"... if that's the world, let, let, actually, let's say the world can generate 20 trillion quin- 20 quintillion tokens per year, each word generated by an AI — okay, just making up a huge number here, okay? — we'll say, okay, 12 of those go to, you know, the normal capitalistic system. But 8 of those 8 quintillion tokens are gonna get divided up equally among 8 billion people. So everybody gets 1 trillion tokens. And that's your kind of universal basic wealth globally. And people can sell those tokens. Like, if I don't need mine, I can sell them to you. We could pool ours together for some like new
art project we wanna do. But, but instead of just like getting a check, you're getting — everybody on earth is getting — like a slice of the world's AI capacity, and then we're letting the, like, massively distributed human ingenuity and creativity and economic engine do its thing. I mean, that's like a crazy idea. Maybe it's a bad one, but that's the kind of thing that I think sounds like someone should think about it more."
Said Sam Altman, in the new episode of Theo Von's podcast (
audio and transcript at Podscribe).
The word in boldface is the word that I said out loud as I was listening to the podcast, through earbuds, as I walked in the woods just now. I would describe my tone of voice as: derisive. Art! Art reared its goofball head in the midst of that insanity. I've heard it before, this notion that if only we were set free from the limitations of the workaday world, what we would do would be to make art.
Posts
57 comments:
Meanwhile, a loaf of bread will cost about 87septaqizillion tokens.
It's a Syndicate, and everybody has a share.
"We could pool ours together for some like new art project we wanna do."
So- the tokens are like money.
"Like, if I don't need mine, I can sell them to you."
You'll sell them for... what? If you don't need them, why wouldn't you just give (or throw) them away?
"I've heard it before, this notion that if only we were set free from the limitations of the workaday world, what we would do would be to make art."
Yeah, all we need is another covid locjdown.
Imagine thinking that AI, which has an even more skewed ratio of capital to labor than a Victorian era steel mill, is just going to hand over 40% of its tokens to the world individually. The people who are starving will sell their tokens instantly for groceries or booze. So no, this isn't compelling. It's alarming that the biggest AI group is led by someone with such sophomoric fantasies, or who pretends to have those fantasies.
We could all be starving artists!
How about Sam Altman use all the money he’s going to waste on AI to build power plants in Africa? You know, actually care about those other 8 billion people rather than just say that you do. It is amazing how this jackhole goes from telling us he cares about the environment and lobbying governments to make things worse for all of us to coming up with a way to burn more GWh than most countries will ever produce. And he keeps with the sanctimony by claiming his toy for creating “art” will also solve global warming. He’s as much a con artist as Sam Bankman-Fried.
Wasn't there another version of this BS during the Obama admin? I seem to recall Nancy Pelosi saying something about how Obamacare extending healthcare coverage for dependents up to the age of 26 was going to help them go out and be "creative" without the buzzkill of having to get up and go to work to earn a crust and get their healthcare through an employer's plan? How did that work out? Did any of those college aged unemployed people go out and do something creative or did they just hunker down in their mom’s basement and play video games?
Tokens are tulips.
Altman is using something.
What would be the metric by which a token is valued? Seems like runaway inflation would be inevitable. Why not just print a gazillion dollars? .....oh, wait...
- Krumhorn
"Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has indeed made statements highlighting the impact of the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) dependent coverage provision, which allows young adults to stay on their parents' insurance until age 26.
One specific quote often associated with this idea, albeit sometimes subject to interpretation, is that this provision could help young people pursue their dreams and be artists or entrepreneurs rather than being constrained by job choices solely dictated by healthcare needs."
That Google AI which seemed fitting in this particular case.
"is that this provision could help"
Great weasel word, "could". Lots of things could help, doesn't mean they will.
Remember when Pelosi was arguing for health insurance disconnected from working and it had to do with the production of art:
PELOSI: "Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or, eh, a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance, or that people could start a business and be entrepreneurial and take risk but not [be] job-locked because a child has asthma or someone in the family is bipolar. You name it. Any condition is job-blocking."
I blogged that back in 2010 when Rush Limbaugh went wild mocking her: https://althouse.blogspot.com/2010/03/rush-limbaugh-still-pissed-about.html
RUSH: "So this is what the Democrats are fighting for. They're fighting for you not to have a job and still have health care so you can pursue your entrepreneurial risk of writing, painting, taking pictures. It's just such a pain in the rear end to have to have a job. It's so damn mean of this country to require people to have a job. It stifles people. It stifles creativity and economic growth to require people to have a job, to have health care. What a country. Man, are we horribly rotten mean to people. So Pelosi says go ahead, health care will allow people to quit their jobs and write, take pictures and paint while the rest of us work to pay for it. While the rest of us work to pay for these... never mind."
If everyone is rich, then no one is rich.
Also, remember that Chappelle show bit about reparations?
More Rush: "So quit work. Indulge your fantasies. Become an artist or documentarian, photographer, what have you -- and let the rest of us pay for your health care bill.... Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance.... She's attempting to establish solidarity with the nation's freeloaders! She's encouraging the freeloaders to freeload. Isn't it such a shame that this country requires people to work to have health care? How inhumane is that? So we're going to enable you to quit! If you want to dabble sitting there writing things, taking pictures or painting garbage that nobody will ever be able to understand, go for it!...Just move to Haight-Ashbury. Just be done with it. Move out there and start painting murals or whatever you want to do, and all of your neighbors will come up and pay for your health care for you."
"Remember when Pelosi was arguing for health insurance disconnected from working..."
She was arguing for health insurance disconnected from paying for it.
I wish people would think more concretely about economics. Instead they think money is wealth. No more wealth is "Things" and people providing you services.
No matter what "AI does", someone will have to make your "things" and produce the food and "the things", and sell the things/food, and move the things/food around. And maintain and repair all the things. And give you healthcare when you're sick. And provide you water, gas, light, fight fires, and provide security and police protection.
So vast numbers of people will have to work, no matter how many "tokens" and advances in AI we have. Lots of us could sit around and paint, but lots of us cant.
Probably the best example of how GDP and money doesn't equal wealth is WW II. The GDP soared from Dec 7th 1941 to September 1945. But you couldn't buy a new house or a new care. Tires/Gas/Food were all rationed. You couldn't travel overseas. Travel in the USA was difficult. The top tax rate was 90 percent, and for first time average people had to pay taxes.
People were employed and worked hard but what did they create? Weapons and supplies for the military. After the war, we had doubled the national debt and had no nothing to show for it but a big military and a lots of weapons.
So the big increase in GDP didn't mean an increase in the standard of living.
Resources are finitely available and accessible. Currency is merely a token to facilitate moderation of supply and demand. Inflation reflects a disjunction between hopes, dreams, and productivity.
Sam Altman is a shrewd guy. He's figured out that hypothesizing a utopian world in which the great desideratum is art (not status, wealth, beauty, or intellect) insulates him from criticism from both the left and the right. If people used their tokens to seek status, wealth, beauty, or intellectual achievement, tokens would be an engine of the dreaded inequality.
"Everybody gets a share!" —Milo Minderbender
This is very much the same as the "just print more money" scheme. Dollars, bitcoin, tokens, are all just socially acceptable substitutes for barter and have absolutely no intrinsic value.
Heinlein had some choice words about government "artists". They were not kind. But they were accurate.
But, hey, we'll ALL be artists. Cool. But where the hell did all the trash can wranglers go?
My understanding is that Sam Altman has a fairly substantial supply of tokens, which he is at liberty to distribute as he sees fit.
'"For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat." —2 Thessalonians 3:10, KJV
Quoted by, among others, Karl Marx, Lenin, Stalin, you get the gist.
Chicken eggs are a renewable resource and no one will go to bed hungry.
Max greater fool theory.
Charlie Munger has passed but he knew a financial scam when he saw one. He called crypto rat poison squared.
This will end badly.
Would you like to come up to my room and see my etchings?
But...I don't have, like...that many tokens...anymore
Yeah, but...I know, but...I used them for my art project...
Wait...I...maybe if you see what I...
That's not very nice.
With the above being said, I own a tiny amount of COIN and GLXY.
A nation’s economy consists of a vast network of millions of people doing millions of jobs, not all of them pleasant. The great Mike Rowe spent years highlighting people who do the “Dirty Jobs” that are necessary but often unpleasant. Quite a few of those jobs pay quite well, but who will do them under the Economics of Wishful Thinking like he proposes? Every product or service that we buy is the result of a supply chain of people, each performing a step in the process. The simple act of turning on a light switch is enabled by the labor of thousands of people to build the infrastructure and hundreds to thousands more to keep it running. All it would take to disrupt all that is a small number of skilled people who decide to pursue art or leisure rather than doing their jobs.
“ After the war, we had doubled the national debt and had no nothing to show for it but a big military and a lots of weapons.”
And we had bought our freedom, once more. And the freedom of the world.
RCOCEAN II said...
“Probably the best example of how GDP and money doesn't equal wealth is WW II. The GDP soared from Dec 7th 1941 to September 1945. But you couldn't buy a new house or a new care. Tires/Gas/Food were all rationed. You couldn't travel overseas. Travel in the USA was difficult. The top tax rate was 90 percent, and for first time average people had to pay taxes.”
About 8 or 9 million did, with transport arranged by Uncle Sam, too.
He needs to read Francisco D’Anconia’s discourse on the nature of money.
He is a perfect example of the people who push AI. Universal income, no work, etc. I used to call that Communism. Now the tech overlords call it 'freedom to become another Bach".
The leftists must be overjoyed-this is the end result of their policies.
Dystopian doesn't even begin to describe the world these asshats have planned for us. They will be part of another world, of course. but boy, do they want us contained and controlled.
Maybe it's a good idea for Musk, and Altman, and all their kind to actually go Mars.
Let them create their perfect society there. Pure communism.
The rest of us can stay here, and enjoy life.
Ann Althouse: the world’s best BS detector!
“ He needs to read Francisco D’Anconia’s discourse on the nature of money.”
Only on the Althouse blog.
Replace the word “like” with “fuck” and it could be Hunter Biden speaking.
A token theory.
Sam Altman appears to closely studied the philosophy of P.T. Barnum.
"The simple act of turning on a light switch is enabled by the labor of thousands of people to build the infrastructure and hundreds to thousands more to keep it running. All it would take to disrupt all that is a small number of skilled people who decide to pursue art or leisure rather than doing their jobs."
Eh. Chill. The basic infrastructure of our society was constructed by people who understood that neither they nor their employees were immortal.
"Isn't it such a shame that this country requires people to work to have health care?"
It seems kind of obvious that the existence of "health care" presupposes people working. When the 'ggers who used to be your best homies decide to glockulate your completely useless ass, someone is going to have to drive the ambulance that scrapes you off the street and injects you into the keeping-vermin-alive scam. And someone else is going to have to pas the laws that make the rest of us pay for your continuation. You think the productive economy bleeds itself to death?
RCOCEAN said:
"People were employed and worked hard but what did they create? Weapons and supplies for the military. After the war, we had doubled the national debt and had no nothing to show for it but a big military and a lots of weapons."
*****************
Sublime horseshit. During the 20 or so years after Japan's surrender the United States experienced a tremenous economic boom. We had the only fully functional industrial economy in the world, along with a workforce trained far beyond any other country's. And along the way we had DEFEATED the Japanese and Germans---or is that a "nothing to show for it" for you?
Geddouddaheah!.
Or we can just keep what we have, Grow old and the government pays your health insurance that you only contributed a small portion of the cost coverage.
The government does what it does including forming a masked black shirt army designed to keep the MAGA Deep State in power while adding to the National Debt.
But . . . the answer is never more bad bookkeeping. And the answer is not reducing controls to permit money laundering by the rich and famous and the giant corporations. In economics, this is striving for unearned rent without having invested in the production of income mostly by using political power.
The United States needs to save the world by ridding our financial system of cash-based transactions, cyber-based exchanges, and credit cards by adopting a Federal Reserve-run system similar to Brazil's Pix.
In the process, all the expensive overheads associated with private financial institutions disappear.
Pix has been around since 2020, so we know it works; unfortunately, bankers hold sway over Congress and the President. India uses a similar system, and the European Union is close to adopting a system for processing Euro transactions.
I have uncirculated Zimbabwe $100 trillion bills available now for $USD 100.00 each. Please forward your offer.
Gadfly: "Brazil's Pix"
Yep, all we need is an American Lula able to intervene in all our financial transactions any time he wants.
Would you want Trump to have that power?
RR
JSM
the fist comment elegantly and accurately describes the economic scenario…
It seems that leftists and EA sufferers - I meant "adherents" - (and, to be fair, a lot of moms) think everyone's "art" is going to be art. Is this a consequence of participation trophies or what?
And for some reason they also think that everyone will gain satisfaction by doing art of some kind. This I see as a holdover from the 19th century genteel and genteel-adjacent. It's Mr. Bingley, isn't it, who stammers on about "how accomplished young ladies are these days"? But the problem is that it's not very satisfying to look at your "art" and realize that the art of everyone else in the room is better... so then you have to destroy all standards so there's no way to judge the actual work, only the "artist" (on the basis of the "artist's " intersectionality quotient, for instance - a trait I would expect to be captured in the barcodes we'll all have tattooed on our forearms sooner or later).
Ugh. I'm in a mood this morning.
First, one must understand what AI is - a monetization scheme, and not for the masses.
Jordan Peterson has had some interesting discussions about the nature of money, wealth and poverty, and currency. https://www.superabundance.com/
These guys argue that the single most important factors in bringing people out of poverty are energy production and technological innovation. They back it up with real, verifiable stats. Basically the measure of wealth vs. poverty is how long or hard does one have to work in order to obtain basic necessities. For example in the mid-1800's the average person had to work 8 hours to earn enough to afford a bag of sugar; now it is about 20 minutes (those figures are just my own made up numbers for illustration, but are typical). The industrial revolution lifted a huge cohort of the world's population out of grinding poverty; the pace of economic gains for the very poor continues to accelerate with technological advancement, notwithstanding population growth.
Saifodeem Ammous wrote a fascinating book, "The Bitcoin Standard." While it is a good primer on Bitcoin, it is perhaps more informative about the nature of "money" and why government printing of "new" currency is not a solution. He is not a big fan of Keynes. Indeed, he argues that civilizational advancements and declines have been largely dependent upon the relative stability of currency, and that maintaining sound currency is a moral obligation of government.
Altman is obviously an economic illiterate.
This Altman guy sounds like a kook tbh. Why the hell do we listen to these screwballs?
So everyone has a gazillion tokens. A gazillion is now the base zero. Take away Altman’s crayon.
If Elon gets the same number of tokens as some starving Ethiopian, how is he gonna finance all those world improving businesses he dreams up?
Post a Comment
Please use the comments forum to respond to the post. Don't fight with each other. Be substantive... or interesting... or funny. Comments should go up immediately... unless you're commenting on a post older than 2 days. Then you have to wait for us to moderate you through. It's also possible to get shunted into spam by the machine. We try to keep an eye on that and release the miscaught good stuff. We do delete some comments, but not for viewpoint... for bad faith.