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A Tech-Driven Boom Is Coming; Please Be Patient

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31–40 of 132 posts

Re: A Tech-Driven Boom Is Coming; Please Be Patient

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact: Berkshire Hathaway (Buffett's company) now has a huge stake in Apple. So it's not really true anymore that he avoids IT.

It's not because of the IT dominance per say, it this: "Apple's mound of cash and cash equivalents continued to scrape the cloudline this quarter, coming in at $268.9 billion in the company's quarterly earnings report." ( https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/02/how-much-cash-does-apple-hav... ) He is betting that in some shape or form, they will put that cash to work or issue a nice dividend.

The Apple investment is probably driven by similar principles as their Coca Cola investment.

Re: A Tech-Driven Boom Is Coming; Please Be Patient

#33
Anyone else questioning this, “The integrated circuit was commercialized in the 1960s yet 25 years later computers still represented just 5% of the value of all business equipment”? ICs are everywhere around us (in our phones, cars, refrigerators, coffee makers, weight scales, HVAC, etc.) and are rightfully invisible to us. Let alone all the major business equipment. Or, am I missing something?

Re: A Tech-Driven Boom Is Coming; Please Be Patient

#35

Anyone else questioning this, “The integrated circuit was commercialized in the 1960s yet 25 years later computers still represented just 5% of the value of all business equipment”? ICs are everywhere around us (in our phones, cars, refrigerators, coffee makers, weight scales, HVAC, etc.) and are rightfully invisible to us. Let alone all the major business equipment. Or, am I missing something?

25 years later was in the late 1980s

Re: A Tech-Driven Boom Is Coming; Please Be Patient

#37
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we are breaking off small pieces of a bigger thing. If that thing is AI, does it already have a form and an older name in the world? Would agree that in this article AI is a stand-in for what used to be called Math, Statistics, and Computer Science? Our scientific output is an artifice, and it is "intelligent" in its ability to guide our action. To me it isn't then strange to think of the sciences as the "general…

As soon as you solve a problem in AI, people start labeling that problem as “just” math, statistics, or computer science. It is no longer considered AI. Shifting goal posts mean “real AI” is always in the future.

Even if we had a general ai, fully indistinguishable from a human, people would dismiss it as a collection of ugly hacks, tricks and math, while completely ignoring that our own consciousness is as well.

Re: A Tech-Driven Boom Is Coming; Please Be Patient

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Converting a user operated machine from a steam engine to electric engine doesn't remove the user. Converting to a computer operated or assisted machine does.

If the electric engine can produce the same things ten times faster, you've just removed nine-tenths of the users. Sure, someone is still around, but then again, automatic factories still have some people supervising them - just much fewer.

Increasing worker productivity has always lead to fulfilling larger a demand.

What is missing from all these discussions is that human wanting is essential infinite. The more productive you can be at making something, the more it will be taken for granted and a new thing wanted.

Demand is infinite. Work is created to supply it. There is no amount of labour that will ever exhaust it.

All automation does is increase the space of "taken for granted products". The infinite space of potential products/services for human beings to supply still exists.

80% of the UK economy is already services from people to other people.

Re: A Tech-Driven Boom Is Coming; Please Be Patient

#39

Anyone else questioning this, “The integrated circuit was commercialized in the 1960s yet 25 years later computers still represented just 5% of the value of all business equipment”? ICs are everywhere around us (in our phones, cars, refrigerators, coffee makers, weight scales, HVAC, etc.) and are rightfully invisible to us. Let alone all the major business equipment. Or, am I missing something?

25 years later was in the late 1980s

Good point. Thanks.

Re: A Tech-Driven Boom Is Coming; Please Be Patient

#40
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we are breaking off small pieces of a bigger thing. If that thing is AI, does it already have a form and an older name in the world? Would agree that in this article AI is a stand-in for what used to be called Math, Statistics, and Computer Science? Our scientific output is an artifice, and it is "intelligent" in its ability to guide our action. To me it isn't then strange to think of the sciences as the "general…

As soon as you solve a problem in AI, people start labeling that problem as “just” math, statistics, or computer science. It is no longer considered AI. Shifting goal posts mean “real AI” is always in the future.

Borrowing from Iaian Banks' Culture universe, where aliens that are pretty much relatable as Earth humans (they're humaniform, even DNA-compatible reproductively, just not from Earth) are designated "1.0" on a sapience scale. See [1] for a discussion of the difference between sentience and sapience. An entity well below 1.0 (Banks never specified, but reading between the lines it felt like 0.5) is considered sentient, but not sufficiently sapient to achieve self-awareness. Personally, I'd prefer a scale that goes negative, to establish a bright line test that accommodates for example, Downs Syndrome patients.

We probably can claim 0.1 or 0.01 on such a scale.

Interesting and left too undiscussed IMO are the economics of productizing what currently goes under the AI umbrella. It is so expensive, and such a big task to automate with even the shard of AI we pursue today, that the numbers in many (though not all) cases don't seem to pencil out unless the benefits can accrue to a few dominant oligopolic providers, from nearly all human-staffed positions where each individual position is largely dominated by a single low-cognitive skill repeatedly applied. But interestingly, lots of physical tasks are left alone, which seems to point to a weakness in that economic model: despite joking talk of the coming robot apocalypse upon jobs, human jobs that require diverse physical and perceptual engagement with the environment are nowhere near common automation.

I see this in a lot of domestic household chores that have yet to experience disruption at the hands of AI. That's at least a 50M-count global market population willing to spend say, $2500-10000 USD per year on a robot that can in the beginning perform the housekeeping chores a hotel housekeeping crew routinely performs for every room. Be trainable on a per-item type basis to put up dishes and cutlery the same way into a dishwasher and back to storage, fold clothes and put them up, and mow the lawn: all highly-repeatable tasks that are only addressed by single-purpose, very expensive "AI solutions" today, tell me that if you are investing into any kind of general-purpose AI, invest long-range, like Uber-scale "point a money-hose at it" long-range.

[1] http://www.rebekkahniles.com/2012/03/word-box-sapience-vs-se...

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