Moore's Law for Everything • Hacker News Board

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#371

Post by nearbuy » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 3:48 AM UTC

wffurr wrote: post #298

qeternity wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What?? It’s the exact opposite. Those people HAVE to work that hard precisely for the reason I mentioned: they won’t be paid otherwise. This is precisely the issue. If you paid people irrespective of how much they work, they won’t work. Your example is evidence of my statement, not refutation.

Do I really work harder as a software engineer than the garbagemen who bust their asses doing a dangerous smelly job? Or teachers wrangling a room full of kids? I don't think so. And yet I am paid 5-10X what they are.

I think you're basically agreeing with the comment you replied to. They're saying people who are financially secure (possibly like a software engineer) are less incentivized to work hard. Someone who really needs the money is more incentivized.

If you got the same pay whether or not you showed up to work each day, you'd be less incentivized to show up.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#372

Post by kajumix » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 3:50 AM UTC

"We could do something called the American Equity Fund. The American Equity Fund would be capitalized by taxing companies above a certain valuation 2.5% of their market value each year, payable in shares transferred to the fund, and by taxing 2.5% of the value of all privately-held land, payable in dollars."

He is talking about taxing unrealized gains, which is quite unfair. If the share price of a company doubles, it doesn't mean the company has extra cash to buy back shares for redistribution. Same with land. I feel property taxes today, as a percentage of market value, are insidious precisely for that reason. Increased demand for housing in my area doesn't mean I have more cash to pay taxes. Not until I sell the house and realize that gain.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#373

Post by hooande » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 3:51 AM UTC

This is definitely good thinking, though it seems unrealistic.

The stuff about AI is just science fiction. We'll see major advances in the next 15 years, but it's unlikely that there will be a compounding intelligence situation where robots are able to program and build other robots without human intervention. There's no scientific evidence that this will happen, but it's certainly possible on a long enough time frame.

A 2.5% property tax is a political impossibility. That's like $500/mo for the average homeowner. And homeowners vote. This would only happen in the most dire of economic circumstances. The remote possibility of super ai in the coming decades is not one of those circumstances.

I'm also not so sure about the idea of taxing corporations based on their market cap. Market cap isn't "real" taxable money like that. It looks like there's been research published on the idea [0], but it's kind of just one person.

[0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1517925

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#374

Post by BurningFrog » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 3:58 AM UTC

nearbuy wrote: post #369

BurningFrog wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> About 96% of people used to work in agriculture. Today it's about 4%.

Let's say the 96% number is from 1750, which I think is roughly right.

World population then was ~800 million. Today it is ~7700 million. Most have jobs.

The human workforce has expanded almost 10x in this period.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#375

Post by poundofshrimp » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 3:59 AM UTC

We’re arguably already in the AI revolution, and I haven’t seen things get much cheaper. Most everyday prices go up with inflation, like they always did. UBI is a wonderful idea but I’m not sure there is currently enough wealth for a scheme like that, even on small scale.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#376

Post by Swizec » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 4:05 AM UTC

dkersten wrote: post #352

riskable wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can make a lot more and better AAA games if 50% of your time isn’t spent on life chores. That's what the robots are for! And they never complain, never need to sleep, and are always one software upgrade away from amazing new capabilities.

That, and human population is still growing, meaning there are more and more humans who need jobs, yet as robots improve, the types of jobs left for humans get fewer. At some point, the lines will cross. Maybe it won't be soon, but if population keeps growing and robots keep being able to do more jobs, then eventually it will happen.

I just finished reading Bullshit Jobs. The author makes a good argument for the users that because we decided working is a moral good, we are also great at making up things for people to do.

For example: the ballooning of admin jobs in academia that add no benefit to services rendered other than keeping other useless admins busy.

According to the book, when you remove the bullshit jobs and bullshit work most of us already work 20 hour weeks or less.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#377

Post by koboll » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 4:07 AM UTC

mrkramer wrote: post #283

koboll wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>horses don't create demand, but neither do unemployed humans. What Sam is proposing is massive wealth redistribution by taxing land and capital. Seen any memes referencing $1400 lately? Unemployed humans who are given cash absolutely create demand.

>Unemployed humans who are given cash absolutely create demand. That's artificial demand which creates inflation.

Again, Sam very specifically talks about paying for this wealth redistribution by taxing land and capital, rather than printing money.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#378

Post by AussieWog93 » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 4:13 AM UTC

I don't buy this whole idea of technological progress being exponential, let alone monotonic.

The average piece of software made in 2021 does less, runs slower and is more difficult to maintain than the average piece of software from 2001.

Consumer-grade CPUs haven't seen a drastic increase in performance for around a decade too. I'm still running an i7-2600k that was released in 2010. A current-tech Ryzen 7 has maybe 30-50% better performance per core, and 2x the number of cores. In 2000, we were still using 800Mhz single-core Athlons.

More broadly, we haven't seemed to have a breakthrough on the scale of penicillin, the steam engine, the assembly line or the transistor since the turn of the millennium (with the possible exception of CRISPR).

I just don't seem to be able to share in the optimism of people like Altman and Kurzweil when it comes to technological progress like this.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#379

Post by tacitusarc » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 4:13 AM UTC

BurningFrog wrote: post #374

nearbuy wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> About 96% of people used to work in agriculture. Today it's about 4%. Let's say the 96% number is from 1750, which I think is roughly right. World population then was ~800 million. Today it is ~7700 million. Most have jobs. The human workforce has expanded almost 10x in this period.

This is moving the goalpost, though. The discussion was about whether or not the replacibility of generalized human labor is comparable to the replacibility of horse labor. No doubt there can be reasonable disagreement, but we can't compare the adaptation to specialized function replacement with generalized function replacement. The point of the analogy is that it (generlized labor) is novel in human populations, but not for horses.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#380

Post by BurningFrog » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 4:14 AM UTC

xyzelement wrote: post #356

BurningFrog wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think his logic holds. The point is that we found new jobs for horses because there were areas where machines were inferior to them. Once machines could do everything that a horse could do (probably some mixture of load carrying and agility / endurance) we had no more work for them. To bring the same logic to humans, in history machines freed up humans to do better work than before. Let's say what humans excel at i…

> The point is that we found new jobs for horses because...

My core point is that horses didn't have jobs!

People used horses to do jobs.

> Once machines are more dexterous and can think better than people, there's no more new jobs - because whatever jobs they would be, machines will be better qualified for.

I think this is another version of the same error. Machines have jobs in this scenario! People have to pay for what the machines produce, but there is no human on the other side of the transaction, so after a while humans run out of all money and die off.

Or something.. It's getting late and I'll stop here.