4 ms·

You can be working without it being your only source of income. If everybody was given let’s say ten million dollars in capital (and endless social security), t

by Gud 4y ago

You can be working without it being your only source of income. If everybody was given let’s say ten million dollars in capital (and endless social security), those who wanted could work. The rest of us wouldn’t mind letting the machines do the work.

wokwokwok 4y ago
By whom? ...and what will happen when every single person goes and tries to buy a 50" TV? Hm? Did we suddenly invent a magical TV making machine? Come on... this is Real Life, not Magical Fairy Land. We're not talking about a magical cornucopia that generates an endless amount of physical goods that can be used to accommodate the needs of every person. We're very specifically talking here about technological shift that will eliminate a large pool of skilled jobs. People will still need jobs, or they will become homeless / starve / have to leave the country. AI is not going to feed the world any time soon.
- Terretta 4y ago
  > Did we suddenly invent a magical TV making machine? I mean ... we already have 3D printing, and car making robots, and electronics making robots. Most of the TV is robots. All that's needed is the equivalent of 3D printing that adds an extra step of "TV-making-robot"-making robots. One reason we don't have that is that it turns out the robot making robot costs more than certain as-yet non-globalized labor markets. It's not that we can't, it's that the ROE is bad.
  - wokwokwok 4y ago
    How is this relevant to GPT4? What you're saying was already true... so what. Now people are unemployed because of GPT4 we're going to start making free TVs for everyone? Dang. That's sure not what happened when all those people lost their jobs during covid (eg. restaurant staff). I guess this time will be different? That's uh... well, very optimistic.
    - Terretta 4y ago
      How is "Did we suddenly invent a magical TV making machine?" relevant to GPT-4? I replied to that. And: > already true so what OK, so we did invent it. Then we agree on that.
      - wokwokwok 4y ago
        > I replied to that. Out of context. This entire thread is in the context of “gpt is going to destroy jobs”; the arbitrary “we need to disassociate working and basic necessities” isn’t an isolated socialist discourse. You can wax philosophical all you like, but you’re failing to address the fundamental reality. There is a physical limit of good and services available right now and no amount of magical posturing will make that untrue. Anything is possible in the future given unlimited time and resources, but this thread is not about that. It is about right now, people losing their jobs. What is being proposed here is not a solution to that problem. The ability for people to build things doesn’t mean they will. It’s pure speculation about what might possibly happen in the future. > Then we agree on that. I do not agree with you. You’re just making arbitrary speculative statements.
  - weatherlite 4y ago
    Would be nice to also have infinite minerals to prepare all those goods, or will the TVs be made of wind and solar?
- Gud 4y ago
  Why do we need jobs? I’m genuinely curious. If the machines can produce the food, goods and luxury items traditionally made by mankind and their domesticated animals, I genuinely don’t see the problem. Naturally this is purely hypothetical, parent argued that work gives meaning to life(which I generally agree with). I argued you can still be working, even if less efficiently than the machines. Maybe it will be a gradual change. Agriculture and manufacturing is already highly automated, for better or worse.
  - weatherlite 4y ago
    > Why do we need jobs? I’m genuinely curious. If the machines can produce the food, goods and luxury items traditionally made by mankind and their domesticated animals, I genuinely don’t see the problem. In principal you're right, we can in theory live like you suggest and expand on leisure culture / volunteering / 'made up' jobs by the government. In practice, we're super far from the utopia. Energy is expensive, food is expensive, housing is expensive in ChatGPT can't do squat about it. What it CAN do is possibly replace me as a worker. So that's the conundrum.
AeiumNE 4y ago
Sadly, one of the lessons of Covid Era I think is I think like this kind of windfall would just destroy everyone spending discipline, and then prices would just inflate correspondingly.
safety1st 4y ago
As any student who takes Econ 101, or reads history, (or has heard of a country called Argentina? or has opened a newspaper during the past year of post-Covid inflation?) will learn, this assumption is factually incorrect. If you give everyone ten million dollars, there will be a phenomenal and rapid increase in the price of goods, especially consumer staples (since everyone got that money, and everyone buys staples). You can't really just throw money at the demand side of the equation and expect everything else to stay the same. Supply side will raise their prices because they can (when everyone's got $10M in the bank, why not charge $50, $500 or even $5,000 for a loaf of artisan bread? And eventually other producers of bread follow suit because the consumer has become less price sensitive). If you want to improve everyone's standard of living, what has repeatedly worked throughout history is to lower the cost of production through technology, and ensure there's lots of competition on the supply side. With enough competition, producers are unable to behave like a cartel. Eventually someone cracks and sacrifices part of their margin to attract more customers, and then a price war ensues. A textbook example is salt, which for most of human history was quite expensive, but after mechanized mining techniques were developed it became so cheap that for the average household it's practically free. Technology + competition. At this moment in history we're quite good at the technology part of the equation but we have allowed many monopolies and oligopolies to form, so we're struggling at the competition part.
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  Sure if you give everybody 10 million dollars in pieces of paper, what you described happening will happen. Money is the measure of the productive capacity of an economy. If you increase the money without increasing the capacity then you get inflation. But let's be charitable and assume that "Gud" was talking about increasing the capacity commensurately. Because that's what's happening. AI, robots and almost zero marginal cost green energy are going to increase the productive capacity of economies dramatically over the next decade or two.
  - starkd 4y ago
    Execting green energy to produce zero marginal cost is probably a bit too optimistic at this point. We have been adding green energy for at least 20 years now and energy keeps getting more expensive. Not even addressing whether its sustainable, but expecting a point at which additional solar panels or wind installations are going are going to produce extra energy at close to zero cost is expecting too much. You might have that argument with nuclear energy, because most of the cost is upfront. But approval process for that will have to be expedited by congress.

by Gud 4y ago

wokwokwok 4y ago

By whom? ...and what will happen when every single person goes and tries to buy a 50" TV? Hm? Did we suddenly invent a magical TV making machine? Come on... this is Real Life, not Magical Fairy Land. We're not talking about a magical cornucopia that generates an endless amount of physical goods that can be used to accommodate the needs of every person. We're very specifically talking here about technological shift that will eliminate a large pool of skilled jobs. People will still need jobs, or they will become homeless / starve / have to leave the country. AI is not going to feed the world any time soon.

Terretta 4y ago
> Did we suddenly invent a magical TV making machine? I mean ... we already have 3D printing, and car making robots, and electronics making robots. Most of the TV is robots. All that's needed is the equivalent of 3D printing that adds an extra step of "TV-making-robot"-making robots. One reason we don't have that is that it turns out the robot making robot costs more than certain as-yet non-globalized labor markets. It's not that we can't, it's that the ROE is bad.
- wokwokwok 4y ago
  How is this relevant to GPT4? What you're saying was already true... so what. Now people are unemployed because of GPT4 we're going to start making free TVs for everyone? Dang. That's sure not what happened when all those people lost their jobs during covid (eg. restaurant staff). I guess this time will be different? That's uh... well, very optimistic.
  - Terretta 4y ago
    How is "Did we suddenly invent a magical TV making machine?" relevant to GPT-4? I replied to that. And: > already true so what OK, so we did invent it. Then we agree on that.
    - wokwokwok 4y ago
      > I replied to that. Out of context. This entire thread is in the context of “gpt is going to destroy jobs”; the arbitrary “we need to disassociate working and basic necessities” isn’t an isolated socialist discourse. You can wax philosophical all you like, but you’re failing to address the fundamental reality. There is a physical limit of good and services available right now and no amount of magical posturing will make that untrue. Anything is possible in the future given unlimited time and resources, but this thread is not about that. It is about right now, people losing their jobs. What is being proposed here is not a solution to that problem. The ability for people to build things doesn’t mean they will. It’s pure speculation about what might possibly happen in the future. > Then we agree on that. I do not agree with you. You’re just making arbitrary speculative statements.
- weatherlite 4y ago
  Would be nice to also have infinite minerals to prepare all those goods, or will the TVs be made of wind and solar?
Gud 4y ago
Why do we need jobs? I’m genuinely curious. If the machines can produce the food, goods and luxury items traditionally made by mankind and their domesticated animals, I genuinely don’t see the problem. Naturally this is purely hypothetical, parent argued that work gives meaning to life(which I generally agree with). I argued you can still be working, even if less efficiently than the machines. Maybe it will be a gradual change. Agriculture and manufacturing is already highly automated, for better or worse.
- weatherlite 4y ago
  > Why do we need jobs? I’m genuinely curious. If the machines can produce the food, goods and luxury items traditionally made by mankind and their domesticated animals, I genuinely don’t see the problem. In principal you're right, we can in theory live like you suggest and expand on leisure culture / volunteering / 'made up' jobs by the government. In practice, we're super far from the utopia. Energy is expensive, food is expensive, housing is expensive in ChatGPT can't do squat about it. What it CAN do is possibly replace me as a worker. So that's the conundrum.

AeiumNE 4y ago

Sadly, one of the lessons of Covid Era I think is I think like this kind of windfall would just destroy everyone spending discipline, and then prices would just inflate correspondingly.

safety1st 4y ago

As any student who takes Econ 101, or reads history, (or has heard of a country called Argentina? or has opened a newspaper during the past year of post-Covid inflation?) will learn, this assumption is factually incorrect. If you give everyone ten million dollars, there will be a phenomenal and rapid increase in the price of goods, especially consumer staples (since everyone got that money, and everyone buys staples). You can't really just throw money at the demand side of the equation and expect everything else to stay the same. Supply side will raise their prices because they can (when everyone's got $10M in the bank, why not charge $50, $500 or even $5,000 for a loaf of artisan bread? And eventually other producers of bread follow suit because the consumer has become less price sensitive). If you want to improve everyone's standard of living, what has repeatedly worked throughout history is to lower the cost of production through technology, and ensure there's lots of competition on the supply side. With enough competition, producers are unable to behave like a cartel. Eventually someone cracks and sacrifices part of their margin to attract more customers, and then a price war ensues. A textbook example is salt, which for most of human history was quite expensive, but after mechanized mining techniques were developed it became so cheap that for the average household it's practically free. Technology + competition. At this moment in history we're quite good at the technology part of the equation but we have allowed many monopolies and oligopolies to form, so we're struggling at the competition part.

bryanlarsen 4y ago
Sure if you give everybody 10 million dollars in pieces of paper, what you described happening will happen. Money is the measure of the productive capacity of an economy. If you increase the money without increasing the capacity then you get inflation. But let's be charitable and assume that "Gud" was talking about increasing the capacity commensurately. Because that's what's happening. AI, robots and almost zero marginal cost green energy are going to increase the productive capacity of economies dramatically over the next decade or two.
- starkd 4y ago
  Execting green energy to produce zero marginal cost is probably a bit too optimistic at this point. We have been adding green energy for at least 20 years now and energy keeps getting more expensive. Not even addressing whether its sustainable, but expecting a point at which additional solar panels or wind installations are going are going to produce extra energy at close to zero cost is expecting too much. You might have that argument with nuclear energy, because most of the cost is upfront. But approval process for that will have to be expedited by congress.