When he was at the helm of Barron's Tech Trader, other writers would speculate about NVIDIA's big-picture thinking, Tiernan would get on the phone to CEO Jensen Huang, get through, and get the answer.
Impressive to watch and useful in the pursuit of loot and/or insight.
From ZD Net:
Scholars at the high-profile Institute for Humanity propose a scheme in which companies agree to pay back to society a portion of excess profits produced by AI, to compensate for lost jobs. Can it be gamed by corporations is one of the questions that springs to mind.
If artificial intelligence eventually eliminates some jobs for humans, should the parties that profit from AI pay money to society to compensate for the loss?....MUCH MORE
That's the intriguing question raised by a paper produced last month by the Future of Humanity Institute, the think tank inside Oxford University that is widely cited in the popular press regarding AI, and that is headed by philosopher Nick Bostrom.
The Institute's Centre for the Governance of AI published "The Windfall Clause: Distributing the Benefits of AI for the Common Good," posting it on the arXiv pre-print server. The paper, authored by Cullen O'Keefe, Peter Cihon, Ben Garfinkel, Jade Leung, and Allan Dafoe, proposes that companies that yield excess profit attributable to AI pay put some portion of the money over and above the taxes they would normally pay.
ZDNet reached out to lead author Cullen O'Keefe, who is also a Juris Doctor candidate at Harvard Law School, requesting to ask follow-up questions. O'Keefe declined, writing in an email to ZDNet that the Institute "has decided against doing publicity on this particular paper." Despite that, ZDNet offers some questions to mull over below.
The authors write that "the transformative potential of AI has become increasingly salient as a matter of public and political interest," but they argue that there have been few proposals that would make institutional obligations a matter of law.
The windfall clause, as it's called, would be a commitment made years before any profits materialize, called an ex-ante agreement. Companies would agree to pay out some percentage, even though they don't know for sure if they'll ever realize any excess profit attributable to AI.
The point is to mitigate the deleterious effects of AI. Because while AI may increase aggregate wealth for society, "many have argued that AI could lead to a substantial lowering of wages, job displacement, and even large-scale elimination of employment opportunities as the structure of the economy changes productivity," the authors write.
There is a "strong consensus" they write, among AI researchers, "that most, if not all, human work can, in theory, be automated." ....
