alt Hacker NewsThe turbulent AI era is here
Comments
Gates was a close friend and blackmail victim of Epstein. I can't separate his business, technical and philanthropic accomplishments from that fact. Sure, he may have funded charitable campaigns to vaccinate against polio in Afghanistan. But, he was also getting rub-downs from underage children.
I'm going to make an anti-capitalist argument in order to make a pro-capitalist argument.
The anti-capitalist argument is that the wealthiest people in the world are not dramatically more intelligent than the average person. Bill Gates is obviously very intelligent and capable, but his IQ does not scale with his wealth. He built the right company at the right time, and Microsoft ended up sitting at the center of massive network effects. Relatively modest advantages in judgment, skill, and industriousness can end up producing enormous differences in wealth due to the compounding effects of success.
That's just how scalable markets work. So Gates's success, while evidence that he was very effective at building Microsoft, is not evidence that he is vastly more knowledgeable than everybody else about economics or the future of technology.
And the same applies to Bezos, Musk, and every other extremely successful founder.
Their arguments should be judged on their merits and not treated as infallible insights from people with superhuman intelligence.
Now, that is not to say that I want their wealth to be capped or politically reallocated. The case for private property depends on the argument that decentralized ownership and investment and capital risking is better than politicians allocating a pool of resources to gain clout or win over popular opinion. A wealth cap or high taxes on the wealthy would transfer control over resources from private owners to political institutions. So what we would be doing is replacing imperfect private allocation with imperfect public allocation, where the people allocating the capital have limited information, political incentives, and the ability to impose costs on others without their consent. So I reject blind deference to billionaires, but I do not want politicians to control billionaires' capital.
Anyway, let me address Gates's argument about AI:
Gates argues that AI will disrupt the economy faster than previous technologies, and therefore stronger government coordination is needed to address the rapidity of the speed of that transition, to cushion people against the speed of that transition. But what his analysis underweights is how quickly AI can help people adapt to the very transformation that AI brings about.
For example, a worker taking on a new position now has access to a tutor and an analyst and a business advisor all wrapped up in one, who can provide world-class assistance 24/7 at the cost of a few cents in electricity. And someone who wants to start a business can employ dozens of AI agents at a cost of a few hundred dollars to test out the idea and build out a prototype within a few days. So what this means is that we cannot hold the human adaptive capacity constant while trying to determine the impact of AI's disruptive capacity.
The second problem with Gates's argument is that he only counts the income that people might lose when AI replaces jobs, but he doesn't count the fall in prices that the same AI will bring about. The fall in prices is effectively an increase in purchasing power. That increase in purchasing power, in economic terms, means an increase in real wages, and that's exactly why wages increased twentyfold between 1826 and 2026. Automation brought about abundance, which reduced prices and thereby increased purchasing power, i.e. increased real wages. If you look at tokens right now, their prices are going down exponentially. They've gone down about a thousandfold over the last four years, while the capability of the tokens themselves has increased. So AI is following exactly the same price trends as every other previous computer technology.
If AI becomes a major input into medicine and education and administration and logistics, that means that all these goods and services become radically cheaper, which means that paychecks can buy a lot more of them. So that's, I think, a huge hole in his analysis. It's also, I think, very simplistic to assume that the future will be based on labor. It could very well be one where the average person becomes a business owner and employs a fleet of hundreds or thousands of AI agents to work for them. That's exactly what the price trends in tokens would suggest.
The broader problem I see with his model is that it assumes disaster from a technology that creates abundance. This seems to me to be fundamentally misguided about the essential dynamics of what's actually happening.
Finally, if AI is ever capable of doing every single thing that a human can do, AI would possess very dangerous traits. And why I say that is because humans themselves are very dangerous. If we're going to create a product, we're not going to create a product that has human-like traits. But it is some of those very traits that make humans dangerous that also make them useful in the economy. We tolerate humans having these dangerous properties because that's what we were born into, and we accept that and we legally protect humans despite the fact that they're dangerous. But nobody, no company, no country will tolerate people creating AI that is dangerous. An autonomous, self-motivated and potentially rebellious digital intelligence is not only not a useful business tool, it's also not a tolerable risk. And if that is ever created, we will have much bigger things to worry about than unemployment and no solution to the problems that this would create would be found in greater taxation.
And as long as that is not created, then there will be abilities or skills that humans uniquely possess that will become the limiting factor in the economy. In other words, all other processes will scale exponentially through mass production of GPUs until all the available scarce human skills are employed in managing those GPUs. That follows the basic pattern that has preceded us over the last 200 years, and there's no reason to assume that pattern will not hold.
Does anyone really believe that Bill Gates would propose any kind of truly altruistic plan, that is to say, would he ever support any AI regulation plan that actually hurts his bottom line at the end of the day? I don't think that AI-adjacent CEOs are really the most trustworthy people on this topic.
Definitely curious to get the perspective on this topic from some of Jeffrey Epstein's other friends as well.
I have been noodling around this for a day or two now and I worry the hype train is clouding everyone’s thoughts (I’m looking at you Dwarkesh)
So we are on a weird combination of science (look Language can be modelled, how does that relate to real world concepts, can you even understand the word love without experiencing emotions) and ultra-capitalism (you get that part)
So my first thought is you cannot monetise AGI
I honestly don’t know where that line is, and different humans will draw it in different places but if (it’s a big if) we do achieve AGI by throwing compute at a pile of language (and seriously that is wrong way round for evolution?) if we do get a model everyone just recognised as alive then, just who in society is going to say “yeah slavery that’s the right approach - those companies definitely should be allowed to keep a data centre of Einsteins, not pay them, and replace call centres for zero cost.”
The goal of the journey just is not monetiseable. If we do create alien intelligence we really want to treat it like they landed in a spaceship.
Plus you know there is bound to be a Hollywood film in productions already about an evil billionaire who creates an AI and tries to lock it away and make it do his bidding. It ends badly.
But even putting AGI aside and just focusing on a word guessing machine that can check its own guesses over and over, you know not an actual intelligent thing but something that is a tool.
Just how much of the amazing cost savings and job replacements from LLMs are really just low hanging fruit available to POS (Plain Old Software). Very very few companies are what Inwoukd call software literate - run through and through with programmatically accessible components at every level and people with skills to use them. The old SOA / API based company is first rung on that ladder.
But the point is, almost every time we are going to replace some jobs it’s “we never digitised this before but now we can just chuck compute at it.” You know what’s cheaper than chuckingncompute at it - doing the hard graft of getting your software and data aligned and then fixing your processes. Then it can run like the scripts that intern wrote last year but no one listened. Yes CV is used in killchains in Ukraine - but the whole killchain is not AI - it’s hard graft building a process just like any business. With AI used as small Part of a larger ecosystem.
Oh and yeah the AI labs and the chip vendors - they are not keeping the value created by firing paralegals. Data centres with almost identical models in them just become utilities.
And did I say value created ? So far all the big value is cost reduction - you know the refuge of the business consultant with no ideas.
I still am waiting for the big new thing - the company that could not exist otherwise. All I hear is cost reduction and yeah that matters at scale, but if it’s all I hear I begin to suspect it’s all anyone can think of.
And moving value around does not count as value creation - Amazon has done amazing things, but if e-commerce did not exist, would humans in America have never bought crap from China ? Or has amazon just mostly taken the growth of the past 30 years away from Walmart ?
And talking of that, Amazon has massively reduced warehousing costs - using POS, and these things called robots. If I had to bet it would be the AI revolution (maths proofs apart) is a robot revolution. And that has the usual scaling laws of design, manufacture, deployment and so on.
Maybe the reason I am Not seeing a AI killer app, is that the iPhone does not have arms.
Anyway needed to get that off my chest :-)
[flagged]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
I honestly can't stand reading a single line more of Bill Gates pontificating, I really can't.
[flagged]
[flagged]
Lemme in now, Lemme in now, Bill Gates, Donald Trump Lemme in now we f-ckin lesbian twins now
Can Bill Gates even code anymore? I bet not.
Bro is a useless sex offender, who cares what he thinks about anything.
The weirdest part is HN hiding the comments lmao
Morpheus; You think that's a genuinely concerned billionaire you are listening to?
More fearmongering overhyping the technology. The investment bubble MUST continue!
Bill vibe-coded this article text.
“We need a plan to ensure that the good outweighs the bad.”
How apt… for Bill Gates to state this.
> With its ability to synthesize knowledge from every scientific field, AI can accelerate innovation in the world’s toughest technical challenges: providing reliable clean energy for everyone, combating climate change, growing enough food, eradicating diseases, and more
I really think this is overstated. So far everything is pointing towards AI accelerating climate change. Especially if we'll automate everything with physical robots.
I'm kind of surprised, but not surprised, by Gates' comments here. Until very recently, apparently, he was a pretty strong techno optimist, now toeing the line of a doomer. The verbiage is substantially in line with the fear-based marketing out of anthropic. I wonder what motive is underneath all of this. Trying to influence policy? But he has so many resources, it transcends policy.
Sigh. Another billionaire whose wealth is being mistaken for authority by the common folk. Worse still, an actual oracle.
I see an old (and successful) pirate king trying to wear yet another hat today.