The turbulent AI era is here

You had me here.

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.

That transparency alone could change the market dynamics a lot.

Just hope that as an individual you wouldn't be taxed for this though...

Maybe it will be seen similarly to the dancing crazes of the Middle Ages.

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?

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.

I agree. However, why aren’t we applying the same standard to AI technologies themselves? That doesn’t strike me as worth pursuing, the article discusses all the ways that is and will go wrong

The first card on the homepage of the DTCC (https://www.dtcc.com/) is "Tokenization". This is a legitimate use case and is being adopted at the largest institutional level. Stablecoins are yet another legitimate use case.

Edit: for what it's worth, I do agree that the crypto craze was insane. I also think the AI craze is insane, even though I agree that its current proliferation is larger than crypto.

After 2 years i feel mostly distracted by it. There are usecases ofc but encountering a chatbot or AI written posts, software, etc. is still a negative.

Knowing medical software requirements, which might be there for a reason, i highly doubt this will see production.

Why would I distribute software that's tailor made for me? I don't want to deal with headaches associated with distributing it.

> Knowing medical software requirements, which might be there for a reason, i highly doubt this will see production.

It won't, the software is not a point of my work, it's just a tool for my actual project which has nothing to do with programming (very useful tool but still - not a goal on it's own).

AI does nothing. CEOs want to use it to replace all cognitive work, it doesn't mean it is inevitable. That is why smart people are fighting against the narrative push.

Crypto only ever allowed me to buy drugs over the internet. I'm not really buying this argument.

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?

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

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.

We did not had nuclearmaxxing. We did not had doomtrolling from nuclear companies.

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

While nuclear power is not intrinsically anti human you can't really separate the public perception of nuclear power and that of nuclear weapons. Anti nuclear sentiment is a lot easier to understand when you realize everyone who grew up under the Cold War had went through nuclear attack drills.

You took the goalpost, moved it to another country and now argue that ball did not moved with it.

In fact you could probably make a strong case that the US and USSR did NuclearMaxxx

It’s called the nuclear arms race/cold war and was the defining characteristic of society post WWII until 9/11

Nuckear arms race was something that could cause harm. This is intended to cause harm by design. And it is already clear it will cause harm to many people regardless of whether ai companies succeed or not.

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

An AI ministry, “human-reserved” jobs, and taxes on AI tokens.

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.

Globally, it is unrealistic.

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

"A lot of people are skeptical of AI because it makes mistakes. But what's going to happen when it stops making mistakes??? It'll change the world!"

Honestly I suspect he's probably just cynically talking his book. All of this "AI is scary good / it'll be even scarier gooder soon" is no less advertising than slapping a cigarette logo on a racing car.

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.

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/docume...

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.

We must tax lines of code. Like property tax, but for code. Every year, companies (and individuals) must declare all repos. Have them appraised.

This part was a good point, so I couldn't tell if the second part is satire or not.

EDIT: parent comment was edited: it used to say $15

$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/

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=%241%2C000%2C000%2C000%2C000...

On which figure?

> The Gates Foundation has 19 years left of the 20 years in which it will spend its remaining $200 billion. AI will help it achieve its ambitious goals by both accelerating the discovery of vaccines and medicines for HIV, TB, malaria, and malnutrition and helping the healthcare workforce and patients know how to use those tools. The foundation’s goals include cutting the number of children who die every year in half again, as was done from 2000 to 2024. All of our work, not just health but also agriculture and education, will take full advantage of AI.

---

I think "maintaining the working poor" is a strange misread of "give people jobs". His point is that people get a ton of meaning out of their work in our current capitalist system, and regardless of whether or not we change our system in the long term, if we don't do something about jobs in the short term, there will be a civil crisis:

> In a capitalist society, employment is the way most people get the money they need to pay for the basics of life as well as being a key source of dignity and social connection.

> When a community has high unemployment, the ripple effects can be pervasive. Research suggests that in some parts of the United States, factory closures contribute to a rise in deaths from opioid overdoses. Now imagine similar pressures on both white-collar and blue-collar workers nationwide.

> Waiting until people are already displaced or underemployed will be too late. AI is a structural challenge to the way our economy is organized, and it requires thinking and action now.

The state papers over that contradiction with the idea of perpetual economic growth, where the economic activity simply grows so fast that more jobs are created than are lost by efficiency improvements.

Gates is somehow expecting that "we" (whoever that is) agree just like that to keep certain jobs from being replaced by AI, even if they could. But that would go against all the forced and incentives that make up the dynamic of the current system.

But the alternative (to refuse to regulate) involves mass disruptions across every level of society as human labor is replaced. A worst case scenario could involve wars or waves of violent revolution + suppression akin to the 1930s.

Curing diseases and making people feel fulfilled are great goals, but they're not the primary ones in my mind. They are in Gates' mind because those are the biggest challenges he has personally experienced in his life.

Making the structural changes to our economy should be trivial if AI works as well as he's supposing it will. We won't need an economy at all, not to solve the problems caused by unemployment. (And that's the thing, is unemployment is not the actual problem, it is a cause of problems, but AGI would give us easy alternatives to the fundamentally unattainable goal of full employment.)

I wonder how the hell did you arrive at this conclusion from this text.

The actual text Bill wrote is more about highlighting upcoming problems and convincing governments to work together on potential harms coming soon.

One is the obvious one, to produce things. AI can somewhat help with that, although less than you might think because it's largely producing knowledge output rather than physical things. If AI lets one knowledge worker do the work of 10, the effect of that is to free up 9 knowledge workers to take up manual labor, it's not to make manual laborers 10x more productive.

The second purpose is to distract people from attempting to work on their own interests and instead corral them into working for others'. You see examples of this in the form of acquihires (where they obviously don't need you to do the work, they already have a competing product, but they do need to take your product off the market), and in bullshit jobs, and in think tanks and consulting firms and legal machinery. It's a form of social control and a means to maintain social order, not a requirement for actual productivity. When you don't give people a job to do, they start working for their own interests, and their own interests frequently conflict with others. And we've seen that over and over again: the Great Depression nearly led to a fascist coup in the U.S. [1] and did result in fascism in Germany, Italy, and Spain, and large communist movements in France and China. The COVID pandemic and subsequent lockdowns led to widespread protests and civil unrest in the U.S. and other countries.

Popular discourse concentrates almost exclusively on the first purpose, because the second one is icky to talk about. In reality most people are individually better off being independently wealthy and not working, but society can only absorb so many free agents with their own ideas and wills to power. (This is also why retirement and stay-at-home parenting are broadly institutionalized: it's okay for people to not work when they no longer have the energy to work, it's only dangerous when people are not working and yet have the energy to do things other than working). But the second reason actually has more explanatory power. If you assume that the true reason for employment is to take people out of the competitive will-to-power market, lots and lots of irrational moves suddenly make sense, like high-paid executives, bullshit jobs, bureaucratic incompetence, projects where billions are invested and then the whole thing is canceled, competing internal divisions, people not getting fired for doing nothing, etc. The whole point is for them to do nothing.

There's a Chesterton's Fence [2] issue at work here. Many people, particularly young people, grow up with the first explanation for work and take it at face value, and then a new technology comes around that saves all this work and they're like "Of course this is a good idea! I want to be part of it!" But if the actual purpose of work is to distract people from pursuing their own interests, this is incredibly dangerous. The actual consequence is going to be widespread unrest and quite possibly war.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

[2] https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/

This is the foundation of the economy. AN engine needs energy to keep going and workers are that energy. AI serves to automate a lot of that energy... but this leads to a side effect.

The side effect is that the economy is a self feedback loop, as workers not only run the engine but they also create the fuel that they themselves run on. If workers aren't working and AI has replaced them then what where are companies getting money from if workers can no longer buy things from the company? This is the fundamental loop of how an economy works... money gets paid to workers, workers spend the money and the loop continues and the economy self improves... If workers are replaced the economy no longer works.

You're addressing a flaw and an imperfection in the existing infrastructure (poverty),The article is talking about the very engine that maintains society itself which in theory can completely break if AI is introduced.

I don't know if it will ACTUALLY break, the circumstances surrounding all of this are very very complex that no one can fully predict the outcome but the theory behind it is legit and much more significant then a poverty issue.

A significant percentage of the world's hungry live under warlords, militias and dictatorships that would simply kill anyone trying to peacefully give their subjects food.

Unless you're proposing AI military interventionism, you cannot fix this.

Homelessness on the other hand is mostly a mental health and drug addiction problem. Fixing it, in many cases, would require violating the consent/wishes of the homeless person.

The world's biggest problems, unfortunately, cannot be solved by throwing money at them. A lot of rich individuals, NGOs, and nation states have tried.