201–210 of 920 posts
If you want to understand what AI can do, listen to computer scientists. If you want to understand it’s likely impact on society, listen to economists.
Reading smart software people talk about AI in 2025 is basically just reading variations on the lump of labor fallacy. If you want to understand what AI can do, listen to computer scientists. If you want to understand it’s likely impact on society, listen to economists.
But realistically, you're not going to have a personal foundry anytime soon.
> 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…
Reading smart software people talk about AI in 2025 is basically just reading variations on the lump of labor fallacy. If you want to understand what AI can do, listen to computer scientists. If you want to understand it’s likely impact on society, listen to economists.
They could of course be right. But they don't have any more insight than any other average smart person does.
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…
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…
Maybe the tech will at some point be good enough. At the current rate of improvement this will still take decades at least. Which is sad because I personally hoped that my kids would never have to get a driver’s License.
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…
There's been a dream of unsupervised models going hog wild on codebases for the last three years. Yet even the latest and greatest Claude models can't be trusted to write a new REST endpoint exposing 5 CRUD methods without fucking something up. No, it requires not only human supervision, but it also requires human expertise to validate and correct.
I dunno. I feel like this language grossly exaggerates the capability of LLMs to paint a picture of them reliably fulfilling roles end-to-end instead of only somewhat reliably fulfilling very narrowly scoped tasks that require no creativity or expertise.
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”.
People are usually obedient because they have something in life and they are very busy with work. So they don't have time or headspace to really care about politics. When suddenly big numbers of people start to more care about politics it leads to organizing and all kinds of political changes.
What i mean is that it wouldn't be current political class pushing things like UBI. At same time it seems that some of current elites are preparing for this and want to get rid of elections altogether to keep the status quo.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It's the same here. Calling what the west has a "free-market capitalist" system is also a lie. At every level there is massive state intervention. Most discoveries come from publicly funded work going on at research universities or from billions pushed into the defense sector that has developed all the technology we use today from computers to the internet to all the technology in your phone. That's no more a free-ma…