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We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness

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Re: We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness

#961

Post by supplied_demand »

xp84 wrote: post #827
skissane wrote: post #689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Immigrants don’t generally earn much, let alone work legally and pay taxes. They are not paying our retirement. They require doctors and produce our “medical deserts” (the name we use in France where social security fails because of lack of practicians). My mother is a doctor and her father was a doctor before, and both are immigrants (from Scotland to Australia) - my grandfather was already a doctor when he immigr…

> France also has huge numbers of socially disadvantaged immigrants, > mismanaged immigration-who, not how many Until I got here I was going to post to suggest that you were allowing yourself to believe that because some of the immigrants were of the successful type that there wasn’t a vast number of immigrants who are very poor and of the type GP was talking about. But I, you and GP agree on the “mismanagement of wh…

== But they don’t know how to reconcile “can save a few” with “can’t literally bring all poor people here without destroying our country.”==

It’s also possible that they hold a fundamentally different view than you and aren’t just naive idiots.

The phrase “destroying our country” is very charged and completely unsubstantiated in your comment. It’s almost like you are falling victim to the same type of emotional reaction you accuse others of holding.

Re: We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness

#962

Post by scotty79 »

edwardbernays wrote: post #870
scotty79 wrote: post #842

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think desire for "real" is just a form of masochism. This real that people talk about is just suffering in sufficient amount to silence their restless brains. Most people aren't like that. Most prefer to use pleasure instead of pain to calm their brains. They don't care if a thing is "real" as long as it does its job. For the 'real' afficiandos pleasure doesn't work. That's why they disparage things that bring joy…

Extremely myopic take. "Real" things can be just as pleasurable as not-"real" things, and not-"real" things can be just as painful. I don't even know by what criteria you're making these distinctions, but it has the smell of an embittered person.

Just trying to understand what is this craving for "real" I never had and what it even is.

Re: We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness

#963

Post by scotty79 »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #764
scotty79 wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you can just get rich and emotionally self-sufficient enough to never depend on anyone. Although it's probably good to have end of life plan for when your body completely fails you because of old age.

Where are you spending riches in order to get food, maintain your house and other property, connect with the news, deal with matters of state etc? On other people. Money won't make them go away.

Spending can be done with surprisingly little human contact these days.

Re: We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness

#964

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

_qbxi wrote: post #930
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's precisely what I meant about disposable income. Safety nets in my mind are what kick in after a person has no way to pay for necessary stuff by themselves. Disposable income is what gets cut down by the costs of necessary stuff. Very few people are going to not go to dinner because they are aware that if they become indigent US society will not pay, and thus feel an obligation to save. Lots of people will not…

The first thing I asked about was healthcare. Without the safety net of socialized healthcare, people routinely have to pay for it.

The overwhelming majority of Americans have health insurance which (at least theoretically) covers most of their health care costs.

Way too many (many millions) have no insurance or inadequate insurance, but that's a problem we need to fix, not a description of the country as a whole.

The problem for most Americans is that what is not covered by insurance is still too expensive for them, but that's a subtly different problem than "no socialized healthcare => everyone has to pay out of pocket for any healthcare they receive"

Re: We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness

#965

Post by dclowd9901 »

esseph wrote: post #482
dclowd9901 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same gen (42). I feel like we have a really unique lens on all of this, too: old enough to remember being in a smoky bar, socializing (not healthy, but fun as hell), but also young enough to have had some technological exposure at a crucial time of our youth. We _leveraged_ technology for socializing in person. Our online pursuits were around organizing lighthearted social goofiness like "getting iced", LARPing, and…

Maybe because everything you do ends up on the internet. There's always a camera nearby. People are afraid to open up and be honest, because of the fear of local, internet or political rejection.

Have some conviction. If you're doing something because you believe in it or love it, then why worry about what others think? Die without regrets.

Re: We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness

#966

Post by [deleted] »

jncfhnb wrote: post #910
somenameforme wrote: post #903

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of us have a vision of Japan from when we were younger. But in modern times their economy is much closer to a developing country. The median income in Japan is $25,313. [1] The median income in the US is $47,960. [2] If we consider only full time year-round employment (which is probably closer to what Japan is measuring), it's $60,070. Ever inflating house prices are caused by high demand and ease of access of d…

Income is a terrible metric for identifying a developing country. Japan is clearly developed. Housing in Japan is kept sensible in large part thanks to their land value tax for real estate.

[deleted]

Re: We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness

#967

Post by skissane »

kiba wrote: post #948
fc417fc802 wrote: post #926

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is scarcity entailed by a (predominantly) private social arrangement where competing arrangements are permitted, but have thus far failed in the market It's a network effect. The same reason it's easy to build a facebook clone yet nearly impossible to get it off the ground.

What I meant is the network effect enjoyed by Facebook and Amazon. That network effect is ripe for taxation and regulation.

I don’t understand what taxing “network effects” has to do with Georgism though - Georgism argues land should be taxed specially because (1) there is fundamentally a finite quantity of it, (2) it is natural not human-made. Network effects don’t seem particularly similar on either front, and hence even if there is an argument for specially taxing them, that argument isn’t clearly Georgist - a Georgist could consistently reject it.

Closer to land are things like mining rights, water rights, fishing rights, pollution rights - taxing them is an obvious extension of the Georgist idea of land taxation, and it would be difficult for a consistent Georgist to oppose them, at least in principle

Re: We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness

#968

Post by weatherlite »

ryandrake wrote: post #911
weatherlite wrote: post #858

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've clearly mentioned full robots and this is all a forward looking conversation about future AI which will have bodies and can interact like humans. There is going to be real competition for humans soon and I think people are overestimating the value of humans a lot. When do you think soon is ? It could easily be 20-30 years imo till there are humanoid robots intelligent enough to carry a long term relationship,…

> Not to mention most people still want intimate relationship ...yeah that thing called sex, while I'm sure someone is working on it somewhere this is gonna take a while to automate. I think "good enough" sex robots are closer than you think. There are already existing physical products approaching that territory, and if you ignore current taboos, there's likely a huge market to be staked out once these are more... l…

> I think "good enough" sex robots are closer than you think.

Source ? I'm very skeptical about that.

Re: We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness

#969

Post by somenameforme »

jncfhnb wrote: post #910
somenameforme wrote: post #903

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of us have a vision of Japan from when we were younger. But in modern times their economy is much closer to a developing country. The median income in Japan is $25,313. [1] The median income in the US is $47,960. [2] If we consider only full time year-round employment (which is probably closer to what Japan is measuring), it's $60,070. Ever inflating house prices are caused by high demand and ease of access of d…

Income is a terrible metric for identifying a developing country. Japan is clearly developed. Housing in Japan is kept sensible in large part thanks to their land value tax for real estate.

The point of the economic numbers is that what's affordable from a Western perspective is not for a Japanese person. You're talking about a country where 50% of workers earn less than $25,000 per year! A $200k house in the US is generally considered very affordable. In Japan that's 8 years of salary for half the country, and easily a 20+ year mortgage.

Their housing prices are being further depressed by the fact that they're now dying off fast enough that even Tokyo's population is starting to significantly decline. And that, in turn, is further compounded by a prevalent superstition in Japan against living in a house where somebody died, which helps to further reduce demand for many housing units that 'become available.'

Re: We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness

#970

Post by somenameforme »

vannevar wrote: post #905
somenameforme wrote: post #903

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of us have a vision of Japan from when we were younger. But in modern times their economy is much closer to a developing country. The median income in Japan is $25,313. [1] The median income in the US is $47,960. [2] If we consider only full time year-round employment (which is probably closer to what Japan is measuring), it's $60,070. Ever inflating house prices are caused by high demand and ease of access of d…

The analogy of education to housing "bubbles" doesn't work. Housing bubbles are economically destructive because dropping prices induce new sellers to drop their price even further, which reduces the market value for everyone. There is a reinforcement loop. No such mechanism happens in education, once you have your degree it is yours forever. There is no secondary market. If the value goes down, sure, other people wi…

Of course there's a connection. The most realistic reason people go to college is to earn more money later in life. Nobody would ever voluntarily go 6 figures into debt with the understanding that, at the end of it all, the best job they're going to be able to find is to go serve coffee.

And especially in the era of the internet the concept of college being a necessity to educate oneself is rather plainly artificial, and it's also highly debatable whether the current GPA inflated profit motivated degree treadmills that colleges have turned into is even providing a meaningful education.

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