Henry Ford's philosophy was that if he paid his workers a higher wage, they would be able to afford the products they were producing, namely his Model T automobiles. This would, in turn, create a larger customer base for his company and help stimulate the economy by increasing consumer spending.
I actually think this is a pretty good argument against AI dooming that I don’t here that often.
Sam Altman doesn’t own AI. His investors actually own most of the actual assets.
Eventually there is going to be pressure for open ai to deliver returns to investors. Given that the majority of the US economy is consumer spending, the incentive is going to be for open ai to increase consumer spending in some way.
That’s essentially what happened to Google during the 2000s. I know everyone is negative about social media right now. But one could envision an alternative reality where Google explicitly controls and sensors all information, took over roadways with their driving cars, completely merged with the government, etc. Basically a doomsday scenario.
What actually happened is Google was incentivized by capital to narrow the scope of their vision. Today, the company mainly sells ads to increase consumer spending.
I'd agree. The logical fallacy I always observe in (what I call) the marxist-nihilist AI doom scenario is that it assumes that the top N% of people perfectly cooperate in a way that the remaining 100-N% cannot. Even stratified social structure is far too muddled for a "mass-replacement" scenario to not cause the elites to factionalize across different plans that would be best for them, which in turn prevents the kind of unified coherent action that the doom scenario hinges on (ex. theyll gun down the proles with robodogs).
Technofeudalism by Varoufakis is about this N% cooperation. Growing wealth concentration means this collusion becomes possible with smaller and smaller N% cooperating. If it's game theory optimal to cooperate I have no doubt Thiel will be releasing the robo hounds the minute he can.
When every industry is dominated by 1 or 2 players, collusion becomes a lot easier. This concentration has been slowly happening for decades now, and we're pretty much at the end. Every industry is dominated by what is essentially a monopoly, but because they keep at least 1 competitor alive, the public and the FTC are fine with it.
