> If LLMs and related technology result in a gutting of the workforce and mass unemployment the world will be a dark and terrible place. I do not trust the gove

> If LLMs and related technology result in a gutting of the workforce and mass unemployment the world will be a dark and terrible place. I do not trust the governments of the world to solve that with UBI or similar. IMHO, UBI is a sop to mitigate the thread of violence and revolution during creation of a poor, disempowered underclass. That's why I'm in favor of literal communal ownership (or some other kind of severe ownership or operation restriction that limits the concentration of power). > I remain optimistic that people will always find new problems to solve... Oh "people" will, the question is which people and how many. I could totally imagine AI leads to a post-scarcity future of abundance for all humanity...which consists of the descendants of the nepo babies of today's billionaires, after everyone else is eased out of existence in some kind of economic holocaust. You can adjust the dial as you see fit to make the survivor group a bit bigger, but the point is the utopia comes only for the few. >> If you really want to advocate for AI, and address most of the concerns about it, advocate for literal communal ownership of the frontier models and data center infrastructure. > This is why I've been following open weight and local models so closely. A couple of years ago, back when GPT-4 had been unbeaten for 10 solid months, I was deeply concerned that we might end up in a dystopia where all of the useful AI was controlled by a single organization. > ... > Right now communal ownership of data centers looks less likely to me than widespread availability of useful models that run on consumer hardware. That's pretty surprising - a year ago I never dreamed I would have a Claude 3 equivalent model that ran on a Mac. I should probably just have said "AI" instead of "frontier models and data center infrastructure." Because fat lot of good a "competent model in ~24GB of GPU-accessible RAM" does me if there's no jobs or the jobs available pay shit or suck, because the wealthy just get the work done with their own local models.