As I recall, Ray Kurzweil wrote extensively about this - minus the tax aspect - in his book The Singularity is Near.
Moore's Law for Everything
191–200 of 554 posts
Re: Moore's Law for Everything
#192I still dont really know about AI taking over the world. The most expensive things in my budget are housing, car, healthcare, childcare, flights/hotels, food. Does AI really change that much? There are definitely too many over-educated people out there already, I'd think this is more of an impact & setting up disappointment than the bots.
Robots building houses on cheap land due to mass work form home would make housing much cheaper. Robot doctors make healthcare much cheaper. Robot teachers make childcare/education much cheaper. Robot farmers + GMO make food much cheaper.
If a house is all I needed I could just move out to some 20km away location and get one for 60k€. You would have to do your own renovations but isn't that part of the deal when you buy a house? But I will concede that automation increases productivity and gives us access to more goods and services. It's absolutely necessary.
Re: Moore's Law for Everything
#193If they could make gpt-4 more coherent than gpt3 and could show understanding on causality than this blog will be more agreeable for me
Re: Moore's Law for Everything
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the incentive to make life/jobs better for humans?
Incentive? not having to do hard labor? making more money? I think that most technology has made life easier if not measurably better for humans. Medicine, machinery, transportation. Those things dont make life better for people? I suppose the cynical take could be that it is for the 'ruling class' but I think the measured take is that even the lower rungs of society have at least some access to better jobs than they…
The lower rungs of society have access to better jobs because they were needed by the ruling class as a workforce, and because technology advanced. As a result of the above two, they were able to negotiate economic power and better working conditions.
What is the incentive for "wasting resources on the lower rungs of society" when you don't need them as workers anymore?
Re: Moore's Law for Everything
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
Horses aren't the center of the economy, though. It's fundamentally different. Horses might always want more and more things no matter how much they get. But they don't create demand in our economy, so we'll never know. No matter how much humans get, they'll always want more. And other humans will have to come up with ways to meet that demand. Sure - if we ever reach a time where the entire human race says "this is e…
I think this is a good take- Having things be better for horses was never the point of the economy. In fact horses were probably the main driver for developing mechanical solutions since horse ownership is expensive and time consuming. There was no incentive to make life/jobs better for horses, and as soon as a better replacement was available horses were not necessary for most people. So you cant swap out horses for…
>Having things be better for horses was never the point of the economy
Neither was making things better for humans. The point of the economy is for capital to reproduce itself, humans being taken care of is an accidental side effect because capital doesn't like a torch mob very much.
Re: Moore's Law for Everything
#196> We will discover new jobs–we always do after a technological revolution CGP grey put this well > Imagine a pair of horses in the early 1900s talking about technology. One worries all these new mechanical muscles (cars etc) will make horses unnecessary. The other horse reminds him that everything so far has made their lives easier - remember all that farm work? Remember running coast-to-coast delivering mail? Rememb…
Another way to think of this: imagine two equally-sized countries A and B. A implements Sam’s suggestion, taxing everything at 2.5% pa, B doesn’t.
In A, people are happy, we’ll fed, Pursuing their interests, living meaningful lives.
In B they are not.
however, in A, companies and the economy are not growing so fast: resources are funnelled into a populace that takes but doesn’t give back.
Over a long period of time, the extra 2.5% growth in country B will become so meaningful that it will look back on the savages in country A and decide that it’s resources would be better off under B’s management.
It’s AI colonialism.
Re: Moore's Law for Everything
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Human wants for things are endless. Human desire for extra time, even more so. Human needs are subjective to each and every human. Why does Bezos get up in the morning?, if you’d like something aphoristic you may reply to in many creative ways. There is a lot of hubris in saying we’re pretty much maxed out now, thanks and time to stop. I’d suggest instead we need to make smart choices, and that usually smart answers…
>Human needs are subjective to each and every human After a certain point that's true but I think you miss the point of the parent. There are many, many hungry people in the world, many people without shelter and further millions who have no access to healthcare education or even clean water. These are not subjective needs. Those people are in that position inspite of the fact that we could, with the wealth we have,…
Ah, thanks. I felt that was a separate point to the idea of stopping progress because we have enough. I didn’t realize that was the main point?
Yes indeed, we have enough to ease those burdens and it’s a terrible thing that they continue!
Re: Moore's Law for Everything
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
The entire point of land value taxes is to turn land into a liability. You don't get to benefit from the accomplishments of other people. You only get to benefit from your own accomplishments e.g. by building a multistory tenant block and renting it out.
Re: Moore's Law for Everything
#199Maybe in the Hacker News echo chamber this all sounds plausible.
But where I live in the real world all I see is software getting worse and worse. It doesn't do ANYTHING automatically anymore and can't be scripted, every 'app' is a silo and has to be constantly tended to by humans. Useful functionality is actually removed and more time is spent on UI visuals than making it usable. This is made worse by the tendency of surveillance software to require humans to interact with it constantly in order to harvest information, interactions or to display ads.
At some point this bubble will burst, the ridiculous tech valuations will crash and we'll be back looking for solutions to real problems again.
Re: Moore's Law for Everything
#200> technological progress follows an exponential curve This is a mantra that I keep hearing, but if I compare the progress from 1900 to 1960 and then from 1960 to 2020, it almost seems like it has been flattening... Sure, we have internet and fancy computers, but the progress from 1900 to 1960 was immense: air travel, electrification, proliferation of automobiles, immense progress in medicine, space exploration, nucle…
He’s rehashing Kurzweil’s analysis of history, which is to broadly fit a few data points to show that exponential growth is baked into the universe. And then go in to claim that the next 100 years is going to be something 20,000 years of 20th century progress.
But I don’t see that the 2000s are progressing any faster than the 80s and 90s. It looks fairly linear since the 50s or 60s overall. smartphones and Deep Learning are incremental progress over what existed before.