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Moore's Law for Everything

moores.samaltman.com

271–280 of 554 posts

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#271

I respect Sam and believe that his thinking is usually a few years ahead of mine - with passage of time, I generally tend to agree with his statements more and more. He seems really bullish on AI, and while he might be a bit biased based on his current role, I think that his public statements are truly authentic because he's putting his money where his mouth is (he left a coveted role at YC for his current role at Op…

I envision the complete opposite. In 10 years I think there will be many companies who offer high quality AI services.

I'm not worried that these companies will just have their cake and eat it too because there's bound to be someone who would unbundle the AI from the product.

I even think it's more valuable to do that than building your own AI-powered product because then you're a service provider, which generally seems like a cushy place place to be.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#272
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Things only have economic value because humans want those things. Capital doesn't have any desires or drives on its own, owners of capital do. Capital owners are humans. Whatever you might say about capitalism, the idea that it doesn't serve humans or can somehow function without humans is just totally wrong. Capitalist economies aren't just human-centric, they are literally collections of human wants and needs.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#273
post #59

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"…

Another way to look at a land tax (instead of as a wealth tax) is that it's sort of "user fee". You're paying society "rent" (a land tax was called ground rent by Adam Smith) for depriving the commons of that land.

Typically, land value tax is based on the rental value of land rather than the market value, so it's even more in line with this model.

We want to move to a society where land is not treated as wealth, but rather as a resource to use (because that leads to less land speculation, and more productive use of land), so this model is fine.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#274

Maybe 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 o…

I think you are on to something. But I don't think the day X will ever come. It is more like the divide between the best software and the average is going to grow and grow.

We will see the amplitude of (critical) failures increase further and their occurrence frequency rising as well. It is and will continue to be evaluated statistically: The cost of actually fixing them vs. the cost of just letting them run wild.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#275

> 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…

Feeling basically neutral towards your employer (or nation) is probably how having reasonably aligned incentives feels at scale. If you were an hourly minimum wage worker for a large corporation, there's a good chance you'd spend a good part of your workday in a blind, passive-aggressive rage.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A society built via capitalism just gives people what they want; not maximizing some arbitrary objective function. We currently have no capitalist societies on earth.

Sounds like an instance of the No True Scotsman fallacy to me, friend. What is capitalism if not the systems that purport to be it? It's like saying "communism has never been tried". They tried _something_, and they certainly labelled it communism. That said, I do find the Equity Fund idea interesting, though it's not entirely clear what this looks like in practice, especially for the unbanked, the mentally ill, home…

Ah, fair. Yea, perhaps the capitalism we have tried is the closest that is practically possible.

I think we overweight how many people in society do not know what to do with cash. I think we may say that we believe they can do something better with it and sure perhaps, but it is bold to believe one knows what to do better with another's resources.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#277
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends how medical advice is defined, but AI has been shown to be better than humans in several contexts already, e.g. radiology.

Source?

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2018/11/ai-outperform...

among others

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#278
post #260

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.

A horse can't change their circumstances the way humans can. A horse can't learn to provide different value. It can only be a horse.

Can you not imagine a scenario where most humans cannot provide a significant amount of value?

Horses also can learn to provide different value, just up to a threshold lower than that of humans. But humans still have a threshold.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#279

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'…

I think the end goal of human society is full automation and immortality. In the process of coming to that there will be all kind of problems, challenges, dramas and chaos. But once we are there it's kinda all gone and done.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#280

> 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…

I don't necessarily disagree but that's really not a good analogy. Horses aren't people. When their jobs disappear no one gives a fuck. No one speaks up for their interests. People will not go so easy. They are able to create amazing things if given the opportunity. No one wants mass human unemployment.

People have an advantage that horses don't have: people can own property, and they have legal rights, like the ability to vote in elections. When we're talking about AI, though, it's not too hard to imagine computer programs eventually being allowed to legally own things and accrue wealth. It's harder to imagine them being allowed to vote (how would that even work?) but something like it could happen. We can also imagine this going the other way: economically "useless" people losing the right to own property or the right to vote. Or if the rights continue to exist in theory, in practice they become poor and disenfranchised. And then "the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must." It happens all the time.

I think in the long run we need to figure out a reasonable economic system that can deal with abundance of the things people want/need, and scarcity of work. Maybe it's as simple as making a 30, or a 20 hour work week the norm. The default alternative seems to be to have more and more people fighting for fewer and fewer jobs, to the point where everyone who has a job has to work extremely hard under long hours and bad conditions for low pay because if they don't there's ten more people ready to take their place at the drop of a hat.

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