Google builds AI to "redistribute Wealth" in America

#1

Oh boy, here they go, Google Admits building an AI that is supposed to help “Redistribute Wealth” in America, maybe “better” than humans…

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Google’s ‘Democratic AI’ Is Better at Redistributing Wealth Than America

Researchers built an AI that gives out money based on who started with less resources—and humans preferred it.

Janus Rose

By Janus Rose

NEW YORK, US

07 July 2022, 2:00pm

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It’s no secret that the overwhelming majority of wealth in the United States is concentrated at the very top, creating staggering levels of poverty and inequality that vastly outpace other supposedly “wealthy” nations. But while the current political system ensures that this upward extraction of wealth continues, AI researchers have begun playing with a fascinating question: is machine learning better equipped than humans to create a society that divides resources more equitably?

The answer, according to a recent paper published in Nature from researchers at Google’s DeepMind, seems to be yes—at least, as far as the study’s participants are concerned.
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#2

interesting: "Pursuing a broadly liberal egalitarian policy, [HCRM] sought to reduce pre-existing income disparities by compensating players in proportion to their contribution relative to endowment,” the paper’s authors wrote. “In other words, rather than simply maximizing efficiency, the mechanism was progressive: it promoted enfranchisement of those who began the game at a wealth disadvantage, at the expense of those with higher initial endowment.”

there can be advantages other than wealth. for example, beauty and charm can be more advantageous than money in modern society. it would be an interesting discussion to see if there could be an agreement on what constitutes an initial ‘advantage’ for the purpose of an equitable distribution of resources.

#3

That’s a good point.

There is an interesting corollary in the reported implicit bias exhibited by constructed AI systems - link below, but the tldr is the extraordinary finding that words have meanings embedded in them!

Enforcing a market economy model with an AI is going to reveal the preferred hierarchy of what constitutes the “starting position”. If the experience of historical market economies is anything to go by, this type of social experiment will result in the law of unintended consequences spitting out more problems than the market system can possibly handle and it will destroy the market in an effort to enforce the predetermined outcome.

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#4

My only question: Why would anybody trust the very people responsible for hyper-concentration of wealth (billionaires, monopolies, and oligopolies) to come up with a way to make wealth distribution fairer? If they were interested in an equal playing field, they wouldn’t be where they are today.

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