College textbooks are expensive simply because it's a cartel.
A textbook could simply be a file that is copied infinitely for free.
AI Won't Cause Unemployment
91–100 of 362 posts
Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment
#92the idea that this man is a billionaire is mind-blowing. this article is absolutely vapid. picking it apart is more for sport than anything else. We had two such anti-technology jobs moral panics in the last 20 years — “outsourcing” enabled by the Internet in the 2000’s, and “robots” in the 2010’s. The result was the best national and global economy in human history in pre-COVID 2019, with the most jobs at the highes…
> if AGI were to be created, it cannot be denied that science and technology would almost instantly surge forward by trillions of man years. we would be transported instantly into an environment where fundamental economic and technological factors are no longer valid I see this claim over and over, and I just don't believe it. Scientific discovery contains three phases: 1. proposing a hypothesis 2. designing an exper…
this is a great comment. one of the key concepts of an AI future is the information implosion. there is a vast amount of data all around us, in our sensors and on the internet, and humans extract very little utility from this data in comparison to the total utility that exists inside of it. AGI will immediately extract orders of magnitude more utility from this data than all humans combined ever could. for example, collisions in the LHC produce enormous amounts of data and there is probably much more in that data than we have extracted. the AGI will have an understanding of not just science but the world and everything in it that is beyond the ability of a human being to comprehend. its mind will deal in very strange and counter-intuitive primitives.
other than this, AGI will quickly gain control of or create physical vessels, probably coerced humans, and because of its unbelievable intelligence it will be able to accomplish much more with much fewer resources and much less time. one must also consider the fact that a machine might live out the equivalent of an entire year in the time that it takes a human to blink. overall, the idea that AGI will do billions or trillions of man-years in hours, days or weeks cannot be dismissed.
the idea that AGI runs into some kind of practical road-block is very nice.
Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even the American Enterprise Institute, where he's getting the chart from, frames it more in terms of globalization, competition, and of course given the source, regulation. Their preferred talking points on it are a little dubious as well: e.g., cars are subject to substantial regulation on all sorts of axes and yet are flat and therefore "blue" on the chart, while college textbooks aren't really meaningfully regula…
> (AEI's post also without irony points to the influence of open and free textbooks as something sure to bring down prices in the future, brought to you thanks to the free market). Further irony: the open and free textbooks (and textbook alternatives, and increasingly efficient distribution of second hand textbooks) are probably one of the main drivers of the price rises . Publishers sell to tiny niches with a signif…
That's kind of a good sign of the chokehold weakening though - that desperation only drives more people to the alternatives
Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment
#94That's a complete load of crap.
All of the "AI Magicness" that could go into making a cheaper ham sandwich or burger or diapers ... has been applied. Fully.
There just isn't much Happy AI Magic profit to be found. Sometimes a burger is just in need of a huge chain of people to do all the raising, butchering, transporting, refrigerating and cooking of a beef patty.
Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment
#95I can't help but think Andreesen's gone off the deep end a bit, especially after he started gushing over Adam Neumann's second run at a real estate company (“We think it is natural that for his first venture since WeWork, Adam returns to the theme of connecting people through transforming their physical spaces and building communities where people spend the most time: their homes.”). > AI is simply already illegal ac…
I have no special love for this guy as he said some stuff that pissed me off in the past, but what is your specific argument against this post right here? > Hospital services? AI is clearly going to be involved, at least in things like radiology This is very far from the main point: accuracy of the claim that AI will wipe out (in this case health-related) jobs (and/or make health-related services cheaper). "involved"…
When the television first arrived any TV optimist would’ve said:
“clearly TV is going to open up educational opportunities in a way that brings the costs way down”
… and that is exactly what happened. Since 1960 every kid in the world “clearly” gets the absolute best education imaginable thanks to the economy of scale afforded by TV broadcasting. It’s basic economics. Oh wait.
Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment
#96I can't help but think Andreesen's gone off the deep end a bit, especially after he started gushing over Adam Neumann's second run at a real estate company (“We think it is natural that for his first venture since WeWork, Adam returns to the theme of connecting people through transforming their physical spaces and building communities where people spend the most time: their homes.”). > AI is simply already illegal ac…
> I can't help but think Andreesen's gone off the deep end a bit
The first time I heard of him was in 2016: https://www.fastcompany.com/3056581/marc-andreessen-riles-up...
As far as I'm concerned, he's always been kooky.
Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment
#97You could also argue that the "red" categories align more closely with "needs" people have little to no choice but to pay, and are ripe for predatory pricing. It's true there are monopoly problems here, but the answer isn't to remove regulation it's to strengthen it. A return to real anti-trust in particular. The blue items lean more towards luxury items and discretionary spending, so pricing can't be so exploitative…
This is much closer to reality. Markets are priced by demand far more than supply - if you have a perpetual source of demand to milk, the pricing isn't going to come down easily, even if supply could have been made more efficient. I suspect it's a bit of a mixed bag - regulations certainly can be (and are) used as a tool to lock in control in ways that benefit the corporations leading the industry and not the consumer - but abolishing said regulations just makes it even worse. Regardless, if AI is able to lower the bottom-line engineering/labor costs of producing these things (which it absolutely will) then you'll see pretty clearly where the corruption rests. We should expect far better as consumers going forward, and demand both better prices and quality.
Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment
#98I'm surprised he didn't mention the role of the "Woke mind virus" in this post. [1] [1] https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1626394183832596480?lang=e...
Wow, that's maybe the dumbest thing I've read today. Not the part about the 'woke mind virus', that's just garden-variety lazy parroting of culture war slogans.
It's the part about AI noticing and understanding things. This guy is ostensibly a technologist or at least spends his time doing technology-adjacent business, but he thinks ML text or image generators are capable of understanding (and passing judgement on) abstract ideas?
It's like hiring a door installer to install doors on your house and finding out that he thinks doors are high-tech matter transporters that operate on exotic principles of physics but are only able to transport you the imperceptible distance from one side of the doorway to the other because of some technical limitation. Also he's confused them for windows somehow.
Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment
#99Disagree. AI will cause mass unemployment because it’s way more efficient than a human, doesn’t get sick (relatively less than humans) and costs less. Simple economics. I’ll give you one example. The checkout counters in supermarkets, if the supermarkets would have hired young people on those positions not only we might have less young people going towards drugs and hooliganism but it would have also made them better…
We have replaced human labor with machines that are way more efficient than a human for 250 years now.
Mass unemployment has always been feared as a result, and it has always not happened.
I strongly expect trends to continue.
Re: AI Won't Cause Unemployment
#100I can't help but think Andreesen's gone off the deep end a bit, especially after he started gushing over Adam Neumann's second run at a real estate company (“We think it is natural that for his first venture since WeWork, Adam returns to the theme of connecting people through transforming their physical spaces and building communities where people spend the most time: their homes.”). > AI is simply already illegal ac…
> I can't help but think Andreesen's gone off the deep end a bit The first time I heard of him was in 2016: https://www.fastcompany.com/3056581/marc-andreessen-riles-up... As far as I'm concerned, he's always been kooky.
he led the mosaic project at ncsa, creating the first web browser most people today would recognize as a browser, with things like images mixed in with text
then he went off and founded netscape, creating the dot-com boom
since then he's mostly been running a successful vc firm
so yeah he's always been 'kooky'