alt Hacker NewsWhenever someone talks about regulation, I always have the same question: How do you enforce it? How do you keep companies from using the replaced talent as a seat warmer? Hire 1 or 2 accountants, give them a chair and a cubicle, and let AI do the rest of the work.
Legislating against using AI to replace employees could create an unevenly distributed basic income. The idea of limiting AI to socially beneficial efforts is appealing, but I keep coming back to Bell Labs and Xerox PARC. Cool stuff was developed when you gave smart people a playground. Maybe the question should be: How do we give AI a playground and see what it comes up with? Although that could set us up with a situation like in the story Dragon's Egg.
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I feel like the contra answer to “how do you enforce it” is like- imperfectly but we can do stuff.
Like we can just do stuff. We can fine companies, take away licenses. We are capable!
But I also think - I’m not trying to be too negative here because certainly we should be investing in scientists and other discoveries, but early tech - xerox park, googles 20 percent time. They were playing in an extremely immature space.
You could throw 20 ideas at a wall and create a billion dollar business.
We should do what you’re saying but we should also build institutions and maybe also limit the extent to which we’re building Elysium. If we can build AI models that rival human intelligence we can create laws to protect its dignity.
It's all about wanting to preserve the status quo, complete with all the suffering and strife, because change is scary and uncomfortable.
Add in the sincere American belief that everyone else is beneath them, and you get the version where they believe even developing countries must accept kneecaping their development so American corporatism doesn't collapse.
Just a reality check. They can absolutely do it.
Altman or Dario will donate some money to Trump, get cozy with the Department of War and make up a bullshit excuse why Open Source needs to be eliminated.
All access to this technology will be gatekept by a bunch of nasty people who want to eliminate your job as a knowledge worker and put everything behind a subscription.
> How do you keep companies from using the replaced talent as a seat warmer? Hire 1 or 2 accountants, give them a chair and a cubicle, and let AI do the rest of the work.
I don’t think the proponents of these ideas care about who does the work. They see it as protection for specific jobs. Basically a jobs program with the costs forced on to large corporations.
As you said, it becomes a great gift to the few people lucky enough (or more usually, with enough nepotistic connections) to get those easy street jobs. It would not help everyone else in the economy.
It would also accelerate moving jobs overseas. Any company that regulates productivity that far downward would be crazy to continue doing automatable work in that country. It just gets moved to foreign offices where they can use AI. There are regulatory maximalists who say we’ll just regulate that, too, but then the whole company relocates to another country. Then some want to try to regulate that, and so on ad infinitum but it’s all layers of holding back your domestic companies so their international competitors can eat their lunch.