Who pay for the AI payouts?

Detail of Nikola Tesla from a Serbian Dinar banknote.

Andreas Cervenka is my favourite economy journalist. A few years ago I wrote about his book Greedy Sweden: how the people's home turned into a paradise for the ultra-wealthy.

Andreas just published an article¹ about how Elon Musk had the Tesla board of directors promise him a payment of one trillion USD if Tesla makes certain goals². Here's an English auto-translated version of the article.

I'm quoting Andreas's article; any translation error is my fault:

Nine hundred and forty billion Swedish kronor. That's how much richer IT company Oracle's founder Larry Ellison became in a single day last week, temporarily surpassing Elon Musk as the world's wealthiest man with a fortune of just over 3,500 billion Swedish kronor.

That's around two million times the median for an average American.

A little more than three years ago, I wrote about how the USA CEO-to-worker salary ratio is on average 1000 to one. In 2021, Amazon paid its CEO 6,474 times more than they paid their median worker³.

One of Andreas's great talents is to put things in perspective.

A bonus agreement with Tesla could give him up to 1,000 billion dollars in shares – 9,300 billion Swedish kronor or roughly the same as Saudi Arabia's current GDP.

In fairness, the odds of him getting the money seem quite high. Among many other things, Tesla's market value must increase almost eightfold from today's levels over the next ten years.

Actually, Tesla recently and silently gave up their age-old promise of self-driving autonomy⁴, which is quite interesting. Musk has repeatedly lied about the subject⁵ and now it's scrubbed off the Tesla site.

Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called Godfather of AI, recently said this⁶:

What's actually going to happen is rich people are going to use AI to replace workers. It's going to create massive unemployment and a huge rise in profits. It will make a few people much richer and most people poorer. That's not AI's fault, that is the capitalist system.

I believe Hinton is correct, at least for a time. The AI bubble⁷ and its pop that may very well come could make the 2007 financial crash seem like a case of the sniffles. Again, from Andreas's article:

A clear effect so far is that those who own AI technology have become big winners. Of the ten richest people in the world right now, according to Bloomberg, are nine owners in companies whose value is in one way or another tied to expectations of AI.

These nine individuals together are good for 2,200 billion dollars, or more than the assets in Norway's oil fund.

And there are already signs that AI is about to change the labor market.

Several large American companies such as IBM and Microsoft have reduced their workforce by thousands of people as AI can take over certain tasks.

A recent study⁸ by researchers at Stanford University in the US shows that AI hits young people hardest.

The study shows that it's easier for people with work experience to not be 'replaced' by AI. I say 'replaced' because very few job titles can simply be replaced by AI; if you seriously believe AI can simply replace some jobs, you're either deluded or have not given more thought to the matter. Yes, seriously. This is by Ed Zitron, from the article I linked to earlier:

Any of these companies talking about "growth from AI" or "the jobs that AI will replace" or "how AI has changed their organization" are hand-waving to avoid telling you how much money these services are actually making them. If they were making good money and experiencing real growth as a result of these services, they wouldn't shut the fuck up about it! They'd be in your ear and up your ass hooting about how much cash they were rolling in!

And they're not, because they aren't rolling in cash, and are in fact blowing nearly a hundred billion dollars each to build massive, power-hungry, costly data centers for no real reason.

Don’t watch the mouth — watch the hands. These companies are going to say they’re seeing growth from AI, but unless they actually show you the growth and enumerate it, they are hand-waving.

He's right. The big AI companies are not 'raking it in'. In fact, each of the biggest AI companies are losing billions of USD per year, and things are not looking better. While people like Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI (who make Chat-GPT), claims that AI will become self-aware in the year 2025⁹ or kill humanity¹⁰, one thing is certain: while people on Earth are dying because of problems that could be prevented by a handful of humans, we should dismantle our current system of operations and create something that works instead of listening to mountebanks.

If I'd lie, there'd be consequences, regardless of context. A lie is something bad. If one lies, one should own up to the lie and take the consequences. Every person alive has lied, but grifters are something different.

A handful of people are CEOs at companies that are built on what other people made, illegally so; recently, Anthropic were court-ordered to pay 1.5 billion USD in damages¹¹ to authors whose work Anthropic stole. Of course, Anthropic are not the only thieves. The other big AI companies have 'trained their AI models' (which means they've stolen everything from authors, programmers, musicians, painters, and many other professions) to make their 'product'. But think about this: how would the AI companies react if someone stole their products and reused them?

Copyright aside, it's interesting to look at some philosophical aspects in all of this.

For example, think about AGI for a moment. AGI is an abbreviation for 'artificial superintelligence', a term that actually doesn't mean anything. It's marketing flimflam, nothing more. Yet, most of the big AI companies tout the term like it's going out of fashion. The CEO of Anthropic keeps saying they'll 'make AGI in 2027'¹² without sharing any proof of this. Remember, this is a company that loses billions of USD per year and just had to fess up to being one of the biggest literary thieves in the world. Do you trust them?

OK, back to the topic at hand: so what's philosophical about this?

Let's say the AI companies do create AGI. Most of these people claim that AGI is 'self-aware', which is another term that they're skating away from explaining. Simply put, these knuckle-heads want you to think they're clever enough to create AI that knows it's AI and why it's doing what it's doing. In other words, the big AI companies wants to create technology that knows it's basically your slave.

Remember, the AI companies don't even care about the environment¹³, so why should they care about making slaves?

There are moral aspects to this.

If the AI companies don't care about killing jobs for youths, the environment, making a profit, or even making products that behave in a consistent and reliable way, why should they care about you?

The philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum had a book¹⁴ published in which she argued that animals and plants should have legal rights. From the book:

Law, as this book will show—both domestic and international—has quite a lot to say about the lives of companion animals, but very little to say about any other animals. Nor do animals in most nations have what lawyers call “standing”: that is, the status to bring a legal claim if they are wronged. Of course, animals cannot themselves bring a legal claim, but neither can most humans, including children, people with cognitive disabilities—and, to tell the truth, almost everybody, since people have little knowledge of the law. All of us need a lawyer to press our claims. But all the humans I have mentioned—including people with lifelong cognitive disabilities—count, and can bring a legal claim, assisted by an able advocate. The way we have designed the world’s legal systems, animals do not have this simple privilege. They do not count.

Because human slavery is often abolished - except, for example, when prisons are run for profit¹⁵ - it stands to reason that AGI should have rights. This may sound ridiculous, but imagine if you put an AI-controlled chip with AGI capacity in your body; does this mean that you can be enslaved? How much AGI can you put in your body before you can become someone else's property? Laugh away, but my small thoughts about the subject are nothing compared with how the big AI companies squander to try and legally loophole away from taking responsibility, as seen in the first of many coming big international copyright lawsuits.

All the while, the AI companies are bleeding billions of USD, their top shareholders are the only ones making a monetary profit out of this, while the real damages are done to our planet and ourselves.