Moore's Law for Everything • Hacker News Board

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#551

Post by gnramires » Fri, Mar 19, 2021, 9:22 PM UTC

gnramires wrote: post #55

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.

I've also spent mental energy on this, about 4-5 years, and recently I've been reaching a conclusion (in a great walkabout about AI, ethics, and the meaning of everything). My conclusion: individual satisfaction is bounded, as long as we have bounded brains. First I should mention that the best principle I've found to underlie life is that we should maximize or optimize some kind of experience of consciousness, for e…

My view may have come off as a little hedonistic.

To be clear, by conscious experience I don't mean just pleasure (or even just "happiness", just joy). Experience is much more complicated than pleasure alone, or any single feeling -- although of course generally they are good proxies in most situations (if you're happy it's usually, but not as a law, having good experiences).

I'll leave it as a reflection to the reader exactly what it entails -- with Humboldt's observation in mind (of "harmonious development [...] to a complete and consistent whole).

Another important observation to be had, is that we should have freedom to chose, in a way, what gives us pleasure, what's engrossing to us -- guided by reason. I call this concept 'freedom of utility' -- sure, we (generally) enjoy physically food, sex, and various other things (sometimes drugs that destroy our bodies and our minds); but what should we like? Imagine our intuitive tastes could be aligned to changes since we've developed millions of years ago, living in totally different environments under new light of reasoning, and new understanding of the universe.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#552

Post by sxp » Sat, Mar 20, 2021, 8:46 PM UTC

nielsole wrote: post #412

cma wrote: 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/

That wasn't even 10 years ago. The comic was 9/24/2014: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1425:_Tasks

I was working on Google Image Search at the time and recognizing photos of animals was bleeding edge tech. It's now a AI 101 project using an off-the-shelf DNN stack.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#553

Post by neilparikh » Sun, Mar 21, 2021, 8:18 AM UTC

chordalkeyboard wrote: post #535

neilparikh wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. You've yet to explain why the people living there have more of a claim to the land than anyone else in society. The model you've proposed is basically "first come first serve" (ie. homesteading principle). Except even that doesn't apply given that some of the land currently…

> You've yet to explain why the people living there have more of a claim to the land than anyone else in society. Generally one would ask that the people proposing a change to circumstances assume the burden of proof; it should be obvious why I can’t remove the food from your kitchen and expect you to justify why I should stop. If you want a more formal argument then its turtles all the way down, I can approach your…

I don't really have the energy to respond to all your points (but thank you for making them, they've shown where I was unclear in my writing, or made assumptions that weren't obvious), but I wanted to mention one thing:

> This whole thing could be bypassed by arguing that these types of improvements should be paid by property taxes

This is pretty much the core policy that Georgism advocates for: "Henry George is best known for popularizing the argument that government should be funded by a tax on land rent rather than taxes on labor". The rest is just a way to provide economic/justice based reasons for this policy.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#554

Post by neilparikh » Sun, Mar 21, 2021, 8:21 AM UTC

lambda_obrien wrote: post #539

neilparikh wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More likely, the government would place a lien on your property, and when you die or sell your home, the profits would be used to pay for the deferred tax, rather than simply accruing to you or your heirs.

And why should the home I paid for be auctioned by the government? How is that fair for anyone but the wealthy? You're saying that only the rich can stay in one place, everyone else has to move to the middle of no where or risk losing it all to said rich folk who will buy my property at auction by the government. Seems silly to me.

In my original comment, I stated "when you die or sell your home", so I don't see why anyone would have to move.

If you think people shouldn't have to pay extra when their land becomes more valuable, I don't see why they should still get the profits when their land becomes more valuable. That's basically socializing the costs, but privatizing the profits, which is obviously a bad thing to do.