> once they wake up and realize that it's 5% of GDP because of the anticipation that so many voters will be thrown out of work

But it's not. The only layer anyone has a handle on is consumers and companies paying AI ridiculous sums for AI. Some of those users are probably justifying it with labour replacement. But a lot may not be. So far, we haven't seen the employment effect outside recent college graduates at enterprise companies.

> as implemented in the United States it's a malignant tumor, a theft of labor by capital, and it must be (minimally) adddressed with confiscatory taxes applied to all those involved with it's creation and operation

It's also a godsend of economic growth. Growth other countries who are trying to balance their books would kill for. Without AI, we'd be in a failure state. Maybe we are, if this is all a bubble. But as it stands, there is paper wealth that can and has–limitedly–been taxed. That gives everyone options.

> If a single AI billionaire exists in the year 2030, then the US is a failed state

This is silly and projecting a narrow view of the world onto a larger voting population. Voters don't care so much that there are billionaires as that living standards haven't kept up with the rate at which they're being minted. Double tax brackets, add more on top, raise the minimum wage, raise Social Security taxes and benefits, expand Medicare, beef up antitrust, establish a progressive property tax on wealth that starts at 1,000x the median American's wage (about $65mm) and billionaires are fine.

> It's also a godsend of economic growth. Growth other countries who are trying to balance their books would kill for. Without AI, we'd be in a failure state.

Sorry, what? You're claiming that which countries exactly are failed states because of a lack of AI? And that the US would have failed, what, in the past four years if ChatGPT hadn't released or something? That's an absolutely insane thing to claim, but I have no clue how to else to interpret what you're saying.

> consumers and companies paying AI ridiculous sums for AI.

VCs are paying ridiculous sums for AI. Consumers are not - we get tokens subsidised by VCs.

> if this is all a bubble

Interesting to see that revenue growth for both Anthropic and OpenAI has levelled off recently. Once this fact percolates through to the VCs, it's going to cause problems. All those valuations are based on projections of vastly greater revenue than they're getting now (and, ofc, achieving AGI and "winning" everything immediately that happens). This is looking less and less likely - the current batch of AIs are very, very, useful tools, but as we learn how to use them commercially they're not generating those limitless revenues that were anticipated.

This tech, like all the rest, will go through the Gartner Hype Cycle, and that includes the Trough of Despair where it all looks shit and the bubble pops. I think we're approaching that rapidly.

AI is creating a huge portion of it's value through labor replacement.

Right now it's replacing "recent college graduates", which makes sense, because they're the least differentiated white collar workers. However it's advancing quickly, and it will (quite obviously) eat more and more white collar jobs.

> It's also a godsend of economic growth.

Fuck no. There is unprecedented Capex that is propping up the economy, as companies are rushing to create capacity that they intend to use to destroy jobs. So yes, those datacenter buildouts and chip purchases and power infrastructure buildouts are creating economic activity... all with the hope that someday companies will be able to fire a huge percentage of workers.

You wrote it as though the gains were from productivity, which they really aren't... but even if they were (and that is likely to happen at some point), it would only be beneficial to actual people if that also results in greater distributions to labor. But a technology like this disfavors labor, so we can anticipate aggregation toward capital, and a slower velocity of money overall.

> Voters don't care so much that there are billionaires as that living standards haven't kept up with the rate at which they're being minted.

I suspect that voters will, at some point, care quite deeply that a lot of awful people got INSANELY rich by destroying tens of millions of lives, and making the K shaped economy have a much smaller segment of winners

The policies you suggest could help... but we have an administration (all three branches) that oppose anything of the sort. They're much more likely to simply try to deploy AI to further oppress the people whose careers they destroyed, than to try to create soft-landings or fair outcomes.

The party most supportive of mass AI deployment is a party that despises the poor, and would happily simply lock them up. This... is not a good mix.

I hope that your optimism turns out to be warranted, but I think you're a fucking idiot, defending reckless bullshit that is executed as part of the biggest heist in modern history.

> So far, we haven't seen the employment effect outside recent college graduates at enterprise companies.

Ignoring the obvious “citation needed” and taking this as accurate, wiping out entry level jobs at massive employers is a serious problem with longterm effects we likely only understand a part of at best.

We gleefully moved manufacturing overseas for decades and finally realized the extent of the cons after it was too late. We clearly needed a more balanced approach. Something tells me we’re setting ourselves up for the same mistake.