cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/47891893
Javier Milei, the president of Argentina, has shed light on billionaire Peter Thiel’s reason for suddenly planting roots in his country.
In a Financial Times op-ed, Milei announced plans to make Argentina the world’s top destination for tech billionaires seeking to escape regulation, legal liability, and taxes. Milei’s op-ed trumpeted new legislation that would do three things:
“Keep AI unregulated,” providing a haven for companies wishing to develop the technology without guardrails or government rules.
Create a new business category for what Milei called the “non-human corporation.” These would be companies supposedly “operated by AI agents or robots” that could “exercise independent judgment in unpredictable environments.” These non-human companies would receive major protections in the form of limited liability for whatever decisions they might allegedly make on their own, without human intervention.
Allow tech companies to duck taxes. Milei’s legislation would impose low corporate tax rates and also allow shareholders to “select the corporate governance law of their choosing.”
Milei made it clear that he intends his legislation as an “invitation” to attract tech moguls to his country, highlighting his nation’s “world-class energy and mining resources” and “geopolitical stability.” The president heralded his plans for Argentina as the dawn of a new Dutch East India Company, the joint-stock corporation founded in 1602 that was granted sweeping, quasi-governmental monopoly powers to carry out trade activities in Asia.
“The logic of 1602 still applies today,” wrote Milei. “Companies run by new technologies such as AI agents require the same legal framework that has underpinned capitalism for over four centuries, one suitable for development and experimentation.”
In essence, Milei plans to turn Argentina into a top destination for the Network State cult. His plan to create a new framework by which tech moguls (and their machines) can escape regulation, laws and taxes is an almost-perfect expression of the Network State idea promoted by Thiel protégé Balaji Srinivasan, who calls for Silicon Valley to secede from the United States. The only thing missing from Milei’s proposal is an option for tech billionaires to create their own private nations on Argentine soil.
I don’t get it. Ok, so you are willing to do away with safety, legality and basic human decency to attract capitals to your country. Fair enough.
But then why not drugs? Drugs are almost as addictive as AI and create less damage to the environment. But above all, unlike AI, drugs are very profitable, even if they face a harsh regulatory environment.
Give it some thought, Milei. True, you like theatrics and the Sinaloa cartel are not as cartoonishly evil as Thiel (they are probably more standard business-like evil) but I’m sure you can work out some effective PR stunt with them too.
Robot drug runners.
I really like programming, 3d printing, arduino/pi stuff, and technology in general but I am starting to seriously hate technology and all these techno-solutionist stuff.
I gueeeeeees because drugs still look bad to the eyes of the politics and the IA not?
WDYM why not drugs? Strong alcohol and tobacco were a state monopoly in many countries for many years, and still are that kind of business heavily intertwined with state.
And prohibited drugs are in a similar position, just the state monopoly is unofficial. Well, officially they are prohibited. As I said. OK.
There are plenty of different kinds of drugs with different degrees of addiction, lethality, damage to the environment in production too.
Anyway, about AI - were it not profitable, it wouldn’t be rolling. It might be a bubble, but it’s, for the users of this kind of technology, a qualitative change from precise algorithms and industrial optimization to fuzzy decisions based on statistics. Basically machines following human orders as humans mean them. Well, kinda like that, except very computationally expensive and as good as your dataset, but there are tasks hard to do the old way and easy to do the new way. Hence (on Jingle Bells melody) bombing swarms, bombing swarms, bombing all the way. I suppose not all the way, but the essence is here. Also surveillance, detecting and stopping people harmful for some political end without ever alarming them or anyone or using direct visible force, predicting events.
It’s inefficient when used for the same tasks a shell script can do. It starts being efficient when used on the scale of lives and families and groups and communities, and armies and economies. Matter of scale.