TheAIBaitAndSwitch

This is good. Watch it, then read my response below

What Sam Altman wants is very sensible. And a great thing.

HOWEVER, we all know that capitalism will fuck it up. Corporations will, in the name of "maximizing value" for their shareholders, do everything in their (considerable, AI enhanced) power to simultaneously take the jobs, suck as much wealth from the wider population as possible, and then sabotage attempts to create land value taxes and universal basic income or any other mechanism that redistributes the value that's captured by the AI, back to the general population. They'll do this by sponsoring "libertarian" think-tanks and politicians who will fight tooth and nail to stop it happening.

Read Cory Doctorow's discussion of "enshittification" of platforms. All the promises and ideals of the early web were betrayed by the web 2.0 giants. We're seeing enshittification going on every day : the platform starts by sharing value with its users, to get them hooked on and locked into the product. Then takes it away and gives it to the paying customers (advertisers on Facebook, secondary sellers on Amazon etc.) Then, once they are also dependent, the platform turns on them too and starts trying to capture every cent of value that was generated, purely for its shareholders and executives. The platform becomes shit for everyone else, but by then all alternative structures and commons have been destroyed and it's the only game in town. (Yanis Varoufakis's "TechnoFeudalism" is another version of this)

So, left up to capitalism, platforms like OpenAI will generate huge value and share it widely with users and corporations. Right up to the point where individual employees are incapable of doing their job without the help of AI, and other businesses are incapable of functioning competitively without using AI. And then the platforms are going to pull the rug and claw back all the value the AI generates for their executives and shareholders. Leaving the rest of the economy devastated. It's no good if all the cool stuff you want to buy is now 100 times cheaper, if your income has also collapsed 100-fold.

So Sam Altman can tell happy stories about how the extra value generated from all this AI MUST go back to everybody. But if he's building the platforms that capture the value from everyone else BEFORE also building the infrastructure to redistribute it back, he's just setting us up for another bait and switch, because the AIs will capture the value for the oligarchs but the LVT and UBI will never materialize.

Look I think Altman is a good guy. And he believes what he's saying. But if he's serious, he shouldn't be building the platforms to suck the wealth from everyone else UNTIL he sees the political moves towards LVT and UBI. If he's serious he should be talking to, and listening to, people like Doctorow about how platforms go bad. And both advocating the kinds of regulation Doctorow suggests to keep platforms honest. He should be restructuring OpenAI to make the bait and switch impossible.