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A Tech-Driven Boom Is Coming; Please Be Patient

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

#61

Post by DougHaber »

petegordon wrote: post #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?

As pointed out, 25 years later was in the 80s. I wonder if some of the delay in adoption was due to the relevant patents, which were filed around 1959. Maybe that gave a two decade monopoly to Texas Instruments making it hard for others to adopt or innovate around the technology?

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

#62

Post by vannevar »

Income for the top 1% of the population is up over 400% over the past 30 years, while remaining largely flat for the rest of the workforce. The tech boom is well underway, it's just that only a tiny fraction of the population is capturing the vast majority of the benefits. The boom is not just about efficiencies, it's also about centralization and winner-take-all market dynamics.

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

#63

Post by garmaine »

eggie wrote: post #19
garmaine wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 claim that "real AI" is a system that can actively perform at human levels in creative tasks, I wouldn't believe that it will always be in the future. However, I don't think this is very near, and I think this is sort of what people are implying when they talk about AI. To me saying "general AI is what we're exploring and making mini-discoveries in" is a kind of apology. Unfortunately, this apology pushes…

What sort of creative task? Music composition? Graphic design? Surrealistic modern art? AIs have been programmed to do all these things and be indistinguishable from human creativity in blind studies.

I have no doubt through that you'll be able to come up with a reason why each of these examples isn't what you really meant by "human level in creative tasks." Which is rather the point.

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

#64

Post by garmaine »

empath75 wrote: post #37
garmaine wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

See: Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, etc.

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

#65

Post by methodin »

heisenbergs wrote: post #18
hliyan wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really not the author's point. I think this quote illustrates his point better: "Online shopping came along in the 1990s but retailers struggled to adapt business processes to the internet. They needed to build complementary infrastructure such as fulfillment centers, and, the authors note, customers had to adapt their habits, as well." The lag between commercialization and widespread adoption is wider than we…

Lag is probably the wrong word. It's a misconception that adoption should be instant. It took a good 50 years for the electric motor to supplant the steam engine, despite it being superior in virtually every way. Tech adoption takes time, given that many things need to be re-learnt/engineered. It's why i'm positive that there won't be swathes of unemployeed people due to tech. It will happen gradually, as it has alwa…

It seems the world today the timing is entirely based on the country. In the U.S. the time it took for regular mobile phones to be supplanted by smartphones is ridiculously small yet the same cannot be said for many countries in the world. It seems to me that countries slow to make progress in tech will be the victims of it initially. It won't take that long to do so once the economic and logistical aspects of are ironclad.

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

#66

Post by 11thEarlOfMar »

vannevar wrote: post #62

Income for the top 1% of the population is up over 400% over the past 30 years, while remaining largely flat for the rest of the workforce. The tech boom is well underway, it's just that only a tiny fraction of the population is capturing the vast majority of the benefits. The boom is not just about efficiencies, it's also about centralization and winner-take-all market dynamics.

Global absolute poverty has plummeted from 40% in 1985 to less than 10% in 2015:

https://ourworldindata.org/slides/world-poverty/#/declining-...

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

#67

Post by maxxxxx »

vannevar wrote: post #62

Income for the top 1% of the population is up over 400% over the past 30 years, while remaining largely flat for the rest of the workforce. The tech boom is well underway, it's just that only a tiny fraction of the population is capturing the vast majority of the benefits. The boom is not just about efficiencies, it's also about centralization and winner-take-all market dynamics.

The money will soon start to trickle down from the top 1% especially with the latest tax cuts. Be patient just a little more.

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

#68

Post by DougWebb »

maxxxxx wrote: post #67
vannevar wrote: post #62

Income for the top 1% of the population is up over 400% over the past 30 years, while remaining largely flat for the rest of the workforce. The tech boom is well underway, it's just that only a tiny fraction of the population is capturing the vast majority of the benefits. The boom is not just about efficiencies, it's also about centralization and winner-take-all market dynamics.

The money will soon start to trickle down from the top 1% especially with the latest tax cuts. Be patient just a little more.

Sarcastic, or do you have some reason to believe that'll actually happen this time?

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

#69

Post by Eridrus »

arbie wrote: post #47
Eridrus wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Productivity" as economists defines it is purely GDP/hours worked, it is only loosely correlated to what a lay person would consider productivity. It doesn't consider the value of consumer surplus or whether prices for goods have fallen due to foreign competition or anything else, it is purely productivity in the sense of our ability to generate dollars for every hour that someone is working.

Is this definition flawed in the age where software can sometimes replace an entire profession? In such cases, can "productivity" sometimes fall in the face of technological advance?

It's tricky to predict what would happen to a statistic that measures the entire economy.

At a first approximation all the money going to that profession would be removed from GDP, but so would result in productivity losses if we automated industries with higher than average "productivity".

However, someone is doing the automating - are those people even more productive over the course of a year? Maybe, or maybe not and there's just a lot of investment that will bear fruit over the long run. But some amount of money is still being spent on the service, and the set of workers has gone down, so this would probably pull the number back up, but by how much?

But that money isn't gone, it remains in someone's pocket, rather than disappearing, and the price of some good has fallen. Does this cause people to buy more of the good or some other good? If they buy more of some other good that has low "productivity", such as food and drinks, then that would pull productivity down.

It would be hard to argue that such an outcome is unilaterally good though; we would hope that in the long run people find other high "productivity" activities, but whether we actually will is uncertain.

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

#70

Post by Robotbeat »

YaxelPerez wrote: post #53
inciampati wrote: post #8

I have frequently wondered if the lag in productivity is partly due to the distracting power of the internet and social media. This isn't really paralleled by the other technical advances that the authors of the study this piece summarizes were examining. Also, AI? We don't have anything even approaching AI in play now nor on the immediate horizon. The energy costs it would have are still enormous, even if we really…

Your brain could be considered a general intelligence, and it only uses a couple of watts. Energy consumption isn't the issue. However, I agree. AI is a bit overhyped right now, and AGI is still pretty far away imo.

It only uses a couple of watts (well, ten times that, actually, about 20 Watts), but that's because neurons are incredibly efficient. The brain is an Exa-ops computer that only requires 20 Watts. If we used today's state of the art TPUs, we're looking at 10,000 to 100,000 times the energy consumption, so on the order of a Megawatt. The electricity costs alone would be higher than the typical human wage.

A corollary: If you can find a way to grow neural tissue (I'm thinking of all the lab-grown meat startups here) and connect to it efficiently and reliably (I'm thinking of Neuralink, here), then you would have access to a computational medium that is orders of magnitude more efficient than even the best of today's processors, and probably way cheaper, too.

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