I am almost completely unconcerned about the “dangers” of AI that I’m hearing about.
In particular, I’m completely unconcerned about the danger that terrorists (or bored high school students) are going to use AI to make a bioweapon. I guess the concern is that AI will be able to try thousands of changes in the time a human could try three? That is different from what evolution has been doing for two billion years in no way whatsoever.
Similar only in that it is another AI danger that’s easily ameliorated, is AI-facilitated hacking, which the AI firms want us to come up with regulations for.
The fact is, we scarcely need any new regulations at all. Just an ordinary legal structure where, if someone using AI does something improper, the legal and criminal liability falls equally on the person prompting the AI and on the company that wrote the AI.
Of course, if the harm passes through someone else who’s supposed to be taking due care (such as your bank or broker) that person also has ordinary responsibility. (So if an AI helps someone steal your retirement account, the broker holding your retirement account has to make you whole, just as if they had handed your money over to someone who hadn’t used AI. About the only AI-related regulation needed is something making it clear that the broker can not only sue the criminal who stole it, but also the AI firm whose tool was used to effectuate the crime.)
My point is that all those supposed horrible dangers are perfectly ordinary, and there is no need to do anything special at all.
What’s really interesting is why are the AI firms and AI scientists trying to gin up all this worry? Could it be that they can see that without some buy-in from governments the companies are all going to collapse in short order?
Many Americans want fewer immigrants, primarily because they worry that immigrants are competing with native-born U.S. citizens for jobs. There are of course other reasons. Some people are racists. Some people imagine that immigrant populations will include radicals or terrorists. But I think the jobs one is the big one.
I think I see a good way to fix this particular problem. A good enough way that we probably don’t even need to have visas, or immigration checks at the borders. Most important, we wouldn’t need to have a police state with ICE agents sweeping up brown people and demanding to see their papers.
My idea is simple: add a tax surcharge—perhaps 15%—on companies, on the payrolls of immigrants, legal or not. (Plus a twist I’ll mention in a minute.)
This fixes several problems at once.
First, it means people can quit arguing about whether companies are hiring immigrants because of their skills, or just because they’re cheaper or more willing to work long hours, or whatever. If companies are willing to pay an extra 15%, they’re definitely in need of the skills. (Maybe the ideal rate is 10% or 20%. It should specifically be enough that companies will hire native-born workers if they’re capable of doing the job, because they’re cheaper than foreign-born workers after taxes. A bit of experience will show us the ideal rate.)
Second, it’ll raise wages and salaries for Americans, because even a big raise would be cheaper than hiring an immigrant.
Third, it’ll greatly reduce the cost and trouble of the numerous visa programs. In fact, we can probably just get rid of visas. Anyone can come to the U.S. and work, as long as their employer pays the surcharge.
Of course this only works if employers actually pay the surcharge—and why would they do that, if they’ve been cheating on employing illegal immigrants all along?
Well, the twist I mentioned above is to solve that: Make the statute of limitations on this tax ridiculously long. Maybe 35 years. Add on some severe penalties for non-payment as well—double the original bill, plus interest and the ordinary penalties for unpaid taxes.
Oh, and spread the liability around. If the immigrant is technically employed by a contractor, but he or she works at your site, you’re also liable for the surcharge. (I don’t expect it would be possible, but I’d like to see the CEO be personally liable for the surcharge, in cases where the corporation went bankrupt somewhere along the line.)
With a policy like this in place, employers—instead of looking the other way when they suspect someone is an illegal immigrant—now really want to know. Because they either have to pay the surtax now, or else they’re on the hook for double that money for years into the future.
I’m thinking of 35 years, because it’s long enough that the immigrants might be reaching retirement age about then. If we throw in a little incentive—perhaps 10% of the tax collected—they might be willing to report all their former employers when they’re ready to retire. Remember: They don’t owe any extra tax—the liability is all on their employers. But they can collect that little 10% as a boost to their retirement by ratting out three decades of tax-cheating employers.
I think this solves everything.
Since everyone is legal, there’s no need to worry about whether someone is “documented” or not. No need to worry about visas. No need to check anyone’s papers.
Oh, there’ll still be a need for papers—employers will want to be sure a potential employee is a citizen—there’s just no need for the police to check them. And of course, some citizens might have trouble coming up with papers. But those problems are no worse than they are already, with the bonus that they can be sorted out at leisure in ordinary courts, rather than in special immigration courts with people in detention. Citizens can show they’re native born all sorts of ways, just like they do now if they need to get a passport, but don’t have a birth certificate. Naturalized citizens have naturalization papers, plus there are other records.
Companies can copy and maintain the documentation to show that their employees were citizens, or else pay the taxes.
Nobody is “illegal.” Anybody can call the police, get a drivers license, get car insurance, send their kids to public school, go to the doctor, all without any worry that they’ll be deported. (Of course, they might not stay long, if they don’t have skills that justify their employer paying an extra 15% tax to employ them, but that’s okay too.)
We can save a bunch of money on border security, because anybody can come into the country, as long as they’re willing to compete with the locals at a 15% disadvantage.
My main interest here is in getting rid of the need for police-state behaviors on the part of the government. If everybody is legal, there’s no need for them. My secondary interest is in living in a more diverse community. I like having foreigners around. I like living among a diverse ethnic population. I think it could be awesome.
As a bonus, those extra taxes will fund quite a bit of extra government spending. Maybe even makes some headway on the national debt.
If you have a podcast, no one can disable it. You can host it anywhere, and if your host makes you stop, you can just get another host and point your URL there. Anyone can listen to it. All they need is a podcast app. Or even just a web browser. No one can stop you from posting episodes, and no one can stop your listeners from listening to them.
But that’s only true if you have a podcast. If you have a YouTube channel instead…. Well, in that case, YouTube can stop you.
Prompted by EFF, I sent the following message to my representative:
I strongly oppose government surveillance of U.S. citizens, so I’m asking you to please vote no on any bill that includes a clean reauthorization of Section 702. Real reform is possible and has more support than ever. Several bills would do much to rein in Section 702 surveillance and protect Americans’ privacy, and do so without hurting national security.
We live in a globalized society in which Americans are constantly communicating with people overseas. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has proven many times over that they cannot be trusted with discretion to warrantlessly query communications collected under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Americans should not lose their constitutional rights to private communications because of a mass surveillance authority that provides federal law enforcement with backdoor access to them.
Please, reform Section 702.
I urge you to urge your representative to work to reform section 702. Here’s a place to start:
A pretty good recent episode of Gil Duran’s Nerd Reich podcast had an odd hole in it.
In the one I’m talking about, the one with Quinn Slobodian, Quinn explains that there’s a reason the many efforts to create a seastead, charter city, network state, and such never go anywhere: They’re unnecessary.
[Y]ou don’t actually need to create a new polity to have your own sense of entitlement and privilege reinforced in every imaginable way, and to have your own economic comfort facilitated by the institutional arrangements of the state in almost every way. With some creative accounting and some use of offshore havens and trusts and so on, you can really game the whole thing very well already, right?
Having said that, they do talk a bit about why, given that there are already tools to protect your property and money (freeports, trust, special economic zones, and the like), anybody would work so hard and spend so much money to create an actual place that’s outside the control of any government. They don’t quite come around to answering that question, which I think is unfortunate, because I think they both know the answer.
The people pushing these efforts want serfs.
They don’t want workers who can join unions. They don’t want software engineers who hesitate to create autonomous munitions or tools for surveillance capitalism. They don’t want maids or pool boys who feel free to resist their advances.
They want the right to be mean to people, in a situation where the people have to just take it.
That’s what places like Próspera offer that you can’t get from a family company incorporated in a special economic zone.
Stephen Miller would have ICE agents (and the rest of us) believe that they have “immunity” to perform their “duties.”
This is, of course, false. Depriving any person (not just citizens) of their rights “under color of law” is its own crime. But it is in that light that we should view their position on face masks as admitting that they know they have it wrong:
The administration’s perceived need for face coverings evocative of Iranian secret police and Russian security agents helps us recognize that assertions of state supremacy and citizen insignificance are claptrap…
If they were immune, they’d not hesitate to show their faces. The fact that they feel the need to keep them hidden makes it very clear that they know they’re totally exposed in a legal sense.
Next weekend is going to be pretty cold in Minneapolis. Maybe cold enough to convince some ICE goons that they’d be better off on disability in Kentucky.
I mean, every ICE goon has probably slipped on the ice at least once. Probably every one of those falls could be turned into a disability claim.
I am (just barely) old enough to remember the Black Panthers in the 1960s, when a group of black people tried to carry legal firearms to protect themselves, before they were mostly murdered by the police, the FBI, and one another.
I also remember the 1980s, when the NRA was trying to convince all marginalized groups (blacks, women, lesbians, gays, socialists, etc.), that arming themselves was a great idea. The NRA was sincere, I think—they just wanted more people to have guns.
Most people, especially black people, were well aware of the fact that walking around armed would make it much more likely that they’d be killed by the police. (They remembered what happened to the Black Panthers, presumably better than I did.)
Over the last couple of years, and especially over the last few days, I think perspectives are changing. First, a lot of white people are walking around armed, and even killing people, with minimal consequences. Second, the increasingly fascist police have been killing unarmed people at increasing rates, and looking like they’ll not only get away with it, but looking like they’re glorying in it.
This article, which had a really annoying headline, turns out to have some really great thinking.
In particular, the political perspective it is describing has more than a little overlap with the stuff I was writing about in my articles at Wise Bread.
An economic vision that … encompasses antimonopoly policies, right to repair and regulatory changes to smooth the path for people to start businesses, buy and work land, even build their own houses and invent things.
Steven suggested that I should revisit my Wise Bread posts. There’s a lot of useful stuff there. It was stuff that had seemed a bit less relevant over the last few years (I started writing in June of 2007, right at the start of the Great Financial Crisis, and carried on for 10 years.) But with government having gone all-in on fascism, racism, and gangsterism this year, a lot of those themes are feeling much more on point than they had for a while.
So I think I’ll do that. A lot of my Wise Bread posts still feel just right. On a few, my perspective has changed a bit. I’ll write some new posts to talk about what’s changed.
A bunch of people in the AI industry have blithely suggested that it will be fine if huge numbers of people lose their jobs to AI, because we’ll create some sort of universal basic income (UBI) to support them.
I think that’s a great idea, and think we should put their money where their mouths are. Starting immediately, any firm with any significant business producing AI should be taxed 50% of their gross revenue, and all that money should be divided up equally among all Americans as a UBI. (Firms with a “significant” AI business that are also in other businesses as might want to spin off the AI part of the business, so that they don’t have to pay this special tax on the non-AI parts of their gross income.)
This wouldn’t immediately produce a big enough UBI to make it unnecessary for someone to work, but I figure about the time it became impossible for an ordinary person to find a job because they’d all been displaced by AI, the AI industry would be making enough money for half their revenues to fund an adequate UBI.
In a similar vein, every firm paying for AI, rather than paying for workers, should have to pay a tax on all that AI spending equal to what they’d pay in withholding taxes if they were paying that money to an employee.
I don’t think this would produce nearly enough to fund a UBI, but I think it might be enough to go a long way toward shoring up Social Security and Medicare.
