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The Gentle Singularity

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: The Gentle Singularity

#431

Post by skeaker »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #426
sjducb wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that housing and health insurance are too expensive. Tech isn’t responsible for either of those problems.

In a way it is. Why are housing costs so high in Redmond, WA? The result of an influx of high income tech workers to the local housing market and the resulting shift of prices such as to eventually dilute the utility of that high salary to begin with. People in the area without a hook on that whale are of course left high and dry.

Citation needed, my understanding was that housing prices are being driven up by real estate owners/agencies buying tons of property to either rent at extortionary prices or sit on until they sell for a higher price to the next sucker. Also stuff like the RealPage scandal where they simply illegally collude: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41330007

I think the idea of a law that only allows a limited number of owned properties per person and requires them to actually be using those properties would be interesting to alleviate this.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#432

Post by nradov »

Rooster61 wrote: post #406
nradov wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real wages have risen a lot since 1980 when you include employer contributions to employee health insurance.

It's difficult for me to call those wages "real" when medical costs have been so absurdly gouged to eat up those contributions. Those increases have had no real impact on the average consumer, and is profoundly awful for those without access to employment that provides that insurance

That's not entirely accurate. Wages are real enough whether paid out as cash, or paid to a third party for the employee's benefit. Some medical costs are unreasonably inflated, but on the other hand much of the cost increase reflects greater capabilities. We can effectively treat many conditions today that would have been a death sentence in 1980, but some of those cutting edge treatments cost >$1M per patient. That doesn't directly benefit the average healthy consumer, but it can help a lot if you get sick.

I do agree that it makes no logical sense to couple medical insurance to employment. This system was created sort of accidentally as a side effect of wartime tax law and has persisted mainly due to inertia.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#433

Post by Teever »

sevensor wrote: post #369
Teever wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long do you think it will be before your average consumer has access to a pair of humanoid robots that each cost the price of a luxury vehicle and are able to perform maintenance and replace all the parts of the other?

Never? Technical feasibility notwithstanding, nobody is ever going to sell a mass market device that defeats planned obsolescence. That’s the opposite of how our economy works. What they’d do, assuming a competent humanoid robot, is design it iphone style so that you get a good five years and then the software won’t update. At that point you scrap it and buy another one.

It sounds like it would a very useful ability for robots involved space missions.

What technical challenges do you foresee with such a device?

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#434

Post by boole1854 »

fusionadvocate wrote: post #424
boole1854 wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It rose 2.75% per year (239% over 45 years). Source with details: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1JxIa

Can you walk me through how to reach this '239%' number? Thank you.

You can hover over places on the chart to get exact values. In January 1980, the index was at 37.124. In April 2025, it was at 125.880.

Then calculate cumulative inflation as the proportional change in the price level, like this:

(P_final - P_initial) / P_initial = (125.880 - 37.124) / 37.124 = 2.39

This shows that the overall price level (the cumulative inflation embodied in the PCEPI) has increased by about 2.39 times over the period, which is 239%.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#435

Post by rgun »

fusionadvocate wrote: post #424
boole1854 wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It rose 2.75% per year (239% over 45 years). Source with details: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1JxIa

Can you walk me through how to reach this '239%' number? Thank you.

1.0275 ^ 45 = 3.389

3.389 - 1 (to account for increase) = 2.38 ~ 239%

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#436

Post by NoGravitas »

km3r wrote: post #147
paxys wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No we'll totally have flying cars and cure cancer and live life in an AR/VR multiverse and make all knowledge 100% free to everyone worldwide. Meanwhile the only real advancements in tech in the last two decades have been smaller computers (smartphones) and ads.

And self driving cars. Real time ray tracing. WiFi. Cloud computing. starlink. Crispr. mRNA vaccines. Blockchain. Voice assistants.

Fully half of these are "bad, actually".

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#437

Post by hooverd »

the_gipsy wrote: post #304
layer8 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think bigger. Earth will only be good for the next 2 billion years or so.

How will any of this solve "affordable housing".

Well, it won't, but it's fun to fantasize about! Plus, who cares about homeless people now when we're comparing them to potentially trillions of future humans.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#438

Post by NoGravitas »

philipallstar wrote: post #381

I can definitely imagine a whole swathe of paperwork-based jobs, such as regulatory, quality assurance, report-writing, and all the non-Personnel bits of HR, could become mostly-AI without a lot of problems.

I'd say you would have to be insane to consider outsourcing regulatory paperwork to LLMs, except that I have seen people working in that field actually proposing it because of FOMO. "Human in the loop" of course, but we all know what that means in practice.

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#439

Post by hollerith »

ethbr1 wrote: post #415
hollerith wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even after that 10x growth, median Chinese household income is only 13-16% of US median household income: China: ~$10,000 – $12,000 US: ~$74,580 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2022)

Purchasing power parity matters a lot too.

The context here is growth and I doubt China's GDPPPP/person has grown anywhere near as much as its GDP/person because the median Chinese household of 40 years ago could still afford the essentials (food, housing, clothing) that the PPP adjustment indexes off of. (It just couldn't afford any imports.)

Actually I doubt that economists even tried to calculate PPP of China 40 years ago because (even back then) the basket of goods used in the PPP calculation probably included gasoline and cars and such, which only the economic top 1% of China could afford 40 years ago, but if you forced the calculation somehow, you'd probably arrive at a GDPPPP/person not much lower than the current GDPPPP/person (i.e., China has grown spectacularly in GDP/person, but not in GDPPPP/person)

Re: The Gentle Singularity

#440

Post by NoGravitas »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #223
lantry wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI could make it happen if it manages to dispense with all these lousy proxies. The thing that you, altman, and every other AI booster fail to explain is how AI will do this. Every argument is littered with "if"s and "could"s, and it's just taken for granted that AI will be smart enough to find a solution that solves all our problems. It's also taken for granted that we'll actually implement the solution! If AI sai…

I've got a few designs in mind for an alternative to scarcity based economics. I don't presume to have it right, but its worth a shot and its a bit more concrete than blind trust in one technology or another. I thought it would take my whole life to just lay the foundation, but with some AI help, maybe not. The trouble with you naysayers is you always take as immutable things that we can change.

We could have had meaningful post-scarcity economics in 1968 (read Murray Bookchin). It is not a technological problem. It is a social problem.
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