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Aside from the usual hedonic treadmill explanation, a lot of our problems with ever-inflating costs are due to competition for limited goods—especially those co

Aside from the usual hedonic treadmill explanation, a lot of our problems with ever-inflating costs are due to competition for limited goods—especially those conferring advantage to our kids. Houses in good school districts, private school slots, various expensive activities that make getting into top-tier colleges more likely, et c. Two-income households? Now you're richer? LOL no, just more money lost to zero-sum competition. Making retirement contributions voluntary? Oh great, now my competitors who choose not to save well can out-compete me for advantage for their children now, thanks a bunch. And so on.

carapace 5y ago
FWIW Bucky meant that we could eliminate poverty and starvation, not that we could supply unbounded luxuries. The rise of non-fungible tokens shows that folks will find ways to compete for limited resources, even if they have to dream them up.
3pt14159 5y ago
Arms races, the growing search space for attack asymmetries, and the ever increasing mobility of capital paired with the inherent centralization of returns due to computing. Housing price inflation and advantages to children are examples of figurative arms races. And you're right, it's destroying our societies. Cyberwarfare and military buildups are actual arms races. Defence is getting more and more expensive. Globally, cybersecurity spending is going north of $1T, and I doubt it will ever decrease. What we have is a coordination or alignment problem. If we could get values aligned enough to coordinate more effectively we wouldn't have such an insane world. And as an aside, I highly doubt we'll be able to solve the alignment problem with AI. Either the AGI is going to want to coordinate due to its own character, or it won't, and short of putting it in some unobservable virtual machine and testing it to, say, see if it would give up its life for its friend; I don't know what else you could do to really know how deeply embedded its values are.

carapace 5y ago

FWIW Bucky meant that we could eliminate poverty and starvation, not that we could supply unbounded luxuries. The rise of non-fungible tokens shows that folks will find ways to compete for limited resources, even if they have to dream them up.

3pt14159 5y ago

Arms races, the growing search space for attack asymmetries, and the ever increasing mobility of capital paired with the inherent centralization of returns due to computing. Housing price inflation and advantages to children are examples of figurative arms races. And you're right, it's destroying our societies. Cyberwarfare and military buildups are actual arms races. Defence is getting more and more expensive. Globally, cybersecurity spending is going north of $1T, and I doubt it will ever decrease. What we have is a coordination or alignment problem. If we could get values aligned enough to coordinate more effectively we wouldn't have such an insane world. And as an aside, I highly doubt we'll be able to solve the alignment problem with AI. Either the AGI is going to want to coordinate due to its own character, or it won't, and short of putting it in some unobservable virtual machine and testing it to, say, see if it would give up its life for its friend; I don't know what else you could do to really know how deeply embedded its values are.