I'm all for driving down the costs of things low on Maslow's hierarchy, but it's arguably more reasonable in the short term to put effective public policy in place than hope the singularity gets here (an exaggeration, but not exceptionally so, considering "Moore's Law for Everything").
Tech people keep trying to fix people problems with tech. ~47k people die each year in the US from a lack of healthcare. Other countries don't need Moore's Law to fix this, for example [1] [2]. Conversely, it's fine that Elon runs around as Technoking as long as the batteries are pumped out of Gigafactories at full speed. Technology fixes for technology problems, people fixes for people problems. We don't need more wealth ("The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed" -- Gibson). America is one of the wealthiest country in the world. We need quality of life floors and more equitable distributions of what passes for and enables wealth.
With all of that rant said, I really love Sam's idea about the American Equity Fund [3]. It's long overdue, and something that the Federal Reserve could administer today with FedAccounts as the target of distributions from taxes on productive concerns. Sam's a smart person, and I hope he can sell the idea with a pitch deck to those who need to be sold on it. The issue of equity (social and economic) has reached a crescendo, and it would do a disservice to county and citizens alike to let the opportunity go to waste.
Could it be that tech people try to fix problems with tech because tech people are familiar with tech?
Said another way, where are the non-tech public policy people solving these problems?
If they don't step up, maybe it's time the tech people do?
Absolutely. This is not condemning technologists, but encouraging a reassessment of effective strategies for implementation to lead to the desired outcome.
Policy is written by the elected. Speak to or assume those roles. Provide covering fire for effective contributors who can execute on your mission and vision, just like a startup.
"This revolution will generate enough wealth for everyone to have what they need, if we as a society manage it responsibly."
I worry that this is already the case, and we are already failing miserably. Globally we seem to have enough resources to feed, clothe, and shelter the global population and in a number of cases (see the USA) to be unable to do so.
Are we failing "miserably"? I mean, global poverty is down, down, down.[0] Famine mortality is down, down, down (in spite of population going up, up, up). [1] Not everyone gets an Escalade and a 5k square-foot home, but arguably they shouldn't be using those anyway. But it seems like in terms of what people "need" (food, shelter, clothing), globally humans are enjoying unprecedented prosperity, despite the enormous gaps that can and will exist - the mean seems higher. I'd call that improvement, not failure in the immediate sense, though of course this is all coming at a price to the environment whose balance due is only starting to be realized.
We're improving rapidly, but I think we need to set our expectations higher. According to givewell.org, it only costs between $3000 and $5000 to save a life. There's a lot of people who could give that amount and don't, so there's a lot of lives that could be saved that aren't. And that's a pretty miserable failure to me.
That's fascinating.. so human lives are worth more, or there's more friction to intervention these days? Hoping it's the former. But curious what you think the explanation is for this. Just a reflection in standard of living, and so the cost to save has a higher standard?
Food insecurity is still a thing, but the only mass starvation is driven by conflict in hard-to-reach places like Yemen, where you can't just easily ship food and save a million lives.
Now, the most effective aid interventions are campaigns like de-worming and Malaria; but those are more of a QALY calculation, where you de-worm 100 kids to prevent serious disease in some subset of them. Which overall drives the cost up, but is actually a good trend.
I think it's more that the lowest hanging fruit have already been picked. In other words, all the lives that could be saved for $200 have already been saved. If I'm right about that it would seem to be an unambiguously good thing.
We can always do better, that's for sure. Charitable giving is massively high in the US as a percentage of GDP though[1]. Individual giving is the highest source of that money[2]. That's a testament to something good, I think. That more people could give more and don't is a failure at an individual level, but systemically the globe is reducing poverty on its current track.
I've spent what is likely way too much mental energy wondering about this, and I'm no closer to an answer. Is there any limit to lifestyle inflation? Is it possible to have growth that simply outpaces what a human could possibly consume? Intuitively it seems obvious that there should be something like that, but in the 1800s our growth today would seem like it should be enough.
The question isn't lifestyle in the abstract. Everything that people buy today is specifically intended to impel more buying. Whether that's cars, houses or sugary foods. The situation is incredibly different than simple "everyone gets what they need" society.
But again, it seems like there are physical limits to how much people can consume. Like, we can agree that if everyone had a machine that could magically summon up to 10 thousand cubic meters of material every day, we realistically would have universal material abundance. Even if we exceeded what the boxes could make, one or two dedicated to making more would result in runaway exponential growth that would speed up much faster than human consumption could.
Obviously that's the extreme case, and the question is how close to universal replicators do you need to come before people can't want more things fast enough.
I kind of am? Besides, people don't need to never be stupid again, they just need to become stupider at a slower rate than productivity increases. If hour by hour production significantly increased, how could people possibly waste enough?
More importantly, would they? We waste resources to signal wealth. Wasting an ever greater proportion of your allocated geyser of materials doesn't signal anything.
> how close to universal replicators do you need to come
We'll probably reach technological self-replication singularity before AGI. I envision a small self replicating/repairing/transforming factory that could function based on local resources. Mostly 3d-printers, robots and tools for making tools.
But I think in reality there will be limited resources, energy and pollution we can all use, so we can't have our exponential utopia. Technology will be more like biology, and it will get good at recycling anything.
There is a manga series which is set in this concept of exponential self-replication technology gone wrong somewhere in the past (thus a futuristic dystopia):
>> The "Netsphere", a sort of computerized control network for The City. The City is an immense volume of artificial structure, separated into massive "floors" by nearly-impenetrable barriers known as "Megastructure". The City is inhabited by scattered human and transhuman tribes as well as hostile cyborgs known as Silicon Creatures. The Net Terminal Genes appear to be the key to halting the unhindered, chaotic expansion of the Megastructure, as well as a way of stopping the murderous robot horde known as the Safeguard from destroying all of humanity.
Modern, first-world society does seem to be reaching some sort of inflection point that might point to a "top" (of physical consumption at least) as we get more efficient and more stuff is moving digital. That's not to say there is really anything conclusive, but it is interesting to think about.
There's certainly people who eschew technology and live in a historical fashion. They might even be happier for it.
If there is a natural (not physical out of resources) limit where humans feel satiated i doubt we're anywhere near it. If we do hit it, wait a bunch of generations and they'll be more humans.
With exponential growth, we might be closer than you'd think. Clearly people always want more, but the rate at which we want more seems like it has to have to have a limit. At the very least, it can grow faster than the population can (almost automatically, since more people increase growth as well).
See that's exactly the thing. We can point to excess today and say "How could that be sustainable" but it seems like the novelty would wear off, no? Like in some hypothetical future where resources are 1000x more available, would people launch 1000 cars into space? It seems unlikely. Somehow I feel like there is some inelasticity to consumption that we just haven't reached yet. I'm not quite sure why I feel like that though.
I don't think launching sports cars into orbit is inherently any more wasteful than say the development of the Deep Blue chess computer. It may have been a vanity project, but the ultimate goal was to test a proof of concept.
I didn't say it was wasteful or make any judgments about it. It's just a fact that a level of lifestyle that allows a person to launch his personal sports car into space has been achieved.
I would say the Dear Moon project is more of an example than launching the car. The car was just for an initial test flight. It took the place of a block of aluminum like in one of the Falcon 1 launches.
I mean I don't think that quite qualifies as lifestyle inflation. A Roadster in Space just costs Elon $100,000 since his business planned to launch the rocket anyways. That's nothing compared to the price of a megayacht.
Except getting a $100k car shot into space also probably requires personally building the company that is "launching the rocket anyways." The SpaceX waiting list to launch junk into space for laughs is a very exclusive club.
It's a level of lifestyle that allows a person to donate his personal sports car to replace an inert mass, because he'll buy another car.
While he and many others could buy personal space launches, that launch is not a demonstration of such. He wasn't paying for it, and it wasn't for him.
I could afford to donate a $100k sports car to be launched into space if I really wanted to. Lots of people here could. How many billions of dollars short of being able to set off a chain of events that actually make that happen do you think I am?
That's the thing, being at an influential and part-marketing position at a space company isn't inherently a lifestyle thing. It's a rare opportunity but I could easily see a world where some engineer's car went up instead.
I've also spent mental energy on this, about 4-5 years, and recently I've been reaching a conclusion (in a great walkabout about AI, ethics, and the meaning of everything).
My conclusion: individual satisfaction is bounded, as long as we have bounded brains. First I should mention that the best principle I've found to underlie life is that we should maximize or optimize some kind of experience of consciousness, for every conscious entity. It's hard to define precisely what that entails, but we have quite good intuition: your life should be rich in activity, in interaction with others, in learning, in thought, in seeing, hearing, thinking; of course, not so rich as to be overwhelming and collapse the whole thing or leave us unable to digest or grasp or understand (at least a part of) what we're experiencing. I don't claim to be completely original: Wilheim von Humboldt for me is one of the great thinkers of conscious motivation (he lived in the 18th century).
"I am more and more convinced that our happiness or unhappiness depends far more on the way we meet the events of life, than on the nature of those events themselves." -- WvH
Being clear: what matters is not the experiences themselves, i.e. the input/output, but what the various consciousness apprehend. What goes on in your brain. It doesn't matter you're at the most beautiful beach in the most beautiful sunset behaving joyfully and peacefully if internally you're depressed or in despair.
"The true end of Man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal and immutable dictates of reason, and not suggested by vague and transient desires, is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole." -- WvH
You can only make an individual so complete, so harmonious with itself. Our brains have about 100 billion neurons, i.e. a finite number, and there's only so much you can activate those connections. Really the goal is not with any single individual -- our goal should be with every conscious being. That's why we should not plan individually, we should plan as a society. A billionaire can only get so happy -- he can keep linearly stacking jet skis and race cars and yatchs but his happiness won't follow (linearly). We should realize we are all part of a society, as a whole, and ideally be completely indifferent among individuals (i.e. everyone deserves as much happiness as we can collectively get them).
In other words, we should take the Golden Rule literally. (of course, in practice, not everyone can be responsible for every other individual, but it should be our ultimate guiding principle, really, as individuals and society, unmistakably): every conscious being has the same value to yourself as yourself.
Because individual satisfaction is bounded, this allows maximizing the practically unbounded (because of almost unbounded entity numbers) satisfaction of society as a whole, currently about 8 billion individuals. We need to move past egoism. I don't think an egoistical civilization, as was Western Society for much of the 20th century, can reliably go much further than we've come (see: climate change, rising political instability, fluctuating inequality, stagnating quality of life).
I'm not arguing for any political system, I'm arguing for a cultural-social-technological outlook of the entire society. I'd label it 'Universalism' (but that's taken), so perhaps 'Conscious Universalism', or 'Concious value universalism'.
That's how we move our entire civilization forward, achieve better political stability, how we're able to tackle mega projects like engineering the climate and rethinking our global supply chain, how we can allocate massive resources to space exploration, space colonization, prevention of extinction events (like asteroid impacts, etc.), how we move definitely past threat of nuclear annihilation (a nuclear conflict, still not completely ...
This way of thinking, as you draw the lines into the future, correspond to rational analysis. Could be called quality of goal-sets, as opposite to "crowing on a pile of dung" as is now the ongoing mindset of our elites. ...fascinating and not depressing the observance of reality, your way would be beyond and far of what is now passing for science, politics, societal engineering, technology layers without a grand design. It is not going to happen, goes against the history of mankind pointers. You Sir, must be one of the few, your status thus would reside in other then wealth and ego, you posess the suicidal gene!
To be clear, by conscious experience I don't mean just pleasure (or even just "happiness", just joy). Experience is much more complicated than pleasure alone, or any single feeling -- although of course generally they are good proxies in most situations (if you're happy it's usually, but not as a law, having good experiences).
I'll leave it as a reflection to the reader exactly what it entails -- with Humboldt's observation in mind (of "harmonious development [...] to a complete and consistent whole).
Another important observation to be had, is that we should have freedom to chose, in a way, what gives us pleasure, what's engrossing to us -- guided by reason. I call this concept 'freedom of utility' -- sure, we (generally) enjoy physically food, sex, and various other things (sometimes drugs that destroy our bodies and our minds); but what should we like? Imagine our intuitive tastes could be aligned to changes since we've developed millions of years ago, living in totally different environments under new light of reasoning, and new understanding of the universe.
Why should there be a limit? If you can command robots to build anything you can ever imagine, who doesn't want his own Versailles - with impressive towers like the Burj Khalifa? Who doesn't want to fly their jet or space rocket just for fun to the moon and back?
And humans will be humans. There will be new games, like drone wars on distant planets, where any production capacity and energy will be used. And since everything is very efficient, there will be no food left for birds or even poor humans.
I don’t. There is the consideration that more money comes with more problems. You can say that more money would fix those problems, but at the end of the day, you still had to spend energy thinking about it.
You can quickly approach a situation where time is the limiting factor. In this case I think that the private jet or extremely fast transportation allows you to get some time back. Beyond that you might have one or two projects that you really enjoy, like a palace, but you don’t really have enough time to handle much more. Elon is a good example: he’s got a few projects that he really cares about and does them at an extreme scale. He effectively has unlimited resources but he would not make any progress on his three major initiatives if he was much more fragmented than he is.
And if you run this to the extreme, the true cost of overconsumption creates the problem of environmental damage and negative externalities on others that can wind you up like Marie-Antoinette.
Plenty of other people are happy with minimalism. And that can be hard for some folks to understand if they aren’t minimalists.
I agree. All I want is peace. Time with my family and friends, a garden, time to read, that kind of thing. Why anyone bothers with loud cars or big houses with huge lawns is beyond me.
I don't; one can only drive one car at a time, one can only be in one room at a time, one can only eat one stomach full of food in a given period, one can only read/watch/experience at most 24 hours of media in a day.
Once your Versailles is big enough, you won't be able to walk it in a day. Once it's bigger than that, you won't be able to drive its length in a day. Once it's bigger than that, you won't be able to travel its length in a lifetime at light speed. There's a limit for you. But you likely won't want to spend your entire life travelling at lightspeed to the far wing of your house, then die. So that drops the limit enormously.
What does it mean for it to be "your Versailles" - could you draw or depict Versailles in detail from memory? How will you verify that your clone is exactly like the original? Do you care? Do you really mean that you get to design your own mega-palace? So now you spend your life choosing furnishings and layouts and architectural details - hope you like that kind of passtime, because there's a lot of it. But if you don't like that, why bother having "your Versailles" instead of going to look at someone else's for a few hours? Or look at a picture, for that matter? What are you going to do with your Versailles? Are you a king or queen with courtiers and subjects so that you can have extravagant parties? Are you going to organise the food and cleaning and heating that the robots do?
How old are you, were you around when computers ran at Khz speeds? And now you have effectively "infinite computing power", you spend your time commenting about Bitcoin on HN - why aren't you simulating your own Virtual Versailles and flights to the moon and stuff? Because it's not that interesting now you can do it? Endless hedonism is boring.
> "Who doesn't want to fly their jet or space rocket just for fun to the moon and back?"
OK, that's taken a week of sitting in a tiny box waiting and doing nothing. What about the rest of your entire life?
Listing fancy sounding things is what religions do to entrap people with dreams of heavenly afterlives. All you have to do is look around you at all the things you once wanted, and suddenly don't once you attain them - the drawer of abandoned Raspberry Pies is a common one for HN people to notice, then start to internalise that you can have any film ever made delivered to you from Amazon for a few bucks, and you don't, you can't think of a film you'd rather watch than comment "Make your own exchange." on a Robinhood thread on HN. Got a wardrobe of too many clothes? Got boxes of unused stuff? A garage of tools and spares?
Endless hedonism is boring until there is competition.
DenisM mentions status in his comment. Status will demand Versailles bigger than can be passed at light speed during a life, just to impress. There will be galaxies full of combat drones, just to keep the balance in fighting power.
I already have everything in the Universe outside your lightcone as my personal Versailles most remote wings, and you can't prove otherwise. My robots are on their way back and information about them will arrive with you approximately a second after you die, whenever that is.
See what a pointless status grab it is? If it's outside all possible knowledge, it may as well be lies (it's not though). You can play Elite: Dangerous if you want a galaxy full of combat, and it's happening right now and better than the rest of the Milky Way there are actual players and ships and things and not silent void. The main lesson I took away from Elite Dangerous is that the Galactic PowerPlay between all the major factions can never end. If it ends, if one side can dominate and win, there is no way for another faction to recover from that without a reset and restart, like all games - play, end, restart.
> "Endless hedonism is boring until there is competition"
Competition doesn't need ever increasing resource use and hedonism, it's not the resource use which captivates people (but it can make a spectacle); competition is fine with animals running, with kickball, with Chess - 32 pieces on 64 squares creates world champions, millionaires, tournaments, audiences, lifelong obsessed people, gambling opportunities, it doesn't need galaxy spanning resource use. The thing about competition is that you can't be Usain Bolt or Magnus Carlsen or John Carmack just by throwing more resources at it. At the point where you can say "I have a Versailles on every planet in the Milky Way" and someone else says "so what, everyone has", there's no competition there. If you claim you can win the Tour de France on a bike in a small region of Earth, people will sit up and take notice.
What if it's not about keeping individual humans comfortable with nice experiences but about growing the amount of awareness? We think of humans as a resource problem but they are also the source of innovation and creativity. Will resources be limited if there is the chance to grow the number of aware beings to new heights with the potential to reach new levels of civilization?
Status is a big deal. A wealth differential allows one to order other people around, building up status. Those others then feel the need to get out from under the yoke, or at least to be in the position to order around other-other people. All of this requires continuous wealth accumulation to which there is no limit. You would have to redefine status to end this game.
Also note that a situation where humanity's productivity is expanding is way better from a social standpoint than one where it is stagnant. The first allows positive sum games to exist. The second is a zero sum game. Of course there is a limit to growth as the reachable universe is finite.
If the goal of wealth accumulation is not actually to be better off but to be better than your neighbour (as it is), then positive sum games become zero sum games functionally.
So no, that's not really a solution either.
But even then, the goal isn't to limit human productivity, is it? It's to limit how much we work and lifestyle inflation, which doesn't require growth to go to zero.
"A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain."
We’ve shifted the goalposts from “providing every human the dignity of a home” to “providing every human a home that doesn’t look too shabby when compared to the highest bar in society”
Certainly, the first is enough, I'm just trying to answer why it is that people increase their consumption without end while it doesn't really make them happy.
Overpopulation is a problem. People will claim that the plant can support 20 billion+ people but they conveniently forget that these people will have an incredibly low standard of living.
Even if we were to assume that an arbitrarily low standard of living is acceptable, at some point that standard of living will include mass starvation and death so there is a real capacity limit. Being well below that limit is a virtue.
That I'm definitely not convinced of. With current levels of technology, poverty in a global setting has more to due with infrastructure and unrest than it does actual shortages. I suspect that we could pack on even more people with the industrialization of the third world, vastly increasing productivity.
More importantly, there's absolutely no reason to think that technology will somehow stop pushing the carrying capacity further. More people will yield more innovation, yielding more growth, yielding more people. If there's an endpoint to that, I doubt we'll see it any time soon. Yes, I too see how insane it is to think that sometime relatively soon global GDP will double twice in a year. But twice in a decade would be just as crazy 500 years ago.
There ought to be a point at which continuing increases in income fail to generate increases in either life expectancy or the proportion of adults who are able to work (not necessarily working). It would be necessary to distinguish this from the effects of anti-aging technology, but it should be possible in principle; improving diet/sleep/exercise and reducing pollution exposure isn't "anti-aging technology", nor are childcare/education.
His workers are poorer because his company's enormous valuation comes from the surplus value they produce but do not receive as compensation. You might be poorer if you own a small business those workers would frequent if they had more money.
Edit: You might also be poorer if you tried to compete with Amazon and were crushed like a bug by their anti-competitive practices.
Labor theory of value lmao. Amazon workers are richer because they've been given an opportunity they otherwise wouldn't have. If they could have a better job they'd take it.
Wrong mode of thinking. The problem is that there aren't enough alternatives. If you want an economy that is fair for workers then you need more jobs per worker so the worker can choose the best offer. That also means you want more employers, including the Jeff Bezos types.
How about his workers are richer because they receive a portion of the value they produce, because by combining their labor with Amazon’s capital they can produce vastly more value than without it; and if people didn’t get their share of value from producing and renting out capital they wouldn’t do it and there wouldn’t be any capital to use.
Sorta. Wealth like that is control and power, and while governments theoretically have absolute power over business, actually using those powers can break things. If the government owned the same shares, you would have slightly more direct control over what Amazon does in practice. Probably. Perhaps.
What ai wil change though is the ability of large categories of labour to win what they need on an open marketplace. I think this initiative is trying to anticipate that.
yep... expectations scale with wealth. if we set a standard of living around that of ~100 years ago there would be "enough" for all. more likely outcome is that wealth disparity remains about the same (or gets worse) but everyone is a bit better off
The GDP per capita of the world is only about $12,000. That's technically "what we need," food, clothes, and shelter for a family of 4, but on a per person basis, it's below the federal poverty line in the US.
I don't think it's correct to say that we had enough wealth a long time ago. There are a lot of places in the world that are still desperately poor by any measure, not just by the standards of the wealthy. And although it's undoubtedly true that the wealthiest few deciles could give up many luxuries to provide more for the poor, it's much more arguable if there is enough for everyone to have enough without generating much more.
GC claimed that food is all that is needed, and that their wants were satisfied by the additional of the other two things.
The fact is that the average human is not actually content to be one notch above animal with "food, sex, and purpose". That is why we have progressed much further than just accepting those basics as all we need. But I think our improvements on those things do provide enough value for the average person to be happy.
- Tasty food
- Safe sex (and relative ease of reproduction)
- Multi-variate / chosen purpose.
Plus other methods to remove annoying friction from your life:
- Optimized shelter
- Optimized travel
- Consumption of various raw goods (not for food and not for shelter). e.g. 3D Printers!
These arguments always ignore the fact that the only reason $X GDP is generated is because people are incentivized. Children don’t produce, so someone else is producing for them. If you tell people they will get $12k no matter how hard they work, they won’t work. We’ve tried socialism.
> If you tell people they will get $12k no matter how hard they work, they won’t work.
This is obviously not true, since in every capitalist society, the hardest working people already make the least amount of money, and the laziest people employed already get given the most amount of money.
Capitalism has already proven that financial incentive has no correlation to how hard someone works.
What?? It’s the exact opposite. Those people HAVE to work that hard precisely for the reason I mentioned: they won’t be paid otherwise. This is precisely the issue. If you paid people irrespective of how much they work, they won’t work.
Your example is evidence of my statement, not refutation.
Do I really work harder as a software engineer than the garbagemen who bust their asses doing a dangerous smelly job? Or teachers wrangling a room full of kids?
I think you're basically agreeing with the comment you replied to. They're saying people who are financially secure (possibly like a software engineer) are less incentivized to work hard. Someone who really needs the money is more incentivized.
If you got the same pay whether or not you showed up to work each day, you'd be less incentivized to show up.
I don't remember from school the bit where Mr Socialism said "let the workers sieze the means of production so they can shutdown the means of production, because they are lazy and stupid". "define:Socialism"[1] - "Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively". NB. that it involves production, and is /not/ "Systems of social organization in which lazy people get paid for doing nothing".
> "If you tell people they will get $12k no matter how hard they work, they won’t work"
Have you never seen or heard of volunteers? There are countries where the unemployed get money, e.g. the UK, and yet most people still work. How does this fit into your claim?
Yes, they are obviously doing the work for other reasons.
> There are countries where the unemployed get money, e.g. the UK, and yet most people still work. How does this fit into your claim?
You aren’t getting it. Those people still work because they can earn more than what the unemployment is. If all of a sudden you said even if you work, you’ll only earn the unemployment benefit, then nobody would work.
Guys please stop deciding you want to be upset about a comment and then trying to backsolve your rationale.
> "Yes, they are obviously doing the work for other reasons."
Yes, and that disproves your claim that people only work for money, and without more money people won't do more work.
> "You aren’t getting it. Those people still work because they can earn more than what the unemployment is." If all of a sudden you said even if you work, you’ll only earn the unemployment benefit, then nobody would work.*"
Volunteers earn no extra money for their work, and yet still work. Many people work unpaid overtime out of loyalty for their employer / coworkers / customers / patients, many people work out of passion and interest and hobbying ("starving artist" trope).
And, again, you're propagandising "Socialism" changing from "people get money without working" to "people can't get more than a fixed limited return on their work", which again it isn't. But let's go with that definition - if everything collectively owned, the more stuff there is the more stuff is collectively owned, so the more benefit everyone gets. When the Federal Government builds more roads, you personally get more roads you can drive on as a benefit. So even if Socialism was "you can't earn more than the minimum wage {because the collective takes it from you!}", you are part of the collective, so it still wouldn't be the case that people got no more benefit for producing more, as you claim.
This isn't a realistic way to project consumption, though. A single adult living alone has more expenses per person than a family of four under one roof. An elderly couple will not get by on $24k. (And half of people are not under 18, 21, or 25 as you may prefer to define childhood.)
Healthcare is around 10% of GDP (bar some countries that have organized their healthcare system inefficiently like my native Germany).
That still leaves you with $10.800. A liability insurance costs here around 50–100€ per year for a family. What more insurances do you need? GDP per capita also includes pensioners, so you do not need to count pension into this.
My understanding is that reducing a single person's income from 12,000 to 10,800 is a big deal. And in any case, my original point was that this is barely "enough," and this is assuming a perfectly efficient and equitable distribution. It may actually, technically be enough, but it's poverty. It's only not poverty if you also receive the income for people you take care of who don't actually need all of the income (like kids). I don't think arguing over whether $11,000 is as good as $12,000 is particularly meaningful because I don't think $12,000 is enough either, and my main disagreement with the original poster was with the statement that there has been enough for a long time. That seems unequivocally untrue to me.
People might still be more unhappy even though society at large delivers them things that could be unimaginable today. The creators and owners who can deliver that future will be richer than everyone else (rightfully so, imo) and that divide is what I think could make people more unhappy although they will be much better off than what we are today.
I doubt that. People who are ultra rich use money as a proxy for power, influence and status. In a post scarcity world money likely won't be a great way to attain status so the hope is that status will be obtained through other means like creative expression or charisma.
"This revolution will erode enough biome for every human to be dependent on the industrial complex to survive, while animals are basically left to starve."
Human wants for things are endless. Human desire for extra time, even more so.
Human needs are subjective to each and every human. Why does Bezos get up in the morning?, if you’d like something aphoristic you may reply to in many creative ways.
There is a lot of hubris in saying we’re pretty much maxed out now, thanks and time to stop.
I’d suggest instead we need to make smart choices, and that usually smart answers are not found at the far extremities.
This “we have all we need” bit reminds me of scientists saying physics was over in the 19th century, combined with a bit of Thomas Malthus in such a way that we all die unless we halt innovation. It reminds me of that, but I’d be overstepping to put those words in your mouth. After all human intention has endless range to match the rest.
>Human needs are subjective to each and every human
After a certain point that's true but I think you miss the point of the parent. There are many, many hungry people in the world, many people without shelter and further millions who have no access to healthcare education or even clean water. These are not subjective needs.
Those people are in that position inspite of the fact that we could, with the wealth we have, feed, house and provide health care and education for each and every one of them.
Ah, thanks. I felt that was a separate point to the idea of stopping progress because we have enough. I didn’t realize that was the main point?
Yes indeed, we have enough to ease those burdens and it’s a terrible thing that they continue!
> Those people are in that position inspite of the fact that we could, with the wealth we have, feed, house and provide health care and education for each and every one of them.
I don’t think this is really true, part of the problem is that the wealth that you think could be allocated to this problem was only generated by incentivizing people to build it with compensation, if you turned around and took it away from the people who built it and gave it to people who did not build it, you would disincentivize creation of more wealth, and the wealth you reappropriated would deteriorate, because you neglected to create an incentive and maintenance infrastructure to keep it working. This is exactly what happened when we tried this, starting with poor people in our own communities.
Public housing projects and welfare programs are money sinks that are notoriously counterproductive at meeting their stated needs; and we can’t get people to consider the structural imbalances that result because the need for these programs is an article of faith and among the believers the only acceptable reasons for their failure are “people who don’t agree with the program” and “lack of funding.”
That's why the article goes on to explain how to fix that. I believe they are two independent points, the taxation proposition is independent from the AI revolution and could be applied today. What the article argues is that the AI revolution would make wealth accumulation so massive that we will need laws and taxes, and new ways of looking at the world.
> We had enough wealth for everyone to have what we need a long time ago.
That's obviously not true today: There isn't enough coronavirus vaccine to go around.
There almost certainly will be enough eventually, but human beings live in the now. There will be another pandemic someday. Or some other natural disaster that creates localized or temporal scarcity. We can't just spin up a new lifesaving drug or a million new homes overnight. Maybe someday we will?
> There isn't enough coronavirus vaccine to go around.
That is mostly a question of regulations. The part that takes so much time is getting the vaccines approved; many researchers don't even try because they know they wouldn't have enough money to get their vaccine approved. Also, most governments negotiate hard to reduce the prices, despite the fact that economic damage from lockdowns is much greater.
> AI will lower the cost of goods and services, because labor is the driving cost at many levels of the supply chain. If robots can build a house on land you already own from natural resources mined and refined onsite, using solar power, the cost of building that house is close to the cost to rent the robots. And if those robots are made by other robots, the cost to rent them will be much less than it was when humans made them.
The issue with rising costs of housing is not (completely) linked to labor costs, it's land value, regulatory capture, bad infrastructure, and heavily marketed house-in-the-suburbs-as-the-only-way-to-live.
Construction is a big part in some locations but it doesn't make housing unaffordable, merely expensive.
From memory:
Tearing a $2 million single family house and putting 6 apartments there would allow you to charge $3k rent. Build taller and rent drops even lower. This is assuming construction costs of $500 per sqft.
Rising costs of housing is, almost entirely, due to the fact that individuals are allowed to own more houses than they can use, while most people don't own any. It seems fairly obvious that if you control the housing market, a human need, you can set prices as high as they will possibly pay them.
I like this idea, but is the technical implementation of a progressive social policy (whether it be a tax on equity versus something else) actually the hard part?
Alternative take: the hard part is that the US is heterogeneous and people just don't trust each other to not abuse benefits. (You could also say it's racist). How could we give equity to every person when we can't even seem to agree that they deserve basic healthcare?
> Economic growth matters because most people want their lives to improve every year.
Improve how? Should I need economic growth to get better health care? This whole techno-utopian argument seems to hinge on extractive growth because it fails to actually tackle the problems of inequality by providing true redistribution of wealth in any meaningful sense. Trickle-down AI is a sham.
> If everyone owns a slice of American value creation, everyone will want America to do better: collective equity in innovation and in the success of the country will align our incentives.
I kind of doubt that. At Google we're paid in part with shares of GOOG, but at Google's scale that's just treated as cash compensation. At my level, nothing I do affects the stock price, and most Googlers feel this way.
Sure, I want Google to do well, and I want America to do well too. Both of them doing well benefits me. But it doesn't really encourage me to do something different day-to-day.
You never know. Butterfly effect and all that. It adds up. Best example I know of is when I was younger and playing WoW, my brother was explaining gemming your gear to me. I told him "what will a +4 intelligence gem do really?" But you add up all the gems on all the sockets on the gear and it makes a huge difference. The difference being the difference between a strong character and a weak one and living or dying. Each you in google is a potential gem in the system. Or you can be an empty socket. Add all those up and it does have a huge effect on the outcome of Google (and the stock price).
I apply this theory to many diverse subjects- voting, finances, human health and car maintenance (once one system is suboptimal or impaired, others often follow). Keep your sockets gemmed. :)
>You never know. Butterfly effect and all that. It adds up.
The butterfly effect affects most no physical systems, which contain incredible amounts of damping processes. The same thing happens with people - if a zillion of them want things that point in somewhat different directions, the net does not add up, it cancels.
Otherwise most physical systems would simply explode to infinities, but in practice they don't. They dissipate and become less useful.
So nicely said.
I read a quote somewhere about ancient big buildings... Like stonemasons that were crafting stones had to imagine each stone beating really important in the bigger picture.
The quote said it better than me here.
Feeling basically neutral towards your employer (or nation) is probably how having reasonably aligned incentives feels at scale. If you were an hourly minimum wage worker for a large corporation, there's a good chance you'd spend a good part of your workday in a blind, passive-aggressive rage.
> “We could do something called the American Equity Fund. The American Equity Fund would be capitalized by taxing companies above a certain valuation 2.5% of their market value each year, payable in shares transferred to the fund..”
I could be in favor of something like this.
However, I’d be curious to hear Sam’s thoughts on what kind of vehicle do we use to ensure that this equity actually reaches end-users?
I can make a very strong historical case that the government is not the right vehicle for this to work. You could also just look at the most recent $1.9T stimulus bill — where only a fraction of it went out as checks to Americans in need.
I feel like unless the words "as checks" are doing a lot of work, the implication of your last sentence is not true. A sibling comment posted a link to a wikipedia article which says:
> The bill's economic-relief provisions are overwhelmingly geared toward low-income and middle-class Americans, who will benefit from (among other provisions) the direct payments, the bill's expansion of low-income tax credits, child-care subsidies, expanded health-insurance access, extension of expanded unemployment benefits, food stamps, and rental assistance programs.
Here's [0] a more direct breakdown of there the 1.9T went. A large chunk of the money was spent on the $1400 checks, extending unemployment insurance (which come as checks/direct deposit), and the child tax credit (which really will just be realized as another check). The majority of the rest goes to state governments (who will probably redistribute some of it), K-12 schools, and "energy and commerce" which supposedly includes contact tracing efforts and vaccines. Doesn't seem like a big misallocation of resources to me.
> In the next five years, computer programs that can think will read legal documents and give medical advice. In the next decade, they will do assembly-line work
Wait, medical advice is easier than assembly line work??
Imagine:
1) I'm the owner of a single family home
2) My income drops to roughly zero because of AI
3) My property values go through the roof
4) I now owe 2.5% of these sky-rocketing property values every year, to be paid from my non-existent income
Doesn't this scenario lead to me either selling my "gifted" shares to pay property taxes, or ending up a renter at best and homeless at worst? I can imagine this proposal leading to greater concentrations of wealth rather than spreading it around.
A variant of this is responsible for the rise of oligarchy during de-Sovietization in Russia. Citizens were given shares of state companies, but people's basic needs weren't met. This resulted in most shares being sold to whomever would buy them for any amount of money or basic resources. This, along with the general power vacuum, led to the rapid consolidation of massive amounts of power in the hands of whoever managed to wield local power for their benefit at the time--those who became the oligarchs.
Bill Browder writes a bit about it in his book, Red Notice. The book is also a great cautionary tale that the whole narrative that we can spread democratic ideals by making business deals with with corrupt/despotism regimes is smoke. It leads to more corruption, less moral authority, and further empowered despots.
Even without the hypothetical AI effect on income, this is a proposal which will tax you 100% of the value of your property over a 40 year period whilst over the same period YC's LPs and founders will have paid just 2.5% of the [much higher] value of their companies.
Now there are efficiency arguments in favour of taxing land to encourage its use and not taxing productive enterprises or their investors too heavily, but this is pretty extreme...
> which will tax you 100% of the value of your property
If it's a property tax, yes. If it's a land tax, no. Under land tax you tax the "ground rent" value of the land, not what's built on it. "Ground rent" is what it costs to rent out your land if it was an empty lot with nothing on it. Property tax and land tax are very different things with very different effects.
How are we determining that the land value increased because of speculation, and not because the land continues to become exponentially more valuable do to its location in a popular area?
The Georgist land value (which Altman suggests might be more practically replaced by a system linked to actual property transaction values) is still going to be a sufficiently large proportion of the value of a typical home to ensure pretty much anyone not living in a multistorey tenement block is paying massively higher tax rates on their home than anyone pays on a YC company.
The entire point of land value taxes is to turn land into a liability. You don't get to benefit from the accomplishments of other people. You only get to benefit from your own accomplishments e.g. by building a multistory tenant block and renting it out.
Property values generally rise because an area has a very attractive jobs market. Overall, it's a benefit to society to incentivize people with no income to move out an area with a lower cost of living. This incentivizes more people move there and do productive work, which can be taxed and distributed.
I just find something very cold and socially undesirable in the idea that somebody can spend a lifetime putting in the work to get the home they want, only to be forced out because "society" decides they are no longer productive. I'm no NIMBY—those people shouldn't have the right to stop others from developing their own properties—but I'm not sure I like the idea of economic incentives kicking the least productive to the curb because it's "efficient".
If being taxed 2.5% a year counts as being "forced out," then staying in a highly productive area of land indefinitely is "forcing" people who can otherwise move to your house to stay poor. Never mind that it's the wealthy are the ones who benefit from elimination of property taxes.
It's society that makes the property valuable in the first place, so it makes sense to pay society back. The firefighters, schools, and social workers in your area need to get paid extra to account for the cost of living increases. That money should come from the people benefit the most from their services, the property owners.
> If being taxed 2.5% a year counts as being "forced out," then staying in a highly productive area of land indefinitely is "forcing" people who can otherwise move to your house to stay poor.
“Otherwise” is doing a lot of work here. The people can’t “otherwise” move there because the person isn’t selling, that’s the idea. Taxing people so they are forced to sell is forcing them out. Not taxing people so they are not forced to sell is letting them stay there. You’ve yet to explain why the people who do live there have less of a claim to the house than the wealthier people who would buy it from them.
> Never mind that it's the wealthy are the ones who benefit from elimination of property taxes.
Yes nevermind that since its not even true.
> It's society that makes the property valuable in the first place, so it makes sense to pay society back.
This reifies “society” as a thing-in-itself rather than properly considering society as consisting of the people who own the properties and make them valuable by their ownership, maintenance, and use. Then it equivocates “society” with the actual government that collects the taxes and decides how they are spent (typically routing them to their friends who sell goods and services to the government).
> The firefighters, schools, and social workers in your area need to get paid extra to account for the cost of living increases.
Cost of living increases like land value tax? Like how landlords pass increased taxes and maintenance onto their tenants?
> That money should come from the people benefit the most from their services, the property owners.
Its not at all clear that property owners benefit disproportionately from social services, and they also pay for those services through taxes.
I think most of this recent fascination with Georgism is a result of California tax policy and doesn’t withstand a cursory economic analysis.
Overall, I agree with you that Georgist LVT is nonsense, but overall, I think that an LVT would be an efficient way to raise revenue.
> Taxing people so they are forced to sell is forcing them out.
That's still very much overstretching the word "force." If the government taxes a cigarette factory out of existence, are they "forcing" the workers to move if they need to do so to find another job?
> You’ve yet to explain why the people who do live there have less of a claim to the house than the wealthier people who would buy it from them.
I view this as a meaningless philosophical question. There are so many ways that life can be unfair. Being taxed into selling your home at a huge profit is just not a concern I care about.
> Like how landlords pass increased taxes and maintenance onto their tenants?
This is completely untrue. Rent is solely dependent on supply and demand. Demand is elastic, and supply is very inelastic and even more so in highly desirable cities, so it doesn't get very affected by a tax. If property taxes get passed down to tenants, Prop 13 would have passed the tax savings onto renters, which it clearly has not.
> Its not at all clear that property owners benefit disproportionately from social services, and they also pay for those services through taxes.
Financially, a renter would be fine if their home burns down, becomes surrounded by used needles, or has a terrible school district. The homeowner reaps the financial benefit from these services, so they should expect to pay a share.
> Financially, a renter would be fine if their home burns down, becomes surrounded by used needles, or has a terrible school district.
Thanks for your reply. I think this statement is a good example of how I think your reply misses the point and so I’m not sure we will come to any agreement. Thanks.
> You’ve yet to explain why the people who do live there have less of a claim to the house than the wealthier people who would buy it from them.
You've yet to explain why the people living there have more of a claim to the land than anyone else in society. The model you've proposed is basically "first come first serve" (ie. homesteading principle). Except even that doesn't apply given that some of the land currently in private ownership was previously used by others, who were forced off it, via colonization in North America, and the enclosure acts in Europe. Should we return the land to the descendants of the Native Americans?
Given that land is a scarce good, and access to good land gives substantial benefits to those with access, "first come first serve" simply isn't a workable way to allocate land. Those with land are able to charge rents to those without, and they can pass this privilege down to their heirs, keeping this inequality going.
> Its not at all clear that property owners benefit disproportionately from social services, and they also pay for those services through taxes.
Here's a simple example. Suppose the government decides to build a new transit line going to the edge of the city. The rents and property values along the line will increase. And in most places, income and sales taxes fund at least part of the cost. So renters will pay some of the cost, but get no financial benefit, while also paying increased rents. On the other hand, the landowners will pay some of the cost, but they'll also profit from the increased rents and land values. Essentially, renters pay "twice" for government services: once for the actual service, and then again when the existence of the service leads to higher rents, which are then reaped by landowners.
> I think most of this recent fascination with Georgism is a result of California tax policy and doesn’t withstand a cursory economic analysis.
Basically every economist agrees with the principles behind Georgism, starting from Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and continuing to modern economists like Milton Friedman and Joseph Stiglitz, so I don't really know what you're talking about here.
You should read about the Law of Rent by Ricardo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent), which basically states what I have said here: land rent is equal to the marginal economic advantage, which is obviously not created by the landowner.
> You've yet to explain why the people living there have more of a claim to the land than anyone else in society.
Generally one would ask that the people proposing a change to circumstances assume the burden of proof; it should be obvious why I can’t remove the food from your kitchen and expect you to justify why I should stop.
If you want a more formal argument then its turtles all the way down, I can approach your preferred landowners on the day post-acquisition and use the same procedure to expropriate them, someone else can do the same to me on the next day, ad infinitum.
> The model you've proposed is basically "first come first serve" (ie. homesteading principle). Except even that doesn't apply given that some of the land currently in private ownership was previously used by others, who were forced off it, via colonization in North America, and the enclosure acts in Europe. Should we return the land to the descendants of the Native Americans?
You are aware that many people argue that we should do exactly that, correct? I’m not aware of many people who argue to the contrary, and I’m not sure there is any use in reciting their arguments here.
The expropriation of the Natives is almost universally regarded as a moral wrong in polite society. its fine for you to disagree but I’m at a loss as to why you would assume that I disagree.
> Given that land is a scarce good, and access to good land gives substantial benefits to those with access, "first come first serve" simply isn't a workable way to allocate land.
This is a non sequitur as you’ve failed to explain why one person’s good deal is unworkable for another.
> Those with land are able to charge rents to those without, and they can pass this privilege down to their heirs, keeping this inequality going.
It seems that you’re assuming that inequality is a bad thing. I think inequality is a fact, and the moral implications must be argued for rather than assumed.
> Suppose the government decides to build a new transit line going to the edge of the city. The rents and property values along the line will increase. And in most places, income and sales taxes fund at least part of the cost. So renters will pay some of the cost, but get no financial benefit,
Why aren’t the renters gaining financial benefit from improvements to mass transit in their area? It seems that you’re arguing against the government being able to fund boondoggles from taxes.
> On the other hand, the landowners will pay some of the cost, but they'll also profit from the increased rents and land values. Essentially, renters pay "twice" for government services: once for the actual service, and then again when the existence of the service leads to higher rents, which are then reaped by landowners.
I feel as though you’ve neglected to consider that the renters benefit from mass transit and therefore there’s no reason for them not to be expected to pay for it; and the fact that public infrastructure results in higher land values is covered under the property tax that we already have established. This whole thing could be bypassed by arguing that these types of improvements should be paid by property taxes (excluding sales taxes etc.).
> Basically every economist agrees with the principles behind Georgism, starting from Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and continuing to modern economists like Milton Friedman and Joseph Stiglitz, so I don't really know what you're talking about here.
Yeah if you think this is a reasonable statement of the economic consensus vis a vis Georgism I doubt we can learn much from discussion with each other, nice talking and have a good day. Thanks for the Ricardo link.
I don't really have the energy to respond to all your points (but thank you for making them, they've shown where I was unclear in my writing, or made assumptions that weren't obvious), but I wanted to mention one thing:
> This whole thing could be bypassed by arguing that these types of improvements should be paid by property taxes
This is pretty much the core policy that Georgism advocates for: "Henry George is best known for popularizing the argument that government should be funded by a tax on land rent rather than taxes on labor". The rest is just a way to provide economic/justice based reasons for this policy.
> because "society" decides they are no longer productive.
You have to consider the benchmark. Do people deserve to live in a castle if they aren't productive enough?
Living in a single family home in the middle of NYC requires a whole lot of productivity because you are literally displacing dozens of other people. You have to be as productive as all those people combined to be worthy of replacing them.
So by your accounting, if I purchase a home in Stockton, CA right now, then in 40 years when I'm old and can't afford the taxes on my lifelong home because Stockton is huge then, I'm to be kicked out for a more productive use?
More likely, the government would place a lien on your property, and when you die or sell your home, the profits would be used to pay for the deferred tax, rather than simply accruing to you or your heirs.
And why should the home I paid for be auctioned by the government? How is that fair for anyone but the wealthy? You're saying that only the rich can stay in one place, everyone else has to move to the middle of no where or risk losing it all to said rich folk who will buy my property at auction by the government.
In my original comment, I stated "when you die or sell your home", so I don't see why anyone would have to move.
If you think people shouldn't have to pay extra when their land becomes more valuable, I don't see why they should still get the profits when their land becomes more valuable. That's basically socializing the costs, but privatizing the profits, which is obviously a bad thing to do.
> I now owe 2.5% of these sky-rocketing property values every year
Just as a UBI gives people an income floor, I think that a land tax should come with a personal allowance below which you are exempt.
To do some rough calculations, the US state with the highest population density is New Jersey, at 1,210.1 people per square mile, which equates to 23,038 square feet per person. The average American house size is apparently 2,687 square feet, which is typically shared by multiple people, so the allowance could be comfortably set to maybe 10,000 square feet per person.
The key thing about a land value tax is that it's based on land value, and not land area, so the allowance should also be based on value and not area, for it to work right.
10,000 sq ft in Manhattan is much more valuable than 10,000 sq ft in a rural area, and so it doesn't make sense that both should be treated equally.
If your property value doubles and you lose your job, why wouldn't you sell your property for a massive gain, take that money and buy a new house somewhere cheaper, thereby avoiding the tax issue entirely? Seems like a situation where you want to have your cake and eat it, too.
A property's value doubling isn't a one-off event, it'd be widespread and continuous. That cheaper place's value will rise proportionally, and now they've the same problem, except with an overall lower quality of life now that they're living in a worse property.
My property has doubled due to an incoming commuter rail line... which means my taxes will go up. I used to have the cheapest house in town, which means if I have to move, I have to find a smaller house in a less desirable neighborhood, or end up renting, then homeless as the rents rise.
The rich will get richer, and the rest of us will get poorer.
As I understand it, the fund would also pay cash. You would get a share of the 2.5% of taxed equities and a share of the 2.5% property taxes. Owners of property with a value over the average would be essentially paying everyone else.
Sold on the premise that when AI gets here it will change everything. What I don't have a good grasp on is how fast it will come. Recent feats of AI are very impressive, but it's hard for me to put it on a trendline that would line it up with massive changes coming with 10 years. Predictions around AI have made similar claims for the last 50 years. Why is it different this time?
I'd recommend the book Life 3.0, the author surveys a large number of AI researchers to answer this timing question (I think 95% said AGI is guaranteed in the next 50 years iirc), and also discusses why this time is different than the times in the past, like in the 60's when a group of researchers thought they would make significant progress towards AGI over the course of a summer
I try to keep up with the industry, just to see where it's going. From what I can tell, AI (in the general sense) is so flexible it can be applied to just about anything with observable data points, which is basically everything. Are these applications useful? I think right now they are impactful, not necessarily useful. EG: we can already copy someone's voice perfectly with just a small amount of audio using AI. But in practise, not much has come from this incredibly remarkable feat.
So what does AI need to get to the next level? Not much but time to mature, all the tools are already there.
For the vast majority of the world: food, shelter, health and comfort are driven by energy. Cheap/abundant energy will lift everyone. AI can help us in that process and then will have broader global benefits in 50 years. Not because it won't be ready, but because we won't be ready.
Let's build a system that's pretty much indistinguishable from socialism, but call it capitalism. That way, when it inevitably fails, we'll blame capitalism.
I know you are being sarcastic, but I don't know if everyone understands Sam Altman's motivation for running OpenAI the way it's being run. Sam is trying to create AI which causes the greatest benefit for humanity. That's openAI's mission. Open sourcing everything now would not achieve the mission.
In case the "why" is not obvious: AI progress is limited by a) great research talent; b) money -- specifically being able to invest in compute. If OpenAI were to open source everything, they would not be able to raise the money they need to invest in compute, which would cause a death spiral in their ability to attract and retain their researchers. They need to have a story for why they will make money in the short term to continue being a top tier AI research org. And since AI is "winner take all", it is likely worse for the world if a less altruistic company takes all the talent and source code.
If your point is just that OpenAI is a misnomer now, I agree :). It's not open. But I do think they have settled on a surprisingly good point in solution space (the capped-profit company, the charter, etc); I don't see ways to validly criticize the company from an altruism perspective.
AI progress is not limited at all, it's the fastest moving research field in the world (5x improvement in efficiency / year for training a task to the same precision for the same cost if I recall correctly, far better than Moore's law).
OpenAI is opening the world to AI and helping people just like Google's doing ,,no evil'', Facebook is connecting people. At the point when an organization gets big enough to not keep its original values (being open for OpenAI), it's not better (less altruistic) in ,,making the world a better place'' than any other organization. Competition and having the power of AI distributed in more companies is good though (until they acquire each other).
There are some really smart ideas in here, and some really smart assessments of existing policies.
The thing I was most taken aback by was Sam's suggestion to tax privately held land, and capital (as opposed to labor tax).
I would love to have Sam and PG go toe to toe and discuss how Sam's proposal is different from the wealth tax post PG made. I don't immediately see how Sam's idea avoids the "wealth tax compounds" problem (his words not mine) that PG is worried about.
Sam's proposal doesn't avoid the wealth tax compounds simple arithmetic that PG notes.
And yes many important questions for society to answer on this, e.g. how much does is disincentivize entrepreneurs if they have half of their wealth taxed away over the decades compared to current taxation system?
Just a thought experiment: let's say we take Sam's ideas alongside something like UBI, where everyone has a baseline of income provided by the society they live in.
You succeed wildly, and get rich as an entrepreneur. Sadly, in a generation or two, your grandchildren will be back with the rest of the plebeians, despite grandpops launching YC, writing books on art and coding and creating an bunch of amazing companies. But, your grandkids are now not motivated by escaping the poverty they live in, but by a simple desire to live differently than the other normal people out there (also living on UBI).
This seems a lot like what happens in places like Russia or Venezuela or Brazil, where the best and the brightest (often from upper crust there) flee their countries to make it big in Europe, US or the Middle East, but not always because they have such horrible lives there.
Except that, unlike entrepreneurs driven by a mindset that has them feel like it is never enough, these ones are just trying to escape the ennui of boredom of suburbia, and slipping back into that isn't so awful. The alternative drive of escaping poverty does something very different and rapacious: see Tyco and Dennis Kozlowski: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Kozlowski, who despite enormous wealth couldn't stop himself from having his company pay for even his rugs.
It's like the best of communism, and the best of capitalism!
</joke>
Seriously, isn't there an interesting space for entrepreneurs in a new world like the one Sam is describing?
In the Soviet Union, there was no such problem - brilliant people by and large were happy to become scientists and engineers, and scientists and engineers got into the planning agencies and into the government too, in droves. Same in pre 1989 China.
I don't see why the USSR and Mao's China were able to retain (and sometimes even attract) these people, but the society you're describing wouldn't be able to.
Actually, after some digging, I found something Lenin wrote about what to do with the entreprising kind of people - he wanted them to be put to use in organising projects and production, whereas the Kozlowski type were to be ignored (or worse).
So I guess the solution he found was to allow them to create big organizations and projects, but instead of paying them in money, they were paid in social status and achievement. If that worked to retain people like Kolmogorov, Ilyushin, Kalashnikov, Korolev, etc..., couldn't simply socially different positions for people that are enterprising be sufficient?
The brilliant people that stayed in the USSR had no choice - they were kept there by force either directly (not allowed to leave) or indirectly (leave but your family will pay the price).
But they all wanted to leave. The more you knew how much better your life could be in the west, the more you hated staying.
See, I don't know if that's true. The main counter evidence to your hypothesis were the defections of scientists and engineers to the USSR, the amount of brilliant people that regretted the fall of the USSR, and so on.
For example, one of my brilliant math teachers was from a Soviet state, and had the opportunity to leave all along - he only did so as the USSR fell and he did not see any prospect in the East anymore.
Patriotism is a strong emotion. But beyond that, many brilliant people in communist countries really did enjoy a very elevated social status - if you see what children aspired too, being a scientist or engineer was really up there. And as far as job security and research freedom, for example, there was often quite a bit of it. On the other hand, you had drastically less freedom, but it doesn't seem the ones who chose to stay valued it as much as we would.
See, I know that is true. I was unlucky enough to grow up behind the iron curtain. I know the situation directly from the choices faced by my parents and their friends and after its fall I watched the best of my teachers slowly but surely emigrate to Canada or the Western Europe.
You can't really understand how it was unless you lived it. First of all, patriotism ceased to exist, except for propaganda. Struggle and fear - abject fear - replaced patriotism as the driving emotion. We ended up hating our country - we're still trying to re-learn how to love it 30 years later.
The ones in elevated status were collaborating with the authorities and the secret police. They ratted out on their friends and family. Everybody hated and feared them because of that.
The freedom was, of course, gone, and we got used to that. Freedom is just not that important when you're hungry. But the feeling that best described our state of mind then was: hopelessness. We did not, could not hope for a better future, for better times for us or our children. We could not see any escape, any chance at change. Because as individuals, there was nothing we could do. We were completely robbed of our agency, of our power, of our rights. The past, present and future was a single color: gray.
People who somehow went to the West came back changed. They just could not believe one could live with so much freedom, choices and wealth. Their stories inspired others. I was maybe 12 and I remember clearly dreaming up ways of running out of the country, to my father's absolute horror. I would cry rivers if my own children would have to go to through that.
The issue is, you're just someone on the internet. The real people I know disagree with you, and so do statistics, so while I completely empathize with you, I can't agree.
Use your logic then. Ask yourself who was defecting where. Ask yourself who had a the better level of life and who had the gulags. Ask yourself why so many countries and their hundred of millions of inhabitants violently overthrew the communist regime at the end of the '80s.
Better yet, go ahead and pay a visit to the communist success stories of N Korea, Cuba or Venezuela. They are still around. Maybe they will convince you.
Then finally look around at the very tools you are using. The car you are driving, the furnace heating your house, the computer you write on. They are all success stories of capitalism. Ask yourself where are the success stories of communism. What things it built, what hard, concrete, useful stuff it created. Believe the proof presented to you by the real world - and reject the propaganda.
The majority of the citizens of the USSR were against its dissolution - but that didn't matter, it was mostly an elite affair.
I look at statistics and what people that I know and lived there told me. Most people who were adults at the time seem to regret the fall of the Soviet Union, and most people from post-Soviet states had to leave when they couldn't make a living anymore as the economy collapsed - despite post Soviet states being squarely in the middle of what you can expect from life on earth and above the median in all relevant metrics.
So certainly, it wasn't perfect, but it was very far from hell on earth, and squarely above the middle.
Your argument would also be stronger if you didn't classify Venezuela, a country with a bigger private sector relatively than France, as a communist country - Cuba, I've went there, was far from bad, much better certainly than where I came from, and despite debilitating American sanctions has a GDP PPP of over 21000$ which is quite impressive and above the average for the world, let alone Latin America, and by far the best of any country sanctioned by the US, and North Korea abandoned communism for a long time for their own "Juché" ideology which is basically Strasserism, preaches the superiority of the Korean race, and now allows private markets too.
Your stories are also quite telling - the computer I'm using was only possible under capitalism because the government gave itself the power to control ideas, as capitalism is otherwise incompatible with large-scale intellectual innovation. I drive no car, as it is far inferior to good quality public transportation plus walkable neighborhood, and my house is electrically heated by 100% renewable energy because we had the good sense of nationalizing the power grid and making massive investments in renewable energy (which we now produce at costs lower than any free market of energy, renewable or not).
The actual evidence when I try to look it at critically, shielding myself from all forms of propaganda (in the classical sense of the word), makes it clear that reality is far more nuanced than is common wisdom in these circles, and one of those results after careful study of history and data is that the USSR did not, in fact, have much of an issue retaining engineers and scientists, and relative to its size and prosperity did an okay job at innovating and keeping its population happy. Far from the best, but much better than most.
As far as I can tell, it's not different. Unless you could consistently generate the 2.5% property value to pay the tax each year (in a world where AI has sent incomes to zero!), then you'll eventually lose your property.
Land Value tax has a long history in economics; it acts very differently from capital and wealth taxes because Land really behaves differently from those two classes of things. I highly recommend reading Henry George on the subject, who originally popularized the idea.
Note "Land Tax" != "Property Tax." Land tax taxes only the value of the underlying "ground rent", NOT the value of the improvements (stuff you build on land). Property Tax taxes both.
I don't see the issue with the wealth tax compounding, because the wealth also compounds.
That's exactly the "problem" with wealth (from the perspective of society's growing wealth inequality). Wealth compounds much, much faster than income grows. Someone who inherits $3 million (not much from the point of view of the wealthy) can live comfortably on the growth alone while still compounding their wealth further every year.
The only way a wealth tax would compound faster than the wealth itself is if it is larger than the growth rate of the wealth. And since that's averaged at ~8-10% over the past few decades, a 1% tax is not going to eat into a person's wealth over time. It's simply going to slightly slow that growth down.
The estimation of 15% loss of market cap due to the 2.5% cap tax is laughable. That is effectively a reverse buyback of 2.5% every year. It would leave many companies with 0 or negative profit. Any company with P/E above 40 immediately loses money. 20 has their profit chopped in half. The values of these companies would be reduced by at least 50%.
That's just an argument for why wealth taxes should never go above 2%. If you can't double or triple your wealth in 60 years what are you doing with it?
Another way to look at a land tax (instead of as a wealth tax) is that it's sort of "user fee". You're paying society "rent" (a land tax was called ground rent by Adam Smith) for depriving the commons of that land.
Typically, land value tax is based on the rental value of land rather than the market value, so it's even more in line with this model.
We want to move to a society where land is not treated as wealth, but rather as a resource to use (because that leads to less land speculation, and more productive use of land), so this model is fine.
As with so much Silicon Valley stuff, I think the latest evangelizing for AI is probably just laundering military and counterinsurgency tech as some kind of utopian consumer godsend. Obviously AGI will remain a pipe dream, but what we will get is autonomous robotic soldiers with no conscience (that can be counted on to put down unrest without questioning their orders), or listening software that can monitor everyone's communications to identify targets in real time.
My main thought after seeing Elysium was "if the robots are so advanced, why not use them to help people?" Healthcare is just a big as the military, so why would the robot makers turn down that opportunity?
There was never in history a quest for the benefit of what is now a surplus population that has as only asset to pollute, contaminate, be parasitical and cannibalistic. Whatever stands for AI(no real definition in the lead text, just suggestive blabla), will be at the benefit of the immediate and power of the established few. Our "elites" are, were cockroaches. Between them and the latter surplus population there is a margin of whoring societals with some wackoo agenda not surpassing their primary drifts. The lower on the food chain, the cruder the desires for basic comfort.
I think the end goal of human society is full automation and immortality. In the process of coming to that there will be all kind of problems, challenges, dramas and chaos. But once we are there it's kinda all gone and done.
The ends justify the means? Forgive me if I don't agree that some small sliver of sociopathic elites getting to live forever as nanite clouds or whatever excuses genocide euphemistically referred to as "dramas and chaos."
For example wars, colonization, and inquisition were dramas and chaos but after them and sometimes with the help of them came progress and innovation.
Medieval Church had monopoly on education and knowledge but still believed earth was flat and prosecuted brutally anyone who opposed them.
French Revolution was bloody and messy but it brought democracy and decentralized education which afterwards led to tremendous progress and innovation.
In the next five years, computer programs that can think will read legal documents and give medical advice.
Aside from the other points, taking "AI" as it exists in it's present form (deep neural networks and related) as specifically the bringer of unlimited wealth certainly puffs up the various "AI companies" notably OpenAI (It should be noted that OpenAI's most famous product, GPT-3, can generate strings that sound a lot like legal or medical advice but it so far "demonstrates non-understanding on a regular basis". Don't follow it's advice to kill yourself, for example).
It really should be said that deep learning, in particular, is still just one technology that's very good at some things, kind of impressive but not functional at other things, and just unable to do other things (actual understanding of biology, for example, seems well beyond them). I don't think this situation has changed since deep learning began it's hype cycle (which isn't to say it's "nothing", it just doesn't seem like to bring us "everything", a scenario the article literally sketches).
Automation has proceeded apace, automation in general has brought us enough resources right now to give minimal comfort to most people in the planet (as people have noted).
But automation has generally succeeded in situations where everything is controlled - ie, factories. Self-driving cars are forever five years away given the 5% or 1% or whatever level of unpredictable variable involved. Progress on robots that can interact well with either humans or "the messy real world" even in very limited terms has been painfully slow and I expect this to continue.
In 1995, a self driving car drove 98% of the way across the country. Think what these same people predicting AI today would have predicted in 1995. They would probably believe we were 10 years away from self driving cars in every household. We still dont have a mass produced level 3 system in 2021.
The scenario of AI mostly replacing people like doctors and lawyers involves bizarre paradoxes beyond whether deep learning "AI" works as advertised. Suppose you can train an "AI" to read legal papers or diagnose patients based on X-rays. That training is done from the data of real life lawyers and doctors actions. Suppose, best case scenario (very unrealistic imo btw), you have a complete "snapshot" of the behavior of lawyers and doctors in a given year. The problem is reality changes, you need new lawyering and doctoring behaviors after N years. Doctors need interpret new maladies, lawyers need to cite new decisions and both need to interpret new language forms that appear. But if you've actually removed the real lawyers and doctors, where would you get the new training data?
The only way you could be beguiled by this framing is if you don't understand just how inept most doctors and lawyers really are.
A future configuration will probably look something like: far fewer highly talented doctors and lawyers remain employable while the rest are replaced by AI that's shown to be vastly more capable, and that is continually enhanced by the encoded expertise of said highly talented remaining specialists.
You don't understand just how inept most doctors and lawyers really are.
It doesn't matter how competent or incompetent whatever professional might be. The only thing a deep learning application is going to do is duplicate their behavior. Deep learning involves no "thinking" at all. Just a very elaborate, brute force curve fitting. If the doctors are on average "incompetent" so will be the deep learning app (ie, you kind fall for the sort of "since it's a machine, it will be accurate" fallacy that makes people want to trust self-driving cars)
A future configuration will probably look something like: far fewer highly talented doctors and lawyers.
If you really automated the work of lawyers and doctors with explicit, maybe. BUT that isn't how "deep learning" work. Deep learning just uses data and the problem is you need sufficient data, a sufficiently large corpus of data to show by many, many examples what the thing should do.
Oddly enough, your scenario of high expert adding their expertise to the system is much more like the original Gofai model where a few experts would hypothetically program in their expertise. That scenario fell with difficulty of expertise programming. The present systems can't work that way.
> Oddly enough, your scenario of high expert adding their expertise to the system is much more like the original Gofai model where a few experts would hypothetically program in their expertise. That scenario fell with difficulty of expertise programming. The present systems can't work that way.
Taking a generalized approach will fail. Taking a tailored, domain-specific one that incrementally carves out use cases will be the basis of future success in these spaces.
> fallacy that makes people want to trust self-driving cars
A lot of successful L4+ autonomous vehicles today, contrary to what the press releases want you to believe, are architectured first and foremost as non-learning (i.e. traditional robotics) systems, with relatively well-defined domain-specific sub-problems carved out and delegated to learning-based methods (e.g. recognizing all cars/humans/signs/... in images captured by the vehicle's cameras). These problems tend to have well-defined metrics and massive real-world data sets backing them up, and are increasingly more common to report how confident they are in the provided results.
ADVs have come a long way despite all the doubt, and the top players are finally getting confident in removing the human from the driver's seat. This is not trivial in the post-Uber-ADV-fatal-accident world.
the opposite if this is true. with scifi ai on that level, bad lawyers would just pay to use the ai for legal work and focus on developing social relationships to get valuable clients. this is how a lot of professionals spend their time now
most things in life that make a lot of money are social. if everyone has access to ai knowledge and skills that can be copied, then the social aspect is even more important
I assume the author is using AI to mean software in its broader sense, not just a machine learning algorithm.
Somebody will eventually write and algorithm that actually understands the laws as they are written, the case law that interpret them, and can read and write contracts. The algorithm might not have anything to do with ML.
I would like to think one day we'll actually understand how our bodies work and can diagnose problems as if we were debugging software rather than stabbing into the dark with drugs.
Some of it is just framing. You can replace a lot of what doctors do with regular tech and plain old organization. You could have done it for decades. Problem is regulations put a lot of limitations on who can perform what service. You can get the best well-informed advice from wherever, but you still need to go to a doctor for your prescription.
I could very well see a situation where "AI" is what finally gets regulators to loosen up, but what actually gets implemented will be traditional stuff that works. It may take a "surgery robot" to allow greater freedom in training people to perform surgeries.
Won't be surprised if in 20 years self driving cars will indeed come to dominate. But most "AI" will get dropped and roads will be retrofitted with something dead simple that assists cars in navigating (I believe that idea goes back to 50s or 60s too).
At least a couple of times in the article the author talks about software "that can think". Deep neural nets can't "think" at least not in the sense that humans can think. I don't think we have any software yet that's close to "thinking".
I still dont really know about AI taking over the world. The most expensive things in my budget are housing, car, healthcare, childcare, flights/hotels, food. Does AI really change that much?
There are definitely too many over-educated people out there already, I'd think this is more of an impact & setting up disappointment than the bots.
Phrasing things as an optimization problem can result in better, more efficient arrangements than how things are presently, but only within the limits that people are willing to accept. It also depends what we're optimizing for - if we naively set it for "maximum number of humans fed and cared for", we really are all going to be eating bugs and living in pods.
Sounds like an instance of the No True Scotsman fallacy to me, friend. What is capitalism if not the systems that purport to be it? It's like saying "communism has never been tried". They tried _something_, and they certainly labelled it communism.
That said, I do find the Equity Fund idea interesting, though it's not entirely clear what this looks like in practice, especially for the unbanked, the mentally ill, homeless people, etc. who might not really know what to do with shares, since some of them don't really know what to do with cash, either. Seems to me these are the people most in need of uplift, no?
I'm not too worried about most lawyers getting automated out of a job anytime soon, after all, to the extent where I want to see the economy overturned for the likes of them.
Ah, fair. Yea, perhaps the capitalism we have tried is the closest that is practically possible.
I think we overweight how many people in society do not know what to do with cash. I think we may say that we believe they can do something better with it and sure perhaps, but it is bold to believe one knows what to do better with another's resources.
The time you spend in your car is more valuable than the cost of the car itself (including gas, repairs, etc). So insofar as you can free that time with an autonomous vehicle, it can absolutely slash the total cost of transportation.
To a lesser extent, similar things can be said about your other examples.
Robots building houses on cheap land due to mass work form home would make housing much cheaper. Robot doctors make healthcare much cheaper. Robot teachers make childcare/education much cheaper. Robot farmers + GMO make food much cheaper.
If a house is all I needed I could just move out to some 20km away location and get one for 60k€. You would have to do your own renovations but isn't that part of the deal when you buy a house? But I will concede that automation increases productivity and gives us access to more goods and services. It's absolutely necessary.
I don't think building costs are the main issue with availability of housing. You need the land to build on - and not just any land, but land in desired locations.
How are the artificial mega cities in China doing? Didn't they build several cities from scratch that are supposed to house several million people each?
Plenty of people would like to live somewhere rural but can't because of work. Obviously not everyone falls into this category, but lower demand in cities = lower prices.
> In the next five years, computer programs that can think will read legal documents and give medical advice.
Bad medical or legal advice is completely possible. It exists now.
Giving good medical or legal advice requires, at a minimum, being able to carry out a full conversation to investigate the problem, including understanding things not directly related to the field. There's no sign of getting that any time soon.
Efficiency improvements in an area like the law may also result in people imposing new burdens, eroding the efficiency gains. Laws that once would have seemed too burdensome will no longer be seen as such.
553 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 391 ms ] threadUgh. Moore's law doesn't apply to everything, and in fact doesn't apply to most things, and wishing it did won't change that.
I think Vaclav Smil did an effective diagnosis of this at the Driva Climate Investment Meeting: https://youtu.be/gkj_91IJVBk?t=1132
It is good for society if the costs of goods and services decrease over time to allow a given income/wealth level to live a better life over time.
Tech people keep trying to fix people problems with tech. ~47k people die each year in the US from a lack of healthcare. Other countries don't need Moore's Law to fix this, for example [1] [2]. Conversely, it's fine that Elon runs around as Technoking as long as the batteries are pumped out of Gigafactories at full speed. Technology fixes for technology problems, people fixes for people problems. We don't need more wealth ("The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed" -- Gibson). America is one of the wealthiest country in the world. We need quality of life floors and more equitable distributions of what passes for and enables wealth.
With all of that rant said, I really love Sam's idea about the American Equity Fund [3]. It's long overdue, and something that the Federal Reserve could administer today with FedAccounts as the target of distributions from taxes on productive concerns. Sam's a smart person, and I hope he can sell the idea with a pitch deck to those who need to be sold on it. The issue of equity (social and economic) has reached a crescendo, and it would do a disservice to county and citizens alike to let the opportunity go to waste.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=healthcare+outcomes+by+count...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_univers...
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24908042
Policy is written by the elected. Speak to or assume those roles. Provide covering fire for effective contributors who can execute on your mission and vision, just like a startup.
But yes I do agree iterating to improve public policy is important too.
Hence the organization of Sam's essay to reflect this.
I worry that this is already the case, and we are already failing miserably. Globally we seem to have enough resources to feed, clothe, and shelter the global population and in a number of cases (see the USA) to be unable to do so.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/size-poverty-gap-world [1] https://sites.tufts.edu/wpf/files/2017/08/famine-mortality-b...
Food insecurity is still a thing, but the only mass starvation is driven by conflict in hard-to-reach places like Yemen, where you can't just easily ship food and save a million lives.
Now, the most effective aid interventions are campaigns like de-worming and Malaria; but those are more of a QALY calculation, where you de-worm 100 kids to prevent serious disease in some subset of them. Which overall drives the cost up, but is actually a good trend.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_charitabl...
[2] https://givingusa.org/giving-usa-2020-charitable-giving-show...
We had enough wealth for everyone to have what we need a long time ago. No matter how much we have humans always want more. AI won't change that.
Take a look at just about any book on consumerism
Obviously that's the extreme case, and the question is how close to universal replicators do you need to come before people can't want more things fast enough.
I'm not convinced human stupidity is bounded.
I kind of am? Besides, people don't need to never be stupid again, they just need to become stupider at a slower rate than productivity increases. If hour by hour production significantly increased, how could people possibly waste enough?
More importantly, would they? We waste resources to signal wealth. Wasting an ever greater proportion of your allocated geyser of materials doesn't signal anything.
We'll probably reach technological self-replication singularity before AGI. I envision a small self replicating/repairing/transforming factory that could function based on local resources. Mostly 3d-printers, robots and tools for making tools.
But I think in reality there will be limited resources, energy and pollution we can all use, so we can't have our exponential utopia. Technology will be more like biology, and it will get good at recycling anything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blame%21
>> The "Netsphere", a sort of computerized control network for The City. The City is an immense volume of artificial structure, separated into massive "floors" by nearly-impenetrable barriers known as "Megastructure". The City is inhabited by scattered human and transhuman tribes as well as hostile cyborgs known as Silicon Creatures. The Net Terminal Genes appear to be the key to halting the unhindered, chaotic expansion of the Megastructure, as well as a way of stopping the murderous robot horde known as the Safeguard from destroying all of humanity.
For anyone curious: https://www.grammarbook.com/blog/definitions/compel-vs-impel...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dematerialization_(economics)
Modern, first-world society does seem to be reaching some sort of inflection point that might point to a "top" (of physical consumption at least) as we get more efficient and more stuff is moving digital. That's not to say there is really anything conclusive, but it is interesting to think about.
If there is a natural (not physical out of resources) limit where humans feel satiated i doubt we're anywhere near it. If we do hit it, wait a bunch of generations and they'll be more humans.
If there is, it's somewhere beyond launching sports cars into orbit.
While he and many others could buy personal space launches, that launch is not a demonstration of such. He wasn't paying for it, and it wasn't for him.
I think it's more "vying for the 'richest person on earth' title" that's important here.
My conclusion: individual satisfaction is bounded, as long as we have bounded brains. First I should mention that the best principle I've found to underlie life is that we should maximize or optimize some kind of experience of consciousness, for every conscious entity. It's hard to define precisely what that entails, but we have quite good intuition: your life should be rich in activity, in interaction with others, in learning, in thought, in seeing, hearing, thinking; of course, not so rich as to be overwhelming and collapse the whole thing or leave us unable to digest or grasp or understand (at least a part of) what we're experiencing. I don't claim to be completely original: Wilheim von Humboldt for me is one of the great thinkers of conscious motivation (he lived in the 18th century).
"I am more and more convinced that our happiness or unhappiness depends far more on the way we meet the events of life, than on the nature of those events themselves." -- WvH
Being clear: what matters is not the experiences themselves, i.e. the input/output, but what the various consciousness apprehend. What goes on in your brain. It doesn't matter you're at the most beautiful beach in the most beautiful sunset behaving joyfully and peacefully if internally you're depressed or in despair.
"The true end of Man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal and immutable dictates of reason, and not suggested by vague and transient desires, is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole." -- WvH
You can only make an individual so complete, so harmonious with itself. Our brains have about 100 billion neurons, i.e. a finite number, and there's only so much you can activate those connections. Really the goal is not with any single individual -- our goal should be with every conscious being. That's why we should not plan individually, we should plan as a society. A billionaire can only get so happy -- he can keep linearly stacking jet skis and race cars and yatchs but his happiness won't follow (linearly). We should realize we are all part of a society, as a whole, and ideally be completely indifferent among individuals (i.e. everyone deserves as much happiness as we can collectively get them).
In other words, we should take the Golden Rule literally. (of course, in practice, not everyone can be responsible for every other individual, but it should be our ultimate guiding principle, really, as individuals and society, unmistakably): every conscious being has the same value to yourself as yourself.
Because individual satisfaction is bounded, this allows maximizing the practically unbounded (because of almost unbounded entity numbers) satisfaction of society as a whole, currently about 8 billion individuals. We need to move past egoism. I don't think an egoistical civilization, as was Western Society for much of the 20th century, can reliably go much further than we've come (see: climate change, rising political instability, fluctuating inequality, stagnating quality of life).
I'm not arguing for any political system, I'm arguing for a cultural-social-technological outlook of the entire society. I'd label it 'Universalism' (but that's taken), so perhaps 'Conscious Universalism', or 'Concious value universalism'.
That's how we move our entire civilization forward, achieve better political stability, how we're able to tackle mega projects like engineering the climate and rethinking our global supply chain, how we can allocate massive resources to space exploration, space colonization, prevention of extinction events (like asteroid impacts, etc.), how we move definitely past threat of nuclear annihilation (a nuclear conflict, still not completely ...
To be clear, by conscious experience I don't mean just pleasure (or even just "happiness", just joy). Experience is much more complicated than pleasure alone, or any single feeling -- although of course generally they are good proxies in most situations (if you're happy it's usually, but not as a law, having good experiences).
I'll leave it as a reflection to the reader exactly what it entails -- with Humboldt's observation in mind (of "harmonious development [...] to a complete and consistent whole).
Another important observation to be had, is that we should have freedom to chose, in a way, what gives us pleasure, what's engrossing to us -- guided by reason. I call this concept 'freedom of utility' -- sure, we (generally) enjoy physically food, sex, and various other things (sometimes drugs that destroy our bodies and our minds); but what should we like? Imagine our intuitive tastes could be aligned to changes since we've developed millions of years ago, living in totally different environments under new light of reasoning, and new understanding of the universe.
And humans will be humans. There will be new games, like drone wars on distant planets, where any production capacity and energy will be used. And since everything is very efficient, there will be no food left for birds or even poor humans.
You can quickly approach a situation where time is the limiting factor. In this case I think that the private jet or extremely fast transportation allows you to get some time back. Beyond that you might have one or two projects that you really enjoy, like a palace, but you don’t really have enough time to handle much more. Elon is a good example: he’s got a few projects that he really cares about and does them at an extreme scale. He effectively has unlimited resources but he would not make any progress on his three major initiatives if he was much more fragmented than he is.
And if you run this to the extreme, the true cost of overconsumption creates the problem of environmental damage and negative externalities on others that can wind you up like Marie-Antoinette.
Plenty of other people are happy with minimalism. And that can be hard for some folks to understand if they aren’t minimalists.
Once your Versailles is big enough, you won't be able to walk it in a day. Once it's bigger than that, you won't be able to drive its length in a day. Once it's bigger than that, you won't be able to travel its length in a lifetime at light speed. There's a limit for you. But you likely won't want to spend your entire life travelling at lightspeed to the far wing of your house, then die. So that drops the limit enormously.
What does it mean for it to be "your Versailles" - could you draw or depict Versailles in detail from memory? How will you verify that your clone is exactly like the original? Do you care? Do you really mean that you get to design your own mega-palace? So now you spend your life choosing furnishings and layouts and architectural details - hope you like that kind of passtime, because there's a lot of it. But if you don't like that, why bother having "your Versailles" instead of going to look at someone else's for a few hours? Or look at a picture, for that matter? What are you going to do with your Versailles? Are you a king or queen with courtiers and subjects so that you can have extravagant parties? Are you going to organise the food and cleaning and heating that the robots do?
How old are you, were you around when computers ran at Khz speeds? And now you have effectively "infinite computing power", you spend your time commenting about Bitcoin on HN - why aren't you simulating your own Virtual Versailles and flights to the moon and stuff? Because it's not that interesting now you can do it? Endless hedonism is boring.
> "Who doesn't want to fly their jet or space rocket just for fun to the moon and back?"
OK, that's taken a week of sitting in a tiny box waiting and doing nothing. What about the rest of your entire life?
Listing fancy sounding things is what religions do to entrap people with dreams of heavenly afterlives. All you have to do is look around you at all the things you once wanted, and suddenly don't once you attain them - the drawer of abandoned Raspberry Pies is a common one for HN people to notice, then start to internalise that you can have any film ever made delivered to you from Amazon for a few bucks, and you don't, you can't think of a film you'd rather watch than comment "Make your own exchange." on a Robinhood thread on HN. Got a wardrobe of too many clothes? Got boxes of unused stuff? A garage of tools and spares?
See what a pointless status grab it is? If it's outside all possible knowledge, it may as well be lies (it's not though). You can play Elite: Dangerous if you want a galaxy full of combat, and it's happening right now and better than the rest of the Milky Way there are actual players and ships and things and not silent void. The main lesson I took away from Elite Dangerous is that the Galactic PowerPlay between all the major factions can never end. If it ends, if one side can dominate and win, there is no way for another faction to recover from that without a reset and restart, like all games - play, end, restart.
> "Endless hedonism is boring until there is competition"
Competition doesn't need ever increasing resource use and hedonism, it's not the resource use which captivates people (but it can make a spectacle); competition is fine with animals running, with kickball, with Chess - 32 pieces on 64 squares creates world champions, millionaires, tournaments, audiences, lifelong obsessed people, gambling opportunities, it doesn't need galaxy spanning resource use. The thing about competition is that you can't be Usain Bolt or Magnus Carlsen or John Carmack just by throwing more resources at it. At the point where you can say "I have a Versailles on every planet in the Milky Way" and someone else says "so what, everyone has", there's no competition there. If you claim you can win the Tour de France on a bike in a small region of Earth, people will sit up and take notice.
So no, that's not really a solution either.
But even then, the goal isn't to limit human productivity, is it? It's to limit how much we work and lifestyle inflation, which doesn't require growth to go to zero.
We're already maxed out on information, tools, media and interactions.
Even if we were to assume that an arbitrarily low standard of living is acceptable, at some point that standard of living will include mass starvation and death so there is a real capacity limit. Being well below that limit is a virtue.
More importantly, there's absolutely no reason to think that technology will somehow stop pushing the carrying capacity further. More people will yield more innovation, yielding more growth, yielding more people. If there's an endpoint to that, I doubt we'll see it any time soon. Yes, I too see how insane it is to think that sometime relatively soon global GDP will double twice in a year. But twice in a decade would be just as crazy 500 years ago.
and also
No, when Larry Ellison built a 200 foot yacht, a Russian oligarch built a 250 foot yacht, The next guy will build a 300 foot yacht, etc.
There ought to be a point at which continuing increases in income fail to generate increases in either life expectancy or the proportion of adults who are able to work (not necessarily working). It would be necessary to distinguish this from the effects of anti-aging technology, but it should be possible in principle; improving diet/sleep/exercise and reducing pollution exposure isn't "anti-aging technology", nor are childcare/education.
Edit: You might also be poorer if you tried to compete with Amazon and were crushed like a bug by their anti-competitive practices.
I don't think it's correct to say that we had enough wealth a long time ago. There are a lot of places in the world that are still desperately poor by any measure, not just by the standards of the wealthy. And although it's undoubtedly true that the wealthiest few deciles could give up many luxuries to provide more for the poor, it's much more arguable if there is enough for everyone to have enough without generating much more.
Food is all you really need. For luxury: food, sex, and purpose. The tribes have all 3.
Want
The fact is that the average human is not actually content to be one notch above animal with "food, sex, and purpose". That is why we have progressed much further than just accepting those basics as all we need. But I think our improvements on those things do provide enough value for the average person to be happy.
- Tasty food
- Safe sex (and relative ease of reproduction)
- Multi-variate / chosen purpose.
Plus other methods to remove annoying friction from your life:
- Optimized shelter
- Optimized travel
- Consumption of various raw goods (not for food and not for shelter). e.g. 3D Printers!
This is obviously not true, since in every capitalist society, the hardest working people already make the least amount of money, and the laziest people employed already get given the most amount of money.
Capitalism has already proven that financial incentive has no correlation to how hard someone works.
Your example is evidence of my statement, not refutation.
I don't think so.
And yet I am paid 5-10X what they are.
If you got the same pay whether or not you showed up to work each day, you'd be less incentivized to show up.
I don't remember from school the bit where Mr Socialism said "let the workers sieze the means of production so they can shutdown the means of production, because they are lazy and stupid". "define:Socialism"[1] - "Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively". NB. that it involves production, and is /not/ "Systems of social organization in which lazy people get paid for doing nothing".
> "If you tell people they will get $12k no matter how hard they work, they won’t work"
Have you never seen or heard of volunteers? There are countries where the unemployed get money, e.g. the UK, and yet most people still work. How does this fit into your claim?
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=define%3Asocialism&ia=definition
Yes, they are obviously doing the work for other reasons.
> There are countries where the unemployed get money, e.g. the UK, and yet most people still work. How does this fit into your claim?
You aren’t getting it. Those people still work because they can earn more than what the unemployment is. If all of a sudden you said even if you work, you’ll only earn the unemployment benefit, then nobody would work.
Guys please stop deciding you want to be upset about a comment and then trying to backsolve your rationale.
Yes, and that disproves your claim that people only work for money, and without more money people won't do more work.
> "You aren’t getting it. Those people still work because they can earn more than what the unemployment is." If all of a sudden you said even if you work, you’ll only earn the unemployment benefit, then nobody would work.*"
Volunteers earn no extra money for their work, and yet still work. Many people work unpaid overtime out of loyalty for their employer / coworkers / customers / patients, many people work out of passion and interest and hobbying ("starving artist" trope).
And, again, you're propagandising "Socialism" changing from "people get money without working" to "people can't get more than a fixed limited return on their work", which again it isn't. But let's go with that definition - if everything collectively owned, the more stuff there is the more stuff is collectively owned, so the more benefit everyone gets. When the Federal Government builds more roads, you personally get more roads you can drive on as a benefit. So even if Socialism was "you can't earn more than the minimum wage {because the collective takes it from you!}", you are part of the collective, so it still wouldn't be the case that people got no more benefit for producing more, as you claim.
That still leaves you with $10.800. A liability insurance costs here around 50–100€ per year for a family. What more insurances do you need? GDP per capita also includes pensioners, so you do not need to count pension into this.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.GD.ZS?most_...
People might still be more unhappy even though society at large delivers them things that could be unimaginable today. The creators and owners who can deliver that future will be richer than everyone else (rightfully so, imo) and that divide is what I think could make people more unhappy although they will be much better off than what we are today.
There is a lot of hubris in saying we’re pretty much maxed out now, thanks and time to stop. I’d suggest instead we need to make smart choices, and that usually smart answers are not found at the far extremities. This “we have all we need” bit reminds me of scientists saying physics was over in the 19th century, combined with a bit of Thomas Malthus in such a way that we all die unless we halt innovation. It reminds me of that, but I’d be overstepping to put those words in your mouth. After all human intention has endless range to match the rest.
After a certain point that's true but I think you miss the point of the parent. There are many, many hungry people in the world, many people without shelter and further millions who have no access to healthcare education or even clean water. These are not subjective needs.
Those people are in that position inspite of the fact that we could, with the wealth we have, feed, house and provide health care and education for each and every one of them.
I don’t think this is really true, part of the problem is that the wealth that you think could be allocated to this problem was only generated by incentivizing people to build it with compensation, if you turned around and took it away from the people who built it and gave it to people who did not build it, you would disincentivize creation of more wealth, and the wealth you reappropriated would deteriorate, because you neglected to create an incentive and maintenance infrastructure to keep it working. This is exactly what happened when we tried this, starting with poor people in our own communities.
Public housing projects and welfare programs are money sinks that are notoriously counterproductive at meeting their stated needs; and we can’t get people to consider the structural imbalances that result because the need for these programs is an article of faith and among the believers the only acceptable reasons for their failure are “people who don’t agree with the program” and “lack of funding.”
That's obviously not true today: There isn't enough coronavirus vaccine to go around.
There almost certainly will be enough eventually, but human beings live in the now. There will be another pandemic someday. Or some other natural disaster that creates localized or temporal scarcity. We can't just spin up a new lifesaving drug or a million new homes overnight. Maybe someday we will?
That is mostly a question of regulations. The part that takes so much time is getting the vaccines approved; many researchers don't even try because they know they wouldn't have enough money to get their vaccine approved. Also, most governments negotiate hard to reduce the prices, despite the fact that economic damage from lockdowns is much greater.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winfried_St%C3%B6cker
The issue with rising costs of housing is not (completely) linked to labor costs, it's land value, regulatory capture, bad infrastructure, and heavily marketed house-in-the-suburbs-as-the-only-way-to-live.
From memory:
Tearing a $2 million single family house and putting 6 apartments there would allow you to charge $3k rent. Build taller and rent drops even lower. This is assuming construction costs of $500 per sqft.
Alternative take: the hard part is that the US is heterogeneous and people just don't trust each other to not abuse benefits. (You could also say it's racist). How could we give equity to every person when we can't even seem to agree that they deserve basic healthcare?
Improve how? Should I need economic growth to get better health care? This whole techno-utopian argument seems to hinge on extractive growth because it fails to actually tackle the problems of inequality by providing true redistribution of wealth in any meaningful sense. Trickle-down AI is a sham.
I kind of doubt that. At Google we're paid in part with shares of GOOG, but at Google's scale that's just treated as cash compensation. At my level, nothing I do affects the stock price, and most Googlers feel this way.
Sure, I want Google to do well, and I want America to do well too. Both of them doing well benefits me. But it doesn't really encourage me to do something different day-to-day.
I apply this theory to many diverse subjects- voting, finances, human health and car maintenance (once one system is suboptimal or impaired, others often follow). Keep your sockets gemmed. :)
The butterfly effect affects most no physical systems, which contain incredible amounts of damping processes. The same thing happens with people - if a zillion of them want things that point in somewhat different directions, the net does not add up, it cancels.
Otherwise most physical systems would simply explode to infinities, but in practice they don't. They dissipate and become less useful.
Basically, the sum of noise is zero.
> “We could do something called the American Equity Fund. The American Equity Fund would be capitalized by taxing companies above a certain valuation 2.5% of their market value each year, payable in shares transferred to the fund..”
I could be in favor of something like this.
However, I’d be curious to hear Sam’s thoughts on what kind of vehicle do we use to ensure that this equity actually reaches end-users?
I can make a very strong historical case that the government is not the right vehicle for this to work. You could also just look at the most recent $1.9T stimulus bill — where only a fraction of it went out as checks to Americans in need.
> The bill's economic-relief provisions are overwhelmingly geared toward low-income and middle-class Americans, who will benefit from (among other provisions) the direct payments, the bill's expansion of low-income tax credits, child-care subsidies, expanded health-insurance access, extension of expanded unemployment benefits, food stamps, and rental assistance programs.
Here's [0] a more direct breakdown of there the 1.9T went. A large chunk of the money was spent on the $1400 checks, extending unemployment insurance (which come as checks/direct deposit), and the child tax credit (which really will just be realized as another check). The majority of the rest goes to state governments (who will probably redistribute some of it), K-12 schools, and "energy and commerce" which supposedly includes contact tracing efforts and vaccines. Doesn't seem like a big misallocation of resources to me.
[0]: https://files.taxfoundation.org/20210312120937/American-Resc...
Wait, medical advice is easier than assembly line work??
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
Doesn't this scenario lead to me either selling my "gifted" shares to pay property taxes, or ending up a renter at best and homeless at worst? I can imagine this proposal leading to greater concentrations of wealth rather than spreading it around.
Bill Browder writes a bit about it in his book, Red Notice. The book is also a great cautionary tale that the whole narrative that we can spread democratic ideals by making business deals with with corrupt/despotism regimes is smoke. It leads to more corruption, less moral authority, and further empowered despots.
Now there are efficiency arguments in favour of taxing land to encourage its use and not taxing productive enterprises or their investors too heavily, but this is pretty extreme...
If it's a property tax, yes. If it's a land tax, no. Under land tax you tax the "ground rent" value of the land, not what's built on it. "Ground rent" is what it costs to rent out your land if it was an empty lot with nothing on it. Property tax and land tax are very different things with very different effects.
It's society that makes the property valuable in the first place, so it makes sense to pay society back. The firefighters, schools, and social workers in your area need to get paid extra to account for the cost of living increases. That money should come from the people benefit the most from their services, the property owners.
“Otherwise” is doing a lot of work here. The people can’t “otherwise” move there because the person isn’t selling, that’s the idea. Taxing people so they are forced to sell is forcing them out. Not taxing people so they are not forced to sell is letting them stay there. You’ve yet to explain why the people who do live there have less of a claim to the house than the wealthier people who would buy it from them.
> Never mind that it's the wealthy are the ones who benefit from elimination of property taxes.
Yes nevermind that since its not even true.
> It's society that makes the property valuable in the first place, so it makes sense to pay society back.
This reifies “society” as a thing-in-itself rather than properly considering society as consisting of the people who own the properties and make them valuable by their ownership, maintenance, and use. Then it equivocates “society” with the actual government that collects the taxes and decides how they are spent (typically routing them to their friends who sell goods and services to the government).
> The firefighters, schools, and social workers in your area need to get paid extra to account for the cost of living increases.
Cost of living increases like land value tax? Like how landlords pass increased taxes and maintenance onto their tenants?
> That money should come from the people benefit the most from their services, the property owners.
Its not at all clear that property owners benefit disproportionately from social services, and they also pay for those services through taxes.
I think most of this recent fascination with Georgism is a result of California tax policy and doesn’t withstand a cursory economic analysis.
> Taxing people so they are forced to sell is forcing them out.
That's still very much overstretching the word "force." If the government taxes a cigarette factory out of existence, are they "forcing" the workers to move if they need to do so to find another job?
> You’ve yet to explain why the people who do live there have less of a claim to the house than the wealthier people who would buy it from them.
I view this as a meaningless philosophical question. There are so many ways that life can be unfair. Being taxed into selling your home at a huge profit is just not a concern I care about.
> Like how landlords pass increased taxes and maintenance onto their tenants?
This is completely untrue. Rent is solely dependent on supply and demand. Demand is elastic, and supply is very inelastic and even more so in highly desirable cities, so it doesn't get very affected by a tax. If property taxes get passed down to tenants, Prop 13 would have passed the tax savings onto renters, which it clearly has not.
> Its not at all clear that property owners benefit disproportionately from social services, and they also pay for those services through taxes.
Financially, a renter would be fine if their home burns down, becomes surrounded by used needles, or has a terrible school district. The homeowner reaps the financial benefit from these services, so they should expect to pay a share.
Thanks for your reply. I think this statement is a good example of how I think your reply misses the point and so I’m not sure we will come to any agreement. Thanks.
You've yet to explain why the people living there have more of a claim to the land than anyone else in society. The model you've proposed is basically "first come first serve" (ie. homesteading principle). Except even that doesn't apply given that some of the land currently in private ownership was previously used by others, who were forced off it, via colonization in North America, and the enclosure acts in Europe. Should we return the land to the descendants of the Native Americans?
Given that land is a scarce good, and access to good land gives substantial benefits to those with access, "first come first serve" simply isn't a workable way to allocate land. Those with land are able to charge rents to those without, and they can pass this privilege down to their heirs, keeping this inequality going.
> Its not at all clear that property owners benefit disproportionately from social services, and they also pay for those services through taxes.
Here's a simple example. Suppose the government decides to build a new transit line going to the edge of the city. The rents and property values along the line will increase. And in most places, income and sales taxes fund at least part of the cost. So renters will pay some of the cost, but get no financial benefit, while also paying increased rents. On the other hand, the landowners will pay some of the cost, but they'll also profit from the increased rents and land values. Essentially, renters pay "twice" for government services: once for the actual service, and then again when the existence of the service leads to higher rents, which are then reaped by landowners.
> I think most of this recent fascination with Georgism is a result of California tax policy and doesn’t withstand a cursory economic analysis.
Basically every economist agrees with the principles behind Georgism, starting from Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and continuing to modern economists like Milton Friedman and Joseph Stiglitz, so I don't really know what you're talking about here.
You should read about the Law of Rent by Ricardo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent), which basically states what I have said here: land rent is equal to the marginal economic advantage, which is obviously not created by the landowner.
Generally one would ask that the people proposing a change to circumstances assume the burden of proof; it should be obvious why I can’t remove the food from your kitchen and expect you to justify why I should stop.
If you want a more formal argument then its turtles all the way down, I can approach your preferred landowners on the day post-acquisition and use the same procedure to expropriate them, someone else can do the same to me on the next day, ad infinitum.
> The model you've proposed is basically "first come first serve" (ie. homesteading principle). Except even that doesn't apply given that some of the land currently in private ownership was previously used by others, who were forced off it, via colonization in North America, and the enclosure acts in Europe. Should we return the land to the descendants of the Native Americans?
You are aware that many people argue that we should do exactly that, correct? I’m not aware of many people who argue to the contrary, and I’m not sure there is any use in reciting their arguments here.
The expropriation of the Natives is almost universally regarded as a moral wrong in polite society. its fine for you to disagree but I’m at a loss as to why you would assume that I disagree.
> Given that land is a scarce good, and access to good land gives substantial benefits to those with access, "first come first serve" simply isn't a workable way to allocate land.
This is a non sequitur as you’ve failed to explain why one person’s good deal is unworkable for another.
> Those with land are able to charge rents to those without, and they can pass this privilege down to their heirs, keeping this inequality going.
It seems that you’re assuming that inequality is a bad thing. I think inequality is a fact, and the moral implications must be argued for rather than assumed.
> Suppose the government decides to build a new transit line going to the edge of the city. The rents and property values along the line will increase. And in most places, income and sales taxes fund at least part of the cost. So renters will pay some of the cost, but get no financial benefit,
Why aren’t the renters gaining financial benefit from improvements to mass transit in their area? It seems that you’re arguing against the government being able to fund boondoggles from taxes.
> On the other hand, the landowners will pay some of the cost, but they'll also profit from the increased rents and land values. Essentially, renters pay "twice" for government services: once for the actual service, and then again when the existence of the service leads to higher rents, which are then reaped by landowners.
I feel as though you’ve neglected to consider that the renters benefit from mass transit and therefore there’s no reason for them not to be expected to pay for it; and the fact that public infrastructure results in higher land values is covered under the property tax that we already have established. This whole thing could be bypassed by arguing that these types of improvements should be paid by property taxes (excluding sales taxes etc.).
> Basically every economist agrees with the principles behind Georgism, starting from Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and continuing to modern economists like Milton Friedman and Joseph Stiglitz, so I don't really know what you're talking about here.
Yeah if you think this is a reasonable statement of the economic consensus vis a vis Georgism I doubt we can learn much from discussion with each other, nice talking and have a good day. Thanks for the Ricardo link.
> This whole thing could be bypassed by arguing that these types of improvements should be paid by property taxes
This is pretty much the core policy that Georgism advocates for: "Henry George is best known for popularizing the argument that government should be funded by a tax on land rent rather than taxes on labor". The rest is just a way to provide economic/justice based reasons for this policy.
You have to consider the benchmark. Do people deserve to live in a castle if they aren't productive enough?
Living in a single family home in the middle of NYC requires a whole lot of productivity because you are literally displacing dozens of other people. You have to be as productive as all those people combined to be worthy of replacing them.
Seems silly to me.
If you think people shouldn't have to pay extra when their land becomes more valuable, I don't see why they should still get the profits when their land becomes more valuable. That's basically socializing the costs, but privatizing the profits, which is obviously a bad thing to do.
Just as a UBI gives people an income floor, I think that a land tax should come with a personal allowance below which you are exempt.
To do some rough calculations, the US state with the highest population density is New Jersey, at 1,210.1 people per square mile, which equates to 23,038 square feet per person. The average American house size is apparently 2,687 square feet, which is typically shared by multiple people, so the allowance could be comfortably set to maybe 10,000 square feet per person.
10,000 sq ft in Manhattan is much more valuable than 10,000 sq ft in a rural area, and so it doesn't make sense that both should be treated equally.
It works very differently than a propery tax.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ok2uR3btMrE
The rich will get richer, and the rest of us will get poorer.
...
If you think that’s cool, you’ll love my upcoming seminar: “How To Live Mortgage Free Using A House and Land You Already Paid Cash For!”
AGI within the next 50 years? I don't think we have any idea, really. We don't even know what "intelligence" means.
So what does AI need to get to the next level? Not much but time to mature, all the tools are already there.
Yep. I saw this movie before.
ActuallyOpenAI ^TM
In case the "why" is not obvious: AI progress is limited by a) great research talent; b) money -- specifically being able to invest in compute. If OpenAI were to open source everything, they would not be able to raise the money they need to invest in compute, which would cause a death spiral in their ability to attract and retain their researchers. They need to have a story for why they will make money in the short term to continue being a top tier AI research org. And since AI is "winner take all", it is likely worse for the world if a less altruistic company takes all the talent and source code.
If your point is just that OpenAI is a misnomer now, I agree :). It's not open. But I do think they have settled on a surprisingly good point in solution space (the capped-profit company, the charter, etc); I don't see ways to validly criticize the company from an altruism perspective.
OpenAI is opening the world to AI and helping people just like Google's doing ,,no evil'', Facebook is connecting people. At the point when an organization gets big enough to not keep its original values (being open for OpenAI), it's not better (less altruistic) in ,,making the world a better place'' than any other organization. Competition and having the power of AI distributed in more companies is good though (until they acquire each other).
The thing I was most taken aback by was Sam's suggestion to tax privately held land, and capital (as opposed to labor tax).
I would love to have Sam and PG go toe to toe and discuss how Sam's proposal is different from the wealth tax post PG made. I don't immediately see how Sam's idea avoids the "wealth tax compounds" problem (his words not mine) that PG is worried about.
http://paulgraham.com/wtax.html
And yes many important questions for society to answer on this, e.g. how much does is disincentivize entrepreneurs if they have half of their wealth taxed away over the decades compared to current taxation system?
Just a thought experiment: let's say we take Sam's ideas alongside something like UBI, where everyone has a baseline of income provided by the society they live in.
You succeed wildly, and get rich as an entrepreneur. Sadly, in a generation or two, your grandchildren will be back with the rest of the plebeians, despite grandpops launching YC, writing books on art and coding and creating an bunch of amazing companies. But, your grandkids are now not motivated by escaping the poverty they live in, but by a simple desire to live differently than the other normal people out there (also living on UBI).
This seems a lot like what happens in places like Russia or Venezuela or Brazil, where the best and the brightest (often from upper crust there) flee their countries to make it big in Europe, US or the Middle East, but not always because they have such horrible lives there.
Except that, unlike entrepreneurs driven by a mindset that has them feel like it is never enough, these ones are just trying to escape the ennui of boredom of suburbia, and slipping back into that isn't so awful. The alternative drive of escaping poverty does something very different and rapacious: see Tyco and Dennis Kozlowski: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Kozlowski, who despite enormous wealth couldn't stop himself from having his company pay for even his rugs.
It's like the best of communism, and the best of capitalism!
</joke>
Seriously, isn't there an interesting space for entrepreneurs in a new world like the one Sam is describing?
In the Soviet Union, there was no such problem - brilliant people by and large were happy to become scientists and engineers, and scientists and engineers got into the planning agencies and into the government too, in droves. Same in pre 1989 China.
I don't see why the USSR and Mao's China were able to retain (and sometimes even attract) these people, but the society you're describing wouldn't be able to.
Actually, after some digging, I found something Lenin wrote about what to do with the entreprising kind of people - he wanted them to be put to use in organising projects and production, whereas the Kozlowski type were to be ignored (or worse).
So I guess the solution he found was to allow them to create big organizations and projects, but instead of paying them in money, they were paid in social status and achievement. If that worked to retain people like Kolmogorov, Ilyushin, Kalashnikov, Korolev, etc..., couldn't simply socially different positions for people that are enterprising be sufficient?
But they all wanted to leave. The more you knew how much better your life could be in the west, the more you hated staying.
For example, one of my brilliant math teachers was from a Soviet state, and had the opportunity to leave all along - he only did so as the USSR fell and he did not see any prospect in the East anymore.
Patriotism is a strong emotion. But beyond that, many brilliant people in communist countries really did enjoy a very elevated social status - if you see what children aspired too, being a scientist or engineer was really up there. And as far as job security and research freedom, for example, there was often quite a bit of it. On the other hand, you had drastically less freedom, but it doesn't seem the ones who chose to stay valued it as much as we would.
You can't really understand how it was unless you lived it. First of all, patriotism ceased to exist, except for propaganda. Struggle and fear - abject fear - replaced patriotism as the driving emotion. We ended up hating our country - we're still trying to re-learn how to love it 30 years later.
The ones in elevated status were collaborating with the authorities and the secret police. They ratted out on their friends and family. Everybody hated and feared them because of that.
The freedom was, of course, gone, and we got used to that. Freedom is just not that important when you're hungry. But the feeling that best described our state of mind then was: hopelessness. We did not, could not hope for a better future, for better times for us or our children. We could not see any escape, any chance at change. Because as individuals, there was nothing we could do. We were completely robbed of our agency, of our power, of our rights. The past, present and future was a single color: gray.
People who somehow went to the West came back changed. They just could not believe one could live with so much freedom, choices and wealth. Their stories inspired others. I was maybe 12 and I remember clearly dreaming up ways of running out of the country, to my father's absolute horror. I would cry rivers if my own children would have to go to through that.
The issue is, you're just someone on the internet. The real people I know disagree with you, and so do statistics, so while I completely empathize with you, I can't agree.
Better yet, go ahead and pay a visit to the communist success stories of N Korea, Cuba or Venezuela. They are still around. Maybe they will convince you.
Then finally look around at the very tools you are using. The car you are driving, the furnace heating your house, the computer you write on. They are all success stories of capitalism. Ask yourself where are the success stories of communism. What things it built, what hard, concrete, useful stuff it created. Believe the proof presented to you by the real world - and reject the propaganda.
The majority of the citizens of the USSR were against its dissolution - but that didn't matter, it was mostly an elite affair.
I look at statistics and what people that I know and lived there told me. Most people who were adults at the time seem to regret the fall of the Soviet Union, and most people from post-Soviet states had to leave when they couldn't make a living anymore as the economy collapsed - despite post Soviet states being squarely in the middle of what you can expect from life on earth and above the median in all relevant metrics.
So certainly, it wasn't perfect, but it was very far from hell on earth, and squarely above the middle.
Your argument would also be stronger if you didn't classify Venezuela, a country with a bigger private sector relatively than France, as a communist country - Cuba, I've went there, was far from bad, much better certainly than where I came from, and despite debilitating American sanctions has a GDP PPP of over 21000$ which is quite impressive and above the average for the world, let alone Latin America, and by far the best of any country sanctioned by the US, and North Korea abandoned communism for a long time for their own "Juché" ideology which is basically Strasserism, preaches the superiority of the Korean race, and now allows private markets too.
Your stories are also quite telling - the computer I'm using was only possible under capitalism because the government gave itself the power to control ideas, as capitalism is otherwise incompatible with large-scale intellectual innovation. I drive no car, as it is far inferior to good quality public transportation plus walkable neighborhood, and my house is electrically heated by 100% renewable energy because we had the good sense of nationalizing the power grid and making massive investments in renewable energy (which we now produce at costs lower than any free market of energy, renewable or not).
The actual evidence when I try to look it at critically, shielding myself from all forms of propaganda (in the classical sense of the word), makes it clear that reality is far more nuanced than is common wisdom in these circles, and one of those results after careful study of history and data is that the USSR did not, in fact, have much of an issue retaining engineers and scientists, and relative to its size and prosperity did an okay job at innovating and keeping its population happy. Far from the best, but much better than most.
Note "Land Tax" != "Property Tax." Land tax taxes only the value of the underlying "ground rent", NOT the value of the improvements (stuff you build on land). Property Tax taxes both.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
That's exactly the "problem" with wealth (from the perspective of society's growing wealth inequality). Wealth compounds much, much faster than income grows. Someone who inherits $3 million (not much from the point of view of the wealthy) can live comfortably on the growth alone while still compounding their wealth further every year.
The only way a wealth tax would compound faster than the wealth itself is if it is larger than the growth rate of the wealth. And since that's averaged at ~8-10% over the past few decades, a 1% tax is not going to eat into a person's wealth over time. It's simply going to slightly slow that growth down.
Stock market is the way to efficiently allocate capital. If value of every company is halved it changes nothing to relative performance of them.
Typically, land value tax is based on the rental value of land rather than the market value, so it's even more in line with this model.
We want to move to a society where land is not treated as wealth, but rather as a resource to use (because that leads to less land speculation, and more productive use of land), so this model is fine.
[1]: http://radicalmarkets.com
The ends justify the means? Forgive me if I don't agree that some small sliver of sociopathic elites getting to live forever as nanite clouds or whatever excuses genocide euphemistically referred to as "dramas and chaos."
Medieval Church had monopoly on education and knowledge but still believed earth was flat and prosecuted brutally anyone who opposed them.
French Revolution was bloody and messy but it brought democracy and decentralized education which afterwards led to tremendous progress and innovation.
Aside from the other points, taking "AI" as it exists in it's present form (deep neural networks and related) as specifically the bringer of unlimited wealth certainly puffs up the various "AI companies" notably OpenAI (It should be noted that OpenAI's most famous product, GPT-3, can generate strings that sound a lot like legal or medical advice but it so far "demonstrates non-understanding on a regular basis". Don't follow it's advice to kill yourself, for example).
It really should be said that deep learning, in particular, is still just one technology that's very good at some things, kind of impressive but not functional at other things, and just unable to do other things (actual understanding of biology, for example, seems well beyond them). I don't think this situation has changed since deep learning began it's hype cycle (which isn't to say it's "nothing", it just doesn't seem like to bring us "everything", a scenario the article literally sketches).
Automation has proceeded apace, automation in general has brought us enough resources right now to give minimal comfort to most people in the planet (as people have noted).
But automation has generally succeeded in situations where everything is controlled - ie, factories. Self-driving cars are forever five years away given the 5% or 1% or whatever level of unpredictable variable involved. Progress on robots that can interact well with either humans or "the messy real world" even in very limited terms has been painfully slow and I expect this to continue.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_self-driving_cars
The scenario of AI mostly replacing people like doctors and lawyers involves bizarre paradoxes beyond whether deep learning "AI" works as advertised. Suppose you can train an "AI" to read legal papers or diagnose patients based on X-rays. That training is done from the data of real life lawyers and doctors actions. Suppose, best case scenario (very unrealistic imo btw), you have a complete "snapshot" of the behavior of lawyers and doctors in a given year. The problem is reality changes, you need new lawyering and doctoring behaviors after N years. Doctors need interpret new maladies, lawyers need to cite new decisions and both need to interpret new language forms that appear. But if you've actually removed the real lawyers and doctors, where would you get the new training data?
And this is just taking AI at it's word.
A future configuration will probably look something like: far fewer highly talented doctors and lawyers remain employable while the rest are replaced by AI that's shown to be vastly more capable, and that is continually enhanced by the encoded expertise of said highly talented remaining specialists.
It doesn't matter how competent or incompetent whatever professional might be. The only thing a deep learning application is going to do is duplicate their behavior. Deep learning involves no "thinking" at all. Just a very elaborate, brute force curve fitting. If the doctors are on average "incompetent" so will be the deep learning app (ie, you kind fall for the sort of "since it's a machine, it will be accurate" fallacy that makes people want to trust self-driving cars)
A future configuration will probably look something like: far fewer highly talented doctors and lawyers.
If you really automated the work of lawyers and doctors with explicit, maybe. BUT that isn't how "deep learning" work. Deep learning just uses data and the problem is you need sufficient data, a sufficiently large corpus of data to show by many, many examples what the thing should do.
Oddly enough, your scenario of high expert adding their expertise to the system is much more like the original Gofai model where a few experts would hypothetically program in their expertise. That scenario fell with difficulty of expertise programming. The present systems can't work that way.
Taking a generalized approach will fail. Taking a tailored, domain-specific one that incrementally carves out use cases will be the basis of future success in these spaces.
A lot of successful L4+ autonomous vehicles today, contrary to what the press releases want you to believe, are architectured first and foremost as non-learning (i.e. traditional robotics) systems, with relatively well-defined domain-specific sub-problems carved out and delegated to learning-based methods (e.g. recognizing all cars/humans/signs/... in images captured by the vehicle's cameras). These problems tend to have well-defined metrics and massive real-world data sets backing them up, and are increasingly more common to report how confident they are in the provided results.
ADVs have come a long way despite all the doubt, and the top players are finally getting confident in removing the human from the driver's seat. This is not trivial in the post-Uber-ADV-fatal-accident world.
Source: I work on ADVs.
most things in life that make a lot of money are social. if everyone has access to ai knowledge and skills that can be copied, then the social aspect is even more important
Somebody will eventually write and algorithm that actually understands the laws as they are written, the case law that interpret them, and can read and write contracts. The algorithm might not have anything to do with ML.
I would like to think one day we'll actually understand how our bodies work and can diagnose problems as if we were debugging software rather than stabbing into the dark with drugs.
I could very well see a situation where "AI" is what finally gets regulators to loosen up, but what actually gets implemented will be traditional stuff that works. It may take a "surgery robot" to allow greater freedom in training people to perform surgeries.
Won't be surprised if in 20 years self driving cars will indeed come to dominate. But most "AI" will get dropped and roads will be retrofitted with something dead simple that assists cars in navigating (I believe that idea goes back to 50s or 60s too).
We currently have no capitalist societies on earth.
That said, I do find the Equity Fund idea interesting, though it's not entirely clear what this looks like in practice, especially for the unbanked, the mentally ill, homeless people, etc. who might not really know what to do with shares, since some of them don't really know what to do with cash, either. Seems to me these are the people most in need of uplift, no?
I'm not too worried about most lawyers getting automated out of a job anytime soon, after all, to the extent where I want to see the economy overturned for the likes of them.
I think we overweight how many people in society do not know what to do with cash. I think we may say that we believe they can do something better with it and sure perhaps, but it is bold to believe one knows what to do better with another's resources.
To a lesser extent, similar things can be said about your other examples.
About all the things you listed - housing, transportation, education, food and travel are being impacted by digitization and AI.
How are the artificial mega cities in China doing? Didn't they build several cities from scratch that are supposed to house several million people each?
Bad medical or legal advice is completely possible. It exists now.
Giving good medical or legal advice requires, at a minimum, being able to carry out a full conversation to investigate the problem, including understanding things not directly related to the field. There's no sign of getting that any time soon.
Efficiency improvements in an area like the law may also result in people imposing new burdens, eroding the efficiency gains. Laws that once would have seemed too burdensome will no longer be seen as such.
among others