Those criticizing those earning billions of dollars think of money as some anonymous fixed pie that magically belongs to everyone. On that completely false view of production (and money), of course it would be offensive for people to grab so much for themselves.
If that's what production was about, humanity never would have left caves.
The ancestors of the fix-pie idea were the ones who would have sneered at the first hut built outside of a cave, at the first crops deliberately sown into the ground, at the first villages built up to provide better living conditions for groups of people including as a trade center.
Everything from 100,000 years ago to today is the result of productive human beings who made more of the world. It's an ongoing process.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding of the economy is that money is earned when someone creates value. Just "giving people money" without having the corresponding value be created increases demand for valuable things without increasing supply, leading to inflation and the costs of said things going up.
Money is earned either by extracting rents/profits/taxes, through borrowing or by selling something. None of these have to actually create value.
You can advertise something without value and “earn” money selling it. The perceived value was created by advertising, but didn’t actually exist.
You can raise funds, sell at a loss, buy out the competition and later drive up prices without creating any value. This is how Amazon got started.
You can go to the bank, borrow money(increasing the money supply, driving inflation, thanks to fractional reserve banking), buy up houses (driving housing inflation), and extract rent without doing anything useful for your community.
In fact, cloud computing is largely that: buying up all the compute and renting it out to those without the capital to buy themselves.
A person can create value without earning money (parenthood, volunteering), and one can earn money without creating value (rent extraction), although the word “earn” is under a lot of strain.
You're wrong. People have inherent value whether they "create value" or not. UBI is not about rewarding people for some economic contribution but rather provides everyone with a reasonable amount of money so they can survive (hopefully) and stay healthy and have a shot at the prerequisites for "freedom" to exist.
Money has been completely manufactured in financial markets already and doesn't seem to be screwing us over too badly. I hardly think UBI paid from taxing the largest economic surpluses and wealth in the history of the world will have a significant impact on inflation.
Any inflationary impact would happen if you print the money supply to pay UBI rather than using existing dollars in the supply.
You're also completely writing off the additional surpluses that people receiving UBI could provide if they're confident they can get by on a daily basis and also ensure they stayed healthy and working rather than spiraling any time one or two things go sideways.
In, say, the Netherlands we already have something that's very close to free money. I know many, many folks perusing said mechanism(s). Sure, it's not UBI and there is some stigma involved but I think it's the closest you'll get. I won't be snarky about this, but let's just say I need some.. convincing this reliably addresses the primary obstacles in economically disadvantaged folks. In my experience our economic situation is downstream from other more urgent issues that we find hard to talk about. Culture, ethics, behavioral and cognitive differences, etc. Thorny, nasty things, but .. real and more importantly they don't respond to dollar bills. In fact, it may make it worse.
But anyway, I'm not too worried about inflation mainly because of the points you raised, but I am worried about resource constrained markets like housing. If nothing is done to stop this, and I don't know how, I'm sure they'll just raise the prices to completely cancel out any UBI you'll pass around. It's not just housing either, but that's an obvious one.
> our economic situation is downstream from other more urgent issues that we find hard to talk about. Culture, ethics, behavioral and cognitive differences
I see it as exactly the opposite - culture, ethics, behavior differences etc are downstream of financial inequality. When people are financially insecure it becomes much harder to tolerate disagreement, and much easier to blame [insert whatever populist notion of enemy]. I think it would be easier to engage with people with opposing ideas, not seeing them as an existential threat, if you are not worried about housing, income or health insurance.
Cultural polarization is a deflection mechanism (both in the subconscious psychological sense as well as a politcal/propaganda technique) meant to mask the real deeper structural inequalities. It's the lie we tell ourselves and the powers that be tell us to prevent to change the direction of the "wealth redistribution" we've been witnessing for 20+ years.
So far in Croatia any kind of stimulus from the government just makes the market compensate. For example, an increase in public spending made the prices of goods and services more expensive and providing subsidies for first time home buyers caused prices of real estate to increase by that amount.
The real problem during the pandemic is most of the stimulus money went to the already wealthy. Higher cost of living is because we keep printing money, that money goes to banks, and inflation ends up being an implicit tax on the poor who aren't invested in the markets.
What I can definitely tell you is that the people that currently can't even afford basic things are somehow causing higher cost of living. The economy is not jacked up right now because we gave people laughably small amounts like a thousand dollars. The real problem is people like Sergei Brin spending 57 million dollars to fight a one-time 5% tax.
Pandemic checks were from expanding the money supply IIRC rather than distributed taxes on the already very wealthy. These are very different mechanisms. What they did (expanding the money supply) drove inflation way more than the actual money in people’s pockets. Otherwise you’d have argue people shouldn’t get paid because it causes too much inflation.
The analogy I make is between airplanes and birds.
Birds are alive, are conscious, flap their wings, and fly.
Planes are not alive, are not conscious, do not flap their wings - and fly.
Similarly, current AIs are not alive, are not conscious - but think.
All prior entities that thought, were human, so the only experience humans had with other thinking entities were other humans. The huge mistake now being made is assuming that because they think, they're alive and conscious as well. Current AIs are neither, and are therefore profoundly and qualitatively different than humans - even though they do think.
Okay sure. But given we don’t know what consciousness comes from, we shouldn’t be too glib about there being a grey area here. Historically people have made racist and speciesist judgments towards other being by assuming certain inferiorities despite obvious “thinking” happenings.
I don’t know “what it’s like to be an LLM” but at some point it will be like something and how will we know?
There are birds that go far longer than typical aeroplane flight times without a single flap of their wings either using thermal, ridge, or other sources of lift. Are these flying birds? I've shared thermals with eagles flying the same circles, neither one of us flapping our wings but making minor adjustments for the same goal.
An albatross might be able to go days flying without a single wing flap and no vertical sources of lift by using dynamic soaring in the wind gradient at the surface of the ocean. Perhaps that's something only birds can do. Except the glider pilot Ingo Renner once found an amazing shear layer at 300m altitude and stayed there with dynamic soaring. Remote control gliders use the lee of ridgelines to approach Mach 1 with dynamic soaring.
Perhaps what defines a bird that flies as opposed to a plane is that a bird produces thrust by flapping its wings? Even an Albatross must flap its wings if it has to take-off from water. Maybe we could add that the flapping is driven by animal muscles? But then is the human powered ornithopter Snowbird a bird that flies as opposed to a plane?
Of course this is all ridiculous because everyone knows what you mean when you refer to a bird or plane. We have other ways to definitively identify the difference rather than their mode of flight. It's trickier when I'm asked if an AI is conscious. There is no definitive base-line to fall back on to decide if this is a conscious or conscious-less thinker.
What if somebody simulated all neurons of a bird and fed them appropriate stimuli? Would a bird neural replica be conscious? It would flap, that's for sure.
This has been tried with much simpler organisms, it did not behave like the real thing thus far. There was a paper about it, there now seems to be a project to push on the frontier
This is always going to be a problem with this sort of discourse. Consciousness is such a slippery concept… what it is, who/what has it, its consequences for claims about reality. Mixing it in to debates about AI just adds confusion, it almost seems besides the point when we’re talking about this tech.
It feels hard to be excited by a DGX Spark stuffed into a laptop. It's still slow RAM (much slower than a Mac) and arbitrarily limited to 128GB. Can't they at least offer a higher end model with faster RAM and more of it? Sure it would cost a bundle, but there are still people who'd buy it for the local AI capability.
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