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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.
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.
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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