No, I think it's likely that this is the first major productivity boom that won't be followed with a consumption boom, quite the opposite. It'll result in a far greater income inequality. Things will be cheaper but the poor will have fewer ways to make money to afford even the cheaper goods.
It's not that simple. If a poor person makes zero dollars how much of the reduced cost item could they now afford?
We have a massively distorted economy driven by debt financialization and legalised banking cartels. It leads to weird inversions. For example as long as housing gets increasingly expensive at a predictable rate the housing becomes more affordable instead of less as banks are more able to lend money. The inverse is also true, if housing were to drop at a predictable rate fewer people would be able to get a mortgage on the house so fewer people could afford to buy one. Housing won't drop below cost of materials and labor (ignoring people dumping housing to get rid of tax debts as I would include such obligations in the cost of acquisition). Long term it's not sustainable but long term is multi-generational.
Fwiw in places like parts of the midwest housing is below cost of labor and materials. An existing house might be $70k and several bedrooms at that. You just can’t get anything built for that even if you build it all yourself.
I intended to make a weaker claim of ‘in general long run / maintainable’ circumstances and should have done so.
Many low cost areas have bad crime problems, there is another little phenomenon where the wealthy by doing a poor job in governance can increase the price of their assets by making alternative assets (lower cost housing) less desirable due to the increase in crime.
Not really the case for much of the midwest. These are low crime areas generally. Working class population is not nearly so rent burdened so less pressure towards making ends meet in other ways. Gang activity is effectively nill unlike placed where you find ms13 written on walls. Homeless people amount to probably a small few dozen visibly homeless if that, and you really need to look to find them.
I gather that such places do exist it would help if you gave an example. When I did travel
to middle america there seemed to be a general drug problem and associated thefts. Perhaps there could be a copper theft map which could be used as a proxy for crime.
> Housing won't drop below cost of materials and labor
Only if every person born needs to have a brand new house constructed for them.
Not if - you know - people die and don't need a house to live in anymore.
But considering how it's been the past 20 years, I'm starting to expect that a lot of the current elder generation will opt to have their houses burnt down to the ground when they die. Or maybe the banker owned politicians will make that decision for them with a new policy to burn all property at death to "combat injustice". Who knows what great ideas they have?
Cool concept, but this isn't 1980. We've been sold these sorts of concepts for 40+ years now and things have only gotten worse.
We have a K shaped economy. Top earners take the majority. The top 20% make up 63% of all spending, and the top 10% accounted for more than 49%. The highest on record. Businesses adapt to reality and target the best market, in this case the top 10 to 20%, and the rest just get ignored, like in many countries around the world.
All that unlocked money? In a K shaped economy it mostly goes to those at the top, who look to new places to park/invest it, raising housing prices, moving the squeeze of excess capital looking for gains to places like nursing homes and veterinary offices. That doesn't result in prices going down, but in them going up.
The benefit to the average American will be more capital in the top earners' hands looking for more ways to do VC style squeezes in markets previously not as ruthless but worth moving to now as there are less and less 'untapped' areas to squeeze (because the top 10-20% need more places to park more capital). The US now has more VC funds than McDonalds.
Irrelevant aside: But I hold grudge against the economists who picked the letter K to represent increased inequality. They missed the perfect opportunity to use the less-then inequality symbol (<) and call it a “less-then economy”.
"will" being the operative word here. High school level Econ makes no promises about WHEN prices adjust. Price setting is a whole science highly susceptible to collusion pressure. Prices generally drop only when the main competition point is price (commodities). In this case the main issue is that AI is commoditizing many if not all types of labor AND product. In a world where nothing has value how does anything get done?
The only solution here is to stop tying people's value to their productivity. That makes a lot of sense in the 1900s but it makes a lot less sense when the primary faucet of productivity is automation. If you insist on tying a person's fundamental right to a decent and secure life to their productivity and then take away their ability to be productive you're left with a permenant and growing underclass of undesirables and an increasingly slim pantheon of demigods at the top.
We have written like, an ocean of scifi about this very subject and somehow we still fail to properly consider this as a likely outcome.
They key is to do it by setting up the right structure or end up with it naturally, not by laws and control, because then you end up in a oppressive nanny state at the very best.
> They key is to do it by setting up the right structure or end up with it naturally
This is extremely hand-wavy.
Can you be more concrete in what you think this looks like?
The way I see it, we're only 5-10 years away from having general purpose robots and AI that can basically do anything. If the prices for that automation is low enough, there will be massive layoffs as workers are replaced.
There's no way to "naturally" solve the problem of skyrocketing unemployment without government involvement.
Speaking of fairytales, you're living in your own.
Disconnecting value from productivity sounds good if you don't examine any of the consequences.
Can you build a society from scratch using that principle? If you can't then why would it work on an already built society?
Like if we're in an airplane flying, what you're saying is the equivalent getting rid of the wings because they're blocking your view. We're so high in the sky we'd have a lot of altitude to work with, right?
Imagine a society where one person produces all the value. Their job is to do highly technical maintenance on a single machine that is basically the Star Trek replicator: it produces all the food, clothing, housing, energy, etc. that is enough for every human in this society and the surplus is stored away in case the machine is down for maintenance, which happens occasionally. Maintaining the machine takes very specialized knowledge but adding more people to the process in no way makes it more productive. This person, let’s call them The Engineer, has several apprentices who can take over but again, no more than 5 because you just don’t need more.
In this society there is literally nothing for anyone else to do. Do you think they deserve to be cut out of sharing the value generated by The Engineer and the machine, leaving them to starve? Do you think starving people tend to obey rules or are desperate people likely to smash the evil machine and kill The Engineer if The Engineer cuts them off? Or do you think in a society where work hours mean nothing for an average person a different economic system is required?
For something to be deserved, it must be earned. What do these people do to distinguish themselves from The Engineer’s pets? If they are wholly dependant on him for their subsistence, what distinguishes him from their god?
To derive an alternate system you need alternate axioms. The axioms of our liberal society are moral equality and peaceful coexistence. Among such equals, no one person, group, or majority has the right to dictate to another. What axioms do you propose that would constrain The Engineer? How would you prevent enslaving him?
Hey, dude. How does someone earn value once automation does all the work? Earning the right to a share of the resources when resources are derived from automated labor is such a thoroughly pathological concept that I'm not sure we're communicating on the same planet.
Same way everyone has earned value from the beginning of time: negotiate with others. We are all born naked and without possessions. Everything we get, from the first day of our birth, is given to us by someone else. Our very first negotiations are simple, we are in turns endearing and annoying. As we grow older they become more complex. All I’m saying is that these interactions should be maximally voluntary and nonviolent.
> For something to be deserved, it must be earned.
Eeeeeerrrr, wrong! This is garbage hypercapitalist/libertarian ideology.
Did you earn your public school education? Did you earn your use of the sidewalk or the public parks and playgrounds? Did you earn your library card? Did you earn your citizenship or right to vote? Did you earn the state benefits you get when you are born disabled? Did you earn your mother’s love?
No, these are what we call public services, unalienable rights, and/or unconditional humanity. We don’t revolve the entire world and our entire selves solely around profit because it’s not practical and it’s empty at its core.
Arguably we still do too much profit-based society stuff in the US where things like healthcare and higher education should be guaranteed entitlements that have no need to be earned. Many other countries see these aspects of society as non-negotiable communal benefits that all should enjoy.
In this hypothetical society with The Engineer, it’s likely that The Engineer would want or need to win over the minds of their society in some way to prevent their own demise and ensure they weren’t overthrown, enslaved, or even just thought of as an evil person.
Many of my examples above like public libraries came about because gilded age titans didn’t want to die with the reputation of robber barons. Instead, they did something anti-profit and created institutions like libraries and museums to boost the reputation of their name.
It’s the same reason why your local university has family names on its buildings. The wealthiest people in society often want to leave a positive legacy where the alternative without philanthropy and, essentially, wealth redistribution, is that they are seen as horrible people or not remembered at all.
> This is garbage hypercapitalist/libertarian ideology.
Go on then, how do you decide what people deserve? How do you negotiate with others who disagree with you?
> examples above like public libraries
I agree! The nice part about all these mechanisms is that they’re voluntary.
If you’re suggesting that The Engineer’s actions should be constrained entirely by his own conscience and social pressure, then we agree. No laws or compulsion required.
You sure seem to know a lot about what people 'deserve' so I'm not sure I can hope to crack the rind of that particular coconut but I will leave you with this: Humans, by virtue of being living, thinking beings deserve lives of fulfillment, dignity, and security. The fact that we have, up until present, been unable (or perhaps unwilling) to achieve this does not mean it's not possible or desirable, only that we have failed in that goal.
Everything else, all the 'isims' and ideologies are abstractions.
> Humans, by virtue of being living, thinking beings deserve lives of fulfillment, dignity, and security.
You wanting people to have that doesn't mean that people deserve to have that. Fundamentally, no one deserves anything. We, as a species, lived for a hundred thousand years with absolutely nothing except what we could carve off the world by ourselves or with the help of small groups that chose to work with us. Everything else since then is a bonus (or sometimes a malus, but on average a bonus).
Also, as much as it sounds nice to declare such things as goals, deserved or not, it is indeed impossible, and probably not desirable, since, for starters, you can't even define what those things would be like. Those aren't actionable, they're at most occasional consequences of a system that is working to alleviate scarcity of resources.
Unfortunately, we're nowhere near that replicator.
These examples aren’t generally voluntary once implemented. I can’t get a refund from my public library or parks department if I decide not to use it.
The social pressure placed on The Engineer is the manifestation of law. That’s all law is: a set of agreed-upon social contracts, enforced by various means.
Obviously, many dictators and governments get away with badly mistreating their subjects, and that’s unfortunate, shouldn’t happen, and shouldn’t be praised as a good system.
I think you may be splitting hairs a little bit here and trying really hard to manufacture…something.
Slavery was (is) also an agreed upon social contract, enforced by various means. What makes it wrong? You clearly have morally prescriptive beliefs. Why are you so sure that your moral prescriptions are the right ones? And that being in the majority gives you the right to impose your beliefs on others?
What if you are in the minority? Do you just accept the hypercapitalist dictates of the majority? Why not?
Law is more than convention. What distinguishes legitimate from illegitimate law?
The only way for people who disagree axiomatically to get along is to impose on each other minimally.
Who ever said you have the right to a decent a secure life? People don’t universally agree about this. Some of us posit that we will never escape a state of competition for fundamentally scarce resources. And that the organizing principle of a free society should be peaceful coexistence, not mandatory cooperation.
You figure out your own economic security, I’ll manage mine.
Oh my, please rant on. I'd love to hear more about people not having the right to a decent and secure life. (After all, I've often thought that having my life tracked and used my a corporation or government would be a wonderful utopia!)
There are already enough resources that nobody should live in abject insecurity and poverty. Your position is fundamentally morally abhorrent to me. You're saying that your ability to take a little bit more for yourself is more important than a child not having polio, a mother feeding her child, a village having clean water.
You are, in short, a tiny little microcosm of why humanity is doomed as a species.
We don't need to have every human care about every single other human to thrive as a species. If anything, if we did, we wouldn't be able to thrive at all.
The issues you mentioned are, in the vast majority of cases, caused by the lack of peaceful coexistence to begin with, because as long as me and everyone else is coexisting peacefully, getting more for myself isn't taking anything away from those in the situations you mentioned. Resources might be scarce, but that doesn't mean they're zero sum.
I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying that my right to choose which children I help is more legitimate than your right to dictate to me. That the voluntary nature of our cooperation is more important than equality of resource distribution.
It's already completely disconnected, don't worry about it. Most people who own any real estate earn more in price appreciation per year than they earn in take-home salary from their real full-time jobs.
to the point of where the cost of bringing the goods to market or its opportunity cost exceed the price the market will bear. Its why people living in areas of material poverty don't just get everything on discount.
It’s one of those ironies in power structures, how a ‘communist’ society can act as turbo capitalist one and visa versa. It’s a mistake to think that just because things are one way at the top they’re the same way all the way down the power structure. Even with heavy corruption there are competing corrupt entities which can lead to a healthy competition of governance as an emergent behavior. Dysfunction at one level efficiencies at another. Corruption is self corrupting so it’s difficult to maintain at all levels.
In my view much of the ‘corruption’ in the west takes the form of very legal financialization, this massively rewards consolidation as the high debt to equity ratios means low interest rates are paramount and combining two entities allows one to act as insurance for the other lowering the risk component of the interest rate allowing the entity to out compete the remaining entities. Once reaching a certain size the company becomes too big to fail and the risk component merges with the US government. Since the US government is very receptive to donations these companies are in effect able to form an oligarchy. Compare this to China where companies are subordinate to the politicians.
I think the West overestimates the deleterious effects of corruption of our competitors and underestimates our own systemic (and legalized) corruption.
I was able to run some stats at scale on this and people who make mistakes are more likely to make more mistakes, not less. Essentially sampling from a distribution of a propensity for mistakes and this dominated any sign of learning from mistakes. Someone who repeatedly makes mistakes is not repeatedly learning, they are accident prone.
My impression of mistakes was that they were an indicator of someone who was doing a lot of work. They're not necessarily making mistakes at a higher rate per unit of work, they just do more of both per unit of time.
From that perspective, it makes sense that the people who made the most mistakes in the past will also make the most mistakes in the future, but it's only because the people who did the most work in the past will do the most work in the future.
If you fire everyone who makes mistakes you'll be left only with the people who never make anything at all.
In this case it was trivial to normalize for work done.
It’s very human to want to be forgiving of mistakes, after all who has not made any mistakes, but there are different classes of mistakes made by all different types of people. If you make a mistake you are the same type of person, but if you are pulling from a distribution by sampling by those who have made mistakes you are biasing your sample in favor of those prone to making such mistakes. In my experience any effect of learning is much smaller than this initial bias.
A decade of data from many hundreds of people, help desk type roll where all communication was kept, mostly chat logs and emails. Machine learning with manual validation. The goal was to put a dollar figure on mistakes made since the customers were much more likely to quit and never come back if it was our fault, but also many customers are nothing but a constant pain in the ass so it was important to distinguish who was right whenever there was a conflict.
Mistakes made per call, like many things, were on a Pareto distribution, so 90% of the mistakes are made by 10% of the people. Identifying and firing those 10% made a huge difference. Some of the ‘mistakes’ were actually a result of corruption and they had management backing as management was enriching themselves at the cost of the company (a pretty common problem) so the initiative was killed after the first round.
This sounds really interesting but possibly qualitatively different than programming/engineering where automated improvements/iterations are part of the job (and what's rewarded)
What if you define a hard rule from this statistics that « you must fire anyone on error one »? Won’t your company be empty in a rather short timeframe?
[or will be composed only of doingNothing people?]
Why would you do that? You’re sampling from a distribution, a single sample only carries a small amount of information, repeat samples compound though.
I use blue blocking glasses, like Bono but darker and they do work. I also use UV LEDs to help me wake up, which also works.
I agree with the premise that night shift and other color warmth features are insufficient to have a strong effect, though they do help with eye strain which is still a positive.
But also, I'm on team "Its really hard to do the same mental job ~20 hours a week". I can do 2hr x 3 cycles x 5 days a week. But that means breaks.. When I did 12 hour days I was terrible at hours 9-12.
Is the suggestion they would work out more if they were paid? I think if obtaining Olympic medals was a function of training more then the avengers would be far higher.
The people high on that leaderboard are objectively ugly. Attractiveness is pretty consistent across individuals and cultures with only minor variations.
Theoretically it can be, though usually not, so the question is what should be the law to cover the general case. It wouldn’t be such a problem if it were easy for them to get around without driving. Either self driving cars, subsidized Ubers, public transit, walkable cities, home delivery, etc.
My opinion is that in the general case people over 70 shouldn’t be driving and I say this as someone who has 4 spritly grandparents in their 90s. I really don’t like how dangerous roads are, a fact that we accept because we did not really have good alternatives, now that we do we should implement them.
Is your point that we should be governed by the exceptions? I think that would be a bad idea. Does he even need a license for a racetrack? I’m sure he could easily afford Uber rides, and just maybe he would like to lower his odds of getting T-boned at an intersection by a geriatric.
The numbers are not arbitrary if they’re based on data, and generalizations are done for the sake of expediency and practicality. If such things are wholly unimportant then sure, capability test all the things.
They are arbitrary. You don't want to bake these things into law. What if people start living to be 150 as of next week because of some miracle drug. It'd be retarded if people lost their license at 70. Don't do things wrong just because you can. This is why software is full of so many bugs. Do shit right the first time, so that we never have to think about this again. jfc
I’m pretty sure laws can be changed easier than lifespans can doubled. You can’t always do things right the first time because knowledge unfolds with time, you’ll always know more later. You are proposing a waterfall design versus an iterative design. It would be easy enough to run an experiment for a few years to see if the lives saved are worth it.
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