211–220 of 249 posts
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> You need to explain, from a systems point of view _why_ the gains must diffuse out as you suggest. Do we? I mean, isn't "because they always have" enough of an argument on its own? I am hardly a libertarian ideologue nor AI-first LLM jockey. But I do think people tend to catastrophize too much. Blacksmiths were killed dead by the industrial revolution. "Secretary" is a forgotten art. It's been decades since an actu…
The 1880s blacksmith didn't become a 1950s American suburbanite. They moved to shared housing in Manchester and a shorter lifespan working for poverty wages, lost fingers/arms in machines, maybe ended up on skid row, the section of town for failures who couldn't 'adapt' to the new modern world. Their children died in WW1 in a trench to industrial produced gas. Their children's children were transported around the wor…
That's... just not remotely true, unless you're talking about it as a maybe-it-happened-to-someone story. In fact it's basically a lie.
Every income group in the US (and recognize that "blacksmiths" represent skilled trades workers who earned well above median and had for thousands of years!) saw huge, huge, HUGE increases between 1880 and 1950. I mean... are you high?
> It took almost 70 years and the post WW2 destruction of the rest of the worlds economies/infrastructure to create that 1950s American suburbanite world.
Again, big citation needed on this one. Western Europe was very close to US quality-of-life numbers by the 60's, and the more successful nations started to pass it in the 90's. (Also recognize that the US had already pulled ahead in the 30's, Germany and France were lagging even before the war). You're looking at something along the lines of a decade to rebuild, tops.
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Perhaps white collar employees have felt jobs not conducted in an office are beneath them. Because a wide range of physical jobs pay a lot more than office work already
Great, just point me to the physical jobs that will hire someone over 50.
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Unless the benefits of AI get communalized (UBI, or some other form of sharing), ya.
How would that work? Taxes are already full of perverse incentives. Certainly anything resembling UBI will be just as bad.
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So tldr they are just standing by until everyone else dies? If this is the theory then they HAVE to be doing some serious AI things internally/R&D/in-secret so they're essentially "ready to go" ?
Of course they are. I’m not an insider so I wouldn’t know the specifics.
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The Iran war is symptomatic of what's to come. If the US/other major powers feel unconstrained to wage semi-limited disruptive conflicts at will - then the world will be much less stable. Iran can close the straight of hormuz as retaliation, and there really isn't anything that can be done about it except for invasion. Other countries have similar capabilities or can acquire them readily. If Cuba wanted to close the…
Cuba has effectively zero capability to project military power beyond their territorial waters. They can't close the Gulf of Mexico or even credibly threaten to do so. They are in no way comparable to Iran. As an island nation with limited natural mineral resources they're also very vulnerable to blockade.
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Cuba has effectively zero capability to project military power beyond their territorial waters. They can't close the Gulf of Mexico or even credibly threaten to do so. They are in no way comparable to Iran. As an island nation with limited natural mineral resources they're also very vulnerable to blockade.
Shahed style drones are quite inexpensive, the straight between key west and cuba is only 90 miles. To my knowledge, it is practically impossible to destroy distributed shahed launchers from an air campaign alone.
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The 1880s blacksmith didn't become a 1950s American suburbanite. They moved to shared housing in Manchester and a shorter lifespan working for poverty wages, lost fingers/arms in machines, maybe ended up on skid row, the section of town for failures who couldn't 'adapt' to the new modern world. Their children died in WW1 in a trench to industrial produced gas. Their children's children were transported around the wor…
> The 1880s blacksmith [...] moved to shared housing in Manchester and a shorter lifespan working for poverty wages, lost fingers/arms in machines, maybe ended up on skid row That's... just not remotely true, unless you're talking about it as a maybe-it-happened-to-someone story. In fact it's basically a lie. Every income group in the US (and recognize that "blacksmiths" represent skilled trades workers who earned we…
https://www.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stor...
https://healthinnovationmanchester.com/cottonopolis-to-metro...
You don't think there are 70 years between 1880 and the end of WW2 and the real start of suburban American prosperity we think of when we think of the end results today? And I need a citation? Or are you saying I should use 1960 not 1950s as the point, since it took a decade to rebuild in much of the world?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suburb#Postwar_suburban_expans...
Or are you arguing that butter use recovered over margarine before the 1970s? https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2016/july/butter-and-ma...
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And will it be by 2030 or ten years later
If it is 2030, compute and software will vastly reduce requirements. Nvidia has so much cash for R&D. You can bet they now have immense optimization and improvements in the pipeline, but why would they release anything groundbreaking right now? There are no real competitors on their heels. As Intel did for decades, they will likely dole out improvements, only when necessary to remain ahead. By 2030, I expect 10x impr…
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I mean, arguably AI is faster (but it's equally arguably oversold, certainly we aren't seeing that kind of change yet). But the stuff I cited was faster than you think. In the rural US, in 1900, most routine transport was still done with horses. By the 20's it was basically all in trucks, and trucks don't need hand-forged shoes that the blacksmiths were making[1]. Likewise professional typists were still clacking awa…
Your example is flawed. The professional typist' role evolved - to serving through other ways, as you say - by become executive assistants. Much like a Bank Tellers' role also evolved. And its not because they (executives) are too lazy to type. They actually need people to manage their calendar, monitor emails etc. Moreover, the personal computing revolution led to an expansion of firms that needed more of said peopl…
The "role" might have evolved, but the jobs disappeared. There are, what, maybe two or three orders of magnitude fewer "executive assistants" than there were typists in the 70's? I was making an argument about economics, not job classification.