Yep. Maybe there will be a net reduction in jobs but I can't help but feel like catastrophic 90% reductions involve "lump of labor"-type fallacies where we just imagine taking the given set of work being done and imagine how much of that will be handled via AI vs. humans in 5 or 10 years or whatever.
When the reality is that good AI tools will cause lots of projects to add video content where it wasn't before, or to spend more time creating high-quality video content. And this will undoubtedly involve some new labor.
>How many Reddit users knew they were agreeing in the future for Reddit to sell the content they wrote to make money for Reddit, not them?
Despite my low opinion of Redditors, I believe that on some level they are aware of the principle that if the product is free, then you are the product.
If you presented the regular users with the choice between "pay a subscription fee and opt out or let us use your data in these ways", the vast majority will end up choosing the latter and we all know it.
Are you seriously attributing public sector bureaucratic dysfunction to some sort of subversive public sector conservative operatives, or vague regulatory poison pills that you cannot actually point to here?
It seems a lot more intuitive to believe that you cannot just legislate that all government employees act selflessly towards the Greater Good, and the Homeless Industrial complex is a real thing that is not necessarily working in the interests of the public. Observing waste, fraud, and abuse and reflexively saying "this must be the fault of conservatives somehow" is just sorta sad.
>If "AI ethics" means being run by so-called rationalists and Effective Altruists then it has nothing to do with ethics or doing anything for the benefit of all humanity.
Many would disagree.
If you want a for-profit AI enterprise whose conception of ethics is dumping resources into an endless game of whack-a-mole to ensure that your product cannot be used in any embarrassing way by racists on 4chan, then the market is already going to provide you with several options.
The reddit moderators who cashed out were not the ones who were shutting down the service. They simply had insider information that allowed them to move first with this information. This was not a rugpull scenario.
>Andreessen’s newly espoused ideology did not spring up in a vacuum. Instead, it’s part of a broader movement that seeks to take all the guardrails off of technological development and push forward with “progress,” whatever the cost may be.
Pretty clear strawman starting at the third paragraph. I'm sure we could dig up many more.
>If I earned profits from a VC fund in San Francisco what are the chances of me paying only UK tax on that? You can also tax the fund directly and the corporations they invested in. You can tax the transfers of wealth between those entities. Of course you can tax these people if you want. Sure some of them will run to Belize, but the US control the domicile rules, tax them as you wish. Are they going to stay there forever? Tax income earned on US PE funds at source.
Obviously you can tax income and put the mandate of enforcement on companies that are paying individuals. You cannot delegate the taxation of pre-existing wealth to companies though and deputize every firm as an IRS agent.
It will bring them back to have their wealth arbitrarily expropriated? Yeah I doubt it. Never mind that it's unclear what it means to "deny them access to the US market" when these people are acting via working for / owning corporations. You're going to deny big corporations access to US markets based on the financial profiles of their owners? You're going to expect foreigners in general to surrender all their wealth in order to access US markets? Good luck enforcing that.
As a response they move their wealth overseas and renounce their citizenship if necessary. What strategy from the banana republic playbook would you like to see the State employ next?
The notion that "talking to a poor person" would somehow illuminate any of the issues that the author is talking about is laughable. Folk economic beliefs are notoriously terrible. Shedding crocodile tears about how poverty will still exist in the techno-utopian future is a way of attacking a strawman. Focusing on the plight of San Francisco in particular is backwards thinking, since Andreessen is undoubtedly more concerned about global metrics than parochial, highly-localized ones. No one should care that much if tech is driving up the Gini coefficient in SF if it's driving down global Gini.
I mean, if that were truly the case we'd see companies hovering around RTO numbers that just barely guaranteed these benefits - so far I haven't seen any stories to this effect, so it seems sorta hand-wavey to me?
I mean, yes it's bullshit to try to apply RTO policies on remote workers that were hired as remote workers. It's not even a "return" in that scenario, properly understood. And IANAL but I wonder if that could be considered a constructive dismissal that mandates severance rather than a "soft" one.
That said, this article flirts with the often-made argument that RTO is some sort of way of boosting commercial property prices or tax incentives. I've never bought this and would be curious to see the argument steelmanned, since I don't think large corporations are going to easily fall into this sunk cost fallacy style thinking. If remote work boosts productivity and allows them to lower the costs of having offices, companies should embrace this even if they made prior investments in having offices.
Yeah, when the primary complaint about Twitter is "other people are using it to say things I dislike", then that seems like a pretty.. motivated critique of the platform.