AI risk, ad taxes, and information curating
Does AI pose a meaningful existential threat to humanity? If an existential threat is one that can lead to mass death or human extinction, and a risk of extinction is meaningful if it is (say) at least 10% as large as the risk of a nuclear holocaust, my answer is that I have no idea.
But it seems clear that AI does pose a serious threat to democratic stability. It will give anti-democratic actors a powerful new tool for spreading political misinformation and fostering discontent with elites and resentment of socially disfavored groups. More generally, AI will speed the process of social and economic change, which unsettles people and makes them more receptive to the promises of authoritarians.
This is very much worth worrying about, and it strengthens the case for social media reforms that encourage information curating or gatekeeping.
I see 4 major concerns about social media: 1) threats to democratic stability caused by the propagation of right-wing misinformation, 2) psychological harm, especially to young people, and especially to teenage girls, 3) privacy concerns, and 4) anti-trust concerns related to price gouging and competition. In my view this is the right order of priority: limiting the spread of misinformation is very important; in comparison I just don’t care much about anti-trust problems. (Large firms and privacy risks might contribute to political risks. If so, this bolsters the case for addressing privacy and reducing firm size. But putting political risks aside, even if we assume that anti-trust costs are at the high end of the plausible range, they will still pale in importance relative to the first problem, and quite likely the second, and probably the third).
The threat to democracy posed by AI will largely operate through social media and the internet, at least in the foreseeable future. Ideally, worry about AI will motivate us to think about how to limit the political destructiveness of social media. How to proceed is far from clear, at least to me, but we could take a careful look at the case for a tax on digital advertising laid out by Paul Romer. Romer proposes a graduated tax on ad revenue for two reasons: it would favor smaller firms, thus reducing the danger posed by behemoths like Google and Facebook, and it would push the internet towards a subscription model.
This is a very useful proposal. I might prefer a flat tax that starts at a low rate and rises slowly over time, gently nudging the internet in the direction of a subscription model that allows for more effective information curating and gatekeeping. If a graduated tax worked to reduce the size of individual firms – which is the point of using a graduated tax, rather than a flat tax – it would not create pressure to move to a subscription model, since smaller firms would pay no tax. This is potentially a problem: Twitter would pay no tax under Romer’s graduated tax plan, but it plays a role in the political disinformation process, and a graduated tax would create many more Twitters (if it worked as Romer hopes). AI makes encouraging gatekeeping and curating even more important; it should lead us to put more weight on moving to a subscription model. In addition, a flat tax would be less costly to the big incumbent firms than a graduated tax, which would make it easier to pass. A graduated tax would mostly benefit small firms that do not yet exist, and are therefore in no position to lobby in favor of it.
In any event, it’s not entirely clear how well a tax designed to push the internet and social media towards a subscription model would work. For one thing, some people might well pay for misinformation, or for accounts on social media platforms that allow misinformation to spread. But it might work, and it would help support organizations that do real shoe-leather reporting. Ad taxes might also lead to usage fees, which in turn might limit social media use by teens, and by the rest of us.
I am worried that the apocalyptic rhetoric surrounding AI will divert our attention from political threats that are both serious and immediate.
If nothing else, AI will likely cause a lot of job loss, particularly white collar. Some say millions of them.
Maybe this is only fair, in that ‘automation’ (computers, robots, etc.) have already cost millions of factory jobs. The industrial revolution keeps evolving.
Learn to enjoy a life of leisure, if only you can figure out how to pay for it.
Dobbs
interesting that you are worried avout job loss when the “serious people” are telling us there won’t be enough workers in twenty years to support all the retired people…even if those retired people paid for their own retirement.
Leisure is what makes us human. It is a blessing long enjoyed only by the rich and powerful. Social Security made it possible (retirement) for the poor. And that does seem to be at least a factor in why “the rich” hate Social Security.
The problem is not so much paying for it… the problem is learning to use it for a fuller happier life that does not consist entirely in the desperate pusuit of plastic toys in the vain hope they will fill the miserable emptiness we feel but do not understand.
Alrighty then. Many of those soon-to-be unemployed folks can readily find jobs in elder care. Problem solved!
OTOH …
Introducing ElliQ The sidekick for healthier, happier aging
300 Million Jobs Will Be Lost Or Degraded By Artificial Intelligence
or so says Goldman-Sachs
If generative AI lives up to its hype, the workforce in the United States and Europe will be upended, Goldman Sachs reported this week in a sobering and alarming report about AI’s ascendance. The investment bank estimates 300 million jobs could be lost or diminished by this fast-growing technology.
Goldman contends automation creates innovation, which leads to new types of jobs. For companies, there will be cost savings thanks to AI. They can deploy their resources toward building and growing businesses, ultimately increasing annual global GDP by 7%.
In recent months, the world has witnessed the ascendency of OpenAI software ChatGPT and DALL-E. ChatGPT surpassed one million users in its first five days of launching, the fastest that any company has ever reached this benchmark. …
The Potentially Large Effects of Artificial Intelligence on Economic Growth
so when did business implement automation and turn and hire more people than they had before?
re-posting…
ChatGPT took their jobs. Now they walk dogs and fix air conditioners.
Washington Post via Seattle Times – June 3
… Some economists predict the technology could replace hundreds of millions of jobs, in a cataclysmic reorganization of the workforce mirroring the industrial revolution. Skeptics say that this fear of job losses is overblown and that AI chatbots will become aids, allowing people to work faster.
For some workers, the impact is real. Those that write marketing and social media content are finding themselves in the first wave of people being replaced with tools like chatbots seemingly able to produce plausible alternatives to their work. …
People may work faster for sure. And then firms will cut staff. Remaining staff will get the message that the cuts were kind of arbitrary and there will be practically no increase in compensation for this productivity. Possibly product and service prices might decrease, so long as true competition is required, but no betting on that too heavily.
chatboxes produce nonsense that gives us the illusion of communicating…no different, really, than advertising and politics has always been.
maybe it will create millions of legal researcher jobs to check the made up citations in briefs, plus millions of fact checkers to edit news stories and releases.
Hmmm. Create millions of legal researching chatbots maybe.
i suppose one possibility is that millions will get hired to validate what ai tool said
yea if they only fix the made up case names and references, seems like a lawyer has already experienced thus. course he used the tool that if any of the cases/references were real, and it confirmed they were
This is a fine essay, and possibly you could further explain this passage:
“AI does pose a serious threat to democratic stability. It will give anti-democratic actors a powerful new tool for spreading political misinformation and fostering discontent with elites and resentment of socially disfavored groups. More generally, AI will speed the process of social and economic change, which unsettles people and makes them more receptive to the promises of authoritarians….”
Isn’t “ad revenue” already taxed? McDonald’s pays a media platform a fee to run their ads and I supposed that that fee was reportable revenue for tax purposes. People have advertised their offerings for centuries. Current AI services I think are being employed a lot to generate ad materials. Also “gatekeeping and curating” sounds like AI-speak for censoring…..maybe just use that word.