I feel like their are (at least) three main critiques of AI, and I wish we could debate them separately, because I think they each have different resolutions.

The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on the works of society. The easiest way would be a straight tax on AI usage, and using that tax to pay a universal basic income. There are obviously a ton of variations on this idea, but I think the general premise of sharing the gains with everyone is sound. I don’t think many would complain if they lost their job but kept their income.

The other two critiques are trickier. The first is the environmental impact of AI, and the response is difficult. Doing work to make it more efficient, and continuing to develop cleaner energy sources is paramount. Taxing and efficiency requirements might be a start. We have the technology to produce energy in sustainable ways, but it is expensive. It has to be non-negotiable if massive energy usage for AI is to continue.

The last is the REAL conversation, and I don’t know the answer. How do we handle AI doing creative work? How do we treat AI creative work? How much creative work do we feel comfortable handing over to AI?

I guess there is another issue, related to the last one, which is how do we deal with the ability to use AI to mislead and commit fraud at scale. How do we deal with not being able to trust what actually said/done by a human and what is AI pretending to be human? How do we avoid and mitigate the ability for AI to generate a massive amount of custom content that is used to mislead and defraud people? So much of our current mitigation strategy relies on the assumption that it takes a lot of effort and time to do certain things that can now be done instantly thousands of times?

>The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on the works of society.

This was the argument about robots. It did not pan out. No taxes materialized. Robots and Automated Machines have not shared productivity. In fact, things like self-checkout has spread the labor load to the customer, instead of the company.

>We have the technology to produce energy in sustainable ways, but it is expensive

AI Datacenters should be completely sustainably self-powered. Full stop. We did not spend decades bringing down the cost of power only to have it all hoovered up by robber barons who "need" it to be the first immortal AI God. We did not install water treatment plants to bring down our water usage rates just to feed the machine spirit.

>How do we treat AI creative work? How much creative work do we feel comfortable handing over to AI?

Someone said it as a joke, but I want AI to be doing my dishes and sorting my laundry while I write books and compose music. I don't want AI writing books and composing music so I have more time to do my dishes and sort my laundry.

If you lost your $60,000 a year job due to this, do you really believe a basic income funded by it will make up that loss? It won't. Basic income in the US is usually proposed at $12k per year, which would add another $3 trillion to the budget. Do you think you can even get that just taxing these companies? I don't.

People who bring up basic income need to get serious about the numbers involved because I never see it. It's not a realistic solution.

> How do we handle AI doing creative work? How do we treat AI creative work? How much creative work do we feel comfortable handing over to AI?

Just as a good for thought, looking back into history, during the late 1920s, mass production had a critical impact on Art Deco [1]. Artists were divided on the question if mass-produced art (using new industrial methods) could have a quality similar to hand-crafted art. It is clear that different people will have different opinion on the subject.

The technology is not there yet, but one example of mass production from AI would be book adaptation into movies. I'm sure that there are many other examples hard to predict that might: empower people, degrade art quality, improve art quality, divide people or maybe gather people.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Deco#Late_Art_Deco

There is also a likeability problem. Altman and, shockingly, to a lesser degree, Musk have terrible brands. When folks see those people at the top of these companies, folks who have been publicly saying they're going to cause massive job losses and cause human extinction or whatnot, they're going to hate the companies irrespective of the actual risk of job losses or environmental impacts.

The fourth aspect to discuss is how do we want to restrict the influence of AI companies on politics? Will we allow the CEOs to implement Thiel's vision of a world run as a company with CEOs at the top via massive monetary influence on political decision making, effectively abolishing democracy? If they really manage to replace 50% of the workforce with AI, their influence over everything from regulation to elections to social security networks as well as foreign policy will be enormous.

> The easiest way would be a straight tax on AI usage, and using that tax to pay a universal basic income

Every call for UBI should be qualified with two estimates:

1) How much money you think UBI will pay out

2) How much money you think the tax will generate

Creating a UBI program with AI taxes sounds like a clean solution to something until you do any math.

If we estimate today’s AI revenues across all the big providers at $100B annually (a little high) and divide by the population of the US, I get around $24 per month per person.

So a 100% tax on AI plans would allow us to give UBI of about 80 cents per day.

Even 10X the revenues wouldn’t make bring that to parity with UBI expectations. A 100% tax would also be an incredible gift to foreign AI companies that could offer similar services for half the price to everyone else in the world.

I think you're missing one of the major reasons people are against "AI": the jerks at the top. When obviously nefarious people are lining their pockets and not bothering to even pretend to care about the people around them, it's no surprise they're hated.

You forgot the part where they stole literally everyone’s copyrighted works and trained on it and have not been sanctioned at all for it.

I don't think the last two critiques are good critiques at all. The environmental impact is a function of our energy sources not energy uses. Complaining about energy and water when we have infinite energy beamed down to us surrounded by a planet that is 70% water seems silly.

And AI "Ikea-fies" art and creativity. It doesn't get rid of it. Of course you can get a generic table from IKEA, but for a real unique piece, you need to go to a real artist. Always.

The real main critique is for AI jobs that are a one-to-one replacement, your taxi driver, your dock worker etc. I don't think UBI is a viable solution (I used to) but nothing replaces the community and status that a real job gives you. This is going to be a tough one.

> The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with.

In the same way that it was straightforward to deal with job loss from the industrial revolution, or when the US shipped away all its manufacturing capability?

The main critique of AI is that it's a dumb hallucinating parrot. It can't do genuine human quality work at all, outside of extremely narrow domains like basic translation and copyediting. Even for Q&A, while it can be useful by quickly accessing a huge storehouse of learned knowledge, the vulnerability to hallucinations means that human expert verification will always be required.

Universal basic income is not an adequate replacement for a good career. Universal unconditional prosperity might be one, but it's not clear whether AI can really do that.

> The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on the works of society. The easiest way would be a straight tax on AI usage, and using that tax to pay a universal basic income.

How much UBI you want from this AI tax ?

I don’t think they’d give me what I want

> Doing work to make it more efficient

Making it more efficient will probably >>increase<< the total energy devoted to AI, not reduce it. See Jevon's Paradox.

I think you may be going too far, as in your critiques assume the tech is further along than it actually is. There are three fundamental problems for mass AI adoption/AGI:

1. Lack of memory/continuity

2. Lack of agency

3. Lack of self-awareness

Based on my understanding of the basic 'loop' of an LLM, solutions for these may be decades off or not possible. Which leads me to the fourth problem:

4. Lack of compute

To get anywhere near AGI we need massive context windows. The whole thing is a mess.

The concern I hear the most (which I don't think is common among the general public) is the existential risk one (that an AI may be created that drastically exceeds human intelligence, and that it may accidentally be incentivized to take actions that destroy most or all of human civilization).

> The easiest way would be a straight tax on AI usage, and using that tax to pay a universal basic income

Problem for jobs is that there are 200 countries and all the earnings will go to a few. Universal basic income for everyone? Or just the US?

Who gets to keep their house locations in a new fair world? The person whose parents bought in the right place 50 years ago? Who pays the money these models earn, if nobody clicks ads or does a job? What is income for if we don’t work and can just ask the AI for everything we want?

What happens when the super smart AI comes up with “better” (more fair, consistent, etc) answers than you think you have to questions like the above? What if they end up socialist? Do we force it (and invite risk it escapes and fights us for the greater good) or give in to the presumably more thorough reasoning?

Needing less offices, less people driving to those offices, less A/C and heating for those offices and less resources building those offices could offset the energy usage of AI.

> The easiest way would be a straight tax on AI usage, and using that tax to pay a universal basic income. There are obviously a ton of variations on this idea, but I think the general premise of sharing the gains with everyone is sound. I don’t think many would complain if they lost their job but kept their income.

Nice, but completely unrealistic. The whole reason why AI is/will be adopted by companies like wildfire is to cut costs and increase profits. If they have to pay taxes equivalent to what they were paying in labor (or anywhere close to that), then AI is for nothing. Business will never agree to it. So this will never happen unless there is some sort of social revolution that completely remakes the system.

Your first critique has a massive hole in it, because it assumes that every person whose job is replaced by "AI" is actually going to be done as well by the "AI" as it was by the human.

To the extent that it's even true that this is going to happen, that is laughably false.

Yes; LLMs can answer some questions well (but unreliably) and with the right setups, can be rigged to perform some tasks well (but unreliably).

There is no way they are ready to take over a single full-time job. If any employer tried, the number of errors in the performance of that job would jump by a huge amount, because LLMs are not reliable and cannot be made so.

I understand your points, but I think what scares people is that the solutions you propose are disregarded by our politicians. At least in the US, both politicians and the large donors funding them seem to be more and more allergic to anything resembling an universal basic income, and they do their best to scare people away with fearmongering about “communism”. The US is also doing a hard U-turn away from environmental protection and is trying to frame environmental conservation as radical and harmful. Other countries might be doing better on these fronts, but it’s definitely not a good sign that the US doesn’t seem to be on board with your first two solutions.

In the more immediate run, I think the concern is that AI will reduce the ability of workers to collectively bargain and thereby grant the wealthy oligarchs even more control over their workers’ lives.

There is another critique that is not specific to AI but I think is bigger than all of these: that a relatively small number of large companies, and the small number of very wealthy people who control those companies, have an outsize influence on many aspects of society. AI is the poster child for this right now, but tech companies in general are also reviled, and more generally all kinds of companies (media, fossil fuels, etc.) are targets of opprobrium.

From this perspective, the main irritation of AI is that it is the biggest, most intrusive case of "some rich guy is messing with my life". This is driven largely from the willingness of a small number of rich people to lose large amounts of money shoving AI down everyone's throats in the hope that that will eventually lead to them recouping those losses.

I believe a significant amount of AI criticism is really about this, and that means we need to resolve the overall issues of wealth inequality and economic skewing. People would be much less angry about AI if its development and ownership were more diffuse, and if the patterns of its use were more directly connected to its current observable abilities, rather than based on what some group of insiders thinks about how much its stocks may go up in the future.

UBI drives inflation. All other effects follow from that.

USA will never have UBI, period. So any idea that includes any mention of is an absolute non-starter. Outside of the USA, perhaps, but for us that is never happening.

In my opinion the main, and really only, issue: AI is a necessity. Everything from war (including defense departments), to jobs, to rental advertisements, to food packaging, to restaurant reviews, to news, to education, to programming, to architecture, to politics ... will have to change due to AI. Not changing them is not really an option. Everything needs to be figured out here.

A lot of this will both cost money AND require people to change their jobs, their investments, their equipment, ... And they hate it.

Everyone, including governments will have to adapt.

And to add insult to injury, everything comes from the US and it's really expensive.

> How do we treat AI creative work?

We erase it and call out the ghouls “creating” that shit, simple. They deserve being called out for creating shit and poisoning our minds.

No, you're backwards. The first point is definitely the most important and most tricky.

UBI is a dangerous distraction in this context. It's a mammoth cost to achieve an impoverished quality of life. It may be worth implementing in general, but it absolutely must stay out of the conversation about AI. It's like if the ruling class started announcing that they would like to imprison us all, and your "discussion" about the problem revolved around how we can make our future jail cells feel as nice as possible.

We are allowed to regulate businesses. We simply don't.

> The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on the works of society.

This is straightforward? This is a colossal task. Monumental. Billionaires own it. That’s the political status quo. You could build something to counter those centers of power. But from what base?

Well-paid software developers have scoffed at or been ignorant of worker organizing for, maybe forever? But I have good paycheck and equity... Now what?

> mislead and commit fraud at scale

This is the "safety" messaging that OpenAI and Anthropic keep harping on and on, and on about, while whistling a merry tune as they turn around and sell AI to the US military and worse, to the tune of $billions/year already.

The "and worse" needs elaboration, because fundamentally the single biggest cash cow for AI vendors will be (and maybe already is) implementing a dystopian future where everything we say, type, or do will not just be recorded but also: read, analysed, and cross-correlated by unfeeling heartless machines tasked with keeping us in line.

I'm not being paranoid, President Biden said as much, but only in reference to China. If you think only China has motivation to use AI to keep a lid on dissent, I have a bridge to sell you. And if you think the Land Of The Free(tm) will never abuse AI in this manner, well... I have some bad news. You may want to sit down.

Here in Australia, the cyberpunk dystopia is already starting to be rolled out. A customer of ours asked their IT team to hook up a variety of HR-related information sources to their new AI system tasked with making recommendations for hiring, promotion, and demotion.

Welcome to 1984, citizen.

There are a few other issues.

Like copyright. All modern LLMs are built on troves of copyrighted material that was used in their training. AI companies are claiming this is fair use, while pretty much all of the copyright holders would strongly disagree. This is going to get litigated for years, but regardless of what various legal systems decide, morally, people can be against this.

And people are already sick and tired of AI-generated content being used to replace human made content, be it on Spotify or TikTok. This is part "AI replacing humans", part "I'm being scammed by lower quality content".

> The easiest way would be a straight tax on AI usage, and using that tax to pay a universal basic income.

The very same CEOs are extremely against social support, any taxes for themselves and any govermental agencies that help or protect people.

How is can this be possibly easiest in the world of Thiel, Musk, Trump, Vance, Palantier and overtone window moving toward economically conservative for years.

Picasso famously said "Computers are useless, they can only give you answers."

You can't put things back in the bag. Perhaps the true underlying social problems are:

1. There's too many humans and not enough jobs.

2. The capitalist system only rewards profit seeking and cost externalization.

3. Our democratic representation myth is dead and buried.

4. Even in the developed world, middle-class security is gone.

So here's my question: given the current global system has failed and is clearly in its death throes, as a pan-national species how can we transition to a less mono-focal economic rationalism driven means of governance and self-organization without turning in to an autocracy or reinforcing negative nationalist bloc-level thinking that will tie us in to the same old human-thump-human stone age ape-ism and environmental cost externalization?

Perhaps AI can help in areas like improved education, improved media, proposals for improved government process or process transition for enhanced efficiency. Enforce transparency and accountability in the halls of power by reducing human process and corruption. Public auditable decision making and public auditable oversight. It's at least potential grounds for partial optimism. The best I can summon under present conditions. Of course, we want to avoid a dystopian global AI autocracy, the technocratic basis for which we have already well established, but if you view the present system as a dystopian human autocracy with the same technocratic basis (an increasingly rational perspective given recent events), then it starts to look more rosy.

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> The easiest way would be a straight tax on AI usage, and using that tax to pay a universal basic income.

If the Epstein class wouldn't go for something like this in a world where they needed workers to produce, the idea that they will when we are surplus to requirement is inconceivable.

I think you left out the part about AI being a plagiarism machine.