Live data from Hacker News

Moore's Law for Everything

moores.samaltman.com

421–430 of 554 posts

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guess what, 90% of humans are also tools that a small percentage of other humans use to accomplish their goals. Few people would argue that the job of “Amazon warehouse worker” is anything other than a tool for Jeff Bezos to become richer and more powerful. The person who has that job, from when they clock in to when they clock out, is functionally equivalent to a horse. Amazon software engineers are the same, they j…

Difference being you can re-train Amazon SWEs as more things are automated / become more efficient.

But to do what? If the economic future this piece presents is right then AI will be able to do everything that humans do.

The difference between this and previous tech improvements is that this one replaces human thought, not manual labor. That’s fundamentally different than everything that’s come before.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#422

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 b…

> 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

What's stopping such organizations from being formed?

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#423
post #290

This is an absolutely horrible idea. As Raoul Pal always says: "Capital will find a way. It always does.". Let's take a look at some examples with real estate: George owns a flat, he lives in it. He owns no other properties and he works a low-wage job What will happen? He'll pay the 2.5% for a while then he'll be forced to sell. Jane owns 5 houses and lives in one. She doesn't have a job, he lives off of the rent pay…

Given that anyone with below mean wealth is a net beneficiary of this scheme your scenario does not seem plausible.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#424
Here is my perspective working in industrial automation field (think of these for 4 points as matrix):

1) Things that are easy to automate are already automated.

2) Many things that are difficult to automate but increase productivity a lot are already automated.

3) Many things that easy to automate and increase productivity only a little bit are already automated.

4) Things that are difficult to automate and increase productivity only a little bit NOT automated.

We constantly make advances in automating things, but the low hanging fruits and high productivity gain things are already gone. It's not so clear to me, that our advances are keeping pace with the things that are left to automate. I feel the point about exponential growth is completely non-obvious. What if the tasks we are automating also get exponentially more difficult and/or the productivity gains decrease exponentially.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#425

"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, i…

The article mentions the solution as regards companies: they pay in stock and can do so via a fresh issue. The situation regarding property is less easy to resolve. Most likely some sort of reverse mortgage product would work.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 thin…

We do track this, it’s called the prime working age participation rate.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#427
post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compare voice recognition in 2001 to 2021.

I tend to forget how unthinkable good image recognition was just ten years ago: e.g. https://xkcd.com/1425/

Yes, or how truck driving was cited as an example of a job difficult to replace with computers.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#428
post #296
post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Consider a case where person A builds widget X, and person B builds widget Y, and they trade with each other. Automation takes over, they lose their jobs. If they continue getting the widgets they used to trade for (which are now created automatically), they simply have the same wealth as before but more time. If they don't have the widgets, they're now detached from the new automated widgets both in production and…

Well, that's the point. If they're getting their goods from a robot, their needs are being met. If they're not, they could trade with person B.

But why are we assuming that they have needs that are not being met by the robots?

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#429

In the next five years, computer programs that can think will read legal documents and give medical advice. Aside from the other points, taking "AI" as it exists in it's present form (deep neural networks and related) as specifically the bringer of unlimited wealth certainly puffs up the various "AI companies" notably OpenAI (It should be noted that OpenAI's most famous product, GPT-3, can generate strings that sound…

You can, today, take a self driving taxi in phoenix with no (other) human in the car.
Post reply on HN