191–200 of 920 posts
they are tremendous tools but seems like they make a near equal amount of work from the stuff the save time on
When I hear folks glazing some kinda impending jobless utopia , I think of the intervening years. I shudder. As they say, "An empty stomach knows no morality."
As evidence of another possibility, in the US, we are as rich as any polis has ever been, yet we barely have systems that support people who are disabled through no fault of their own. We let people die all the time because they cannot afford to continue to live.
You think anyone in power is going to let you suck their tit just because you live in the same geographic area? They don't even pay equal taxes in the US today.
Try living in another world for a bit: go to jail, go to a half way house, live on the streets. Hard mode: do it in a country that isn't developed.
Ask anyone who has done any of those things if they believe in a "jobless utopia"?
Euphoric social capitalists living in a very successful system shouldn't be relied upon for scrying the future for others.
> The future may reduce the economic prosperity and push humanity to switch to some different economic system (maybe a better system). Markets don’t want to accept that. [Emphasis added] What a silly premise. Markets don't care . All markets do is express the collective opinion; in the short term as a voting machine, in the long term as a weighing machine. Seeing a real uptick of socio-policital prognostication from…
> What a silly premise. Markets don't care.
You read the top sentence way too literally. In context, it has a meaning — which can be explored (and maybe found) with charity and curiosity.
In every technology wave so far, we've disrupted many existing jobs. However we've also opened up new kinds of jobs. And, because it is easier to retrain humans than build machines for those jobs, we wound up with more and better jobs. This is the first technology wave that doesn't just displace humans, but which can be trained to the new job opportunities more easily than humans can. Right now it can't replace human…
Carpenters, landscapers, roofers, plumbers, electricians, elderly care, nurses, cooks, servers, bakers, musicians, actors, artists... Those jobs are probably still a couple decades plus off from displacement. some possibly never, And we will need them in higher numbers.. and perhaps it's ironic because these are some of the oldest professions. Everything we do is in service of paying for our housing, transportation,…
Imagine what they’ll be like with an influx of additional laborers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but which can be trained to the new job opportunities more easily than humans can What makes you think that? Self driving cars have had untold billions of dollars in reaearch and decades in applied testing, iteration, active monitoring, etc and it still has a very long tail of unaddressed issues. They've been known to ignore police traffic redirections, they've run right through construction barriers, and recently…
Self-driving cars are a political problem, not a technical problem. A functioning government would put everything from automation-friendly signaling standards to battery-swapping facilities into place. We humans used to do that sort of thing, but not anymore, so... bring on the AI. It won't work as well as it might otherwise be able to, but it'll probably kill fewer humans on the road at the end of the day. A low bar…
- destroy voting population's jobs
- put power in the hand of 1-2 tech companies
- clog streets with more cars rather than build trams, trains, maglevs, you name it
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A few months ago I saw one driverless car maybe every three days. Now I see roughly 3-5 every day. I get that it’s taken a long time and a lot of hype that hasn’t panned out. But once the tech works and it’s just about juicing the scale then things shift rapidly. Even if you think “oh that’s the next generation’s problem” if there is a chance you’re wrong, or if you want to be kind to the next generation: now is the…
Not sure how exactly politicians will jump from “minimal wages don’t have to be livable wages” and “people who are able to work should absolutely not have access to free healthcare” and “any tax-supported benefits are actually undeserved entitlements and should be eliminated” to “everyone deserves a universal basic income”.
Well, if one believes that the day will come when their choices will be "make that jump" or "the guillotine", then it doesn't seem completely outlandish.
Not saying that day will come, but if it did...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think the most sensible answer would be something like UBI. Having had the experience of living under communist regime prior to 1989 I have zero trust in the state providing support, while I am totally dependent and have no recourse. Instead I would rather rely on my own two hands like my grandparents did. I see a world where we can build anything we want with our own hands and AI automation. Jobs might become op…
I'd argue against the entire perspective of evaluating every policy idea along one-dimensional modernist polemics put forwards as "the least worst solution to all of human economy for all time". Right now the communists in China are beating us at capitalism. I'm starting to find the entire analytical framework of using these ideologies ("communism", "capitalism") to evaluate _anything_ to be highly suspect, and maybe…
I think the reality is just that governments use words and have an official ideology, but you have to ignore that and analyze their actions if you want to understand how they behave.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ive never taken one. They seem nice though. On the other hand, the Tesla “robotaxi” scares the crap out of me. No lidar and seems to drive more aggressively. The Mark Rober YouTube of a Tesla plowing into a road-runner style fake tunnel is equal parts hilarious and nightmare fuel when you realize that’s what’s next to your kid biking down the street.
> Mark Rober YouTube of a Tesla plowing into a road-runner style fake tunnel I understand the argument for augmenting your self-driving systems with LIDAR. What I don't really understand is what videos like this tell us. The comparison case for a "road-runner style fake tunnel" isn't LIDAR, it's humans, right? And while I'm sure there are cases where a human driver would spot the fake tunnel and stop in time, that is…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A few months ago I saw one driverless car maybe every three days. Now I see roughly 3-5 every day. I get that it’s taken a long time and a lot of hype that hasn’t panned out. But once the tech works and it’s just about juicing the scale then things shift rapidly. Even if you think “oh that’s the next generation’s problem” if there is a chance you’re wrong, or if you want to be kind to the next generation: now is the…
UBI is not a good solution because you still have to provision everything on the market, so it's a subsidy to private companies that sell the necessities of life on the market. If we're dreaming up solutions to problems, much better would be to remove the essentials from the market and provide them to everyone universally. Non-market housing, healthcare, education all provided to every citizen by virtue of being a hu…
The costs of what you propose are enormous. No legislation can change that fact.
There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.
Who’s going to pay for it? Someone who is not paying for it today.
How do you intend to get them to consent to that?
Or do you think that the needs of the many should outweigh the consent of millions of people?
The state, the only organization large enough to even consider undertaking such a project, has spending priorities that do not include these things. In the US, for example, we spend the entire net worth of Elon Musk (the “richest man in the world”, though he rightfully points out that Putin owns far more than he does) about every six months on the military alone. Add in Zuckerberg and you can get another 5 months or so. Then there’s the next year to think about. Maybe you can do Buffet and Gates; what about year three?
That’s just for the US military, at present day spending levels.
What you’re describing is at least an order of magnitude more expensive than that, just in one country that only has 4% of people. To extend it to all human beings, you’re talking about two more orders of magnitude.
There aren’t enough billionaires on the entire planet even to pay for one country’s military expenses out of pocket (even if you completely liquidated them), and this proposed plan is 500-1000x more spending than that. You’re talking about 3-5 trillion dollars per year just for the USA - if you extrapolate out linearly, that’d be 60-200 trillion per year for the Earth.
Even if you could reduce cost of provision by 90% due to economies of scale ($100/person/month for housing, healthcare, and education combined, rather than $1000 - a big stretch), it is still far, far too big to do under any currently envisioned system of wealth redistribution. Society is big and wealthy private citizens (ie billionaires) aren’t that numerous or rich.
There is a reason we all pay for our own food and housing.