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What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?

economist.com

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Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?

#141

Post by bhickey »

esseph wrote: post #69
bhickey wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pretty much every one mentions that their apartment is too small and too expensive. This is due to under supply of urban housing due to bad zoning law designed to inflate rents. > When construction becomes cheaper, it will be more compelling to build houses outside the city. Suburbs are financially underwater. People don't want to pay high property taxes to live in some Levittown hellscape.

> Suburbs Still the "American Dream" for a lot of people, and these copy/pasta McMansions are going up all over the place.

That's because they externalize their costs leading to high builder ROI.

Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?

#142

Post by bugsMarathon88 »

pyman wrote: post #140
bugsMarathon88 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I'm in favour of countries regulating US exports, social media, tobacco, weapons, AI, and porn included. I'm sure those living in the US won't agree with me and will be against such regulations, since they don't benefit their companies and that's fine, everyone has to protect their own interests.

[flagged]

Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?

#143

Post by pyman »

bugsMarathon88 wrote: post #142
pyman wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in favour of countries regulating US exports, social media, tobacco, weapons, AI, and porn included. I'm sure those living in the US won't agree with me and will be against such regulations, since they don't benefit their companies and that's fine, everyone has to protect their own interests.

[flagged]

I was echoing the words of EU regulators, who've already imposed heavy regulations on US weapons manufacturers, pharma companies, social media, AI and now porn.

By the way, these goods and services don't represent freedom to the rest of the world. In fact, the US is seen as a protectionist country that promotes neoliberalism while imposing tight regulations to foreign companies.

Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?

#144

Post by wnc3141 »

karim79 wrote: post #34
Tyrubias wrote: post #5

I think a more important question is not whether AI will make economic growth explode but rather who that economic growth will benefit and in general how those benefits will be distributed.

I suppose, if a huge proportion of workers get replaced by AI software, leading to mass unemployment, there will be impetus for governments to step in and force corporations to contribute to some sort of UBI or social wealth fund. If AI grabs everything and few consumers are left then it is zero-sum. I'm looking forward to seeing how this might play out. Pessimistically, it seems very bubblish.

Your second point about zero-sum growth misses in that in a competitive system, investors and their proxies (management) are certainly not going to miss out on the wealth being created right now in this industry. Long term, economy-wide impacts are not relevant decision criteria. Sort of a tragedy of the commons sort of thing.

Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?

#145

Post by bbuut »

gruez wrote: post #137
bbuut wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did. The average person worked fewer hours through almost all of recorded history until the last few decades. They did not have vague “line go up” motives. They worked to stabilize biological necessity. Workers today work more because of a large investor class that doesn’t. We’re working for two or more shareholders not our own roof and food.

>The average person worked fewer hours through almost all of recorded history until the last few decades. If you're claiming that people worked fewer hours during the industrial revolution than today, I'll need a citation for that. If you're referencing the claims made by "Original affluent society", that has problems around how working hours are counted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society#Crit..…

The criticisms have the same lack of information problems.

So modern anecdotes make the most sense. I grew up in 80s dairyland. None of the farmers worked a 9-5 but they rarely worked 40+ too.

We worked much much less in rural-landia before the last few decades gave rise to "service and knowledge" work with no concrete goal but "make line go up".

Knowledge work comes along with zero concrete termination points. Programmers grinding code 80+ hours are not stopping to see if it's useful or just repetition.

Sure from a physics perspective they're doing "work". From a lived experience, to real needs of biology, economy perspective they're just sitting at a computer juicing their hormones, while exploiting farmers labor, who now works more hours as more knowledge workers contribute less real outputs essential to biology. Same with why carpentry and other trades services are so expensive; supply and demand. Millennials wanted 24/7 office jobs.

While I grew up in farmland I later went into EE, and have a good sense for who is moving the ball. It isn't software people. Their biology is addicted to a stupid loop of zero real productivity. Playing abstract snake games in one's head, to count initialized memory registers and recording their data is some basic bitch work marketed to the point of fostering delusion it's cutting in 2010-2020 to use 1960s style syntaxes to manage machines.

Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?

#147

Post by aspenmayer »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #106
ashoeafoot wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tons of people do not have anything on that list thanks to the social implants and if we are honest cant have it ever again in a world with 8 billion. So why not stop pretending that the idealizations of the past is a viable alternative. Its empty appartments, games, drugs and loneliness on UBI, that would be the outcome.

> ts empty appartments, games, drugs and loneliness on UBI, that would be the outcome. Alright then, if that's really the foregone conclusion, then what's the point of existence? Should we not try and make things better by any means necessary?

> > ts empty appartments, games, drugs and loneliness on UBI, that would be the outcome.

> Alright then, if that's really the foregone conclusion, then what's the point of existence? Should we not try and make things better by any means necessary?

That's the pertinent question, and I don't have an answer that can adjudicate the dispute, but I can humbly help you formulate the choice as one between Leviathan or oblivion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Ophuls#Leviathan_or_ob...

> In his contribution, "Leviathan or Oblivion?", Ophuls wrote on the political and economical implications of environmental problems. His main argument was that "because of the tragedy of the commons, environmental problems cannot be solved through cooperation...and the rationale for government with major coercive powers is overwhelming." According to Ophuls "reforming a corrupt people is a Herculean task," which only leaves us with the choice of becoming a leviathan or oblivion.

> Eckersley (1992) argued that, "...although Ophuls has since moderated his position by placing a greater emphasis on the need for self restraint than on the need for external coercion, he continues to maintain that the latter must be resorted to if calls for the former are unsuccessful."

The sobering realization that others smarter and earlier than I am have seen this change coming over the horizon and have warned us heedlessly leads me to believe that we must be the change we wish to see, and that change must happen socially, culturally, and politically.

Ours must be a human revolution toward society, not withdrawing from it. We must encourage and embrace the humanity in ourselves and in each other, and seek to lift others up more than we seek to tear others down. Hate can't drive out hate; only love can do that. We must love each other more than we hate each other. Love will guide us to our salvation.

Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?

#148

Post by EliRivers »

gruez wrote: post #130
danaris wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're asking "what caused the change?" the answer is "Ronald Reagan". If you're asking "why didn't the people before then work less?" the answer is "because productivity gains hadn't yet made that possible". Just to expand on that a bit, in case it isn't fully clear: There is a level of productivity per worker required to support everyone in the society. This level fluctuates some with the overall standard of liv…

>If you're asking "why didn't the people before then work less?" the answer is "because productivity gains hadn't yet made that possible". >[...] I don't know exactly when real-world productivity got enough higher than P that we could realistically start reducing worked hours, but it definitely did so at some point in the last several decades. [...] GDP per capita has been growing exponentially for centuries[1]. Is t…

Sure looks like the wealthy have captured an awful lot:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1e/19...

Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?

#149

Post by Henchman21 »

gruez wrote: post #120
pydry wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Efficiency improvements tend not to create more leisure time because the capacity for the economy to create "bullshit work" (e.g. work which is engaged in zero sum "wealth defense") is unbounded. For efficiency improvements to create more leisure time or even let the bottom 50% retire early, society would need to be radically restructured so that its locus of control is not capital. This would probably only happen wi…

>This might happen one day, but for now, efficiency improvements get capitalized into the ponzi-esque stock market That's a seductive narrative, but not backed up by data. The share of GDP that goes to labor is has held relatively stable in the past few decades. It has admittedly fallen, but it's on the order of a few percentage points, whereas the GDP per capita more than tripled. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/…

How do you square these “growing wages” against the zeitgeist which says more and more people are living hand-to-mouth? At what point do these statistics get tossed out because they have little to no bearing on the lived experience of the great mass of people? At what point does one acknowledge that these statistics seem like they’re compiled simply to muddy the waters to make reality seem different than it is?

Famously, one can spin statistics any way they wish. Prove to us this isn’t the case here.

Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?

#150

Post by Nevermark »

danaris wrote: post #131
Nevermark wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your reversing the effect. A steeper land tax, but no development tax, discourages sprawl and incentivizes parsimonious & maximally effective use. Which would be the opposite dynamic to the one you are concerned about. An income tax break on food production would be a good way to keep food prices lower, while maintaining a farmers incentive to use land efficiently. And is good economics: matching a national tax break…

I still don't see how this doesn't punish non-rich people in rural areas. ETA: You seem to have edited your post after I made mine. However, your edit does not in any way explain how "steeper land tax" does not hurt people in rural areas. I'm not concerned with sprawl ; I'm concerned with rural people near the poverty line being taxed out of their homes with no recourse. Also, "income tax breaks for food production"…

Those are good questions.

In total taxes stay the same (for an area), with empty land tax increasing, land with property decreasing (because the property taxes disappear, and land tax increases proportionally to result in the same total tax).

So it will impact different people in an area, with different situations, differently obviously.

But you are clearly right, there will be additional factors that need to be handled.

The umbrella principle, is the law should simply correct a market's oversight of external/commons costs and needs, in proportion to their real value. Then the market can do its job of optimizing resources properly.

Things like farming practices that impact land value, should be incentivized or disincentives in direct proportion to the real value being lost or gained.

(Another addition would be that any tax change impacting investments already made, should transition over a time interval long enough individuals and businesses to realign their private economics, without sudden hardship.)

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