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Ocasio-Cortez Says ‘We Should Not Be Entertaining a Bailout’ of AI Industry as Bubble Fears Grow (www.commondreams.org)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/politics@lemmy.world
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[+] -8 points 11 months ago* (19 children)

I... actually disagree with this even though I don't want to.

Yes, fuck OpenAI and Meta.

But the problem is that the government has been 500% enabling this "bubble". Basically any governent grant for the past five or six years has more or less required "AI" to be front and center. The more senior folk have generally been good about "I am doing Machine Learning enhanced construction of that office building, sure, whatever" but this, in turn, has more or less gutted academia as more and more programs have essentially been built around providing what funding is literally asking for. Flipping NOBODY thinks "I am a prompt engineer" is worth anything but scorn and mockery. But when those grants and CFPs basically require a prompt engineer on the proposal to have any chance of being accepted...

It's easy to say "you should have known better and not lied to us" but... they were telling the lies that were demanded of them. And just cutting them free and letting capitalism sort it out is going to mean pretty much an entire generation lost and countless companies down the drain as well. Which... also won't be all that useful for getting people healthcare.

Similarly, Jensen is a prick (and always has been but...). But if the rug gets pulled and the "bubble pops"? nVidia is not a US company but it is essential to the US economy and capabilities. We can't afford to let that go the way of Intel.

Do I think giant checks should be written? No. But we need a LOT of transition grants and programs and possibly outright stimulus checks so that the entire tech and research and science industries can pivot to what is being asked of them now.

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  • [–] 23 points 11 months ago (13 children)

    I think the point is that the people should be "bailed out" before the shareholders should be. There should be a safety net in place robust enough that stupid risks like this can be allowed to fail without essentials and ordinary people being caught in the fallout.

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago (6 children)

    The problem is most Americans with retirement savings are shareholders of these tech companies whether they know it or not. My mom lost a HUGE part of her retirement savings when WorldCom went under and was never able to recover from it and is now in her mid 70s and still has to work full time. She's almost blind and can hardly walk and she's worked her whole life and tried to do everything right but her financial advisor was giving her what was thought to be good, safe advice in the early 2000s and completely changed how her twilight years are playing out.

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  • [–] 8 points 11 months ago

    That sucks, but we're not a real economy if we just keep bad companies afloat because people have invested in them. We certainly don't need to filter any aid to unfortunate retirees in need through the stock market.

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago* (3 children)

    "Retirement savings" are a scam.

    They shift the social responsibility of caring for those who cannot work for pay into a personal responsibility. Retirement should not be something that you have to save for by bending over backwards for corporate overlords to get a well-paying job and putting away a tiny share of your tiny share of the profits for later. Retirement should be part of a robust social safety net. People should be cared for in their old age (and at every age) regardless of whether they would be able to earn enough wages to put away retirement savings.

    To younger generations, the idea of retirement savings is laughable. Not just because it's so far away and it's dubious whether society will even last that long, but because the social safety net is in such a bad state that able-bodied young people are suffering at a massive scale right now. We aren't even earning enough to pay our cost of living, let alone retirement savings. The system is deeply broken and needs much deeper and much wider fixes than a bailout only for those lucky enough to have retirement savings in the first place. Not to mention that most of the bailout money would go to the wealthier shareholders that have more shares.

    We need the rich to be taxed much more and for money to be distributed as aid to all who need it, not just those who have retirement savings at stake.

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  • [–] 0 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Great points, but not the world we currently live in, nor on any track towards. I'll just let my mom know she can stop working because society should be taking care of her and I'll go ahead and liquidate my 401k and IRAs since they won't be needed.

    It's great to work towards those goals of having better social programs, but you still have to exist in the world that you actually live in.

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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago* (1 child)

    It's easy to talk about the living in the world we live in when such a world is not an existential threat to you. There are many for whom this world has become an existential threat, and the numbers keep going up as we continue to live in this world that we live in, as you put it.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago

    Who said that this world isn't also an existential threat to me? I've never implied that things shouldn't change, in fact I said that they should. My statement about having to live in the world we have is merely a statement of fact, but I was hoping to imply that for many this still means investing for your future. Just because it isn't useful advice for some, doesn't mean it isn't still helpful for others.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (5 children)

    The US in particular has embraced 401ks over pensions. The advantage is that you don't lose the past 20 years of your life if you change jobs. The bad news is that you kinda need the economy to function.

    But, regardless: how would you help "the people" without "the companies"? You can give someone 2 grand but that is worth jack all when it comes to paying rent for more than a few months (or one month...) and so forth.

    And it still has the fundamental problem of a complete brain and capability drain.

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (4 children)

    You can help the people by funding social programs like social security, healthcare (medicare, medicaid, and ACA subsidies or better yet a full single-payer healthcare program), food assistance, housing assistance, education, childcare, direct monetary assistance for the working class (such as tax breaks or UBI), etc.

    You can put the people before the companies by not bailing out the shareholders of stupid investments like AI, by cracking down on labor violations and monopolies, and by seriously increasing taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals in order to fund the social safety net. Reducing spending on the military industrial complex would probably help too.

    Neither 401ks or corporate pensions are a good solution. They place a burden that should be caught by a social safety net on each individual, and further pressure each individual to engage in capitalism in order to secure their retirement, giving more power to the employers. Retirement should not be tied to employment, same as healthcare.

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  • [–] 0 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    Okay. If we can get all of that infrastructure in place, sure.

    Otherwise: A LOT of people in a LOT of industries will be suffering in the medium/long term without some form of offramp.

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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Okay, but hear me out.

    Take the amount of money that would be spent on a bailout. If you go ahead with the bailout, then the majority of that money goes to the wealthy because they are the ones who can afford most of those shares. Some working-class people get aided, but most of the money goes to maintain or even increase the power of the wealthy.

    Now, take that same amount of money, and put it towards ACA subsidies, or any other social program that aids the working class. Now the vast majority of that money goes to those who really need it, and it lessens the pain which the working class would be burdened with following the crash.

    You can put some of that money directly into useful research grants that aren't AI related as well.

    Whatever your concern is, you can spend the money directly addressing that concern with much more efficiency than a corporate bailout that benefits mostly the wealthy.

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  • [–] -1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 child)

    Yes. Which is why I specifically mentioned the need for grants and incentive programs to allow those companies and research groups/universities to pivot.

    Because, yes, we very much need better social programs. But there are going to be a LOT of people out of jobs. And a LOT of early career/new grads who just spent the past 4-8 years of their life literally training themselves to do what the government et al demanded of them. And they'll be shit out of luck.

    All of which will very much overwhelm whatever half-assed social programs we rapidly implement.

    Like... to be blunt, what you are suggesting is very comparable to the "trump healthcare plan" of giving every 2 grand and telling them to figure it out themselves. On the surface, maybe that sounds nice. But that is not much of an insurance premium and would get cleaned out the first time someone gets sick. It is not a solution.

    The reality is that we desperately need actual social safety nets and we have needed them for decades at this point. But "We'll figure something out in a few years, for real this time" doesn't help people in even the medium term.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago

    Sending everyone 2 grand would be much more effective than spending the equivalent amount of money on a corporate bailout. A corporate bailout would do nothing to help all those people out of jobs. They don't have stocks. They don't have useful skills, if they're trained for AI specifically.

    2 grand is not enough, but it would absolutely be more useful to give the money to them than to give it to their employers.

    The democrats absolutely should oppose a corporate bailout. I have no faith that they would actually do that, but they should.

    I also highly doubt that Trump would actually follow through on that 2 grand thing.

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  • [–] 8 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    Why does anyone need NVIDIA? If they go busy, they sell their assets to pay their debts. Including IP.

    I don't think NVIDIA will go bust. They have a product people want even without ai and have been profitable for years.

    However, they will have a giant correction.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    I don't think you'll like the orgs that buy nVidia IP. I'll give you a hint: it will be jared and the saudis.

    But yes. nVidia is in a really good position to pivot. But that pivot IS important. And it is important that there are companies to actually buy those cards while they shift towards "our flagship is data center and HPC cards" rather than "our flagship is machine learning cards". Since the nVidia model is very much to manufacture as many flagships as they can and sell the factory seconds and fourths to the rest of the market.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago

    Or the Chinese.

    However, the point is that if they go bust, the technology is not lost. Someone will buy it and will seek to profit from it in the same way that NVIDIA currently does, by selling buck loads and pushing forward with development.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago

    A "generation" of students aren't prompt engineers. And even if you learned one useless skill in your major during college, you still have the entire rest of the program. I haven't used many of the skills I learned in college and my industry has changed extensively since then, but learning those things contributed to a larger competency.

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