86 ms·

Moore's Law for Everything

• amirmaleki 6y ago
  I can't believe no one commented about the green bills turning blue when you hover your mouse above it. How is it implemented?
• AndrewBissell 6y ago
  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.
  • wmf 6y ago
    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?
    • AndrewBissell 6y ago
      Who owns the robots, and what are their motivations?
      • wmf 6y ago
        I thought ruthless capitalists were in it for the money but maybe the cruelty was the point all along.
  • m___ 6y ago
    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.
  • mrkramer 6y ago
    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.
    • AndrewBissell 6y ago
      > 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."
      • mrkramer 6y ago
        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.
• aksss 6y ago
  > “Moore’s Law for everything” should be the rallying cry of a generation whose members can’t afford what they want." Ugh. 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 https://youtu.be/gkj_91IJVBk?t=1132
  • adambaybutt 6y ago
    Altman isn't arguing that Moore's Law DOES apply to everything but rather than we should work toward such a world. 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.
    • toomuchtodo 6y ago
      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. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=healthcare+outcomes+by+country https://www.google.com/search?q=healthcare+outcomes+by+count... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_universal_health_care https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_univers... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24908042 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24908042
• unreal6 6y ago
  "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.
  • aksss 6y ago
    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. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/size-poverty-gap-world https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/size-poverty-gap-world [1] https://sites.tufts.edu/wpf/files/2017/08/famine-mortality-banner.jpg https://sites.tufts.edu/wpf/files/2017/08/famine-mortality-b...
    • lucasmullens 6y ago
      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.
      • bpodgursky 6y ago
        Well, a few decades ago, it took maybe $200 to save a life. We're certainly trending right.
        • aksss 6y ago
• ralph84 6y ago
  > This revolution will generate enough wealth for everyone to have what they need 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.
  • ravi-delia 6y ago
    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.
    • rocmcd 6y ago
      If you haven't already, I'd recommend reading up on dematerialization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dematerialization_(economics) 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.
    • ctoth 6y ago
      Read some Culture novels.
      • ravi-delia 6y ago
        Oh man, I'd love to but there aren't any more. Fantastic concept, solid execution.
    • wmf 6y ago
      I think it's a good sign that per-capita energy consumption is decreasing in the US; there are limits to consumption.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• thatfrenchguy 6y ago
  > 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.
  • aqme28 6y ago
    Construction is a very small part of housing costs. Outside of rural areas, much of the cost is speculative or supply/demand.
    • imtringued 6y ago
      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.
  • A12-B 6y ago
    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.
• SeanFerree 6y ago
  I totally agree with this! I think it will be more like 15 to 20 years though. 5 years may be too soon. Great article!
• sendtown_expwy 6y ago
  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?
• psoots 6y ago
  > 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.
• lucasmullens 6y ago
  > 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.
  • JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
    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. :)
    • ChrisLomont 6y ago
      >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. Basically, the sum of noise is zero.
    • random_kris 6y ago
      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.
• iMuzz 6y ago
  Great read. > “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.
  • dgellow 6y ago
    Slightly off topic regarding the 1.9T: Where did the rest go?
    • wmf 6y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Rescue_Plan_Act_of_2021#Key_elements_of_the_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Rescue_Plan_Act_of_20...
  • adambaybutt 6y ago
    He's seems open to the idea that it is just a transfer to a citizen's brokerage account which could be a service provided by the private market.
  • anchpop 6y ago
    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. [0]: https://files.taxfoundation.org/20210312120937/American-Rescue-Plan-Act-of-2021-1.9-Trillion-Covid-Relief-Bill-Expanded-Child-Tax-Credit-Unemployment-Insurance-state-and-local-aid-economic-impact-payments-education-funding-pensions.png https://files.taxfoundation.org/20210312120937/American-Resc...
• bawolff 6y ago
  > 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??
  • maxerickson 6y ago
    One factor is that assembly line work is already subject to a lot of automation.
  • AlexandrB 6y ago
    For AI, probably yes[1]. Arbitrary sensing and motion are surprisingly hard. Any problem that can be expressed as pure data is easier by comparison. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
    • bawolff 6y ago
      I would assume a big difference is its easy to redesign assembly lines to be easy for computers. We cant do the same for our bodies.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• tvanantwerp 6y ago
  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.
  • zz865 6y ago
    I think if most people are in 2) then 3) isn't going to happen.
    • tvanantwerp 6y ago
      I include 3 because Altman assumes it. Even if property values stay the same—or even drop—I think it would not be a fun situation for home owners.
  • elmomle 6y ago
    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.
    • shmageggy 6y ago
      Shocking that an article with no references or citations might miss some important history!
• hyko 6y ago
  If robots can build a house on land you already own from natural resources mined and refined onsite ... 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!”
• walleeee 6y ago
  you'd think by 2021 we'd have wised up to this tired fever dream
  • whateveracct 6y ago
    the author is trying to make money on the back of said tired fever dream
• cbau 6y ago
  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?
  • matthalvorson 6y ago
    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
    • jfk13 6y ago
      I suspect that if someone asked the same questions a decade ago, or two, they'd have gotten similar explanations of why "this time is different". AGI within the next 50 years? I don't think we have any idea, really. We don't even know what "intelligence" means.
  • A12-B 6y ago
    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.
• magwa101 6y ago
  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.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• mdpopescu 6y ago
  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. Yep. I saw this movie before.
• xiphias2 6y ago
  I have an idea for sharing wealth: Why not create a non-profit organization that democratizes AI by sharing its models openly with everyone?
  • forgotmypw17 6y ago
    We could call it... Open AI?
    • cphajduk 6y ago
      Time to start: ActuallyOpenAI ^TM
  • lincolnq 6y ago
    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.
    • xiphias2 6y ago
      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).
• xrd 6y ago
  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. http://paulgraham.com/wtax.html http://paulgraham.com/wtax.html
  • adambaybutt 6y ago
    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?
    • xrd 6y ago
      <joke> 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 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?
• chrislloyd 6y ago
  If anybody is interested in reading more about Henry George and a land-value tax, Radical Markets[1] has an in-depth chapter on it. [1]: http://radicalmarkets.com http://radicalmarkets.com
  • cbau 6y ago
    Sell us on it!
• joe_the_user 6y ago
  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.
  • niels_bom 6y ago
    Thanks. I was starting to think I was the only one not believing in the AI hype train.
  • kart23 6y ago
    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. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_self-driving_cars https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_self-driving_cars
    • 6y ago
• zz865 6y ago
  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.
  • core-questions 6y ago
    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.
    • adambaybutt 6y ago
      A society built via capitalism just gives people what they want; not maximizing some arbitrary objective function. We currently have no capitalist societies on earth.
      • core-questions 6y ago
        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.
        • adambaybutt 6y ago
• nitwit005 6y ago
  > 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.
  • adambaybutt 6y ago
    Depends how medical advice is defined, but AI has been shown to be better than humans in several contexts already, e.g. radiology.
    • Jommi 6y ago
      Source?
      • adambaybutt 6y ago
        https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2018/11/ai-outperformed-radiologists-in-screening-x-rays-for-certain-diseases.html https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2018/11/ai-outperform... among others
  • jppope 6y ago
    hmm... I've been to WebMD and the answer to any question is that I have cancer.
• csomar 6y ago
  > democracy can become antagonistic as people seek to vote money away from each other. ... > We should therefore focus on taxing capital rather than labor I find it amazing that these "thinkers" don't see the irony. You are "afraid" that people are going to vote you away from your wealth via democracy; but then you feel privileged to decide how this wealth should be taxed. Since AIs are getting smarter than humans, maybe we should let them decide? > and AI teachers that can diagnose and explain exactly what a student doesn’t understand. Since AIs are smarter than humans, why bother teaching humans at all? Unless there is a point where a developed human brain could outsmart the AI, it seems to be a waste and emotionally guided. > We could do something called the American Equity Fund. Any solution that is not universal is bound the fail. These companies can move overseas to cut their tax bill. It also easier than moving now since all they need to move is data; electronics being already made in Asia. The reality is, there is no place for humans in an AI driven world where AI is smarter than humans and robots can make stuff. Realizing that is the first step to move forward in this new world.
  • chishaku 6y ago
    > emotionally guided > move forward What do you mean by these phrases? Can you elaborate on your framework for value?
    • csomar 6y ago
      > emotionally guided As humans, we emotionally feel sympathy toward other animals of the human race. Bonus points if they look similar (ethnically). > move forward Without honestly realizing what an AI driven world means, any "solution" is just vaporware talks, and will probably mean we are not ready when the shift happens.
  • core-questions 6y ago
    > The reality is, there is no place for humans in an AI driven world where AI is smarter than humans and robots can make stuff. Luckily, that's a hell of a lot further away than AI bulls indicate. Can't even use AI to help with hiring people without it getting cancelled as racist, after all.
• second--shift 6y ago
  I read some time ago (I think as a link here) the following: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist... One of my takeaways is that growth cannot exist forever; there is a thermal bound to how much energy (economy = energy consumption, if you reduce it enough) we can produce and consume. Another commenter posted that if you zoom out enough, economic growth is exponential. I tend to agree, at least backwards-looking, so I think of intervals of economic progress as "doubling" (ie, logarithmic instead of linear). We only have a few more doublings before we hit some serious thermal discomfort. The "AI Revolution" as dreamed in the OP I think is largely impossible: if the AI/Robots/Whatever get sufficiently advanced they will require orders of magnitude more energy than we already consume, which would run the risk of cooking us all. I would rather see someone or someones trying to break the economy = energy paradigm. At some point, we will be unable to generate more useful energy; I'd like to see us do more with less.
  • anchpop 6y ago
    I read this article a couple months ago and found it incredibly bizarre (to the point of wondering if the economist was actually real or just an invention of the author). Firstly, it spends a lot of time analyzing the consequences of exponential growth in energy usage over the next few centuries. But Google [0] will tell you that energy usage has barely moved between the beginning of their data of 1960 and the end of 2015 (and has actually been on the decline since its peak in the 70s). Thankfully they then move on to discussing what will happen if energy usage continues not growing exponentially, when the physicist says this: > If the flow of energy is fixed, but we posit continued economic growth, then GDP continues to grow while energy remains at a fixed scale. This means that energy—a physically-constrained resource, mind—must become arbitrarily cheap as GDP continues to grow and leave energy in the dust. Then, to clarify, he says: > Energy today is roughly 10% of GDP. Let’s say we cap the physical amount available each year at some level, but allow GDP to keep growing. We need to ignore inflation as a nuisance in this case: if my 10 units of energy this year costs $10,000 out of my $100,000 income; then next year that same amount of energy costs $11,000 and I make $110,000—I want to ignore such an effect as “meaningless” inflation: the GDP “growth” in this sense is not real growth, but just a re-scaling of the value of money. No! This is not what economic growth means! No economist in the world should agree with that. It's possible that electricity will be too cheap to meter, or it's possible it won't, but some commodity increasing in price at the same rate as GDP doesn't somehow neutralize the possibility of there having been economic growth. Here's an example. Let's say widgets currently cost $2 to make and there's demand for 1000 widgets/year. If I find some innovation to save $1 on the per-widget production cost, that's $1000 of economic growth. If that innovation uses slightly more electricity (and let's assume the production of electricity is fixed), we'll bid up the price of electricity some amount and displace some less-productive use. That already happens for other finite resources like land (which in some cases leads to exorbitantly high land prices in areas like silicon valley, but that wouldn't mean there's been no growth). [0]: https://www.google.com/search?q=us+energy+consumption&rlz=1C1GCEA_enUS897US897&oq=us+energy+consumption+&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l9.4985j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=us+energy+consumption&rlz=1C...
• deleted 6y ago
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• bambax 6y ago
  > My work at OpenAI... OpenAI isn't open, so why did you continue to call it that?
• RandomLensman 6y ago
  I very much like the idea of Moore's Law for a lot of things (maybe not for everything, there could be some nasty surprises in games of catch-up between offensive and defense). Setting aside social implications, it might also not quite come to this, as not everything might be solvable by data and/or thinking. Our understanding of nature could be correct enough in some areas to block progress. For example, it might not be possible to predict which atom will decay next, or maybe there are no gravity shields possible in this universe as it is a fundamental property of mass (very very handwaving here).
• nindalf 6y ago
  > We will discover new jobs–we always do after a technological revolution CGP grey put this well > Imagine a pair of horses in the early 1900s talking about technology. One worries all these new mechanical muscles (cars etc) will make horses unnecessary. The other horse reminds him that everything so far has made their lives easier - remember all that farm work? Remember running coast-to-coast delivering mail? Remember riding into battle? All terrible! These new city jobs are pretty cushy, and with so many humans in the cities there will be more jobs for horses than ever. Even if this car thingy takes off, he might say, there will be new jobs for horses we can't imagine. > But you know what happened. There are still working horses, but nothing like before. The horse population peaked in 1915 - from that point on it was nothing but down. > There's no law of economics that says that better technology makes more better jobs for horses. It sounds shockingly dumb to even say that out loud. But swap horses for humans and suddenly people think it sounds about right. "Humans need not apply" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
  • colinmhayes 6y ago
    I don't necessarily disagree but that's really not a good analogy. Horses aren't people. When their jobs disappear no one gives a fuck. No one speaks up for their interests. People will not go so easy. They are able to create amazing things if given the opportunity. No one wants mass human unemployment.
    • Judgmentality 6y ago
      You realize it's an allegory, right?
      • Dylan16807 6y ago
        It's fine to reply to an allegory with "you're right, that solution doesn't work, but it doesn't preclude other solutions because of these reasons, so don't use it to make decisions".
        • 6y ago
• msikora 6y ago
  > technological progress follows an exponential curve This is a mantra that I keep hearing, but if I compare the progress from 1900 to 1960 and then from 1960 to 2020, it almost seems like it has been flattening... Sure, we have internet and fancy computers, but the progress from 1900 to 1960 was immense: air travel, electrification, proliferation of automobiles, immense progress in medicine, space exploration, nuclear energy. Even the MOSFET transistor was invented in 1959. Not saying there wasn't any progress between 1960 and 2020, but it sure doesn't look "accelerating"...
  • wmf 6y ago
    He's just talking about performance, not qualitative progress.
  • goatlover 6y ago
    He’s rehashing Kurzweil’s analysis of history, which is to broadly fit a few data points to show that exponential growth is baked into the universe. And then go in to claim that the next 100 years is going to be something 20,000 years of 20th century progress. But I don’t see that the 2000s are progressing any faster than the 80s and 90s. It looks fairly linear since the 50s or 60s overall. smartphones and Deep Learning are incremental progress over what existed before.
    • bick_nyers 6y ago
      Well, it's hard to view an exponential when you are on it, because the time steps are so small, it can feel linear. As a 24 year old, I can see the effects of internet+smartphones has on people my age. We navigate information so much more efficiently than older generations, not just from technical skill, but from the standpoint of how we frame mental models, ask questions, etc. The early 1900's were a revolution on atoms, and the past couple decades were a revolution on information. It is harder to see and measure in general, especially when we are still in the thick of it.
      • goatlover 6y ago
        While smartphones certainly are a boon to quickly navigating information and accessing lots of ideas, PCs did that for people in the 80s and 90s to an extent, and the internet has its roots in networked computers across universities and other institutions in the 60s. Incremental improvement means that overall what we have today is just a few decades worth of steady improvement in hardware and software from the initial implementations. And while the culmination of the computing revolution today is disruptive, compare that to how many technologies and sciences were undergoing disruption in the late 19th century through the mid 20th. Of course computer hardware lends itself well to exponential gains, but it's less clear how many other things have done so over the past several decades, including software, which seems to be a bit more linear in its improvement. The hardware today is vastly more powerful, but the software often does not take full advantage of it.
• vincentmarle 6y ago
  Great, after the great VC pandemic expert reinvention of last year, they've now found a new victim: capitalism. Really wish these VC types would just stick to what they do best: pump money into overpriced startups.
• deleted 6y ago
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• ch33zer 6y ago
  I think that this essay assumes the possibility of infinite growth. That runs into the reality that we are actively running into the limitations of our interactions with the natural world. What else is climate change but an indication that we've reached the limit of what we can produce using our current technology. Now, it is possible that we can find a way to reduce our impact on the earth while continuing to grow, but I'm not sure that we can do that AND generate the astronomical growth this essay requires.
  • dvdhnt 6y ago
    Well, that's the dirty secret, isn't it? It's hard to get this crowd to admit that "growth" isn't infinite.
  • lmarcos 6y ago
    Go tell all those startup founders that they shouldn't grow!
• sneak 6y ago
  It's a bummer that while he starts out talking about a global revolution that will profoundly affect all human beings, he smoothly transitions into tax policy opinions and suggestions that, in a best case scenario, will affect about 3.5% of human beings (Americans). Most of the world is not American, and for every American, there are around 19 people who are not. > If everyone owns a slice of American value creation, everyone will want America to do better: Americans say "everyone" when they mean "Americans". "Everyone" is actually 20x larger. (In a section on inclusivity, no less!)
• justicezyx 6y ago
  I am more and more amused by Sam's ambition of describing so-called plans for Humans, while at the same time is 1 year younger than myself, who had co-founded a failed startup loopt based on sharing location information; and joined YC because of largely Paul Graham and him being somewhat liked each other without much deep connections, and eventually become chairman of YC; then now co-founded OpenAI as the one working business side of the org. I don't think Sam is using his time and energy wisely. But I could be wrong. Who knows. Edit: to answer the question in the reply. I don't know what he should be doing, exactly. But Sam probably would do more value by focusing on his work at OpenAI and figure out a way to make their work more "open" and "accessible" to puny humans who does not possess a billion dollar computing cluster. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman
  • lincolnq 6y ago
    What do you think he should be doing instead?
• Pandabob 6y ago
  A little off-topic but I’ve been thinking about technological progress and its impact on inflation recently. In 2018 Jay Powell partly blamed Amazon (and others) for pushing prices down so much that the fed wasn’t able to hit its inflation targets [0]. Isn’t Sam’s vision also inherently deflationary? If consumer prices keep dropping due to technological progress, shouldn’t we keep printing money? I’m still a little sceptical of Sam’s vision coming to pass, but if it does, it’ll have some weird consequences on monetary policy. [0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/01/new-fed-chairman-says-amazon-helped-keep-inflation-low.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/01/new-fed-chairman-says-amazon...
  • mrkramer 6y ago
    I was thinking the same how deflation is good for society? Reducing costs of production, increasing efficiency and having decent market competition brings prices down and technological progress enables all of that. Not anytime soon prices will be so low that all people can afford everything they want. Luxury goods and premium pricing are here to stay. Maybe he was referring to Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek [1]. Post-scarcity moneyless society. Here is excerpt from Wikipedia: "The third chapter talks about the replicator, the machine that makes Star Trek's post-scarcity possible. Post-scarcity's meaning is the infinite social wealth. The replicator is as a metaphor for automation, and an endpoint of the industrial revolution. Crucially, in the Star Trek's society it and its produces are public good." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trekonomics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trekonomics
• m___ 6y ago
  To the author: Stick to pealing the layer on top of what you see in your daily, AI, for now the only output being some analysis and synthesis for some data that has meaning, and is in the hands of a few, for the few. SQL for human data mongers. The data in the public domain are one of many, botched, out of focus, wrong datasets, lack of context, a mix of right context, too limited scope to data... as is your own admitted supposition, of what you see is not what you suggest it would mean. Garbage in garbage out, a DdOS on AI is the big one to solve for now? Add some inevitable layers, individual psychology, societal collective psychology, surplus population and their going rate of psychological settings, the list of variables "known" is endless, even more so are there hiding some very well known "unknowns". Some serious contenders of raw AI are bluntly omitted, the size of the global population versus the index of resources of the iron-ore ball as is the planet. Relying on "money", a sublimated layer, to account for anything but a tool for social engineering, as is your outright omission to define at all AI, it's reliance on the most infinitesimal part of the few (humans), the outright wrong definition of wealth in it's relativity and dynamics, the USA as a definite part of the planet, derivatives of all and everything, i really do not know where to stop to end the rant. As a remark to your artisan ready for consumption product page, ...it is not very data searches friendly, it has a very limited scope, it is suggestive of different proven fallacies, and has no definite declared vocabulary. Are you to blame, of course not, as you suggest yourself AI and not "universal" human genie, as in disproportion of memory and processing capacity is to blame. As long as energy is infinite at the level of AI, the processing versus energy economy of the human brain, as is that even more energy efficient processing brain of say a raven, is largely overpowered in meaning as to the absolute (till now, not necessarily tomorrow), and the nano-technologies and biology of genetics), inferior scalability of human minds. When crudely put, nano-technology, the biology of genetics (Corona probably), are serious contenders readily to cooperate. Again the case for lack of scope and context of the tease of your blog page. Publish or perish well assumed, you Sir are desperately clinging to the flimsy single rope, trying not to drown. Jouralists and media, politics build a living on this, it is called a narrative. I am very convinced that you could come up with such, say every week or two.
• WoodenChair 6y ago
  This essay cites no sources and provides no data to back up its big claims and projections. It’s interesting to hear what someone close to emerging technologies is thinking, but big claims require big evidence. It reads like reading Marx, or Kurzwell, or other utopian “futurists” more than anything practical and realistic.
• WalterGR 6y ago
  As I recall, Ray Kurzweil wrote extensively about this - minus the tax aspect - in his book The Singularity is Near.
• asbund 6y ago
  If they could make gpt-4 more coherent than gpt3 and could show understanding on causality than this blog will be more agreeable for me
• fungiblecog 6y ago
  Maybe in the Hacker News echo chamber this all sounds plausible. But where I live in the real world all I see is software getting worse and worse. It doesn't do ANYTHING automatically anymore and can't be scripted, every 'app' is a silo and has to be constantly tended to by humans. Useful functionality is actually removed and more time is spent on UI visuals than making it usable. This is made worse by the tendency of surveillance software to require humans to interact with it constantly in order to harvest information, interactions or to display ads. At some point this bubble will burst, the ridiculous tech valuations will crash and we'll be back looking for solutions to real problems again.
  • Lichtso 6y ago
    I think you are on to something. But I don't think the day X will ever come. It is more like the divide between the best software and the average is going to grow and grow. We will see the amplitude of (critical) failures increase further and their occurrence frequency rising as well. It is and will continue to be evaluated statistically: The cost of actually fixing them vs. the cost of just letting them run wild.
• savant_penguin 6y ago
  "Even more power will shift from labor to capital." You can say the same thing for machines replacing workers at farms, but hardly anyone would rather ban tractors for taking people's jobs You can say the exact same thing for bank tellers replaced by ATM's but no one wants to wait in long lines to withdraw money and pay expensive service fees The list goes on and on Google maps (how often people need physical maps anymore?) Gmail (goodbye to a lot of physical mailing service) Excel (1 accountant can do the work of tens of more accountants of the past) Forklifts take away many body breaking jobs Jobs do disappear, but very few people would rather go back
• Barrin92 6y ago
  This is basically the generic singularity blogpost that comes out every few months or so. And at this point could probably be written by GPT-3, would be a nice experiment if someone could tell the difference Either way two major things wrong with this. First off, there isn't actually a whole lot of evidence that we're living in the most innovative time in history and that the robots are coming for us. Productivity growth is low, employment is high. If technology was eliminating labour, the opposite would be happening. We'd be growing at 7% per year while we'd have bazillions of unemployed people roaming the street. Secondly, and this is very typical for SV liberalism/centrism there is absolutely no understanding of power in this article and we just solve things by doing 'the right policies' which is 'simple' and then everything is fine. Of course if that was so simple we'd already be doing it to begin with. We don't need some futuristic 2200 utopia to solve child poverty. We actually could do all the things mentioned in the article literally right now. You could have been taxing the shit out of land in 1800. The question Sam Altman needs to answer is why the technolords of the future don't just simply hire some Terminator Pinkertons to mow down everyone who wants to get their hands on some of their riches.
• jay_kyburz 6y ago
  This essay doesn't address any of the key problems often raised when talking about AI and UBI. Here is Australia we are already seeing one the effects of very cheap stuff. Skilled labor is significantly more expensive than buying things, so anything that has to have an Australian involved is ridiculously expensive. Calling the Plumber to fix a drain? That's a week of groceries or perhaps a new TV. At some point soon there is going to be a fairly significant upheaval, not just when AI takes some peoples jobs, but when it's just not worth it to pay somebody $200 an hour to do something for you. I think to some extent, peoples time is linked to the price of products you can buy. Eventually, Plumbers won't need $200 an hour to buy their own things, they can drop their rates. Wages everywhere might fall. Taxing land sounds fair enough, but I was under the impression we are already subsidizing a lot of farming anyhow, and since we are racing to the bottom on food pricing, there is not much profit to be made on food anyhow. Any aren't we supposed to be reclaiming land to turn back into national parks, planting trees, and capturing carbon.
  • neilparikh 6y ago
    > Taxing land sounds fair enough, but I was under the impression we are already subsidizing a lot of farming anyhow I'm not sure what you're referring to here. Taxing land doesn't really have much connection to farming specifically. In fact, most high value land is urban areas and cities (NYC, SF, Silicon Valley, etc.), so farm land is mostly irrelevant when talking about a land value tax. > Any aren't we supposed to be reclaiming land to turn back into national parks, planting trees, and capturing carbon. To do so, we need to use more land more efficiently: less sprawl, and more building up/dense. And a land value tax incentivizes precisely that, since in high value areas, the tax would be high enough that it dense buildings would be the only real financially viable option. This increase in density in the core means we don't need to develop other land (and even reclaim some of it to parks as you suggest).
    • jay_kyburz 6y ago
      Oh, here in Australia I'm already paying nearly 4K a year for my block of land in the suburbs. Do you not have similar in the US? I had assumed the OP was suggesting we tax the big primary producers who work the land for profit, not people who need somewhere to live.
• dvdhnt 6y ago
  The beginning of the "Capitalism for Everyone" section is laughably out of touch with the reality of 2021. However, buried further down is an agreeable point: > We should therefore focus on taxing capital rather than labor Yes, along with repatriation of capital so tax payers can't stash their cash abroad.
• pgsimp 6y ago
  I live in a city with high rents. What would it look like if everybody had a shot at fulfilling their economic dreams? Let's say their dream is to live in the center of the city, in one of those flats that now cost 2 million dollars. So society is obliged to give everybody a shot at that 2 million dollar flat, no matter what their line of work or their qualifications are. How is that supposed to work? Some things still are limited and will probably always be limited, unless everybody can live in virtual reality in their ideal world.
  • BirdieNZ 6y ago
    I don't know if this completely answers your question, but it won't be high rent if a land value tax is implemented correctly.
    • pgsimp 6y ago
      How is that supposed to work? I would expect the tax to be factored into the rent?
  • neilparikh 6y ago
    A land value tax doesn't really change the market dynamics of housing. That is to say, living in desirable locations will still cost more, and will still be allocated via a market to those who can pay the most. The key thing is that the rent you pay for locations will go to the commons, rather than private landowners, which makes sense, since locations are valuable because of all of society. So some people will still be unable to afford to live in desirable locations, just as they can't afford to live there right now. The key difference is that even if they can't afford to live there, they will still share in some of the wealth created there, through the land value tax. Effectively, those who can afford to live in the desirable locations will pay some of their rent to those who can't (indirectly).
    • pgsimp 6y ago
      "living in desirable locations will still cost more, and will still be allocated via a market to those who can pay the most." But then the demand of "giving everybody a shot at what they want" is not fulfilled. The people with not a lot of money don't have a shot. "since locations are valuable because of all of society." I saw that argument in the article, but I don't really think it holds up. I would say the people making a place high value already benefit from that place, they don't need extra taxes to benefit (for example if a place is great because of nice neighbors, those neighbors already live there and therefore already benefit from the place. If shops make a place great, those shops already benefit from the people shopping there. And so on). And sometimes people make a place worse, should the tax then punish them somehow? "Effectively, those who can afford to live in the desirable locations will pay some of their rent to those who can't (indirectly)." But then not because those "others" make the place so great, so in the end, what is the rationale? Also, isn't there a ground tax already? There is in my country? I can agree that since property is a product of guns and more specifically police, and the government provides the police, some money can be asked for the service.
• dzink 6y ago
  Sam, you have a lot of great ideas and a lot of assumptions in this essay. Just like the parameters in deep learning models, we can’t know what will work in different scenarios until we can model it reliably. Time to build a worldwide game, version of the Sims if you will, to test different assumptions and global activity based on them. Happy to help on this too. Some big assumptions: - Childcare can or cannot be handled by robots (very likely not if you need to raise healthy humans). - Healthcare can or cannot be handled by robots. - Humans will enjoy lack of employment without mental damage and how to retrain or provide for those needs. In the game each player should be assigned a random individual with different roles in society - so they can see all angles (from different speeds of income accruing, to health, to time demands of their job, to responsibilities that need handled, etc). You will see all kinds of bugs that way - from individual liquidity crunches, to mental breakdowns, to industries that need more innovation/AI. You can run any assumption in different epochs and get the answer by humans who play along worldwide. That way when the rules are about to change due to an innovation, we can run a fun game simulation instead of running the risk of anarchy which kills a lot of people. It is critically important to think about how we structure the future based on the technology we unlock. My pull request on this essay would be to propose we build a test suite for that first. Maybe we can use AI to simulate outcomes too after a good number of human runs.
• tehjoker 6y ago
  Sam: We better make sure capitalism keeps growing because otherwise people will use the democracy to equalize wealth levels. Sounds like an awful situation.
• aerosmile 6y ago
  I respect Sam and believe that his thinking is usually a few years ahead of mine - with passage of time, I generally tend to agree with his statements more and more. He seems really bullish on AI, and while he might be a bit biased based on his current role, I think that his public statements are truly authentic because he's putting his money where his mouth is (he left a coveted role at YC for his current role at OpenAI). That just makes me worry that we're likely to enter an AI cycle in entrepreneurship that will be characterized by high barriers to entry for new entrepreneurs. I have so many ideas for future companies, and none of them will be feasible if in each vertical I have to compete against companies with mature AI capabilities. I suppose there is a possibility of someone offering AI as a service that will be good enough to go up against the FAANG companies, but I imagine that anyone with such capabilities might be more likely to just own the whole opportunity (eg: Red Antler switching from helping startups with brand building to Red Antler building their own brands). I think there are still opportunities out there for a VC-backed company that starts out in a garage, but that window seems to be closing - for both, entrepreneurs and VCs as well (FAANG companies are not going to take any venture capital). I really hope I am wrong and would love to hear counterpoints (apart from the usual "they have been saying this for the last 50 years and it always turned out different"). It's important to realize that 50 years ago the world was very different for entrepreneurs, and I have no reason to believe that the current cycle is just that - a cycle that will pass and that the world will return to its previous state of making it exceptionally difficult to go up against big companies. The best counterargument I can offer is PG's essay on the history of corporations and how startups will become a permanent part of our future (don't have the time to look up the link, but hope that someone else can find it).
  • ZephyrBlu 6y ago
    I envision the complete opposite. In 10 years I think there will be many companies who offer high quality AI services. I'm not worried that these companies will just have their cake and eat it too because there's bound to be someone who would unbundle the AI from the product. I even think it's more valuable to do that than building your own AI-powered product because then you're a service provider, which generally seems like a cushy place place to be.
• deleted 6y ago
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• dflock 6y ago
  This is predicated on taxing capital and giving to labor, once labor is no longer necessary for capital. This isn't going to happen, absent an _enormous_ crisis to precipitate this kind of change. No way are the establishment going to allow this kind of thing to happen ahead of time. The kind of political engineering required to do any of this is far beyond anything that the US government is currently capable of.
• edem 6y ago
  This is an absolutely horrible idea. As Raoul Pal always says: "Capital will find a way. It always does.". Let's take a look at some examples with real estate: George owns a flat, he lives in it. He owns no other properties and he works a low-wage job What will happen? He'll pay the 2.5% for a while then he'll be forced to sell. Jane owns 5 houses and lives in one. She doesn't have a job, he lives off of the rent payments. What will happen? Jane will raise the prices by 2.5% every year. Plot twist: George is now renting from Jane. Since George works a low-wage job he'll have to move out after a few years to an even smaller apartment, and at some point he'll be practically homeless. The same is true for companies. They'll just raise the prices by 2.5% creating a price inflation that will hit __everybody__ who doesn't have a company or real estate. Real life example: where I live there is a government program that will let certain kinds of people (newly wed couples) to get their VAT back from buying a house. What happened to the market? Real estate prices went up by 5% and everybody who is not in this bracket now suffers.
  • tome 6y ago
    Given that anyone with below mean wealth is a net beneficiary of this scheme your scenario does not seem plausible.
• jonmc12 6y ago
  I think the foundation of the argument about the application and utility of AI needs to go deeper. A good starting point might be to address the arguments that Arvind Narayanan brings up in "How to recognize AI snake oil"[1]. ie: - "Much of what’s being sold as 'AI' today is snake oil — it does not and cannot work." - "AI excels at some tasks, but can’t predict social outcomes." The way that AI "joins the workplace" matters a lot to discuss the reciprocal policy. AI progress in certain domains has been amazing, while other domains may require a philosophically different approach to leverage computation and intelligence for true productivity gains. [1] https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/talks/MIT-STS-AI-snakeoil.pdf https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/talks/MIT-STS-AI-snake...
• rebelos 6y ago
  I really fail to see how parts of the tech community continue to be beguiled by utopianist notions wrt AI and automation, unless what's really happening is that the already successful techno-capitalists are trying to lay a disingenuous groundwork for them to innovate ever closer towards AGI, unimpeded. We know what will happen in a future world with more AI and automation that renders more people obsolete: the world at large will increasingly approximate what we already see in the poorest parts of it. Specifically, those with capital and who can access AI and automation will be in charge and have most of the wealth and the rest will look not very different from villagers in Africa or slum dwellers in Mumbai. People who think capitalism is the problem fail to see that there is no alternative to it that is both compatible with human nature and that would also yield a substantially better outcome. The future is a world in which the masses are pacified by the provision of a minimally-viable lifestyle that keeps them just satisfied enough to nullify the threat of violence. And even that bar will be lowered when policing and military force become fully automated.
• natch 6y ago
  Will the stock certificates that are inflationarily printed (or virtually printed, issued) to “pay” regular people in ownership have any value though? Are we being real here?
• daxfohl 6y ago
  Unfortunately I don't see price of healthcare coming down, just more doctors out of work. AI in healthcare will be highly regulated, probably monopolized, and tons of artificial barriers to entry created by corporate lobbyists. The AI quality won't make much of a difference: the winners will be the stodgy bureaucratic companies with political influence and just enough "AI" to be useful. WebMD will probably go offline and things like it will become illegal, "for the public good." Medicine isn't expensive because doctors have gotten more expensive; it's expensive because the industry as a whole needs to maximize its revenue, and AI changes nothing in that respect. Entertainment will keep getting cheaper and cheaper, but for services people actually need: education, healthcare, and soon food, it's going to continue to be "how much can you afford to pay?" Or worse, "how much can the government afford to pay on your behalf after we've milked you for everything." (I hope I'm wrong.)
  • jlokier 6y ago
    I predict counterculture AI will be a thing, and it will compete with corporate lobbyists at their own game. WebMD may go offline, but countercultureMD will come online in its place, and it will be more data driven. I don't know whether that's good for medical care; maybe it is.
  • prawn 6y ago
    I'm not sure that entertainment will keep getting cheaper. Where I live, sports and concerts seem to be getting more expensive for the top bracket in each case (pro sports and major international musical artists). We're subscribed to four TV/film streaming services and a music streaming service, that when combined start to add up and aren't getting cheaper. If you own the most recognised franchises and stars, people will pay. YouTubers would be a counterpoint to that, I guess? I think prepared food should at least get cheaper as it's dependent on commercial kitchens and staff, two things that will see a lot of change.
• prestigious 6y ago
  It doesn’t take long for government to own everything if they take 2.5% every year.
  • Knufferlbert 6y ago
    That doesn't seem true. Picketey's (probably misspelled) "capital in the 21st century" has a compelling argument for exactly this kind of tax. And my realization that I can't see it implemented ever, is about as chilling to me as climate change in terms of a real existential threat that we as humans see coming but will be unable to stop, because it requires cooperation that seems impossible. The basic argument is, I'm hoping I'm getting this right: The return of capital far outstrips return of labour, that difference (if above a certain percentage) is a transfer of wealth from labourers to the capitalists. Return of labour is basically GPD growth, return of capital is income from rent/investment/interest and all of that. This increases inequality over time leads to destabilization of society, I'd argue you can see that in the USA quite well. And starts happening in rest of Europe more slowly (not quite as capitalistic as the USA but heading there nevertheless). Wealth building for the bottom 50% is extremely difficult (house prices for example) 2.5% is a significant percentage, but rate of return is around 5% or thereabouts, basically a 50% tax if you make the average and continue investing (i.e. it's presumably useful to society). Once you "sit on your money", it would reduce the wealth slowly (no longer useful to society). I.e. if you keep investing, the government will still have less wealth than the capitalists no matter how long you do it. It won't be as a significant increase in national budgets as one may assume. Also, "government owning things", the idea is that that money is redistributed to the people via benefits (unemployment, education, health care, ubi etc).
• hntrader 6y ago
  TLDR - Implement a wealth tax and use it to pay a UBI. Fine, but he should address why he thinks a wealth tax will work this time when it didn't work when it was tried in Europe (due to international competitiveness reasons). Moreover, what's the rationale for excluding small business ownership from the tax? Why should a middle-class pensioner invested in public equities with $500k have to sacrifice 2.5 percent of their wealth each year, but a rich person that owns a small business worth $50m has no such burden?
• TaylorAlexander 6y ago
  It’s very good to see someone as influential as Sam talking about this. The idea that automation can be used (intentionally!) to lower the cost of living to zero has been a key component of my personal writing and work for some years now. [1] There is a lot that I agree with here and some things I disagree with. For example capitalism can encourage value creation but it can also encourage rent seeking. Since I have been focused on the idea of lowering the cost of living I’ve come to see rent seeking as a direct antagonist to that goal. Taking something that could be distributed for free and adding a cost to it makes it much harder to bring the cost of life to near zero. The most common way this is done is with intellectual property, and I’ve found several helpful critiques of IP restrictions [2][3][4] that have led me to believe we’d be better off phasing them out and intentionally collaborating with one another. But my biggest disagreement with Altman here is about the means of producing equity in society. I think the proposed tax and UBI would be good. But I don’t think it is the best solution. The elephant in the room here is that Socialists have been working very hard for two centuries to try to understand how to organize an industrial society in such a way as to provide a decent and fair life to all. We’ve completely vilified the notion of socialism in USA to the point that we never even learn about it. Richard Wolff talks about getting an Ivy League economics education in the USA and never being required to read a single word of Marx. Unlike many socialists I think I broadly agree with what most libertarians believe, and we simply use very different terminology and frameworks for understanding the solution. So I support for example left market anarchists aka left libertarian capitalists like the folks at the Center for a Stateless Society. But I think the most significant point is one made by David Harvey, a teacher and scholar of Marxism. Harvey says that wealth redistribution is the lowest form of socialism. The actual point of socialism is not to capture the wealth from capitalists after they have it in their accounts. Instead you change the structure of the organization so that at the point of wealth creation all of the workers and perhaps all of society has some stake in it. The simplest example comes from Richard Wolff, who draws on Marxism to essentially advocate for an increase in worker owned cooperatives. Such an organization could still have whatever leadership structure they wanted, but they would get a vote on who was in charge and they’d make sure pay was fair for all. Socialism is a complex and well studied subject so I cannot relate it all here. But I will say, Altman’s proposed fund is one way of ensuring all workers and all of society have a stake. I strongly prefer using means of organization that automatically benefit everyone without the means of a state to intervene. For example the state protects intellectual property restrictions for certain qualifying works. If we were to stop providing those protections, then the moment a work was created everyone on Earth would receive more benefit than if it was restricted. We could provide every book ever written for free. Car companies could start sharing part designs and standardize on parts to reduce costs to all. When the patents on 3D printers expired the price dropped from $25k to $300 in ten years. I am glad we can ask ourselves how to make this world more equitable for all. Please consider that this has been the goal of socialism for as long as it has existed, and if you reading this are from the USA like I am, you may deeply misunderstand what socialism really means. Regardless of your view I think we can all learn a lot from people like David Harvey. Check out his podcast for a view in to his thinking. [5] See also Economics For People by Ha-Joon Chang [6] [1] http://www.tlalexander.com/machine/ http://www.tlalexander.com/machine/ [2] http://dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm http://dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm [3] https://youtu.be/GZgLJkj6m0A https://youtu.be/GZgLJkj6m0A [4] https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284 [5] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPJpiw1WYdTPmOmC2i3hR4_aR7omqhaCj https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPJpiw1WYdTPmOmC2i3hR4_aR... [6] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmtuEaMvhDZbNVIDHA-MTVH0sLb5HP7Pn https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmtuEaMvhDZbNVIDHA-MTVH0s...
• deleted 6y ago
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• kajumix 6y ago
  "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, and by taxing 2.5% of the value of all privately-held land, payable in dollars." He is talking about taxing unrealized gains, which is quite unfair. If the share price of a company doubles, it doesn't mean the company has extra cash to buy back shares for redistribution. Same with land. I feel property taxes today, as a percentage of market value, are insidious precisely for that reason. Increased demand for housing in my area doesn't mean I have more cash to pay taxes. Not until I sell the house and realize that gain.
  • webmaven 6y ago
    > Increased demand for housing in my area doesn't mean I have more cash to pay taxes. Not until I sell the house and realize that gain. Right. As I understand it, that's part of the point (for economists, anyway): It incentivizes the allocation of scarce resources to those who value it more highly (and thus, presumably, to those who can make more productive use of it). Now, I don't want to give the impression that I am on board with this argument, since it implicitly incentivizes the concentration of property ownership into the hands of those who will rent it out, rather than those who will use it. Landlords who are faced with a growing tax bill don't have to sell the property to realize their gains, they can just raise rents (not to mention using it as collateral for a loan to purchase more property). In order to make the incentives align correctly for more participants, you would also have to establish a pretty robust system of rent control to keep spiraling property values from pricing existing homeowners out of the market, and incentivizing redevelopment: if you can't raise rents arbitrarily to cover your property taxes, you have to build more units to rent (but not so many that a glut of available units depresses rental income).
  • tome 6y ago
    The article mentions the solution as regards companies: they pay in stock and can do so via a fresh issue. The situation regarding property is less easy to resolve. Most likely some sort of reverse mortgage product would work.
• hooande 6y ago
  This is definitely good thinking, though it seems unrealistic. The stuff about AI is just science fiction. We'll see major advances in the next 15 years, but it's unlikely that there will be a compounding intelligence situation where robots are able to program and build other robots without human intervention. There's no scientific evidence that this will happen, but it's certainly possible on a long enough time frame. A 2.5% property tax is a political impossibility. That's like $500/mo for the average homeowner. And homeowners vote. This would only happen in the most dire of economic circumstances. The remote possibility of super ai in the coming decades is not one of those circumstances. I'm also not so sure about the idea of taxing corporations based on their market cap. Market cap isn't "real" taxable money like that. It looks like there's been research published on the idea [0], but it's kind of just one person. [0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1517925 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1517925
  • soberpeach 6y ago
    It's not a property tax (which taxes the building and the land), it's only a land value tax. So if you have a $300,000 house, it's not going to tax 2.5% of the $300,000 house, just the $50,000 worth of land it sits on.
• poundofshrimp 6y ago
  We’re arguably already in the AI revolution, and I haven’t seen things get much cheaper. Most everyday prices go up with inflation, like they always did. UBI is a wonderful idea but I’m not sure there is currently enough wealth for a scheme like that, even on small scale.
• AussieWog93 6y ago
  I don't buy this whole idea of technological progress being exponential, let alone monotonic. The average piece of software made in 2021 does less, runs slower and is more difficult to maintain than the average piece of software from 2001. Consumer-grade CPUs haven't seen a drastic increase in performance for around a decade too. I'm still running an i7-2600k that was released in 2010. A current-tech Ryzen 7 has maybe 30-50% better performance per core, and 2x the number of cores. In 2000, we were still using 800Mhz single-core Athlons. More broadly, we haven't seemed to have a breakthrough on the scale of penicillin, the steam engine, the assembly line or the transistor since the turn of the millennium (with the possible exception of CRISPR). I just don't seem to be able to share in the optimism of people like Altman and Kurzweil when it comes to technological progress like this.
  • cma 6y ago
    Compare voice recognition in 2001 to 2021.
    • nielsole 6y ago
      I tend to forget how unthinkable good image recognition was just ten years ago: e.g. https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/
      • sxp 6y ago
        That wasn't even 10 years ago. The comic was 9/24/2014: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1425:_Tasks https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1425:_Tasks I was working on Google Image Search at the time and recognizing photos of animals was bleeding edge tech. It's now a AI 101 project using an off-the-shelf DNN stack.
      • divbzero 6y ago
        Yes, or how truck driving was cited as an example of a job difficult to replace with computers.
    • AussieWog93 6y ago
• jaakl 6y ago
  There is one curve following Moore’s Law alarmingly accurately: global temperature record. Many say it is direct result of the other curves, industrialism, perhaps even capitalism in general. What about trying to fix this first?
• puchatek 6y ago
  > there will be dramatically more wealth to go around There is already a dramatic amount of wealth to go around and yet it is held by fewer and fewer individuals and organizations every year. Just like there is enough food in the world to feed everybody. Our world is not optimized for distributing resources evenly. Can AI change this?
• _fizz_buzz_ 6y ago
  Here is my perspective working in industrial automation field (think of these for 4 points as matrix): 1) Things that are easy to automate are already automated. 2) Many things that are difficult to automate but increase productivity a lot are already automated. 3) Many things that easy to automate and increase productivity only a little bit are already automated. 4) Things that are difficult to automate and increase productivity only a little bit NOT automated. We constantly make advances in automating things, but the low hanging fruits and high productivity gain things are already gone. It's not so clear to me, that our advances are keeping pace with the things that are left to automate. I feel the point about exponential growth is completely non-obvious. What if the tasks we are automating also get exponentially more difficult and/or the productivity gains decrease exponentially.
  • divbzero 6y ago
    OP’s thesis is that AI sets us on a new exponential curve that dramatically increases the ease of automation and the range of things worth automating. At the same time, your point about other exponential effects that offset the gains is thought-provoking. As other comments point out, the Moore’s Law in computing hardware has not translated to a Moore’s Law for software usability or productivity. It’s not guaranteed that a Moore’s Law in AI will translate into a Moore’s Law for everything.
• paraschopra 6y ago
  Not everything is following Moore's law. The R&D efficiency in pharma is exponentially _declining_. See Eroom's law, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eroom%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eroom%27s_law
  • carrozo 6y ago
    True but you have outfits like LabGenius using exponential tech and ideas to go around that, which we’ll start to see the fruits of in the 2030s: https://labgeni.us/ https://labgeni.us/ [disclosure: I do some comms work for them]
• ExtraE 6y ago
  I don’t see the world this piece presents panning out. Either we make general intelligence (which then scales almost instantly to be way, way smarter than any human ever and then accidentally kills us [1]) or we don’t and humans still have a role to play in the workforce. [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tcdVC4e6EV4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tcdVC4e6EV4
• danybittel 6y ago
  As an engineer you want to solve problems with systems. The world is too complex for that. It is doomed to fail, which creates an endless cycles of fixing it up, which basically politics is. Can it be improved? Sure, go into politics. Can it be solved, oh good no! We still have collective nightmares of the attempts.
• carapace 6y ago
  > A stable economic system requires two components: growth and inclusivity. Stability and continuous growth would seem to be incompatible, surely? > Economic growth matters because most people want their lives to improve every year. It may be true that most people want that but so what? I'm a big proponent of everyone having a decent level of quality of life, that's not the problem. The problem is taking a child's view of reality and trying to make it stick when it comes to deciding policy. We can't "improve every year" forever. What does that mean? A larger house each year? I can understand saying that as a political move to get people on your side, but it's irrational. We must design forms of economic growth that respect basic physical reality. > In a zero-sum world, one with no or very little growth, But we don't live in a zero-sum world. We live in a bubble sandwiched between hard vacuum and magma that hosts a fantastic chemical tautology powered (mostly) by the energy gradient between the Sun and the rest of the dark sky. This process is not zero-sum. In order to have a stable system with continuous growth there must also be death and decay. - - - - I think we could set up a "split-level" economy that is physically steady-state and virtually growth-and-death dynamic. The physical economy would be much simpler and much much more efficient than it is today, and everyone would have a decent standard of living within their energy/pollution budget. Most of the wins and losses and creativity and innovation and all that good economic drama would happen in the online virtual economy where it can't cause environmental issues with our Spaceship Earth. But I don't think you have to make national policy to do that. Buy some land in the desert, build "Village Homes"[1] with some integrated regenerative farms, rent/lease/sell it and repeat. Build hyper-efficient ecologically harmonious neighborhoods. We could do this today, it's self-funding and self-correcting. The major issues there would be putting together the expertise and getting past the red tape. All the technology you would need is off-the-shelf. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_Homes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_Homes
• tedsanders 6y ago
  Looks like it's time to add another Moore's Law to the list: https://www.tedsanders.com/moores-law-of-moores-laws/ https://www.tedsanders.com/moores-law-of-moores-laws/
• tectonic 6y ago
  I wonder if we’re mistaking a sigmoid for an exponential.
• HPsquared 6y ago
  Technological innovation is a balance between diminishing returns (ever-smaller niches getting filled, ever-increasing complexity) and the occasional breakthrough which spawns further development. The visual metaphor of bacteria developing antibiotic resistance in ever-greater levels of the antibiotic, springs to mind: https://youtu.be/plVk4NVIUh8 https://youtu.be/plVk4NVIUh8
• nathias 6y ago
  we find new more specialized jobs, but fewer than we automate, we also create more 'jobs' to replace the jobs that are gone with some completely redundant human activity and pretend its a job
• johbjo 6y ago
  Many basic resources are now almost free in the sense that the market price barely covers cost of production/collecting. Vegetables and certain farm products are examples of this. Slightly out-of-date electronics. Many more things are like this. It reduces living costs. This has had no effect on politics wrt to wealth distribution. Rather, decreasing living costs has resulted in increasing inequality because it reduces the perception of need for change. AI in production brings a similar change to the economy as when Chinese labour started producing goods for the world. It will make shiny toys available to everyone, but it will have no effect on wealth or income inequality. So, AI will result in even more "homeless" people with not only iPhones, but an abundance of all sorts of toys. Maybe even houses.
• Andy_G11 6y ago
  Society is currently not ideally structured to realise much of human potential (setting aside how some individuals with immense initiative will nevertheless succeed). Piketty has described how wealth concentration arises and is perpetuated and has drawn a link to reduced overall productivity. He has also proposed a wealth tax to circulate cash and resources to combat stagnation and inequality - your tax proposals on capital seem similar. A change in the distribution of income across society might lead to an uplift in the origination and development of new concepts and ideas, but to tackle some ideas will still demand hubs of resource concentration in some fields, e.g. CERN, pharma labs, space exploration, quantum computing, etc. Perhaps enabling many more nuclei of independent development will result in a snowballing effect which will ultimately create more of these large scale resource hubs, but even so I think that there will have to be an adjustment in the collaborative protocols we use to really significantly increase the growth, development and employment of talent and potential that is latent and currently wasted. Still, a great and relevant article.
• naveen99 6y ago
  We already have a federal target of 2% inflation and a 20% capital gains tax, which add up to about a 2.5% wealth tax. Also, if the government starts owning shares in equities, they may as well pump and dump the share market directly like they do with bonds. Also if you're going to design a utopia per country, why not just make it a global utopia, and model it for the 7 billion humans instead. Same for equality, model it for the global population instead of the 5% living in the usa.
• NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago
  This is a story about a billionaire who imagines a rosy future full of unicorns and rainbows. What is the point of more wealth created by AI or magic genie from the lamp when it will end up in the pockets of the same people as always? Even now, there is plenty of wealth, but it is concentrated in 0.01% of the population. So, there is a straightforward question for Sam, why don't you give up your wealth now, same as all billionaires worldwide? So spare me of the long rich guy "moral" story, answer is simple neither Sam or any billionaire around the world will. As usually when they do they do it through tax loophole relieves schemes, their money will never get to those who actually may contribute to this world if they could just free their time from the rat race. So, when stronger AI comes online, there will be no fairness. All the immense riches will go to the same minority - that same minority or wealthy people will not give away as they will as always think that they are entitled to it. Same as Elon Musk believes that Tesla currently has a "fair" valuation. ... Fairness is a tricky word; it depends on the head, which is pronouncing it ...
• machiaweliczny 6y ago
  IMO AGI is pipe-dream and it will require breakthrough(Darwin/Einstein level) rather than incremental improvements. This means it can happen tomorrow or not happen in 1000s of years. What's more likely is (post)capitalism for all but I think we need new money and value distribution and funding models for that and projects like Ethereum can possibly deliver this. +1 to taxing land.
  • ben_w 6y ago
    While I don’t think it’s a pipe dream, I agree we don’t know how far we are from achieving it, and that it may be tomorrow or never. I think it’s worth planning for as if it’s imminent, because of the cost of it happening without planning is unbounded while the cost of planning now is perhaps a few thousand PhDs.