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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

#101

Post by atomi »

pm90 wrote: post #89
yomly wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this fact touted around a lot, often in the context of stagnating/eroding wages. It 100% goes without saying that global poverty decreasing is cause for celebration, but eroding quality of life for a economic bracket of people should not be ignored. If you look at both facts together however (global poverty is down, wealth has concentrated at the top) then it would suggest that the wealth of the non-wealthy has…

I don't think we have seen anything like this in history before, and it will be interesting, to say the least, at how all the millions of people elevated from destitution will contribute to the world and change it.

"You can't hold the tide with a broom."

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

#102

Post by observation »

prostoalex wrote: post #87
yomly wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this fact touted around a lot, often in the context of stagnating/eroding wages. It 100% goes without saying that global poverty decreasing is cause for celebration, but eroding quality of life for a economic bracket of people should not be ignored. If you look at both facts together however (global poverty is down, wealth has concentrated at the top) then it would suggest that the wealth of the non-wealthy has…

The wages are a proxy for buying power. Starting at the bottom of the Maslow’s pyramid and moving up, do today’s wages buy less of food, shelter, water, clothing, transportation, etc. than someone receiving wages 30/50/100/200 years ago?

Wages really do buy less house than 100 years ago.

This would have been about 1920 when the Sears kit houses were invented.

Look at this: http://eastsidehill.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/1927...

The inflation calculator here:

32,424.83 in today's dollars for a respectable, quality 8 room house.

Sure it doesn't include land or labour but there's no way an 8 room house costs 32k today.

Today that would buy you a Tiny House on the low end of that market.

In my opinion, and I know we are far richer than our great-grandparents, but anybody arguing we're quantitatively richer than our parents has a long row to hoe. If this is progress it sure is lumpy. As Peter Thiel says the most likely explanation is we've had an nearly completely unacknowledged (by Western intelligentsia) stagnation technologically.

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

#103

Post by [deleted] »

saas_co_de wrote: post #91
maxxxxx wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Money does trickle down but what it trickles down onto is a determining factor in economic growth. When rich people put their money into employing people for non-productive servant type jobs, welfare for people (to not work), loans for people to go to college (to not work, at least in the short term), hand outs for their children and family members (to not work) then the end result is a lot of people not working and…

[deleted]

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

#104

Post by maxxxxx »

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.

I think I need to clarify that I was sarcastic. Nothing will trickle down.

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

#105

Post by gnicholas »

observation wrote: post #102
prostoalex wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wages are a proxy for buying power. Starting at the bottom of the Maslow’s pyramid and moving up, do today’s wages buy less of food, shelter, water, clothing, transportation, etc. than someone receiving wages 30/50/100/200 years ago?

Wages really do buy less house than 100 years ago. This would have been about 1920 when the Sears kit houses were invented. Look at this: http://eastsidehill.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/1927... The inflation calculator here: 32,424.83 in today's dollars for a respectable, quality 8 room house. Sure it doesn't include land or labour but there's no way an 8 room house costs 32k today. Today that would buy you a…

> Tyler Cowen points out that there's not a single thing in your list of kitchen appliances that didn't exist in the 50s. People have highly temporally displaced notions, believing that things like washing machines or dishwashers are recent mass consumer items but they're not, they're nearly a century old.

Economists know that GDP measures are skewed by the fact that “a car is not a car” — that is, a new car today is much more than a new car from 30 years ago. It is safer and more comfortable, and consumers who pay the same amount in real dollars for a new car today are better off than consumers who bought a new car in years past.

So the “house” from the Sears catalog isn’t likely comparable to a house today with the same number of rooms. For example, the size of bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, closets, and garages has increased greatly in the last 100 years. New homes are more energy efficient and have safer wiring. Does this close the gap with a $32k house? Not in Silicon Valley, but there are parts of the country where the house (excluding the land, which Sears didn’t include either) is worth around $50k.

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

#106

Post by vannevar »

11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #66
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-...

Great news, for sure. But was that a result of the tech boom, or government policies? I'm betting on the latter. And the fact that the lowest rungs of the economic ladder aren't fixed in an absolute sense doesn't change the fact that an increasingly enormous share of the wealth produced by humanity globally is going to just 1% of the population.

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

#107

Post by vannevar »

pm90 wrote: post #89
yomly wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this fact touted around a lot, often in the context of stagnating/eroding wages. It 100% goes without saying that global poverty decreasing is cause for celebration, but eroding quality of life for a economic bracket of people should not be ignored. If you look at both facts together however (global poverty is down, wealth has concentrated at the top) then it would suggest that the wealth of the non-wealthy has…

I don't think we have seen anything like this in history before, and it will be interesting, to say the least, at how all the millions of people elevated from destitution will contribute to the world and change it.

Don't get too excited. The chart only shows that fewer people fall below the $2/day line. They could all be living on $2.01/day now and it would still be valid.

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

#108

Post by marvin »

garmaine wrote: post #17
eggie wrote: 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.

That's certainly how it's been un until now and probably in the near future, but there is nothing apart from history that indicates it will always be in the future.

No physical laws preclude a machine that can operate independently and is more capable than humans at any human activity. If we ever make a machine like that, you won't be able to say that "oh, that's just computer science". Well, of course you could, but you would also have met the original definition of general AI.

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

#109

Post by sli »

garmaine wrote: post #63
eggie wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How specific are they to those tasks, is what I'm curious about. Can the surrealist bot produce musical compositions as well as the musical composition bot? The generality angle would say that one bot can do all of those things mostly or entirely on its own (i.e. trains itself as well, and was not necessarily "told" to train in that area), not multiple discrete bots that are all heavily trained by a human.

Just to be clear, I'm not trying to argue with you in the sense that you convey in that second part of your comment, I just enjoy supposing about this particular subject.

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

#110

Post by existencebox »

prostoalex wrote: post #92
decebalus1 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm waiting for the common folks to start hoarding money too and decrease consumption. Ford figured this problem out at the start of the 20th century but apparently everyone forgot about it (if my employees aren't well off enough to buy my product, I'm screwed). I personally believe that what we're going through right now isn't going to scale and it will collapse. It's probably one of the very few times in agree with…

Ford’s assembly line required higher investment in worker training, so churn was more expensive for Ford than other autoworkers. Ford employees did not represent a major buying market for the company and did not own vehicles in higher proportion when compared to the rest of the population. If we decide that we want to encourage companies whose final products workers can afford and discourage companes whose final prod…

Although this wasn't your primary statement, wanted to take a bite out of your second clause about "encouraging cheaper product companies" as this is a point close to my heart as a regular advocate for consumer demand driven economics.

Boeing or Spacex's product demand is driven directly by transitive demand for an affordable product; air travel and to give one "space" example; gps, are both "consumer tier" products that facilitate a whole vertical of production. I'm hard pressed to think of a single super-expensive item that doesn't in some way link back to consumer demand; outside of additional injections via nations. To me this seems intuitive; as I'm hard pressed to think of another driver of production with comparable volume, and as such don't see any reason increasing that source of demand would bias "cheap" products any more than they are now.

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