Maybe because I'm not originally from this country my view is different, but I think the fact the majority of the world's increase in population is about to happen in extremely poor places that will be subject to the worst of climate change means that the AI will have to be immensely powerful to actually increase worse imbalances than we're already headed for.
So powerful that it'd also raise the floor on quality of life for the 8 billion people on earth almost with ease, even if its owners stayed deeply profit/power motivated.
After all, it's not like the tech bros will get to make money by hoarding the AI and it's fruits after all. They need to apply to downstream tasks to actually cash in on its value. They could hoard the AI itself, but if OpenAI was suddenly able to break into every industry with a tireless AI army of top engineers and researchers they'd still be be producing real advancements for the world.
(and to be clear that's closer the worst timelines where AI advances so greatly. I think the more realistically we'd seem competition lead to something much closer to widespread advancements rather than some singular superpower emerging)
I am almost certainly wrong, and we will find some solution, or sue the hell out of the genAI firms, but this is the economic issue I see. It competes with productivity as a core economic driver of human wellbeing:
Concentration of wealth.
GenAI consumes content, even that created in low resource languages and regions, and spits it back out, separating the creator from the traffic due to their labor.
This isn’t entirely unknown - we’ve all been inspired by someone else stuff and copied our own.
Now, genAi firms have inserted themselves into this loop. And they’re cutting out the creator.
The scaled, automated pseudo workers that these firms promise, are owned by the firms. The productivity they create accrues to a small group of foreign multi nationals.
Economically - this shouldn’t be an issue. More productivity, means more capability of people doing newer work.
I do expect this to happen. However firms are also very good at making sure they capture the greater share of the market.
So powerful that it'd also raise the floor on quality of life for the 8 billion people on earth almost with ease, even if its owners stayed deeply profit/power motivated.
After all, it's not like the tech bros will get to make money by hoarding the AI and it's fruits after all. They need to apply to downstream tasks to actually cash in on its value. They could hoard the AI itself, but if OpenAI was suddenly able to break into every industry with a tireless AI army of top engineers and researchers they'd still be be producing real advancements for the world.
(and to be clear that's closer the worst timelines where AI advances so greatly. I think the more realistically we'd seem competition lead to something much closer to widespread advancements rather than some singular superpower emerging)