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Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

geohot.github.io

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Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

#191

Post by zozbot234 »

deaux wrote: post #186
mike_hearn wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forget UBI and AI. They are distractions. Today it's very unclear that even just existing welfare schemes are sustainable. Political parties can buy votes with welfare and they do, so it's an unstable configuration. Europe is full of countries with this problem. A good example of a country in a downward spiral towards UBI hell is the UK. Around 25% of the working-age population now claim to be disabled, and around 10…

> The UK can't afford anything even close to this. It can't even afford the theoretically non-universal benefits schemes it has: it has massive government debt and deficits because its economy doesn't generate enough wealth, I'm fairly certain its economy generates more wealth per capita than at any point in the past, and this is the general consensus. If you believe it doesn't, please explain how, as it goes against…

Much of that wealth is wasted by excess government spending. Same pattern as India, which actually used to be ruled by the UK as a colony - then they became independent but kept all the excess bureaucracy and red tape from their former oppressors.

Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

#192

Post by fragmede »

PowerElectronix wrote: post #158
fragmede wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just if you already have enough money, but it's easy to say if you're as smart as Geohot. For those who aren't, (I'm not), creating that kind of value isn't just hard, it's impossible!

Hey, don't dismiss your intelligence like that!

Haha, thanks! I like to think I'm smart (sometimes), just not at Geohot's level.

Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

#193

Post by Mtinie »

10xDev wrote: post #179

You will get laid off but you won't if you create value and you will create value if you don't care about money and it will go recursive but it won't go recursive because there are limits. It won't change anything but it will change everything. No one knows what he is actually saying (see comments) but at least he managed to compress the entire discourse on AI impact into a blog post.

…and a concise one at that. Which is more impressive given the (general) penchant to say less with more.

Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

#194

Post by mike_hearn »

deaux wrote: post #186
mike_hearn wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forget UBI and AI. They are distractions. Today it's very unclear that even just existing welfare schemes are sustainable. Political parties can buy votes with welfare and they do, so it's an unstable configuration. Europe is full of countries with this problem. A good example of a country in a downward spiral towards UBI hell is the UK. Around 25% of the working-age population now claim to be disabled, and around 10…

> The UK can't afford anything even close to this. It can't even afford the theoretically non-universal benefits schemes it has: it has massive government debt and deficits because its economy doesn't generate enough wealth, I'm fairly certain its economy generates more wealth per capita than at any point in the past, and this is the general consensus. If you believe it doesn't, please explain how, as it goes against…

I didn't say otherwise. It generates more wealth now than in the past and that is still far from sufficient for its government to afford its current levels of welfare spending.

Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

#195

Post by fragmede »

mike_hearn wrote: post #175
maybewhenthesun wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Geohot is a smart dude. But here I think he misses the forest for the trees. He has a point, certainly. But while he is harping about the U part of ubi, he's completely ignoring the B part. UBI is meant to provide some basic income so people don't starve. It's just an optimization of welfare programs where you have a ton of bureaucracy and make people jump through endless hoops and cause them endless amounts of stres…

Someone needs to make a website explaining why UBI doesn't work conceptually because this comes up over and over again on HN. You cannot make UBI work from money saved by removing means testing. Even UBI is a welfare scheme and would require significant bureaucratic hoop jumping to check that a person claiming it isn't: • Dead • Non-citizen • Already claiming it under a different name/bank account/etc • In prison • M…

I'll come out and get kicked out of communism club to say that I don't support UBI on the basic fact that money is exchanged for goods and services is just so foundational that I can't support UBI. I think everybody should have a roof over their heads and 3 square meals a day, but UBI isn't the way to get there.

Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

#196

Post by [deleted] »

maybewhenthesun wrote: post #151
shaman1 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/02/27/the-i... from the same author

Geohot is a smart dude. But here I think he misses the forest for the trees. He has a point, certainly. But while he is harping about the U part of ubi, he's completely ignoring the B part. UBI is meant to provide some basic income so people don't starve. It's just an optimization of welfare programs where you have a ton of bureaucracy and make people jump through endless hoops and cause them endless amounts of stres…

[deleted]

Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

#197

Post by georgehotz »

bananaflag wrote: post #170

> Always has been, and if you paid attention in CS class, you know the limits of those things. I don't remember ever learning a theorem stating that computers cannot surpass humans.

Haha that's not what the post (or the post it links to) says. Every CS student should know there's no free lunch in search and optimization. There's tradeoffs between random search, evolutionary algorithms, and convex optimization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_in_search_and_op...

There's an AI "smell" to things that are generated. Why is that? Mode collapse is impossible to see from a small number of samples. Are we mode collapsing society? How would we know if we were?

Also, will computers surpass humans has such an implicit bias in it. Have humans surpassed ants? Have ants surpassed rocks? Have jet planes surpassed teletubbies?

Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

#198

Post by borski »

OtherShrezzing wrote: post #183
borski wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but we are not talking about evaluating your contributions daily. Over a lifetime, people find new ways to provide more value. Life is long, and that is how adapting works. We don't all sit at typewriters anymore either, but former typists found other ways to provide value, I'm certain, and didn't just disappear and become homeless (the vast majority of them, anyway). Once upon a time, we had armies of secretar…

>Sure, but we are not talking about evaluating your contributions daily. Over a lifetime, people find new ways to provide more value. Life is long, and that is how adapting works. I can't really take that sentiment to my bank when I default on my mortgage while I retrain though. So although you're correct, across a lifetime, this isn't much of an issue, you're minimising people's very real near-term anxieties here.

I'm not being dismissive or trying to minimize anything, I promise. But most people aren't 'losing their jobs to AI' in the short-term as much as you might think. The layoffs have not been due to AI "taking jobs," but due to companies overhiring during the pandemic and finally having an excuse to lay people off, imho.

There is plenty of time to 'retrain.' You could even do it while you currently have a role. Some people won't be able to; I respect that, and those people will still find jobs.

This is certainly not the first 'period of layoffs' to ever occur, and I am not implying people won't face hard times. They may! But that also won't last forever, and when people get laid off they receive unemployment, which helps in the 'not defaulting on your mortgage' thing. Somehow, people (on average) seem to manage not losing their home every time they get laid off.

The idea that our unemployment rate is about to reach 25-50% in the next 3 years is absurd, imho. (I know you didn't say that, and I'm not trying to construct a strawman. I'm just applying numbers to it because 'very real near-term' is not the phrase I'd use for something that is, in my estimation, still half a decade or more away.)

Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

#199

Post by gottheUIblues »

mike_hearn wrote: post #180
zozbot234 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which of course ignores the obvious point that UBI is all about taking existing resource redistribution and making it less costly and more efficient. Practically all Western countries redistribute income on a massive scale (compared to the default outcomes of a completely free market capitalism) in order to ensure everyone can provide for their basic needs, and that could all be gradually replaced by UBI. This is bro…

Forget UBI and AI. They are distractions. Today it's very unclear that even just existing welfare schemes are sustainable. Political parties can buy votes with welfare and they do, so it's an unstable configuration. Europe is full of countries with this problem. A good example of a country in a downward spiral towards UBI hell is the UK. Around 25% of the working-age population now claim to be disabled, and around 10…

Money is a social construct, not some kind of physical quantity subject to conservation laws, and can be and is introduced into the economic system all the time. The real question is really would introducing more money or a UBI cause social disruption by e.g. disrupting price signalling by high inflation or changing incentives to work so less goods and services that people actually value are produced.
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