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There’s also plenty of opportunity for corruption. But even with safeguards, there’s going to be opportunities to steer investment towards favored companies and industries and away from those that oppose the administration or otherwise do things the administration doesn’t like (think of efforts to divest from Israel or fossil fuel companies).
“Just invest in the S&P”. Something like this would give substantial power to the index makers. But it also gives preference to already huge companies. Small, unlisted companies would be indirectly penalized by having to compete against companies with government funding.
It's somewhat entertaining to watch both sides argue about this as if it's some major difference when both are actually aligned on wanting bigger gov and more gov ownership/control of corps (one party via taxes the other wants it direct).
Corporations are literally government sponsored entities. Where do you think they get their limited liability and separate legal personhood from?
We should own a piece of every single one for that service we provide.
The ideal in a democracy would be that we behave as adults and make the decision where to draw the lines.
...and yeah, corruption is a problem, but it's going to find a way regardless of what we throw at it. We would be better off handling the existing corruption than worrying about some hypothetical future corruption as a reason we can't try new things.
The title has the opposite meaning: it's not X, but it's Y.
Consider the OpenAI case of "goblins". The models overfit to a specific type of output. Goblins was a specific case of this type and needed to be corrected.
https://openai.com/index/where-the-goblins-came-from/
> We unknowingly gave particularly high rewards for metaphors with creatures. From there, the goblins spread.
I've never really cared about fashion.
(Disclaimer: didn't read the article. It's paywalled.)
Also, FT is too big to not be aware of AI writing, and to not have internal checks (Pangram, ...)
AI speak infects human language now, people start to talk like LLMs.
"It isn't x, its y" was a common device before, AI has just highlighted it's use. Em dashes on the other hand are the devil's work.
Using capital ownership to distribute the proceeds of an industry whose raw material was the creative output of everyone everywhere … seems like the neatest and most obvious possible solution to AI displacement and provenance. But I can see how it might make a few dozen people less likely to be billionaires.
* The clunky turns of phrase and jarring introduction of analogies reads strongly of Claude to me, at least
But basically, the argument is that a government shouldn't accrue and own appreciating assets mixed with AI skepticism.
SWFs are a great tool for reducing inequality and influencing corporate governance. see, e.g. https://peoplespolicyproject.org/project/creating-an-alaska-...
Some technologies are inherently more centralizing, some are less so.
I agree that most technologies can be applied for imperialistic interests, and the tech space is full of things that seemed decentralizing and have since been captured, but it's not quite law.
IC manufacturing is basically a modern global palace economy full of shipping and single-player choke points and large capital investments, so it leans hard to the centralizing side. It's less clear that AI will work that way, if it turns out that it is relatively practical to do useful work on locally hosted models it might end up being somewhat decentralizing.
Or, we'll get technological and/or regulatory capture, end up paying rents to technofeudalist douchebags with data centers and proprietary models who bribe governments and peek at user behavior and try to use their already vast resources to preemptively capture any value before anyone else can, until the next major perturbation.
But this is the world we live in.
If you put your head in the sand, you become the EU - squeezed by trade wars against China and the US with two large scale conventional wars within your near abroad.
Read the full thread on Hacker News →
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