A.I. and Politics - Important Question of Time

 "A.I. will generate phenomenal wealth largely by destroying countless jobs — that’s a big part of how everything gets cheaper — and shifting huge amounts of wealth from labor to capital. And whether that world becomes a post-scarcity utopia or a feudal dystopia hinges on how wealth, power and dignity are then distributed — it hinges, in other words, on politics.

An answer: a move toward taxing land and wealth, and distributing it to all.
 
And so another way of saying what you’re saying is that A.I. will make owners of capital and land much more powerful. And we are then somehow going to tax the owners of capital and land much more aggressively. And one of my, certainly, concerns about the world being sketched here is that my sense as a political person is you would somehow need to get a more equitable distribution of power in order to have the more equitable distribution of resources.

Something I’ve been starting to try to think through is how do you have a technologically aware progressivism. Have you ever read the book, “Fully Automated Luxury Communism“?

The argument it makes is that the set of technological changes coming down the pike — of which A.I. is central to that, but it’s not the only one — they actually make a case for much more radical form of public ownership. He’s using communism a little bit facetiously. But forms of communism, of socialism make a lot — of planning, of ownership, make a lot more sense under the technological structure that’s coming.

But the question then becomes in order to have that happen, I think you actually need to set up the politics before the technology hits. Because if the technology hits first and then it just pools power among the people who own it, well, power increases its own wealth and increases its own power. And then we got these crazy A.I.s that are out there trying to manipulate public opinion and whatever else. It can get a little bit dystopic.

But one of my observations from covering policy for a long time is policy reflects power. It doesn’t precede it.

In the Industrial Revolution, when the joint stock corporation was created as this second order sovereign entity, everyone was OK with that, because it was second order and the real sovereign had more power. But I think you can certainly make a case now that the giant tech companies are more powerful than many countries, certainly not the U.S. yet. But they don’t have any kind of democratically governed system. So yeah, I mean, that causes me deep discomfort."