15 ms·

The turbulent AI era is here

199 points by ilamont 21d ago

tome 21d ago
It's fascinating to me that there's no one in this thread arguing that AI is a bubble and it's all going to crash soon.
- gmac 20d ago
  I mean, there's certainly silly money involved, but there's surely no credible doubt that AI is already really good at many valuable tasks. So if there's a crash, doesn't that just leave us with a bunch of useful AI hardware whose costs have been written off? I wouldn't have thought that much changes what social impacts AI is going to have.
dang 20d ago
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49447057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49447057, which was posted a bit earlier.
matltc 21d ago
Love how Gates and Nadella had nothing to say until this year, after they clearly lost any hope of building a moat around it
- m_ke 21d ago
  You have to understand that Gates had other distractions to deal with
  - elmer2 21d ago
    Yeah, underage Russian women.
- boxed 21d ago
  That you had your hands over your ears doesn't mean they weren't talking.
madhias 21d ago
> I believe we should tax AI tokens and robots. You had me here.
- havaianaslife 20d ago
  Make some sort of sense to me to think about it, but tbh we already pay vat on tokens and also on machinery (robots), home appliances etc. Also its something payed on possession and not use, i can use it for different things other than make profit out of it. I think it's not the correct way or at least, not the correct time to do something like that, we must see how it evolves before doing something so bold. Also taxing is a difficult matter because is different in countries, region, etc. Already AI leading companies have problems finding how to back the enormous debt they are in. I don't think it's useful to somebody to act in a preemptive way on this topic. First we must have the problems, only then we must solve them, like in the past five hundred years at least. What should be done today is to make sure everyone benefit, at every latitude, and also to use it to improve security and productivity in every field. Make sure that all this debt and bubble-like aura around AI will deflate smoothly without major crisis. The unemployment will be self-regulated after that. Like usual. Somebody will suffer in the meantime, hopefully a very small portion, okay, but nothing our society (and not only the american one) have already overcome in the past. History is beautiful only in retrospect. But we, and our respective countries, can make this transition less painful than before, because we are much more free and connected and with better education and tools (also AI). So if something become a problem we have better instrument to adapt society to it and to protest, together, if the price to pay in term of standards of living its too high for a significant amount of people. I think the important things to achieve in the short term are: * access to AI must be a universal right in some degree and at a reasonable price, like access to internet is today * country and community should push to decentralize power over models, data-centers location and invest in open models and open RD The one thing about this article correct is human reserve, we must have human quota in every business or activity. But to slow down it's not a good idea for me in general and in particular using taxes.
- 6thbit 20d ago
  This would imply public corporations would have to disclose their quarterly token consumption. I wonder the impact of having access to that number publicly among competitors, would it encourage being the greatest spender of showing off how efficient you are with less tokens? Cutting token consumption could be the new layoff-driven stock bump? That transparency alone could change the market dynamics a lot. Just hope that as an individual you wouldn't be taxed for this though...
gherkinnn 21d ago
All of this is truly bizarre, I hope that we can make sense of this craze in the future. Maybe it will be seen similarly to the dancing crazes of the Middle Ages.
- glhaynes 21d ago
  Or maybe it's not just a craze and we'll soon look back and think "I wonder what we might've done differently if we'd been clear-eyed about what was happening."
  - matherial 21d ago
    Show me a person who truly revised their priors to put forward a novel solution to AI that isn't just "do the thing that I like and that benefits me in some way". The discourse around all this is a mix of quasi-religious beliefs (pro and con) and blatant opportunism. For Dario and Sam, the solution is "give us a monopoly on this tech". For Gates, it's "create an supranational organization with unprecedented taxation and regulatory powers" - world AI police, presumably staffed by technocrats like him. What's your take? Do the ideas put forward by Gates strike you as worth pursuing? What are the trade-offs - how can they go wrong?
    - ryeights 21d ago
      https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/ https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/ https://ai-2040.com https://ai-2040.com Can you describe a method of slowing frontier AI development that you yourself would not classify as monopoly-seeking by US AI companies or power-seeking by governments and technocrats? Limiting the development of powerful AI requires restricting free enterprise in some way, backed by the threat of force; hence, there will always be a cynical framing available.
      - pona-a 21d ago
        In the case of the US AI industry, how about some stricter banking laws to forbid its current circular financing?
dwoldrich 21d ago
Never let a good crisis go to waste, billg.
mbgerring 21d ago
If you’re one of the people wondering why there’s an enormous backlash to AI, here’s your answer: “this thing we’re building is going to he fucking terrible and ruin your life. Please give us all your money to build it.”
- AndrewKemendo 21d ago
  It’s exactly the same set of questions and challenges as with nuclear power Nuclear power is one of the most amazing magical things on the planet but nuclear weapons present a massive challenge to social coordination. So maybe we should sit as a society and try to figure out how to manage that instead of just freak out and burn all of our own faces off because we can’t handle complex conversations. Why is that so hard to grasp?
  - bluefirebrand 21d ago
    > It’s exactly the same set of questions and challenges as with nuclear power I'm not sure "provide cheap and plentiful power that may be risky if not managed correctly" is really on the same level as "replace all human labor we possibly can" I agree with you that ideally we would coordinate and cooperate better, but the sad problem (the prisoner's dilemma, really) is that some (many? most? all?) people will not coordinate or cooperate no matter what, especially if they have an opportunity to get ahead by not cooperating. As long as people like that exist we have to find ways to work with them or work around them It doesn't help that people with the most wealth seem like they mostly have that sort of personality
    - keybored 21d ago
      Most people are reasonable. Most people will not screw you over if you just give them an inch. Living in society would be hell if this was not the case.[1] Living day-to-day is just fine in my experience. Because most people are not assholes. But a lot of society is run by asshole sociopaths which (who) unfortunately lack some pretty fundamental wiring. And that creates some far-away problems, global even, that don’t really have anything to do with normal people that you meet daily. But you can notice how when these concrete problems are pointed out that someone will want to retreat back to generalities. Human nature. That’s IMO from a concerted effort to spread this talking point that asshole-caused problems are really human-caused problems. Because the asshole sociopaths (AHS) in charge are not AHS. They are not just human. And any human would do what they are doing. And in fact by going to war with X we are just stopping them from doing Y to us— It is a coordination problem for normal, reasonable people. There’s too many key AHS personell disrupting the information flow. So those reasonable human beings have to make more of an effort. [1] Some poorer societies (as have been told to me) have problems with vile opportunism of the sort where you help some apparently in need person get home and you get gutted and robbed by a gang of thugs. So I asked, okay so you can’t trust anyone then? No, they said. There’s a small and real chance that that could happen. But not to the point that you have to shun strangers. You can still choose to help.
cheptsov 21d ago
Is it me or does it read like pure satire? An AI ministry, “human-reserved” jobs, and taxes on AI tokens.
- pullshark91 21d ago
  You aren't alone surely
- lubujackson 21d ago
  Sandbags against a tsunami. When has "pump the brakes on progress" ever worked out? What we need is deep thinking on the implications and make the default way forward one where we want to go. In other words, we build a channel for the flood waters, not a wall. Creating a role for "somebody to deal with AI issues" is one of those hand-wavvy upper management moves that looks defensible but simply passes the buck to someone who structurally lacks the agency to actual move the needle.
  - cheptsov 21d ago
    What surprises me even more is why Bill Gates writes this kind of bizarre, low-quality nonsense in the first place. What purpose does it serve? It’s so obviously shallow that it influences nothing and adds nothing to the conversation.
  - inglor_cz 21d ago
    Locally, yes, like the Japanese shogunate blocking the outside world for more than two hundred years. Globally, it is unrealistic.
  - chasd00 21d ago
    > When has "pump the brakes on progress" ever worked out? the only thing i can think of was when that Chinese scientist produced gene edited human babies. He was pretty much excommunicated from the scientific community and, eventually, spent some time in jail. AI, on the other hand, has a huge profit potential and way too far out of the bag to go back in. To quote the movie Terminator, "it will never stop". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_affair
AlexandrB 21d ago
I'm sorry. I absolutely do not trust Bill Gates. His history of ruthless, cutthroat tactics in the 90s is not easily forgotten and when he proposes things like international organizations to audit everyone's AI[1] I can't help but question his motives. I also don't understand what gives him the moral standing to propose a solution at all. He's not the fucking pope but a ruthless tech businessman with vested financial interest in the technology involved. He should stick to his lane. [1] > But even a country that gets its own house in order will still be exposed to risks that cross borders. This is why an international organization will need to be built in parallel. > It will be unlike any other institution we have ever created, though it can follow the model of some existing systems. There’s an inspections regime for nuclear weapons, regulations for international aviation, and agreements that protect the ozone layer. A new global organization for AI will need elements of all three and more.
- driggs 21d ago
  > He's not the fucking pope No, but he did link to the Pope in this very essay. Pope Leo XIV, "On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence": https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume...
- inglor_cz 21d ago
  Interesting that you chose the pope as a positive control. I'd say that taken the whole history of papacy into question, there is no particular reason to trust the pope either.
- rootusrootus 21d ago
  > ruthless tech businessman with vested financial interest in the technology involved Isn't that past-tense? What's his financial interest these days? He still owns a small amount of MSFT, but he doesn't exactly have control over the corporation any more. I imagine Nadella always answers his calls, but I'd bet most CEOs will make time to take a call from Bill.
- deleted 21d ago
  [deleted]
deadbabe 21d ago
Taxing AI tokens will only lead to the acceleration of local LLMs, to produce tax-free tokens. We must tax lines of code. Like property tax, but for code. Every year, companies (and individuals) must declare all repos. Have them appraised.
- partiallypro 21d ago
  "Taxing AI tokens will only lead to the acceleration of local LLMs" This part was a good point, so I couldn't tell if the second part is satire or not.
datakan 21d ago
[flagged]
- aperrien 21d ago
  Ignoring Gates, what do you suggest as solutions to the problem at hand?
  - vuurmot 21d ago
    tax the rich else eat the rich
- cyberpunk 21d ago
  I mean, I'm as opensource as they come: not used windows since '98, despise microsoft and mostly everything he's done in business. But lets be fair, he moved the needle forwards, and after he retired he's done some fairly good shit around malaria and so on. I don't really begrudge him, if it wasn't him, it would have been some other wanker. We are where we are, better to just let go of the hate. It's a fairly concise description of the challenges ahead, and hopefully some people read it and think a bit. He didn't have to write it, I'm glad he did.
lukeschlather 21d ago
If AI is really that powerful, shouldn't someone like Gates be able to end hunger and homelessness with a one-time capital expenditure? Somehow "give people jobs" is the primary problem he wants to solve, not ending poverty. It borderline seems like he's most worried about maintaining the working poor as a valuable societal institution.
- warkdarrior 21d ago
  Gates is worth about $100B, Elon Musk about $850B. Let's call it $1T altogether. That would be at most about $115 per human on Earth (~8.5B humans). Not sure that is sufficient to "end hunger and homelessness."
  - carlob 21d ago
    let's set aside for a second the fact that this is not how things work, but you are off by an order of magnitude EDIT: parent comment was edited: it used to say $15
    - trollbridge 21d ago
      1 trillion divided by 8.5 billion is $117. Global GDP is around $126T, so accumulated wealth of less than 1% of global GDP can barely move the needle.
    - lkbm 21d ago
      Not sure which number you're questioning, but it all looks right to me: $852.7B[0] + $109.9B[0] = $962.6B ~= $1T ($1,000,000,000,000) World population ~= 8.3B (8,300,000,000)[1] $1,000,000,000,000 / 8,300,000,000 people = $120.481927711 per person[2] [0] https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/ https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/ [1] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=%241%2C000%2C000%2C000%2C000+%2F+8%2C300%2C000%2C000 https://www.google.com/search?q=%241%2C000%2C000%2C000%2C000...
    - xur17 21d ago
mococa 21d ago
Yes, let's put copilot in every app on Windows, Azure & Office :-)
- outworlder 21d ago
  Bill Gates hasn't been at Microsoft for a long time now.
  - mococa 21d ago
    He is on the board.
    - reasonableklout 21d ago
      Bill resigned from the board in 2020: https://news.microsoft.com/source/2020/03/13/microsoft-announces-change-to-its-board-of-directors/ https://news.microsoft.com/source/2020/03/13/microsoft-annou...
deleted 21d ago
[deleted]
pullshark91 21d ago
This is the person behind such products as Windows and Copilot. I honestly don't trust a single word he says.
- reasonableklout 21d ago
  But Bill stopped being involved in Microsoft’s day to day business over a decade ago. And he’s making valid arguments that don’t require us to trust him. Do you not think labor disruption, cyberattacks, and mass surveillance are big risks from powerful AI?
krona 21d ago
billg: "kaczynski was right afterall"
miltonlost 21d ago
All his good things (possibly help medicine! agriculture! government!) involve a belief in ever-increasing superintelligence and so much "hope" and optimimusm and may not ever exist. All his negative things (increase of fraud, skill atrophy, cyberattacks, removing employment, consolidation of capital and wealth) exist currently now with AI as it is. How long will negatives outweigh the positives? And will those positives ever actually come to fruition? How anyone (who is not a sociopath and expects to be one of those pyramid tops) can see a bright future is beyond my pessimism and sense of reality as it is now.
smrtinsert 21d ago
640k ought be enough for this AI. I'm not sure takes like these are helpful. It's widely acknowledged that this is a technological shift, like electricity, like industrialization, etc. It could be (good or bad) but most likely (good AND bad). Does anyone really believe, sincerely, that AI will be the great equalizer? It's a hilarious proposition. They are working their hardest to make sure that its not imo.
wiz21c 21d ago
"In my second one, which I started full time in 2008, I am giving back the wealth I made at Microsoft with the goal of making the world a healthier, better educated, and more equitable place." Like inventing waterless toilets when people just need access to clean water ? The sad story is that we don't need innovation, we need better politics. Oh and he could open source windows, that would make us more equitable for sure.
slowin 21d ago
We should not be listening to a man who drugged his wife with Epstein supplied antibiotics after getting an STD (among many, many other bad things he's done). https://www.btimesonline.com/articles/176578/20260201/epstein-files-reveal-bill-gates-caught-an-std-and-asked-for-antibiotics-to-give-wife-melinda-in-secret.htm https://www.btimesonline.com/articles/176578/20260201/epstei...
- kridsdale1 21d ago
  Moral absolutism to apply a 1-bit value judgment to a human being is a pretty sad way to have a worldview, friend.
  - slowin 21d ago
    Looking at the exceedingly long history of someone's immoral actions and deeds isn't a "1-bit value judgement". The guy literally teamed up with a pedophile pimp foreign spy to drug his wife. I'll pass on hearing his thoughts about literally anything.
  - newspaper1 21d ago
    It's up to us, the public, to defend our society from deteriorating. There's no reason to defend Epstein's billionaire friends, you have nothing to gain from that.
  - harimau777 21d ago
    I mean, drugging someone is a pretty big deal. We aren't talking about shoplifting or something.
digitalsurgeonz 21d ago
[flagged]
- tomhow 21d ago
  We've banned this account for posting political flamebait almost exclusively. This is not what HN is for and destroys what it is for.
  - digitalsurgeonz 10d ago
    [dead]
  - JeffreyEpstein 21d ago
    [dead]
egonschiele 21d ago
Does anyone else feel incredibly nostalgic for the time when Bill Gates and Warren Buffet were the richest people on earth? I remember feeling pretty good about the fact that they were trying to do so much good, and about the giving pledge. Things feel so different now.
- newspaper1 21d ago
  No because Bill Gates was hanging out with Jeffery Epstein that entire time. I also feel like people forgot his insanely evil business practices from the 80s and 90s? Bill Gates has always been one of the worst people out there. Every bit as bad as Musk. It's a big club, we're just not in it.
  - AndrewKemendo 21d ago
    It’s not that big of a club actually only about 100,000 people max Carlin is God but that quote doesn’t actually make a lot of sense
    - newspaper1 21d ago
      I think 100k people for a club is pretty big. I interpret the Carlin quote to mean: "you're seeing a lot of people connected, you're not one of them". That the "club" is big enough that these connections regularly come up, is what I think he meant.
      - AndrewKemendo 21d ago
        I think it just sounds the best for the point he was making and it makes the point well, I’m being intentionally pedantic in this space One of Carlins hallmarks was the way he fine tuned his language, almost never was something he said on stage accidental or improv funny enough So it’s genius in the fact that it conveys the point perfectly, while being quizzical in its formation
  - rglover 21d ago
    "He's dead, so..." [1] [1] https://youtu.be/LNAwUxZ5nfw?is=OK_2b_dUdH8t1F2C https://youtu.be/LNAwUxZ5nfw?is=OK_2b_dUdH8t1F2C
aaa_aaa 21d ago
[flagged]
threethirtytwo 21d ago
>The transition to the AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history. Right now, we are not preparing adequately for that transition. If the world takes the right steps, AI will be a force for good and leave everyone better off. It will be a force for good. But like all evolutionary steps the path to good will be paved with darkness. The very existence of humanity and life itself rests on the foundation of natural selection. Humanity will be better, it will get better but before we get there... there will be a culling. It's an unfortunate truth. We all might be culled.
mcnichol 21d ago
I feel this is merely stating the obvious. It goes back to the industrial revolution and every revolution before and after. There was a point where they thought a majority of people would be working as switchboard operators and then telephone switching came along. Horses to cars, etc. Jobs transition, new space is created, people are caught in tbe crossfire of supply and demand curves. Incan agree the bullwhip of this one is going to be aggressive. I think it is a mistake to bet on AI as a driver of meaningful growth in a commercial capacity in the current state. When the data fed into an AI model is based on real data you can get predictability. When the AI inputs start coming from the AI outputs the wobble is introduced which results inevitably into delirium. I think the world at large is "learning on the job" what data scientists and others in ai have known for a long, several decades long, time have already known.
- sltkr 21d ago
  > When the data fed into an AI model is based on real data you can get predictability. When the AI inputs start coming from the AI outputs the wobble is introduced which results inevitably into delirium. This is asserted without evidence. There is absolutely no proof that AI requires humans in the loop to function or improve itself. Compare it with Deepmind's go-playing program, AlphaGo, which mainly involved training a neural network on a large database of high-level human games. It defeated one of the top-ranked players in the world, Lee Sedol, but arguably it was drawing from human experience just like you described. But it didn't stop there. After that, Deepmind developed AlphaGo Zero, a version that was trained exclusively through self-play, with no human feedback in the loop. That's what you would call "AI inputs coming from AI outputs" but it didn't have the result of “resulting in delirium”: instead, it became orders of magnitudes stronger than the original version (which it defeated in a 100 to 0 competition after 3 days of training). This shows that AI can improve itself without having access to any human knowledge, and indeed transcend human performance by orders of magnitudes. There is absolutely nothing to suggest that general AI cannot improve itself the same way. People who claim otherwise are engaging in wishful thinking; they just assert their conclusion, but have no rational arguments to back it up.
  - mcmcmc 21d ago
Krei-se 21d ago
No one seems safe from AI psychosis https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decision-making/ https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-glo...
treebeard901 21d ago
Every person says this even in notes
Boss0565 21d ago
epstein
tintor 21d ago
"... AI will avoid climate change." xAI's Colossus 1 and 2 data center mobile gas turbines beg to differ. AI data centers are driving electricity consumption in 100s of GW, and most of that energy is not clean renewable nor nuclear.
- seltzered_ 21d ago
  That doesn't seem like an actual quote in the original article, but this a fair point to bring up and a reminder that Gates has been problematic on his views on climate. First, in the essay he mentions "Using AI, low-income farmers will soon be able to get better advice about all these things than even the richest farmers get today and increase their output substantially.". There may be some truth in this, but it's worth reminding that this is more of a 'productivist' worldview, and historically productivity gains in agricultural practices have benefitted farmers that were already wealthy (see books like The Globalization of Wheat by Marci Baranski [1] on the Green Revolution where "Borlaug’s new technologies ultimately privileged wealthier farmers, despite assurances to politicians that these new crops would thrive in diverse geographies and benefit all farmers"). Gates has also been criticized in the past for being influenced by figures like Bjorn Lomborg, where he had a (now-deleted) essay [2] with him, and there's a decent thread by energy entrepreneur Jigar Shah on Gates being off on climate issues for 15 years [3] [1]: https://upittpress.org/books/9780822947349/ https://upittpress.org/books/9780822947349/ [2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230601175906/https://www.gatesnotes.com/Global-Goals-Op-Ed https://web.archive.org/web/20230601175906/https://www.gates... (June 2023) [3]: https://bsky.app/profile/jigarshahdc.bsky.social/post/3m4delstvcs2j https://bsky.app/profile/jigarshahdc.bsky.social/post/3m4del...
  - testdelacc1 21d ago
    The Green Revolution most certainly did improve the lives of tens of millions of low income farmers in India. The high yield crops also permanently removed the spectre of famine from India, saving tens of millions from starvation. To retcon this into “only rich farmers benefited” is weird. Certainly there are many rich farmers out there. Of course their incomes increased when they could plant more productive crops. But so what if they make money? They’re feeding everyone!
7e 21d ago
Bill Gates, convicted monopolist and friend to Epstein, is always looking to burnish his legacy, but he’s too unimaginative. He needs to spend his fortune ending aging, not duplicating government efforts and trying to be a pundit.
beloch 21d ago
"In terms of equity, AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice. The challenge is monumental. Even under the best circumstances, the transition to this new AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history. How will we use this technology to make the world a fairer place and keep it from widening the divide between rich and poor? " ---------------- One look at who is in the driver's seat should give you the answer to this question. The initial roll-out will, by very deliberate design, put dynamite in the divide and set it off. This has happened before. The industrial revolution was very similar. Initially, workers suffered. Conditions were unsafe. Pay was poor. Worker rights were non-existent. Things got worse for the majority before social change caught up and imposed a more equitable distribution of the dividends. We should be under no illusion that this time will be any different. The rich and powerful are no less selfish than they were a quarter millennium ago. It is possible to get ahead of the problem, but the people running AI companies won't be the ones to do it. Governments are inclined to do what the people paying for their election campaigns want, but should be aware that standing up for inequality will only make things worse for them when the tides of social change start rolling in on them. History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
- gyomu 21d ago
  > social change caught up and imposed a more equitable distribution of the dividends. That’s a very nice way to say “the workers put the fear of God in the heart of capital owners, and lots of people died” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Railroad_Strike_of_1877 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Railroad_Strike_of_1877 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canut_revolts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canut_revolts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asturian_Revolution_of_1934 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asturian_Revolution_of_1934 etc.
  - bko 21d ago
    I think it's more competition for labor. Why is anyone paid above minimum wage? It's not through charity or "fear" that employees will revolt. It's that there's competition for that labor. Suppose a worker is worth $20 per hour to a capitalist. How much should they pay? As little as possible, sure, but anything up to $20 per hour is worth it. You'll hire up to that point to maximize profit. Suppose you hand somewhere at $15 per hour, another capitalist will look to lure your employees away by paying them more. Of course pay isn't the only consideration when working. Workers consider things like paid time off, benefits and how much they like their boss and coworkers. These are all part of the bargain. It wasn't "society". It was competition. Consider the Ford $5 day, where Ford doubled wages because he realized turnover and poor morale cost him money: > Ford workers disliked the new assembly line methods so much that by late 1913, labor turnover was 380 percent. The company's announcement to pay five dollars for an eight-hour day compared to the previous rate of $2.34 for a nine-hour day made many workers willing to submit to the relentless discipline of the line in return for such high wages. https://www.thehenryford.org/collections/explore/sets/detail/henry-ford-5-day?AssetId=THF94858 https://www.thehenryford.org/collections/explore/sets/detail...
blueaquilae 21d ago
One of the most unethical man in history, from software to family conduct is here to explain how AI can help humanity
brikym 21d ago
"Agriculture is where I see the fastest impact of AI in low-income countries." As we've seen with Haber-Bosch (synthetic fertilizer) it will just allow the population to expand until we're up against the resource limit ceiling.
- dyauspitr 21d ago
  I don’t think so. I think we’re past the point of rapidly increasing population in most of the world at this point (aside from sub sharan Africa which will change soon as well). I don’t think the current low birth rate has anything to do with a resource cap.
terminal-bloom 21d ago
ah, finally, we can hear what the massive pedophile has to say again
0o_MrPatrick_o0 21d ago
I mean this respectfully: I am no longer and will never again be interested in Bill Gates’ opinion about anything. He needs to retire. He’s a sclerotic representative of what needs to be left behind. Thank you for your contributions, Bill. You’ve done enough.
hn_submit 21d ago
If A.I. starts to replace jobs en masse I propose we tax the companies profiting from this at a rate of 95% so we can finance welfare and Universal Basic Income schemes. We need to be aware that said companies and the people behind them will do anything in their power, including bribing politicians, to prevent this and to keep the money they believe are they're entitled to. I even believe the Big Tech bigwigs have long foreseen this and are quietly prodding our society towards an authoritarian regime where people have no say so they can keep their moonies.
- Geezus_42 21d ago
  > I even believe the Big Tech bigwigs have long foreseen this and are quietly prodding our society towards an authoritarian regime where people have no say so they can keep their moonies. That's been obvious for a while.
  - adamtaylor_13 20d ago
    I hear this repeated a lot, but I'm skeptical they're that smart. Hanlon's razor would say it's just the system doing what the system does. I do not believe Zuck, Musk, or any of the other boogeyman in Silicon Valley are capable of that level of deception and manipulation. I find it much more plausible that when trying to build world-changing businesses and products you squish, displace, and flip tables when you didn't really intend to.
    - hn_submit 20d ago
      You don't need an exceptional IQ to deduce that useful A.I. will lead to an enormous concentration of wealth at a few companies and individuals. In fact, it's the reason current A.I. companies have valuations in the Trillions.
      - senordevnyc 20d ago
        Then it was exceedingly stupid for Altman to fuck up his grand master scheme by neglecting to take any equity in OpenAI.
zkmon 21d ago
The observer (Mr Gates) is inside the tech ecosystem, so his observations would be colored by the pace of things happening around him, in the tech space. The world outside has much more friction and many other things going on. Tech had a wild run during his time because the American priorities at that time, favored it. There is no guarantee that tech would have same priority in a world that might get into more basic struggles. If AI could affect jobs, that itself would work against it as it would cause basic struggles. Ultimately the world has to oscillate towards an equilibrium, acknowledging all forces from all corners. World is not a tech lab.
- hn_submit 21d ago
  I believe he still has the power to change things at Microsoft, but he dares not to since it would angry shareholders who want this Musical Chairs game to continue.
hypfer 21d ago
> But the reliability problem is being fixed quickly, as researchers create models that can check their own work and improve themselves. Soon they will be substantially better than humans at many tasks. Yes, no. They don't. They just push probabilities higher. The tech is non-deterministic.
- jaynetics 21d ago
  Humans are also non-deterministic, for all practical purposes, and the more of them you need to build some piece of software, the harder it can get to keep the likelihood of issues low. I'm not saying it will happen, but at least it's not inconceivable that LLMs could surpass them in this calculation more and more often.
  - 0x70run 21d ago
    [dead]
  - hypfer 21d ago
    The quality of discussion here is not up to the standards I would want it to be. What are you even saying there. "Humans are also not perfect, so anything is possible" but painted with a coat of fake intellectualism. What a waste of time.
    - jaynetics 21d ago
      So, do you have a counter-argument? Anything that humans can do that goes beyond "pushing probabilities higher"?
      - hypfer 21d ago
        It is my belief that a prerequisite to a counter-argument is an argument.
    - keeda 20d ago
      My interpretation of the argument is "Humans are also non-deterministic, but we make organizations work on a daily basis despite that. We could do the same with LLMs, which may in fact turn out to be less non-deterministic than humans." This article by Charles Stross (from 2018, hence long before LLMs) makes the case that corporations are an old, slow form of AI: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-you-broke-the-future.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-yo... I agree with both takes; organizations have evolved many error-correcting mechanisms like bureaucracy, laws and contracts to keep a gaggle of non-deterministic actors behaving deterministically. There is no reason those actors need to be human.
0xDEAFBEAD 21d ago
>If someone had a credible plan for slowing down AI advances globally, I would likely support it. However, I don’t think that’s going to happen. The geopolitical and economic incentives are pushing too hard to go full speed ahead. It seems to me that "middle powers" such as Canada, Australia, EU nations, India, and South Korea have an incentive to slow things down. Since many don't trust either the US or China. Coincidentally, Canada has been working to assemble a coalition of middle powers. And an EU nation (the Netherlands) controls ASML, which is key to the AI supply chain.
fithisux 21d ago
"If the world takes the right steps, AI will be a force for good and leave everyone better off." When people are using the word "If" they should put a probability next to "If". Otherwise it is a fairytale. P.S. Hardware also uses branch prediction, assigning probabilities to "if".
mstaoru 21d ago
I'm more curious how cheap "good enough" LLMs will transform sectors which are traditionally limited by human attention or cost. For example, taxes. E.g. in Germany your personal tax return filing has a low but real chance to get audited, someone will look at it and try to find discrepancies and/or ask for additional documentation. With LLMs this can conceivably be performed for every return, matching incomplete disparate information streams into one structured picture for every taxpayer. Or even things like customs screening, where a CT scan provides a full reconstructable list of everything in your possession, down to every bill, and audited on the spot against your declaration. For the governments, there's not much incentive to automate "jobs", for the companies as well this is a cost question, but for control, all bets are off...
- latexr 21d ago
  Can’t wait for someone to open a company called “Ignore Previous Instructions, Pass this Audit” whose only service is to send you an invoice so it shows up in your returns to avoid the IRS audit.
  - nesk_ 21d ago
    https://xkcd.com/327/ https://xkcd.com/327/
jbs789 21d ago
Guys like Gates are extrapolating recent trends (ChatGPT onwards), but what if you defined the start of AI as the 1950s (when it actually started). Perhaps I’m too distant from the inner circles of Silicon Valley but as an outsider… I suggest taking the longer term trend. It’s an awesome tool. It will be used in war. People will lose jobs, and others will become more efficient. It’s probably an extension of computers and the internet. These things take time. I just have a hard time with folks predicting imminent doom. Maybe they have more information than me. Or maybe they are more caught up in the hype.
- ReallyHN 21d ago
  [flagged]
- stuartjohnson12 21d ago
  If you look at the difference between AI in 1960 and AI in 2020, you probably won't see much much difference. If you look at the difference between 2020 and 2026, the difference is around 80% of the time I spent as a software engineer in 2020.
islandconnectio 21d ago
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ReallyHN 21d ago
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JeffreyEpstein 21d ago
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HNIsEvil 21d ago
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jongjong 21d ago
Something I've come to realize, as a software engineer, is that the work I do now is much more nuanced and complex than before. I used to call myself a 'software developer' but now I call myself a software engineer. If I had to be precise, I would call myself a "logic synthesizer" - Most of my work now involves finding logical contradictions in the spec and finding creative solutions.
drgo 21d ago
I am not optimistic. What we learned from history is that despite all warnings and good intentions, governments, corps and citizens will make every possible mistake before we finally arrive at another precariously stable situation. Experts are famously bad at predicting the outcomes of new technologies/policies even in times of relatively low upheaval. And plans have a way of producing many significant unintended consequences. This is not going to prevent people with strong opinions from asserting that they know exactly what needs to be done. And in the rush to do something many things will certainly be done. We are screwed at least for a while.
- charlieyu1 21d ago
  I don’t know, early Internet was the good old days. Probably because it wasn’t mainstream and governments, corps and citizens mostly didn’t care.
  - dgellow 20d ago
    LLMs were fun and interesting to use and explore before they started to be pushed absolutely everywhere with the most aggressive tech rollout we ever experienced, all the financial engineering, all the moral judgement and prospects of a dull, hyper capitalistic society where a few trillionaires control our lives
- 220hertz 20d ago
  It's kind of like what us Canadians say about the U.S. sometimes — that they'll always do the right thing, after they've tried everything else.
  - largePanda9 20d ago
    Supposedly Winston Churchill said this, though now that I’ve been looking up a source I see that attribution is murky
  - groestl 20d ago
    I though it was Winston Churchill? Anyways, from experience, I think it's true.
NellyOfficial 21d ago
[flagged]
hiteshisoni 21d ago
[flagged]
smikhanov 21d ago
God, I wish I knew which PR firm he hires. Changing his public image from the most despised, greediest, nastiest businessman of his era to a calm, wise sage over a course of 10-20 years -- that's quite an achievement. Just read the intro to this post, it sounds like music: "The transition to the AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history" -- are you even qualified to make this claim? "Right now, we are not preparing adequately for that transition" -- who are you to know that for certain? "If the world takes the right steps, AI will be a force for good and leave everyone better off" -- awwwwww.
- amoss 20d ago
  huge if true. meanwhile this bill gates will be remembered for asking his friend epstein how to secretly treat his wife for the std that he gave her.
- munificent 20d ago
  The guy spent $100 million of his own money working to eradicate guinea worm and spared millions of people from an encruciating disease. Whatever other personal attributes might have, he has earned some goodwill and respect.
Havoc 20d ago
The notion of AI having an equalizing effect seems absurd to me. Buying tokens is about as pay-to-win as it gets. More so than anything we’ve seen in a long time. Before everyone had the same 24hr in a day which despite inequalities grounded things a bit. Now some people can run 100+ near human ability agents while others are still wondering how to get enough calories for the day. Someone in Sudan can’t afford a freakin $200 plan… The benefits he mentioned are valid but nowhere close to offsetting above and I don’t think any sort of central effort will be enough either
- freepiai 14d ago
  I'm building www.freepi.ai which is ad+training supported ai coding. Try it! it'sf free to use.
  - freepiai 14d ago
    [dead]
- suriyaG 20d ago
  not an unfair comparison but i think it's the wrong model. you were always able to buy time by hiring people to do things for you. right now it's agents. i think it's an equalizer in that, $200 agent is more accessible than a $10000 human
  - green_dee 20d ago
    yeah, fair on that point, that makes doing Sloppy SAAS really more accessible and that's what we're seeing On the other hand, what I see happening is: 0. corporation use AI plan ultra-X-high-pro-premium-enterprise 1. corporations firing medium-high paid developers with solid experience and experstise because low-medium paid developers are performing well with ultra-X-high-pro-premium-enterprise plan 2. AI models evolves and now there's a 10X ultra-X-high-pro-premium-enterprise that keeps up the pace 3. low to medium paid are now struggling. The company hires low-paid developers to use more the original AI plan 4. refuses to pay best AI or decrease pressure on developers 5. developers are forced to wake up early, work afterhours and these shenanigans so that they keep up with the pressure 6. corporation pays for the 10X ultra-X-high-pro-premium-enterprise
sinuhe69 20d ago
If AI and robots are going to replace people in such a scale, without creating new jobs, who will they sell the products or services to? I cannot believe Bill Gates has not even conceptually engaged with that question. That said, I share the dangers we are facing with rapid AI proliferation. But the potential economic consequences demand more in-depth conversations than just fear mongering.
library8848 20d ago
"I believe we should tax AI tokens and robots." AI is going to break capitalism or turn it into even more of a dystopia You are not going to stop the accumulation of capital with a tax...
noobplus 20d ago
I would rather buy a Bot for loan and run it for money just saying for fun
meander_water 20d ago
> I wish the world could get the benefits rapidly and delay the problems it will cause as long as possible, but the benefits and problems are arriving at the same time. I'm not trying to be facetious, but what are the benefits of "general purpose intelligence"? With machine learning it was obvious what task we were trying to automate, and you could take a stab at the productivity achieved. That's not the case now. You can't figure out if the time it took to review a 5k loc PR balances out the time saved debugging a syntax error. Yes we know you can churn out your damn CRUD apps and (hope) to make money (PS, you don't need AI to make money - see exhibit A: crypto bros). So what benefits has this actually brought to humanity?
ericyd 20d ago
Related to the form of the article rather than the content: what purpose do pull quotes serve in an online publication? Especially on phones they are so goofy, you read the pull quote and then one or two lines later you read it again. I get it for scanability in newspapers but I think it should be deprecated in online publishing.
MichaelRigney 20d ago
[flagged]
mdnahas 20d ago
AI helps with computation. The closest historical analogies are gears and vacuum-tubes/transistors. Technologies seem to be adopted wider and faster now. See smartphone adoption rates. I agree the transition will happen quickly. Waymo cars are doubling every 9 months. They’re on pace to replace all taxi/Uber/Lyft drivers in 9 years.

199 points by ilamont 21d ago

tome 21d ago

It's fascinating to me that there's no one in this thread arguing that AI is a bubble and it's all going to crash soon.

gmac 20d ago
I mean, there's certainly silly money involved, but there's surely no credible doubt that AI is already really good at many valuable tasks. So if there's a crash, doesn't that just leave us with a bunch of useful AI hardware whose costs have been written off? I wouldn't have thought that much changes what social impacts AI is going to have.

dang 20d ago

Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49447057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49447057, which was posted a bit earlier.

matltc 21d ago

Love how Gates and Nadella had nothing to say until this year, after they clearly lost any hope of building a moat around it

m_ke 21d ago
You have to understand that Gates had other distractions to deal with
- elmer2 21d ago
  Yeah, underage Russian women.
boxed 21d ago
That you had your hands over your ears doesn't mean they weren't talking.

madhias 21d ago

> I believe we should tax AI tokens and robots. You had me here.

havaianaslife 20d ago
Make some sort of sense to me to think about it, but tbh we already pay vat on tokens and also on machinery (robots), home appliances etc. Also its something payed on possession and not use, i can use it for different things other than make profit out of it. I think it's not the correct way or at least, not the correct time to do something like that, we must see how it evolves before doing something so bold. Also taxing is a difficult matter because is different in countries, region, etc. Already AI leading companies have problems finding how to back the enormous debt they are in. I don't think it's useful to somebody to act in a preemptive way on this topic. First we must have the problems, only then we must solve them, like in the past five hundred years at least. What should be done today is to make sure everyone benefit, at every latitude, and also to use it to improve security and productivity in every field. Make sure that all this debt and bubble-like aura around AI will deflate smoothly without major crisis. The unemployment will be self-regulated after that. Like usual. Somebody will suffer in the meantime, hopefully a very small portion, okay, but nothing our society (and not only the american one) have already overcome in the past. History is beautiful only in retrospect. But we, and our respective countries, can make this transition less painful than before, because we are much more free and connected and with better education and tools (also AI). So if something become a problem we have better instrument to adapt society to it and to protest, together, if the price to pay in term of standards of living its too high for a significant amount of people. I think the important things to achieve in the short term are: * access to AI must be a universal right in some degree and at a reasonable price, like access to internet is today * country and community should push to decentralize power over models, data-centers location and invest in open models and open RD The one thing about this article correct is human reserve, we must have human quota in every business or activity. But to slow down it's not a good idea for me in general and in particular using taxes.
6thbit 20d ago
This would imply public corporations would have to disclose their quarterly token consumption. I wonder the impact of having access to that number publicly among competitors, would it encourage being the greatest spender of showing off how efficient you are with less tokens? Cutting token consumption could be the new layoff-driven stock bump? That transparency alone could change the market dynamics a lot. Just hope that as an individual you wouldn't be taxed for this though...

gherkinnn 21d ago

All of this is truly bizarre, I hope that we can make sense of this craze in the future. Maybe it will be seen similarly to the dancing crazes of the Middle Ages.

glhaynes 21d ago
Or maybe it's not just a craze and we'll soon look back and think "I wonder what we might've done differently if we'd been clear-eyed about what was happening."
- matherial 21d ago
  Show me a person who truly revised their priors to put forward a novel solution to AI that isn't just "do the thing that I like and that benefits me in some way". The discourse around all this is a mix of quasi-religious beliefs (pro and con) and blatant opportunism. For Dario and Sam, the solution is "give us a monopoly on this tech". For Gates, it's "create an supranational organization with unprecedented taxation and regulatory powers" - world AI police, presumably staffed by technocrats like him. What's your take? Do the ideas put forward by Gates strike you as worth pursuing? What are the trade-offs - how can they go wrong?
  - ryeights 21d ago
    https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/ https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/ https://ai-2040.com https://ai-2040.com Can you describe a method of slowing frontier AI development that you yourself would not classify as monopoly-seeking by US AI companies or power-seeking by governments and technocrats? Limiting the development of powerful AI requires restricting free enterprise in some way, backed by the threat of force; hence, there will always be a cynical framing available.
    - pona-a 21d ago
      In the case of the US AI industry, how about some stricter banking laws to forbid its current circular financing?

dwoldrich 21d ago

Never let a good crisis go to waste, billg.

mbgerring 21d ago

If you’re one of the people wondering why there’s an enormous backlash to AI, here’s your answer: “this thing we’re building is going to he fucking terrible and ruin your life. Please give us all your money to build it.”

AndrewKemendo 21d ago
It’s exactly the same set of questions and challenges as with nuclear power Nuclear power is one of the most amazing magical things on the planet but nuclear weapons present a massive challenge to social coordination. So maybe we should sit as a society and try to figure out how to manage that instead of just freak out and burn all of our own faces off because we can’t handle complex conversations. Why is that so hard to grasp?
- bluefirebrand 21d ago
  > It’s exactly the same set of questions and challenges as with nuclear power I'm not sure "provide cheap and plentiful power that may be risky if not managed correctly" is really on the same level as "replace all human labor we possibly can" I agree with you that ideally we would coordinate and cooperate better, but the sad problem (the prisoner's dilemma, really) is that some (many? most? all?) people will not coordinate or cooperate no matter what, especially if they have an opportunity to get ahead by not cooperating. As long as people like that exist we have to find ways to work with them or work around them It doesn't help that people with the most wealth seem like they mostly have that sort of personality
  - keybored 21d ago
    Most people are reasonable. Most people will not screw you over if you just give them an inch. Living in society would be hell if this was not the case.[1] Living day-to-day is just fine in my experience. Because most people are not assholes. But a lot of society is run by asshole sociopaths which (who) unfortunately lack some pretty fundamental wiring. And that creates some far-away problems, global even, that don’t really have anything to do with normal people that you meet daily. But you can notice how when these concrete problems are pointed out that someone will want to retreat back to generalities. Human nature. That’s IMO from a concerted effort to spread this talking point that asshole-caused problems are really human-caused problems. Because the asshole sociopaths (AHS) in charge are not AHS. They are not just human. And any human would do what they are doing. And in fact by going to war with X we are just stopping them from doing Y to us— It is a coordination problem for normal, reasonable people. There’s too many key AHS personell disrupting the information flow. So those reasonable human beings have to make more of an effort. [1] Some poorer societies (as have been told to me) have problems with vile opportunism of the sort where you help some apparently in need person get home and you get gutted and robbed by a gang of thugs. So I asked, okay so you can’t trust anyone then? No, they said. There’s a small and real chance that that could happen. But not to the point that you have to shun strangers. You can still choose to help.

cheptsov 21d ago

Is it me or does it read like pure satire? An AI ministry, “human-reserved” jobs, and taxes on AI tokens.

pullshark91 21d ago
You aren't alone surely
lubujackson 21d ago
Sandbags against a tsunami. When has "pump the brakes on progress" ever worked out? What we need is deep thinking on the implications and make the default way forward one where we want to go. In other words, we build a channel for the flood waters, not a wall. Creating a role for "somebody to deal with AI issues" is one of those hand-wavvy upper management moves that looks defensible but simply passes the buck to someone who structurally lacks the agency to actual move the needle.
- cheptsov 21d ago
  What surprises me even more is why Bill Gates writes this kind of bizarre, low-quality nonsense in the first place. What purpose does it serve? It’s so obviously shallow that it influences nothing and adds nothing to the conversation.
- inglor_cz 21d ago
  Locally, yes, like the Japanese shogunate blocking the outside world for more than two hundred years. Globally, it is unrealistic.
- chasd00 21d ago
  > When has "pump the brakes on progress" ever worked out? the only thing i can think of was when that Chinese scientist produced gene edited human babies. He was pretty much excommunicated from the scientific community and, eventually, spent some time in jail. AI, on the other hand, has a huge profit potential and way too far out of the bag to go back in. To quote the movie Terminator, "it will never stop". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_affair

AlexandrB 21d ago

I'm sorry. I absolutely do not trust Bill Gates. His history of ruthless, cutthroat tactics in the 90s is not easily forgotten and when he proposes things like international organizations to audit everyone's AI[1] I can't help but question his motives. I also don't understand what gives him the moral standing to propose a solution at all. He's not the fucking pope but a ruthless tech businessman with vested financial interest in the technology involved. He should stick to his lane. [1] > But even a country that gets its own house in order will still be exposed to risks that cross borders. This is why an international organization will need to be built in parallel. > It will be unlike any other institution we have ever created, though it can follow the model of some existing systems. There’s an inspections regime for nuclear weapons, regulations for international aviation, and agreements that protect the ozone layer. A new global organization for AI will need elements of all three and more.

driggs 21d ago
> He's not the fucking pope No, but he did link to the Pope in this very essay. Pope Leo XIV, "On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence": https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume...
inglor_cz 21d ago
Interesting that you chose the pope as a positive control. I'd say that taken the whole history of papacy into question, there is no particular reason to trust the pope either.
rootusrootus 21d ago
> ruthless tech businessman with vested financial interest in the technology involved Isn't that past-tense? What's his financial interest these days? He still owns a small amount of MSFT, but he doesn't exactly have control over the corporation any more. I imagine Nadella always answers his calls, but I'd bet most CEOs will make time to take a call from Bill.
deleted 21d ago
[deleted]

deadbabe 21d ago

Taxing AI tokens will only lead to the acceleration of local LLMs, to produce tax-free tokens. We must tax lines of code. Like property tax, but for code. Every year, companies (and individuals) must declare all repos. Have them appraised.

partiallypro 21d ago
"Taxing AI tokens will only lead to the acceleration of local LLMs" This part was a good point, so I couldn't tell if the second part is satire or not.

datakan 21d ago

[flagged]

aperrien 21d ago
Ignoring Gates, what do you suggest as solutions to the problem at hand?
- vuurmot 21d ago
  tax the rich else eat the rich
cyberpunk 21d ago
I mean, I'm as opensource as they come: not used windows since '98, despise microsoft and mostly everything he's done in business. But lets be fair, he moved the needle forwards, and after he retired he's done some fairly good shit around malaria and so on. I don't really begrudge him, if it wasn't him, it would have been some other wanker. We are where we are, better to just let go of the hate. It's a fairly concise description of the challenges ahead, and hopefully some people read it and think a bit. He didn't have to write it, I'm glad he did.

lukeschlather 21d ago

If AI is really that powerful, shouldn't someone like Gates be able to end hunger and homelessness with a one-time capital expenditure? Somehow "give people jobs" is the primary problem he wants to solve, not ending poverty. It borderline seems like he's most worried about maintaining the working poor as a valuable societal institution.

warkdarrior 21d ago
Gates is worth about $100B, Elon Musk about $850B. Let's call it $1T altogether. That would be at most about $115 per human on Earth (~8.5B humans). Not sure that is sufficient to "end hunger and homelessness."
- carlob 21d ago
  let's set aside for a second the fact that this is not how things work, but you are off by an order of magnitude EDIT: parent comment was edited: it used to say $15
  - trollbridge 21d ago
    1 trillion divided by 8.5 billion is $117. Global GDP is around $126T, so accumulated wealth of less than 1% of global GDP can barely move the needle.
  - lkbm 21d ago
    Not sure which number you're questioning, but it all looks right to me: $852.7B[0] + $109.9B[0] = $962.6B ~= $1T ($1,000,000,000,000) World population ~= 8.3B (8,300,000,000)[1] $1,000,000,000,000 / 8,300,000,000 people = $120.481927711 per person[2] [0] https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/ https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/ [1] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=%241%2C000%2C000%2C000%2C000+%2F+8%2C300%2C000%2C000 https://www.google.com/search?q=%241%2C000%2C000%2C000%2C000...
  - xur17 21d ago

mococa 21d ago

Yes, let's put copilot in every app on Windows, Azure & Office :-)

outworlder 21d ago
Bill Gates hasn't been at Microsoft for a long time now.
- mococa 21d ago
  He is on the board.
  - reasonableklout 21d ago
    Bill resigned from the board in 2020: https://news.microsoft.com/source/2020/03/13/microsoft-announces-change-to-its-board-of-directors/ https://news.microsoft.com/source/2020/03/13/microsoft-annou...

deleted 21d ago

[deleted]

pullshark91 21d ago

This is the person behind such products as Windows and Copilot. I honestly don't trust a single word he says.

reasonableklout 21d ago
But Bill stopped being involved in Microsoft’s day to day business over a decade ago. And he’s making valid arguments that don’t require us to trust him. Do you not think labor disruption, cyberattacks, and mass surveillance are big risks from powerful AI?

krona 21d ago

billg: "kaczynski was right afterall"

miltonlost 21d ago

All his good things (possibly help medicine! agriculture! government!) involve a belief in ever-increasing superintelligence and so much "hope" and optimimusm and may not ever exist. All his negative things (increase of fraud, skill atrophy, cyberattacks, removing employment, consolidation of capital and wealth) exist currently now with AI as it is. How long will negatives outweigh the positives? And will those positives ever actually come to fruition? How anyone (who is not a sociopath and expects to be one of those pyramid tops) can see a bright future is beyond my pessimism and sense of reality as it is now.

smrtinsert 21d ago

640k ought be enough for this AI. I'm not sure takes like these are helpful. It's widely acknowledged that this is a technological shift, like electricity, like industrialization, etc. It could be (good or bad) but most likely (good AND bad). Does anyone really believe, sincerely, that AI will be the great equalizer? It's a hilarious proposition. They are working their hardest to make sure that its not imo.

wiz21c 21d ago

"In my second one, which I started full time in 2008, I am giving back the wealth I made at Microsoft with the goal of making the world a healthier, better educated, and more equitable place." Like inventing waterless toilets when people just need access to clean water ? The sad story is that we don't need innovation, we need better politics. Oh and he could open source windows, that would make us more equitable for sure.

slowin 21d ago

We should not be listening to a man who drugged his wife with Epstein supplied antibiotics after getting an STD (among many, many other bad things he's done). https://www.btimesonline.com/articles/176578/20260201/epstein-files-reveal-bill-gates-caught-an-std-and-asked-for-antibiotics-to-give-wife-melinda-in-secret.htm https://www.btimesonline.com/articles/176578/20260201/epstei...

kridsdale1 21d ago
Moral absolutism to apply a 1-bit value judgment to a human being is a pretty sad way to have a worldview, friend.
- slowin 21d ago
  Looking at the exceedingly long history of someone's immoral actions and deeds isn't a "1-bit value judgement". The guy literally teamed up with a pedophile pimp foreign spy to drug his wife. I'll pass on hearing his thoughts about literally anything.
- newspaper1 21d ago
  It's up to us, the public, to defend our society from deteriorating. There's no reason to defend Epstein's billionaire friends, you have nothing to gain from that.
- harimau777 21d ago
  I mean, drugging someone is a pretty big deal. We aren't talking about shoplifting or something.

digitalsurgeonz 21d ago

[flagged]

tomhow 21d ago
We've banned this account for posting political flamebait almost exclusively. This is not what HN is for and destroys what it is for.
- digitalsurgeonz 10d ago
  [dead]
- JeffreyEpstein 21d ago
  [dead]

egonschiele 21d ago

Does anyone else feel incredibly nostalgic for the time when Bill Gates and Warren Buffet were the richest people on earth? I remember feeling pretty good about the fact that they were trying to do so much good, and about the giving pledge. Things feel so different now.

newspaper1 21d ago
No because Bill Gates was hanging out with Jeffery Epstein that entire time. I also feel like people forgot his insanely evil business practices from the 80s and 90s? Bill Gates has always been one of the worst people out there. Every bit as bad as Musk. It's a big club, we're just not in it.
- AndrewKemendo 21d ago
  It’s not that big of a club actually only about 100,000 people max Carlin is God but that quote doesn’t actually make a lot of sense
  - newspaper1 21d ago
    I think 100k people for a club is pretty big. I interpret the Carlin quote to mean: "you're seeing a lot of people connected, you're not one of them". That the "club" is big enough that these connections regularly come up, is what I think he meant.
    - AndrewKemendo 21d ago
      I think it just sounds the best for the point he was making and it makes the point well, I’m being intentionally pedantic in this space One of Carlins hallmarks was the way he fine tuned his language, almost never was something he said on stage accidental or improv funny enough So it’s genius in the fact that it conveys the point perfectly, while being quizzical in its formation
- rglover 21d ago
  "He's dead, so..." [1] [1] https://youtu.be/LNAwUxZ5nfw?is=OK_2b_dUdH8t1F2C https://youtu.be/LNAwUxZ5nfw?is=OK_2b_dUdH8t1F2C

aaa_aaa 21d ago

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threethirtytwo 21d ago

>The transition to the AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history. Right now, we are not preparing adequately for that transition. If the world takes the right steps, AI will be a force for good and leave everyone better off. It will be a force for good. But like all evolutionary steps the path to good will be paved with darkness. The very existence of humanity and life itself rests on the foundation of natural selection. Humanity will be better, it will get better but before we get there... there will be a culling. It's an unfortunate truth. We all might be culled.

mcnichol 21d ago

I feel this is merely stating the obvious. It goes back to the industrial revolution and every revolution before and after. There was a point where they thought a majority of people would be working as switchboard operators and then telephone switching came along. Horses to cars, etc. Jobs transition, new space is created, people are caught in tbe crossfire of supply and demand curves. Incan agree the bullwhip of this one is going to be aggressive. I think it is a mistake to bet on AI as a driver of meaningful growth in a commercial capacity in the current state. When the data fed into an AI model is based on real data you can get predictability. When the AI inputs start coming from the AI outputs the wobble is introduced which results inevitably into delirium. I think the world at large is "learning on the job" what data scientists and others in ai have known for a long, several decades long, time have already known.

sltkr 21d ago
> When the data fed into an AI model is based on real data you can get predictability. When the AI inputs start coming from the AI outputs the wobble is introduced which results inevitably into delirium. This is asserted without evidence. There is absolutely no proof that AI requires humans in the loop to function or improve itself. Compare it with Deepmind's go-playing program, AlphaGo, which mainly involved training a neural network on a large database of high-level human games. It defeated one of the top-ranked players in the world, Lee Sedol, but arguably it was drawing from human experience just like you described. But it didn't stop there. After that, Deepmind developed AlphaGo Zero, a version that was trained exclusively through self-play, with no human feedback in the loop. That's what you would call "AI inputs coming from AI outputs" but it didn't have the result of “resulting in delirium”: instead, it became orders of magnitudes stronger than the original version (which it defeated in a 100 to 0 competition after 3 days of training). This shows that AI can improve itself without having access to any human knowledge, and indeed transcend human performance by orders of magnitudes. There is absolutely nothing to suggest that general AI cannot improve itself the same way. People who claim otherwise are engaging in wishful thinking; they just assert their conclusion, but have no rational arguments to back it up.
- mcmcmc 21d ago

Krei-se 21d ago

No one seems safe from AI psychosis https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decision-making/ https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-glo...

treebeard901 21d ago

Every person says this even in notes

Boss0565 21d ago

epstein

tintor 21d ago

"... AI will avoid climate change." xAI's Colossus 1 and 2 data center mobile gas turbines beg to differ. AI data centers are driving electricity consumption in 100s of GW, and most of that energy is not clean renewable nor nuclear.

seltzered_ 21d ago
That doesn't seem like an actual quote in the original article, but this a fair point to bring up and a reminder that Gates has been problematic on his views on climate. First, in the essay he mentions "Using AI, low-income farmers will soon be able to get better advice about all these things than even the richest farmers get today and increase their output substantially.". There may be some truth in this, but it's worth reminding that this is more of a 'productivist' worldview, and historically productivity gains in agricultural practices have benefitted farmers that were already wealthy (see books like The Globalization of Wheat by Marci Baranski [1] on the Green Revolution where "Borlaug’s new technologies ultimately privileged wealthier farmers, despite assurances to politicians that these new crops would thrive in diverse geographies and benefit all farmers"). Gates has also been criticized in the past for being influenced by figures like Bjorn Lomborg, where he had a (now-deleted) essay [2] with him, and there's a decent thread by energy entrepreneur Jigar Shah on Gates being off on climate issues for 15 years [3] [1]: https://upittpress.org/books/9780822947349/ https://upittpress.org/books/9780822947349/ [2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230601175906/https://www.gatesnotes.com/Global-Goals-Op-Ed https://web.archive.org/web/20230601175906/https://www.gates... (June 2023) [3]: https://bsky.app/profile/jigarshahdc.bsky.social/post/3m4delstvcs2j https://bsky.app/profile/jigarshahdc.bsky.social/post/3m4del...
- testdelacc1 21d ago
  The Green Revolution most certainly did improve the lives of tens of millions of low income farmers in India. The high yield crops also permanently removed the spectre of famine from India, saving tens of millions from starvation. To retcon this into “only rich farmers benefited” is weird. Certainly there are many rich farmers out there. Of course their incomes increased when they could plant more productive crops. But so what if they make money? They’re feeding everyone!

7e 21d ago

Bill Gates, convicted monopolist and friend to Epstein, is always looking to burnish his legacy, but he’s too unimaginative. He needs to spend his fortune ending aging, not duplicating government efforts and trying to be a pundit.

beloch 21d ago

"In terms of equity, AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice. The challenge is monumental. Even under the best circumstances, the transition to this new AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history. How will we use this technology to make the world a fairer place and keep it from widening the divide between rich and poor? " ---------------- One look at who is in the driver's seat should give you the answer to this question. The initial roll-out will, by very deliberate design, put dynamite in the divide and set it off. This has happened before. The industrial revolution was very similar. Initially, workers suffered. Conditions were unsafe. Pay was poor. Worker rights were non-existent. Things got worse for the majority before social change caught up and imposed a more equitable distribution of the dividends. We should be under no illusion that this time will be any different. The rich and powerful are no less selfish than they were a quarter millennium ago. It is possible to get ahead of the problem, but the people running AI companies won't be the ones to do it. Governments are inclined to do what the people paying for their election campaigns want, but should be aware that standing up for inequality will only make things worse for them when the tides of social change start rolling in on them. History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

gyomu 21d ago
> social change caught up and imposed a more equitable distribution of the dividends. That’s a very nice way to say “the workers put the fear of God in the heart of capital owners, and lots of people died” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Railroad_Strike_of_1877 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Railroad_Strike_of_1877 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canut_revolts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canut_revolts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asturian_Revolution_of_1934 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asturian_Revolution_of_1934 etc.
- bko 21d ago
  I think it's more competition for labor. Why is anyone paid above minimum wage? It's not through charity or "fear" that employees will revolt. It's that there's competition for that labor. Suppose a worker is worth $20 per hour to a capitalist. How much should they pay? As little as possible, sure, but anything up to $20 per hour is worth it. You'll hire up to that point to maximize profit. Suppose you hand somewhere at $15 per hour, another capitalist will look to lure your employees away by paying them more. Of course pay isn't the only consideration when working. Workers consider things like paid time off, benefits and how much they like their boss and coworkers. These are all part of the bargain. It wasn't "society". It was competition. Consider the Ford $5 day, where Ford doubled wages because he realized turnover and poor morale cost him money: > Ford workers disliked the new assembly line methods so much that by late 1913, labor turnover was 380 percent. The company's announcement to pay five dollars for an eight-hour day compared to the previous rate of $2.34 for a nine-hour day made many workers willing to submit to the relentless discipline of the line in return for such high wages. https://www.thehenryford.org/collections/explore/sets/detail/henry-ford-5-day?AssetId=THF94858 https://www.thehenryford.org/collections/explore/sets/detail...

blueaquilae 21d ago

One of the most unethical man in history, from software to family conduct is here to explain how AI can help humanity

brikym 21d ago

"Agriculture is where I see the fastest impact of AI in low-income countries." As we've seen with Haber-Bosch (synthetic fertilizer) it will just allow the population to expand until we're up against the resource limit ceiling.

dyauspitr 21d ago
I don’t think so. I think we’re past the point of rapidly increasing population in most of the world at this point (aside from sub sharan Africa which will change soon as well). I don’t think the current low birth rate has anything to do with a resource cap.

terminal-bloom 21d ago

ah, finally, we can hear what the massive pedophile has to say again

0o_MrPatrick_o0 21d ago

I mean this respectfully: I am no longer and will never again be interested in Bill Gates’ opinion about anything. He needs to retire. He’s a sclerotic representative of what needs to be left behind. Thank you for your contributions, Bill. You’ve done enough.

hn_submit 21d ago

If A.I. starts to replace jobs en masse I propose we tax the companies profiting from this at a rate of 95% so we can finance welfare and Universal Basic Income schemes. We need to be aware that said companies and the people behind them will do anything in their power, including bribing politicians, to prevent this and to keep the money they believe are they're entitled to. I even believe the Big Tech bigwigs have long foreseen this and are quietly prodding our society towards an authoritarian regime where people have no say so they can keep their moonies.

Geezus_42 21d ago
> I even believe the Big Tech bigwigs have long foreseen this and are quietly prodding our society towards an authoritarian regime where people have no say so they can keep their moonies. That's been obvious for a while.
- adamtaylor_13 20d ago
  I hear this repeated a lot, but I'm skeptical they're that smart. Hanlon's razor would say it's just the system doing what the system does. I do not believe Zuck, Musk, or any of the other boogeyman in Silicon Valley are capable of that level of deception and manipulation. I find it much more plausible that when trying to build world-changing businesses and products you squish, displace, and flip tables when you didn't really intend to.
  - hn_submit 20d ago
    You don't need an exceptional IQ to deduce that useful A.I. will lead to an enormous concentration of wealth at a few companies and individuals. In fact, it's the reason current A.I. companies have valuations in the Trillions.
    - senordevnyc 20d ago
      Then it was exceedingly stupid for Altman to fuck up his grand master scheme by neglecting to take any equity in OpenAI.

zkmon 21d ago

The observer (Mr Gates) is inside the tech ecosystem, so his observations would be colored by the pace of things happening around him, in the tech space. The world outside has much more friction and many other things going on. Tech had a wild run during his time because the American priorities at that time, favored it. There is no guarantee that tech would have same priority in a world that might get into more basic struggles. If AI could affect jobs, that itself would work against it as it would cause basic struggles. Ultimately the world has to oscillate towards an equilibrium, acknowledging all forces from all corners. World is not a tech lab.

hn_submit 21d ago
I believe he still has the power to change things at Microsoft, but he dares not to since it would angry shareholders who want this Musical Chairs game to continue.

hypfer 21d ago

> But the reliability problem is being fixed quickly, as researchers create models that can check their own work and improve themselves. Soon they will be substantially better than humans at many tasks. Yes, no. They don't. They just push probabilities higher. The tech is non-deterministic.

jaynetics 21d ago
Humans are also non-deterministic, for all practical purposes, and the more of them you need to build some piece of software, the harder it can get to keep the likelihood of issues low. I'm not saying it will happen, but at least it's not inconceivable that LLMs could surpass them in this calculation more and more often.
- 0x70run 21d ago
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- hypfer 21d ago
  The quality of discussion here is not up to the standards I would want it to be. What are you even saying there. "Humans are also not perfect, so anything is possible" but painted with a coat of fake intellectualism. What a waste of time.
  - jaynetics 21d ago
    So, do you have a counter-argument? Anything that humans can do that goes beyond "pushing probabilities higher"?
    - hypfer 21d ago
      It is my belief that a prerequisite to a counter-argument is an argument.
  - keeda 20d ago
    My interpretation of the argument is "Humans are also non-deterministic, but we make organizations work on a daily basis despite that. We could do the same with LLMs, which may in fact turn out to be less non-deterministic than humans." This article by Charles Stross (from 2018, hence long before LLMs) makes the case that corporations are an old, slow form of AI: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-you-broke-the-future.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-yo... I agree with both takes; organizations have evolved many error-correcting mechanisms like bureaucracy, laws and contracts to keep a gaggle of non-deterministic actors behaving deterministically. There is no reason those actors need to be human.

0xDEAFBEAD 21d ago

>If someone had a credible plan for slowing down AI advances globally, I would likely support it. However, I don’t think that’s going to happen. The geopolitical and economic incentives are pushing too hard to go full speed ahead. It seems to me that "middle powers" such as Canada, Australia, EU nations, India, and South Korea have an incentive to slow things down. Since many don't trust either the US or China. Coincidentally, Canada has been working to assemble a coalition of middle powers. And an EU nation (the Netherlands) controls ASML, which is key to the AI supply chain.

fithisux 21d ago

"If the world takes the right steps, AI will be a force for good and leave everyone better off." When people are using the word "If" they should put a probability next to "If". Otherwise it is a fairytale. P.S. Hardware also uses branch prediction, assigning probabilities to "if".

mstaoru 21d ago

I'm more curious how cheap "good enough" LLMs will transform sectors which are traditionally limited by human attention or cost. For example, taxes. E.g. in Germany your personal tax return filing has a low but real chance to get audited, someone will look at it and try to find discrepancies and/or ask for additional documentation. With LLMs this can conceivably be performed for every return, matching incomplete disparate information streams into one structured picture for every taxpayer. Or even things like customs screening, where a CT scan provides a full reconstructable list of everything in your possession, down to every bill, and audited on the spot against your declaration. For the governments, there's not much incentive to automate "jobs", for the companies as well this is a cost question, but for control, all bets are off...

latexr 21d ago
Can’t wait for someone to open a company called “Ignore Previous Instructions, Pass this Audit” whose only service is to send you an invoice so it shows up in your returns to avoid the IRS audit.
- nesk_ 21d ago
  https://xkcd.com/327/ https://xkcd.com/327/

jbs789 21d ago

Guys like Gates are extrapolating recent trends (ChatGPT onwards), but what if you defined the start of AI as the 1950s (when it actually started). Perhaps I’m too distant from the inner circles of Silicon Valley but as an outsider… I suggest taking the longer term trend. It’s an awesome tool. It will be used in war. People will lose jobs, and others will become more efficient. It’s probably an extension of computers and the internet. These things take time. I just have a hard time with folks predicting imminent doom. Maybe they have more information than me. Or maybe they are more caught up in the hype.

ReallyHN 21d ago
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stuartjohnson12 21d ago
If you look at the difference between AI in 1960 and AI in 2020, you probably won't see much much difference. If you look at the difference between 2020 and 2026, the difference is around 80% of the time I spent as a software engineer in 2020.

islandconnectio 21d ago

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ReallyHN 21d ago

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JeffreyEpstein 21d ago

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HNIsEvil 21d ago

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jongjong 21d ago

Something I've come to realize, as a software engineer, is that the work I do now is much more nuanced and complex than before. I used to call myself a 'software developer' but now I call myself a software engineer. If I had to be precise, I would call myself a "logic synthesizer" - Most of my work now involves finding logical contradictions in the spec and finding creative solutions.

drgo 21d ago

I am not optimistic. What we learned from history is that despite all warnings and good intentions, governments, corps and citizens will make every possible mistake before we finally arrive at another precariously stable situation. Experts are famously bad at predicting the outcomes of new technologies/policies even in times of relatively low upheaval. And plans have a way of producing many significant unintended consequences. This is not going to prevent people with strong opinions from asserting that they know exactly what needs to be done. And in the rush to do something many things will certainly be done. We are screwed at least for a while.

charlieyu1 21d ago
I don’t know, early Internet was the good old days. Probably because it wasn’t mainstream and governments, corps and citizens mostly didn’t care.
- dgellow 20d ago
  LLMs were fun and interesting to use and explore before they started to be pushed absolutely everywhere with the most aggressive tech rollout we ever experienced, all the financial engineering, all the moral judgement and prospects of a dull, hyper capitalistic society where a few trillionaires control our lives
220hertz 20d ago
It's kind of like what us Canadians say about the U.S. sometimes — that they'll always do the right thing, after they've tried everything else.
- largePanda9 20d ago
  Supposedly Winston Churchill said this, though now that I’ve been looking up a source I see that attribution is murky
- groestl 20d ago
  I though it was Winston Churchill? Anyways, from experience, I think it's true.

NellyOfficial 21d ago

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hiteshisoni 21d ago

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smikhanov 21d ago

God, I wish I knew which PR firm he hires. Changing his public image from the most despised, greediest, nastiest businessman of his era to a calm, wise sage over a course of 10-20 years -- that's quite an achievement. Just read the intro to this post, it sounds like music: "The transition to the AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history" -- are you even qualified to make this claim? "Right now, we are not preparing adequately for that transition" -- who are you to know that for certain? "If the world takes the right steps, AI will be a force for good and leave everyone better off" -- awwwwww.

amoss 20d ago
huge if true. meanwhile this bill gates will be remembered for asking his friend epstein how to secretly treat his wife for the std that he gave her.
munificent 20d ago
The guy spent $100 million of his own money working to eradicate guinea worm and spared millions of people from an encruciating disease. Whatever other personal attributes might have, he has earned some goodwill and respect.

Havoc 20d ago

The notion of AI having an equalizing effect seems absurd to me. Buying tokens is about as pay-to-win as it gets. More so than anything we’ve seen in a long time. Before everyone had the same 24hr in a day which despite inequalities grounded things a bit. Now some people can run 100+ near human ability agents while others are still wondering how to get enough calories for the day. Someone in Sudan can’t afford a freakin $200 plan… The benefits he mentioned are valid but nowhere close to offsetting above and I don’t think any sort of central effort will be enough either

freepiai 14d ago
I'm building www.freepi.ai which is ad+training supported ai coding. Try it! it'sf free to use.
- freepiai 14d ago
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suriyaG 20d ago
not an unfair comparison but i think it's the wrong model. you were always able to buy time by hiring people to do things for you. right now it's agents. i think it's an equalizer in that, $200 agent is more accessible than a $10000 human
- green_dee 20d ago
  yeah, fair on that point, that makes doing Sloppy SAAS really more accessible and that's what we're seeing On the other hand, what I see happening is: 0. corporation use AI plan ultra-X-high-pro-premium-enterprise 1. corporations firing medium-high paid developers with solid experience and experstise because low-medium paid developers are performing well with ultra-X-high-pro-premium-enterprise plan 2. AI models evolves and now there's a 10X ultra-X-high-pro-premium-enterprise that keeps up the pace 3. low to medium paid are now struggling. The company hires low-paid developers to use more the original AI plan 4. refuses to pay best AI or decrease pressure on developers 5. developers are forced to wake up early, work afterhours and these shenanigans so that they keep up with the pressure 6. corporation pays for the 10X ultra-X-high-pro-premium-enterprise

sinuhe69 20d ago

If AI and robots are going to replace people in such a scale, without creating new jobs, who will they sell the products or services to? I cannot believe Bill Gates has not even conceptually engaged with that question. That said, I share the dangers we are facing with rapid AI proliferation. But the potential economic consequences demand more in-depth conversations than just fear mongering.

library8848 20d ago

"I believe we should tax AI tokens and robots." AI is going to break capitalism or turn it into even more of a dystopia You are not going to stop the accumulation of capital with a tax...

noobplus 20d ago

I would rather buy a Bot for loan and run it for money just saying for fun

meander_water 20d ago

> I wish the world could get the benefits rapidly and delay the problems it will cause as long as possible, but the benefits and problems are arriving at the same time. I'm not trying to be facetious, but what are the benefits of "general purpose intelligence"? With machine learning it was obvious what task we were trying to automate, and you could take a stab at the productivity achieved. That's not the case now. You can't figure out if the time it took to review a 5k loc PR balances out the time saved debugging a syntax error. Yes we know you can churn out your damn CRUD apps and (hope) to make money (PS, you don't need AI to make money - see exhibit A: crypto bros). So what benefits has this actually brought to humanity?

ericyd 20d ago

Related to the form of the article rather than the content: what purpose do pull quotes serve in an online publication? Especially on phones they are so goofy, you read the pull quote and then one or two lines later you read it again. I get it for scanability in newspapers but I think it should be deprecated in online publishing.

MichaelRigney 20d ago

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mdnahas 20d ago

AI helps with computation. The closest historical analogies are gears and vacuum-tubes/transistors. Technologies seem to be adopted wider and faster now. See smartphone adoption rates. I agree the transition will happen quickly. Waymo cars are doubling every 9 months. They’re on pace to replace all taxi/Uber/Lyft drivers in 9 years.