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Moore's Law for Everything

moores.samaltman.com

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Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#311

Post by burlesona »

bobm_kite9 wrote: post #196
nindalf wrote: post #123

> 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 country B in that case has extreme inequality it may actually struggle with economic growth as there isn’t enough purchasing power among the poor to drive consumption which generally is what drives corporate profits.

In that case it could be that country A outgrows country B because the restributive policies have a stimulus effect.

The thing is, we don’t know how fast society-wide experiments will turn out.

In the US, this is where federalism is advantageous. Allow different states to try different policies and then measure the outcomes. Over time, winning policies will emerge and spread across the country.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#312

Post by natch »

Will the stock certificates that are inflationarily printed (or virtually printed, issued) to “pay” regular people in ownership have any value though? Are we being real here?

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#313

Post by eggsmediumrare »

michael1999 wrote: post #147
ravi-delia wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See that's exactly the thing. We can point to excess today and say "How could that be sustainable" but it seems like the novelty would wear off, no? Like in some hypothetical future where resources are 1000x more available, would people launch 1000 cars into space? It seems unlikely. Somehow I feel like there is some inelasticity to consumption that we just haven't reached yet. I'm not quite sure why I feel like that…

Ever watch someone burn $500 in gas running a boat for an afternoon?

Yes. I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy the feeling of self-righteous rage that comes with it.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#314

Post by eggsmediumrare »

bob33212 wrote: post #252
ravi-delia wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've spent what is likely way too much mental energy wondering about this, and I'm no closer to an answer. Is there any limit to lifestyle inflation? Is it possible to have growth that simply outpaces what a human could possibly consume? Intuitively it seems obvious that there should be something like that, but in the 1800s our growth today would seem like it should be enough.

Yes, There are a lot of people who make more money than they care to spend. Some of those people give the money away. and also No, when Larry Ellison built a 200 foot yacht, a Russian oligarch built a 250 foot yacht, The next guy will build a 300 foot yacht, etc.

Pardon my English, but fuck Larry Ellison, the Russian oligarch, and the next guy.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#315

Post by burlesona »

musingsole wrote: post #293
adwf wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That logic only works because we have no issue with slaughtering horses en masse. It'll take 100+ years of economic deprivation for the human population to balance out.

Some humans have issue slaughtering horses en masse. But still, I don't follow your point. Horses WERE NOT slaughtered. They were just bred at a point lower than replacement.

Actually they were slaughtered.

> Processing wild horses into chicken food in the 1930s reached its peak, when nearly 30 million pounds of horse flesh were canned.

http://netnebraska.org/basic-page/television/wild-horses-sla...

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#316

Post by cbozeman »

sudosysgen wrote: post #278
cschep wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm shocked he can't.

All you have to do is look at the bell curve for IQ and see where this all leads, and its nowhere pretty.

A person with an 85 IQ or below is too dumb to even be in the Army, even doing the most basic of tasks. Turns out, a military force with advanced computerized weaponry requires smart people. Now here's the kicker... 85 and below is something like 16% of the population.

That's 1,250,000,000 people that will, in the coming years / decades, be totally unable to function in the economy in any worthwhile way. And I'm sorry, I just do not trust the "benevolence" of the human race to fix this problem when our technology advances to the point that people of 100 IQ and below aren't useful. There is no way that 50% of the people with 101 IQs and above are going to spend money to keep the other 50% of the human race alive.

I doubt there'll be "mass exterminations" like we've seen of ethnic groups throughout history, but more likely the unemployable will be left to their own devices; after all, out of sight, out of mind.

As higher and higher IQ individuals are keeping the same company more and more and self-segregating, I suspect we're going to see the development of an overclass of individuals that will eventually grow resentful of spending X percent of their income, whatever number "X" ends up being, for keeping those who aren't able to provide for themselves alive. That's a pretty common human emotion. The tribe works fine when every tribe member is even minimally capable. When half the tribe members are literally dead weight? Nothing good, I'm afraid.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#317

Post by eggsmediumrare »

imtringued wrote: post #174
AlexandrB wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wrong mode of thinking. The problem is that there aren't enough alternatives. If you want an economy that is fair for workers then you need more jobs per worker so the worker can choose the best offer. That also means you want more employers, including the Jeff Bezos types.

Would this not apply to industries with lots of competition like restaurants or hotels?

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#318

Post by thyrsus »

scatters wrote: post #300
statstutor wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. If wealth continues to become increasingly centralised, the wealthy might be able to have all their desires fully satisfied, while the poor won't have enough power to demand that - which potentially creates a vicious cycle. Then the existence of suf…

Continues? The world is more equal than it ever has been, at least since the invention of agriculture.

In western economies, Piketty showed that equality peaked approximately in the 1950's, and has been dropping since. (Almost) no one recommends we have another world war to decrease the assets owned by the rich, but Piketty, like the original article, also recommends a wealth tax (this article includes the significant refinement that the tax be on corporations and not individuals; Piketty does not go into details for his wealth tax proposal).

If you disagree with these points, please site evidence.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#319

Post by anchpop »

second--shift wrote: post #105

I read some time ago (I think as a link here) the following: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist... One of my takeaways is that growth cannot exist forever; there is a thermal bound to how much energy (economy = energy consumption, if you reduce it enough) we can produce and consume. Another commenter posted that if you zoom out enough, economic growth is exponential. I tend to agree, at leas…

I read this article a couple months ago and found it incredibly bizarre (to the point of wondering if the economist was actually real or just an invention of the author). Firstly, it spends a lot of time analyzing the consequences of exponential growth in energy usage over the next few centuries. But Google [0] will tell you that energy usage has barely moved between the beginning of their data of 1960 and the end of 2015 (and has actually been on the decline since its peak in the 70s).

Thankfully they then move on to discussing what will happen if energy usage continues not growing exponentially, when the physicist says this:

> If the flow of energy is fixed, but we posit continued economic growth, then GDP continues to grow while energy remains at a fixed scale. This means that energy—a physically-constrained resource, mind—must become arbitrarily cheap as GDP continues to grow and leave energy in the dust.

Then, to clarify, he says:

> Energy today is roughly 10% of GDP. Let’s say we cap the physical amount available each year at some level, but allow GDP to keep growing. We need to ignore inflation as a nuisance in this case: if my 10 units of energy this year costs $10,000 out of my $100,000 income; then next year that same amount of energy costs $11,000 and I make $110,000—I want to ignore such an effect as “meaningless” inflation: the GDP “growth” in this sense is not real growth, but just a re-scaling of the value of money.

No! This is not what economic growth means! No economist in the world should agree with that. It's possible that electricity will be too cheap to meter, or it's possible it won't, but some commodity increasing in price at the same rate as GDP doesn't somehow neutralize the possibility of there having been economic growth. Here's an example. Let's say widgets currently cost $2 to make and there's demand for 1000 widgets/year. If I find some innovation to save $1 on the per-widget production cost, that's $1000 of economic growth. If that innovation uses slightly more electricity (and let's assume the production of electricity is fixed), we'll bid up the price of electricity some amount and displace some less-productive use. That already happens for other finite resources like land (which in some cases leads to exorbitantly high land prices in areas like silicon valley, but that wouldn't mean there's been no growth).

[0]: https://www.google.com/search?q=us+energy+consumption&rlz=1C...

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#320

Post by YinLuck- »

nindalf wrote: post #123

> 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…

That CGP Grey video is 6+ years old already and none of its claims have come to pass. That video and this blog post both seem like the usual techno-utopian fluff -- a sermon to the already converted.

Here's the truth: life expectancy is going down, birth rates are below replacement, sperm counts are down something like 90% in less than a century, we're working longer hours than medieval serfs, and suffering from more disease than our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

This Techno-religion of AI, genetic engineering, automation, etc being "right around the corner" is the opiate of the masses -- the propaganda keeping the working class from revolting.

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