Society has been built on the principle that people can find productive jobs, earn money from those jobs and pay for life's necessities with that pay. Prior to all this we had more subsistence living. It started to change in the medieval era and really took shape with the industrial revolution.
We like to believe the lie that this is a meritocracy. It is not. Most people get jobs because of who they know. Whole industries are dominated by nepotism (eg Hollywood). A sign of the rising waters is that having a wealthy backer or social connections is the only way to advance. This comes up even with becoming a doctor. Having a parent who is a doctor massively increases your chances of getting into med school, getting a good residency (particularly in a competitive specialty), etc. You want a job in investment banking or on a trading desk? Compare your chances as a nobody vs if your father is on a trading desk.
But what happens when, with increasing automation, there aren't enough jobs for everybody? That's the fundamental question of AI (and automation in general). The two extremes for how this can go are:
1. A small group will become increasingly wealthy while large swathes of the population will be permanently unemployed or underemployed. This is where people end up living in shanty towns and slums. Wages are overall low because demand exceeds supply; or
2. Society as a whole enjoys the benefits of automation by having to work less. Basic needs are provided for. People get to live with dignity regardless of whether or not they win the job lottery.
Put another way: AI isn't a technological issue. It's an economic one.
Companies inevitably reach a state where the only way to satiate the need for ever-increasing profits is by:
1. Raising prices; or
2. Cutting costs.
Every use of AI falls into one of these. Demand pricing? Raising prices. Replacing people with AI systems? Cutting costs. But I really have to add a third to this list:
3. Weapons.
Recently there's been reporting on how the Minot school bombing happened at the onset of the Iran War eg [1]. Humans normally have to be involved in target selection and the so-called "kill chain" as a safeguard. There are open questions here about how this happened. It's unclear if the human verification failed here or was bypassed by new policy.
As another example, there are the AI targeting systems (eg Lavender, Where's Daddy?) used in Gaza [2].
So if you're working for any of these companies (eg OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX), you need to realize what it'll be used for: to more efficiently kill people. It's no different to working for RTX, Boeing or Lockheed Martin.
As for the NSA, I've always been skeptical about the claims that the NSA records everything, simply because of the infrastructure required to do that. Networking, storage, physical server space, water for cooing, etc. Also, what good is it because nobody can possibly review it? But AI to the rescue!
It's entirely reasonable to assume that every communication at some near future point will be intercepted, processed, tagged and logged by some government AI system.
This is going to separate the wheat from the chaff in regards to who can negotiate a contract and who can't.
The big tech companies have typically used Special Purpose Vehicles ("SPVs") [1] for their hyperscalar investments and there's a lot of insulation from financial woes. Here's an example structure:
1. One subsidiary (or SPV) builds the physical building the data center is in. That's all it does;
2. The main SPV will lease the building from (1). It borrows a bunch of money for the GPUs and other hardware.
So, done right, if a hyperscalar fails, the company only loses the hardware.
Has Oracle done this correctly or have they screwed up and the debtholders have rights to Oracle itself in the case of a default?
The bigger issue for the economy is similar to 2008. There is so much AI debt that it's impossible to avoid. Mutual funds, pension funds, retirement accounts, etc will all be exposed to it so you can get a cascading economic collapse.
Yes. But even with these SPVs is was largely about keeping the liabilities off the hyperscalers balance sheets. GAAP has some rules being exploited there on keeping commitments off the balance sheets until they’re delivered. But the big players are still very exposed. The WSJ recently reported there’s are 3 trillion in these little gems hiding “off the books” that will start popping up as real liability soon. It’s a huge mess.
The first is that AI will actuallly the world Skynet-style. I actually consider this unlikely. People are unlikely to completely remove people from the decisions to launch nuclear missiles, for example. Look at the Soviet/Russian design for Dead Hand [1], as one example.
The second is that AI destroys so many jobs that society falls apart. This is the far more problematic and likely scenario (IMHO). To put this in context, I see two general outcomes for AI:
1. AI will be used for further widen the inequality gap as the already ultra-wealthy will get, well, more wealthy, for literally no reason. This is the outcome where you still need a job to survive but a whole bunch of them disappear and aren't replaced. The world of The Expanse was kind of like this (on Earth); or
2. AI makes everyone's lives easier so less work needs to be done. Crappy jobs get automated. People in general get more leisure time and quality of life.
I believe (1) is far more likely at this stage and it's not going to be pretty. But this is an issue of economics not technology. Put another way: our society isn't structured to handle this change. Put yet another way: no amount of guardrails or slowdowns on AI will solve the fundamental issue of wealth distribution. And put even yet another way: this is capitalism vs socialism.
We have a preview of what this looks like when you compare the US to China.
The US has crumbling infrastructure, has lost the ability to manufacture everything but weapons and about 1000 people are insanely wealthy while everyone else are struggling to survive while AI systems drive up the cost of everything necessary to live like food and housing through demand pricing. We now spend over $1 trillion a year on a military to essentially siphon money to those 1000 from everyone else.
And what's China done? It's invested in infrastructure and its people. China's vision for AI isn't to maximize shareholder value at all costs. It will be strictly regulated so society as a whole gets to benefit.
So while I can respect people such as this author leaving on principle, I think they're still focusing on the wrong problem.
> And what's China done? It's invested in infrastructure and its people. China's vision for AI isn't to maximize shareholder value at all costs. It will be strictly regulated so society as a whole gets to benefit.
China is not in an ideal place right now, youth unemployment is way up, lots of dead end jobs, a 35 age employment limit that isn't just a meme. China has disparate visions for AI but maximizing owner (erm, sort of like shareholder) value is definitely one of them. Don’t get me wrong, China could get this right in the end, but it’s not a forgone conclusion right now.
I absolutely agree that China has problems and youth unemployment is absolutely on that list.
Here's the difference though: in the US that would be treated as a personal moral failure ("git gud", if you will) whereas China is actively dealing with such issues.
You see all this play out with how China and the US treat AI models. The US is busy trying to build a moat around AI for the benefit of the investors in OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, etc. Chinese labs are essentially destroying "shareholder value" by releasing open weight models. China wants to commoditize (even democratize) the models themselves so society itself benefits and, geopolitically, the US doesn't become an AI monopoly.
We really should avoid putting China on a pedestal here because as soon as its position flips with the USA (inevitable at this point), they are going to look a lot less appealing to the rest of us. Alibaba, Tencent, etc… are absolutely not more moral than American big techs, they aren’t being altruistic even if acts to check the American big techs.
The logical fallacy here is that we can't use a hypothetical future harm to justify a current real harm because you can justify anything that way.
Open weight models, for example, are forever. Proprietary models are intentionally building a moat to extract more value from people. I know which one I prefer.
A lot of China fearmongering (in general, not you in particular) is just xenophobia. You will see the argument that the US has to do imperialism because if it doesn't, then China will become dominant and do the exact same sins. It's also a bit of a self-report: we tend to assume other people will act like us if given the chance so any accusation is really a confession.
China is neither good nor bad, it will do whatever is in its best interests. They are, however, smart, smarter than the current USG (which isn't hard), so maybe they will pull out more win-wins? Take their investments in new energy and EV, it’s completely due to self interest, but has the potential to lift up the rest of the world. But then they are also already a mass surveillance state, face recognition and cameras are everywhere, it’s like flock on steroids, that is tech they are also exporting to the rest of the world. Better AI is just going to make that issue worse.
When it becomes dominant, China’s sins will probably be very different from the USA’s, but they are still going to be there.
The thing people need to understand about China is that they tell you exactly what they're doing and why. There's no mystery in it. They have five year plans. They have doctrines. They love writing stuff down. And you will better understand and be able to predict China than 95% of Western analysts if you simply take what China says at face value. Seriously.
Consider Xi Jinping Thought on Ecological Civilization doctrine [1]. At the UN Summit on Biodiversity in 2020 Xi Jinping said [2]. He is saying that the world cannot support the developing world living in a resource-intensive way that Western societies currently do and you need a more ecological way of living. So when China massively pushes solar and other renewables, it's just the natural extension of their political philosophy.
The US, on the other hand, is just 5 companies in a trench coat.
Like I said, China is smart, compared to the USA which just makes dumb decision after dumb decision based on momentum alone. That can be good and bad. Let’s put it this way: imagine how much more damage the Americans could do to the world if they were actually smart? That will be China in a decade or two.
China at least has a demonstrable capacity to serve anything other than bottom line of the shareholders. It is not perfect, but it at least has capacity for improvement.
This! China is full of problems. But at the very least, it manages to serve its people over capital (as flawed as that service is). America can’t seem to do anything to hold capital to account, which is why people are terrified of AI taking their shitty jobs.
This should be at the top. I’ve been arguing this for months, that the issue of AI acceleration is an economic problem, not a tech one. That’s why the Chinese aren’t so afraid of it, compared to Americans who have zero faith their government will do anything to redistribute wealth from the future AI trillionaires.
There's a lot of sci-fi about the wealthy bringing on an apocalypse so they can rule the world that comes out of it. Two examples on TV now are Fallout (from the video games, obviously) and Silo.
One thing that gives me some small level of comfort is that the billionaires who have the means to make that sort of thing happen don't want to live in bunkers or a radioactive wasteland afterwards. They have it pretty good on Earth as it is now. So there's only so bad things can get (I hope).
To your point, it does feel like we are bouldering towards major disruption, even the unravelling of the fabric of society, thanks to worsening inequality as well as the impacts of AI. In the coming decades we may well have a billion climate refugees. We may have large swathes of the population who have no productive outlet in a world that still requires you to have a job to live. And that could go south very, very quickly.
So I guess my point is that if things get so bad you need to put your AI DC in space to avoid the unwashed masses burning it down, I suspect we'll have far bigger problems long before that becomes an issue.
You assume billionaires and politicians are all-powerful and that they congregate in a secret cabal voting on where to take civilization next. No they live in fear of what other powerful people might do and their reactions to what is perceived risk can really f up everything. Even the most powerful autocrats in the world have to deal with other countries.
Framing it as some Illumianti-like dark room cabal is the wrong way to think about it.
Look at our present woes in the Middle East. We have two nuclear powers who are dragging the world towards economic collapse. I believe that before we reach that economic doomsday scenario or anyone seriously considers deploying nuclear weapons, the money behind those powers will oust those who try to push us past the brink.
To this point, I believe there's a very real possibility that Trump gets 25A'ed next year, meaning the 25th Amendment is invoked to remove him from office.
There's no world where this makes sense. Let's take it issue by issue.
1. Hardware failures: If you know anything about data centers you know that servers fail all the time. I've seen estimates of AI DC servers that have a failure rate of about 9% annually. A terrestrial DC has hardware techs who get alerted to the failure, replace the bits with known good bits and then take the suspect bits for testing to either bin them or verify they're working. You have no option to economically do this in space;
2. Radiation: We have the atmosphere and a concrete box protecting ground-based servers from cosmic rays flipping bits as well as the potentially more problematic (in space) solar storms;
3. Power generation: solar is the only option and yes, orbital panels would be more efficient than ground based. But space-based solar solar tech is much more expensive than what we put here on Earth because it absorbs multiple wavelengths of light to generate electricity. The launch cost and weight savings overcome the high panel costs. But to generate power in the gigawatt range, you're talking about solar panel arrays far larger than anything we've ever deployed in space;
4. Cooling: this is a big one. The only way to get rid of heat is to radiate it away into space and this is bound by physics. I'm sure people have done the maths on this but it's not going to be pretty;
5. Heating: the sun will be heating your vessel a lot of the time. You can shield it to some degree with solar panels but they too will radiate away heat in all directions, which will heat the things behind them. JWST uses several sophisticated layers of cooling to reach the low temperatures it needs to operate; and
6. Interconnectivity: these things are likely to be tens of kilometers apart in the very least. You're going to need terabit level networking to be useful for coordination and even then latency will be an issue. Laser dispersion will be an issue as well as the power and heat generated.
I honestly don't know what anyone is trying to achieve with any of this.
1. If wealth was only motivated by taxes and was going to leave, it would've left already. Fact is, billionaires don't want to live in Tennessee;
2. Nobody is doing the right thing to tackle any of this, including California.
The article mentions California has land and that's the key point. Unfortunately, California homeowners have been coopted into voting against their own interests to raise property values. If the house you bought in SF in 1975 for $80,000 is now worth $3M, you still only own 1 housing unit's worth of wealth. And that housing cost is an input into everything you need to buy because all the workers required for those things have to be paid high enough to pay those exorbitant rents.
Let me repeat that: high housing costs are an input into everything that you buy.
So what needs to happen? We need to stop treating housing as a speculative asset. It's simply stealing from the next generation. Worse, it's diverting investment capital from productive output because land has become the asset with the best tax treatment, highest returns and most government protections. So what does this look like?
1. Some form of land value tax. The higher the value goes, the higher the taxes go. You raise the rent and your land value taxes go up because it's more valuable;
2. Punitively tax land hoarding including second homes. We could give discounted rates to primary residences of state residents. Nobody else should get a discount. This would mean repealing Prop 13 and that's never going to happen. As an example of this, I'll bring up Prop 19. In CA you can inherit a preferential property tax rate. Prop 19 proposed to limit this to only one property could inherit this preferential rate and it barely passed (51% IIRC). Do we think that 49% of California voters have multiple properties that have property tax rates set 40+ years ago? Of course they don't. It's an example of how people vote against their own interests;
3. Part of what sold Prop 13 originally was the idea of pushing seniors out of their homes with property taxes. Well, that gave Disneyland a tax rate that was set in the 1960s. California should do what Texas does: you can defer your property taxes until you die if you're a senior but there's no capped property tax rates like incumbent SF residents have and no inherited preferential property tax rates;
4. Wind back the preferential collateralization of property for mortgage debt over time. Residential property lending now dominates bank lending and earnings. It's significantly harder to get finance for any form of productive output;
5. Wind back over time preferential tax treatment for home ownership.
Do I think any of this will happen? No.
Oh, one of the worst things to do is transaction taxes, often called stamp duty. This is where you pay a percentage of the value on purchase. This really hurts mobility. I guess it's fine if it's only on the luxury end of the market (CA's is at $5M+?) but it's not a good idea regardless.
The other part of this is to provide social housing like Vienna. The government should be a significant supplier of affordable quality housing.
> We need to stop treating housing as a speculative asset.
This kind of assumes the only reason a house appreciates in value is because people are "treating it as an asset" rather than "the house I bought 30 years ago in the middle of nowhere is now smack dab in the middle of a very desirable area." At that point it's simple supply and demand, not some homeowner being greedy.
> The higher the value goes, the higher the taxes go. You raise the rent and your land value taxes go up because it's more valuable
This makes the fatal assumption that just because a house is worth dramatically more than what you paid for it many years ago that your income must have risen just as dramatically. "Oh well, too bad, sell your house and deal with it." Maybe people kind of like living where they've put down roots and don't want to be punished for something outside of their control? Any proposal that boils down to "pay more or fuck off" is not going to go over very well.
> We need to stop treating housing as a speculative asset.
Something I've been yelling from the rooftops.
Housing can either be affordable, or it can be an investment that's bought, rented, and sold for the sole purpose of profit. It's not possible for it to be both.
People expect their house to appreciate faster than inflation, but all that does is rob the next generation of home ownership.
And now, when mom and dad downsize after the kids move out, rather than selling the house or pass it to one of their children, they rent it out.
Alternatively, they keep the house, but get either a reverse mortgage or a cash out refi to survive until they die, at which point their kids can't afford to buy it from the bank.
Increase taxes on rental income on single-family homes and double the property tax on vacant homes to discourage hoarding.
Encourage building upwards to increase housing supply. This can be done via tax breaks or subsidies. Especially encourage multi-use buildings to make cities walkable. Stores/restaurants at the street level with apartments above.
Ditch or reform/restrict the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage. Remove barriers to building more housing. Other stuff, but you can do a web search, I'm sure.
2. Even that cost is only obtained by accounting tricks, basically arguing the life of the plant is 60 years;
3. The true cost in the last 30 years just isn't known (eg Hinkley Point-C);
4. Processing of uranium ore into fuel creates is an unsolved problem when it comes to waste byproducts eg UF6;
5. Processing and storage of spent fuel is an unsolved problem. No, you can't just stick it in a cave. Most spent fuel requires active cooling for years, possibly decades;
6. Long term investment in maintenance is super-important and something that particularly private companies are incredibly bad at as evidence by the infrastructure management of every private utility in the US;
7. They take 15-25 years to build, typically, if you're anyone but China. Who know how cheap the alternatives will be by then? Look at solar's price collapse;
8. SMR does not work and will not work. It's a myth sold to government to siphon grants;
9. The cost of a catastrophe of a single plant is many orders of magnitude higher than any other power plants. Examples: Chernobyl, Fukushima. And yes I can already feel the hand-waving away of "outliers";
10. No nuclear power plant has ever been built without significant government subsidies; and
11. No nuclear power plant pays the true insurance cost. Those costs will ultimately fall onto the taxpayer who will typically enjoy none of the proits.
> No nuclear power plant pays the true insurance cost.
Do fossil fuel plants pay co2 costs, or insurance costs for killing the planet? Well, it wouldn't make any sense, since it's not accidents that kill in that case, but the steady state.
The radiation from coal power alone (excluding accidents) kills more people every single year than nuclear power has killed in its entire existence (even including accidents).
About waste: somehow, this is a solved problem (at scale) ? Fast breeder reactor, half life ~= 30 years (IIRC)
From your message, I understand that your country fails to build nuclear plant in a timely fashion but that other (china) can. Seems like a lack of skill/willingness to me, not a technical issue.
I agree with everything you said but want to add some more about the Price-Anderson Act. It does a few things:
1. It caps the liability for an incident at a single reactor. It goes up with inflation and I believe it's currently $500 million;
2. It establishes an industry-wide secondary self-insurance fund for broader incidents and caps liability. I believe the current theoretical value is $15-20 billion; and
3. In the event of a wider incident, the per-reactor liability cap is lower than (1). I believe it's $150 million.
So who pays if an incident exceeds these caps? The government does. These are either entirely or largely privately owned. Why exactly are we subsidizing private providers this way while enjoying none of the profits?
Now go and look at the cleanup costs of either Chernobyl or Fukushima. The latter is going to take decades, possibly a century, and the costs are in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Chernobyl is probably higher.
Yet these get hand-waved away by nuclear advocates despite there being 2 major events when fewer than 700 nuclear plants have been built (and I believe that includes non-power plants).
Take coal, then. The radiation from coal power alone (excluding accidents) kills more people every single year than nuclear power has killed in its entire existence (even including accidents).
But you focus on one single thing: Oil spills. The grandparent comment talks of fossile fuels. What about co2?
Co2 has been leaking out into the atmosphere for many years. You know what happens to it? It stays around basically forever, kills enormously (directly and indirectly), and in fact causes a spiralling effect.
SMR makes no sense. It never did. It's a program to fuel academic empire-building and to siphon government money in the form of research grants and investment.
You see this pattern a lot in academia. Education is a great example. We know what works when, for example, it comes to teaching literacy. It's phonics. But over the past few decades we had a fad with "sight words". The evidence has come in that this has been a disaster. So why did it happen? Because nobody is going to get prestige in their education PhD by pushing an existing idea. They're incentivized to reinvent that wheel to shape themselves as an expert in the new wave.
That's exactly how SMR came about. It takes the idea of scaling by going small and repeating what you're doing rather than doing what you actually need to do and that is to standardize large designs. Larger reactors are just more efficient and that's physics.
I bet I could come back to HN in 10 years and SMR will still be exactly nowhere yet people will still be promising a bright future for it.
Owning capital.
Society has been built on the principle that people can find productive jobs, earn money from those jobs and pay for life's necessities with that pay. Prior to all this we had more subsistence living. It started to change in the medieval era and really took shape with the industrial revolution.
We like to believe the lie that this is a meritocracy. It is not. Most people get jobs because of who they know. Whole industries are dominated by nepotism (eg Hollywood). A sign of the rising waters is that having a wealthy backer or social connections is the only way to advance. This comes up even with becoming a doctor. Having a parent who is a doctor massively increases your chances of getting into med school, getting a good residency (particularly in a competitive specialty), etc. You want a job in investment banking or on a trading desk? Compare your chances as a nobody vs if your father is on a trading desk.
But what happens when, with increasing automation, there aren't enough jobs for everybody? That's the fundamental question of AI (and automation in general). The two extremes for how this can go are:
1. A small group will become increasingly wealthy while large swathes of the population will be permanently unemployed or underemployed. This is where people end up living in shanty towns and slums. Wages are overall low because demand exceeds supply; or
2. Society as a whole enjoys the benefits of automation by having to work less. Basic needs are provided for. People get to live with dignity regardless of whether or not they win the job lottery.
Put another way: AI isn't a technological issue. It's an economic one.
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