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  • Hacker News
  • Love how Gates and Nadella had nothing to say until this year, after they clearly lost any hope of building a moat around it
    by matltc
  • That you had your hands over your ears doesn't mean they weren't talking.
    by boxed
  • You have to understand that Gates had other distractions to deal with
    by m_ke
  • >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.

    by 0xDEAFBEAD
  • 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.

    by zkmon
  • 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.
    by hn_submit
  • > I believe we should tax AI tokens and robots.

    You had me here.

    by madhias
  • 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.

    by havaianaslife
  • 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...

    by 6thbit
  • 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.

    by mcnichol
  • > I feel this is merely stating the obvious.

    I think there is value in someone of Gates' stature stating the obvious, plainly.

    by petesergeant
  • This is potentially much more upending since it would put hundreds of millions of people out of work and concentrate all wealth at literally a handful of individuals. We could lead this towards a beneficial scenario with proper taxation, but the individuals who stand to gain will do anything in their power to prevent this.
    by hn_submit
  • Industrial transitions pushed more people from leg-work to hand-work and then brain-work. What is left once AI is better at that?
    by brikym
  • If AI would become better at cognitive work than humans, I don't really see what new jobs would be created.
    by azan_
  • > new space is created

    That seems to be the crux here. You think it will be, I (and a lot of other people) aren't sure it will. If new space for jobs are created, I am certain we'll be fine long term.

    What do you think will happen if it isn't (I know you have strong evidence for and reasons to believe it will be, but just indulge the hypothetical)?

    by numeri
  • > 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.

    by sltkr
  • 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...

    by mstaoru
  • 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.
    by latexr
  • "... 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.

    by tintor
  • I believe we are on autopilot towards essentially free renewable electricity, and so this doesn't feel like a big concern when held against the potential end-of-humanity potential that AI has.
    by petesergeant
  • Those emissions are nothing. Its a drop in the bucket compared with other industrial uses. A 50% reduction would change nothing, reduction to 0 would change nothing.
    by AuthAuth
  • 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/

    [2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230601175906/https://www.gates... (June 2023)

    [3]: https://bsky.app/profile/jigarshahdc.bsky.social/post/3m4del...

    by seltzered_
  • "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.

    by beloch
  • > 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.

    Yeah, it could be worse. During the industrial revolution, the rich and powerful absolutely needed workers (and lots of them) to run the machines, and that gave the workers power.

    The whole point of the AI revolution is to no need workers anymore, or far fewer of them.

    > It is possible to get ahead of the problem, but the people running AI companies won't be the ones to do it.

    It's possible, but dumbass software engineers missed their best chance, because they were too busy misunderstanding themselves as capitalists and embracing their bosses' libertarianism thinking, when they should have been unionizing to consolidate their former economic power.

    by palmotea
  • So, dust off those guillotines?
    by steve1977
  • This time will be different, because the oligarchs think that when the people finally come for them with pitchforks, they'll have an army of terminators to hide behind. That's why they're going YOLO full mask off.
    by CuriouslyC
  • > One look at who is in the driver's seat should give you the answer to this question.

    I think you are fundamentally misunderstanding the question Gates is asking here. He’s not asking “how this going to play out?”, he’s asking “how can we impact how this will play out?”

    He makes specific proposals like AI token and robot taxes. I just wish people being cynical would at least comment on possible solutions.

    I think AI taxes potentially make sense. His idea of Human Reserved is fascinating. It might not be his idea but I’ve never heard it described like that before

    by bryan0
  • > 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/Canut_revolts

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asturian_Revolution_of_1934

    etc.

    by gyomu
  • 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.

    by hn_submit
  • Anyone seriously trust in the fairytale that the rich and powerful gives 95% of their profit back to customers?

    It's not really what they've built their business empires for.

    by zx8080