Moore's Law for Everything • Hacker News Board

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#391

Post by nearbuy » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 5:16 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.

But the food needs (and other needs) have expanded 10x. It makes no sense to look at the absolute numbers instead of the percentage. If there had been no technological advancements at all, the workforce would have still expanded (in absolute numbers) to match the population.

Without machines and technology, we would need far, far more people today in agriculture. The need for all those jobs has been destroyed by technology.

When one job becomes obsolete, this frees up labour and people gradually move to other jobs. This increases production, since we're still producing agricultural products (using fewer people), and there's more people now producing other things. Agricultural jobs were destroyed, but there were always other jobs people could do, that weren't done before simply because agriculture sucked up so much labour.

This pattern will continue for a while. When human labour is no longer the best tool for one job, that labour will be reallocated to something else. There's still plenty of things we'd like more of.

But the video is talking about what happens when humans are no longer the best tool for any job. It's happened many times in history that some job has become obsolete. We haven't yet made a machine that's better than humans at every job.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#392

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 5:20 AM UTC

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…

[deleted]

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#393

Post by chordalkeyboard » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 5:26 AM UTC

Aunche wrote: post #148

tvanantwerp wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just find something very cold and socially undesirable in the idea that somebody can spend a lifetime putting in the work to get the home they want, only to be forced out because "society" decides they are no longer productive. I'm no NIMBY—those people shouldn't have the right to stop others from developing their own properties—but I'm not sure I like the idea of economic incentives kicking the least productive to…

If being taxed 2.5% a year counts as being "forced out," then staying in a highly productive area of land indefinitely is "forcing" people who can otherwise move to your house to stay poor. Never mind that it's the wealthy are the ones who benefit from elimination of property taxes. It's society that makes the property valuable in the first place, so it makes sense to pay society back. The firefighters, schools, and…

> If being taxed 2.5% a year counts as being "forced out," then staying in a highly productive area of land indefinitely is "forcing" people who can otherwise move to your house to stay poor.

“Otherwise” is doing a lot of work here. The people can’t “otherwise” move there because the person isn’t selling, that’s the idea. Taxing people so they are forced to sell is forcing them out. Not taxing people so they are not forced to sell is letting them stay there. You’ve yet to explain why the people who do live there have less of a claim to the house than the wealthier people who would buy it from them.

> Never mind that it's the wealthy are the ones who benefit from elimination of property taxes.

Yes nevermind that since its not even true.

> It's society that makes the property valuable in the first place, so it makes sense to pay society back.

This reifies “society” as a thing-in-itself rather than properly considering society as consisting of the people who own the properties and make them valuable by their ownership, maintenance, and use. Then it equivocates “society” with the actual government that collects the taxes and decides how they are spent (typically routing them to their friends who sell goods and services to the government).

> The firefighters, schools, and social workers in your area need to get paid extra to account for the cost of living increases.

Cost of living increases like land value tax? Like how landlords pass increased taxes and maintenance onto their tenants?

> That money should come from the people benefit the most from their services, the property owners.

Its not at all clear that property owners benefit disproportionately from social services, and they also pay for those services through taxes.

I think most of this recent fascination with Georgism is a result of California tax policy and doesn’t withstand a cursory economic analysis.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#394

Post by DSingularity » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 5:28 AM UTC

YinLuck- wrote: post #320

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…

For me, it’s enough to consider the state of our hearts to realize how much more we need before this utopian vision comes to be. We may be extremely educated and creative but we still walk and drive by homeless people in the wealthiest country in the world. We still work for and consume the products of companies see nothing wrong with profiting from things universally obscene. Compared to our minds — our hearts have made little progress.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#395

Post by AndrewBissell » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 5:29 AM UTC

mrkramer wrote: post #279

AndrewBissell wrote: post #68

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.

> Once we are there it's kinda all gone and done.

The ends justify the means? Forgive me if I don't agree that some small sliver of sociopathic elites getting to live forever as nanite clouds or whatever excuses genocide euphemistically referred to as "dramas and chaos."

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#396

Post by carapace » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 5:31 AM UTC

> A stable economic system requires two components: growth and inclusivity.

Stability and continuous growth would seem to be incompatible, surely?

> Economic growth matters because most people want their lives to improve every year.

It may be true that most people want that but so what?

I'm a big proponent of everyone having a decent level of quality of life, that's not the problem. The problem is taking a child's view of reality and trying to make it stick when it comes to deciding policy. We can't "improve every year" forever. What does that mean? A larger house each year?

I can understand saying that as a political move to get people on your side, but it's irrational.

We must design forms of economic growth that respect basic physical reality.

> In a zero-sum world, one with no or very little growth,

But we don't live in a zero-sum world. We live in a bubble sandwiched between hard vacuum and magma that hosts a fantastic chemical tautology powered (mostly) by the energy gradient between the Sun and the rest of the dark sky. This process is not zero-sum.

In order to have a stable system with continuous growth there must also be death and decay.

- - - -

I think we could set up a "split-level" economy that is physically steady-state and virtually growth-and-death dynamic.

The physical economy would be much simpler and much much more efficient than it is today, and everyone would have a decent standard of living within their energy/pollution budget. Most of the wins and losses and creativity and innovation and all that good economic drama would happen in the online virtual economy where it can't cause environmental issues with our Spaceship Earth.

But I don't think you have to make national policy to do that. Buy some land in the desert, build "Village Homes"[1] with some integrated regenerative farms, rent/lease/sell it and repeat. Build hyper-efficient ecologically harmonious neighborhoods. We could do this today, it's self-funding and self-correcting. The major issues there would be putting together the expertise and getting past the red tape. All the technology you would need is off-the-shelf.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_Homes

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#397

Post by lukifer » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 5:32 AM UTC

hooande wrote: post #367

joe_the_user wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 con…

> both are human social concepts and can be re-imagined at any time

I think that's what's essentially being advocated (whether now or later): reimagining human social roles outside the wage/employment model (and perhaps distributing an "automation dividend" to ensure liquidity and market demand).

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#398

Post by webmaven » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 5:34 AM UTC

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…

> Yes, entire industries are reconfigured and nation-states are redrawn because some humans want them to be reconfigured.

I think you're missing the point that if necessary, the humans involved can be swapped out until ones with the 'right' desires are in place.

> but that in no way implies that an organization is actually some kind of inhuman entity that functions without humans.

An organization doesn't have to be capable of functioning without humans to be an inhuman entity with inhuman motivations and so on. The human components just need to be fungible and more easily steered by tweaking incentives etc. than the organization is.

For that matter, epiphenomena like regulatory capture really don't occur at an individual level much, but largely at the interface between governments/agencies and corporations, or even higher-level entities like industry trade groups and consortia.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#399

Post by hellbannedguy » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 5:49 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.

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

I doubt this.

In the USA, we have an unemployment number, “able bodied, but not working, or looking for work.” If the 50’s, it was basically housewives. Today it’s a lot of people. (This might not be the exact wording the government uses.)

My point is this number is huge, and never talked about much in the United States. I don’t think the government even has a way of tracking the number?

I don’t know how the rest of the world treats this number.

My guess would be most don’t have jobs, or if that number crossed 50% in any country, the jobs would not be of a livable wage living alone.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#400

Post by willhinsa » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 5:56 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…

> Aren't workers also tools used to produce things? What's special about workers that makes them irreplaceable?

Absolutely correct. And the entities employing those tools are called "Capital".