Yes. Did a double take when I saw the name of the author, which I assumed based on the article was someone in their early to mid teens who'd learned everything they knew about the world of business from a copy of Atlas Shrugged!
No adult, least of all a VC, should be citing clothing and household furnishings as shining examples of technology-driven innovation in stark contrast to the moribund world of healthcare, or implying government regulates textbooks more than new cars
> We had two such anti-technology jobs moral panics in the last 20 years — “outsourcing” enabled by the Internet in the 2000’s, and “robots” in the 2010’s. The result was the best national and global economy in human history in pre-COVID 2019, with the most jobs at the highest wages ever.
How much of this economy and growth was real and how much was free money from the FED? We’ve still got all that same stuff now, but the only difference is the free money is gone and things look a lot different.
People overestimate the potency of monetary policy. Japan's central banks had its foot to the pedal for 2 decades and only recently have things gotten better. 0% interest rates is not an elixir for growth. It's not that easy or simple. Same for other countries which had 'easy money' polices but far less success compared to the US, no Facebook or Aamzons coming out of the UK or Germany.
Japan is ahead of us in time. What they are we will be. Zero interest rates can’t fix massive debt, a graying population with low population growth, low immigration, and out of control property prices.
It can. Zero interest rates are the natural rate for money - since it is costless to produce.
Therefore that is the optimal rate for the currency issuer. There is no need to pay people not to spend when you can tax them if they do. That's just basic income for rich people.
Banks then discount assets into liquidity at a markup over zero and they can be allowed to compete fully and go bust which controls the net interest margin.
If you optimise the system so it operates on maximum liquidity then you lower the cost of business investment while selecting for productivity by moving the business to where the people are rather than the other way around.
That gets you around the greying population problem without destroying your society - by learning to do more with less.
Japan has gone some way down this road, but not entirely.
No, making coins or dollars, particularly the type which is resistant to counter-fitting, takes an awful lot of money to produce. Hell, pennies are worth significantly more than their face value, hence why we have people calling to ban the penny all the time!
I partially agree on that - for example, I find it hard to believe the LLMs will make many lawyers or doctors redundant - not necessarily because of a lack of capabilities, but due to regulatory burdens.
I've worked with software for lawyers, and I remember thinking if it was done right, it would not make lawyers redundant, it would make paralegals redundant. Still seems to be the case.
Some people probably agree with him. I think his reasoning isn't quite right and do think that there will be people fired and replaced at least in part by AI, but I think his insistence that AI is illegal and that's the reason health, education, and housing prices are so high is kind of funny. I feel like he hasn't thought about how setting a bone, wrapping a bandage, meeting with individual students, building on finite land might not be done as relatively efficiently as the other things on that list.
Most of the recent AI advances and hype is around content creation, like generating essays or images. The big money is not content creation, but strategy, ranking visibility, etc. that arise from competition, like promoting a new product or outranking a competitor. Google is worth $1 trillion for this reason. Facebook $400 billion. Getty Images is worth $1 billion. Humans have to compete against other humans for an edge; AI does not stand a chance.
I can't help but think Andreesen's gone off the deep end a bit, especially after he started gushing over Adam Neumann's second run at a real estate company (“We think it is natural that for his first venture since WeWork, Adam returns to the theme of connecting people through transforming their physical spaces and building communities where people spend the most time: their homes.”).
> AI is simply already illegal across most of the economy, soon to be virtually all of the economy.
This just isn't true - AI won't necessarily be a product in the sectors he's talking about, but it'll absolutely improve them. Hospital services? AI is clearly going to be involved, at least in things like radiology. College tuition? I suppose that depends on how much the value of higher education remains in scarce brand names vs. education, but clearly AI is going to open up educational opportunities in a way that brings the costs way down.
And then AI will eventually (and to be clear, it might be a while) get us to general-purpose robots. He says "Those industries are monopolies, oligopolies, and cartels, with extensive formal government regulation as well as regulatory capture, price fixing, Soviet style price setting, occupational licensing, and every other barrier to improvement and change you can possibly imagine." but in an industry like construction, if you accept what he's saying, all of that control is in the hands of the rich folks at the top. What he's suggesting is that they'll protect the jobs of construction workers when they can replace them with cheaper, more efficient robots who are exempt from safety standards.
Yeah, his whole post is thinly veiled anti-regulations blather. I suppose it’s a nice break from his web3 nonsense and his deranged anti-“woke” posting.
> Might just be drink being less affordable, or other drugs being more affordable rather than a fashion decision
Or they're just joyless teetotalers who've replaced their friends with SSRIs and amphetamines.
Inebriation is vulnerability. It's too risky to drink around other people these days, which is the entire point of it. I don't even see/smell anybody smoking weed despite it being legal and accessible...my local dispensary is a ghost town.
Loosened social inhibitions is a footgun, and drinking alone is miserable, so why bother?
Crypto was a big mistake on his part, imho . Crypto is not at all like the 'next facebook' or the 'next world wide web'. At best it will be a niche and limited to gambling. Even I could have told him it was a bad idea, but it's not his money, so what does he have to lose. As long as there are people chasing the latest thing in the hope of getting rich, there will be people selling shovels and ticket.
Limited to gambling is hardly limited at all if your mission is life is to extract money out of people by any means possible.
If your mission is whatever noble sounding thing most investors claim then yes, it is very limited.
On the topic of the article. Employment and unemployment are social constructs and how AI changes them is up to us.
It won't inevitably lead to a post-scarcity society or to mass poverty.
What happens will depend on what you, the reader, do. Do you assume it will all work out? Do you get active in remaking the social contract? Do you try to exploit the situation for your own ends?
Probably realizes the Crypto ting is tainted, he needs a new steaming pile of shit to scam people with. AI is perfect like crypto, because you can use techyspeak to confuse people.
I have no special love for this guy as he said some stuff that pissed me off in the past, but what is your specific argument against this post right here?
> Hospital services? AI is clearly going to be involved, at least in things like radiology
This is very far from the main point: accuracy of the claim that AI will wipe out (in this case health-related) jobs (and/or make health-related services cheaper). "involved" here is so vague as to be meaningless.
> clearly AI is going to open up educational opportunities in a way that brings the costs way down
It may be crystal clear to you that AI will bring the cost of popular education down, but it is not clear to me at all, and adding "clearly" and "obviously" to some future claim does not make it any more convincing. He's trying to work with existing trends and data, you are saying "clearly the trend will reverse just because".
I realize the original post was written by somebody who has a reputation for saying one thing and doing something completely different, etc. etc.
> This is very far from the main point: accuracy of the claim that AI will wipe out (in this case health-related) jobs (and/or make health-related services cheaper). "involved" here is so vague as to be meaningless.
Let me rephrase: AI is better at human beings at the sort of pattern-matching work that radiology entails, so the majority of radiologists will be unemployed (I'll say in 20 years, if you want to check back down the line a bit and see how I did). This will both improve patient outcomes (fewer mistakes) and lower costs. Some radiologists will remain in supervisory/research/needing to have a human to rubber stamp type roles.
> It may be crystal clear to you that AI will bring the cost of popular education down, but it is not clear to me at all, and adding "clearly" and "obviously" to some future claim does not make it any more convincing. He's trying to work with existing trends and data, you are saying "clearly the trend will reverse just because".
I'm not saying anything "just because." I'm saying that technological changes in the form of AI will cause the trend to change, as technological changes have caused numerous economic upheavals. Nonetheless, I will be more specific - AI will give everyone a completely knowledgeable, fully personalized tutor. It will be able to very specifically identify places where a student is having difficulty and create custom exercises that are tailored to not only the subject, but also the student's optimal methods of learning. It will be able to custom tailor curriculum to fit a student's specific knowledge and career goals. The relative inefficiency of the large-scale lecture model of higher education will be so significant that the value it'll retain will just lie in the brand cache of the institute of higher learning (effectively, you passed the Stanford admissions AI's muster, so you're smart).
> ...AI will give everyone a completely knowledgeable, fully personalized tutor.
I want to see a GPT-based implementation of A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer-like open world that constantly teaches. We have a lot of the precursors needed to attempt it and give it a shot.
This is my life long dream. To get to work on gen1 of something like this.
In place of paid mechanical Turk tutors I want to create an epistemological engine consisting of 3 main things: an inventory system of composable pieces of collected knowledge about the game world, a set of story writing design tools to create vignettes and connect pieces of narrative… a kind of narrative procedural generation system, and finally a set of original ui elements to showcase how the “knowbits” can be used to interact with the games narrative. AI will be used for character actors.
But, i get the gist of it, we can probably find many more niches that might suffer.
My take on the bigger point is, I wouldn't be so sure about the economy-wide apocalypse. I agree with what he said about the outsourcing scare of 2000's, and if pure cost+customization of education, for example, were an issue, you could conceivably hire a very good personal tutor (professor even) from a low-COL English speaking country, even like 15 years ago, or build yourself your own full custom curriculum for free from MIT videos and plentiful other information that has been around forever, mostly for free. Yet, colleges haven't been abandoned, people are taking on more and more debt every year just to be a part of that system. This is probably not technological in nature. Same for healthcare, there are so much money (and technology) getting poured into that but the system keeps getting more expensive and not too much more efficient, will probably start regressing at some point.
My personal point of curiosity was that autonomous driving, which 10 years ago was promised to have fully arrived 5 years ago, among other things would have turned 2,000,000 not-very-retrainable-in-such-numbers truck drivers in the US into basically near-homeless people. Well, it hasn't really happened:
> from 2020 you will become a permanent backseat driver
We've been, too, promised that AI will revolutionize healthcare, e.g. that Watson will replace your doctor (at least, according to the IBM and friends' pitches). Watson turned out to be less than a rounding error in the healthcare equation (i think they got rid of parts of it by now).
The point being, to me it's not very clear cut, and some of what MA pointed out seems really to be caused not by inferior pre-ChatGPT technology but for more societal/economical reasons and incentives (perverse or not).
The statement that "AI is better than human beings at the pattern-matching work of radiology, so the majority of radiologists will be unemployed" oversimplifies the role of radiologists. While AI can assist with pattern matching and improve scan quality, radiologists are doctors who diagnose pathologies based on multiple factors, not just scans. They also interact with patients, make important judgments, and determine when further investigation is necessary, for example.
While it is possible in theory for AI to handle these tasks, they are complex and difficult problems to solve. There is currently no evidence to suggest that AI will replace radiologists in the two decades. Therefore, it is important to recognize the valuable role that radiologists play in patient care and not underestimate the challenges that remain in developing AI technology that can effectively replicate their expertise.
> doctors who diagnose pathologies based on multiple factors
This is part of “patterns”. Multiple factors are just patterns.
> They also interact with patients, make important judgments, and determine when further investigation is necessary, for example.
Judgements and determining further investigation can be just output of AIs. Interacting with patient can be important, but as we can and could see, that is not preferred by many people. For example, I used an AI in the past few years for every of my medical problems. It was better than my doctors averagely. I still followed my doctors advices, but they failed many-many times when it wasn’t a simple cold or injury. It’s a matter of time when something will click in my mind and I start to ignore doctors as the first contact points. Especially that there is a good chance that you get an asshole, or an idiot, who just causes more problems (both happened to me way more frequently than it should be acceptable).
I am 90% sure that some form of "this was clearly written by ChatGPT" will be the new go to comment for people who don't have a counterargument to people who disagree.
When the television first arrived any TV optimist would’ve said:
“clearly TV is going to open up educational opportunities in a way that brings the costs way down”
… and that is exactly what happened. Since 1960 every kid in the world “clearly” gets the absolute best education imaginable thanks to the economy of scale afforded by TV broadcasting. It’s basic economics. Oh wait.
The cost of educating 1 child was never lower than when they were taught by their parents how to work the fields while doing said work. Education costs tell us very little about both quality and efficiency of education.
Well the thing with education is that there is always more to learn since knowledge keeps increasing. So arguably what you want to measure is productivity. Has television, say PBS increased educational productivity. I would say yes. I remember watching Nova shows in science class and so forth. So yes TV has reduced costs.
Books also increased productivity in the same way.
Do you mean education as in actually education? Then the cost has fallen to basically nothing. Or do you mean education as in credentialing, which is the way most people use the word? In that case it hasn't because, as the value of a credential rests entirely on other people not having it, it is in the interest of schools to restrict the supply.
It is not clear to me that is the case. Has the proliferation of screens actually improved learning outcomes?
It appears to me that e.g., HS graduate standards have been gradually lowered over time, particularly the further back you go. Maybe this is independent of the screens.
Unequivocally yes. Not every usage of a screen in education is beneficial.
But there are absolutely numerous use cases where being able to display graphics on a screen (or even better interactively) is a massive benefit. Think of any sort of science that's better shown with animation than just a static image on a page for example.
Sure, no doubt, a video can sometimes make things much clearer. A great example (to me) is this [1] for example. I had understood from the old illustrations that I was supposed to imagine something like that, but video makes it incredibly clear.
The actual net impact of screens in classrooms, however, appears to me to be extremely negative, and I think learning outcomes bear that out.
You are not wrong. This is what I would call a severe imagination deficit. Which is of course not a great trait for a venture capitalist. Andreesen is framing things in a very US centric context. Which of course represents the status quo there and the way things are; mostly for historic reasons. That's going to change for two simple reasons. Number 1 would be that it is sub optimal to say the least. It's simply not sustainable. And number 2 is that this is not the way things are elsewhere and the US is in competition with those places. Andreesen is making a closed world assumption and navel gazing. Failing to adapt basically means a slide towards being less relevant, less competitive, etc. Which is of course another way of saying that change is inevitably coming. Whether people like it or not and whether they are ready for it or not. Eventually the economy would collapse and people would adapt. But probably some time before that people will get a clue and start fixing things. Either way, things change. So predicting that things won't, shouldn't or can't change is a foolish prediction to make.
If you want a concrete example of a few places that aren't going to be held back by regulation and bureaucracy: China, India, most of Africa. They have bureaucracies of course but they are also booming economies and very much making the difference via technology. People are going to push boundaries with what is possible technically and some places are going to be more comfortable doing that than others. Ultimately, the willingness to push boundaries is what will lead to breakthrough results. If the US is not willing, too complacent, or too scared, that just means it happens elsewhere.
All this is true regardless of AI. But of course given that we have that, people are going to use that in anger for all sorts of things. Some misguided, some foolish, and some very productive and practical. Andreesen is arguing that flat panels are cheap and education is expensive. Flat panels are cheap because they are not made in the US and the production of those is not bogged down by how inefficient things have become in the US. For the same reason, you are better off getting your education outside of the US. Education is more or less free in other parts of the world. It's only this expensive in the US. Probably silicon valley is the worst place in the world to get one in terms of economics. Which is why a lot of the people working there are coming from abroad. Which is where they get most of their education.
Probably education is at the forefront of what AI can do short term btw. I've played a bit with chat gpt and it's an obviously awesome educational tool. It's like this patient tutor that is willing to explore any subject and answer any question. It might be a bit off with the facts and all the bat shit crazy hallucination. But that sounds like it should be a fixable problem. Once that is fixed, there will be no shortage of teachers any more. Anyone willing to learn will be able to learn and receive an education that is completely tailored to them. Anything, anyone, anywhere. Kids are using chat gpt already to fool their teachers. The next logical step is replacing them entirely. That's not going to take a lot of time. And it won't cost anywhere near a million dollars.
he led the mosaic project at ncsa, creating the first web browser most people today would recognize as a browser, with things like images mixed in with text
then he went off and founded netscape, creating the dot-com boom
since then he's mostly been running a successful vc firm
i don't think you can be brilliant without being kooky; if all you know is consensus reality you can never reach any conclusions before consensus reality does
Copying comment from earlier thread because I sent it two days after thread:
You should add your Matrix to your contact page.
Edit: Also, is there going to be another der* release this year? They and therefore you have taught me more than I'd learned in the last five years otherwise.
wow, that's astonishing and wonderful to hear, thank you
i hope the things you learned from them were mostly true
i was planning to do one in december but i felt like i didn't have much material because i had a pretty unproductive year in 02022, and i'm increasingly dissatisfied with the medium
> but in an industry like construction, if you accept what he's saying, all of that control is in the hands of the rich folks at the top. What he's suggesting is that they'll protect the jobs of construction workers when they can replace them with cheaper, more efficient robots who are exempt from safety standards.
That doesn't follow, particularly in construction.
There are many regulations that require something which is nominally better but is a trade off against cost, making the lower cost alternative unavailable. Much of that increase goes to the construction contractors as labor costs or markups on more expensive materials, so it's their unions and trade organizations lobbying in favor of the cost increase. The regulatory capture is by the construction workers.
They're also aligned with anyone who wants housing costs to stay high, including realtors and real estate investors. So yes, the rich folks at the top will protect the jobs of the construction workers when the high construction costs help them keep rents high.
- Just a little bit of ideological over-simplification in this piece and , generally speaking, a false equivalence between technology and libertarian deregulation. There's plenty of room for technological authoritarianism, ask anyone who lived through zero-covid.
- I don't disagree at all that hospital costs are the direct result of regulatory failure. However, it has nothing to do with technology? Hospitals are actually bastions of advanced technology and AI? We just have no market on healthcare. I actually see plenty of room for AI to help make markets efficient, by helping poorly informed consumers be more aware of their options (such as seeking healthcare in places that DO have two-sided healthcare markets).
- One of the pathological 'red' lines is "college textbooks" some insignificant fraction of the economy, not really a relevant counter to "household furnishings".
You could also argue that the "red" categories align more closely with "needs" people have little to no choice but to pay, and are ripe for predatory pricing.
It's true there are monopoly problems here, but the answer isn't to remove regulation it's to strengthen it. A return to real anti-trust in particular.
The blue items lean more towards luxury items and discretionary spending, so pricing can't be so exploitative.
Even the American Enterprise Institute, where he's getting the chart from, frames it more in terms of globalization, competition, and of course given the source, regulation. Their preferred talking points on it are a little dubious as well: e.g., cars are subject to substantial regulation on all sorts of axes and yet are flat and therefore "blue" on the chart, while college textbooks aren't really meaningfully regulated at all and are one of the worst categories. (AEI's post also without irony points to the influence of open and free textbooks as something sure to bring down prices in the future, brought to you thanks to the free market).
Anyway, regardless of your view on AEI's gloss on those numbers, it's much more reasonable than Andreesen's claim that "technology is banned" in all the red sectors.
> (AEI's post also without irony points to the influence of open and free textbooks as something sure to bring down prices in the future, brought to you thanks to the free market).
Further irony: the open and free textbooks (and textbook alternatives, and increasingly efficient distribution of second hand textbooks) are probably one of the main drivers of the price rises. Publishers sell to tiny niches with a significant core market who find it really important to have the latest edition of the course text, and fringe around that that now has much cheaper alternatives. There's no mass market potential from pricing really low, so the publishers try to offset the loss of sales to the second group by squeezing the first group for higher prices. In any case, textbook revenues are already in decline despite the price rises.
This is much closer to reality. Markets are priced by demand far more than supply - if you have a perpetual source of demand to milk, the pricing isn't going to come down easily, even if supply could have been made more efficient. I suspect it's a bit of a mixed bag - regulations certainly can be (and are) used as a tool to lock in control in ways that benefit the corporations leading the industry and not the consumer - but abolishing said regulations just makes it even worse. Regardless, if AI is able to lower the bottom-line engineering/labor costs of producing these things (which it absolutely will) then you'll see pretty clearly where the corruption rests. We should expect far better as consumers going forward, and demand both better prices and quality.
I feel more like the red items are all the ones where the price pressure has been removed for one reason or another, where a new company with a rich investor can't arrive and create a hugely increased supply.
Housing in desirable areas works that way due to zoning/NIMBY restrictions, education works that way because at the point of choosing to pay there's no effective price competition as student loans cover the difference so that potential students don't really change their decisions meaningfully because the price is $10,000 higher than in another place, textbooks have the same but even more - because students paying for textbooks have almost no say in which textbooks will get chosen and can't choose a different book because it's cheaper, and medicine because of both of these factors - artificially limited supply of doctors due to restricted residency&licensing spots, and a price disconnect with insurers paying huge bills according to rules of what needs to be paid or not and lack of price transparency (and price competition!) for procedures; the majority of medical cost is for planned, non-urgent procedures but even for these people aren't making a meaningful choice whether they'll do the same thing in Hospital A for $10,000 or in Hospital B for $7,000, it's either covered/in-network/whatever or not; so there's no free market price setting that would limit these costs.
Uhh… from the point of view of someone that has spent 12 years in academia (post-secondary education, in Canada) essentially studying health sciences and healthcare, the premise of this article is delusional— completely disconnected from reality.
The conclusion may be correct, I don’t know… But if it’s correct, it’s only accidentally so. Garbage reasoning.
I think there is real difference between a) devaluing someone's work, and b) and voiding work of value. What makes AI different from previous technological innovations is that it seems to have the potential to make peoples labor worthless, rather than merely devalued. To give examples, if your writing is worse than ChatGPTs then your writing is worthless. If your art is worse than stable diffusion then your art is worthless, and if it takes more money to feed, clothe, and train you for construction than it does to run the Atlas robot then your physical labor is worthless too.
I do not think our current social policies are ready for that.
But this is the story of technology for two centuries or more. Somehow we kept income and aggregate growth going even as we needed far fewer farmers, factory foremen, and travel agents.
Arguably there is a larger portion of people unable to adapt as specialization has skyrocketed. Look at how much education is now expected, more than 12y in most industries. And the portion of the working age population under employed or on SSDI.
Except it isn't, and the failure of most people to perceive this nuance could be catastrophic.
We have never created (and we still haven't, but recent advances are starting to become frightening) an artificial replacement for general human cognition. General cognition is the only thing that makes us special and valuable. Replace that, and most of us will be reduced to just another discardable animal.
This could end up great, and could usher in a post-scarcity future. There are also a number of dystopias, and outright near-extinction scenarios that could result if the wrong actors develop AGI first.
How is this different from previous leaps in industrialization or technological innovation? If you make widgets worse than a machine in a factory then your labor is worthless.
We moved from farming and digging ditch to offices where we think for a living. But tell me, what is left after physical labor and thinking? Sex work? I don't think most of us are cut out for that. And with AI taking on creative work it won't be long before someone makes a Cherry 2000.
Well you might be farming again when you have nothing left to do?
I'm sure a shit not going to be laid off due a robot and do nothing about it, I'll be doing whatever I need to do to survive, this might be farming and living a simpler life, even if it's considered a step backwards, I have really no idea how far it will go.
My theory is however, I'll be either building AIs, or developing new ones, helping optimize them etc.
I'm not really sold that we're going to every create an AGI that can reason and will just want to sit in a box all day and work for humans, I think there are some serious ethical considerations there too.
So as long as we're not talking about sentience, these thing are systems, and there will be demand for new and improved systems.
Correct, most here think that this time isn't different because "unemployment goes down as technology improves since demand increases more than supply". The issue is that AI makes the supply effectively infinite. I claim humans do not have "effectively infinite" demand, and even if they did, the cardinality of the supply infinity is higher than the demand infinity.
> I do not think our current social policies are ready for that.
Understatement. (And also, they weren't really ready for the previous waves either)
The upside is we exist as both producers and consumers - and while our value is about to go down (or be voided entirely), so is the price of all the things we want/need. Can't afford a house because the Atlas robot outperformed you at construction? Well, get a few buddies to pool funds to buy an Atlas robot yourselves and get it to build your houses. The barrier of entry is similarly dropping fast. It's gonna be a weird, sad and awkward short-to-medium term as the fluctuation of which drops first - employment or consumer prices - plays out, especially if government doesn't step in to protect people. But long-term I think it's hard to argue that there's not going to be an enormous increase in overall quality of life. (barring some sort of annihilation event...)
Either indoctrination or a detachment from reality. Can’t tell which. Wonder when the last time he spoke to someone who isn’t a reflection of himself was.
I am sorry to agree with his conclusion because I really look forward to an abundance world where the marginal cost of production asymtotes to nil and unemployment is universal (pretty sure I won't live long enough to see this).
(He should have stopped his essay after the first couple of paragraphs).
However we'll need more sophisticated intelligence than what most of today's "AI" work is leading towards.
That argument is extremely underwhelming and repeatedly makes assertions that are flat out wrong. Somehow high inflation areas like "college textbooks" are more heavily regulated than low inflation areas like "new cars". Meanwhile, the article completely ignores how much labor costs make up the prices in those different sectors. It does this in an article explicitly about fears that AI will be used to drive down labor costs and cause unemployment.
I have dramatically less respect for Marc Andresson after reading an example of such poor reasoning.
I have an extremely low opinion of Marc Andreesen (because of all the web3 scamming), and I actually thought that was a good article. It's almost a reframing of David Graeber's bullshit jobs in a sense, so much of what's tied up in these sectors (the ones that keep getting more expensive) is bullshit anyway, it could have been automated or just removed long before some new take on "AI" but it hasn't been, and a lifelike chatbot or whatever people think makes this time different isn't going to change that.
It was interesting in the beginning, but ended with “and then I found 5 dollars”.
The term “illegal” is not explained, and the graph (which is the basis) doesn't have an “AI-services” line, so overall the dots are not connected to prove that conclusion.
Honest question (willing to be consider new info): I always thought that housing, health care, and college are more expensive than TVs and cell phones because those things can't be OUTSOURCED to another country.
- If an American/Westerner wants a TV or a cell phone, Samsung or Apple can manufacture it overseas and have someone ship it here cheaply.
- If an American wants a house, they generally have to hire local labor, and pay local prices for land.
- If an American wants health care, for practical reasons, they must be treated by doctors and nurses who live here, and who are generally educated here.
- If an American wants to send his or her children to college, they often pay a huge premium for a campus in this country, with educators who also live in this country.
i.e. these are the industries where "remote work" is less appealing for inherent logistical reasons.
Andressen says that prices have increased because of regulation, but he doesn't provide evidence for these claims:
Why? The sectors in red are heavily regulated and controlled and bottlenecked by the government and by those industries themselves. Those industries are monopolies, oligopolies, and cartels, with extensive formal government regulation as well as regulatory capture, price fixing, Soviet style price setting, occupational licensing, and every other barrier to improvement and change you can possibly imagine. Technological innovation in those sectors is virtually forbidden now
Sure, there are little mini-cartels in all those industries. But wasn't that also the case 50 years ago? (I remember watching a documentary about the Mafia in the 20th century in NYC, and even then it was common for real estate builders to have to pay the mafia for labor. The mafia controlled some union leaders.)
So how much of the tremendous price increase is due to regulation, vs. labor costs? And there are obviously more than 2 possibilities.
Not being outsourced is part of what's going on. There is more to it, and each of these different goods have their own particular factors going into the rise in their costs.
A big factor leading to this graph is labor productivity. An hour is an hour for everyone, but while we've figured out how to make a TV in a lot less labor hours, it still takes about as many labor hours to set a bone or read a book.
The idea he is trying to say is similar to old school investors in which the the prices continue to be hiked up in order to afford people who are willing to bribe / lobby to reduce the possibility for disruption. I think there’s a UC Santa Barbara talk by Charlie Munger on this pricing power.
His data is meaningless without actually saying the sources for these numbers. BLS inflation data is highly criticized and it may make his entire point moot if the cost of those industries hasn't actually increased.
Something tells me that if someone came up with a technology that threatened to make venture capitalists unemployed and bankrupt, Andreesen would suddenly become very pro-luddite.
I don’t get the argument of tech not being able to affect prices.
Having an AI research assistant or tutor surely should reduce the ridiculous prices of college textbooks and the need for TAs no?
Also how does virtual and reimagined medical care not disrupt this? Go look at OneMedical and Amazon and they seem to be bringing costs down significantly.
Didn’t Charlie Munger say something about how high prices create the illusion of scarcity and quality?
> Having an AI research assistant or tutor surely should reduce the ridiculous prices of college textbooks and the need for TAs no?
Not clear: the textbook prices have been detached from reality for many years now not because there weren't alternative ways to get the knowledge all along. But because they are a part of a bloated system that works to extract more and more money by gatekeeping (formal degrees), upselling, cross-selling, making deals. That this system will disappear or become irrelevant overnight because of better tooling is not obvious. MIT had a bunch of classes online forever, a determined person could get all the content for a full degree almost for free for many years, yet people still flock to colleges and pay more money than ever to be a part of that (broken) system.
> Go look at OneMedical and Amazon and they seem to be bringing costs down significantly
If this was happening industry-wide, it would probably be noticeable on his "Medical care services" graph line, which instead is shooting way up? Maybe it's crap and I don't have any better data, but do you?
I don’t think you’d see the change immediately as many of these companies just shifted strategies to be digital in the last few years and continued to increase prices.
I’d expect that to slowly reverse over the next decade or two. If not, then there was plenty of successful lobbying.
Disagree. AI will cause mass unemployment because it’s way more efficient than a human, doesn’t get sick (relatively less than humans) and costs less. Simple economics. I’ll give you one example. The checkout counters in supermarkets, if the supermarkets would have hired young people on those positions not only we might have less young people going towards drugs and hooliganism but it would have also made them better productive citizens as they gain skills in their teen years.
Corporates need to understand that their greed for infinite profit will eventually create a singularity which will consume them one day. People without jobs buy less. May be we will finally get rid of the consumerism.
It took 20 years for self checkout to really catch on. It's not even fully there yet.
It took months for Book and Magazine publishers to say. No more submissions please, we have enough content for a while.
The winner of a massive photography comp in the US took no pictures, had no subjects and didn't write the back stories of his "subjects". He AI'd the lot.
You’re applying what I would call the fallacy of scale.
Your take is correct as long as these singularity happen at relative scales.
We don’t know at all what happens when massive scale becomes a factor.
Computers and the internet allowed virtualization and we now base our economies largely on virtualization and abstraction.
That also means almost infinite replicability. In turn, infinite replicability allows levels of scale never before seen.
Now we are at the verge of a large optimization of the economy at a level of scale that we have never ever experienced before.
While I’m sure that in the time of a couple generations we would probably find ways to rewire our brains around the new AI normal like we did in the past, we will probably have to face an unemployment risk to a level we haven’t experienced so far.
With inequalities growing, the question is if societies can grow through this phase unscathed, or if it will be enough of a critical mass and tipping point for partial or complete collapse.
Don't you think that a lot of what you're talking about depends on how people react to this technology and it's use? To ask another way, if everyone around you is in complete suffering and misery from "AI", we're all broke, hungry and miserable, maybe people will just not want to use AI and prefer to buy and trade services with other humans so that we maintain a nice quality of life?
There is an assumption Silicon Valley is making here which is whether we like it or not, we're all going to have to give up everything, our money, careers, professions, lives and just use AI(tm) because they've made it and while economists will tell me I'm wrong, because "economies of scale etc", I'm certainly not going to trade everything, and everyone I know so I can get images cheaper than I can today from Getty Images.
Maybe <Insert billionaires who control all the bots> will just build his own robocops who will come and make sure I do what I'm told, or maybe even just wipe me out completely for growing my own food and trading goods and services with others who are out of work, I don't know. But I just can't see humans, who still actually do have brains btw, to just roll over and let our lives descend into chaos over Clippy.
Edit: I want to say that even to this day, I actually buy things from people who grow things locally etc just to support them rather than go to the grocer, I do this because I know it's doing some good for my community, I'll just be doing more of this in the future if people aren't working.
This is a good point but I’m not sure we can really compare the size and reach of what corporations can do with this tool with smaller circular and local economies driven by ethics.
It’s again a problem of scale :)
My steelman of what you're saying is that "this time it's different" because this will be a much bigger change than the normal yearly loss of 2-4% of all jobs.
I'd add that it's different in that it will hit us college educated professionals who are not at all used to this, instead of the usual blue collar industries. We as a group are not ready and will scream very very loudly if/when this happens :)
It's important to remember that a society consumes as much as it produces. This is how "rich" it is in aggregate. And job losses like this come from being able to produce as much as before with fewer people. So even if no one finds a new job, the society is as rich as before.
All experience is that those losing their jobs find/create new ones after an adjustment period. Maybe this adjustment period will be longer, but it will clear in time.
Unless, of course, Eliezer is right and AI kills us all.
I think that the visible impact will also be different because it not only matters how many people suffer but what types of people suffer. When the bad stuff happens to mostly disenfranchised poor people, they can (and will) push for change by e.g. protest votes for populists that promise to break the status quo and turn back time (and, to be clear, I'm not talking about the USA here - this is a global phenomenon), but that won't effectively advance their interests, as that simply can't be done even if the populists both get power and try to keep their promises.
On the other hand, when/if the same suffering happens to "semi-elites" with social capital and connections, they will raise noise in media and try to use the government establishment to "do something", and while it also might be ineffective, at least the appearance of governments needing to take action and help the adjustment will be much more significant than for the blue collar troubles.
Good example actually. In Switzerland nearly every store has automated checkouts and depending on the local demographic more and more people are using them. There is one human supervising like 4-16 automated checkouts, or 1 open real checkout that keeps an eye on the machines.
That is at least 2-3 workers less for every single store in the country in just the last few years.
You should also mention that one classic checkout line with an average-skilled worker is, in practice, easily as fast with regard to the "items processed per minute" metric as 4-8 self-checkouts where average-talented customers perform self checkout.
The advent of AI will absolutely eliminate jobs, either by decimating the required headcount or by making whole professions redundant. I don’t think we can accurately predict which industries will be affected either, as surprisingly many creative disciplines are being impacted now.
How our society integrates AI and robotics technology will determine who is impacted and how we handle it. This is actually a great opportunity to find what is valuable and meaningful. For instance, what can we do to improve people’s lives with excess hands and funds?
I think the foundation will be in providing equitable access to society. For instance, greater accessibility technology will help those who are disabled or differently-abled. There is so much beyond ADA compliance that can help the blind, deaf, lame, and mentally handicapped.
Coming out of a global pandemic, we’ve also learned how crucial socialization is to mental health. Rather than using technology to cut people out of the system (self-checkout; ordering from kiosks; automated support desks), I imagine we will expand services like counseling, fitness, and social events. Places where we prefer interacting with humans to machines.
In the end, it is a bit of a reckoning - what can I do that’s meaningful when I am outperformed by a machine? It means throwing away the culture of being the best, and picking up the habits of doing the best for others.
361 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 277 ms ] threadNo adult, least of all a VC, should be citing clothing and household furnishings as shining examples of technology-driven innovation in stark contrast to the moribund world of healthcare, or implying government regulates textbooks more than new cars
How much of this economy and growth was real and how much was free money from the FED? We’ve still got all that same stuff now, but the only difference is the free money is gone and things look a lot different.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lawrencelight/2021/02/24/will-t...
Therefore that is the optimal rate for the currency issuer. There is no need to pay people not to spend when you can tax them if they do. That's just basic income for rich people.
Banks then discount assets into liquidity at a markup over zero and they can be allowed to compete fully and go bust which controls the net interest margin.
If you optimise the system so it operates on maximum liquidity then you lower the cost of business investment while selecting for productivity by moving the business to where the people are rather than the other way around.
That gets you around the greying population problem without destroying your society - by learning to do more with less.
Japan has gone some way down this road, but not entirely.
No, making coins or dollars, particularly the type which is resistant to counter-fitting, takes an awful lot of money to produce. Hell, pennies are worth significantly more than their face value, hence why we have people calling to ban the penny all the time!
Metalism lost the argument centuries ago.
Money is a promise, not a thing.
I haven't done so for this article, but it could be a similar motivator for others.
> AI is simply already illegal across most of the economy, soon to be virtually all of the economy.
This just isn't true - AI won't necessarily be a product in the sectors he's talking about, but it'll absolutely improve them. Hospital services? AI is clearly going to be involved, at least in things like radiology. College tuition? I suppose that depends on how much the value of higher education remains in scarce brand names vs. education, but clearly AI is going to open up educational opportunities in a way that brings the costs way down.
And then AI will eventually (and to be clear, it might be a while) get us to general-purpose robots. He says "Those industries are monopolies, oligopolies, and cartels, with extensive formal government regulation as well as regulatory capture, price fixing, Soviet style price setting, occupational licensing, and every other barrier to improvement and change you can possibly imagine." but in an industry like construction, if you accept what he's saying, all of that control is in the hands of the rich folks at the top. What he's suggesting is that they'll protect the jobs of construction workers when they can replace them with cheaper, more efficient robots who are exempt from safety standards.
(In all seriousness, I'm very happy it's becoming more fashionable to not drink)
What is fashionable: to drink a lot for many years, then stop drinking and blather on about how much better life is.
Might just be drink being less affordable, or other drugs being more affordable rather than a fashion decision
Or they're just joyless teetotalers who've replaced their friends with SSRIs and amphetamines.
Inebriation is vulnerability. It's too risky to drink around other people these days, which is the entire point of it. I don't even see/smell anybody smoking weed despite it being legal and accessible...my local dispensary is a ghost town.
Loosened social inhibitions is a footgun, and drinking alone is miserable, so why bother?
If your mission is whatever noble sounding thing most investors claim then yes, it is very limited.
On the topic of the article. Employment and unemployment are social constructs and how AI changes them is up to us.
It won't inevitably lead to a post-scarcity society or to mass poverty.
What happens will depend on what you, the reader, do. Do you assume it will all work out? Do you get active in remaking the social contract? Do you try to exploit the situation for your own ends?
Moreover, even associating with Neumann after the antics he pulled is nuts.
> Hospital services? AI is clearly going to be involved, at least in things like radiology
This is very far from the main point: accuracy of the claim that AI will wipe out (in this case health-related) jobs (and/or make health-related services cheaper). "involved" here is so vague as to be meaningless.
> clearly AI is going to open up educational opportunities in a way that brings the costs way down
It may be crystal clear to you that AI will bring the cost of popular education down, but it is not clear to me at all, and adding "clearly" and "obviously" to some future claim does not make it any more convincing. He's trying to work with existing trends and data, you are saying "clearly the trend will reverse just because".
I realize the original post was written by somebody who has a reputation for saying one thing and doing something completely different, etc. etc.
Let me rephrase: AI is better at human beings at the sort of pattern-matching work that radiology entails, so the majority of radiologists will be unemployed (I'll say in 20 years, if you want to check back down the line a bit and see how I did). This will both improve patient outcomes (fewer mistakes) and lower costs. Some radiologists will remain in supervisory/research/needing to have a human to rubber stamp type roles.
> It may be crystal clear to you that AI will bring the cost of popular education down, but it is not clear to me at all, and adding "clearly" and "obviously" to some future claim does not make it any more convincing. He's trying to work with existing trends and data, you are saying "clearly the trend will reverse just because".
I'm not saying anything "just because." I'm saying that technological changes in the form of AI will cause the trend to change, as technological changes have caused numerous economic upheavals. Nonetheless, I will be more specific - AI will give everyone a completely knowledgeable, fully personalized tutor. It will be able to very specifically identify places where a student is having difficulty and create custom exercises that are tailored to not only the subject, but also the student's optimal methods of learning. It will be able to custom tailor curriculum to fit a student's specific knowledge and career goals. The relative inefficiency of the large-scale lecture model of higher education will be so significant that the value it'll retain will just lie in the brand cache of the institute of higher learning (effectively, you passed the Stanford admissions AI's muster, so you're smart).
I want to see a GPT-based implementation of A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer-like open world that constantly teaches. We have a lot of the precursors needed to attempt it and give it a shot.
In place of paid mechanical Turk tutors I want to create an epistemological engine consisting of 3 main things: an inventory system of composable pieces of collected knowledge about the game world, a set of story writing design tools to create vignettes and connect pieces of narrative… a kind of narrative procedural generation system, and finally a set of original ui elements to showcase how the “knowbits” can be used to interact with the games narrative. AI will be used for character actors.
If it is obvious to all, then the word is meant to point out how stupid the listener is.
If it's not obvious to all then the speaker is just trying to shut down a conversation.
Clearly I'm right about this. It's obvious.
But, i get the gist of it, we can probably find many more niches that might suffer.
My take on the bigger point is, I wouldn't be so sure about the economy-wide apocalypse. I agree with what he said about the outsourcing scare of 2000's, and if pure cost+customization of education, for example, were an issue, you could conceivably hire a very good personal tutor (professor even) from a low-COL English speaking country, even like 15 years ago, or build yourself your own full custom curriculum for free from MIT videos and plentiful other information that has been around forever, mostly for free. Yet, colleges haven't been abandoned, people are taking on more and more debt every year just to be a part of that system. This is probably not technological in nature. Same for healthcare, there are so much money (and technology) getting poured into that but the system keeps getting more expensive and not too much more efficient, will probably start regressing at some point.
My personal point of curiosity was that autonomous driving, which 10 years ago was promised to have fully arrived 5 years ago, among other things would have turned 2,000,000 not-very-retrainable-in-such-numbers truck drivers in the US into basically near-homeless people. Well, it hasn't really happened:
> from 2020 you will become a permanent backseat driver
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/13/self-driv...
We've been, too, promised that AI will revolutionize healthcare, e.g. that Watson will replace your doctor (at least, according to the IBM and friends' pitches). Watson turned out to be less than a rounding error in the healthcare equation (i think they got rid of parts of it by now).
The point being, to me it's not very clear cut, and some of what MA pointed out seems really to be caused not by inferior pre-ChatGPT technology but for more societal/economical reasons and incentives (perverse or not).
While it is possible in theory for AI to handle these tasks, they are complex and difficult problems to solve. There is currently no evidence to suggest that AI will replace radiologists in the two decades. Therefore, it is important to recognize the valuable role that radiologists play in patient care and not underestimate the challenges that remain in developing AI technology that can effectively replicate their expertise.
“clearly TV is going to open up educational opportunities in a way that brings the costs way down”
… and that is exactly what happened. Since 1960 every kid in the world “clearly” gets the absolute best education imaginable thanks to the economy of scale afforded by TV broadcasting. It’s basic economics. Oh wait.
Books also increased productivity in the same way.
Would remote learning reduce costs? Yes.
Will AI systems reduce cost, yes.
What cost did the school save themselves here? The paid for televisions, so TV increased costs.
It appears to me that e.g., HS graduate standards have been gradually lowered over time, particularly the further back you go. Maybe this is independent of the screens.
But there are absolutely numerous use cases where being able to display graphics on a screen (or even better interactively) is a massive benefit. Think of any sort of science that's better shown with animation than just a static image on a page for example.
The actual net impact of screens in classrooms, however, appears to me to be extremely negative, and I think learning outcomes bear that out.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrwgIjBUYVc
If you want a concrete example of a few places that aren't going to be held back by regulation and bureaucracy: China, India, most of Africa. They have bureaucracies of course but they are also booming economies and very much making the difference via technology. People are going to push boundaries with what is possible technically and some places are going to be more comfortable doing that than others. Ultimately, the willingness to push boundaries is what will lead to breakthrough results. If the US is not willing, too complacent, or too scared, that just means it happens elsewhere.
All this is true regardless of AI. But of course given that we have that, people are going to use that in anger for all sorts of things. Some misguided, some foolish, and some very productive and practical. Andreesen is arguing that flat panels are cheap and education is expensive. Flat panels are cheap because they are not made in the US and the production of those is not bogged down by how inefficient things have become in the US. For the same reason, you are better off getting your education outside of the US. Education is more or less free in other parts of the world. It's only this expensive in the US. Probably silicon valley is the worst place in the world to get one in terms of economics. Which is why a lot of the people working there are coming from abroad. Which is where they get most of their education.
Probably education is at the forefront of what AI can do short term btw. I've played a bit with chat gpt and it's an obviously awesome educational tool. It's like this patient tutor that is willing to explore any subject and answer any question. It might be a bit off with the facts and all the bat shit crazy hallucination. But that sounds like it should be a fixable problem. Once that is fixed, there will be no shortage of teachers any more. Anyone willing to learn will be able to learn and receive an education that is completely tailored to them. Anything, anyone, anywhere. Kids are using chat gpt already to fool their teachers. The next logical step is replacing them entirely. That's not going to take a lot of time. And it won't cost anywhere near a million dollars.
Lack of bureaucracy and government control are not defining features of these places.
The first time I heard of him was in 2016: https://www.fastcompany.com/3056581/marc-andreessen-riles-up...
As far as I'm concerned, he's always been kooky.
then he went off and founded netscape, creating the dot-com boom
since then he's mostly been running a successful vc firm
so yeah he's always been 'kooky'
https://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/research/project-highlights/nc...
You should add your Matrix to your contact page.
Edit: Also, is there going to be another der* release this year? They and therefore you have taught me more than I'd learned in the last five years otherwise.
i hope the things you learned from them were mostly true
i was planning to do one in december but i felt like i didn't have much material because i had a pretty unproductive year in 02022, and i'm increasingly dissatisfied with the medium
you're right about matrix
That doesn't follow, particularly in construction.
There are many regulations that require something which is nominally better but is a trade off against cost, making the lower cost alternative unavailable. Much of that increase goes to the construction contractors as labor costs or markups on more expensive materials, so it's their unions and trade organizations lobbying in favor of the cost increase. The regulatory capture is by the construction workers.
They're also aligned with anyone who wants housing costs to stay high, including realtors and real estate investors. So yes, the rich folks at the top will protect the jobs of the construction workers when the high construction costs help them keep rents high.
- I don't disagree at all that hospital costs are the direct result of regulatory failure. However, it has nothing to do with technology? Hospitals are actually bastions of advanced technology and AI? We just have no market on healthcare. I actually see plenty of room for AI to help make markets efficient, by helping poorly informed consumers be more aware of their options (such as seeking healthcare in places that DO have two-sided healthcare markets).
- One of the pathological 'red' lines is "college textbooks" some insignificant fraction of the economy, not really a relevant counter to "household furnishings".
It's true there are monopoly problems here, but the answer isn't to remove regulation it's to strengthen it. A return to real anti-trust in particular.
The blue items lean more towards luxury items and discretionary spending, so pricing can't be so exploitative.
Anyway, regardless of your view on AEI's gloss on those numbers, it's much more reasonable than Andreesen's claim that "technology is banned" in all the red sectors.
Further irony: the open and free textbooks (and textbook alternatives, and increasingly efficient distribution of second hand textbooks) are probably one of the main drivers of the price rises. Publishers sell to tiny niches with a significant core market who find it really important to have the latest edition of the course text, and fringe around that that now has much cheaper alternatives. There's no mass market potential from pricing really low, so the publishers try to offset the loss of sales to the second group by squeezing the first group for higher prices. In any case, textbook revenues are already in decline despite the price rises.
Housing in desirable areas works that way due to zoning/NIMBY restrictions, education works that way because at the point of choosing to pay there's no effective price competition as student loans cover the difference so that potential students don't really change their decisions meaningfully because the price is $10,000 higher than in another place, textbooks have the same but even more - because students paying for textbooks have almost no say in which textbooks will get chosen and can't choose a different book because it's cheaper, and medicine because of both of these factors - artificially limited supply of doctors due to restricted residency&licensing spots, and a price disconnect with insurers paying huge bills according to rules of what needs to be paid or not and lack of price transparency (and price competition!) for procedures; the majority of medical cost is for planned, non-urgent procedures but even for these people aren't making a meaningful choice whether they'll do the same thing in Hospital A for $10,000 or in Hospital B for $7,000, it's either covered/in-network/whatever or not; so there's no free market price setting that would limit these costs.
The conclusion may be correct, I don’t know… But if it’s correct, it’s only accidentally so. Garbage reasoning.
I do not think our current social policies are ready for that.
None of us know where we are on the S curve currently.
We have never created (and we still haven't, but recent advances are starting to become frightening) an artificial replacement for general human cognition. General cognition is the only thing that makes us special and valuable. Replace that, and most of us will be reduced to just another discardable animal.
This could end up great, and could usher in a post-scarcity future. There are also a number of dystopias, and outright near-extinction scenarios that could result if the wrong actors develop AGI first.
I'm sure a shit not going to be laid off due a robot and do nothing about it, I'll be doing whatever I need to do to survive, this might be farming and living a simpler life, even if it's considered a step backwards, I have really no idea how far it will go.
My theory is however, I'll be either building AIs, or developing new ones, helping optimize them etc.
I'm not really sold that we're going to every create an AGI that can reason and will just want to sit in a box all day and work for humans, I think there are some serious ethical considerations there too.
So as long as we're not talking about sentience, these thing are systems, and there will be demand for new and improved systems.
Understatement. (And also, they weren't really ready for the previous waves either)
The upside is we exist as both producers and consumers - and while our value is about to go down (or be voided entirely), so is the price of all the things we want/need. Can't afford a house because the Atlas robot outperformed you at construction? Well, get a few buddies to pool funds to buy an Atlas robot yourselves and get it to build your houses. The barrier of entry is similarly dropping fast. It's gonna be a weird, sad and awkward short-to-medium term as the fluctuation of which drops first - employment or consumer prices - plays out, especially if government doesn't step in to protect people. But long-term I think it's hard to argue that there's not going to be an enormous increase in overall quality of life. (barring some sort of annihilation event...)
(He should have stopped his essay after the first couple of paragraphs).
However we'll need more sophisticated intelligence than what most of today's "AI" work is leading towards.
I have dramatically less respect for Marc Andresson after reading an example of such poor reasoning.
The term “illegal” is not explained, and the graph (which is the basis) doesn't have an “AI-services” line, so overall the dots are not connected to prove that conclusion.
- If an American/Westerner wants a TV or a cell phone, Samsung or Apple can manufacture it overseas and have someone ship it here cheaply.
- If an American wants a house, they generally have to hire local labor, and pay local prices for land.
- If an American wants health care, for practical reasons, they must be treated by doctors and nurses who live here, and who are generally educated here.
- If an American wants to send his or her children to college, they often pay a huge premium for a campus in this country, with educators who also live in this country.
i.e. these are the industries where "remote work" is less appealing for inherent logistical reasons.
Andressen says that prices have increased because of regulation, but he doesn't provide evidence for these claims:
Why? The sectors in red are heavily regulated and controlled and bottlenecked by the government and by those industries themselves. Those industries are monopolies, oligopolies, and cartels, with extensive formal government regulation as well as regulatory capture, price fixing, Soviet style price setting, occupational licensing, and every other barrier to improvement and change you can possibly imagine. Technological innovation in those sectors is virtually forbidden now
Sure, there are little mini-cartels in all those industries. But wasn't that also the case 50 years ago? (I remember watching a documentary about the Mafia in the 20th century in NYC, and even then it was common for real estate builders to have to pay the mafia for labor. The mafia controlled some union leaders.)
So how much of the tremendous price increase is due to regulation, vs. labor costs? And there are obviously more than 2 possibilities.
Anyone have real evidence to cite?
A big factor leading to this graph is labor productivity. An hour is an hour for everyone, but while we've figured out how to make a TV in a lot less labor hours, it still takes about as many labor hours to set a bone or read a book.
Having an AI research assistant or tutor surely should reduce the ridiculous prices of college textbooks and the need for TAs no?
Also how does virtual and reimagined medical care not disrupt this? Go look at OneMedical and Amazon and they seem to be bringing costs down significantly.
Didn’t Charlie Munger say something about how high prices create the illusion of scarcity and quality?
Not clear: the textbook prices have been detached from reality for many years now not because there weren't alternative ways to get the knowledge all along. But because they are a part of a bloated system that works to extract more and more money by gatekeeping (formal degrees), upselling, cross-selling, making deals. That this system will disappear or become irrelevant overnight because of better tooling is not obvious. MIT had a bunch of classes online forever, a determined person could get all the content for a full degree almost for free for many years, yet people still flock to colleges and pay more money than ever to be a part of that (broken) system.
> Go look at OneMedical and Amazon and they seem to be bringing costs down significantly
If this was happening industry-wide, it would probably be noticeable on his "Medical care services" graph line, which instead is shooting way up? Maybe it's crap and I don't have any better data, but do you?
I’d expect that to slowly reverse over the next decade or two. If not, then there was plenty of successful lobbying.
Corporates need to understand that their greed for infinite profit will eventually create a singularity which will consume them one day. People without jobs buy less. May be we will finally get rid of the consumerism.
Mass unemployment has always been feared as a result, and it has always not happened.
I strongly expect trends to continue.
It took 20 years for self checkout to really catch on. It's not even fully there yet.
It took months for Book and Magazine publishers to say. No more submissions please, we have enough content for a while.
The winner of a massive photography comp in the US took no pictures, had no subjects and didn't write the back stories of his "subjects". He AI'd the lot.
Don't you think that a lot of what you're talking about depends on how people react to this technology and it's use? To ask another way, if everyone around you is in complete suffering and misery from "AI", we're all broke, hungry and miserable, maybe people will just not want to use AI and prefer to buy and trade services with other humans so that we maintain a nice quality of life?
There is an assumption Silicon Valley is making here which is whether we like it or not, we're all going to have to give up everything, our money, careers, professions, lives and just use AI(tm) because they've made it and while economists will tell me I'm wrong, because "economies of scale etc", I'm certainly not going to trade everything, and everyone I know so I can get images cheaper than I can today from Getty Images.
Maybe <Insert billionaires who control all the bots> will just build his own robocops who will come and make sure I do what I'm told, or maybe even just wipe me out completely for growing my own food and trading goods and services with others who are out of work, I don't know. But I just can't see humans, who still actually do have brains btw, to just roll over and let our lives descend into chaos over Clippy.
Edit: I want to say that even to this day, I actually buy things from people who grow things locally etc just to support them rather than go to the grocer, I do this because I know it's doing some good for my community, I'll just be doing more of this in the future if people aren't working.
I highly doubt it.
I'd add that it's different in that it will hit us college educated professionals who are not at all used to this, instead of the usual blue collar industries. We as a group are not ready and will scream very very loudly if/when this happens :)
It's important to remember that a society consumes as much as it produces. This is how "rich" it is in aggregate. And job losses like this come from being able to produce as much as before with fewer people. So even if no one finds a new job, the society is as rich as before.
All experience is that those losing their jobs find/create new ones after an adjustment period. Maybe this adjustment period will be longer, but it will clear in time.
Unless, of course, Eliezer is right and AI kills us all.
On the other hand, when/if the same suffering happens to "semi-elites" with social capital and connections, they will raise noise in media and try to use the government establishment to "do something", and while it also might be ineffective, at least the appearance of governments needing to take action and help the adjustment will be much more significant than for the blue collar troubles.
I believe we can solve it by having robots buying the goods. They should be able to process it into trash just as well as a human could /s
That is at least 2-3 workers less for every single store in the country in just the last few years.
They just shifted it from a paid cashier to buyers doing it for free.
How our society integrates AI and robotics technology will determine who is impacted and how we handle it. This is actually a great opportunity to find what is valuable and meaningful. For instance, what can we do to improve people’s lives with excess hands and funds?
I think the foundation will be in providing equitable access to society. For instance, greater accessibility technology will help those who are disabled or differently-abled. There is so much beyond ADA compliance that can help the blind, deaf, lame, and mentally handicapped.
Coming out of a global pandemic, we’ve also learned how crucial socialization is to mental health. Rather than using technology to cut people out of the system (self-checkout; ordering from kiosks; automated support desks), I imagine we will expand services like counseling, fitness, and social events. Places where we prefer interacting with humans to machines.
In the end, it is a bit of a reckoning - what can I do that’s meaningful when I am outperformed by a machine? It means throwing away the culture of being the best, and picking up the habits of doing the best for others.