131–140 of 356 posts
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Because you'll be shot, probably by a robot.
But eventually, the robots, unable to cope with what they've got to do, will turn to robot drugs, robot alcohol, and other robot-destructive behaviors to escape.
Reads like this are slowly convincing me not to buy into the world of mortgages and debt and to just live the rest of my life paying for everything in cash. I tried to buy a house last year with my wife but the market exploded where I live and suddenly houses were 40% more expensive from last year. So we still rent, which makes me feel incomplete. Like I'm kind of failing my duty of bringing the Canadian Dream to my…
It's no surprise that we're seeing more and more anxiety coalesce around land: this is the classical economic expectation of what would happen as automated output starts to outperform labor, and capital can be automatically produced. When this happens, scarce natural resources (such as location) increase in value. Henry George saw this nearly 140 years ago, with his "Fool's Paradise" thought experiment.[0] As efficie…
I’m sure Georgianism has its merits, but housing generally hasn’t been a great investment in most of north america, especially once maintenance costs are factored in.
Meanwhile, Toronto and Vancouver are in the midst of a speculative housing mania. House prices have far outpaced rents. OP is correct not to buy. (Especially now, the bank regulator has just announced restrictions on mortgage lending. These are likely to reduce home prizes as average mortgage eligibility will shrink)
Long run, you may be right, but re: the canadian markets OP is referring to you’re commenting on a situation of short term mania.
Note: I’m referring chiefly to your “it’s no surprise” line. I’d say the cause of the immediate anxiety is the housing mania I described, rather than a longer run trend.
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The largest market cap companies in a given decade, overwhelmingly tend to be under-performers in the following decade. It's a trend that has repeated decade after decade. Many of these types of companies - AMZN, NFLX, GOOGL, FB - have pulled a massive share of their future returns forward (which is what happened to Microsoft, stagnating its stock for ~15 years). In 2007 the largest companies were: Exxon, GE, Microso…
> The largest market cap companies in a given decade, overwhelmingly tend to be under-performers in the following decade. Yes, sometimes it's important to remind people of the efficient-market hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient-market_hypothesis You can't beat the market buying stocks using publicly available information, because everybody else knows everything you do. The average seller has no reaso…
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That works OK as a deterrent against (some) individuals, but there are numerous historical examples of its failure to scale.
There also numerous examples of failed mass uprisings. If you can throw enough robots at the problem, the 0.1% would have nothing to fear.
When high automation comes, it's not going to be only the rich that own robots. As an analogy, take smartphones - there are 5 billions of them in use in 2017. Almost everyone can have the best phone today, or one that was as good as the best from a couple of years ago.
There are going to be cheap and useful robots for everyone, 3d-printed, open sourced designs running on open source AI, and capable of assembling more robots. What goes into a robot? Motors, gears, sensors, batteries and computer chips? Those are all commodity everywhere on earth. The moment we can assemble them into working useful robots, we will see an explosion of do-it-yourself automation everywhere.
With self printing and self assembly we can make a software based factory that can "compile" itself and anything we desire. We will have built the first "material compiler" that can "bootstrap itself" by creating a replica. Then everything will cost only as much as raw materials.
I just don't buy it. I understand I'm in a minority, so let me indulge myself and explain, for a moment, why I think AI / Robots are nothing to worry about. My claim is: Robots will not replace humans in all jobs. Further, it's more than because of Human preference, I think that Robots will lack cognitive abilities that we have. My expectation is that in each area where they are deficient then they may well become a…
> 5) Intuitive leaps. e.g. Rubics cube. You're trolling, right? Intuitive leaps are the bread and butter of neural nets.
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Some might say it's a "Brave New World" :) The real question is what happens to the 90%.
The best outcome is the "Culture" endpoint: a post-need society. 10% of people are called upon to work, and the rest thrive on basic income and become artists and inventors, philosophers and musicians and actors. The worst outcome, on the other hand, is rather more dystopian. A society with a very large percentage of young, unemployed people with no particular path to success is not a stable society. I suppose it mat…
Judge Dredd or the Culture.
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Investors are willing to accept much lower long-term returns for safe haven assets. If you're going to "just own the damn robots" at any price, you're essentially paying for this sort of insurance.
but Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are software, not hardware, so you're not owning the robots.
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I think this is where social safety nets (or the lack of them) come into play. The market can be short sighted when it comes to training and typically focus on younger generations where they do (large orgs sponsoring university courses etc). A good adult education scheme in conjunction with social welfare to allow people to make use of it makes a world of difference when it comes to re-tooling older people once jobs…
I don't disagree but how are you going to pay for social welfare if no one is making money? So what do you tax? do you do something else? These are the questions that are really relevant to figure out IMO.
You stop taxing income and start taxing wealth. A land tax would be a good start. Resource taxes are another.
15 years ago all the software jobs I worked at were retiring clerical workers with software (oh you have 15 people doing spreadsheets ? We can automate that and you won't need them for the same report generation). So this has been going on a lot longer than the article supposes. Yes its true that the sophistication of the automation, and the breadth of its reach (with robots / gig economy) is higher than before, so i…
> but it will also create new jobs managing the automation No, that's bullshit. New jobs will be created that way but far less: there would be no incentive to automation otherwise. This month I visited a warehouse with a team tasked to automate it. If we succeed, phase I should put ~10 people out of job and we don't expect to have to do more than occasional monthly interventions (and that's assuming that we have a hi…
Interesting article but I think the premise that workers are buying tech stocks because they fear automation is incorrect. Gallup found 13% of Americans thought that their jobs would soon be replaced by automation[1]. In fact you usually find more people worried about immigration than automation[2]. Maybe people /should/ be more concerned about automation but they just aren’t right now. [1]: http://news.gallup.com/po…
I'm starting to get the impression that this genre of "technology gone bad" article is starting to be a safe surrogate for talking about class. The muddling of terms is actually a feature: one can avoid the dirty reality of class by framing it as an inherent feature of technological progress, which, of course, is a good in-and-of-itself (unless you're a dirty commie).
I think the same is true of immigration: low class people blame their poor condition on immigrants, rather than their class standing.