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Sam Altman's bad week continues, as a car stopped and appears to have fired a gun at the Russian Hill home of OpenAI’s CEO.
It appears that, if measured by deed, Mr. Altman may be in contention for the title of most hated business executive in the country.
Unless I am profoundly misinformed about the base rate of assassination attempts on tech CEOs, it appears AI anxiety has apparently reached a precipitation point among American youth, to the point where discontent is crystalizing into direct action. I've seen this in my personal life. My youngest brother is a bright kid - top of his class, eagle scout, 1400+ on his SATs as a junior, the whole shebang. He's completely given up on his original goal of going to college for something software-related, and he's not only adrift about what he's going to do with his future, but he's angry about it. I hope he has a support network sufficient to keep him on the right track, but I don't like what I see.
I'm not exactly old, but I'm sure as hell not young either. For those of you who are 25 or under, what does it feel like on the ground right now?
One comment sentiment I see regarding billionaires is "there's no ethical way for anyone to acquire that much money."
This reads to me as a complaint that billionaries aren't cashing out early enough.
Say you create a rocketship of a company. You're Mark Zuckerberg, it's the mid-aughts. Various media companies are offering hundreds of millions for what you've built. We know what actually happened, Zuck didn't sell.
There's a hypothetical where Zuck cashed out and lived a quiet but ultra-rich life instead of building one of the world's most valuable companies. In that hypothetical, Zuck would be a better person according to the anti-billionaire crowd.
What of the other side of the transaction? The only entities capable of acquiring Facebook would have necessarily been even more valuable, so then you're just enriching the established billionaries instead of creating new ones.
What do they actually want?
Your terms are acceptable. I would consider a world without gigantic monopolies with huge sway over public influence to be a better one.
The amount of power these mega corporations have is, I think, incompatible with liberal democracy. Having public discourse be decided by algorithms on a handful of global powerhouses is actually an insane state of affairs with huge potential for abuse.
So yeah, let Zuck and his ilk retire early. Have Facebook fade to obscurity. Let Google fall before internet search is optimized. The entities that buy the companies should also cash out, or break up into smaller parts. Give me a bunch of multi-millionaire medium to large entities instead of the titans we see today. Spread out the money and power, and I genuinely believe the world would be in a much better state than it is today.
Zuck cashing out in 2007 doesn’t mean the end of Facebook, it means another entity, even bigger than Facebook, gets to control Facebook.
Facebook, in not selling out, wrested control from the established media players who were looking to acquire it.
That’s an outcome in your preferred direction, no? Time Warner, Fox, et al are less powerful as a result.
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You're basically asking for a magic wand to give you the upsides of what you want without the downsides. It does not exist.
That seems a bit defeatist. I am not saying people shouldn't be allowed vastly more wealth than me, or to retire early. Just that the current richest people are clearly too rich and powerful for the good of society. I am essentially asking for policies that would prevent individuals and companies from getting this big in the first place, and to break up the existing monopolies into smaller, competing groups.
While wealth taxes and antitrust legislation come with their own downsides, and taxing people because they are wealthy is in some sense unfair, it seems to me that the current situation is so undesirable that it would be worth it. Fundamentally, money and power go hand in hand, so having ultra wealthy individuals in practice means that power becomes centralized within an increasingly smaller circle. Worse, the longer this goes on, the harder breaking up the circle becomes, as power is transferred through wealth from the people to the rich.
The current richest people created many of the good things in society. On the Internet, you kill Google and anything else that could become big, and at best you end up with a world with a lot of Altavistas and Yahoos. Kill Amazon and anything else big, and you have a whole lot of relatively crappy e-commerce sites (which still exist, mostly for things that aren't sold on Amazon; they're usually not great). Electric cars remain impractical curiosities; space is confined to NASA and Arianespace. You also kill a lot of other things; some you wouldn't like, and some you likely would. Useful speech recognition and high-quality synthesis. Cloud computing. AI.
Currently the richest people in America are tech people. But go back a few decades or a century and you wipe out more. Retail giants. Railroads. Oil refining and retailing. Electric generation and distribution. The banking system financing all this -- like 'em or not, they're necessary. The richest people living now are why we're living with a 21st century standard of living instead of a 20th; some the richest people at any given time were responsible for similar advancements. Cut off the potential rewards, you also cut off the advancements.
The people never had the power in the first place. Power in the US is obtained by those who have political ability; the wealthy can purchase some of this but the agents they purchase are by nature often treacherous. Eliminating the wealthy leaves the ambitions of the politically savvy unrestrained by anything.
I suppose the question is then: Are most of the richest uniquely capable to the extent that those good things wouldn't exist at all without their work, or are they just the ones who were marginally faster than the next best competitor and/or cutthroat enough to use often questionable means to eliminate their competitors. If primarily the latter you could argue they are in fact a net negative on society. It is easy to imaging scenarios in which the value they produce over replacement is minimal or even negative, but winner-take-all dynamics in things like e-commerce or social media networks make this impossible to measure.
Maybe taking away the carrot entirely for the wealthy would cut off their motivation to develop advancements like electric cars and Amazon, but there's obviously a sliding scale that can be applied here. Is the potential for 100 billion in wealth that much less of a motivator than 200 billion? I can't imagine that possibly being the case. If anything, the striving by the ultra wealthy is almost entirely positional rather than anything absolute.
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This isn't clear to me, though. At the very least, it's not clear to me that policies that would accomplish this would make society better rather than immensely worse. It's not clear to me it would make it immensely worse, either, but I certainly know which way I would bet if it were possible to adjudicate this and pay out.
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Is China going to reciprocate?
I don't think that we can assume that American champions are just going to continue to be massively successful without the economies of scale or that even less accountable foreign companies won't take over. This, I assume, is Nybbler's complaint about wanting upsides with no downsides.
I assume China is scary to you because its interests do not necessarily line up with those of America, and if the Chinese government deems it necessary, it might take actions that are detrimental to American citizens if it becomes too powerful.
I would argue that the same is true for the mega corporations though. They did not get rich by being nice, and will tend to look out for their own interests first and foremost. Those interests may not always align with those of the local population, so if they become too powerful, they may take actions that are detrimental to American citizens. The main advantage of the mega corps being local then, are the jobs, taxes, and the fact that you can regulate them.
Unfortunately, the last two factors only work if the state is significantly stronger than the corporate entities, and willing to regulate them. When social media companies become big enough to sway public opinion though, they get the power to significantly reduce the will of the population, whilst lobbying for politicians to deregulate. So for large enough entities the advantages of taxes and regulation are bound to lessen over time.
So only jobs are left. This is important of course, but I would argue that mega corps are not necessary for this. After all, several countries exist without mega corps and still manage to have low unemployment.
So I suppose I don't see much of a difference between having the mega corps in America or in China. They don't seem to care about how their activities effect the world regardless.
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