u/Great-Gardian

Open Philanthropy (rebranded as Coefficient Giving) is financed primarily by billionaire Facebook co-founder and Asana CEO Dustin Moskovitz.

In 2016, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman led a $50 million venture-capital investment in Asana, a software company founded and led by Moskovitz. In 2017, Moskovitz’s Open Philanthropy provided a $30 million grant to OpenAI. Asana and OpenAI also share a board member in Adam D’Angelo, a former Facebook executive. Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/13/open-philanthropy-funding-ai-policy-00121362

Moskovitz’s Open Philanthropy is the largest donor to an entire ecosystem of organizations lobbying for "AI safety". Source: https://www.aipanic.news/p/the-ai-existential-risk-industrial

The "AI safety" ecosystem encompasses hundreds of organizations. Many advocate extreme authoritarian measures to stop/pause AI. They include “requiring registration and verifying location of hardware,” “a strict licensing regime, clamp down on open-source models, and impose civil and criminal liability on developers.”

These regulations are pushed as solutions to the problem of AI doomerism. AI doomerism is the narrative around AI and its "dangerous civilization-ending effect". This narrative is amplified by the network of "AI safety" and funded by tech billionaires influenced by the Effective Altruism ideology.

Effective Altruism is one popular ideology among the rich. You can learn more on that here: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-acronym-behind-our-wildest-ai-dreams-and-nightmares/

It is clear the Big Tech billionaires want global surveillance of the AI industry and "AI safety" is a costume to trick everyone.

I'm concerned about technophobia rising in leftism. Strong technophobic opinions usually share absolutist generalization like "this technology is inherently harmful and should be rejected entirely." I often see this type of opinion on AI.

Strong technophobia is a problem because it increases inequality. Let's compare a group who use AI with a technophobic group.

Over time, the AI group will process more information faster, compare options more effectively, make more data-informed decision, get comfortable with AI-assisted learning, research, and problem-solving. Workers will be more productive and will gain more opportunities to be hired or promoted than the technophobics.

The technophobic group will be less productive because of their lower technology adoption. Less opportunities will present to them because of their reduced productivity. Access to adopt technology will be limited because of less opportunities.

This is an exemple of economic inequality widening, but I also think political awareness will be amplified for the AI group, and reduced for the technophobic group because of how informations is faster and diversified with new technologies. Examples, Internet is faster and more diversified than television. AI can compare more information and faster than me manually searching Internet.

This isn't saying AI and new technologies are perfect. We should be skeptical of them with nuances, and not with radical technophobia. Leftism is about progress for a better world, and technology can help us do that.

I want to look at incentives States have to regulate and redistribute AI's benefits.

First, the incentives to regulate and redistribute. If AI leads to large-scale job displacement or inequality, governments will face unemployment spikes, political unrest and loss of trust in institutions. Redistribution here can act as a stabilizer. States may regulate AI to avoid overdependence on foreign tech giants to build domestic capacity.

Second, why States would not act. Large tech firms have significant influence through lobbying, campaign financing and partnerships with governments. States worry that too much regulation and taxation result in capital flight.

How do you think the States will respond to this contradiction?

The idea that automation will naturally free people from work sounds intuitive, but history doesn’t really support it.

Since the Industrial Revolution, productivity has skyrocketed. A worker today produces far more than one 100 years ago. Yet most people still work full-time. Unless something intervenes, like labor laws, unions, or redistribution, automation tends to concentrate wealth and power, not spread leisure.

Historically, reductions in working hours came from pressure, not technology alone. Whether that happens with AI is a political and economic choice, not a technological inevitability.

So how can we organize pressure? How to turn concerns into coordinated leverage?