This is quite confusing to me. It was never my read in your slowdown scenario that the shareholders were supposed to have any relevance by the end of it. My read (which appear to align with what @williawa is saying elsewhere in this thread) as that the “Oversight Committee” emerged as the new ruling class supplanting the shareholders (let alone any random person who got rich trying to “escape the permanent underclass”), just like e.g. the barbarian lords replaced the Roman patricians, the industrial capitalists replaced the aristocracy, guild masters, and landed gentry, etc. Technological transitions are notoriously a common time for newly empowered elites to throw a revolution against old elites!
My claim is that Altman can’t do it alone, he needs the cooperation of at least a fraction of the existing system (the government+business leaders who form the Oversight Committee—some of whom might be the biggest OpenAI shareholders). Once you get enough of the existing system involved, it becomes plausible that they keep money around for some of the same reasons that the existing system currently keeps money around. Near the end of the Oversight Committee ending, it says:
As the stock market balloons, anyone who had the right kind of AI investments pulls further away from the rest of society. Many people become billionaires; billionaires become trillionaires. Wealth inequality skyrockets. Everyone has “enough,” but some goods—like penthouses in Manhattan—are necessarily scarce, and these go even further out of the average person’s reach. And no matter how rich any given tycoon may be, they will always be below the tiny circle of people who actually control the AIs.
...so I think it endorses the idea that wealth continues to exist.
This is quite confusing to me. It was never my read in your slowdown scenario that the shareholders were supposed to have any relevance by the end of it. My read (which appear to align with what @williawa is saying elsewhere in this thread) as that the “Oversight Committee” emerged as the new ruling class supplanting the shareholders (let alone any random person who got rich trying to “escape the permanent underclass”), just like e.g. the barbarian lords replaced the Roman patricians, the industrial capitalists replaced the aristocracy, guild masters, and landed gentry, etc. Technological transitions are notoriously a common time for newly empowered elites to throw a revolution against old elites!
My claim is that Altman can’t do it alone, he needs the cooperation of at least a fraction of the existing system (the government+business leaders who form the Oversight Committee—some of whom might be the biggest OpenAI shareholders). Once you get enough of the existing system involved, it becomes plausible that they keep money around for some of the same reasons that the existing system currently keeps money around. Near the end of the Oversight Committee ending, it says:
...so I think it endorses the idea that wealth continues to exist.