Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley

Often find it troubling that people find it so easy to cast an opinion on a topic they so poorly understand. Yes, this topic is important, no, I don't understand it. What is the best way to understand the current situation?

Humans are more complex than flies and social atmosphere would need to be healthy relative to dramatic population sizes.

John B. Calhorn's mouse utopia experiments give some indication of complexity in large communities beyond food resources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun#Mouse_experime...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z760XNy4VM

  There was no shortage of food or water or nesting 
  material. There were no predators. The only adversity was 
  the limit on space.


  Initially the population grew rapidly, doubling every 55 
  days. The population reached 620 by day 315, after which 
  the population growth dropped markedly. The last 
  surviving birth was on day 600. This period between day 
  315 and day 600 saw a breakdown in social structure and 
  in normal social behavior. Among the aberrations in 
  behavior were the following: expulsion of young before 
  weaning was complete, wounding of young, increase in  
  homosexual behavior, inability of dominant males to 
  maintain the defense of their territory and females, 
  aggressive behavior of females, passivity of non-dominant 
  males with increased attacks on each other which were 
  not  defended against.[2] After day 600, the social 
  breakdown continued and the population declined toward 
  extinction. During this period females ceased to 
  reproduce. Their male counterparts withdrew completely, 
  never engaging in courtship or fighting. They ate, drank, 
  slept, and groomed themselves – all solitary pursuits. 
  Sleek, healthy coats and an absence of scars 
  characterized these males. They were dubbed “the 
  beautiful ones.” Breeding never resumed and behavior 
  patterns were permanently changed.

This one works well on FF 45 on Linux: https://github.com/tomkel/hn-collapse.

But surely a GreaseMonkey script should be able to do the job too?

My premise for a basic I come is that most of the work we do is simply more than necessary. My thought is that a lot of people will be shut out because many entry level jobs and jobs that require minimal training will continue to get automated and disappear as we move towards the future. We need to make sure those who won't be able to find a job don't starve.

Maybe we ought to bring in wealthy people in for experiment. What makes them get up in the morning and work when they could just sleep all day? Why does Bill Gates still care about Microsoft even though it represents an ever decreasing portion of his wealth?

Of course, we will have tons of free riders but that's the price we pay. Also we don't care because any welfare system will have free riders.

This is conflating what I said - and like I said, capitalism does not consider shortages in terms of human need, but in terms of the wants of wealth. We have a shortage of housing because the poor are too poor to afford it, and thus they do not create demand to be met.

Essential to that is how you phrased it - non-luxury. The market for the (relative) rich to buy houses is so large there are over a million of unoccupied homes[1] just to sate the potential choices of the ownership class that can afford them. There is an immense glut of building supply, rather than a shortage of it, just it is all directed to where the money is.

[1]: http://www.mintpressnews.com/empty-homes-outnumber-the-homel...

China is a great extrapolated example of this with their ghost cities[2]. The economic machine of China, using the same capitalistic peak employment model of expectation, has a tremendous civil engineers corps that needs to do something. But China takes some of the worst of capitalism and mixes it with the worst of Marxism and a large dose of totalitarianism, so rather than provide modern living to hundreds of millions there are dozens of cities built without anybody living in them, because nobody can afford to buy housing within them. But the CCP kept building them to keep the workers "busy" and keep the supply chain flowing, because they kept anticipating - in the same way many deceived Americans are - that the prosperity for the masses is coming eventually.

[2]: http://priceonomics.com/surveying-the-ghost-cities-of-china/

This just reflects on my central point - capitalist economic systems do not distribute labor or create supply based on human needs, but human wants. Those without who need have nothing to give capitalism to get their needs back, but those who have to give will have all their wants provided for and more. Not to say capitalism is not the best economic organizational system we have, it just does not align with most peoples common ethics.