I've been pondering this, and have been moving between cynicism and (cautious) optimism.

I think there will be more action on this than climate change, only because the AI impact will have a more immediate, direct impact on politicians.

One thing I can't get my head around is the promise that AI will make everyone better off. If AI is taking peoples jobs, that will lead to more people unemployed, which will lead to more people not being able to purchase goods that ultimately benefit the rich who have large amounts of influence on politicians.

Once this impact starts to hurt the people that has influence, we will start to see some action.

Climate change is something that won't impact many of today's leaders for too long, so the can is constantly kicked down the road.

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fragmede 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Why would that impact hurt the people that have influence? In the K shaped economy, the people with influence are on the top side going up. They're not losing their job, and even if they did, they're independently wealthy and can live off of interest on their investment accounts. Much like when all the money went to Google and Facebook in the previous economic shift, if the money all goes to OpenAI and Anthropic, the question is what will they spend their money on? Something to do with yachts is probably a good business to get into, but other than that, how are they going to spend their money? ChatGPT-12 comes out and it's as competent as a $60,000/yr employee, without the human messiness and companies fire all their human employees and give OpenAI $60,000/yr instead. What's OpenAI going to do with that money? It's not just going to disappear into the ether. Their millionaire employees will invest that money somewhere, it isn't going anywhere. Even if it's just sitting in a Chase investment account in an index fund, it's there on Chase's books and Chase can loan out money to people to do things.

	▲	ebbi 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Because you're assuming the people on the top have liquid assets needed to sustain themselves. They would need the economy to be operating and funds flowing into their accounts via their businesses/holdings. And these investments you talk about - they'll just be even more concentration of wealth than what we see today, especially with these more advanced AI systems and robots, not needing to hire as many people for the same output. Why would Chase loan out money to someone that doesn't have a job, because the above AI systems/robots are now doing those jobs for the capitalists?