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>> While we’ll likely never run out of need for human labor, it’s very possible we’re running out of capital investment opportunities Is this true? automation

>> While we’ll likely never run out of need for human labor, it’s very possible we’re running out of capital investment opportunities Is this true? automation is essentially a emphasis from human to physical capital. It seems like we're continuing to reduce and specialize human capital while growing other forms. Now I definitely see an end to passive capital gains in traditional financial markets; there's a lot of money sloshing around with not enough good places to put it. Anything near-passive (i.e. real estate) is also feeling similar pressures. It seems like a great time to build big projects that take a huge amount of money, I'm just not on board with pure public funding and all the issues that go with that.

pmiller2 6y ago
> Now I definitely see an end to passive capital gains in traditional financial markets; there's a lot of money sloshing around with not enough good places to put it. Anything near-passive (i.e. real estate) is also feeling similar pressures. It seems like a great time to build big projects that take a huge amount of money, I'm just not on board with pure public funding and all the issues that go with that. Carry this a little further, and this means either the death of the concept of retirement as we know it. > Is this true? automation is essentially a emphasis from human to physical capital. It seems like we're continuing to reduce and specialize human capital while growing other forms. Here is really the only hope. If we can recognize one day that it's just plain not necessary for humans to labor for ~50 years between ~20 and ~70, leaving them only with their "golden years" -- the ones where serious health problems start to take the life out of life. I don't know what to call this type of society. It certainly wouldn't be "capitalist" in any real sense. It may be "post scarcity," but not necessarily. Perhaps it will be some weird techno-socialist thing?
tschwimmer 6y ago
I'm becoming less and less bullish on automation. It may be stupid, but I think that a lot of commmon tasks are functionally un-automatable, or at least not at an acceptable level of error. Think about something as simple as phone support for pretty much any product or service. There's a ton of automation being employed there to relatively little effect - just try to do anything meaningful at any company yourself and you'll find you need to be shunted to a representative. I recently needed to switch my phone plan ownership from a personal account to a company account. There were a couple of wrinkles that made my case more complicated than normal which I can't share. Despite 4 or 5 calls, I couldn't get it done. It just didn't seem like the process for doing this type of transfer didn't exist in any codified way. I could explain what I wanted to do in plain language, but it wasn't a valid transition. Not only was it invalid, it seems like nobody at this major phone provider had ever planned for this scenario to happen. Now imagine this scenario under full phone support automation. The system wouldn't even understand what I was trying to do. You could definitely argue that you could design some sort of scenario router that might handle a situation like this, but it seems unlikely that if they couldn't come up with a human process, I doubt they could swing an automated one. Something like AGI could handle a problem like this, but it feels like we're dozens or maybe hundreds of years away from that.
- gowld 6y ago
  > I couldn't get it done. It's quite easy to automate that outcome.

pmiller2 6y ago

> Now I definitely see an end to passive capital gains in traditional financial markets; there's a lot of money sloshing around with not enough good places to put it. Anything near-passive (i.e. real estate) is also feeling similar pressures. It seems like a great time to build big projects that take a huge amount of money, I'm just not on board with pure public funding and all the issues that go with that. Carry this a little further, and this means either the death of the concept of retirement as we know it. > Is this true? automation is essentially a emphasis from human to physical capital. It seems like we're continuing to reduce and specialize human capital while growing other forms. Here is really the only hope. If we can recognize one day that it's just plain not necessary for humans to labor for ~50 years between ~20 and ~70, leaving them only with their "golden years" -- the ones where serious health problems start to take the life out of life. I don't know what to call this type of society. It certainly wouldn't be "capitalist" in any real sense. It may be "post scarcity," but not necessarily. Perhaps it will be some weird techno-socialist thing?

tschwimmer 6y ago

I'm becoming less and less bullish on automation. It may be stupid, but I think that a lot of commmon tasks are functionally un-automatable, or at least not at an acceptable level of error. Think about something as simple as phone support for pretty much any product or service. There's a ton of automation being employed there to relatively little effect - just try to do anything meaningful at any company yourself and you'll find you need to be shunted to a representative. I recently needed to switch my phone plan ownership from a personal account to a company account. There were a couple of wrinkles that made my case more complicated than normal which I can't share. Despite 4 or 5 calls, I couldn't get it done. It just didn't seem like the process for doing this type of transfer didn't exist in any codified way. I could explain what I wanted to do in plain language, but it wasn't a valid transition. Not only was it invalid, it seems like nobody at this major phone provider had ever planned for this scenario to happen. Now imagine this scenario under full phone support automation. The system wouldn't even understand what I was trying to do. You could definitely argue that you could design some sort of scenario router that might handle a situation like this, but it seems unlikely that if they couldn't come up with a human process, I doubt they could swing an automated one. Something like AGI could handle a problem like this, but it feels like we're dozens or maybe hundreds of years away from that.

gowld 6y ago
> I couldn't get it done. It's quite easy to automate that outcome.