> When they say "We don't want to increase inequality" and the response is "We don't believe you". Where do you go from there?

The response is "we don't believe you" because their actions show that they are hellbent on accelerating inequality using AI and they have offered absolutely no concrete plan or halfway convincing explanation of how, if their own predictions of AI's future capabilities are correct, we're supposed to go from here and now to a future that isn't extremely dark for the vast majority of humans on Earth (to the extent that said humans continue to exist).

The work they have done in this direction so far is not serious, so it's not taken seriously. They obviously care much more about enriching themselves than slowing or reversing current trends.

If they want to be taken seriously, maybe they should start acting like they're serious about anything besides their own wealth and power. And I do mean acting---they need to show us through their actions that they are serious.

We can look at their actions, in particular their efforts to influence public policy.

The billionaires could start to earn trust by lobbying for laws and programs that help the poor and displaced. Put money in to retraining programs to help people who lose their jobs. So far they seem to be doing the opposite, CEOs are publicly declaring ‘fuck you, got mine’ and leaving it at that.

>How can you hope for anything better if you consider it an us versus them situation?

Because it IS an us vs them situation.

They're awfully good at turning it into an us vs us situation whether it's blaming our parents' (boomers), blaming immigrants, blaming muslims or (their favorite), blaming the unstoppable forward march of technological progress (e.g. AI).

The media organizations they own are constantly telling these stories because it protects them.

>The Government could legislate that any increase in profits that are attributable to the use of AI are taxed

Nothing a billionaire loves more than misdirection and a good scapegoat. This is why Bill Gates made the exact suggestion you just did.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-wants-tax-robots-2...

When THEY are the problem they love a bit of misdirection, especially when the "problem" is a genie that cant be put back in its bottle.

They're terrified that we might latch on to the solutions that actually work (i.e. tax them to within an inch of their life) and drive a populist politician to power which might actually enact them.

Sounds promising honestly. One of the scariest parts of the big AI labs is all of the exclusive training data they get through their UIs. (It’s unclear whether distillation is a feasible way to close the gap).

If there were another party involved, that would (hopefully) diversify power that (potentially) comes with those streams of data.

It’s a bit ironic that the USA has mostly abandoned interoperability after being one of the pioneers with the American manufacturing method. [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_system_of_manufacturi...

This is interesting to see since on another HN post everyone is bemoaning how expensive it’s getting to use frontier models because Anthropic is massively throttling Pro Max Claude plans. That’s certainly not going to become more accessible to us normal folk through taxation.

This might be a solution if there wasn’t staggering wealth inequality prior to AI.

This is only true if productivity gains tied to general well being, but instead it's being concentrated in the hands of a few.

No.

Because success is individual, inequality is statistical.

It ia true that AI gives ordinary people a lot more chance to be successful.

But do not forget that success depends on lots of factors that are not in one’s control: knowing the right people, time being right for what you are doing, and lots of others. So while the mechanics of success is a lot different to lottery, it does not work much differently: 1 in 1M attempts are successful.

Yes, AI gives everyone more lottery tickets, but it gives rich people a lot more tickets.

And is controlled by a handful of mega corporations? How is that equitable?

> AI is actually a mass decrease in inequality, as much as the Gutenberg printing press was. It takes something that used to be the foremost example of pure bourgeois and intellectual privilege - the culture contained within millions of books and other instances of human creativity[.]

I would rather claim that this is a proper description of shadow libraries [1].

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

Yup. This is why if you claim to espouse literally any form of egalitarian political belief while being upset about (open source) generative AI, I know you're a fraud/charlatan/intellectual bankrupt/ontologically evil.

Huggingface, Swartz et al have done more social/political good for this world than billions have.