[HN Gopher] Moore's Law for Everything
___________________________________________________________________
Moore's Law for Everything
Author : icey
Score : 174 points
Date : 2021-03-16 18:38 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (moores.samaltman.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (moores.samaltman.com)
| [deleted]
| dzink wrote:
| Sam, you have a lot of great ideas and a lot of assumptions in
| this essay. Just like the parameters in deep learning models, we
| can't know what will work in different scenarios until we can
| model it reliably. Time to build a worldwide game, version of the
| Sims if you will, to test different assumptions and global
| activity based on them. Happy to help on this too.
|
| Some big assumptions: - Childcare can or cannot be handled by
| robots (very likely not if you need to raise healthy humans).
|
| - Healthcare can or cannot be handled by robots.
|
| - Humans will enjoy lack of employment without mental damage and
| how to retrain or provide for those needs.
|
| In the game each player should be assigned a random individual
| with different roles in society - so they can see all angles
| (from different speeds of income accruing, to health, to time
| demands of their job, to responsibilities that need handled,
| etc). You will see all kinds of bugs that way - from individual
| liquidity crunches, to mental breakdowns, to industries that need
| more innovation/AI.
|
| You can run any assumption in different epochs and get the answer
| by humans who play along worldwide.
|
| That way when the rules are about to change due to an innovation,
| we can run a fun game simulation instead of running the risk of
| anarchy which kills a lot of people.
|
| It is critically important to think about how we structure the
| future based on the technology we unlock. My pull request on this
| essay would be to propose we build a test suite for that first.
| Maybe we can use AI to simulate outcomes too after a good number
| of human runs.
| AndrewBissell wrote:
| As with so much Silicon Valley stuff, I think the latest
| evangelizing for AI is probably just laundering military and
| counterinsurgency tech as some kind of utopian consumer godsend.
| Obviously AGI will remain a pipe dream, but what we _will_ get is
| autonomous robotic soldiers with no conscience (that can be
| counted on to put down unrest without questioning their orders),
| or listening software that can monitor everyone 's communications
| to identify targets in real time.
| wmf wrote:
| My main thought after seeing Elysium was "if the robots are so
| advanced, why not use them to help people?" Healthcare is just
| a big as the military, so why would the robot makers turn down
| that opportunity?
| AndrewBissell wrote:
| Who owns the robots, and what are their motivations?
| m___ wrote:
| There was never in history a quest for the benefit of what is
| now a surplus population that has as only asset to pollute,
| contaminate, be parasitical and cannibalistic. Whatever stands
| for AI(no real definition in the lead text, just suggestive
| blabla), will be at the benefit of the immediate and power of
| the established few. Our "elites" are, were cockroaches.
| Between them and the latter surplus population there is a
| margin of whoring societals with some wackoo agenda not
| surpassing their primary drifts. The lower on the food chain,
| the cruder the desires for basic comfort.
| [deleted]
| nitwit005 wrote:
| > In the next five years, computer programs that can think will
| read legal documents and give medical advice.
|
| Bad medical or legal advice is completely possible. It exists
| now.
|
| Giving good medical or legal advice requires, at a minimum, being
| able to carry out a full conversation to investigate the problem,
| including understanding things not directly related to the field.
| There's no sign of getting that any time soon.
|
| Efficiency improvements in an area like the law may also result
| in people imposing new burdens, eroding the efficiency gains.
| Laws that once would have seemed too burdensome will no longer be
| seen as such.
| adambaybutt wrote:
| Depends how medical advice is defined, but AI has been shown to
| be better than humans in several contexts already, e.g.
| radiology.
| Jommi wrote:
| Source?
| jppope wrote:
| hmm... I've been to WebMD and the answer to any question is
| that I have cancer.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| This essay cites no sources and provides no data to back up its
| big claims and projections. It's interesting to hear what someone
| close to emerging technologies is thinking, but big claims
| require big evidence. It reads like reading Marx, or Kurzwell, or
| other utopian "futurists" more than anything practical and
| realistic.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| I very much like the idea of Moore's Law for a lot of things
| (maybe not for everything, there could be some nasty surprises in
| games of catch-up between offensive and defense).
|
| Setting aside social implications, it might also not quite come
| to this, as not everything might be solvable by data and/or
| thinking. Our understanding of nature could be correct enough in
| some areas to block progress. For example, it might not be
| possible to predict which atom will decay next, or maybe there
| are no gravity shields possible in this universe as it is a
| fundamental property of mass (very very handwaving here).
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| > AI will lower the cost of goods and services, because labor is
| the driving cost at many levels of the supply chain. If robots
| can build a house on land you already own from natural resources
| mined and refined onsite, using solar power, the cost of building
| that house is close to the cost to rent the robots. And if those
| robots are made by other robots, the cost to rent them will be
| much less than it was when humans made them.
|
| The issue with rising costs of housing is not (completely) linked
| to labor costs, it's land value, regulatory capture, bad
| infrastructure, and heavily marketed house-in-the-suburbs-as-the-
| only-way-to-live.
| aqme28 wrote:
| Construction is a very small part of housing costs. Outside of
| rural areas, much of the cost is speculative or supply/demand.
| imtringued wrote:
| Construction is a big part in some locations but it doesn't
| make housing unaffordable, merely expensive.
|
| From memory:
|
| Tearing a $2 million single family house and putting 6
| apartments there would allow you to charge $3k rent. Build
| taller and rent drops even lower. This is assuming
| construction costs of $500 per sqft.
| A12-B wrote:
| Rising costs of housing is, almost entirely, due to the fact
| that individuals are allowed to own more houses than they can
| use, while most people don't own any. It seems fairly obvious
| that if you control the housing market, a human need, you can
| set prices as high as they will possibly pay them.
| SeanFerree wrote:
| I totally agree with this! I think it will be more like 15 to 20
| years though. 5 years may be too soon. Great article!
| sendtown_expwy wrote:
| I like this idea, but is the technical implementation of a
| progressive social policy (whether it be a tax on equity versus
| something else) actually the hard part?
|
| Alternative take: the hard part is that the US is heterogeneous
| and people just don't trust each other to not abuse benefits.
| (You could also say it's racist). How could we give equity to
| every person when we can't even seem to agree that they deserve
| basic healthcare?
| nindalf wrote:
| > We will discover new jobs-we always do after a technological
| revolution
|
| CGP grey put this well
|
| > Imagine a pair of horses in the early 1900s talking about
| technology. One worries all these new mechanical muscles (cars
| etc) will make horses unnecessary. The other horse reminds him
| that everything so far has made their lives easier - remember all
| that farm work? Remember running coast-to-coast delivering mail?
| Remember riding into battle? All terrible! These new city jobs
| are pretty cushy, and with so many humans in the cities there
| will be more jobs for horses than ever. Even if this car thingy
| takes off, he might say, there will be new jobs for horses we
| can't imagine.
|
| > But you know what happened. There are still working horses, but
| nothing like before. The horse population peaked in 1915 - from
| that point on it was nothing but down.
|
| > There's no law of economics that says that better technology
| makes more better jobs for horses. It sounds shockingly dumb to
| even say that out loud. But swap horses for humans and suddenly
| people think it sounds about right.
|
| "Humans need not apply" -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
| joe_the_user wrote:
| I agree that the "new jobs are generated automatically" claim
| isn't supported by any good argument.
|
| But the horse analogy isn't good way to show this imo. I hate
| to be "specie-ist" but human beings have a remarkable ability
| to learn new skills and attain new abilities. Horses don't. The
| human consumption of human's time, attention and so-forth is at
| the center of the economy. Human consumption of horse time
| isn't all that high a priority.
|
| Human flexibility makes human activity something that can
| satisfy a vast number of human wants (and it means that there
| are a vast number of those wants to satisfy). That still
| doesn't mean you'll always have people employed but it makes
| employment a more plausible thing.
| hospadar wrote:
| I hope we discover less work!
|
| I so agree that increasing automation doesn't always mean more
| Jobs That Make Money (even if it might continue to for a while
| yet). Maybe when there's less work for humans to do we just...
| work less? and get more?
| bobm_kite9 wrote:
| Another way to think of this: imagine two equally-sized
| countries A and B. A implements Sam's suggestion, taxing
| everything at 2.5% pa, B doesn't.
|
| In A, people are happy, we'll fed, Pursuing their interests,
| living meaningful lives.
|
| In B they are not.
|
| however, in A, companies and the economy are not growing so
| fast: resources are funnelled into a populace that takes but
| doesn't give back.
|
| Over a long period of time, the extra 2.5% growth in country B
| will become so meaningful that it will look back on the savages
| in country A and decide that it's resources would be better off
| under B's management.
|
| It's AI colonialism.
| confidantlake wrote:
| The 2.5% tax doesn't mean country B is growing 2.5% faster.
| The 2.5% in country B could be sitting in a vault doing
| nothing or being spent on yachts. Conversely the 2.5% in
| country A is being invested in making the workforce more
| productive.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| I don't necessarily disagree but that's really not a good
| analogy. Horses aren't people. When their jobs disappear no one
| gives a fuck. No one speaks up for their interests. People will
| not go so easy. They are able to create amazing things if given
| the opportunity. No one wants mass human unemployment.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| You realize it's an allegory, right?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| It's fine to reply to an allegory with "you're right, that
| solution doesn't work, but it doesn't preclude other
| solutions because of these reasons, so don't use it to make
| decisions".
| Judgmentality wrote:
| That's very different from a comment which suggests he
| doesn't realize it's an allegory.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| The comment directly says it's not a good analogy.
| Complaining that they didn't specifically say "allegory"
| is really nitpicky. The terms are very close and overlap.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| If someone says Animal Farm is a good story, but it
| wouldn't work if the animals were humans, I would say
| they didn't get the message.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Animal farm is a fictional story about humans disguised
| as animals. The horse allegory is a non-fictional story
| about the downfall of horses which are very much not
| human-like.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Depends on what reason they gave. If they misunderstand
| something about humanity, that's a great jumping point
| toward discussion.
|
| But if they said "yes, those politics would happen in
| humans, but some of these other factors are more
| important toward the eventual outcome[...]" then that's
| perfectly compatible with understanding the story. And
| that's roughly what the earlier commenter did! They
| accepted the argument that jobs will go away, while
| saying the secondary and tertiary effects would be
| different.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| Fair, I'm sure it doesn't seem like it but I really don't
| want to argue. We're obviously reading that comment
| differently.
|
| Cheers.
| soperj wrote:
| We already have mass human unemployment. What's the average
| daily wage? It's not that low because everyone is gainfully
| employed.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Pre-covid, Global wages and employment levels have never
| been higher. Global poverty levels have never been lower.
| Either way, I don't disagree that AI will replace some
| jobs, I'm just not sold on the horse story.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Horses aren't the center of the economy, though.
|
| It's fundamentally different. Horses might always want more and
| more things no matter how much they get. But they don't create
| demand in our economy, so we'll never know.
|
| No matter how much humans get, they'll always want more. And
| other humans will have to come up with ways to meet that
| demand.
|
| Sure - if we ever reach a time where the entire human race says
| "this is enough" and everything is automated, then there won't
| be any jobs. But we're a very far way away from that point. In
| 2013, 60% of people on the planet didn't even have a toilet
| [1].
|
| There are obvious problems. In the Western world, it certainly
| seems like we don't have enough jobs for workers without
| certain skillsets - or at least jobs that employers are willing
| to pay minimum wage for.
|
| But there are also lots of jobs available.
|
| [1] https://slate.com/technology/2013/02/60-percent-of-the-
| world...
| S_A_P wrote:
| I think this is a good take- Having things be better for
| horses was _never_ the point of the economy. In fact horses
| were probably the main driver for developing mechanical
| solutions since horse ownership is expensive and time
| consuming. There was no incentive to make life /jobs better
| for horses, and as soon as a better replacement was available
| horses were not necessary for most people.
|
| So you cant swap out horses for humans as they analogy is
| completely flawed.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >Having things be better for horses was never the point of
| the economy
|
| Neither was making things better for humans. The point of
| the economy is for capital to reproduce itself, humans
| being taken care of is an accidental side effect because
| capital doesn't like a torch mob very much.
| maxsilver wrote:
| > So you cant swap out horses for humans as they analogy is
| completely flawed.
|
| You kind of can though. The economy cares about no one, it
| cares only about capital. And as far as capital is
| concerned, humans are just fancy horses. Humans are
| expenses that need minimizing to the point of zeroing. In a
| perfectly efficient capitalist economy, no one pays any
| humans for anything ever.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| But having things be better for humans was never the point
| of the economy either. The actual point has always been
| making things better for a subset of humans, everywhere
| throughout history.
|
| I don't see why an unemployable horse would be considered
| any differently from an unemployable human to the cold
| profit motive.
| alpha_squared wrote:
| What's the incentive to make life/jobs better for humans?
| S_A_P wrote:
| Incentive? not having to do hard labor? making more
| money?
|
| I think that most technology has made life easier if not
| measurably better for humans. Medicine, machinery,
| transportation. Those things dont make life better for
| people? I suppose the cynical take could be that it is
| for the 'ruling class' but I think the measured take is
| that even the lower rungs of society have at least some
| access to better jobs than they did 100 years ago.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| The lower rungs of society have access to better jobs
| because they were needed by the ruling class as a
| workforce, and because technology advanced. As a result
| of the above two, they were able to negotiate economic
| power and better working conditions.
|
| What is the incentive for "wasting resources on the lower
| rungs of society" when you don't need them as workers
| anymore?
| corecursion wrote:
| As you pointed out there has been high demand for toilets
| even during recent years, and yet unemployment is a thing
| that still exists in the world.
|
| Where are all the toilet-manufacturing and toilet-installing
| jobs? We certainly have the technology to produce billions of
| toilets if we as a society decided to. We know there are
| billions of humans who need toilets, why isn't this demand
| creating jobs? Where are the toilets?
|
| A big part of the answer to that question is that the
| billions of people who need toilets can't afford them,
| because they don't have jobs that would enable them to pay
| for toilets.
|
| Toilets are so easy to manufacture at our technological level
| that toilet factories don't require many workers. Certainly
| not billions of workers, but we have billions of humans who
| need toilets.
|
| Maybe the same problem affects all products. Will technology
| advance until 10000 or 10 or zero human workers will be
| required to run all the factories in the entire world for
| every imaginable product? Where then will billions of
| unemployed humans get money to buy the products from those
| factories?
| sudosysgen wrote:
| I can't get myself to agree with this.
|
| Indeed, it's true, horses don't create demand, but neither do
| unemployed humans.
|
| Our economy isn't centred around humans, it's centred around
| capital. Unemployable humans are as useless to it as horses,
| as they can't exchange their labour with capital owners (or
| become capital owners themselves).
|
| Unemployable people might want more, but will they get more?
| No, they won't.
| bnralt wrote:
| I think there's two distinct ideas being discussed. Can
| people be unemployed because of structural, societal, or
| political reasons? Sure, and I think most people would
| agree. We have plenty of example of that happening -
| depressions, recessions, mass refugees, etc.
|
| But can people be unemployed because we run out of things
| for humans to do? That's what the video is arguing, but it
| won't be the case unless we've fully satisfied all of our
| desires. If we haven't, there are, by definition, still
| things to do.
|
| This idea was particularly popular during the recession
| (the video was made on the tale end of it). It was common
| to hear that the high level of unemployment was because
| automation had taken our jobs or because Americans didn't
| have the skills for the jobs that were needed. But much of
| this was nonsense, and we saw employment gradually rebound
| as we moved out of the recession. Not only nonsense, but
| dangerous nonsense, since it leads people to entirely
| misunderstand a solvable problem.
| darawk wrote:
| > I think there's two distinct ideas being discussed. Can
| people be unemployed because of structural, societal, or
| political reasons? Sure, and I think most people would
| agree. We have plenty of example of that happening -
| depressions, recessions, mass refugees, etc.
|
| > But can people be unemployed because we run out of
| things for humans to do? That's what the video is
| arguing, but it won't be the case unless we've fully
| satisfied all of our desires. If we haven't, there are,
| by definition, still things to do.
|
| The question at hand though is exactly why is this true
| of humans but not horses?
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _But can people be unemployed because we run out of
| things for humans to do?_
|
| -- You'll always have something that some other human
| wants the human X to do. Whether that other person can
| pay human X sufficient money to make that activity their
| job is the question. And it seems plausible you'll reach
| a point where the answer will be no for a lot of people.
| You can call that "structural" if you wish but it seems
| related to the marginal utility provided by a given
| person and that goes down as one finds automated
| alternatives.
| boring_twenties wrote:
| > That's what the video is arguing, but it won't be the
| case unless we've fully satisfied all of our desires. If
| we haven't, there are, by definition, still things to do.
|
| Obviously true, but that doesn't mean the things still
| left to do can be done by anyone.
|
| In a world where there's not enough food or housing,
| everyone can be gainfully employed, since just about
| everyone can learn to plant seeds or cut wood.
|
| In a world where all of our material desires are already
| met, plenty of people will still want e.g. new AAA-
| quality video games every year. But what are the people
| who aren't programmers or artists supposed to do?
| ls65536 wrote:
| > horses don't create demand, but neither do unemployed
| humans.
|
| Sure they do, although almost certainly nowhere near enough
| to sustain our current situation and the system it's built
| atop of (from which the holders of capital seem to have
| benefited immensely), although perhaps this is exactly the
| point you were making.
|
| It might not be recognizable to most people living in
| modernity today, but in general humans will always trade
| (by some means, not necessarily with "money") with other
| humans whenever relative specializations occur between
| them, which even in small groups is likely to happen
| naturally.
|
| After all, it's not the exchange of paper bills or service
| to capital in particular that makes an economy, and there
| is always going to be demand of something and some supply
| of some of those things as long as humans are around and
| interacting, regardless of how miserable the existence is,
| or how "inefficient" such a system might be.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Indeed, horses like most humans do not create demand
| innately, they only do so insofar as their labour must be
| reproduced, which naturally is more for humans than
| horses because humans can negotiate wages, but not
| incredibly so for those at the bottom.
|
| _" It might not be recognizable to most people living in
| modernity today, but in general humans will always trade
| (by some means, not necessarily with "money") with other
| humans whenever relative specializations occur between
| them, which even in small groups is likely to happen
| naturally."_
|
| This is reductive. Yes, humans have always traded. But
| never before our current economic system has trade been
| the primary ordinator of people's lives - this is a
| modern creation, indeed core to property itself.
|
| _" After all, it's not the exchange of paper bills or
| service to capital in particular that makes an economy,
| and there is always going to be demand of something and
| some supply of some of those things as long as humans are
| around and interacting, regardless of how miserable the
| existence is, or how "inefficient" such a system might
| be."_
|
| This is also reductive in the same sense. Traditionally
| in human society, demand and supply were not, for the
| majority of people, the very core of one's life - that is
| a modern invention. And that was only possible in the
| framework where labour became service to capital before
| service to oneself. Outside this set of relations of
| production, the problem of runaway unemployment isn't
| possible, because employment itself is not a major
| productive force. And that's precisely how humans got
| into a situation like that of workhorses - or rather how
| workhorses got into the situation of humans!
| erikstarck wrote:
| "...it's centred around capital"
|
| Well, actually around value - which is different from
| capital. It just so happens that we use capital to trade a
| lot (but not all) of what we consider to be valuable.
|
| Even in a world of abundance there would be things that are
| scarce but we still consider valuable. Social status for
| example.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Certainly, our economy is not centred around abstract
| value. Value for who? What kind of value? Does value rule
| the life of the average man, or does trading his labour
| for access to capital and a share of it's proceeds
| describe the relation one has to the economy more
| accurately?
|
| Trade is not what I'm discussing as an abstract concept,
| but instead how we structure our relationship to
| sustenance and work. That is centred around capital, not
| value - hence the word "capitalism". Which is not
| necessarily a bad thing, in some ways this is a good
| organization for things we care about, but it's not
| mainly about maximizing value for everyone, it came about
| very mechanistically.
| koboll wrote:
| >horses don't create demand, but neither do unemployed
| humans.
|
| What Sam is proposing is massive wealth redistribution by
| taxing land and capital. Seen any memes referencing $1400
| lately? Unemployed humans who are given cash absolutely
| create demand.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Certainly, if you put wealth redistribution into the
| equation, then we don't have this argument anymore. But
| I'm arguing in the abstract sense outside of government
| intervention or structural modification.
|
| Besides, massive wealth redistribution in the form of
| direct payments indiscriminately is not politically
| viable right now, but maybe this line of argument can
| help.
| imtringued wrote:
| If you could restrain those pesky humans or prevent them from
| reproducing then it would be a valid concern.
| aksss wrote:
| As prosperity increases, growth booms but then predictably
| falls below replacement rate. So humans kind of do this on
| their own if you can get through the boom period without
| breaking things too badly.
| NortySpock wrote:
| But why would we not see "those who desire to have kids"
| out-reproduce those who don't have kids, within a few
| generations?
| rmah wrote:
| Yes, some people will get screwed end up like those out-of-work
| horses because of AI or automation. Other people will benefit
| greatly. On average, most people will benefit a little bit.
| This is how every technological advance has worked for the last
| few hundred years. The promise of higher efficiency == higher
| standard of living is a general promise for society as a whole,
| not for any particular individual.
| [deleted]
| csomar wrote:
| > democracy can become antagonistic as people seek to vote money
| away from each other.
|
| ...
|
| > We should therefore focus on taxing capital rather than labor
|
| I find it amazing that these "thinkers" don't see the irony. You
| are "afraid" that people are going to vote you away from your
| wealth via democracy; but then you feel privileged to decide how
| this wealth should be taxed. Since AIs are getting smarter than
| humans, maybe we should let them decide?
|
| > and AI teachers that can diagnose and explain exactly what a
| student doesn't understand.
|
| Since AIs are smarter than humans, why bother teaching humans at
| all? Unless there is a point where a developed human brain could
| outsmart the AI, it seems to be a waste and emotionally guided.
|
| > We could do something called the American Equity Fund.
|
| Any solution that is not universal is bound the fail. These
| companies can move overseas to cut their tax bill. It also easier
| than moving now since all they need to move is data; electronics
| being already made in Asia.
|
| The reality is, there is no place for humans in an AI driven
| world where AI is smarter than humans and robots can make stuff.
| Realizing that is the first step to move forward in this new
| world.
| core-questions wrote:
| > The reality is, there is no place for humans in an AI driven
| world where AI is smarter than humans and robots can make
| stuff.
|
| Luckily, that's a hell of a lot further away than AI bulls
| indicate. Can't even use AI to help with hiring people without
| it getting cancelled as racist, after all.
| tempestn wrote:
| If you want to follow that chain of logic, then the thing to do
| would be to either find a way to prove that a sufficiently AI
| would be conscious, or to augment human consciousness with AI.
| Because even if AI's are superior to humans at everything, if
| they're not self-aware, you still need humans or other
| conscious animals for anything to have a point - you need
| someone to experience the stuff that exist. And humans aren't
| built to be happy existing simply as consumers, so if humans
| are going to be those experiencers, they need to be involved in
| creation, not just consumption.
| csbartus wrote:
| > Realizing that is the first step to move forward in this new
| world.
|
| Right, we've become disposable. Up until the computer era we
| were part of the equation. We went to war, to vote, and we paid
| taxes - making ourselves useful for state and capital.
|
| Now, they don't need us anymore. We are a burden for the state
| (universal basic income) and capital plays its own game (high
| frequency trading).
|
| Samuel Butler was right in Erewhon (1872): "Advertising is the
| way we grant power to the machine"
|
| AI is powered by advertising, by the data we voluntarily feed
| into the machine. For the false reward of shining the ego.
|
| Yes, we must admit, as a specie we are highly disappointing.
| Instead of lifting ourselves we've created a monster above us.
| naringas wrote:
| > Since AIs are smarter than humans, why bother teaching humans
| at all? Unless there is a point where a developed human brain
| could outsmart the AI, it seems to be a waste and emotionally
| guided.
|
| taking this point and running off with it. why bother having
| humans at all? let's all become a simulation and live within a
| computer.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| That's the goal. Infinite jest.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| But, by your exact same logic: Why bother having humans _even
| within the simulation_? An AI will out-perform them there as
| well.
|
| I suggest that the original logic was flawed...
| mbesto wrote:
| > Since AIs are smarter than humans, why bother teaching humans
| at all? Unless there is a point where a developed human brain
| could outsmart the AI, it seems to be a waste and emotionally
| guided.
|
| The obscurity for the definition of AI is precisely what drives
| this. The term AI is so vague among tech circles that I find
| the term basically laughable at this point.
|
| If we're talking about sentient AI, then none of these concepts
| matter. We'll have WAY more interesting problems to deal with.
| stevenhuang wrote:
| > The reality is, there is no place for humans in an AI driven
| world where AI is smarter than humans and robots can make
| stuff.
|
| You need to read more sci-fi. The Culture series by Ian Banks
| is a good start.
|
| Of course there is dystopic fiction too, but the point is there
| are many possibilities of what life post-ai may look like
|
| Nothing says it has to work out the way you think so stating
| that so confidently is unwarranted.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| But in The Culture series humans have no meaningful role and
| everything that humans can do machines can do better. Some
| extreme edge cases may apply to very specific things, but
| even then, it's one or two individual humans being useful
| contributors out of countless trillions.
|
| I agree that The Culture is the science fiction future to
| aspire to - but the place for humans in The Culture is just
| enjoying how good society is once machines and AI do
| everything for you. Importantly, the AI's of The Culture like
| humans and want to promote human flourishing.
|
| If human+ level AGI is achieved then I think it does have to
| work out the way the parent is stating. There will be no
| useful role for the vast majority of humans. Humans are
| intelligence plus the physical capabilities of our bodies.
| Machines can already exceed our physical capabilities in most
| things, and if artificial intelligence exceeds ours - what
| will be left for humans?
| stevenhuang wrote:
| If that was the point parent was making then I agree as
| well, there would indeed be no useful role for humanity.
|
| > Importantly, the AI's of The Culture like humans and want
| to promote human flourishing
|
| Yes, perhaps this was what I wanted to highlight, that even
| if we are to end up in such a situation, it could be
| beneficial.
| visarga wrote:
| > Since AIs are smarter than humans, why bother teaching humans
| at all?
|
| Just give humans cell phones and social accounts, and let them
| eat fake news all day. Problem solved.
|
| But the flip side is that creatives and inventors will be
| empowered to achieve more.
| imtringued wrote:
| I have decided to replace AI (and robots) with Orcs in your
| comment.
|
| > We should therefore focus on taxing capital rather than labor
|
| I find it amazing that these "thinkers" don't see the irony.
| You are "afraid" that people are going to vote you away from
| your wealth via democracy; but then you feel privileged to
| decide how this wealth should be taxed. Since Orcs are getting
| smarter than humans, maybe we should let them decide?
|
| > and Orc teachers that can diagnose and explain exactly what a
| student doesn't understand.
|
| Since Orcs are smarter than humans, why bother teaching humans
| at all? Unless there is a point where a developed human brain
| could outsmart the Orcs, it seems to be a waste and emotionally
| guided.
|
| > We could do something called the American Equity Fund.
|
| Any solution that is not universal is bound the fail. These
| companies can move overseas to cut their tax bill. It also
| easier than moving now since all they need to move is data;
| electronics being already made in Asia.
|
| The reality is, there is no place for humans in an Orc driven
| world where Orcs are smarter than humans and Orcs can make
| stuff. Realizing that is the first step to move forward in this
| new world.
|
| Now try replacing humans with your nationality (e.g. Americans)
| and Orcs with people of a different nationality from yours to
| get even closer to reality.
| chishaku wrote:
| > emotionally guided
|
| > move forward
|
| What do you mean by these phrases?
|
| Can you elaborate on your framework for value?
| csomar wrote:
| > emotionally guided
|
| As humans, we emotionally feel sympathy toward other animals
| of the human race. Bonus points if they look similar
| (ethnically).
|
| > move forward
|
| Without honestly realizing what an AI driven world means, any
| "solution" is just vaporware talks, and will probably mean we
| are not ready when the shift happens.
| ch33zer wrote:
| I think that this essay assumes the possibility of infinite
| growth. That runs into the reality that we are actively running
| into the limitations of our interactions with the natural world.
| What else is climate change but an indication that we've reached
| the limit of what we can produce using our current technology.
| Now, it is possible that we can find a way to reduce our impact
| on the earth while continuing to grow, but I'm not sure that we
| can do that AND generate the astronomical growth this essay
| requires.
| dvdhnt wrote:
| Well, that's the dirty secret, isn't it?
|
| It's hard to get this crowd to admit that "growth" isn't
| infinite.
| WalterGR wrote:
| As I recall, Ray Kurzweil wrote extensively about this - minus
| the tax aspect - in his book The Singularity is Near.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| This is basically the generic singularity blogpost that comes out
| every few months or so. And at this point could probably be
| written by GPT-3, would be a nice experiment if someone could
| tell the difference
|
| Either way two major things wrong with this. First off, there
| isn't actually a whole lot of evidence that we're living in the
| most innovative time in history and that the robots are coming
| for us. Productivity growth is low, employment is high. If
| technology was eliminating labour, the opposite would be
| happening. We'd be growing at 7% per year while we'd have
| bazillions of unemployed people roaming the street.
|
| Secondly, and this is very typical for SV liberalism/centrism
| there is absolutely no understanding of power in this article and
| we just solve things by doing 'the right policies' which is
| 'simple' and then everything is fine. Of course if that was so
| simple we'd already be doing it to begin with.
|
| We don't need some futuristic 2200 utopia to solve child poverty.
| We actually could do all the things mentioned in the article
| _literally right now_. You could have been taxing the shit out of
| land in 1800. The question Sam Altman needs to answer is why the
| technolords of the future don 't just simply hire some Terminator
| Pinkertons to mow down everyone who wants to get their hands on
| some of their riches.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| This essay doesn't address any of the key problems often raised
| when talking about AI and UBI.
|
| Here is Australia we are already seeing one the effects of very
| cheap stuff. Skilled labor is significantly more expensive than
| buying things, so anything that has to have an Australian
| involved is ridiculously expensive. Calling the Plumber to fix a
| drain? That's a week of groceries or perhaps a new TV.
|
| At some point soon there is going to be a fairly significant
| upheaval, not just when AI takes some peoples jobs, but when it's
| just not wort it to pay somebody $200 an hour to do something for
| you. I think to some extent, peoples time is linked to the price
| of products you can buy.
|
| Eventually, Plumbers won't need $200 an hour to buy their own
| things, they can drop their rates. Wages everywhere might fall.
|
| Taxing land sounds fair enough, but I was under the impression we
| are already subsidizing a lot of farming anyhow, and since we are
| racing to the bottom on food pricing, there is not much profit to
| be made on food anyhow.
|
| Any aren't we supposed to be reclaiming land to turn back into
| national parks, planting trees, and capturing carbon.
| psoots wrote:
| > Economic growth matters because most people want their lives to
| improve every year.
|
| Improve how? Should I need economic growth to get better health
| care? This whole techno-utopian argument seems to hinge on
| extractive growth because it fails to actually tackle the
| problems of inequality by providing true redistribution of wealth
| in any meaningful sense. Trickle-down AI is a sham.
| mdpopescu wrote:
| Let's build a system that's pretty much indistinguishable from
| socialism, but call it capitalism. That way, when it inevitably
| fails, we'll blame capitalism.
|
| Yep. I saw this movie before.
| asbund wrote:
| If they could make gpt-4 more coherent than gpt3 and could show
| understanding on causality than this blog will be more agreeable
| for me
| lucasmullens wrote:
| > If everyone owns a slice of American value creation, everyone
| will want America to do better: collective equity in innovation
| and in the success of the country will align our incentives.
|
| I kind of doubt that. At Google we're paid in part with shares of
| GOOG, but at Google's scale that's just treated as cash
| compensation. At my level, nothing I do affects the stock price,
| and most Googlers feel this way.
|
| Sure, I want Google to do well, and I want America to do well
| too. Both of them doing well benefits me. But it doesn't really
| encourage me to do something different day-to-day.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| You never know. Butterfly effect and all that. It adds up. Best
| example I know of is when I was younger and playing WoW, my
| brother was explaining gemming your gear to me. I told him
| "what will a +4 intelligence gem do really?" But you add up all
| the gems on all the sockets on the gear and it makes a huge
| difference. The difference being the difference between a
| strong character and a weak one and living or dying. Each you
| in google is a potential gem in the system. Or you can be an
| empty socket. Add all those up and it does have a huge effect
| on the outcome of Google (and the stock price).
|
| I apply this theory to many diverse subjects- voting, finances,
| human health and car maintenance (once one system is suboptimal
| or impaired, others often follow). Keep your sockets gemmed. :)
| random_kris wrote:
| So nicely said. I read a quote somewhere about ancient big
| buildings... Like stonemasons that were crafting stones had
| to imagine each stone beating really important in the bigger
| picture. The quote said it better than me here.
| ChrisLomont wrote:
| >You never know. Butterfly effect and all that. It adds up.
|
| The butterfly effect affects most no physical systems, which
| contain incredible amounts of damping processes. The same
| thing happens with people - if a zillion of them want things
| that point in somewhat different directions, the net does not
| add up, it cancels.
|
| Otherwise most physical systems would simply explode to
| infinities, but in practice they don't. They dissipate and
| become less useful.
|
| Basically, the sum of noise is zero.
| pgsimp wrote:
| I live in a city with high rents. What would it look like if
| everybody had a shot at fulfilling their economic dreams? Let's
| say their dream is to live in the center of the city, in one of
| those flats that now cost 2 million dollars.
|
| So society is obliged to give everybody a shot at that 2 million
| dollar flat, no matter what their line of work or their
| qualifications are. How is that supposed to work?
|
| Some things still are limited and will probably always be
| limited, unless everybody can live in virtual reality in their
| ideal world.
| BirdieNZ wrote:
| I don't know if this completely answers your question, but it
| won't be high rent if a land value tax is implemented
| correctly.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| I have an idea for sharing wealth: Why not create a non-profit
| organization that democratizes AI by sharing its models openly
| with everyone?
| lincolnq wrote:
| I know you are being sarcastic, but I don't know if everyone
| understands Sam Altman's motivation for running OpenAI the way
| it's being run. Sam is trying to create AI which causes the
| greatest benefit for humanity. That's openAI's mission. Open
| sourcing everything now would not achieve the mission.
|
| In case the "why" is not obvious: AI progress is limited by a)
| great research talent; b) money -- specifically being able to
| invest in compute. If OpenAI were to open source everything,
| they would not be able to raise the money they need to invest
| in compute, which would cause a death spiral in their ability
| to attract and retain their researchers. They need to have a
| story for why they will make money in the short term to
| continue being a top tier AI research org. And since AI is
| "winner take all", it is likely worse for the world if a less
| altruistic company takes all the talent and source code.
|
| If your point is just that OpenAI is a misnomer now, I agree
| :). It's not open. But I do think they have settled on a
| surprisingly good point in solution space (the capped-profit
| company, the charter, etc); I don't see ways to validly
| criticize the company from an altruism perspective.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| AI progress is not limited at all, it's the fastest moving
| research field in the world (5x improvement in efficiency /
| year for training a task to the same precision for the same
| cost if I recall correctly, far better than Moore's law).
|
| OpenAI is opening the world to AI and helping people just
| like Google's doing ,,no evil'', Facebook is connecting
| people. At the point when an organization gets big enough to
| not keep its original values (being open for OpenAI), it's
| not better (less altruistic) in ,,making the world a better
| place'' than any other organization. Competition and having
| the power of AI distributed in more companies is good though
| (until they acquire each other).
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| We could call it... Open AI?
| cphajduk wrote:
| Time to start:
|
| ActuallyOpenAI ^TM
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _In the next five years, computer programs that can think will
| read legal documents and give medical advice._
|
| Aside from the other points, taking "AI" as it exists in it's
| present form (deep neural networks and related) as specifically
| the bringer of unlimited wealth certainly puffs up the various
| "AI companies" notably OpenAI (It should be noted that OpenAI's
| most famous product, GPT-3, can generate strings that sound a lot
| like legal or medical advice but it so far "demonstrates non-
| understanding on a regular basis". Don't follow it's advice to
| kill yourself, for example).
|
| It really should be said that deep learning, in particular, is
| still just one technology that's very good at some things, kind
| of impressive but not functional at other things, and just unable
| to do other things (actual understanding of biology, for example,
| seems well beyond them). I don't think this situation has changed
| since deep learning began it's hype cycle (which isn't to say
| it's "nothing", it just doesn't seem like to bring us
| "everything", a scenario the article literally sketches).
|
| Automation has proceeded apace, automation in general has brought
| us enough resources right now to give minimal comfort to most
| people in the planet (as people have noted).
|
| But automation has generally succeeded in situations where
| everything is controlled - ie, factories. Self-driving cars are
| forever five years away given the 5% or 1% or whatever level of
| unpredictable variable involved. Progress on robots that can
| interact well with either humans or "the messy real world" even
| in very limited terms has been painfully slow and I expect this
| to continue.
| niels_bom wrote:
| Thanks. I was starting to think I was the only one not
| believing in the AI hype train.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| One other thing I'd like to add.
|
| The scenario of AI mostly replacing people like doctors and
| lawyers involves bizarre paradoxes beyond whether deep learning
| "AI" works as advertised. Suppose you can train an "AI" to read
| legal papers or diagnose patients based on X-rays. That
| training is done from the data of real life lawyers and doctors
| actions. Suppose, best case scenario (very unrealistic imo
| btw), you have a complete "snapshot" of the behavior of lawyers
| and doctors in a given year. The problem is reality changes,
| you need new lawyering and doctoring behaviors after N years.
| Doctors need interpret new maladies, lawyers need to cite new
| decisions and both need to interpret new language forms that
| appear. But if you've actually removed the real lawyers and
| doctors, where would you get the new training data?
|
| And this is just taking AI at it's word.
| kart23 wrote:
| In 1995, a self driving car drove 98% of the way across the
| country. Think what these same people predicting AI today would
| have predicted in 1995. They would probably believe we were 10
| years away from self driving cars in every household. We still
| dont have a mass produced level 3 system in 2021.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_self-driving_cars
| msikora wrote:
| > technological progress follows an exponential curve
|
| This is a mantra that I keep hearing, but if I compare the
| progress from 1900 to 1960 and then from 1960 to 2020, it almost
| seems like it has been flattening... Sure, we have internet and
| fancy computers, but the progress from 1900 to 1960 was immense:
| air travel, electrification, proliferation of automobiles,
| immense progress in medicine, space exploration, nuclear energy.
| Even the MOSFET transistor was invented in 1959.
|
| Not saying there wasn't any progress between 1960 and 2020, but
| it sure doesn't look "accelerating"...
| goatlover wrote:
| He's rehashing Kurzweil's analysis of history, which is to
| broadly fit a few data points to show that exponential growth
| is baked into the universe. And then go in to claim that the
| next 100 years is going to be something 20,000 years of 20th
| century progress.
|
| But I don't see that the 2000s are progressing any faster than
| the 80s and 90s. It looks fairly linear since the 50s or 60s
| overall. smartphones and Deep Learning are incremental progress
| over what existed before.
| wmf wrote:
| He's just talking about performance, not qualitative progress.
| sneak wrote:
| It's a bummer that while he starts out talking about a global
| revolution that will profoundly affect all human beings, he
| smoothly transitions into tax policy opinions and suggestions
| that, in a best case scenario, will affect about 3.5% of human
| beings (Americans).
|
| Most of the world is not American, and for every American, there
| are around 19 people who are not.
|
| > _If everyone owns a slice of American value creation, everyone
| will want America to do better:_
|
| Americans say "everyone" when they mean "Americans". "Everyone"
| is actually 20x larger. (In a section on inclusivity, no less!)
| second--shift wrote:
| I read some time ago (I think as a link here) the following:
| https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...
|
| One of my takeaways is that growth cannot exist forever; there is
| a thermal bound to how much energy (economy = energy consumption,
| if you reduce it enough) we can produce and consume. Another
| commenter posted that if you zoom out enough, economic growth is
| exponential. I tend to agree, at least backwards-looking, so I
| think of intervals of economic progress as "doubling" (ie,
| logarithmic instead of linear).
|
| We only have a few more doublings before we hit some serious
| thermal discomfort. The "AI Revolution" as dreamed in the OP I
| think is largely impossible: if the AI/Robots/Whatever get
| sufficiently advanced they will require orders of magnitude more
| energy than we already consume, which would run the risk of
| cooking us all.
|
| I would rather see someone or someones trying to break the
| economy = energy paradigm. At some point, we will be unable to
| generate more useful energy; I'd like to see us do more with
| less.
| iMuzz wrote:
| Great read.
|
| > "We could do something called the American Equity Fund. The
| American Equity Fund would be capitalized by taxing companies
| above a certain valuation 2.5% of their market value each year,
| payable in shares transferred to the fund.."
|
| I could be in favor of something like this.
|
| However, I'd be curious to hear Sam's thoughts on what kind of
| vehicle do we use to _ensure_ that this equity actually reaches
| end-users?
|
| I can make a very strong historical case that the government is
| not the right vehicle for this to work. You could also just look
| at the most recent $1.9T stimulus bill -- where only a fraction
| of it went out as checks to Americans in need.
| adambaybutt wrote:
| He's seems open to the idea that it is just a transfer to a
| citizen's brokerage account which could be a service provided
| by the private market.
| dgellow wrote:
| Slightly off topic regarding the 1.9T: Where did the rest go?
| wmf wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Rescue_Plan_Act_of_20.
| ..
| fungiblecog wrote:
| Maybe in the Hacker News echo chamber this all sounds plausible.
|
| But where I live in the real world all I see is software getting
| worse and worse. It doesn't do ANYTHING automatically anymore and
| can't be scripted, every 'app' is a silo and has to be constantly
| tended to by humans. Useful functionality is actually removed and
| more time is spent on UI visuals than making it usable. This is
| made worse by the tendency of surveillance software to require
| humans to interact with it constantly in order to harvest
| information, interactions or to display ads.
|
| At some point this bubble will burst, the ridiculous tech
| valuations will crash and we'll be back looking for solutions to
| real problems again.
| dvdhnt wrote:
| The beginning of the "Capitalism for Everyone" section is
| laughably out of touch with the reality of 2021.
|
| However, buried further down is an agreeable point:
|
| > We should therefore focus on taxing capital rather than labor
|
| Yes, along with repatriation of capital so tax payers can't stash
| their cash abroad.
| [deleted]
| unreal6 wrote:
| "This revolution will generate enough wealth for everyone to have
| what they need, if we as a society manage it responsibly."
|
| I worry that this is already the case, and we are already failing
| miserably. Globally we seem to have enough resources to feed,
| clothe, and shelter the global population and in a number of
| cases (see the USA) to be unable to do so.
| aksss wrote:
| Are we failing "miserably"? I mean, global poverty is down,
| down, down.[0] Famine mortality is down, down, down (in spite
| of population going up, up, up). [1] Not everyone gets an
| Escalade and a 5k square-foot home, but arguably they shouldn't
| be using those anyway. But it seems like in terms of what
| people "need" (food, shelter, clothing), globally humans are
| enjoying unprecedented prosperity, despite the enormous gaps
| that can and will exist - the mean seems higher. I'd call that
| improvement, not failure in the immediate sense, though of
| course this is all coming at a price to the environment whose
| balance due is only starting to be realized.
|
| [0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/size-poverty-gap-world
| [1] https://sites.tufts.edu/wpf/files/2017/08/famine-
| mortality-b...
| lucasmullens wrote:
| We're improving rapidly, but I think we need to set our
| expectations higher. According to givewell.org, it only costs
| between $3000 and $5000 to save a life. There's a lot of
| people who could give that amount and don't, so there's a lot
| of lives that could be saved that aren't. And that's a pretty
| miserable failure to me.
| aksss wrote:
| We can always do better, that's for sure. Charitable giving
| is massively high in the US as a percentage of GDP
| though[1]. Individual giving is the highest source of that
| money[2]. That's a testament to something good, I think.
| That more people could give more and don't is a failure at
| an individual level, but systemically the globe is reducing
| poverty on its current track.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_char
| itabl...
|
| [2] https://givingusa.org/giving-usa-2020-charitable-
| giving-show...
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Well, a few decades ago, it took maybe $200 to save a life.
| We're certainly trending right.
| aksss wrote:
| That's fascinating.. so human lives are worth more, or
| there's more friction to intervention these days? Hoping
| it's the former. But curious what you think the
| explanation is for this. Just a reflection in standard of
| living, and so the cost to save has a higher standard?
| bpodgursky wrote:
| A few decades ago, mass famine was still a thing, and all
| it took to keep people alive was food aid. Ex, the famine
| in Ethiopia which killed a million+: https://en.wikipedia
| .org/wiki/1983%E2%80%931985_famine_in_Et...
|
| Food insecurity is still a thing, but the only mass
| starvation is driven by conflict in hard-to-reach places
| like Yemen, where you can't just easily ship food and
| save a million lives.
|
| Now, the most effective aid interventions are campaigns
| like de-worming and Malaria; but those are more of a QALY
| calculation, where you de-worm 100 kids to prevent
| serious disease in some subset of them. Which overall
| drives the cost up, but is actually a good trend.
| boring_twenties wrote:
| I think it's more that the lowest hanging fruit have
| already been picked. In other words, all the lives that
| could be saved for $200 have already been saved. If I'm
| right about that it would seem to be an unambiguously
| good thing.
| zz865 wrote:
| I still dont really know about AI taking over the world. The most
| expensive things in my budget are housing, car, healthcare,
| childcare, flights/hotels, food. Does AI really change that much?
| There are definitely too many over-educated people out there
| already, I'd think this is more of an impact & setting up
| disappointment than the bots.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Robots building houses on cheap land due to mass work form home
| would make housing much cheaper. Robot doctors make healthcare
| much cheaper. Robot teachers make childcare/education much
| cheaper. Robot farmers + GMO make food much cheaper.
| imtringued wrote:
| If a house is all I needed I could just move out to some 20km
| away location and get one for 60kEUR. You would have to do
| your own renovations but isn't that part of the deal when you
| buy a house? But I will concede that automation increases
| productivity and gives us access to more goods and services.
| It's absolutely necessary.
| pgsimp wrote:
| I don't think building costs are the main issue with
| availability of housing. You need the land to build on - and
| not just any land, but land in desired locations.
|
| How are the artificial mega cities in China doing? Didn't
| they build several cities from scratch that are supposed to
| house several million people each?
| jessriedel wrote:
| The time you spend in your car is more valuable than the cost
| of the car itself (including gas, repairs, etc). So insofar as
| you can free that time with an autonomous vehicle, it can
| absolutely slash the total cost of transportation.
|
| To a lesser extent, similar things can be said about your other
| examples.
| visarga wrote:
| > Does AI really change that much?
|
| About all the things you listed - housing, transportation,
| education, food and travel are being impacted by digitization
| and AI.
| core-questions wrote:
| Phrasing things as an optimization problem can result in
| better, more efficient arrangements than how things are
| presently, but only within the limits that people are willing
| to accept. It also depends what we're optimizing for - if we
| naively set it for "maximum number of humans fed and cared
| for", we really are all going to be eating bugs and living in
| pods.
| adambaybutt wrote:
| A society built via capitalism just gives people what they
| want; not maximizing some arbitrary objective function.
|
| We currently have no capitalist societies on earth.
| core-questions wrote:
| Sounds like an instance of the No True Scotsman fallacy to
| me, friend. What is capitalism if not the systems that
| purport to be it? It's like saying "communism has never
| been tried". They tried _something_, and they certainly
| labelled it communism.
|
| That said, I do find the Equity Fund idea interesting,
| though it's not entirely clear what this looks like in
| practice, especially for the unbanked, the mentally ill,
| homeless people, etc. who might not really know what to do
| with shares, since some of them don't really know what to
| do with cash, either. Seems to me these are the people most
| in need of uplift, no?
|
| I'm not too worried about most lawyers getting automated
| out of a job anytime soon, after all, to the extent where I
| want to see the economy overturned for the likes of them.
| bawolff wrote:
| > In the next five years, computer programs that can think will
| read legal documents and give medical advice. In the next decade,
| they will do assembly-line work
|
| Wait, medical advice is easier than assembly line work??
| AlexandrB wrote:
| For AI, probably yes[1]. Arbitrary sensing and motion are
| surprisingly hard. Any problem that can be expressed as pure
| data is easier by comparison.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
| bawolff wrote:
| I would assume a big difference is its easy to redesign
| assembly lines to be easy for computers. We cant do the same
| for our bodies.
| dgellow wrote:
| i can already imagine the quality of medical and legal advices
| we will get from an AI trained on public internet data :)
| maxerickson wrote:
| One factor is that assembly line work is already subject to a
| lot of automation.
| tvanantwerp wrote:
| Imagine: 1) I'm the owner of a single family home 2) My income
| drops to roughly zero because of AI 3) My property values go
| through the roof 4) I now owe 2.5% of these sky-rocketing
| property values every year, to be paid from my non-existent
| income
|
| Doesn't this scenario lead to me either selling my "gifted"
| shares to pay property taxes, or ending up a renter at best and
| homeless at worst? I can imagine this proposal leading to
| _greater_ concentrations of wealth rather than spreading it
| around.
| zz865 wrote:
| I think if most people are in 2) then 3) isn't going to happen.
| tvanantwerp wrote:
| I include 3 because Altman assumes it. Even if property
| values stay the same--or even drop--I think it would not be a
| fun situation for home owners.
| mdorazio wrote:
| If your property value doubles and you lose your job, why
| wouldn't you sell your property for a massive gain, take that
| money and buy a new house somewhere cheaper, thereby avoiding
| the tax issue entirely? Seems like a situation where you want
| to have your cake and eat it, too.
| Aunche wrote:
| Property values generally rise because an area has a very
| attractive jobs market. Overall, it's a benefit to society to
| incentivize people with no income to move out an area with a
| lower cost of living. This incentivizes more people move there
| and do productive work, which can be taxed and distributed.
| tvanantwerp wrote:
| I just find something very cold and socially undesirable in
| the idea that somebody can spend a lifetime putting in the
| work to get the home they want, only to be forced out because
| "society" decides they are no longer productive. I'm no NIMBY
| --those people shouldn't have the right to stop others from
| developing their own properties--but I'm not sure I like the
| idea of economic incentives kicking the least productive to
| the curb because it's "efficient".
| Aunche wrote:
| If being taxed 2.5% a year counts as being "forced out,"
| then staying in a highly productive area of land
| indefinitely is "forcing" people who can otherwise move to
| your house to stay poor. Never mind that it's the wealthy
| are the ones who benefit from elimination of property
| taxes.
|
| It's society that makes the property valuable in the first
| place, so it makes sense to pay society back. The
| firefighters, schools, and social workers in your area need
| to get paid extra to account for the cost of living
| increases. That money should come from the people benefit
| the most from their services, the property owners.
| imtringued wrote:
| > because "society" decides they are no longer productive.
|
| You have to consider the benchmark. Do people deserve to
| live in a castle if they aren't productive enough?
|
| Living in a single family home in the middle of NYC
| requires a whole lot of productivity because you are
| literally displacing dozens of other people. You have to be
| as productive as all those people combined to be worthy of
| replacing them.
| goesnowhere wrote:
| A land value tax taxes the value of the land not the things
| built on it. It hurts speculators/landlords and benefits people
| who build/improve.
|
| It works very differently than a propery tax.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ok2uR3btMrE
| elmomle wrote:
| A variant of this is responsible for the rise of oligarchy
| during de-Sovietization in Russia. Citizens were given shares
| of state companies, but people's basic needs weren't met. This
| resulted in most shares being sold to whomever would buy them
| for any amount of money or basic resources. This, along with
| the general power vacuum, led to the rapid consolidation of
| massive amounts of power in the hands of whoever managed to
| wield local power for their benefit at the time--those who
| became the oligarchs.
|
| Bill Browder writes a bit about it in his book, Red Notice. The
| book is also a great cautionary tale that the whole narrative
| that we can spread democratic ideals by making business deals
| with with corrupt/despotism regimes is smoke. It leads to more
| corruption, less moral authority, and further empowered
| despots.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > I now owe 2.5% of these sky-rocketing property values every
| year
|
| Just as a UBI gives people an income floor, I think that a land
| tax should come with a personal allowance below which you are
| exempt.
|
| To do some rough calculations, the US state with the highest
| population density is New Jersey, at 1,210.1 people per square
| mile, which equates to 23,038 square feet per person. The
| average American house size is apparently 2,687 square feet,
| which is typically shared by multiple people, so the allowance
| could be comfortably set to maybe 10,000 square feet per
| person.
| notahacker wrote:
| Even without the hypothetical AI effect on income, this is a
| proposal which will tax you 100% of the value of your property
| over a 40 year period whilst over the same period YC's LPs and
| founders will have paid just 2.5% of the [much higher] value of
| their companies.
|
| Now there are efficiency arguments in favour of taxing land to
| encourage its use and not taxing productive enterprises or
| their investors too heavily, but this is pretty extreme...
| larsiusprime wrote:
| > which will tax you 100% of the value of your property
|
| If it's a property tax, yes. If it's a land tax, no. Under
| land tax you tax the "ground rent" value of the land, not
| what's built on it. "Ground rent" is what it costs to rent
| out your land if it was an empty lot with nothing on it.
| Property tax and land tax are very different things with very
| different effects.
| tvanantwerp wrote:
| In high-demand cities, the land is the expensive part--not
| the house on top of it.
| larsiusprime wrote:
| Right you are, and the land tax is specifically designed
| to destroy the speculative activity that causes it to
| increase forever.
| goesnowhere wrote:
| Yeah thats kinda the point.
| notahacker wrote:
| The Georgist land value (which Altman suggests might be
| more practically replaced by a system linked to actual
| property transaction values) is still going to be a
| sufficiently large proportion of the value of a typical
| home to ensure pretty much anyone not living in a
| multistorey tenement block is paying massively higher tax
| rates on their home than anyone pays on a YC company.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| As it should be. Single family homes are wasteful, they
| should cost more.
| larsiusprime wrote:
| One of the chief purposes of a land tax is to destroy the
| speculative activity which drives land prices up forever
| and ever.
| imtringued wrote:
| The entire point of land value taxes is to turn land into
| a liability. You don't get to benefit from the
| accomplishments of other people. You only get to benefit
| from your own accomplishments e.g. by building a
| multistory tenant block and renting it out.
| xrd wrote:
| There are some really smart ideas in here, and some really smart
| assessments of existing policies.
|
| The thing I was most taken aback by was Sam's suggestion to tax
| privately held land, and capital (as opposed to labor tax).
|
| I would love to have Sam and PG go toe to toe and discuss how
| Sam's proposal is different from the wealth tax post PG made. I
| don't immediately see how Sam's idea avoids the "wealth tax
| compounds" problem (his words not mine) that PG is worried about.
|
| http://paulgraham.com/wtax.html
| SamBam wrote:
| I don't see the issue with the wealth tax compounding, because
| the wealth _also_ compounds.
|
| That's exactly the "problem" with wealth (from the perspective
| of society's growing wealth inequality). Wealth compounds much,
| much faster than income grows. Someone who inherits $3 million
| (not much from the point of view of the wealthy) can live
| comfortably on the growth alone while _still_ compounding their
| wealth further every year.
|
| The only way a wealth tax would compound faster than the wealth
| itself is if it is larger than the growth rate of the wealth.
| And since that's averaged at ~8-10% over the past few decades,
| a 1% tax is not going to eat into a person's wealth over time.
| It's simply going to slightly slow that growth down.
| tvanantwerp wrote:
| As far as I can tell, it's not different. Unless you could
| consistently generate the 2.5% property value to pay the tax
| each year (in a world where AI has sent incomes to zero!), then
| you'll eventually lose your property.
| goesnowhere wrote:
| But if everyone is poor then prices drop...
| imtringued wrote:
| That's just an argument for why wealth taxes should never go
| above 2%. If you can't double or triple your wealth in 60 years
| what are you doing with it?
| colinmhayes wrote:
| The estimation of 15% loss of market cap due to the 2.5% cap
| tax is laughable. That is effectively a reverse buyback of 2.5%
| every year. It would leave many companies with 0 or negative
| profit. Any company with P/E above 40 immediately loses money.
| 20 has their profit chopped in half. The values of these
| companies would be reduced by at least 50%.
| larsiusprime wrote:
| Land Value tax has a long history in economics; it acts very
| differently from capital and wealth taxes because Land really
| behaves differently from those two classes of things. I highly
| recommend reading Henry George on the subject, who originally
| popularized the idea.
|
| Note "Land Tax" != "Property Tax." Land tax taxes only the
| value of the underlying "ground rent", NOT the value of the
| improvements (stuff you build on land). Property Tax taxes
| both.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
| adambaybutt wrote:
| Sam's proposal doesn't avoid the wealth tax compounds simple
| arithmetic that PG notes.
|
| And yes many important questions for society to answer on this,
| e.g. how much does is disincentivize entrepreneurs if they have
| half of their wealth taxed away over the decades compared to
| current taxation system?
| xrd wrote:
| <joke>
|
| Just a thought experiment: let's say we take Sam's ideas
| alongside something like UBI, where everyone has a baseline
| of income provided by the society they live in.
|
| You succeed wildly, and get rich as an entrepreneur. Sadly,
| in a generation or two, your grandchildren will be back with
| the rest of the plebeians, despite grandpops launching YC,
| writing books on art and coding and creating an bunch of
| amazing companies. But, your grandkids are now not motivated
| by escaping the poverty they live in, but by a simple desire
| to live differently than the other normal people out there
| (also living on UBI).
|
| This seems a lot like what happens in places like Russia or
| Venezuela or Brazil, where the best and the brightest (often
| from upper crust there) flee their countries to make it big
| in Europe, US or the Middle East, but not always because they
| have such horrible lives there.
|
| Except that, unlike entrepreneurs driven by a mindset that
| has them feel like it is never enough, these ones are just
| trying to escape the ennui of boredom of suburbia, and
| slipping back into that isn't so awful. The alternative drive
| of escaping poverty does something very different and
| rapacious: see Tyco and Dennis Kozlowski:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Kozlowski, who despite
| enormous wealth couldn't stop himself from having his company
| pay for even his rugs.
|
| It's like the best of communism, and the best of capitalism!
|
| </joke>
|
| Seriously, isn't there an interesting space for entrepreneurs
| in a new world like the one Sam is describing?
| hyko wrote:
| _If robots can build a house on land you already own from natural
| resources mined and refined onsite_
|
| ...
|
| If you think that's cool, you'll love my upcoming seminar: "How
| To Live Mortgage Free Using A House and Land You Already Paid
| Cash For!"
| justicezyx wrote:
| I am more and more amused by Sam's ambition of describing so-
| called plans for Humans, while at the same time is 1 year younger
| than myself, who had co-founded a failed startup loopt based on
| sharing location information; and joined YC because of largely
| Paul Graham and him being somewhat liked each other without much
| deep connections, and eventually become chairman of YC; then now
| co-founded OpenAI as the one working business side of the org.
|
| I don't think Sam is using his time and energy wisely. But I
| could be wrong. Who knows.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman
| lincolnq wrote:
| What do you think he should be doing instead?
| Pandabob wrote:
| A little off-topic but I've been thinking about technological
| progress and its impact on inflation recently. In 2018 Jay Powell
| partly blamed Amazon (and others) for pushing prices down so much
| that the fed wasn't able to hit its inflation targets [0]. Isn't
| Sam's vision also inherently deflationary? If consumer prices
| keep dropping due to technological progress, shouldn't we keep
| printing money?
|
| I'm still a little sceptical of Sam's vision coming to pass, but
| if it does, it'll have some weird consequences on monetary
| policy.
|
| [0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/01/new-fed-chairman-says-
| amazon...
| walleeee wrote:
| you'd think by 2021 we'd have wised up to this tired fever dream
| whateveracct wrote:
| the author is trying to make money on the back of said tired
| fever dream
| ralph84 wrote:
| > This revolution will generate enough wealth for everyone to
| have what they need
|
| We had enough wealth for everyone to have what we need a long
| time ago. No matter how much we have humans always want more. AI
| won't change that.
| franciscop wrote:
| That's why the article goes on to explain how to fix that. I
| believe they are two independent points, the taxation
| proposition is independent from the AI revolution and could be
| applied today. What the article argues is that the AI
| revolution would make wealth accumulation so massive that we
| will need laws and taxes, and new ways of looking at the world.
| abraxas wrote:
| I doubt that. People who are ultra rich use money as a proxy
| for power, influence and status. In a post scarcity world money
| likely won't be a great way to attain status so the hope is
| that status will be obtained through other means like creative
| expression or charisma.
| stickfigure wrote:
| > We had enough wealth for everyone to have what we need a long
| time ago.
|
| That's obviously not true today: There isn't enough coronavirus
| vaccine to go around.
|
| There almost certainly _will be_ enough eventually, but human
| beings live in the now. There will be another pandemic someday.
| Or some other natural disaster that creates localized or
| temporal scarcity. We can 't just spin up a new lifesaving drug
| or a million new homes overnight. Maybe someday we will?
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| > There isn't enough coronavirus vaccine to go around.
|
| That is mostly a question of regulations. The part that takes
| so much time is getting the vaccines approved; many
| researchers don't even try because they know they wouldn't
| have enough money to get their vaccine approved. Also, most
| governments negotiate hard to reduce the prices, despite the
| fact that economic damage from lockdowns is much greater.
|
| https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winfried_St%C3%B6cker
| fnord77 wrote:
| the wealth-hoarders are interfering with this...
| missedthecue wrote:
| How does one hoard wealth? Am I made poorer because Bezos
| owns 9% of his own company?
| m___ wrote:
| Yes you are, very much so, a multiplication of what you
| yourself could theoretically approach in a life-time.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| His workers are poorer because his company's enormous
| valuation comes from the surplus value they produce but do
| not receive as compensation. _You_ might be poorer if you
| own a small business those workers would frequent if they
| had more money.
|
| Edit: You might also be poorer if you tried to compete with
| Amazon and were crushed like a bug by their anti-
| competitive practices.
| imtringued wrote:
| Wrong mode of thinking. The problem is that there aren't
| enough alternatives. If you want an economy that is fair
| for workers then you need more jobs per worker so the
| worker can choose the best offer. That also means you
| want more employers, including the Jeff Bezos types.
| chordalkeyboard wrote:
| How about his workers are richer because they receive a
| portion of the value they produce, because by combining
| their labor with Amazon's capital they can produce vastly
| more value than without it; and if people didn't get
| their share of value from producing and renting out
| capital they wouldn't do it and there wouldn't be any
| capital to use.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Labor theory of value lmao. Amazon workers are richer
| because they've been given an opportunity they otherwise
| wouldn't have. If they could have a better job they'd
| take it.
| ben_w wrote:
| Sorta. Wealth like that is control and power, and while
| governments _theoretically_ have absolute power over
| business, actually using those powers can break things. If
| the government owned the same shares, you would have
| slightly more direct control over what Amazon does in
| practice. Probably. Perhaps.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| "This revolution will erode enough biome for every human to be
| dependent on the industrial complex to survive, while animals
| are basically left to starve."
| mattnewton wrote:
| What ai wil change though is the ability of large categories of
| labour to win what they need on an open marketplace. I think
| this initiative is trying to anticipate that.
| pharmakom wrote:
| yep... expectations scale with wealth. if we set a standard of
| living around that of ~100 years ago there would be "enough"
| for all. more likely outcome is that wealth disparity remains
| about the same (or gets worse) but everyone is a bit better off
| tobmlt wrote:
| Human wants for things are endless. Human desire for extra
| time, even more so. Human needs are subjective to each and
| every human. Why does Bezos get up in the morning?, if you'd
| like something aphoristic you may reply to in many creative
| ways.
|
| There is a lot of hubris in saying we're pretty much maxed out
| now, thanks and time to stop. I'd suggest instead we need to
| make smart choices, and that usually smart answers are not
| found at the far extremities. This "we have all we need" bit
| reminds me of scientists saying physics was over in the 19th
| century, combined with a bit of Thomas Malthus in such a way
| that we all die unless we halt innovation. It reminds me of
| that, but I'd be overstepping to put those words in your mouth.
| After all human intention has endless range to match the rest.
| tomgp wrote:
| >Human needs are subjective to each and every human
|
| After a certain point that's true but I think you miss the
| point of the parent. There are many, many hungry people in
| the world, many people without shelter and further millions
| who have no access to healthcare education or even clean
| water. These are not subjective needs.
|
| Those people are in that position inspite of the fact that we
| could, with the wealth we have, feed, house and provide
| health care and education for each and every one of them.
| tobmlt wrote:
| Ah, thanks. I felt that was a separate point to the idea of
| stopping progress because we have enough. I didn't realize
| that was the main point? Yes indeed, we have enough to ease
| those burdens and it's a terrible thing that they continue!
| ravi-delia wrote:
| I've spent what is likely way too much mental energy wondering
| about this, and I'm no closer to an answer. Is there any limit
| to lifestyle inflation? Is it possible to have growth that
| simply outpaces what a human could possibly consume?
| Intuitively it seems obvious that there should be something
| like that, but in the 1800s our growth today would seem like it
| should be enough.
| bob33212 wrote:
| Yes, There are a lot of people who make more money than they
| care to spend. Some of those people give the money away.
|
| and also
|
| No, when Larry Ellison built a 200 foot yacht, a Russian
| oligarch built a 250 foot yacht, The next guy will build a
| 300 foot yacht, etc.
| visarga wrote:
| > Is it possible to have growth that simply outpaces what a
| human could possibly consume?
|
| We're already maxed out on information, tools, media and
| interactions.
| wmf wrote:
| I think it's a good sign that per-capita energy consumption
| is decreasing in the US; there are limits to consumption.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| People can't all reliably afford food and shelter, so I don't
| think lifestyle inflation is the real problem.
| imtringued wrote:
| Overpopulation is a problem. People will claim that the
| plant can support 20 billion+ people but they conveniently
| forget that these people will have an incredibly low
| standard of living.
|
| Even if we were to assume that an arbitrarily low standard
| of living is acceptable, at some point that standard of
| living will include mass starvation and death so there is a
| real capacity limit. Being well below that limit is a
| virtue.
| heleninboodler wrote:
| > Is there any limit to lifestyle inflation?
|
| If there is, it's somewhere beyond launching sports cars into
| orbit.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| See that's exactly the thing. We can point to excess today
| and say "How could that be sustainable" but it seems like
| the novelty would wear off, no? Like in some hypothetical
| future where resources are 1000x more available, would
| people launch 1000 cars into space? It seems unlikely.
| Somehow I feel like there is some inelasticity to
| consumption that we just haven't reached yet. I'm not quite
| sure why I feel like that though.
| michael1999 wrote:
| Ever watch someone burn $500 in gas running a boat for an
| afternoon?
| Aunche wrote:
| I don't think launching sports cars into orbit is
| inherently any more wasteful than say the development of
| the Deep Blue chess computer. It may have been a vanity
| project, but the ultimate goal was to test a proof of
| concept.
| heleninboodler wrote:
| I didn't say it was wasteful or make any judgments about
| it. It's just a fact that a level of lifestyle that
| allows a person to launch his personal sports car into
| space has been achieved.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| I would say the Dear Moon project is more of an example
| than launching the car. The car was just for an initial
| test flight. It took the place of a block of aluminum
| like in one of the Falcon 1 launches.
| Aunche wrote:
| I mean I don't think that quite qualifies as lifestyle
| inflation. A Roadster in Space just costs Elon $100,000
| since his business planned to launch the rocket anyways.
| That's nothing compared to the price of a megayacht.
| heleninboodler wrote:
| Except getting a $100k car shot into space also probably
| requires personally building the company that is
| "launching the rocket anyways." The SpaceX waiting list
| to launch junk into space for laughs is a very exclusive
| club.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| It's a level of lifestyle that allows a person to donate
| his personal sports car to replace an inert mass, because
| he'll buy another car.
|
| While he and many others _could_ buy personal space
| launches, that launch is not a demonstration of such. He
| wasn 't paying for it, and it wasn't for him.
| gnramires wrote:
| I've also spent mental energy on this, about 4-5 years, and
| recently I've been reaching a conclusion (in a great
| walkabout about AI, ethics, and the meaning of everything).
|
| My conclusion: individual satisfaction is bounded, as long as
| we have bounded brains. First I should mention that the best
| principle I've found to underlie life is that we should
| maximize or optimize some kind of experience of
| consciousness, for every conscious entity. It's hard to
| define precisely what that entails, but we have quite good
| intuition: your life should be rich in activity, in
| interaction with others, in learning, in thought, in seeing,
| hearing, thinking; of course, not so rich as to be
| overwhelming and collapse the whole thing or leave us unable
| to digest or grasp or understand (at least a part of) what
| we're experiencing. I don't claim to be completely original:
| Wilheim von Humboldt for me is one of the great thinkers of
| conscious motivation (he lived in the 18th century).
|
| "I am more and more convinced that our happiness or
| unhappiness depends far more on the way we meet the events of
| life, than on the nature of those events themselves." -- WvH
|
| Being clear: what matters is not the experiences themselves,
| i.e. the input/output, but what the various consciousness
| apprehend. What goes on in your brain. It doesn't matter
| you're at the most beautiful beach in the most beautiful
| sunset behaving joyfully and peacefully if internally you're
| depressed or in despair.
|
| "The true end of Man, or that which is prescribed by the
| eternal and immutable dictates of reason, and not suggested
| by vague and transient desires, is the highest and most
| harmonious development of his powers to a complete and
| consistent whole." -- WvH
|
| You can only make an individual so complete, so harmonious
| with itself. Our brains have about 100 billion neurons, i.e.
| a finite number, and there's only so much you can activate
| those connections. Really the goal is not with any single
| individual -- our goal should be with _every_ conscious
| being. That 's why we should not plan individually, we should
| plan as a society. A billionaire can only get so happy -- he
| can keep linearly stacking jet skis and race cars and yatchs
| but his happiness won't follow (linearly). We should realize
| we are all part of a society, as a whole, and ideally be
| completely indifferent among individuals (i.e. everyone
| deserves as much happiness as we can collectively get them).
|
| In other words, we should take the Golden Rule _literally_.
| (of course, in practice, not everyone can be responsible for
| every other individual, but it should be our ultimate guiding
| principle, really, as individuals and society, unmistakably):
| every conscious being has the same value to yourself as
| yourself.
|
| Because individual satisfaction is bounded, this allows
| maximizing the practically unbounded (because of almost
| unbounded entity numbers) satisfaction of society as a whole,
| currently about 8 billion individuals. We need to move past
| egoism. I don't think an egoistical civilization, as was
| Western Society for much of the 20th century, can reliably go
| much further than we've come (see: climate change, rising
| political instability, fluctuating inequality, stagnating
| quality of life).
|
| I'm not arguing for any political system, I'm arguing for a
| cultural-social-technological outlook of the entire society.
| I'd label it 'Universalism' (but that's taken), so perhaps
| 'Conscious Universalism', or 'Concious value universalism'.
|
| That's how we move our entire civilization forward, achieve
| better political stability, how we're able to tackle mega
| projects like engineering the climate and rethinking our
| global supply chain, how we can allocate massive resources to
| space exploration, space colonization, prevention of
| extinction events (like asteroid impacts, etc.), how we move
| definitely past threat of nuclear annihilation (a nuclear
| conflict, still not completely out of imagination, could
| perhaps still collapse society).
|
| How to do it? I think part of it is simply enlightenment,
| discussion, writing and reading; the other is indeed
| recreating our institutions, including our economic and
| political systems (focused around this goal).
|
| This century is when we decide whether we become the Borg or
| the Federation. Cylon or Human. Dalek or Doctor. (or just
| slowly collapse... hopefully not; we have potential)
| m___ wrote:
| This way of thinking, as you draw the lines into the
| future, correspond to rational analysis. Could be called
| quality of goal-sets, as opposite to "crowing on a pile of
| dung" as is now the ongoing mindset of our elites.
| ...fascinating and not depressing the observance of
| reality, your way would be beyond and far of what is now
| passing for science, politics, societal engineering,
| technology layers without a grand design. It is not going
| to happen, goes against the history of mankind pointers.
| You Sir, must be one of the few, your status thus would
| reside in other then wealth and ego, you posess the
| suicidal gene!
| joe_the_user wrote:
| The question isn't lifestyle in the abstract. Everything that
| people buy today is specifically intended to impel more
| buying. Whether that's cars, houses or sugary foods. The
| situation is incredibly different than simple "everyone gets
| what they need" society.
|
| Take a look at just about any book on consumerism
| ravi-delia wrote:
| But again, it seems like there are physical limits to how
| much people can consume. Like, we can agree that if
| everyone had a machine that could magically summon up to 10
| thousand cubic meters of material every day, we
| realistically would have universal material abundance. Even
| if we exceeded what the boxes could make, one or two
| dedicated to making more would result in runaway
| exponential growth that would speed up much faster than
| human consumption could.
|
| Obviously that's the extreme case, and the question is how
| close to universal replicators do you need to come before
| people can't want more things fast enough.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| Then people would create television shows demonstrating
| innovative ways go waste 10,000 cubic meters of material
| every day.
|
| I'm not convinced human stupidity is bounded.
| visarga wrote:
| > how close to universal replicators do you need to come
|
| We'll probably reach technological self-replication
| singularity before AGI. I envision a small self
| replicating/repairing/transforming factory that could
| function based on local resources. Mostly 3d-printers,
| robots and tools for making tools.
|
| But I think in reality there will be limited resources,
| energy and pollution we can all use, so we can't have our
| exponential utopia. Technology will be more like biology,
| and it will get good at recycling anything.
| Lichtso wrote:
| There is a manga series which is set in this concept of
| exponential self-replication technology gone wrong
| somewhere in the past (thus a futuristic dystopia):
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blame%21
|
| >> The "Netsphere", a sort of computerized control
| network for The City. The City is an immense volume of
| artificial structure, separated into massive "floors" by
| nearly-impenetrable barriers known as "Megastructure".
| The City is inhabited by scattered human and transhuman
| tribes as well as hostile cyborgs known as Silicon
| Creatures. The Net Terminal Genes appear to be the key to
| halting the unhindered, chaotic expansion of the
| Megastructure, as well as a way of stopping the murderous
| robot horde known as the Safeguard from destroying all of
| humanity.
| loosetypes wrote:
| Comment aside, I'd never seen the word impel before.
| Interesting.
|
| For anyone curious:
| https://www.grammarbook.com/blog/definitions/compel-vs-
| impel...
| birdsbirdsbirds wrote:
| Why should there be a limit? If you can command robots to
| build anything you can ever imagine, who doesn't want his own
| Versailles - with impressive towers like the Burj Khalifa?
| Who doesn't want to fly their jet or space rocket just for
| fun to the moon and back?
|
| And humans will be humans. There will be new games, like
| drone wars on distant planets, where any production capacity
| and energy will be used. And since everything is very
| efficient, there will be no food left for birds or even poor
| humans.
| mlac wrote:
| I don't. There is the consideration that more money comes
| with more problems. You can say that more money would fix
| those problems, but at the end of the day, you still had to
| spend energy thinking about it.
|
| You can quickly approach a situation where time is the
| limiting factor. In this case I think that the private jet
| or extremely fast transportation allows you to get some
| time back. Beyond that you might have one or two projects
| that you really enjoy, like a palace, but you don't really
| have enough time to handle much more. Elon is a good
| example: he's got a few projects that he really cares about
| and does them at an extreme scale. He effectively has
| unlimited resources but he would not make any progress on
| his three major initiatives if he was much more fragmented
| than he is.
|
| And if you run this to the extreme, the true cost of
| overconsumption creates the problem of environmental damage
| and negative externalities on others that can wind you up
| like Marie-Antoinette.
|
| Plenty of other people are happy with minimalism. And that
| can be hard for some folks to understand if they aren't
| minimalists.
| rocmcd wrote:
| If you haven't already, I'd recommend reading up on
| dematerialization:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dematerialization_(economics)
|
| Modern, first-world society does seem to be reaching some
| sort of inflection point that might point to a "top" (of
| physical consumption at least) as we get more efficient and
| more stuff is moving digital. That's not to say there is
| really anything conclusive, but it is interesting to think
| about.
| bawolff wrote:
| There's certainly people who eschew technology and live in a
| historical fashion. They might even be happier for it.
|
| If there is a natural (not physical out of resources) limit
| where humans feel satiated i doubt we're anywhere near it. If
| we do hit it, wait a bunch of generations and they'll be more
| humans.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| With exponential growth, we might be closer than you'd
| think. Clearly people always want more, but the rate at
| which we want more seems like it has to have to have a
| limit. At the very least, it can grow faster than the
| population can (almost automatically, since more people
| increase growth as well).
| DenisM wrote:
| Status is a big deal. A wealth differential allows one to
| order other people around, building up status. Those others
| then feel the need to get out from under the yoke, or at
| least to be in the position to order around other-other
| people. All of this requires continuous wealth accumulation
| to which there is no limit. You would have to redefine status
| to end this game.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| _" A house may be large or small; as long as the
| neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all
| social requirement for a residence. But let there arise
| next to the little house a palace, and the little house
| shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that
| its inmate has no social position at all to maintain."_
| est31 wrote:
| Also note that a situation where humanity's productivity is
| expanding is way better from a social standpoint than one
| where it is stagnant. The first allows positive sum games
| to exist. The second is a zero sum game. Of course there is
| a limit to growth as the reachable universe is finite.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| If the goal of wealth accumulation is not actually to be
| better off but to be better than your neighbour (as it
| is), then positive sum games _become zero sum games
| functionally_.
|
| So no, that's not really a solution either.
|
| But even then, the goal isn't to limit human
| productivity, is it? It's to limit how much we work and
| lifestyle inflation, which doesn't require growth to go
| to zero.
| ctoth wrote:
| Read some Culture novels.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| Oh man, I'd love to but there aren't any more. Fantastic
| concept, solid execution.
| ksdale wrote:
| The GDP per capita of the world is only about $12,000. That's
| technically "what we need," food, clothes, and shelter for a
| family of 4, but on a per person basis, it's below the federal
| poverty line in the US.
|
| I don't think it's correct to say that we had enough wealth a
| long time ago. There are a lot of places in the world that are
| still desperately poor by any measure, not just by the
| standards of the wealthy. And although it's undoubtedly true
| that the wealthiest few deciles could give up many luxuries to
| provide more for the poor, it's much more arguable if there is
| enough for everyone to have _enough_ without generating much
| more.
| randyrand wrote:
| I've been watching videos about tribes in Papa New Guniea and
| it makes you realize you don't need very much for clothes or
| shelter.
|
| Food is all you really need. For luxury: food, sex, and
| purpose. The tribes have all 3.
| fastball wrote:
| You should probably move out there then.
| dudeman13 wrote:
| _Need_
|
| _Want_
| fastball wrote:
| GC claimed that food is all that is _needed_ , and that
| their wants were satisfied by the additional of the other
| two things.
|
| The fact is that the average human is _not_ actually
| content to be one notch above _animal_ with "food, sex,
| and purpose". That is why we have progressed much further
| than just accepting those basics as all we need. But I
| think our improvements on those things do provide enough
| value for the average person to be happy.
|
| - _Tasty_ food
|
| - _Safe_ sex (and relative ease of reproduction)
|
| - _Multi-variate_ / chosen purpose.
|
| Plus other methods to remove annoying friction from your
| life:
|
| - Optimized shelter
|
| - Optimized travel
|
| - Consumption of various raw goods (not for food and not
| for shelter). e.g. 3D Printers!
| kbutler wrote:
| GDP per capita of $12,000 implies family of 4 is $48,000,
| because "per capita" is per person in that family.
| legulere wrote:
| GDP per capita also counts children. $48,000 for a family of
| four sounds perfectly fine to me.
| qeternity wrote:
| These arguments always ignore the fact that the only reason
| $X GDP is generated is because people are incentivized.
| Children don't produce, so someone else is producing for
| them. If you tell people they will get $12k no matter how
| hard they work, they won't work. We've tried socialism.
| maxsilver wrote:
| > If you tell people they will get $12k no matter how
| hard they work, they won't work.
|
| This is obviously not true, since in every capitalist
| society, the hardest working people already make the
| least amount of money, and the laziest people employed
| already get given the most amount of money.
|
| Capitalism has already proven that financial incentive
| has no correlation to how hard someone works.
| qeternity wrote:
| What?? It's the exact opposite. Those people HAVE to work
| that hard precisely for the reason I mentioned: they
| won't be paid otherwise. This is precisely the issue. If
| you paid people irrespective of how much they work, they
| won't work.
|
| Your example is evidence of my statement, not refutation.
| victor106 wrote:
| Came here to say the same thing.
|
| People _might_ still be more unhappy even though society at
| large delivers them things that could be unimaginable today.
| The creators and owners who can deliver that future will be
| richer than everyone else (rightfully so, imo) and that divide
| is what I think could make people more unhappy although they
| will be much better off than what we are today.
| m___ wrote:
| To the author:
|
| Stick to pealing the layer on top of what you see in your daily,
| AI, for now the only output being some analysis and synthesis for
| some data that has meaning, and is in the hands of a few, for the
| few. SQL for human data mongers.
|
| The data in the public domain are one of many, botched, out of
| focus, wrong datasets, lack of context, a mix of right context,
| too limited scope to data... as is your own admitted supposition,
| of what you see is not what you suggest it would mean. Garbage in
| garbage out, a DdOS on AI is the big one to solve for now?
|
| Add some inevitable layers, individual psychology, societal
| collective psychology, surplus population and their going rate of
| psychological settings, the list of variables "known" is endless,
| even more so are there hiding some very well known "unknowns".
|
| Some serious contenders of raw AI are bluntly omitted, the size
| of the global population versus the index of resources of the
| iron-ore ball as is the planet. Relying on "money", a sublimated
| layer, to account for anything but a tool for social engineering,
| as is your outright omission to define at all AI, it's reliance
| on the most infinitesimal part of the few (humans), the outright
| wrong definition of wealth in it's relativity and dynamics, the
| USA as a definite part of the planet, derivatives of all and
| everything, i really do not know where to stop to end the rant.
|
| As a remark to your artisan ready for consumption product page,
| ...it is not very data searches friendly, it has a very limited
| scope, it is suggestive of different proven fallacies, and has no
| definite declared vocabulary.
|
| Are you to blame, of course not, as you suggest yourself AI and
| not "universal" human genie, as in disproportion of memory and
| processing capacity is to blame. As long as energy is infinite at
| the level of AI, the processing versus energy economy of the
| human brain, as is that even more energy efficient processing
| brain of say a raven, is largely overpowered in meaning as to the
| absolute (till now, not necessarily tomorrow), and the nano-
| technologies and biology of genetics), inferior scalability of
| human minds.
|
| When crudely put, nano-technology, the biology of genetics
| (Corona probably), are serious contenders readily to cooperate.
| Again the case for lack of scope and context of the tease of your
| blog page.
|
| Publish or perish well assumed, you Sir are desperately clinging
| to the flimsy single rope, trying not to drown. Jouralists and
| media, politics build a living on this, it is called a narrative.
| I am very convinced that you could come up with such, say every
| week or two.
| vincentmarle wrote:
| Great, after the great VC pandemic expert reinvention of last
| year, they've now found a new victim: capitalism. Really wish
| these VC types would just stick to what they do best: pump money
| into overpriced startups.
| aksss wrote:
| > "Moore's Law for everything" should be the rallying cry of a
| generation whose members can't afford what they want."
|
| Ugh. Moore's law doesn't apply to everything, and in fact doesn't
| apply to most things, and wishing it did won't change that.
|
| I think Vaclav Smil did an effective diagnosis of this at the
| Driva Climate Investment Meeting:
| https://youtu.be/gkj_91IJVBk?t=1132
| adambaybutt wrote:
| Altman isn't arguing that Moore's Law DOES apply to everything
| but rather than we should work toward such a world.
|
| It is good for society if the costs of goods and services
| decrease over time to allow a given income/wealth level to live
| a better life over time.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I'm all for driving down the costs of things low on Maslow's
| hierarchy, but it's arguably more reasonable in the short
| term to put effective public policy in place than hope the
| singularity gets here (an exaggeration, but not exceptionally
| so, considering "Moore's Law for Everything").
|
| Tech people keep trying to fix people problems with tech.
| ~47k people die each year in the US from a lack of
| healthcare. Other countries don't need Moore's Law to fix
| this, for example [1] [2]. Conversely, it's fine that Elon
| runs around as Technoking as long as the batteries are pumped
| out of Gigafactories at full speed. Technology fixes for
| technology problems, people fixes for people problems. We
| don't need more wealth ("The future is already here -- it's
| just not very evenly distributed" -- Gibson). America is one
| of the wealthiest country in the world. We need quality of
| life floors and more equitable distributions of what passes
| for and enables wealth.
|
| With all of that rant said, I really love Sam's idea about
| the American Equity Fund [3]. It's long overdue, and
| something that the Federal Reserve could administer today
| with FedAccounts as the target of distributions from taxes on
| productive concerns. Sam's a smart person, and I hope he can
| sell the idea with a pitch deck to those who need to be sold
| on it. The issue of equity (social and economic) has reached
| a crescendo, and it would do a disservice to county and
| citizens alike to let the opportunity go to waste.
|
| [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=healthcare+outcomes+by+co
| unt...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_univ
| ers...
|
| [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24908042
| ctoth wrote:
| Could it be that tech people try to fix problems with tech
| because tech people are familiar with tech? Said another
| way, where are the non-tech public policy people solving
| these problems? If they don't step up, maybe it's time the
| tech people do?
| adambaybutt wrote:
| Exactly. Sam isn't a politician or policymaker. He is
| trying to contribute ideas for others to improve and
| implement.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I would encourage him at trying his hand at being one.
| It's not a long journey from the ideas in his post to
| legislation.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Absolutely. This is not condemning technologists, but
| encouraging a reassessment of effective strategies for
| implementation to lead to the desired outcome.
|
| Policy is written by the elected. Speak to or assume
| those roles. Provide covering fire for effective
| contributors who can execute on your mission and vision,
| just like a startup.
| adambaybutt wrote:
| Technology has reduced costs of goods and services by
| orders of magnitude more than any public policy.
|
| But yes I do agree iterating to improve public policy is
| important too.
|
| Hence the organization of Sam's essay to reflect this.
| [deleted]
| aksss wrote:
| If wishes were fishes, nobody would go hungry.
| [deleted]
| cbau wrote:
| Sold on the premise that when AI gets here it will change
| everything. What I don't have a good grasp on is how fast it will
| come. Recent feats of AI are very impressive, but it's hard for
| me to put it on a trendline that would line it up with massive
| changes coming with 10 years. Predictions around AI have made
| similar claims for the last 50 years. Why is it different this
| time?
| matthalvorson wrote:
| I'd recommend the book Life 3.0, the author surveys a large
| number of AI researchers to answer this timing question (I
| think 95% said AGI is guaranteed in the next 50 years iirc),
| and also discusses why this time is different than the times in
| the past, like in the 60's when a group of researchers thought
| they would make significant progress towards AGI over the
| course of a summer
| jfk13 wrote:
| I suspect that if someone asked the same questions a decade
| ago, or two, they'd have gotten similar explanations of why
| "this time is different".
|
| AGI within the next 50 years? I don't think we have any idea,
| really. We don't even know what "intelligence" means.
| A12-B wrote:
| I try to keep up with the industry, just to see where it's
| going. From what I can tell, AI (in the general sense) is so
| flexible it can be applied to just about anything with
| observable data points, which is basically everything. Are
| these applications useful? I think right now they are
| impactful, not necessarily useful. EG: we can already copy
| someone's voice perfectly with just a small amount of audio
| using AI. But in practise, not much has come from this
| incredibly remarkable feat.
|
| So what does AI need to get to the next level? Not much but
| time to mature, all the tools are already there.
| chrislloyd wrote:
| If anybody is interested in reading more about Henry George and a
| land-value tax, Radical Markets[1] has an in-depth chapter on it.
|
| [1]: http://radicalmarkets.com
| cbau wrote:
| Sell us on it!
| magwa101 wrote:
| For the vast majority of the world: food, shelter, health and
| comfort are driven by energy. Cheap/abundant energy will lift
| everyone. AI can help us in that process and then will have
| broader global benefits in 50 years. Not because it won't be
| ready, but because we won't be ready.
| savant_penguin wrote:
| "Even more power will shift from labor to capital."
|
| You can say the same thing for machines replacing workers at
| farms, but hardly anyone would rather ban tractors for taking
| people's jobs
|
| You can say the exact same thing for bank tellers replaced by
| ATM's but no one wants to wait in long lines to withdraw money
| and pay expensive service fees
|
| The list goes on and on
|
| Google maps (how often people need physical maps anymore?)
|
| Gmail (goodbye to a lot of physical mailing service)
|
| Excel (1 accountant can do the work of tens of more accountants
| of the past)
|
| Forklifts take away many body breaking jobs
|
| Jobs do disappear, but very few people would rather go back
| bambax wrote:
| > _My work at OpenAI..._
|
| OpenAI isn't open, so why did you continue to call it that?
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