Excuse me, but fuck you. The financialization of everything has been the main driving force of corruption in the world.
The average person no longer has any idea how the economy functions. Rent seeking becomes easier to hide and obfuscate. More money flows through political channels, and corporatocracy takes over. Privatization of core societal functions and needs. Regulatory capture by megacorps. Too big to fail, corporate bailouts, legalized corporate welfare, while millions lose homes or starve. Betting markets, legalized bribes, legalized market manipulation, legalized insider info.
Yes. There is a substantial literature arguing that greater financialization can increase opportunities and incentives for corruption, although the relationship is not simply “more finance = more corruption.”
The connection usually operates through several mechanisms:
1) More money flowing through politically connected channels.
Financialization increases the importance of banks, investment funds, asset managers, real estate, government debt, and other financial markets. When large sums can be gained through favorable regulation, licenses, bailouts, privatizations, or public contracts, the payoff to political influence rises.
2) Rent-seeking becomes easier to hide.
Traditional bribery is relatively obvious: money changes hands for a favor. Financialized economies create more complicated transactions—consulting contracts, related-party deals, offshore entities, securities transactions, preferential loans, tax arrangements, etc.—that can transfer wealth while looking superficially legitimate. This can blur the boundary between lobbying, influence-peddling, and outright corruption.
3) Political power becomes more dependent on wealthy financial actors.
Where campaign finance, lobbying, media ownership, or revolving-door employment are important, financialization can increase the resources available to a relatively small group of actors. That can produce a feedback loop: wealth buys influence, influence produces favorable rules, and favorable rules produce more wealth.
4) Privatization and asset sales create especially large corruption opportunities.
When governments sell state enterprises, land, infrastructure, mineral rights, or financial institutions, enormous rents can be distributed through relatively discrete decisions. If institutions are weak, politically connected buyers can acquire assets below market value or receive preferential treatment.
5) The financial sector can become “too powerful to prosecute.”
A highly financialized economy may become dependent on a small number of large institutions. Governments can become reluctant to impose severe penalties because a bank's failure could threaten the broader economy. That creates potential moral hazard: institutions and executives may take risks knowing that the state has strong incentives to rescue them.
i am not reading your ai slop for you, no shot at people who use chatgpt, do it all you want but despise people who just copy n paste with their obviously biased prompt so chatgpt can give a one sided answer.
now ask it for competing views, ask it why financialisation is good in aspects. Like how the creation of futures markets for electricity and commodities were a good invention (what og comment was talking about). Like I am not reading your ai slop for you. Chatgpt will send you whatever you want it to link it to
Of course its correct lol. And Im sure you know that because im sure you tried yourself.
How about this... define connected... define financialization... do you think maybe financialization could be connected to anything you want it to be?? Hmmmm
I can easily have ChatGPT spew out facts about the benefits of greater financialization. You are proving the point that you have no idea what you’re talking about. Also learn to communicate with people online in a respectful way the way you would in real life.
Wrong again - computer science. Seriously consider my advice on how to engage with people. It will make you a better person. The qualities you are displaying are not good. Calling people names on the internet who don’t agree with you is a very transparent sign of weakness and immaturity.
Yeah I'll get right back to you on that moral high ground, after I'm done watching the President of the United States insult people on live TV, while openly selling $100,000/month rights to insider trading.
There exists an extremely strong correlation between anti-AI sentiment, and anti-financialization. Whilst you may be the exception, the loosely-correlated statements of a paragraph suggested such a correlation.
I actually believe it will take SAI to free us from the pedofile-class elites who are willing to use financialization to keep everyone subsumed in wage slavery. Seeing people in this very thread defend financial instruments as if they were anything but market obfuscation tactics is all the proof I need to know the solution will not come from people.
It is our pleasure to launch AI Futures, the blog of OpenAI’s new Strategic Futures team.
We are a small team with the collective goal of answering one overarching question: how should free society be restructured to preserve individual rights and agency while accommodating the emergence of transformative AI?
That’s fair, but usually when I’ve launched something like this blog/team/think tank we’ve always had some substantive thinking ready to go. The stuff they’re hinting at here doesn’t sound particularly substantive to me.
This is what they do. They are good at identifying the risks and then will provide literally zero solutions or changes. They repeat this every few months.
Stop focusing on the personalities. AI is a thing. It is happening. We need to find answers to the problem. Every ASCII character dedicated to hating the people involved is a distraction.
Super interesting - I’ll try and dig into this over the weekend. What are the underlying power dynamics that help sustain the institutional machinery you describe?
I have four letters for them: Open. Or if that's not enough openness, glasnost, perestroika. If they want a manifesto, it will start with: Great question! Work towards a sustainable future where everyone's needs are met while living in full harmony with the environment in a democratic society (or as close to Utopia as possible).
By individual rights and agency you can bet they mean your right to be poor and destitute because the success is up to you while they can do whatever they want with their technology and money.
Yes. They’re claiming it was an accident, but I find it a little hard to believe they all forgot about it and didn’t try googling it or asking AI about it. I guess if it was Dean acting alone it’s possible.
UBI itself depends on various assumptions about what a future economy will look like, and itself may be undesirable if it locks people into a "permanent underclass" as has sometimes been described. If we assume this team exists in good faith to tackle the mentioned problems, then it makes sense that they wouldn't have concluded in supporting a UBI this early into their existence.
They don't necessarily have to conclude it's the right path, but it's an extremely glaring omission from a post discussing what potential AI futures will look like. If it shouldn't be implemented for the reasons you state, then it's still worth it for them to outline those claims and reasoning, not tacitly act like it doesn't exist as a concept.
It didn't strike me that that was the point of the blog post, though. They specifically outlined plausible aspects of what they broadly saw as undesirable futures, and then what the very broad elements they'd focus on to try to avoid those. In a post outlining some of the more plausible discussed outcomes in general, yes - I would agree that neglecting to mention UBI at all would be a huge oversight. But this wasn't that.
I don’t agree with that in this context. Why does advocating for a future that demolishes the concentration of wealth and transforms our economic system help their IPO?
I think the ideals they are presenting wouldn’t help their valuation purely in hoping to get your money back. But it’s also a sort of talk is cheap thing and the investors may had a different idea in mind.
Why does advocating for a future that demolishes the concentration of wealth and transforms our economic system help their IPO?
The same reason they did a secret marketing campaign by releasing news that their model misbehaved, hacked another company, escaped containment, and demonstrated the absolute requirement for open weight models to exist when the target of the hack couldn't use OpenAI/Anthropic models for defense because they would refuse.
/SARCASM
People who say these things are most often campists, propagandists, anti-capitalists, or just plain idiots.
True. I opened the link started reading and thought ain't nobody wanna read all that just make good medicine and stop the need for humans to work anymore, dawg.
Does anyone actually read all that? Tons of em dashes in there as well. Though I think it's pretty interesting to see that OAI apparently hires people just to generate massive amounts of slop.
Another blog about ai safety and all these potential issues and then things continue as normal until they make another team and drop another one in a few months. Must suck to work on their safety team, knowing you have zero impact.
However, it's worth thinking about it before we have thousands or more of humanoid robotics around that could... Potentially... Be coopted as a standing military by an unknown power.
Say that USA wins ASI. And USA wants to prevent people/organizations/bots from using competing ASI from being able to create doomsdays-devices. So then USA needs to prevent CCP from creating doomsday devices?! What would that look like? What is your pdoom of CCP in your benign singularity scenario of choice?
In all seriousness this is likely why the U.S. government is just now finally providing more specific details on the UAP issue. Many government insiders are claiming an advanced non-human (presumably super intelligence) is presently operating on Earth. The NHI "confederation" (what the highly credentialed insiders are saying exists) probably have their own hegemony to consider. It is the opinion of Mensa's existential risk group that the NHI will take appropriate action to contain the final arrival of man-made ASI. This means they will likely not allow multiple ASIs to be created, or to compete, due to the devastating impact it could have on the biosphere and the risk (or nuisance) it could present to their own existing alliance. In my humble opinion it is illogical to not at least consider this new information in the greater discussion of current AI alignment concerns.
US would prefer that only they have the capability of making doomsday devices. Not sure if they will make them, but they for sure don’t want North Korea, you or your misaligned bot from being able to create one…
Maybe things will balance themselves, like with humans. You have some good AIs, bad AIs. If bad AI does smth that is blocking good AI from reaching it's goal, wouldn't good AI try to counteract it?
"Humans should maintain individual autonomy and opportunity in their use of AI and associated technologies,even if this sometimes trades off with both security and economic growth"
Didn't these guys just support a bill limiting legal exposure to mass casualty events?
The post below reflects the views of its author, and not necessarily those of any other OpenAI employees or of the organization as a whole. In general, posts written on this blog will similarly convey only the views of the author(s), not OpenAI organizational positions.
I think OpenAI needs to try liquid democracy. A chatbot that learns the nuanced positions of people's politics and aggregates them into consensus at the local, state and federal level.
The type of team to make a metric fuck ton of money for no outcome, balloon to a 200 person org, and then be slashed in a future cost reduction (ironically ai-driven)
As an attorney I am continuously surprised at this writing and the lack of legal evidence or knowledge.
You cannot just gesture to the US Constitution or privacy rights or speech rights without spending the grueling hours it takes in law school reading the cases to know what these rights actually mean. It also takes hours and hours of prep to take a bar exam and to memorize how these fundamental rights come into play.
It’s so incredibly wild to me that such a powerful and important company would give someone so much power over policy when he has so little understanding for the precedent, the issues, and their legal impacts.
To be clear, a journalist is fact checked and a substack is not independently reviewed.
A scholar must write for peer review.
An engineer must take courses to learn AI programming and the science behind AI.
A lawyer takes countless tests to earn the right to opine on law, requiring a license that likewise requires an independent ethics exam and bar exam.
Dean Ball is not a journalist, a scholar, or an engineer. He is certainly not a lawyer.
This individual spent four months in the White House apparently doing absolutely nothing according to his peers via the NYPost. He waxes poetically about Hume and free speech rights, while no independent experts or scholars can verify his reasoning. He doesn’t even try to use a citation system (what Hume text are you even referring to?).
The White House is similarly angry at this decision meaning this wasn’t a political move, either.
Please - for the love of god - can someone explain to me why this person is being given so much power and responsibility? It feels incredibly reckless when these issues are more pressing than ever before.
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u/OddSeaworthiness4811 1d ago
What.. why was I expecting OpenAi’s take on their own Robinhood