This was interesting right up until "The fund pays every eligible American the same amount each year. "

I'm in Australia. I've contributed my share of dirt to the delta. Why do I not get a share of this?

I get that the frontier companies are (for the moment) US companies. But that's just corporate ownership, it's not what we're talking about. We're talking about compensating the people who wrote the training data for their contribution. That contribution came from all over the world, so the Corpus Fund needs to be paid all over the world.

Set it up in the UN, get the UN to provide the training data sets as a common good, and have the UN collect the money from all AI companies using the training data sets. And the UN should distribute the money in the most equitable manner globally (so most of it going to alleviate poverty, probably).

I'd happily trade my collected years of shitposts to help folks get out of poverty.

> This was interesting right up until "The fund pays every eligible American the same amount each year. "

There could be so many other ways to set this up. Enforce a higher tax on any business selling AI models that have capabilities greater than some threshold, and use it to fund development and infrastructure project like roads, hospitals, schools, etc. Or you could even do a negative income tax[1].

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

Why do you think a UN-hosted process would work? Has the UN done similarly intrusive things before and been effective at it? How do you account for Chinese frontier and open weights models, which are just months behind American models and subsidized by a sovereign state that does not share any of these premises about intellectual property?

A lot of these posts seem subtextually premised on the idea that it's possible to put the genie back into the bottle; that if frontier labs in America didn't sign on to this tolling scheme, our recourse would be to halt the progression of AI completely. But that option does not exist, unless we're going to fight a world war to create it.

As long as places like Taiwan are effectively blocked from being in the UN[0], I don't believe we should be adding more to their power and responsibilities than what they have now, au contraire!

If it was a truly world representation, this might be different. But if things like health are sacrificed (ie. no WHO access either), I don't think they really deserve the benefit of the doubt.

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

Author here. Thanks for reading!

I have additional essays coming out that will address this exact issue and other issues I know that people will raise.

I’m building the essays series around arguing for practical policy I believe can get implemented and am sequencing it as thoughtfully as I can. I just can’t fit every argument into every essay.

I agree UN sounds like a good organization to help distribute the wealth created by AI to the world. But this idea won't be considered by the current U.S. administration. In that case what other countries can do is probably to tax the AI companies at rates higher than regular companies.

Screw that. I'm not willing to send any more money to an organization as corrupt and incompetent at the UN.

> I'd happily trade my collected years of shitposts to help folks get out of poverty.

In other words, you'd happily do nothing to help folks get out of poverty?