71–80 of 150 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are ignoring the cost of acquiring resources. Robots will run society before the problem of unlimited energy is solved.
Enough sunlight hits earth every 5 minutes to power all of civilization for a year. The energy is unlimited, the challenge is collection.
> Rents are not always bad. Protections for intellectual property make sense not in spite of the rents they generate, but rather because of them. A patent, after all, is a temporary monopoly. These monopoly rents give incentives for innovation and allow innovators to cover the costs of research and development. This is a weird way to talk about IP and rent. Is profit from IP necessarily rent? The problem is that "ren…
I've always seen rent defined as payment collected in excess of the seller's cost to make and hand over the product (not the whole product line, just the individual item). In a perfectly competitive market, price is driven down to match that cost, but the comparison with production cost is easier to apply in markets that aren't perfectly competitive (like licenses for a particular patent). Once an invention has been…
What you described is nearly precisely the definition of market power. Economic rent is, from what I've read (IANAE), a special case of market power that applies to factors of production (particularly land).
> Rents are not always bad. Protections for intellectual property make sense not in spite of the rents they generate, but rather because of them. A patent, after all, is a temporary monopoly. These monopoly rents give incentives for innovation and allow innovators to cover the costs of research and development. This is a weird way to talk about IP and rent. Is profit from IP necessarily rent? The problem is that "ren…
My monopoly on SilasX's labor? No problem.
Creator's monopoly on patterns that only exist because that creator found them? Reasonable.
Monopoly on all trade in salt? No, just no.
(It gets trickier for physical property because of what counts as creating, but you get the point.)
This is a very important topic as robotics and automation begin their exponential curve of running our lives. Who will own the robots? Will the majority of humanity be enslaved to rent-seekers who own patents on a robot hinge?
No. Anecdotal argument: In my budget the biggest costs are housing, food, utility bills. The costs of my semi-automatic robots - such as the dishwasher, fridge, washing machine, vacuum cleaner, lawnmower are loose change in comparison. I doubt the fully automatic robots of the future will be excessively priced but yes some patent holders will be rich, even undeservedly so, but we won't be their slaves. The bigger pro…
This is amateur nonsense. One could easy argue the same for anything: "Humans will discover there is more to life than money, success, and pleasure, and they will all kill themselves. That's what I'm afraid of!"
How much you care to work is not a function of your intelligence or awareness. The problems that you choose to solve aren't either.
If you build a computer to value something, it will, because there is no other way for it to establish a value function outside of the values it already implements.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Enough sunlight hits earth every 5 minutes to power all of civilization for a year. The energy is unlimited, the challenge is collection.
You might like this: The Last Question by Isaac Asimov http://www.thrivenotes.com/the-last-question/
> Rents are not always bad. Protections for intellectual property make sense not in spite of the rents they generate, but rather because of them. A patent, after all, is a temporary monopoly. These monopoly rents give incentives for innovation and allow innovators to cover the costs of research and development. This is a weird way to talk about IP and rent. Is profit from IP necessarily rent? The problem is that "ren…
The way I reconcile it is usually, "Monopolies are okay when the the good in question only exists because of the monopolist." My monopoly on SilasX's labor? No problem. Creator's monopoly on patterns that only exist because that creator found them? Reasonable. Monopoly on all trade in salt? No, just no. (It gets trickier for physical property because of what counts as creating, but you get the point.)
Unrelated to the content - do people find that the bolding of linked words/phrases makes the article easier or harder to read?
In the context of a URL, usability would dictate underlining links, to match convention.
> Rents are not always bad. Protections for intellectual property make sense not in spite of the rents they generate, but rather because of them. A patent, after all, is a temporary monopoly. These monopoly rents give incentives for innovation and allow innovators to cover the costs of research and development. This is a weird way to talk about IP and rent. Is profit from IP necessarily rent? The problem is that "ren…
The philosophy behind patents is that they encourage the sharing of research so that the total cost of rnd to society is minimized. Whithout ip protection, firms would rely on trade secrets. They would still charge more for their products but a competitor would have to spend the money on research to compete. I don't know if you would still call the premium they could charge rent or if you would amortize rnd over the…
> Rents are not always bad. Protections for intellectual property make sense not in spite of the rents they generate, but rather because of them. A patent, after all, is a temporary monopoly. These monopoly rents give incentives for innovation and allow innovators to cover the costs of research and development. This is a weird way to talk about IP and rent. Is profit from IP necessarily rent? The problem is that "ren…
Yes, but they tend to be in jail. In any event, he appears to be talking about rent and the profits from IP in the context of Western civilization, in which IP rights are indeed a legitimate instance of ownership.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're wrong. Humanity won't destroy the golden goose. The next Aaron Swartz will release it to the public, whether that's distributing the software to everyone, or finding a way to freely build/distribute high-level robotics. Just as Prometheus brought fire to the humans, someone will find a way to prevent the future from being locked away. Once you achieve the necessary level of automation, you only need on…
You are ignoring the cost of acquiring resources. Robots will run society before the problem of unlimited energy is solved.