'I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff': professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI

[highplainsdem]

28. I wish I could believe that Musk really wants abundance for all, but IIRC there's little or no evidence

he's at all charitable:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musk_Foundation

Both the selection of recipients of donations and a relatively low payout ratio have been criticized. In 2021 and 2022, the Musk Foundation awarded less than 5% of its assets in donations, after its assets grew to several billion dollars. This means that it fell short of the legal minimum donation required to maintain its tax-exempt status.[8] The Guardian criticized the fact that the foundation financed various projects of Musk and his family members, although this is not unusual for billionaires and wealthy donors.[2] The New York Times concluded that through 2022, about half of the Musk Foundation's grants went to organizations "tied" to Musk, one of his employees, or one of his companies. Musk's philanthropy would be "largely self-serving."[8]

In one instance, after Musk challenged World Food Programme director David Beasley to draft a plan to use money of Musk's that Beasley said could contribute to ending world hunger, Musk instead donated the $6 billion in question to his own foundation even after Beasley's plan showed that the money could feed 42 million people for a year.[27] According to the biographer Walter Isaacson, Musk has little interest in philanthropy. He believes that he can do more for humanity by leaving his money in his companies and pursuing the goals of sustainable energy, space exploration and AI safety with them.[28] On December 12, 2024, The New York Times reported the foundation again awarded less than 5% of its assets in donations in 2024.[3][29]

And what he and DOGE did with USAID was so cruel it could be considered sadistic. Of course most of those people were not the white people from the right countries that he cares about.

I believe Musk would like to be viewed as a technological savior of mankind, and he might be thinking that if abundance for others went mostly to the right race and ethnicities, and if he didn't have to surrender any of his own wealth - and especially if he would be acknowledged as the savior of humanity - he d be happy with a high-tech abundant utopia. Especially if it meant more white babies being born.

I'd say there's zero chance he wouldn't do everything he could to keep the wealthy from being taxed enough for even a low UBI.

Ten years ago Sam.Altman talked a bit about a UBI when he was interviewed by the New Yorker, but his ideas were very hazy and unrealistic.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-manifest-destiny

The problems with the idea seem as basic as the promise: Why should people who don’t need a stipend get one, too? Won’t free money encourage indolence? And the math is staggering: if you gave each American twenty-four thousand dollars, the annual tab would run to nearly eight trillion dollars—more than double the federal tax revenue. However, Altman told me, “The thing most people get wrong is that if labor costs go to zero”—because smart robots have eaten all the jobs—“the cost of a great life comes way down. If we get fusion to work and electricity is free, then transportation is substantially cheaper, and the cost of electricity flows through to water and food. People pay a lot for a great education now, but you can become expert level on most things by looking at your phone. So, if an American family of four now requires seventy thousand dollars to be happy, which is the number you most often hear, then in ten to twenty years it could be an order of magnitude cheaper, with an error factor of 2x. Excluding the cost of housing, thirty-five hundred to fourteen thousand dollars could be all a family needs to enjoy a really good life.”

So with everything magically cheap except housing, and housing excluded, he could imagine UBI. He also excluded healthcare, a car, and all sorts of other expenses. And it was probably especially important to.exclude the.cost of housing when some of the interviewing for the profile was done.at "a seven-thousand-square-foot mansion, catered food under a grapefruit tree festooned with lights, a back yard that seemed to stretch to Redwood City." It wasn't Sam's mansion, but he was already quite well off by then, though I don't know if he was driving around in his $20 million McLaren yet. (See https://www.thesupercarblog.com/chatgpt-creator-sam-altman-spotted-in-his-mclaren-f1/ which says he might own two of those.)

I have no idea what sort.of housing he envisioned for those families getting a UBI. Maybe a nice tent city, a long way from any of his houses.

The abundance the tech lords want is for themselves. They like the idea of network states, which Gil.Duran has written about. High tech fiefdoms, basically, where they'd set the rules, and they would rule the small population they'd permit to live there.

Sam did talk briefly a few years ago of possibly considering every person on the planet worth one eight-billionth of the world's compute, which he said would be the most valuable resource. And then people could use that fraction of the world's compute for their own computing needs, or they could sell it to another person or business, and this would give everyone a wonderfully abundant life. But he admitted he wasn't sure how that would work, and he soon stopped talking about it.

He's now mentioned at times that we'll be in for a few rough decades before we reach the AI utopia he wants us all to imagine, our happy AI-run world with few if any jobs for humans.

The tech lords are not on humanity's side.