211–220 of 554 posts
Either way two major things wrong with this. First off, there isn't actually a whole lot of evidence that we're living in the most innovative time in history and that the robots are coming for us. Productivity growth is low, employment is high. If technology was eliminating labour, the opposite would be happening. We'd be growing at 7% per year while we'd have bazillions of unemployed people roaming the street.
Secondly, and this is very typical for SV liberalism/centrism there is absolutely no understanding of power in this article and we just solve things by doing 'the right policies' which is 'simple' and then everything is fine. Of course if that was so simple we'd already be doing it to begin with.
We don't need some futuristic 2200 utopia to solve child poverty. We actually could do all the things mentioned in the article literally right now. You could have been taxing the shit out of land in 1800. The question Sam Altman needs to answer is why the technolords of the future don't just simply hire some Terminator Pinkertons to mow down everyone who wants to get their hands on some of their riches.
There are some really smart ideas in here, and some really smart assessments of existing policies. The thing I was most taken aback by was Sam's suggestion to tax privately held land, and capital (as opposed to labor tax). I would love to have Sam and PG go toe to toe and discuss how Sam's proposal is different from the wealth tax post PG made. I don't immediately see how Sam's idea avoids the "wealth tax compounds"…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does one hoard wealth? Am I made poorer because Bezos owns 9% of his own company?
His workers are poorer because his company's enormous valuation comes from the surplus value they produce but do not receive as compensation. You might be poorer if you own a small business those workers would frequent if they had more money. Edit: You might also be poorer if you tried to compete with Amazon and were crushed like a bug by their anti-competitive practices.
> AI will lower the cost of goods and services, because labor is the driving cost at many levels of the supply chain. If robots can build a house on land you already own from natural resources mined and refined onsite, using solar power, the cost of building that house is close to the cost to rent the robots. And if those robots are made by other robots, the cost to rent them will be much less than it was when humans…
Construction is a very small part of housing costs. Outside of rural areas, much of the cost is speculative or supply/demand.
From memory:
Tearing a $2 million single family house and putting 6 apartments there would allow you to charge $3k rent. Build taller and rent drops even lower. This is assuming construction costs of $500 per sqft.
As with so much Silicon Valley stuff, I think the latest evangelizing for AI is probably just laundering military and counterinsurgency tech as some kind of utopian consumer godsend. Obviously AGI will remain a pipe dream, but what we will get is autonomous robotic soldiers with no conscience (that can be counted on to put down unrest without questioning their orders), or listening software that can monitor everyone'…
> 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,…
> If everyone owns a slice of American value creation, everyone will want America to do better: collective equity in innovation and in the success of the country will align our incentives. I kind of doubt that. At Google we're paid in part with shares of GOOG, but at Google's scale that's just treated as cash compensation. At my level, nothing I do affects the stock price, and most Googlers feel this way. Sure, I wan…
You never know. Butterfly effect and all that. It adds up. Best example I know of is when I was younger and playing WoW, my brother was explaining gemming your gear to me. I told him "what will a +4 intelligence gem do really?" But you add up all the gems on all the sockets on the gear and it makes a huge difference. The difference being the difference between a strong character and a weak one and living or dying. Ea…
> This revolution will generate enough wealth for everyone to have what they need We had enough wealth for everyone to have what we need a long time ago. No matter how much we have humans always want more. AI won't change that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't get myself to agree with this. Indeed, it's true, horses don't create demand, but neither do unemployed humans. Our economy isn't centred around humans, it's centred around capital. Unemployable humans are as useless to it as horses, as they can't exchange their labour with capital owners (or become capital owners themselves). Unemployable people might want more, but will they get more? No, they won't.
I think there's two distinct ideas being discussed. Can people be unemployed because of structural, societal, or political reasons? Sure, and I think most people would agree. We have plenty of example of that happening - depressions, recessions, mass refugees, etc. But can people be unemployed because we run out of things for humans to do? That's what the video is arguing, but it won't be the case unless we've fully…
> But can people be unemployed because we run out of things for humans to do? That's what the video is arguing, but it won't be the case unless we've fully satisfied all of our desires. If we haven't, there are, by definition, still things to do.
The question at hand though is exactly why is this true of humans but not horses?