As it turns out, telling the world’s workers to prepare for a dystopia rife with poverty and alienation isn’t the smartest way to market your exciting new tech.
As data centers are shut down by angry mobs and AI surveillance cameras are ripped from their poles, the world’s tech billionaires and CEOs are waking up to the reality that the masses are, broadly speaking, not on board with their plan to automate the world with AI. It isn’t necessarily that working people want to stay shackled to the wage-based employment system, but that folks need those jobs to have any hope of eating, seeing a doctor, and sleeping with a roof over their heads.
Instead of the tone-deaf hype we once heard about AI’s potential, these rich and powerful figures are now moderating their messaging, calling for policy measures to help workers weather the AI storm — or perhaps head off a violent revolt led by the many who lost their jobs.
For example, Amazon executive chairman Jeff Bezos — whose net worth would take the average US worker 3.8 million years to earn on their own — recently shared his new belief that the bottom 50 percent of US earners should pay no federal income tax.
“You could double the taxes I pay and it’s not going to help that teacher in Queens,” he said, painting the federal income tax as the main hurdle for working-class families (though he’s started paying his share in recent years, Bezos paid $0 in federal income tax in 2007 and 2011, when he was already a multibillionaire.)
Elon Musk, meanwhile, has floated the idea of “universal high income,” a play on the well-known concept of universal basic income, where a government issues cost-of-living checks to the broader population (from what we can tell, the only difference is that Musk’s version would be driven by humanoid robots creating radical economic abundance).
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has similar ideas, like a “universal basic compute” where everybody’s income corresponds to a share of his company’s revenue — which would also conveniently make ChatGPT the most important AI chatbot on the planet.
There’s also another option that none of them seem to be pushing: if AI is as disruptive as they say, there’s always the option to pull the plug. That they won’t even consider this choice suggests that their appeals to the toiling masses aren’t in good faith — which at this point should be obvious to just about everyone.
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