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The End of the Computer Age

manhattan-institute.org

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Re: The End of the Computer Age

#81

Post by incognition »

Animats wrote: post #39
taneq wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And then, it is literally communist because China loves AI; it hates crypto. And so that, I think, tells you something. China also loves cheap r/c cars, does that make them communist?

"Crypto"? The biggest Bitcoin miners are in China. That's because mining Bitcoin is "exporting", and a legit way to get yuan into dollars or euros. Buy mining hardware with yuan, mine, sell Bitcoin outside China. Not only is it legal, because it's exporting, it's encouraged and some breaks for creating an export business are available.

Exactly. Obvious factual errors on Thiel's part tells he's lost the plot

Re: The End of the Computer Age

#82

Post by incognition »

chrisco255 wrote: post #28
Animats wrote: post #15

It reads like a long rant on Reddit. I'm a lot less impressed with Thiel now. His fascination with "scale" is interesting. Some of the problems we have today come from the conquest of scale. It used to be that big companies couldn't get out of their own way. This limited how big a company could get before smaller competitors were more efficient. With computers and networks, businesses can now be scaled to national, i…

Scale in tech has been solved, because it's trivial to reproduce a software program. It's not like manufacturing. We've got a dozen or so large automobile manufacturers that are all thriving. There's five big tech companies: Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook. And three big telcos is an improvement over the early 20th century that Thiel is idealizing when AT&T was the only game in town. But Thiel himself…

I don't agree with your summary of the greats, you're lumping in scientists with entrepreneurs.

If you want revolutionary entrepreneurs in our era, this list is a fairly good summary: http://startupsusa.org/fortune500/ 2017 Fortune 500 "Companies Founded by Immigrants or the Children of Immigrants, by Company, Founder" . Jobs, Brin, Yang, Huang, Bezos and more

Re: The End of the Computer Age

#83

Post by dredmorbius »

Animats wrote: post #39
taneq wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And then, it is literally communist because China loves AI; it hates crypto. And so that, I think, tells you something. China also loves cheap r/c cars, does that make them communist?

"Crypto"? The biggest Bitcoin miners are in China. That's because mining Bitcoin is "exporting", and a legit way to get yuan into dollars or euros. Buy mining hardware with yuan, mine, sell Bitcoin outside China. Not only is it legal, because it's exporting, it's encouraged and some breaks for creating an export business are available.

"Crypto" in context clearly means cryptography, not cryptocurrency.

Re: The End of the Computer Age

#84

Post by perl4ever »

davidivadavid wrote: post #37
perl4ever wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, but China doesn't use AI to centrally plan the details of its economy. Corporations, prices, and competition are undisputed features of the economy there. Whether you want to call it communist or not, the computational problem is still as intractable as ever. There's a difference between monitoring and regulating society with computers and solving the classical economic calculation problem. And Harvard is a way…

Sure. Thiel is proposing a model. All models are wrong, some are useful, and so on. His models happen to be interesting to people who like to think in more contrarian ways. That doesn't make them right, and we can debate their merit, of course. But it hardly makes them impossible to understand. That China hasn't solved the economic calculation problem yet is plain to see, and I don't think that's quite what Thiel is…

"well as its ramifications in terms of the type of society it can produce asymptotically."

My assertion is that it can't though. That's because the complexity of even a fairly small entity makes the number of the particles in the universe look infinitesimal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busy_Beaver_game

"In 2016, Adam Yedidia and Scott Aaronson obtained the first (explicit) upper bound on the minimum n for which Σ(n) is unprovable in ZFC. To do so they constructed a 7910-state[2] Turing machine whose behavior cannot be proven based on the usual axioms of set theory (Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice), under reasonable consistency hypotheses (stationary Ramsey property).[3][4] This was later reduced to 1919 states, with the dependency on the stationary Ramsey property eliminated."

To me, granted I have only a vague idea of the meaning of the above, that's saying that "solving the economic calculation problem" (society having more than 1919 moving parts) is not just beyond physical limits of the amount of matter in the universe that could be used for computation. It's not just beyond the physical laws that we think we know, like a FTL spaceship would be. It's beyond the most fundamental math we have. To me, that's like a third order of infinite impossibility.

And as far as Harvard goes, how can the interaction between students and faculty have nothing to do with higher education? What else is higher education? In every school, people learn from each other, and they interact more than with people at other schools.

Re: The End of the Computer Age

#85

Post by perl4ever »

ssalazar wrote: post #48
perl4ever wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, but China doesn't use AI to centrally plan the details of its economy. Corporations, prices, and competition are undisputed features of the economy there. Whether you want to call it communist or not, the computational problem is still as intractable as ever. There's a difference between monitoring and regulating society with computers and solving the classical economic calculation problem. And Harvard is a way…

Rightly or not, Thiel is conflating communism and totalitarianism- China is indisputably a leader in using AI to perpetuate the latter.

I thought I was making it clear I don't care whether China is labeled communist or totalitarian or whatever, nor whether the author labels it so.

My point was that they are not using AI to do the sort of central planning that earlier communists failed at and that economists eventually decided was infeasible. And I don't think there's any prospect of that happening in the forseeable future either.

Re: The End of the Computer Age

#86

Post by justforyou »

sologoub wrote: post #21
_bxg1 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the market is what silently concluded that the physical world has evolved enough; software isn't more important, just more profitable. And because the United States is allergic to public spending, that's all that matters.

NYC seems to be just fine at redeveloping. So the problem is regional (though very widespread).

That's hardly the case. The entirety of NYC (including the 5 bouroughs) is falling apart, and quality/cost of new projects leaves much to be desired.

Re: The End of the Computer Age

#87

Post by ryacko »

flir wrote: post #57
buboard wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> silently concluded that the physical world has evolved enough the main culprit is regulation. There are other markets which build modern cities at breakneck pace the same thing is going to happen to tech now that regulation is kicking in

As someone who saw Grenfell go up from his bedroom window, I'll take the regulation thanks.

How do you regulate public housing?

Re: The End of the Computer Age

#88

Post by flir »

ryacko wrote: post #87
flir wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who saw Grenfell go up from his bedroom window, I'll take the regulation thanks.

How do you regulate public housing?

I don't even understand the question in this context.

But on not turning buildings into death traps, I'd start by asking the ICWCI.

Re: The End of the Computer Age

#89

Post by Miraste »

droithomme wrote: post #29
fadisaleh wrote: post #13

"...the iPhones that distract us from our environment also distract us from how strangely old and unchanging our environment is, how you're riding a subway that's 100 years old. And I think sort of a healthier sort of progress would happen on many different fronts." This quote stood out to me. It seems like we silently concluded that the physical world has evolved enough, developed enough, even though there's a ton o…

> you're riding a subway that's 100 years old ... a healthier sort of progress would happen on many different fronts Is he saying there is something wrong with electric subways? It seems an excellent solution to transport in a dense urban area. And metros have kept up with technology fairly well. What is the better solution to the subway for the problem it solves in the places it solves them? Yes, we've had subways f…

I think he's referring to the horrifically unmaintained and archaic state of the world's older subways, like NYC and the London Underground. Besides the expense, NYC is absurdly behind on modern train timing systems, which causes very loose scheduling and frequent delays. There's also the general squalor and lack of maintenance of the platforms. London's tunnels are so full of iron dust and other particulates that a half hour in them literally turns your mucus black, and the lack of a cooling system has caused the ambient temperature to rise ~30 degrees since their construction with no sign of stopping. They also screech loudly enough to cause permanent hearing damage.

These systems could be modern and effective, but instead they're disintegrating in place. That's the problem.

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