671–680 of 1001 posts
Intellectual property right can get abolished and also company confidentiality is made illegal.
No one will have Moat.
There will be always manufactured scarcity of something which people aspire for. Like respect, popularity, game expert etc.
Universal high income is possible.
Beginning of infinity is good book to realize there are infinite possibilities to explore.
Just fyi: I am not poor but thinking the above from a poor person's perspective.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is already to some extent a solved problem. The top 10% of households in the US for example are 50% of spending, the "horses" to a large extent already don't matter to the economy. This is similar to the relationship between US consumers and workers in undeveloped nations during globalization. Historically this tends to be resolved when it creates an unsustainable level of political instability, but there are ma…
How many of these top 10% of households will have their breadwinners be replaced with AI? The LLM boom is aimed at them, professionals, knowledge workers, not at landscapers and plumbers.
I know this isn't exactly related, so maybe a low value comment, but it itches in my mind. Years ago I talked with a recruiter at Facebook and they bragged about how many floors of developers they had working on Messenger in just one location (Seattle). What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger? I mean, really? I feel like in a way, AI just adds to that weird situation of overcapacity. M…
> What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger? I mean, really? Over 1 billion monthly users and over 100 billion messages a day, much of which is multimedia. Plus ads, payments, business integrations, a developer platform... ...you need quite a lot of devs for that, even if you freeze all feature development forever. > Musk chopped an awful lot of headcount at Twitter, right, and proved it…
Right, but it's already doing that, and runs just fine, from what I understand. The developers don't have to sit there pounding the enter key on their keyboards over and over all day to keep the messages flowing.
Is the user count and message rate growing so quickly that people are constantly needing to make architectural changes and performance improvements in order to keep it scaling up? Does adding new capacity need constant human intervention?
Or are they adding new crazy features all the time that are genuinely challenging to implement?
As a software developer who has worked on big distributed systems, I'm well aware that things take a lot more work than they often seem from the outside, but this strains belief.
> It has panned out for Musk to have a radical right-wing echo chamber for him and his supporters.
I suspect this was the goal all along. Twitter didn't have to grow revenue/profit-wise; those two metrics could even decline, and Musk would be happy. He just needed to find a side-business for Twitter to get into (which turned out to be AI datacenters) that could make some cash to help keep the lights on. The point of owning Twitter wasn't the business; the point was for Musk to be able to control discourse in exactly the way he wanted.
Relatedly: a tip for writers. When an article has an obviously AI-generated slop image followed by a wall of text, I immediately know that the wall of text is also a mechanical product and I stop reading. There's nothing worse you can do to tarnish your personal brand than to open with obvious zero-effort graphics. The text might be insightful, who knows, but the AI slop images are such an immediate red flag that the…
I'm sure it's no loss to the author to lose out on close-minded readers. The author also added a little blurb to his article to address the concerns raised.
I know this isn't exactly related, so maybe a low value comment, but it itches in my mind. Years ago I talked with a recruiter at Facebook and they bragged about how many floors of developers they had working on Messenger in just one location (Seattle). What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger? I mean, really? I feel like in a way, AI just adds to that weird situation of overcapacity. M…
> Musk chopped an awful lot of headcount at Twitter, right, and proved it was overkill, has that panned out? Has X-Twitter released a single new feature since?
> Turn three: the company that fired its workers to save money discovers that its customers were, in aggregate, other companies’ workers. Revenue growth stalls. The AI subscription that was supposed to be an investment in efficiency turns out to be a contribution to the destruction of its own market. If we take it to the extreme, the final solution to this problem is secessionism: a fully non-human AI economy where t…
I hear and have a lot respect for what you’re saying, but I’d like to propose that we thoroughly explore every other alternative first, just to make sure we aren’t missing out on something bigger and better and leaving anything on the table.
Sigh.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It's all so obscene. Instead, why don't we try to protect human dignity and move towards a more humane future? I think the Darwinian logic of reality might make this hard. If society A and society B are both developing AI and one of them stops in order to protect humans, society B may continue to develop AI and then it might either outcompete society A economically to the point of reducing it to poverty (it is theor…
Maybe a stupid question but aren't the Amish essentially this thought process put into practice? They aren't able to outcompete their neighbouring societies economically yet are in no way impoverished, and in many cases actually come out on top by many QOL/health metrics.
The assumption is that if you send people checks, they’ll find meaning in hobbies and community. They’ll paint. They’ll garden. They’ll finally write that novel. The author suggests it will fail because we'll all use drugs and booze and commit suicide. But it works for retired people. They love it. Is this why we all have to work 9 to 5 drudge jobs? Because we can't handle the freedom?
The retired people who you know are happy love it. The retirement-age people who didn't love it went back into the workforce. Or they didn't stop working in the first place. And c'mon, the "retired person struggling to find purpose" is basically a societal trope at this point.
> Is this why we all have to work 9 to 5 drudge jobs? Because we can't handle the freedom?
I really really really don't want that to be true. I don't think it's really true for me (though I know, job or no job, I need to find self-defined "productive" things to do with my time), but I do think it's true for a lot of people. I don't know if it's just decades of social conditioning throughout life, or fear of change, or... whatever it might be. But it does seem like a lot of people really do need the structure/purpose of employment in order to find meaning in life and be happy.
There's plenty of research showing that older people without a feeling of purpose tend to die sooner than older people who do feel they have a purpose. Employment is that purpose for a lot of people, and for some, they don't really know how to adequately replace it if they don't have a job. That makes me profoundly sad, but I don't know what to do with that, really.