there’s never going to be effective global governance of technology.
- blind_tomato 11mo ago
  > Until the plurality of humans on the earth understand that human exceptionalism is no longer something to be taking for granted (and shouldn’t have been) there’s never going to be effective global governance of technology. Could you elaborate more on this? FYI fully agreed on the former sentences.
  - icandoit 11mo ago
    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?
  - AndrewKemendo 11mo ago
    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.
blibble 11mo ago
they seem to have omitted the scenarios where the newly unemployable electorate turn on them
- wmf 11mo ago
  The higher taxes proposed here could be used to buy off the electorate.
- mrshadowgoose 11mo ago
  I used to think that "AI operating in meatspace" was going to remain a tough problem for a long time, but seeing the dramatic developments in robotics over the last 2 years, it's pretty clear that's not going to be the case. As the masses fade into permanent unemployment, this will likely coincide with (and be partially caused by) a corresponding proliferation in intelligent humanoid robots. At a certain point, "turning on them" becomes physically impossible.
  - jononor 11mo ago
    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.
- thawawaycold 11mo ago
  They just know it's not going to happen
robbrown451 11mo ago
I'm having trouble understanding what they want to "upskill" those people to do. What skills won't be replaced? The only ones I can think of either have a large physical component, or are only doable by a tiny fraction of the current workforce. As for the ones with a physical component (plumbers being the most cited), the cognitive parts of the job (the "skilled" part of skilled labor) can be replaced while having the person just following directions demonstrated onscreen for them. And of course, the robots aren't far behind, since the main hard part of making a capable robot is the AI part.
- tintor 11mo ago
  'main hard part of making a capable robot is the AI part' Robots are far behind. Mechanical hands with human equivalent performance is as hard as the AI part. Strong, fast, durable, tough, touch and temp sensitive, dexterous, light, water-proof, energy efficient, non-overheating. Muscles and tendons in human hands and forearms self-heal and grow stronger with more use. Mechanical tendons stretch and break. Small motors have plenty of issues of their own.
  - AndrewKemendo 11mo ago
    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.
    - WastedCucumber 11mo ago
      There's nothing in that post claiming those problems will never be solved. I understand the claim as "the hardware conponent of robotics needs more work and this will take some time, compared to AI capabilities/software" Or soemthing like that. Maybe you could clarify what your experience on the matter is, how the state of th art looks to you, and most of all what timelines you imagine?
      - AndrewKemendo 11mo ago
        Just look up “fine dexterous manipulation with pressure feedback” to see the SOTA for dexterous manipulation There’s at least a half dozen products, two recently from Unitree and Allegro announced. Rodney Brooks wrote about the challenges - but frankly it was a submarine piece for his work https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dexterity/ https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dex...
notatoad 11mo ago
i see the comments here are pretty cynical about this post, and probably for good reason. especially "you might have to start taxing consumption instead of income because people won't have income anymore" but at least a couple of these proposals seem to boil down to needing to tax the absolute crap out of the AI companies. which seems pretty obviously true, and its interesting that the ai companies are already saying that.
- eucyclos 11mo ago
  I've found large entrenched players tend to prefer slightly more than a reasonable amount of taxation and regulation in any industry; governments are easier to predict and handle than scrappy competitors.
- varispeed 11mo ago
  > its interesting that the ai companies are already saying that. This is just cheap PR to launder legitimacy and urgency. To create false equivalence between AI agent and an employee. I think this is a sign of weakness, having seen AI rolled out in many companies where it already shows signs of being absolute disaster (like summaries changing meaning and losing important details - so tasks go in wrong direction and take time to be corrected, developers creating unprecedented amount of tech debt with their vibe coded features, massive amount of content that sound important, but it is just equivalent of spam, managers spending ours with LLM "researching" strategy feeding the FOMO and so on).
  - buu700 11mo ago
    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.
mjbale116 11mo ago
anthropic are so sure about the incoming economic impact of their AI that they want to start talking about policy - for our sake. Incredible stuff...
remarkEon 11mo ago
ctrl + f for "immigration" returns nothing. Not serious, not worth reading.
- vkou 11mo ago
  This is a horn that must be harped on, frequently and loudly. Anyone with anxieties over immigration should have those same concerns over AI, many times over. Skilled immigrants just got a $100,000/year head tax in the US. Where is such a tax for AI?
  - remarkEon 11mo ago
    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"?
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
throw-10-13 11mo ago
Seem’s like the crypto gifters and moon boys have found a new home.
musicale 11mo ago
The most immediate impact might be the bursting of the AI bubble and a dotcom-like crash of tech stocks and businesses like Anthropic. Financial circularity could also lead to instability.
- Mistletoe 11mo ago
  This is actually the most likely outcome but it's the quiet part an AI company isn't going to say out loud.
- frozenseven 11mo ago
  >bursting of the AI bubble I hope people will eventually revisit these predictions and admit they were wrong.
  - Jensson 11mo ago
    There is an AI bubble just like there were a dotcom bubble, they are not wrong everyone know there is an AI bubble even Sam Altman says that AI is currently a bubble. The question is how much value AI gives after the bubble has popped, but there is a bubble.
    - frozenseven 11mo ago
      AI is undervalued & I don't give a shit what Sam Altman has to say about anything.
danpalmer 11mo ago
If you write policy about AI you're doing it wrong. AI is an implementation, but policies must be written for outcomes. Discrimination by law enforcement, exclusion from loan approval, bad moderation on social networking, cheating on exams, creating fake news or media about people, swallowing up user data... all the negative social impact of AI can be achieved without it, and much of it is already illegal anyway. Legislation that is predicated on AI will fail in the long run. Legislation that focuses on the actual negative outcomes will stand the test of time much more.
- Cheer2171 11mo ago
  Oh, so we can't address any specific problems with any technology, because we should actually be fixing all of society at the root of all those problems. So while you wait for our broken political system to solve those root causes, enjoy feeling smug about not having implemented any imperfect, temporary bandaids to stop some bleeding. Are you working on fixing those root problems? Or after dismissing short term policy bandaids, are you going to go back to working in an industry where you will probably make more money in the short run if governments don't do any tech regulation in the short run? Your commitment to the long run will lead to paralysis and do nothing in the long run.
  - danpalmer 11mo ago
    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.
    - cudgy 11mo ago
watwut 11mo ago
> "you might have to start taxing consumption instead of income because people won't have income anymore" Proposal written by billionaire trying to shift taxation even more away from themselves and even more to everyone else. > Accelerate permits and approvals for AI infrastructure Oh, they want that? Who would not say.
- cudgy 11mo ago
  They want to speed up the process of getting laws written to protect them and AI. One way to do that is to appear like you’re looking for a solution while at the same time mentioning how urgent things are and how we need to pass laws quickly. You can guess how those laws will be focused, but my guess is it will be focused on benefiting the AI companies and companies that plan to use AI companies to build their companies. The reasons for that will be proposed as protecting the citizens from the evil other country that’s building AI. “Without strong AI, we can’t build weapons to defend the country.” and “without strong AI, our companies won’t be able to compete in the world marketplace.”
intended 11mo ago
If upskilling is your hope - you have no hope. Without any modifications - MOOCs have single digit completion rates. This is high quality, free, publicly available educational material. The vast majority of people do not simply have the time, money, or undivided attention - to get a new domain under their belt. This is “help miners learn code” territory.
- sateesh 11mo ago
  What other option you can propose. This article [1] says preferred suggestions by economists is: retraining, regulation, or social insurance and for most of the people surveyed "retraining" was the preferred approach. Not sure MOOCs can be taken as an useful alibi to measure success of upskill. Most (employers) won't honor the MOCC certs, and people do MOOC while working. Taking a MOOC doesn't inherently ensure that the learner has mastered the course they took, hence there is less incentive in completing too. 1. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/coming-ai-backlash https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/coming-ai-backl...
  - intended 11mo ago
    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.
    - sateesh 11mo ago
      Not that I completely disagree with you, yes indeed with excellent training not sure how many can be retrained to be good enough for new kind of job roles, skills. Also it isn't certain that there will be far more new jobs than what would get shed, in which case there won't be enough demand to absorb even the retrained (and skilled) labor.
swoorup 11mo ago
This smells of regulatory capture.

75 points by grantpitt 11mo ago

It's hard to read this without being cynical. How seriously would you take a proposal on car pollution regulation and traffic law updates written by Volkswagen?

blibble 11mo ago
> How seriously would you take a proposal on car pollution regulation and traffic law updates written by Volkswagen? they more or less wrote the EU emission regulations the only reason diesel cars were sold in huge numbers in the EU
- JohnMakin 11mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
protocolture 11mo ago
Am I the US Government in this scenario?
SpicyLemonZest 11mo ago
If Volkswagen's competitors ran around saying that cars aren't dangerous and there's no need to regulate them, and their critics insisted that you're a mark if you accept the premise that cars are a useful transportation method at all, I don't suppose I'd have a choice but to take it seriously. If you know of a similar analysis from a less conflicted group I'd love to read it!

AndrewKemendo 11mo ago

Much like the end of history wasn’t the end of history LLM-Attention centric AI isn’t the end of AI development So if they are successful at locking in it will be at their own demise because it doesn’t cover the infinity many pathways for AI to continue down, specifically intersections with robotics and physical manipulation, that are ultimately way more impactful on society. Until the plurality of humans on the earth understand that human exceptionalism is no longer something to be taking for granted (and shouldn’t have been) there’s never going to be effective global governance of technology.

blind_tomato 11mo ago
> Until the plurality of humans on the earth understand that human exceptionalism is no longer something to be taking for granted (and shouldn’t have been) there’s never going to be effective global governance of technology. Could you elaborate more on this? FYI fully agreed on the former sentences.
- icandoit 11mo ago
  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?
- AndrewKemendo 11mo ago
  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.

blibble 11mo ago

they seem to have omitted the scenarios where the newly unemployable electorate turn on them

wmf 11mo ago
The higher taxes proposed here could be used to buy off the electorate.
mrshadowgoose 11mo ago
I used to think that "AI operating in meatspace" was going to remain a tough problem for a long time, but seeing the dramatic developments in robotics over the last 2 years, it's pretty clear that's not going to be the case. As the masses fade into permanent unemployment, this will likely coincide with (and be partially caused by) a corresponding proliferation in intelligent humanoid robots. At a certain point, "turning on them" becomes physically impossible.
- jononor 11mo ago
  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.
thawawaycold 11mo ago
They just know it's not going to happen

robbrown451 11mo ago

I'm having trouble understanding what they want to "upskill" those people to do. What skills won't be replaced? The only ones I can think of either have a large physical component, or are only doable by a tiny fraction of the current workforce. As for the ones with a physical component (plumbers being the most cited), the cognitive parts of the job (the "skilled" part of skilled labor) can be replaced while having the person just following directions demonstrated onscreen for them. And of course, the robots aren't far behind, since the main hard part of making a capable robot is the AI part.

tintor 11mo ago
'main hard part of making a capable robot is the AI part' Robots are far behind. Mechanical hands with human equivalent performance is as hard as the AI part. Strong, fast, durable, tough, touch and temp sensitive, dexterous, light, water-proof, energy efficient, non-overheating. Muscles and tendons in human hands and forearms self-heal and grow stronger with more use. Mechanical tendons stretch and break. Small motors have plenty of issues of their own.
- AndrewKemendo 11mo ago
  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.
  - WastedCucumber 11mo ago
    There's nothing in that post claiming those problems will never be solved. I understand the claim as "the hardware conponent of robotics needs more work and this will take some time, compared to AI capabilities/software" Or soemthing like that. Maybe you could clarify what your experience on the matter is, how the state of th art looks to you, and most of all what timelines you imagine?
    - AndrewKemendo 11mo ago
      Just look up “fine dexterous manipulation with pressure feedback” to see the SOTA for dexterous manipulation There’s at least a half dozen products, two recently from Unitree and Allegro announced. Rodney Brooks wrote about the challenges - but frankly it was a submarine piece for his work https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dexterity/ https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dex...

notatoad 11mo ago

i see the comments here are pretty cynical about this post, and probably for good reason. especially "you might have to start taxing consumption instead of income because people won't have income anymore" but at least a couple of these proposals seem to boil down to needing to tax the absolute crap out of the AI companies. which seems pretty obviously true, and its interesting that the ai companies are already saying that.

eucyclos 11mo ago
I've found large entrenched players tend to prefer slightly more than a reasonable amount of taxation and regulation in any industry; governments are easier to predict and handle than scrappy competitors.
varispeed 11mo ago
> its interesting that the ai companies are already saying that. This is just cheap PR to launder legitimacy and urgency. To create false equivalence between AI agent and an employee. I think this is a sign of weakness, having seen AI rolled out in many companies where it already shows signs of being absolute disaster (like summaries changing meaning and losing important details - so tasks go in wrong direction and take time to be corrected, developers creating unprecedented amount of tech debt with their vibe coded features, massive amount of content that sound important, but it is just equivalent of spam, managers spending ours with LLM "researching" strategy feeding the FOMO and so on).
- buu700 11mo ago
  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.

mjbale116 11mo ago

anthropic are so sure about the incoming economic impact of their AI that they want to start talking about policy - for our sake. Incredible stuff...

remarkEon 11mo ago

ctrl + f for "immigration" returns nothing. Not serious, not worth reading.

vkou 11mo ago
This is a horn that must be harped on, frequently and loudly. Anyone with anxieties over immigration should have those same concerns over AI, many times over. Skilled immigrants just got a $100,000/year head tax in the US. Where is such a tax for AI?
- remarkEon 11mo ago
  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"?

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

throw-10-13 11mo ago

Seem’s like the crypto gifters and moon boys have found a new home.

musicale 11mo ago

The most immediate impact might be the bursting of the AI bubble and a dotcom-like crash of tech stocks and businesses like Anthropic. Financial circularity could also lead to instability.

Mistletoe 11mo ago
This is actually the most likely outcome but it's the quiet part an AI company isn't going to say out loud.
frozenseven 11mo ago
>bursting of the AI bubble I hope people will eventually revisit these predictions and admit they were wrong.
- Jensson 11mo ago
  There is an AI bubble just like there were a dotcom bubble, they are not wrong everyone know there is an AI bubble even Sam Altman says that AI is currently a bubble. The question is how much value AI gives after the bubble has popped, but there is a bubble.
  - frozenseven 11mo ago
    AI is undervalued & I don't give a shit what Sam Altman has to say about anything.

danpalmer 11mo ago

If you write policy about AI you're doing it wrong. AI is an implementation, but policies must be written for outcomes. Discrimination by law enforcement, exclusion from loan approval, bad moderation on social networking, cheating on exams, creating fake news or media about people, swallowing up user data... all the negative social impact of AI can be achieved without it, and much of it is already illegal anyway. Legislation that is predicated on AI will fail in the long run. Legislation that focuses on the actual negative outcomes will stand the test of time much more.

Cheer2171 11mo ago
Oh, so we can't address any specific problems with any technology, because we should actually be fixing all of society at the root of all those problems. So while you wait for our broken political system to solve those root causes, enjoy feeling smug about not having implemented any imperfect, temporary bandaids to stop some bleeding. Are you working on fixing those root problems? Or after dismissing short term policy bandaids, are you going to go back to working in an industry where you will probably make more money in the short run if governments don't do any tech regulation in the short run? Your commitment to the long run will lead to paralysis and do nothing in the long run.
- danpalmer 11mo ago
  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.
  - cudgy 11mo ago

watwut 11mo ago

> "you might have to start taxing consumption instead of income because people won't have income anymore" Proposal written by billionaire trying to shift taxation even more away from themselves and even more to everyone else. > Accelerate permits and approvals for AI infrastructure Oh, they want that? Who would not say.

cudgy 11mo ago
They want to speed up the process of getting laws written to protect them and AI. One way to do that is to appear like you’re looking for a solution while at the same time mentioning how urgent things are and how we need to pass laws quickly. You can guess how those laws will be focused, but my guess is it will be focused on benefiting the AI companies and companies that plan to use AI companies to build their companies. The reasons for that will be proposed as protecting the citizens from the evil other country that’s building AI. “Without strong AI, we can’t build weapons to defend the country.” and “without strong AI, our companies won’t be able to compete in the world marketplace.”

intended 11mo ago

If upskilling is your hope - you have no hope. Without any modifications - MOOCs have single digit completion rates. This is high quality, free, publicly available educational material. The vast majority of people do not simply have the time, money, or undivided attention - to get a new domain under their belt. This is “help miners learn code” territory.

sateesh 11mo ago
What other option you can propose. This article [1] says preferred suggestions by economists is: retraining, regulation, or social insurance and for most of the people surveyed "retraining" was the preferred approach. Not sure MOOCs can be taken as an useful alibi to measure success of upskill. Most (employers) won't honor the MOCC certs, and people do MOOC while working. Taking a MOOC doesn't inherently ensure that the learner has mastered the course they took, hence there is less incentive in completing too. 1. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/coming-ai-backlash https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/coming-ai-backl...
- intended 11mo ago
  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.
  - sateesh 11mo ago
    Not that I completely disagree with you, yes indeed with excellent training not sure how many can be retrained to be good enough for new kind of job roles, skills. Also it isn't certain that there will be far more new jobs than what would get shed, in which case there won't be enough demand to absorb even the retrained (and skilled) labor.

swoorup 11mo ago

This smells of regulatory capture.