cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/12399007
By the way, in order for AI to indeed create wealth and "abundance", it needs to increase productivity - which pretty much means it needs to replace some jobs.
That's one of the contradictions in today's public discourse on AI: we simultaneously scaremonger around it destroying jobs and hope it creates unprecedented abundance, without acknowledging that the latter requires the former.
The thing people should be more scared by, IMHO, is if AI does NOT increase productivity because it'd mean the size of the cake stays the same, only distributed differently.
That's, in a way, the core of the battle between closed source and open source: the Anthropics and OpenAIs of this world want to appropriate, thanks to AI, a big share of the global wealth cake, while open source ensures the AI cake slice gets shared rather than captured.
You want open source to prevail even if the cake overall gets bigger but you REALLY want it if the cake stays the same size, because then it's a zero sum game - purely a question of who takes from whom.
That would be the real AI dystopia: AI not increasing productivity and closed source winning. In that scenario, AI becomes nothing more than a wealth transfer mechanism to major AI firms.
It's also, unfortunately, probably the most likely scenario.
First of all, there is a precedent: it's exactly what happened with the internet. Contrary to popular belief, the internet did not increase productivity: Total Factor Productivity growth fell from 1.4% (1780-1829) to 0.9% (1830-1854) (congress.gov/crs-product/R48…). So: peak internet penetration coincided with the worst productivity performance on record.
In effect, what that means is what we all witnessed: the so-called FAANG captured a massive share of the economy's value without actually expanding it. They became trillion-dollar companies not by making the pie bigger, but by redirecting where the money flows - from Main Street retail to Amazon, from local advertising to Google and Facebook, from the entertainment industry to Netflix.
It's also what initial data on AI's impact on jobs suggests: so far the displacement isn't showing up anywhere. Anthropic's own economists (anthropic.com/research/labor…), an NBER study of 25,000 Danish workers (nber.org/papers/w33777), the Stanford AI Index (hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/20…) - all three reach the same conclusion: no aggregate job losses. Which, if you follow the logic above, is exactly the bad news.
And it's of course what AI frontier labs keep lobbying the US government for: they want to deploy lawfare against Chinese open source precisely because they understand better than anyone that their trillion-dollar valuations depend not on AI growing the economy, but on establishing a toll booth position to extract rent from it.
In fact it's a vicious circle: the more successful closed source labs are at extracting rent, the more the economy's AI gains go to them rather than to the businesses that could use AI to actually produce more. Rent-seeking and productivity growth actively work against each other.
So, yes, paradoxically the best-case scenario is the one the media scaremonger against: AI replacing jobs and Chinese open source prevailing. Because the first means the cake is actually growing, and the second means no one gets to hoard it.
Source: https://xcancel.com/RnaudBertrand/status/2084116343012626942#m