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A bubble that knows it's a bubble

craigmccaskill.com

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Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#41

Post by mcny »

xg15 wrote: post #24
ehnto wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the allure of humanoid robots is that they are drop in replacements for agents in a world desgined for humans. If you want your robot to be a helper around the general populations houses for example, you would aim to make a general purpose bot capable of stairs, ladders, lying down, reaching high, stepping over things, holding awkward weights and loads while doing all of the above. Pinch, twist, push, pull, i…

Completely off-topic: I find it odd that we easily use this argument for humanoid robots (and also self-driving cars), but handicapped people are still bound to wheelchairs and have to constantly fight to change the environment and make it wheelchair-accessible. If we applied the same logic, there should be a massive effort to ditch wheelchairs and build exoskeletons instead.

> If we applied the same logic, there should be a massive effort to ditch wheelchairs and build exoskeletons instead.

Knowing the kind of markup on wheelchairs that means a YouTuber wheel chair look like a bargain (see Jerry rig everything wheelchair), I can't imagine how much the US healthcare "industry" would charge for a "medical grade" exoskeleton.

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#42

Post by esseph »

oezi wrote: post #27
WA wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI-is-hype people are delusional. The computer has never been able to do what it’s doing today. We could only dream of it. Sure, but do the math. It doesn’t work out yet. This stuff burns money and energy. Either revenue has to go up A LOT or costs do have to come down A LOT (or quality has to suffer by using smaller models).

If we assume that every American will pay 20 USD per month for AI that's already 100bn per year. Electricity will become very cheap during the day at least with solar continuing its declining trajectory.

Except we're killing all solar and wind projects in the US :(

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#43

Post by cjfd »

layoric wrote: post #32

> Creative destruction is brutal math. The capital? Gone. Completely vaporized. But infrastructure isn’t stock certificates. Those fiber optic cables didn’t vanish when Pets.com did. I read quotes like this and reminded that it is common that people forget money is just a competitive resource we use to outbid each other for _real_ things. Money moves around, it isn't lost or "Completely vaporized", someone receives i…

This is incorrect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_creation . A bubble bursting is the inverse process of money creation. Money isn't paper bills or metal coins. It is mostly numbers in a computer.

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#44

Post by starwatch »

layoric wrote: post #32

> Creative destruction is brutal math. The capital? Gone. Completely vaporized. But infrastructure isn’t stock certificates. Those fiber optic cables didn’t vanish when Pets.com did. I read quotes like this and reminded that it is common that people forget money is just a competitive resource we use to outbid each other for _real_ things. Money moves around, it isn't lost or "Completely vaporized", someone receives i…

Money can be "lost", and "created". In fact, it regularly is by commercial banks; this is the cornerstone of the modern economy. The bank of England wrote a pretty accessible document on money being created and destroyed [1]. For a slightly deeper dive (but equally accessible) check out "Can’t We Just Print More Money?" by Rupal Patel, et al. [2] which describes the different kinds of money.

The 2014 doc was a pretty wild read for me when it came out - it changed my perspective quite a bit.

[1]:https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-...

[2]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58796370-can-t-we-just-p...

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#45

Post by danmaz74 »

layoric wrote: post #32

> Creative destruction is brutal math. The capital? Gone. Completely vaporized. But infrastructure isn’t stock certificates. Those fiber optic cables didn’t vanish when Pets.com did. I read quotes like this and reminded that it is common that people forget money is just a competitive resource we use to outbid each other for _real_ things. Money moves around, it isn't lost or "Completely vaporized", someone receives i…

"capital" in the economic sense isn't money at all - it's tools, infrastructure, knowledge; from this point of view, you're correct. A bubble bursting on the stock market doesn't destroy capital.

On the other hand, the monetary value of the stock market (and other assets) going up and down does create or destroy "money". From a financial point of view, it's not a zero sum game.

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#46

Post by bostik »

fhd2 wrote: post #31
LarsDu88 wrote: post #4

I had the same thoughts as much as 2 years ago on how this will play out. Unlike with railroads and fiber optic cable however, the core infrastructural asset of GPUs tends to become rapidly obsolete after about 5 years. Commoditization of this scale of compute is definitely going to be a boon for many fields of research. Unfortunately fundamental public research is exactly what is being cut right now in the US. Long…

> however, the core infrastructural asset of GPUs tends to become rapidly obsolete after about 5 years. Is it all about the actual GPUs though, is that the only "infrastructure" being built? A list from the top of my head of things that I'd say do last: 1. Data center buildings (take a while to build, contents completely aside). 2. Organisations and processes for running operations and procurement in said data center…

Consider the second order effects of building all those data centers.

The GPU hardware rots and becomes obsolete in a matter of years, but the national infrastructure required to support the physical sites isn't going away. Things such as...

- improved power distribution networks

- logistics arrangements to build and support the DC sites

- lots and lots of new fibre interconnects to support the massive bandwidth needs

- hopefully: better power delivery planning laws

- plumbing infrastructure, because all that hardware requires cooling

Some of the DC sites will be decommissioned from their initial use, but given the physical security requirements, might morph into handy higher-security industrial facilities with only small repurposing. Such reuse cases would especially benefit from improved logistics (see above).

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#47

Post by Freak_NL »

xg15 wrote: post #24
ehnto wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the allure of humanoid robots is that they are drop in replacements for agents in a world desgined for humans. If you want your robot to be a helper around the general populations houses for example, you would aim to make a general purpose bot capable of stairs, ladders, lying down, reaching high, stepping over things, holding awkward weights and loads while doing all of the above. Pinch, twist, push, pull, i…

Completely off-topic: I find it odd that we easily use this argument for humanoid robots (and also self-driving cars), but handicapped people are still bound to wheelchairs and have to constantly fight to change the environment and make it wheelchair-accessible. If we applied the same logic, there should be a massive effort to ditch wheelchairs and build exoskeletons instead.

For disabled people who can use their arms and propel themselves, a wheelchair is low-maintenance, dependable, repairable, self-powered, and generic enough for there to be a healthy market and not too much vendor lock-in. Wheelchairs are not necessarily low-tech, but they are fully understandable. If the user of a wheelchair is unable to move themself for whatever reason, any able bodied person can step in and push. These things matter in any situation I think, but they matter even more in an emergency or a war zone.

Exoskeletons can't match that.

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#48

Post by FinnLobsien »

gligorot wrote: post #29
FinnLobsien wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Right now it’s easy to look at it as a relatively niche thing. But at the time it was going to be the next big thing transforming everything. Same as 3D printing. Certainly cool and useful in some niche contexts, but it has not disrupted manufacturing.

I would argue it disrupted engineering. So many videos on YouTube can be found of people cutting out expensive molds (for example) and getting a product to market faster and cheaper. And this is happening in companies as well (Prusa released an enterprise grade printer not long ago). At the same time, Printables and MakerWorld are flooded with…toys. They gamified their platforms and a ton of “thingy” models, ex. gene…

This is precisely what I mean though. It's a technology that has found its place and is definitely useful and a value-add to society.

But if we look at the types of predictions made in the early days (print a house in a day for under $5k, print any food you want at home, obviating factories you can make anything at home...), almost none of that has come through.

And that doesn't mean it's a bad technology. Most technologies don't revolutionize the average person's life, but can still change corners of civilization.

But compare that to the internet, which has literally changed how we do basically everything in our daily lives.

I think the point is that most technologies are like 3D printing while the current narrative is that AI will be more like the internet.

Re: A bubble that knows it's a bubble

#49

Post by FinnLobsien »

kortilla wrote: post #18
ivape wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Influencers, streamers, crypto … Housing is back … Dotcom came back… Nothing was a bubble. Dotcom was into a new paradigm shift with mobile in less then a decade. These aren’t even significant timelines when you think about it. So you pull out of the AI hype today, fine. These past recent bubbles show that everything ramps back up within five years. AI-is-hype people are delusional. The computer has never been able t…

Eventually coming back doesn’t mean it wasn’t a bubble that popped.

Precisely the article's point. AOL may not have been the successful company it could've been, but it did get millions of households online, which became infrastructure for the successful companies we all know today.
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