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Moore's Law for Everything

moores.samaltman.com

111–120 of 554 posts

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#111

Imagine: 1) I'm the owner of a single family home 2) My income drops to roughly zero because of AI 3) My property values go through the roof 4) I now owe 2.5% of these sky-rocketing property values every year, to be paid from my non-existent income Doesn't this scenario lead to me either selling my "gifted" shares to pay property taxes, or ending up a renter at best and homeless at worst? I can imagine this proposal…

> I now owe 2.5% of these sky-rocketing property values every year

Just as a UBI gives people an income floor, I think that a land tax should come with a personal allowance below which you are exempt.

To do some rough calculations, the US state with the highest population density is New Jersey, at 1,210.1 people per square mile, which equates to 23,038 square feet per person. The average American house size is apparently 2,687 square feet, which is typically shared by multiple people, so the allowance could be comfortably set to maybe 10,000 square feet per person.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#112

> In the next five years, computer programs that can think will read legal documents and give medical advice. Bad medical or legal advice is completely possible. It exists now. Giving good medical or legal advice requires, at a minimum, being able to carry out a full conversation to investigate the problem, including understanding things not directly related to the field. There's no sign of getting that any time soon…

hmm... I've been to WebMD and the answer to any question is that I have cancer.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even without the hypothetical AI effect on income, this is a proposal which will tax you 100% of the value of your property over a 40 year period whilst over the same period YC's LPs and founders will have paid just 2.5% of the [much higher] value of their companies. Now there are efficiency arguments in favour of taxing land to encourage its use and not taxing productive enterprises or their investors too heavily, b…

> which will tax you 100% of the value of your property If it's a property tax, yes. If it's a land tax, no. Under land tax you tax the "ground rent" value of the land, not what's built on it. "Ground rent" is what it costs to rent out your land if it was an empty lot with nothing on it. Property tax and land tax are very different things with very different effects.

The Georgist land value (which Altman suggests might be more practically replaced by a system linked to actual property transaction values) is still going to be a sufficiently large proportion of the value of a typical home to ensure pretty much anyone not living in a multistorey tenement block is paying massively higher tax rates on their home than anyone pays on a YC company.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#114
post #104

Imagine: 1) I'm the owner of a single family home 2) My income drops to roughly zero because of AI 3) My property values go through the roof 4) I now owe 2.5% of these sky-rocketing property values every year, to be paid from my non-existent income Doesn't this scenario lead to me either selling my "gifted" shares to pay property taxes, or ending up a renter at best and homeless at worst? I can imagine this proposal…

Property values generally rise because an area has a very attractive jobs market. Overall, it's a benefit to society to incentivize people with no income to move out an area with a lower cost of living. This incentivizes more people move there and do productive work, which can be taxed and distributed.

I just find something very cold and socially undesirable in the idea that somebody can spend a lifetime putting in the work to get the home they want, only to be forced out because "society" decides they are no longer productive. I'm no NIMBY—those people shouldn't have the right to stop others from developing their own properties—but I'm not sure I like the idea of economic incentives kicking the least productive to the curb because it's "efficient".

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#117
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there any limit to lifestyle inflation? If there is, it's somewhere beyond launching sports cars into orbit.

I don't think launching sports cars into orbit is inherently any more wasteful than say the development of the Deep Blue chess computer. It may have been a vanity project, but the ultimate goal was to test a proof of concept.

I didn't say it was wasteful or make any judgments about it. It's just a fact that a level of lifestyle that allows a person to launch his personal sports car into space has been achieved.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#118
post #103

> democracy can become antagonistic as people seek to vote money away from each other. ... > We should therefore focus on taxing capital rather than labor I find it amazing that these "thinkers" don't see the irony. You are "afraid" that people are going to vote you away from your wealth via democracy; but then you feel privileged to decide how this wealth should be taxed. Since AIs are getting smarter than humans, m…

> The reality is, there is no place for humans in an AI driven world where AI is smarter than humans and robots can make stuff.

Luckily, that's a hell of a lot further away than AI bulls indicate. Can't even use AI to help with hiring people without it getting cancelled as racist, after all.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#119
post #103

> democracy can become antagonistic as people seek to vote money away from each other. ... > We should therefore focus on taxing capital rather than labor I find it amazing that these "thinkers" don't see the irony. You are "afraid" that people are going to vote you away from your wealth via democracy; but then you feel privileged to decide how this wealth should be taxed. Since AIs are getting smarter than humans, m…

If you want to follow that chain of logic, then the thing to do would be to either find a way to prove that a sufficiently AI would be conscious, or to augment human consciousness with AI. Because even if AI's are superior to humans at everything, if they're not self-aware, you still need humans or other conscious animals for anything to have a point - you need someone to experience the stuff that exist. And humans aren't built to be happy existing simply as consumers, so if humans are going to be those experiencers, they need to be involved in creation, not just consumption.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#120
I very much like the idea of Moore's Law for a lot of things (maybe not for everything, there could be some nasty surprises in games of catch-up between offensive and defense).

Setting aside social implications, it might also not quite come to this, as not everything might be solvable by data and/or thinking. Our understanding of nature could be correct enough in some areas to block progress. For example, it might not be possible to predict which atom will decay next, or maybe there are no gravity shields possible in this universe as it is a fundamental property of mass (very very handwaving here).

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