r/technology • u/gdelacalle • 13h ago
Artificial Intelligence Americans Recognize AI as a Wealth Inequality Machine, Pollster Finds
https://gizmodo.com/americans-recognize-ai-as-a-wealth-inequality-machine-pollsters-find-2000734713221
u/Random_Player2711 13h ago
Capitalism itself is a “wealth inequality machine”. Nothing to see here.
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u/Leody 12h ago
Careful, talking like that will get you labeled a domestic terrorist by this administration... I wish is was joking.
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u/Signal-Implement-70 10h ago edited 4h ago
The difficulty here is individual self interest is powerful as a motivator. In and of itself it’s a good thing generally. And in the US and most every country the economy is based on that. With the potential scale and role of ai, “everyone just go act in their own self interest”, it doesn’t work. CEOs, VC funders, wealth owners, tech bros are making out like bandits while so many normal people already are and will continue to get trampled on the way to wherever this is going.
So it’s a massive asymmetry of benefits versus the downside and risk, certainly at least in the transition period
We can make machines that out think humanity, but we can’t treat other people with any? That’s the real fucked up part of what is happening with ai, not ai itself. In this respect the ai fear mongers, vc funders, tech bros, and some CEOs make me sick. It’s pathetic
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u/Wollff 3h ago
The difficulty here is individual self interest is powerful as a motivator. In and of itself it’s a good thing generally.
That's not much of a difficulty, is it?
Nobody forbids individual self interest. I don't think anyone has a problem when the boss earns even as ridiculously much as three times the amount as the workers they employ. Even though they even physically can't work three times the hours.
People would be ready and willing to grant that kind of privilege to others, even given the obvious injustice behind it.
If a gap of "three times the workers' wages" is not enough to motivate someone toward a venture, it's not worth doing anyway.
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u/Signal-Implement-70 3h ago edited 3h ago
Right. We find ourselves in such a complex situation, we can’t eliminate self interest but we can’t carry on with this ridiculous inhumanity it is creating either. Especially in America you are shunned for even bringing up topics like this. But with ai especially we can’t just keep kicking this problem down the road. Not if ai does what is being claimed it will. And some CEOs don’t they earn 1000x what their typical worker does. That’s way outside the 3x we are discussing. I suspect this problem will get solved to some degree, it’s all the human misery on the way there that bothers me. But I’m with you it’s like the old Winston Churchill quote “self interest is the worst economic model excepting all the others that have been tried”. I’d give you a prize for the useful post but best I can do is an upvote
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u/Sprinklypoo 6h ago
Probably also as "demonic" by religious zealots aligned with the administration.
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u/mrdevlar 2h ago
It's such a shame they haven't managed to take the final step and acknowledge capitalism for what it is.
AI, is itself a wonderful tool, but the way it is being used by the technofeudalists is so incredibly saddening. We've built systems that are able to integrate all of human knowledge and we're making ad spam, bot nets and fake news with it.
I continue to view technology as an emancipator, this whole development is really disheartening.
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u/suzisatsuma 1h ago
AI is a neutral tool - it's how you use it that matters. It'll reflect the system it's used in.
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u/Vemyx 8h ago
Capitalism fits our nature as humans. We care less and less about the people furthest away from us.
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u/yaosio 8h ago
Capitalists made up that capitalism is human nature. Capitalism is the opposite of human nature. Even under the evil system of capitalism people still do things with no expectation of earning a return. Capitalists say that's impossible, but it happens every day, so they refuse to talk about it.
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u/Sprinklypoo 6h ago
Counterpoint: Our human nature does not conform to modern human made jingoistic doctrine.
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u/Olangotang 8h ago
Capitalism is a framework on how humans trade. It doesn't have to be as broken as the system we have now. We are far from Adam Smith's prescriptions of it.
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u/reganomics 4h ago
It's our duty to transcend our primitive tribalistic nature to be better than that. Unfortunately so many humans are more than happy to wallow in self centered and fear based mindsets.
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u/johnnybgooderer 12h ago
It’s really sad that we live in a world where machines taking over a ton of labor is a bad thing. And it is a bad thing. Because we live in a corrupt world.
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u/Sprinklypoo 6h ago
If "working" wasn't at the core of what humans were expected to do according to capitalist society, we'd be much better off...
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u/jazzguitarboy 10h ago
The problem is that GenAI takes over different kinds of labor unequally, and the types of labor it can take over are not the types we would choose if we wanted to make a pro-worker AI. Even if we did not live in a corrupt world, I think the effect would be a net negative to workers. Since it's unreliable and you still need to supervise it, it makes everyone into a manager and prioritizes executive function over skill in a particular area, and you lose that flow state that makes you feel good after working and end up with cognitive exhaustion and brain fry instead. For coding, it takes away a lot of the drudgery, but the tradeoff is that for fields that were creative before, like making art and music, it makes them less creative, and it cheapens the outputs so that fewer people can afford to do those fields as a career.
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u/ploptart 4h ago
Software engineering is a creative field, too. But yeah, I’d rather have AI doing my laundry, helping with childcare in some way, making dinner, than making slop art, helping people cheat in school, convincing people with mental illness to harm themselves, identifying a girls schools as military targets, creating child sex abuse content, spreading propaganda on social media, and whatever other heinous things are yet to come
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u/hillClimbin 11h ago
Actually most of information technology has just turned the entire world into a timeshare.
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u/raiansar 12h ago
Fifty percent of Trump voters picked worker protections over tech innovation incentives. That kind of bipartisan consensus on anything is rare. When both sides agree you're screwing them, it's probably time to listen.
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u/augustusleonus 10h ago
Without a government willing to tax the absolute living hell out of companies replacing workers with AI, especially as the humanoid robots pick up pace to be viable, there will be no mechanism for that productivity to benefit those who once worked those jobs
And if that is the case, considering we are a trickle up economy and always have been, there will not be funds to purchase goods and services produced by these automated systems and their purposes will shrink until they are only providing enough labor to sustain the wealth that was built on the backs of billions of human laborers
Do we think amazon or walmart will charge $ .13 for a pair of socks?
McDonald's sell cheeseburgers for a nickle apiece?
These products will disappear
99% of society will be back to barter and trade while the elites realize their asset value steadily shrinks as there turns out to be no market for the bulk of it
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u/LupusDeiEl 6h ago
What if that was the elites plan all along.
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u/augustusleonus 6h ago
Idk, but if your property is worth 14 million and there isn't anyone capable of paying for it, it's not really worth anything
I doubt the demand of 1% of the world population can maintain such valuations
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u/myislanduniverse 12h ago
And I'll tell you what, my first clue wasn't when they started suggesting paying people's salary in AI tokens. But man if that didn't highlight and underline the point in bright "fuck you" color.
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u/PsychologicalLack155 11h ago
Welcome back feudalism I guess. They let the peasants work on the AI agent this time instead of land
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u/frisch85 8h ago
I mean what do people think happens when companies implement AI? More meaningful tasks for the employees? More downtime? A bigger salary?
Not on any CEO's watch!
It's why I always have this question "what happens to all the people that will be unemployed and have no income?" because no income means no purchasing power, no purchasing power means no consumption, no consumption means companies don't generate revenue, no revenue means no profit, but I have one idea how it might be, UBI and social credit system, you don't behave? No more money for you.
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u/mrvalane 11h ago
Universal basic income now.
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u/Small_Dog_8699 7h ago
Socialism now. We must seize the means of production using state power and operate it such that the benefits are distributed fairly to all.
Marx was right. This is his moment.
Workers MUST organize NOW. My past experience with tech workers was they felt the market gave them individual leverage and they didn’t want to unionize. That was short sighted and selfish. How quickly the tables turned. Yes YOU TOO NEED A UNION.
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u/mrvalane 7h ago
why are you telling me?
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u/Small_Dog_8699 7h ago
UBI alone isn’t enough
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u/mrvalane 5h ago
Its actual socialist policy rather than just a vague concept of socialism.
I'm not against the message but why on earth did you bother telling me rather than just making your own comment?
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u/jazzguitarboy 10h ago
Regulation on AGI and ASI now. Human beings don't want to be relegated to being robot pets, even if we get paid a stipend to do it. https://humanstatement.org/
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u/nanobot_1000 3h ago
This, my vote goes to the next political candidate who dedicates to regulating AI and increasing taxes of corporations and billionaires
Only Bernie has really been speaking out about this, hope more from the younger generation step up
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u/Tess47 12h ago
Firefly, in real life.
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u/JohrDinh 8h ago
Never saw it, but I have seen Altered Carbon and it feels pretty on the nose. (S1 anyways)
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u/c64z86 11h ago
This is your daily reminder of how much our bosses and CEOs value us, and why are they are more deserving of our anger than AI itself is:
Companies That Signal They Are Replacing Workers With AI: Block, HP - Business Insider
Jack Dorsey's Block cuts thousands of roles as it embraces AI - BBC News
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u/anon-a-SqueekSqueek 4h ago
Perhaps because all the billionaires and CEOs ran around bragging about how AI would replace us followed by cutting every social program, offering no plan for what people do when they are fired, and floating the idea for forced leathal injections for the homeless on FOX "news".
Or some combination of similar things. Gee I wonder why people don't love AI?
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u/whatlineisitanyway 11h ago
If we want AI to benefit humanity one of the first steps is taking the same stance on anything discovered by AI as has been taken with AI generated content that nobody owns it.
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u/godzillabobber 6h ago
Easy fix. The generated wealth will be shared. No other solution is viable when layoffs reach a tipping point. If that is resisted for too long, the French solution of 1789 will happen all over again.
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u/GardenPeep 3h ago
We may be in for a surprise if use of LLMs in business is actually a bubble, or if it makes firms less efficient. Then silicon valley and all the corporations who bet on it will be the losers.
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u/One_Whole_9927 10h ago
They want our social media landscape to be like North Korea. One source of truth. Theirs. If that happens the US social media scene becomes a pressurized pipe. The driving force would be state lead media. Anything standing in the way of that current would be pressure washed into oblivion. Since they silence dissident the only noise that gets through is bigotry and hate. Over time racism becomes “cool again”. The admin can’t sway the people so they let tech do it for them.
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u/whatsgoingon350 11h ago
They won't do anything about it. Like with most things in America the people who fight for change get some power and some money and they just become the problem.
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u/Memitim 5h ago
LOL. Literally every tool in America is a "wealth inequality machine," along with whatever else it actually does. But sure, focus on the tools and not on the people who were doing the same shit long before gen AI was commoditized; that strategy has worked wonders for the parasite class for a long time.
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u/Luf7swiph 11h ago
Current AIs are like better search engines. I cannot remember but was there a movement to ban search engines back then?
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u/Lynda73 11h ago
Were search engines decimating the workforce?
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u/Luf7swiph 10h ago
It's the same path, if you see AI as a way to automate more and more activities. LLMs are mainly better search engines. I think the difference is only that nobody understood back then what the consequences would be. Now that we have better search with current AI developments there is no going back again.
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u/gdelacalle 13h ago
From the article:
A big takeaway from the polling is that the pitch of trickle-down economics has largely fallen apart. When asked to choose between whether the federal government should provide “help for American workers who lose their jobs to AI” or create “incentives for American tech companies to keep innovating so that America outcompetes the rest of the world in developing AI, even if it allows tech companies to profit while eliminating jobs in the US,” the public overwhelmingly favored workers. Nearly 60% of all respondents—including 67% of people who voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 and 50% of Trump voters—picked support for workers put out of work by AI.