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Moore's Law for Everything

moores.samaltman.com

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Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#361

Post by thyrsus »

burlesona wrote: post #311
bobm_kite9 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Could, say, California tax corporations net worth at a percentage of the revenue derived from California? (This is a downward extrapolation from the original article's proposal to deal with assets hidden overseas.) I'm queasy about the current SCOTUS's assent.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#362

Post by hooande »

rebelos wrote: post #305
joe_the_user wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One other thing I'd like to add. The scenario of AI mostly replacing people like doctors and lawyers involves bizarre paradoxes beyond whether deep learning "AI" works as advertised. Suppose you can train an "AI" to read legal papers or diagnose patients based on X-rays. That training is done from the data of real life lawyers and doctors actions. Suppose, best case scenario (very unrealistic imo btw), you have a com…

The only way you could be beguiled by this framing is if you don't understand just how inept most doctors and lawyers really are. A future configuration will probably look something like: far fewer highly talented doctors and lawyers remain employable while the rest are replaced by AI that's shown to be vastly more capable, and that is continually enhanced by the encoded expertise of said highly talented remaining sp…

the opposite if this is true. with scifi ai on that level, bad lawyers would just pay to use the ai for legal work and focus on developing social relationships to get valuable clients. this is how a lot of professionals spend their time now

most things in life that make a lot of money are social. if everyone has access to ai knowledge and skills that can be copied, then the social aspect is even more important

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#363

Post by jodrellblank »

birdsbirdsbirds wrote: post #83
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.

Why should there be a limit? If you can command robots to build anything you can ever imagine, who doesn't want his own Versailles - with impressive towers like the Burj Khalifa? Who doesn't want to fly their jet or space rocket just for fun to the moon and back? And humans will be humans. There will be new games, like drone wars on distant planets, where any production capacity and energy will be used. And since eve…

I don't; one can only drive one car at a time, one can only be in one room at a time, one can only eat one stomach full of food in a given period, one can only read/watch/experience at most 24 hours of media in a day.

Once your Versailles is big enough, you won't be able to walk it in a day. Once it's bigger than that, you won't be able to drive its length in a day. Once it's bigger than that, you won't be able to travel its length in a lifetime at light speed. There's a limit for you. But you likely won't want to spend your entire life travelling at lightspeed to the far wing of your house, then die. So that drops the limit enormously.

What does it mean for it to be "your Versailles" - could you draw or depict Versailles in detail from memory? How will you verify that your clone is exactly like the original? Do you care? Do you really mean that you get to design your own mega-palace? So now you spend your life choosing furnishings and layouts and architectural details - hope you like that kind of passtime, because there's a lot of it. But if you don't like that, why bother having "your Versailles" instead of going to look at someone else's for a few hours? Or look at a picture, for that matter? What are you going to do with your Versailles? Are you a king or queen with courtiers and subjects so that you can have extravagant parties? Are you going to organise the food and cleaning and heating that the robots do?

How old are you, were you around when computers ran at Khz speeds? And now you have effectively "infinite computing power", you spend your time commenting about Bitcoin on HN - why aren't you simulating your own Virtual Versailles and flights to the moon and stuff? Because it's not that interesting now you can do it? Endless hedonism is boring.

> "Who doesn't want to fly their jet or space rocket just for fun to the moon and back?"

OK, that's taken a week of sitting in a tiny box waiting and doing nothing. What about the rest of your entire life?

Listing fancy sounding things is what religions do to entrap people with dreams of heavenly afterlives. All you have to do is look around you at all the things you once wanted, and suddenly don't once you attain them - the drawer of abandoned Raspberry Pies is a common one for HN people to notice, then start to internalise that you can have any film ever made delivered to you from Amazon for a few bucks, and you don't, you can't think of a film you'd rather watch than comment "Make your own exchange." on a Robinhood thread on HN. Got a wardrobe of too many clothes? Got boxes of unused stuff? A garage of tools and spares?

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#364

Post by SequoiaHope »

It’s very good to see someone as influential as Sam talking about this. The idea that automation can be used (intentionally!) to lower the cost of living to zero has been a key component of my personal writing and work for some years now. [1]

There is a lot that I agree with here and some things I disagree with. For example capitalism can encourage value creation but it can also encourage rent seeking. Since I have been focused on the idea of lowering the cost of living I’ve come to see rent seeking as a direct antagonist to that goal. Taking something that could be distributed for free and adding a cost to it makes it much harder to bring the cost of life to near zero. The most common way this is done is with intellectual property, and I’ve found several helpful critiques of IP restrictions [2][3][4] that have led me to believe we’d be better off phasing them out and intentionally collaborating with one another.

But my biggest disagreement with Altman here is about the means of producing equity in society. I think the proposed tax and UBI would be good. But I don’t think it is the best solution.

The elephant in the room here is that Socialists have been working very hard for two centuries to try to understand how to organize an industrial society in such a way as to provide a decent and fair life to all.

We’ve completely vilified the notion of socialism in USA to the point that we never even learn about it. Richard Wolff talks about getting an Ivy League economics education in the USA and never being required to read a single word of Marx.

Unlike many socialists I think I broadly agree with what most libertarians believe, and we simply use very different terminology and frameworks for understanding the solution. So I support for example left market anarchists aka left libertarian capitalists like the folks at the Center for a Stateless Society.

But I think the most significant point is one made by David Harvey, a teacher and scholar of Marxism. Harvey says that wealth redistribution is the lowest form of socialism.

The actual point of socialism is not to capture the wealth from capitalists after they have it in their accounts. Instead you change the structure of the organization so that at the point of wealth creation all of the workers and perhaps all of society has some stake in it. The simplest example comes from Richard Wolff, who draws on Marxism to essentially advocate for an increase in worker owned cooperatives. Such an organization could still have whatever leadership structure they wanted, but they would get a vote on who was in charge and they’d make sure pay was fair for all. Socialism is a complex and well studied subject so I cannot relate it all here.

But I will say, Altman’s proposed fund is one way of ensuring all workers and all of society have a stake. I strongly prefer using means of organization that automatically benefit everyone without the means of a state to intervene. For example the state protects intellectual property restrictions for certain qualifying works. If we were to stop providing those protections, then the moment a work was created everyone on Earth would receive more benefit than if it was restricted. We could provide every book ever written for free. Car companies could start sharing part designs and standardize on parts to reduce costs to all. When the patents on 3D printers expired the price dropped from $25k to $300 in ten years.

I am glad we can ask ourselves how to make this world more equitable for all. Please consider that this has been the goal of socialism for as long as it has existed, and if you reading this are from the USA like I am, you may deeply misunderstand what socialism really means. Regardless of your view I think we can all learn a lot from people like David Harvey. Check out his podcast for a view in to his thinking. [5] See also Economics For People by Ha-Joon Chang [6]

[1] http://www.tlalexander.com/machine/

[2] http://dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm

[3] https://youtu.be/GZgLJkj6m0A

[4] https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284

[5] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPJpiw1WYdTPmOmC2i3hR4_aR...

[6] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmtuEaMvhDZbNVIDHA-MTVH0s...

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#365

Post by Barrin92 »

themacguffinman wrote: post #322
Barrin92 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>they are literally collections of human wants and needs. And humans are literally just collections of cells, does that mean you have no wants and that your pancreas is running the show? It's very arrogant to think that only humans have desires. Nations have desires, institutions have desires, and capital itself has a lot of desires. Lots of scary entities out there that have desires. When capital is unhappy with cap…

Nation-state desires & institutional desires are human desires . Capital can't "fire" capital owners, that's just a non-sequitur, the very concept of capital ownership is both defined and enforced by human beings. Other capital owners and consumers, ie. humans, fire them. Yes, entire industries are reconfigured and nation-states are redrawn because some humans want them to be reconfigured . This seems like a fundamen…

>One might group together the common interests of an organization as a whole for the sake of simplifying discussion, but

the same applies to you. You're a system of competing interests which we call "themacguffinman" solely for the purpose of simplification. You're nothing but an organisation of cells, systems and drives and the interaction of a lot of parts that we slap a label on for practical purposes. When we say something like "Britain likes X" we actually should take it literally, because Britain is a very real thing. Just like your body sends immune cells to kill themselves to fend off a disease, Britain sends her soldiers to die for a quasi empty rock off the coast of Argentina. Britain has territory, but none of her citizens have one. Britain has interests that are older and different than the interests of any of her people.

The world actually makes a lot more sense when you let go of the very atavistic idea that humans have any sort of special ontological status or have some level of realness that other entities don't have, it's just systems all the way up and down.

People actually intuitively understand this when they discuss the so called 'AI alignment problem'. They just don't understand that all the AIs are already around and we're solving alignment problems with entities with non-human desires and interests all day already.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#366

Post by xrd »

sudosysgen wrote: post #299
xrd wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a thought experiment: let's say we take Sam's ideas alongside something like UBI, where everyone has a baseline of income provided by the society they live in. You succeed wildly, and get rich as an entrepreneur. Sadly, in a generation or two, your grandchildren will be back with the rest of the plebeians, despite grandpops launching YC, writing books on art and coding and creating an bunch of amazing companies.…

Is this actually realistic? In the Soviet Union, there was no such problem - brilliant people by and large were happy to become scientists and engineers, and scientists and engineers got into the planning agencies and into the government too, in droves. Same in pre 1989 China. I don't see why the USSR and Mao's China were able to retain (and sometimes even attract) these people, but the society you're describing woul…

This is a fascinating and out of the regular narrative of communism (at least to me). Thanks.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#367

Post by hooande »

joe_the_user wrote: post #251
bnralt wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? -- You'll always have something that some other human wants the human X to do. Whether that other person can pay human X sufficient money to make that activity their job is the question. And it seems plausible you'll reach a point where the answer will be no for a lot of people. You can call that "structural" if you wish but it seems related…

Anything that can be a job. Whatever people are willing to pay others to do, limited only by imagination.

And just from the definition of money, it's unlikely to find a scenario where people can't pay other people to do arbitrary labor. There will always be people that have a majority of wealth, however that's denoted

It's not possible for civilization as a whole to run out of jobs or money. both are human social concepts and can be re-imagined at any time

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#368

Post by heleninboodler »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #161
heleninboodler wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a level of lifestyle that allows a person to donate his personal sports car to replace an inert mass, because he'll buy another car. While he and many others could buy personal space launches, that launch is not a demonstration of such. He wasn't paying for it, and it wasn't for him.

I could afford to donate a $100k sports car to be launched into space if I really wanted to. Lots of people here could. How many billions of dollars short of being able to set off a chain of events that actually make that happen do you think I am?

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#369

Post by nearbuy »

BurningFrog wrote: post #350
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…

This is a very misleading metaphor. Horses were not workers. The were tools workers used. Farmers used horses to plow the fields. Transport workers used them to transport goods and people. As those workers got better tools to plow and transport, productivity increased, society got richer. There are also millions of old telegraphs, slide rules, and rotary phones "unemployed" across the world. The fate of these no long…

I don't see the distinction. Aren't workers also tools used to produce things? What's special about workers that makes them irreplaceable?

> Also, the fact that you can't find a human example to make this argument

What would you count as a single human example of human workers becoming obsolete? This has happened many times. About 96% of people used to work in agriculture. Today it's about 4%. Machines and technology have replaced the rest of the labor needed to grow our food.

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