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Comment by capableweb | Hacker News Reader

> Philanthropy is my full-time job these days, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how—in addition to helping people be more productive—AI can reduce some of the world’s worst inequities. Globally, the worst inequity is in health: 5 million children under the age of 5 die every year.

One great first step OpenAI can take towards this is by actually making their models open. As long as the models are intentionally kept back and intentionally profited from by already wealthy private citizens, inequality will grow, not shrink.

Not to mention that people in poor countries (which as Gates cites as the "hotspots" for inequality in health) won't be able to use some HTTP API based in US/SF. Not just that latency will kill requests, some of the places don't even have internet connectivity. How is OpenAI supposed to help those communities if the "inequality fighter GPT-4" is gate-kept behind a centralized HTTP API?

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Honestly I think its borderline criminal that gates say stuff like this "AI can reduce some of the world’s worst inequities. Globally, the worst inequity is in health: 5 million children under the age of 5 die every year." Like how is this not false advertising at its lightest and outright lying at its worse until AI is actually used to do something here with 5 million children dying? As far as I am aware the issue with famine and starvation in the global south is not that we have been unable to model these issues well with our current tooling, which probably also involves ml, and now need to ask a chatbot for what to do. It's been one of political will, considering how much wealth is present in this world.

Before this happens AI will be utilized to better navigate billing at hospitals to maximize the profits.

Let’s play a game of “conservative impacts of AI on the labor force”

- the Bureau of Labor Statistics thinks we should have 15% more software engineers in 10 years. What if we had 10% fewer?

-800k project managers - how about 650k in 10 years?

-nearly 4 million executive assistants and admins - let’s take 1M off that total

-millions combined (still) in clerical roles across industries, including financial, medical, warehouse, etc. let’s take 1-2M off that total

- journalists, writers, editors, graphic designers, interior designers, illustrators, …

… and the list goes on. These are intentionally conservative numbers (no 50% cuts or jobs going away entirely) but they still add up to millions.

In what sense is any of that “conservative”?

(I mean, my intuition would be, for example, that it means more software engineers, and disproportionately even more PMs -- though probably often with a different title -- as it expabds the market for software solutions, and reduces the engineering effort to product decision ratio. But that’s not conservative, any more than your catastrophizing is.)

Okay let’s take the software industry out of it. Do you think millions of non-software jobs will be affected?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FW3iOswWQAA933O?format=jpg&name=...

> [...] reduce some of the world’s worst inequities.

Is it fair to say that 90's and early 2000's microsoft was a great proponent and enabler of such inequalities?

Microsoft was the main driving force behind bringing down the price of computers and software come to a point where they could be in every home and in every classroom around the world. They have done more to educate people in developing countries and offer them a path out of poverty than maybe any other company in history.

The main reason microsoft software was ever used in developing countries was because it was easy enough to pirate -- not something the company did "on purpose" that I'm aware of

This! And I have to back you on that: “And as long as they’re going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.” [1]

[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-apr-09-fi-micro...

oh I had never heard it was an explicit strategy, I thought it sort of happened by accident. good to know

We could have just used Linux, which was free, instead of pirating Windows, but we didn't.

People in developing countries chose to pirate and use Windows because it ran most of the important apps of the era, namely video games, which were also easy to pirate, and because it ran on any custom built PC from the parts each user could afford to scrap together. It was the perfect storm.

At one point, I remember windows vista license being a significant price of a new computer. At the same time, microsoft made huge efforts to hurt linux image on the desktop, which could really bring "down the price of computers and software".

One may see them as a good "driving force behind bringing down the price of computers and software" for a very limited time. I don't know if the result of 90's and early 2000's microsoft was a net positive to the field.

I don't think "They have done more to educate people in developing countries [..] than maybe any other company in history" considering how they also made many governments, institutions and people dependent on their software. This eventually cost these same entities a lot more than needed if there was a healthy competition which always fought against.

What hurt Linux was that it was – and still is – completely unusable for the average non-technical person. Microsoft wasn't the one holding back adoption.

Been living in Mali for some times, worked in a few African countries.

Done charity work there.

Created an IT company there.

You have it totally backward.

IT is NOT helping the poorest part of Africa. Quite the opposite.

But it does help us create a lot of BS virtue signaling about all the good we do in Africa.

The explanation would take a lot of text, unfortunately and I'm not in the mood for the rant again. But it comes from experience, not from the idealized narrative you have been sold.

Is it your theory that capitalism makes people poorer?

If the money supply is fixed, and one person is rich, where does that money come from? By it not going to someone else.

It’s interesting how the first benefit he lists for AI is productivity. It was a similar message in one of OpenAI’s recent blog posts.

> AI can reduce some of the world’s worst inequities.

To reduce inequity abolish (c)opywrong laws.

BG grew rich via (c)opywrong laws.

That is the dilemma. Does he see it and just not connect the dots? Or can he connect the dots but doesn't really care? I am not sure.

What are "(c)opywrong" laws?

I'm not being facetious. What specifically are you drawing objection to?

Laws that make it illegal to use one's own property to share information.

A correction of the copyright misnomer.

Got it, so you have a general aversion to copyright, the concept of intellectual property, and to an extent, the funding of knowledge work I'm assuming?

You didn't carve out any exceptions, hence my assumption.

I have no aversion to `the funding of knowledge work`. (c)opywrong law is actually a huge tax on doing knowledge work for everyone except the 1%.

Can you help me understand how "[copyright] law is actually a huge tax on doing knowledge work for everyone except the 1%?"

Revenue gained from (c)opywrong law - minus sum of [all fees], [royalties], [license overhead], [additional red tape someone has to jump through to use information] - minus sum of the same for all government agencies that one pays taxes to.

> Revenue gained from [copyright] law - minus sum of [all fees], [royalties], [license overhead], [additional red tape someone has to jump through to use information] - minus sum of the same for all government agencies that one pays taxes to.

I'm not sure this answers the question. Who's revenue is this, and which of the elements you described is "a tax"?

He didn't grow rich via copywrong laws. He grew rich by creating value and selling it. Their business model was selling software. Copyright laws kept people from copying the software freely without paying for it.

Joshua Ward didn't grow rich via slavery. He grew rich by creating cotton and selling it. Their business model was selling cotton. Slavery laws kept people from breathing freely without paying for it.

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