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AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers

telegraph.co.uk

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Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers

#151

Post by simianwords »

thot_experiment wrote: post #23

Surely this time we'll learn our lesson and disempower the parasites that create these situations, right? Right guys?

Increasingly more prominent is this new genre of activist hacker who thinks all big tech guys are bad parasites and if only they didn’t exist and we would have world peace and prosperity. That’s about the biggest virtue they know to signal.

The took the antithesis of the “great man” theory and ended up believing in a nonsensical version of it - every great thing in the world was done by normal people working 9-5. This is a kind of crude Labour Theory Of Value.

So you see these kind of comments signalling hatred in an attempt to show solidarity. But ultimately it is simply a signalling thing, a way to LARP as an activist because what else might one do as a simple rank and file employee. One wants to have a greater purpose to life and being an activist is a path for it.

Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers

#152

Post by BenFranklin100 »

simianwords wrote: post #148
BenFranklin100 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For context, the US alone spends annually a bit more than $2T on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. That money is widely dispersed both geographically and socioeconomically. $2T is not as much as one may think. I think we should let investors put their private money where they wish. Also, as an aside, the benefits of globalization on the balance far outweigh the drawbacks. Globalization has been the primary for…

You are comparing flow with a static amount. 2 trillion is the market cap of AI companies right?

No I am not. The discussion is about investment spending on AI.

It’s actual less than $2T IIRC, which makes my point even more.

Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers

#153

Post by vintermann »

watutalkinbout wrote: post #95
christiangenco wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding of injecting money in education is that it's proven to be extremely ineffective at improving outcomes. Schools just hire more administrators and build nicer gyms.

Maybe don't just 'inject' it. Maybe use it to increase outcomes.

Trying to micromanage how the money gets spent is how you get administrators.

Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers

#154

Post by simianwords »

BenFranklin100 wrote: post #152
simianwords wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are comparing flow with a static amount. 2 trillion is the market cap of AI companies right?

No I am not. The discussion is about investment spending on AI. It’s actual less than $2T IIRC, which makes my point even more.

I agree with you. The parent thinks 2 trillion is injected into AI companies. I think that is false and they are conflating it with market cap. It does make your point even better.

Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers

#155

Post by scoofy »

Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #149

How do you prepare for such thing? Do you sell all stocks now? Then what?

I sold in May. I'm in the largest cash position (t-bills) I've ever had. I might be completely wrong. I just looked at the situation with the oil crisis, and without any obvious way to end it, I just figure, if there was every a more obvious "sell in May and go away" year, this is it.

Maybe I miss out on some gains and buy back in December or January. Maybe I'll increase my Berkshire position. I don't know. But companies tend to push the bad news till the end of the year, and boy, howdy there could be some bad news this year.

Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers

#156

Post by peterbecich »

red369 wrote: post #126
thot_experiment wrote: post #23

Surely this time we'll learn our lesson and disempower the parasites that create these situations, right? Right guys?

Always loved this from The Big Short (movie): "In the years that followed, hundreds of bankers and rating agency's executives went to jail. The SEC was completely overhauled, and Congress had no choice but to break up the big banks and regulate the mortgage and derivatives industries. Just kidding. Banks took the money the American people gave them, and they used it to pay themselves huge bonuses, and lobby the Congr…

The narrative of the Big Short omits something big i.m.o.: encouragement of easy mortgage lending standards by Washington politicians. Is this line about the SEC the only reference to government in the movie?

Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers

#157

Post by spwa4 »

piva00 wrote: post #145
christiangenco wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding of injecting money in education is that it's proven to be extremely ineffective at improving outcomes. Schools just hire more administrators and build nicer gyms.

Investment in education is one of the best ROI a society can have. Quite surprising that in the USA this relationship has been eroded by schools spending in sports and admin, in most other developed countries it's a quite direct relationship between more investments -> better educational outcomes.

But there's 2 problems with that. To save money governments declare that "teaching is a profession". By which they mean: "teaching", not subject matter expertise, matters. Except:

1) the single thing you cannot beat is capable teachers. And NOT capable as in able to teach, subject-matter-experts. And that is what everybody wants to avoid at all costs.

Put it like this: an unwashed, abrasive, offensive smelly asshole with a master in math can teach kids math. A super-friendly, nice, beautiful, polite social science major (or not even that) who doesn't know math well cannot. The level of teachers needs to be an order of magnitude above the level expected of kids at the end of the class. Knowledge of the subject needs to take absolute precedence in teacher hiring decisions, to the point that good teachers get rejected if lacking expertise in the subject.

This is not how things work. They only worked that way for a short while due to the crash of 89. I've had a French teacher that couldn't speak more than "some" French. Certainly nowhere near fluent.

2) Money needs to support that. Which means for Math, the money for math teachers needs to be competitive with research departments of banks, and very different for different subjects, which seems offensive to schools and government in general. If teaching positions aren't competing with other professional careers in the subject matter, it will never work. This will, of course, mean that many science teachers make more than a school principal and even a district administrator. Deal with it.

For Math, they are literally not even 25% of that, but even for French it's insufficient.

Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers

#158

Post by piva00 »

spwa4 wrote: post #157
piva00 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Investment in education is one of the best ROI a society can have. Quite surprising that in the USA this relationship has been eroded by schools spending in sports and admin, in most other developed countries it's a quite direct relationship between more investments -> better educational outcomes.

But there's 2 problems with that. To save money governments declare that "teaching is a profession". By which they mean: "teaching", not subject matter expertise, matters. Except: 1) the single thing you cannot beat is capable teachers. And NOT capable as in able to teach, subject-matter-experts. And that is what everybody wants to avoid at all costs. Put it like this: an unwashed, abrasive, offensive smelly asshole…

> 2) Money needs to support that. Which means for Math, the money for math teachers needs to be competitive with research departments of banks, and very different for different subjects, which seems offensive to schools and government in general. If teaching positions aren't competing with other professional careers in the subject matter, it will never work. This will, of course, mean that many science teachers make more than a school principal and even a district administrator. Deal with it.

I believe this to be a heavily US-centric view, Estonia and Finland do not pay more for math teachers than they could get in banks' research departments but still manage to get competent teaching across most school subjects.

Things work outside of the US, the issue is the US does not want to look outside and adapt itself to incorporate what's been learnt from other systems. It's a "do the US way or no way" attitude, and it's slowly eroding to become more a "no way" than any kind of "US way" of doing things.

Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers

#159

Post by scoofy »

thelastgallon wrote: post #142
overgard wrote: post #58

I'm not usually for arguments of "this money could have been better spent elsewhere", but here's a thought experiment. Lets say instead of injecting $2 trillion and counting into a few AI companies, we instead injected $2 trillion dollars into things like infrastructure (real infrastructure, not GPU warehouses), education, helping out communities ravaged by globalization (I doubt most people on Hacker News venture ou…

This is 100 manhattan projects. Lots and lots and lots of things that can be done. Reminds me of the quote "water water everywhere not a drop to drink" ==> Money, money everywhere, not a cent goes towards something remotely useful. 1) Could've added nifty features to roads (rf beacons?) and make it super easy to build autonomous vehicles. This would've solved so many problems, but most importantly 45,000 lives every…

You are describing altruistic gifts, not investment meant to generate a return.

All this money is being deployed to try and turn a dime into a dollar.

The biggest area I can see where money could be deployed into building something useful -- while generating a positive return -- is real estate development in cities with massive housing shortages. That's basically not allowed in the same cities. In large part, because people who yearn for an more altruistic world care very much about their own quality of life and property values than they do about the well-being of their community in the long run.

Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers

#160

Post by neonstatic »

simianwords wrote: post #147
neonstatic wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is showing the world how it's done. Check out how many nuclear reactors they have built in the last 10 years. Turns out having a government that plans long term and actually delivers what they said they would makes a huge difference.

China glazing is strange. I think they are a cool country but they would have killed to be in the forefront in the AI race. There’s something obviously right that America is doing.

An amusing comment. Thanks. On a website, where every mention of China must be annotated with a disclaimer about how brutal and authoritarian they are, a comment that just states an opinion without it sure looks like "glazing". Let me know if it's safe to talk truthfully about George Floyd yet, free-man.
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