AI is not a Net Positive for Society

It's just going to make the rich richer

While I am a hardcore capitalist, I do occasionally see an endemic risk to society. In this case, I see one with the modern AI (really ML LLM models). The inherent issue is that all of the large ones are owned by the biggest and wealthiest people in the world. And what is their end goal? It’s not to help society, but to sell AI workers at a fraction of the price of human workers to all the world’s companies, which would cause mass unemployment. You’ve probably heard this dystopian prediction before.

Except it really is that bad. One need look no further than how these models are trained. OpenAI is facing numerous lawsuits for violating copyright on millions of articles around the web used to train their AI. Github takes all of your code and is training AI engineers on it. All AI companies are essentially stealing our labor already completed to train our replacements. And instead of paying thousands of employees, companies will just make one big monthly payment to OpenAI.

Now, if the someday massive profits from replacing employees actually benefit taxpayers, this would be a good thing. The theory of a utopian society with large universal basic income would be somewhat feasible. But that’s not the case. The profits from all of this will flow to the AI companies which are, as I mentioned, owned by a very select few and reducing costs for other companies, which really only benefits their shareholders, which is a small amount of Americans overall.

In the end, if the current dream of AI is realized, it will be the single greatest addition to the already high wealth gap that exists in this world, with our AI owning overlords controlling basically everything.

The good news is we’re a ways off from that. But somehow we need to figure out how to avoid it. Layoffs are already occurring due to AI and will only accelerate, especially as it gets smarter and more capable.

Even though I am generally against taxes, I actually proposed something like a payroll tax on AI. Every worker replaced needs to pay a significant tax so that that money can be distributed to the worker. Not that I think anything would ever come from that proposal, but it would be one way to avoid economic disaster.

One way or another I’m sure we’ll find our way through this as a society but I do not hold a positive view on AI other than that it currently assists me in my job and allows me to create new products. The long term harm and hoarding of capital it will cause will have dramatic ramifications in coming years.