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Geoffrey Hinton: 'AI Will Make a Few People Much Richer and Most People Poorer' (ft.com) 102

Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton has warned that AI will concentrate wealth among a small elite while impoverishing most workers. The computer scientist, who pioneered neural network research in the 1980s, told Financial Times that rich people will use AI to replace workers, creating massive unemployment and profit increases.

Hinton, who left Google in 2023 after selling his AI startup for $44 million a decade earlier, dismissed universal basic income as insufficient to address human dignity concerns from job losses. The 77-year-old physicist predicts superintelligent AI will arrive within five to twenty years. He blamed capitalism rather than AI technology itself for the coming economic disruption, stating the system ensures AI will primarily benefit the wealthy rather than solve grand problems like hunger or poverty.
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Geoffrey Hinton: 'AI Will Make a Few People Much Richer and Most People Poorer'

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  • Access (Score:3, Insightful)

    by JBMcB ( 73720 ) on Friday September 05, 2025 @12:48PM (#65641148)
    People thought computers would crush the working class because only rich people would have access to them. People are still making that argument to this day.
    • Re:Access (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ihadafivedigituid ( 8391795 ) on Friday September 05, 2025 @01:01PM (#65641176)
      Rich people have disproportionately derived the benefits, haven't you been paying attention to the widely reported shrinkage of the middle class for the last 45-50 years?
      • Re: Access (Score:2, Insightful)

        A good deal of that shrinkage was up, not down.

        You could make the case that that's also bad because having a middle is better than having just rich and poor. I might even agree with some of that thinking. But at least be honest about what actually went down.

        And also about the fact that a shitbox used car that only the poors drive today has stuff in it standard that only came on luxury models back in my childhood. Power windows? Keyless entry? AC and stereo?

        Yeah man. Maybe society bifurcated more than you mi

        • Re: Access (Score:5, Informative)

          by dfghjk ( 711126 ) on Friday September 05, 2025 @01:18PM (#65641240)

          "A good deal of that shrinkage was up, not down."
          A bullshit lie.

          "But at least be honest about what actually went down."
          Take your own advice.

          "And also about the fact that a shitbox used car that only the poors drive today..."
          Another lie. People increasingly cannot afford cars, just like they cannot afford homes.

          "...being poor today is better than being "poor" in the 80s or 90s."
          Homeless and starving is not better today than in the 80s or 90s.

          • Re: Access (Score:5, Interesting)

            by crunchygranola ( 1954152 ) on Friday September 05, 2025 @02:54PM (#65641580)

            "A good deal of that shrinkage was up, not down." A bullshit lie.

            The game the rightwingnutjobs and their patrons employ is to set an extremely low bar for measuring the well being of the bottom tier. Despite real per capital GDP increasing 2.5 fold since 1975, and doubling since 1985, the real income of the lowest decile has barely budged. But since it hasn't actually decreased the plutocrat apologists assert there is no problem at all, since according to this one metric "nobody is getting poorer".

            A related game is to portray the poor as actually not being poor at all since they "have stuff" - like a TV and a microwave, as it those were still luxury items like they were 60 years ago.

            • ... they "have stuff" ...

              So the government can tax them for owning a Bentley, a yacht and 3 holiday homes: They won't be poor because they'll still "have stuff". Maybe not have a bank loan that helps them avoid income tax.

              This dissonance reveals rich people are just saying "I have more rights".

          • "...being poor today is better than being "poor" in the 80s or 90s."
            Homeless and starving is not better today than in the 80s or 90s.

            Oh come on, be honest now, it's totally better! Back in the '80s the homeless were sitting on the street corner tweaked out on drugs while begging for change. Now, in 2025, those same homeless people sitting on the street corner tweaked out on drugs and begging for change gets to scroll through Slashdot on their dubiously acquired smartphone!

            See, isn't that so much better!? /s

        • by dskoll ( 99328 )

          "A good deal of that shrinkage was up, not down."

          LOOOOOOOOL! What a bald-faced lie.

          Wealth inequality in the United States has skyrocketed since the 1960s and especially so since the 1980s. Middle income earning as a share of aggregate income has plummeted [pewresearch.org].

          • He didn't say middle income as a share of aggregate income hasn't plummeted. He said a "good deal" of the shrinkage went to people who became richer. I'm not sure he's right but if you're going to argue his point, please don't be disingenuous.
          • Wealth inequality in the United States has skyrocketed since the 1960s and especially so since the 1980s. Middle income earning as a share of aggregate income has plummeted.

            Indeed, it has decreased by about 20 percentage points, from 62% to 43%, since the early 70s. At the same time, though, median real income has increased by 50%. Each generation is wealthier than the last and even has higher home ownership rates, which I find a little surprising give the increase in prices, but that's what the data shows.

            So while America has become less equal, it has also become significantly wealthier across the whole income distribution. Basically, GDP has increased by about 70% since 1

            • > or good because Americans as a whole got a lot better off is a matter of perspective I suppose.

              I wonder what has happened to smaller slices of the population, because averages can hide a lot. In a lot of situations the average can go up quite a lot while for some lower groups it's stagnant or goes down.

              It also looks like wealth going up for some when it's going up much faster for others can be worse on overall social and physical health than if wealth had stayed the same for everyone. I don't have any

              • Perspectives indeed.

                Part of me suspects that the middle class existence in absolute terms isn't much different across the board, but the ability to see more Joneses to keep up with is orders of magnitude higher now than in the 90s.

                I was an only child in a ~40th percentile income household, which turned into a ~60th percentile income household by the time I left for college.

                We lived in a 1950s 1000 sq foot ranch in a middle-of-the-road suburb just over the Philadelphia city limits that my parents bought with

              • I wonder what has happened to smaller slices of the population, because averages can hide a lot. In a lot of situations the average can go up quite a lot while for some lower groups it's stagnant or goes down.

                This is why we use median rather than average. Median measurements can still hide a little, but a lot less than averages (means). But if you look at the population by deciles what you see is the same thing; even the poorest 10% of Americans have gotten ~50% richer in the last 50 years. A lot of that is due to the welfare state, which is far more generous today than it was in the 70s, but a lot of it is due to the fact that even low incomes have risen relative to the cost of living.

                It also looks like wealth going up for some when it's going up much faster for others can be worse on overall social and physical health than if wealth had stayed the same for everyone. I don't have any specific links for that, just a general impression.

                Rising inequality does h

                • > This is why we use median rather than average. Median measurements can still hide a little, but a lot less than averages (means).

                  Yes, but that can still hide a lot.

                  > But if you look at the population by deciles what you see is the same thing;

                  I usually want to see finer grained numbers because deciles can also hide a lot.

                  > even the poorest 10% of Americans have gotten ~50% richer in the last 50 years ...

                  50 %, any references ?

                  What of numbers like these: The 10th percentile saw a 5% drop in wages (s

        • >>And also about the fact that a shitbox used car that only the poors drive today has stuff in it standard that only came on luxury models back in my childhood. Power windows? Keyless entry? AC and stereo?

          This is the result of globalization and concentrated ownership of industry creating economies of scale for mass-produced gadgets. These are meaningless trinkets, not real wealth. In my fathers day a single bread-winner with no education could buy a home and support a family. Now it takes both parent

      • It's not "computers"/specifically that concentrated wealth. It's politics. All computers did was make.us more efficient at getting shit done.

        Case in point: wealth was concentrated in few hands when there weren't any computers, shortly after invention of the steam engine.

        There's only two ways of not concentrating wealth in few hands: (1)/) we cease to be efficient and essentially revert back to growing our own food without mechanisation; or (2), we get our ahit together and install a long overdue more civili

        • by kertaamo ( 16100 )

          Your example is silly.

          Those who managed to the steam engines to run their factories and ships and such got the wealth. Notably they were not necessarily people coming from the old aristocracy. The workers got shitty, low paid, hard work in the factories.

          In modern times those who managed to capture markets, via network effects, and get the server farms got the wealth. See FaceBook, Google, etc,

          Now, those who manage to get the AI have immense power.

          • Now, those who manage to get the AI have immense power.

            Why do you think is that?

            There's no inherent power in AI. Or machines. Or computers.

          • What is silly is not recognizing that it doesn't matter to the average person that the aristocrats lost control when they were simply replaced with capitalists. It's just a different kind of elitist running their lives.

            • What is silly is not recognizing that it doesn't matter to the average person that the aristocrats lost control when they were simply replaced with capitalists. It's just a different kind of elitist running their lives.

              Also a new set of elites have emerged with each successive technological revolution. With cotton and textiles you had Robert Peel, Samuel Slater, Francis Cabot Lowell, etc. Few of them came from either money or aristocracy. With railroads you had Leland Stanford, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, etc. Again, none from significant wealth. With steel you had Andrew Carnegie, Henry Frick, Elbert Gary, etc. Same story. With oil you had John D. Rockefeller, Harry Sinclair, J. Paul Getty, etc. Same story.

              • "if they don't manage to produce things that people want to buy, they don't get wealthy."

                Regulatory capture says hold my Pinot.

                • "if they don't manage to produce things that people want to buy, they don't get wealthy."

                  Regulatory capture says hold my Pinot.

                  There are cases where that works, but they're actually pretty rare. Regulatory capture is mostly useful to maintain a dominant position once it's achieved, but it rarely helps you build a successful business to begin with.

        • It's not "computers"/specifically that concentrated wealth. It's politics. All computers did was make.us more efficient at getting shit done.

          Technology has been responsible for pushing up Gini coefficients for a long time. I'm not sure of the breakdown of "computer" or what "computer" even means in the context where everything contains microprocessors.

          Case in point: wealth was concentrated in few hands when there weren't any computers, shortly after invention of the steam engine.

          No, Gini coefficients are higher today than they were in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.

          There's only two ways of not concentrating wealth in few hands: (1)/) we cease to be efficient and essentially revert back to growing our own food without mechanisation

          This is an overgeneralization.

        • It's not "computers"/specifically that concentrated wealth. It's politics.

          Nope, it's tech.

          This isn't the first time, either. Every major step in technology over the last 200+ years has followed the same pattern: A major new techological advance creates a lot of new wealth which primarily accrues to a small class because they were the first-mover entrepreneurs, making them super rich. Then as the full benefits of the technology gradually percolate through society, the first-mover edge evaporates and competition spreads the benefits more broadly across society. Rinse, repeat.

          • There's one obvious flaw in your reasoning: there are not noly "tech" billionaires out there.

            The higher principle is: the lowest you can pay a person is whay they need to survive (because otherwise they will eventually kill you.

            So everything between what a person can produce, and what they need to aurvive, ia "excess wealth". Since we've started doong agriculture instead of hunting and gathering we've generated increasing amounts of excess wealth. AI and modern "tech" aren't any different.

            Then, on top of th

            • Whenever "something" gives Humanity the occasion to be even more efficient in generating wealth, all other things staying the same there's even more potential for wealth being moved uphill.

              Somewhat, but who cares? The rising tide really does lift all boats, which is why today only 9% of humanity lives in extreme poverty, whereas 500 years ago 99% did. Even as recently as 1950, 50% of humanity did. Technology did that, and the single most important technology in raising the world out of poverty is the one we call "capitalism". It hasn't, and never will, produce perfect equality. Instead, it produces varying degrees of inequality which peak during the adoption of each significant new techno

              • I'm not sure if I should reply, as you seem lretty brainwashed, but I'll try.

                The rising tide really does lift all boats, which is why today only 9% of humanity lives in extreme poverty, whereas 500 years ago 99% did.

                Except.that this isn't a "tide". What you're using are "trickle down"/talking points, and they're BS.

                If we look at US population alone, I.believe the official statistics is that 2/3 live paychecl to paycheck. More than half live off less money per month than it takes to rent a place. The number of fully employed homeless people is the highest in the world.

                The definition of "extreme poverty" is a UN one, fairly recently, and wouldn'

      • by RobinH ( 124750 )
        That shrinkage has nothing to do with computers and almost everything to do with competition for middle class jobs via globalization. If anything, computers and automation slowed the shrinkage because it helped maintain a higher worker productivity in the US than in developing nations.
      • Not a bad FP branch, though I wish I could see a funny angle to lighten the mood a bit... The key problem is that the tools are morally neutral, but people ain't. Some of them have good motivations and will try to use AI for good stuff, while others are immoral or downright evil and the AI tools will work tor them just as well. So the nice folks have visions of making everyone happier while some other people are fixated on making themselves richer and more powerful, even though the money and the power are j

        • Fake and insincere politeness.

          Thank you, I can't stand when it tries to sound excited and stroke my ego, "Wow, great idea!" like shut up baby I know it.

          Maybe i'm just too old and my ideal version of an AI is the TNG ships computer.

          • by shanen ( 462549 )

            You're right. I should have said "fake politeness and fake enthusiasm", though DeepSeek is the one that comes to mind first in the fake enthusiasm category.

        • It's about engagement. Keep Joe typing questions. Good job Joe! if you give me the (bla bla bla) I can help you further troubleshoot that network connection.

          (Joe reporting here: Gemini couldn't figure out the problem and offered some pretty bad advice over the course of 20 tries, I guess I'll try for the 21st time, gee, I'm engaged)

          Moral of the story: giving the right answer doesn't foster increased engagement.
      • by taustin ( 171655 )

        While the rich have gotten richer faster, the poor have gotten richer, too. The is the nature of technological advancement. The alternative is to go back to hunting dinner - or each other - with sharp sticks, and everybody dies by age 30.

      • That shrinkage has been almost exclusively in the United States, while the standard of living around the world has gone up with poverty rates going down almost everywhere and with drastic improvements by other metrics also. See e.g. https://ourworldindata.org/poverty [ourworldindata.org] . And even in the US there's evidence that the rise in inequality slowed down and even reversed in the last few years. See discussion at https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/inequality-might-be-going-down-now [noahpinion.blog]. So if there's a problem, it is US policy
      • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        "Middle class" is a fun term because you can define it all sorts of different ways, and change the definition over time. Makes for great articles.

        Pretty much everybody on the planet, from the richest to the poorest, is much richer than they have ever been, both in quality of life and in raw income. Income inequality has been decreasing in the world as a whole too, and also decreasing or staying much the same in most of the developing countries, the EU, Canada and Australia. The US has been drifting up.

      • People thought computers would crush the working class because only rich people would have access to them. People are still making that argument to this day.

        Rich people have disproportionately derived the benefits, haven't you been paying attention to the widely reported shrinkage of the middle class for the last 45-50 years?

        My guess is that massive income inequality comes from personal greed and is independent of computers or AI. Unfortunately for the ultrarich, the US economy is overwhelmingly consumer driven, so eventually those tens of billions will become merely billions as the economy contracts with fewer consumers and consumer dollars. If fewer people can afford to buy iPhones, Apple will get crushed. If general consumer spending plummets and sends online ad revenue decreasing, Google and Meta will get crushed.

      • Yeah?

        What kind of middle class did we have 500 years ago?

        1000?

        What about 1500 years ago?

        Seems to me the middle classes is doing pretty well by historical standards.

    • That's almost what happened. The people making/selling computers and services did well, but on the whole the working and middle classes have been otherwise squeezed. Their purchasing power today is far lower, especially in view of housing, healthcare and college/education costs. Inequality today rivals the Gilded Age. https://www.nasdaq.com/article... [nasdaq.com]
    • No, they said that about automation, and they weren't wrong, it just largely missed white-collar jobs. Until now.

    • by flink ( 18449 )

      Look at productivity vs wages [epi.org] since the mid 70s when digitization really started taking off. Rich people have derived virtually all the benefit. Yes, a handful of middle class knowledge workers have been created in IT, but compare that to the number of jobs that have been deskilled or eliminated.

    • For 20 years, plus or minus, personal computers reversed that idea.

    • 70% of middle class jobs lost since 1980 got taken by automation.

      The first big automation push for replacing jobs was targeted to unionized factory workers because they were making good money. That was the bulk of the American middle class. Also having tens of thousands, hell millions of good paying factory jobs meant that other jobs had to pay more because they were competing for workers...

      We spent decades automating those jobs away and right when we were doing it wages completely stagnanted. Hones
    • My other computer is a 40yo Amiga. That still works.
    • by Rujiel ( 1632063 )
      This lazy argument shows up every fucking time there is any story abouy AI, so it's fitting that it would be first. A computer can enable you, but the fundamental purpose of AI is to place most of the population in serfdom.
  • by Sebby ( 238625 ) on Friday September 05, 2025 @01:01PM (#65641178) Journal

    The computer scientist [said] that rich people will use AI to replace workers, creating massive unemployment and profit increases. [...] He blamed capitalism rather than AI technology itself for the coming economic disruption, stating the system ensures AI will primarily benefit the wealthy rather than solve grand problems like hunger or poverty.

    Of course it will - capitalism always triumphs over the little guy!

    I can only imagine that the amount of political money/lobbying by AI firms [will/has] dwarfs those of other industries in the past - I'm thinking movie, tobacco and even the oil industries here.

    • >Hinton, who left Google in 2023 after selling his AI startup for $44 million

      He certainly knows what he's talking about.

    • Of course it will - capitalism always triumphs over the little guy!

      Also, capitalism always make the little guy a lot wealthier than he was, even if he doesn't gain nearly as much as the capitalist. Capitalism has lifted 90% of the human population out of extreme poverty over the last couple of centuries.

      Capitalism is not without flaws, but to re-purpose Churchill's comment about democracy: Capitalism is the worst form of economic system, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

      It would be marvelous if we found something better than capi

  • Nothing new really (Score:3, Informative)

    by CQDX ( 2720013 ) on Friday September 05, 2025 @01:08PM (#65641198)

    Using computers and automation in business has always about reducing costs by reducing the number of workers needed to get something done.

    • by RobinH ( 124750 )
      Yes... but when deployed broadly across industries it also supports higher worker efficiency and productivity, which allows higher wages. And it's not like the unemployment rate went up to 30% and stayed there. A couple years ago we had record low unemployment. If all the jobs where gone due to automation, what were all those people doing working? I don't actually believe there's much behind the AI hype. We're poised for a big correction. But automation, in general, has improved worker productivity an
      • The reason wages haven't risen as fast as worker productivity is because an increasing amount of the worker productivity is the product of using mechanization owned by their employer to do the job.

        You've been hiring 10 guys to dig a ditch. You buy an excavator and for $100K and fire 9 of the guys, the last guy runs the excavator. Worker productivity just went up by a factor of 10. Are you going to increase his pay by a factor of 10 so your payroll stays the same? No, you'll pay him maybe a little more

        • by RobinH ( 124750 )
          Yes, in the very short term. But you're completely ignoring the competition factor. Someone else will buy an excavator and force the market price of digging lower.
          • by dryeo ( 100693 )

            Or, over a beer, they'll agree to split the market and keep prices and profits high. Though sometimes they will lower prices to put the new competition out of business, before raising them again. The higher the barrier to entry, the more likely that happens.

            • by RobinH ( 124750 )
              What you're talking about is called price collusion, and while it does happen, it's also illegal and does get prosecuted (I can think of two examples in recent memory).
    • by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      "Using computers and automation in business has always about reducing costs..."
      No, but that has been a benefit, among a great many other things. Virtually everything we take for granted is better today because we have computers to help us to work better, often times cheaper as well.

      AI is different, it's not about better, it's about eliminating work forces entirely. It's about replacement. Computers used to assist, now they replace...badly.

  • “Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” — Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam
    • by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      This is a work of fiction being presented as though a real person is being quoted. Embarrassing.

      "Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads." — Dr. Emmett Brown
      "These go to eleven." — Nigel Tufnel
      "No, I am your father." — Darth Vader

      • by allo ( 1728082 )

        "Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans."

  • Sorry dude. Physics entails interrogating Nature, not making chatbots with python scripts.

    Oh look..."blames capitalism"...yeah there it is.

    Looking back to my early childhood in the waning days of Soviet Union, I can't help but wonder if the bread lines might have been shorter, the greengrocer's shelves a little less emptier, and the power and water cuts a little less frequenty if only there had been a State Artificial Intelligence Bureau to make sure the chatbots and AI agents centrally planned the parcelin

    • Chile seemed to be making something similar work with early-'70s computer technology, until Henry Kissinger decided that democratic socialism was a threat worse than Soviet communism and had the regime overthrown and replaced with a murderous right-wing dictatorship:

      https://thereader.mitpress.mit... [mit.edu]

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      The Soviet Union failing does not mean capitalism cannot be criticized. You could perhaps stop confusing free markets and capitalism. Capitalism destroys free markets.

      "... I can't help but wonder ..."

      I doubt that you wonder anything other than how to shamelessly promote your right winger point of view. The soviet collapse has been studied, its causes can be researched. Nowhere would you find that if only they had AI things might have been different, not even you would wonder that.

  • like finally getting Linux up and running without doing a ton of digging into error messages and software that takes forever to install and or manage. It's a tool, so I use it.

    • ...like finally getting Linux up and running without doing a ton of digging into error messages...

      I agree. Those Linux installation errors messages have gotten ridiculous. Just doing a simple install has (at least!) four "Next" error messages that look a lot like buttons. I have to click each and every one of them before I get a usable desktop! That's absurd! Any more than zero clicks is completely unacceptable!

      ...and software that takes forever to install and or manage.

      I hear you, brother! Who on Earth has five whole seconds to install a package?! It's crazy!

      • by 2TecTom ( 311314 )

        rotflmao, so, tell me, what year is going to be the year of the Linux desktop? Remember now, as bad as Windows is, as unethical as Micro$oft is and as expensive as Windows is, yet Linux struggles to get even 5% share of the desktop market. There's a reason for that.

        • "There's a reason for that."

          Yes, anticompetitive behavior.

          • by 2TecTom ( 311314 )

            care to explain

            look, I've been ding this long enough to know there's no way a non-technical user would be able to manage when there's this many issues with basic desktop functionality

            Linux has a lot going for it, ease of installation just isn't one of them

            once everything's installed and configured, i have no issues but even basic setup take me hours longer than with Windows and I've installed a number of different distros and levels of distros all the way down to Linux from scratch, and yes,AI is a big help

  • He's right, but that's true about everything. The rich and powerful use their wealth and influence to stay rich and powerful ... with AI, or with anything else. It's how the world works.

    • ... until war, revolution, plague, or famine kills a bunch of people. After that, things sort of reset because (1) elites are nicer in a growing economy and (2) power was effectively democratized by the catastrophe... especially when you have a bunch of young men coming back from war. The decades following WWII are a good example of this.
  • If there's massive unemployment, then who's going to spend the money to massively increase profits???

  • Actors (Score:3, Insightful)

    by groobly ( 6155920 ) on Friday September 05, 2025 @01:41PM (#65641350)

    I don't trust actors to tell me about economics, and I don't trust computer scientists to tell me about it either.

    • Billionaires have been buying them off for some time. I trust (but verify) statisticians.

      As for a computer scientist though what I trust is he knows enough to know what the technology can actually automate.

      And that means he can predict pretty easily what this is going to do to the labor market. It doesn't take a genius to figure that out though.

      Getting back to staticians we've got excellent statistics on the effects of automation with regards to the middle class. And it ain't good. So you don't
  • What I wonder about it what happens to the legions of displaced and their children? Seems like this will be the industrial moves to Asia but with a far wider impact. One starts to think about stuff like the French Revolution... or perhaps the Russian. And in the US at least the displaced will be well armed and not too happy. A problem that has been building for decades. At least the birth rate is falling.

  • ...would stop trying to predict the future and concentrate on building AI and talking about actual accomplishments. The future has always been unpredictable and it's getting increasingly unpredictable as tech advances

  • He founded and sold an AI company, and he believes so much in his product that he feels bad about how many people will be put out of work by what he has done.

    Lucky for him, the product isn't likely to do nearly as much good--or harm--as he (the chief salesman of his company) convinced himself that it would do.

  • Can't read the article, it's paywalled.

    My question is, by what mechanism will AI (specifically, his product) make the rich much richer, and the poor poorer?

    So far, AI has proved to provide a *small* productivity boost. This is offset by the high cost of AI products. This high cost will greatly slow adoption, making the cost/benefit equation of an already over-hyped product, much less attractive.

    If we look at history, past automations have eliminated some jobs, but have replaced them with better, higher-payi

    • My question is, by what mechanism will AI (specifically, his product) make the rich much richer, and the poor poorer?

      Salesforce replaces 4,000 support staff with AI: CEO Marc Benioff revealed Salesforce slashed its customer support workforce from 9,000 to 5,000 this year after deploying AI “agents” to handle half of all support interactions

      Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company’s corporate workforce will shrink in the coming years as it adopts more generative artificial intelligence tools and agents.

      • SalesForce sells an AI product. Of course they're going to claim that their layoffs are the result of AI.

        Amazon has likewise been laying off people *before* AI.

        No, not buying it. They're telling a story to please investors, to make their layoffs look like "progress."

        Meanwhile, Taco Bell has had to scale back its AI drivethroughs because it didn't work out as expected. https://www.bbc.com/news/artic... [bbc.com]

  • New technology always make as few much richer, but over time every ones life is rich, Consider, the wealth from the introduction of railroads, cars, radio, computer, cell phones, etc.
  • The people who strongly against AI due to fears of being disadvantaged and pushing for hard regulations are actually creating the future disadvantage for themselves. Whatever regulations may come, you can be sure that companies will still use AI to make money. But will there be (good) open AI that you can use without depending on what a large company is willing to offer you?

    For instance, if all training data requires licensing because the transformative use argument is invalidated, only rich companies able

  • Really, what purpose do you serve now? Change the process into an app, change laws and rules to restrict choices to what AI's can deal with.

    Lucky this coincides with houses being too expensive for you to buy anyway, so not a big deal for politicians.
  • The tipping point is when enough workers are displaced there's no longer a market of buyers for discretionary items. There will be a handful of oligarchs at the top able to purchase unimaginable luxury, and the rest will live in squaller. Back to the time of kings and surfs. The rich better beware of what they wish for, many "kings" didn't end up well, and many died at the hands of those paid to protect them.
  • Cars replaced horses. That made rich people richer.

    But, eventually, cars gave everyone FAR better lives.

    It is too soon to know all the ways AI will eventually affect us.
    • Mass adoption of cars for individual transport was the single largest policy blunder post WWII. They're expensive, dangerous, inefficient, bad for our health, bad for the environment. Millions of people were displaced to make room for highways. Our lives are far worse for surrendering our freedoms to car dependency.

  • I am afraid the situation will be worse: the "companies" will not wait for super-intelligent AI, they will just get high on the hype and will destroy the life of people by replacing them with over-hyped AI that will not be able to do the same jobs. So we will get enshitification AND poverty.
  • Capitalism enables climate collapse.

A quarrel is quickly settled when deserted by one party; there is no battle unless there be two. -- Seneca

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