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"It doesn’t seem necessary that pushing a button all day for someone else’s benefit is more moral than building a realm in Minecraft all day, but our culture is

by simonh 3y ago

"It doesn’t seem necessary that pushing a button all day for someone else’s benefit is more moral than building a realm in Minecraft all day, but our culture is replete with admonishments that time spent laboring is the only time well spent." It depends what happens when you push the button. Is all that happens really that you boss makes a profit, what is your company's business? Does it not have customers? Does it not do anything of benefit to anyone other than your boss? How could that even work, where does the revenue come for your salary? It's called productivity because it's about producing. Somebody somewhere is paying for that. There's no mystery here, we know how this works. If productivity goes up, the product gets cheaper and demand goes up. The customer benefits, the company benefits and your society is now better off. That means in aggregate it can afford more stuff, including services, which generates jobs. That's how progress works. It's why we don't have thousands of unemployed horse drawn buggy drivers on every street corner because people can drive their own cars.

fnordpiglet 3y ago
That’s how it’s worked when production scaled with human labor input. As we potentially enter an age where that’s not true, will we make fake buttons to keep the charade going?
- simonh 3y ago
  Production does scale with human labour input. At small increments it scales linearly, but you get scale efficiencies as you ramp up. Then you satisfy demand at a certain price point and reach equilibrium. But if you can dramatically increase productivity per worker and for a given capital investment, your costs stay the same but your production is now higher and you can cut prices. That stimulates demand which mops up the available supply. Now very broadly several things can happen, it's more than the below but this isn't an essay. One effect is the price of production drops, you raise margins a bit and cut prices which increases demand. The company makes more money and society gets more stuff at a cheaper price. If your product is itself productive, like it's a tool, then your customers can produce more with it more cheaply. Your company is more profitable, your society gets even more stuff. Your customers are better off, so they can hire more people, buy more products, pay people more. It's great all round. Another possibility is demand goes up so much that in addition to the above your company can expand, increasing production further with more scaling effects, hiring more people, maybe also developing new products because it can invest more. So productivity increases can wash through the economy raising all boats. That's partly what GDP growth is, and it's one reason why for example the lowest 10% by income in the UK now earns twice as much in purchasing power parity than they did in the early 80s. That sounds great, and it is, but middle incomes have stagnated the most and inequality has risen. Fairness matters, but raising all boats is worth doing. Let's not let the real social issues we do have blind us to economic reality.
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    Until AI comes into the scene. Then it scales independently.
    - simonh 3y ago
      True human level AI yes, but we’re still a long way from that IMO. For the singularity to really kick in AIs need to start optimising and improving AIs faster than we can. Then we’ll be in a feedback loop that is beyond our ability to forecast.
      - fnordpiglet 3y ago
        I don’t think that’s correct. There’s an awful lot of human intelligence that’s entirely orthogonal to productivity, despite all social and cultural constructs telling us our only purpose is to produce. All that has to happen is for AI to be able to expand its own production based on demand and improve in the tasks it’s got at hand. That doesn’t require the AI to improve itself - or be able get a girl to go to the prom with it. It just requires it adapt and observe it’s environment in a way that allows it to improve things. I think in some ways we already have that ability to develop into AIs. What we are missing until now was something that can navigate an abstract semantic space and interpret the environment in non trivial and in ways that can adapt to unexpected situations. LLMs lack agency, the ability to plan, the ability to optimize, reason concretely, etc. But we have already have that tools. LLMs can do the other stuff. By constraining and informing and putting them in the mix as a glue between different models and techniques, multimodal LLMs can provide much of what’s needed to build agent based AIs that can autonomously produce at increasing scale independent of human input. Certainly once AI takes the task of improving AI, things go off the rails. But there’s a lot of steps along the way and the materiality of human labor I think is an early thing to go.
pixl97 3y ago
>If productivity goes up, the product gets cheaper and demand goes up. Only if I have money to buy it. That's why monetary velocity is a very important economic measure. If I have a 1 trillion dollar economy, and 999 billion is in the hands of one person, and the last billion is spread across 1000 million people, then the average monetary velocity is apt to be both low and only exchange between a few actors. It will be a very unhealthy economy.
- simonh 3y ago
  That’s not how wealth works though. Billionaires don’t literally have tens of millions of $100 notes in their hands. So where is all that money? Almost all of it is in the form of shares and bonds, which represent control of and investments in the economy. The control is in the form of deciding what products are produced, where and how. Those investments create jobs and produce goods and services. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet don’t have huge money piles in warehouses. Their wealth is active in the economy. Wealth is actually economic control. The people who have it run large chunks of the economy. Historically there have been two answers to the question of who do we want running most of the productive forces in the economy and directing investment in it, private citizens or politicians and government bureaucrats? The former is capitalism and the latter is socialism. Even the Chinese Communist Party eventually went with option 1. Who should run Microsoft or Ford, investors and professional managers, or the federal government? Actually there is another option, Russian style oligarchy. That’s what real corruption looks like. Every system has some corruption and waste, the question is how we manage and limit that.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  Money in this construction is a means of allocating scarce items. Post scarcity means money is less relevant. But, as we need little bits of paper to give meaning, universal basic income speaks directly at monetary velocity. By giving everyone money, everyone participates in the economy at some basic level. But it really depends on whether we can get over the industriousness is godliness meme.

by simonh 3y ago

fnordpiglet 3y ago

That’s how it’s worked when production scaled with human labor input. As we potentially enter an age where that’s not true, will we make fake buttons to keep the charade going?

simonh 3y ago
Production does scale with human labour input. At small increments it scales linearly, but you get scale efficiencies as you ramp up. Then you satisfy demand at a certain price point and reach equilibrium. But if you can dramatically increase productivity per worker and for a given capital investment, your costs stay the same but your production is now higher and you can cut prices. That stimulates demand which mops up the available supply. Now very broadly several things can happen, it's more than the below but this isn't an essay. One effect is the price of production drops, you raise margins a bit and cut prices which increases demand. The company makes more money and society gets more stuff at a cheaper price. If your product is itself productive, like it's a tool, then your customers can produce more with it more cheaply. Your company is more profitable, your society gets even more stuff. Your customers are better off, so they can hire more people, buy more products, pay people more. It's great all round. Another possibility is demand goes up so much that in addition to the above your company can expand, increasing production further with more scaling effects, hiring more people, maybe also developing new products because it can invest more. So productivity increases can wash through the economy raising all boats. That's partly what GDP growth is, and it's one reason why for example the lowest 10% by income in the UK now earns twice as much in purchasing power parity than they did in the early 80s. That sounds great, and it is, but middle incomes have stagnated the most and inequality has risen. Fairness matters, but raising all boats is worth doing. Let's not let the real social issues we do have blind us to economic reality.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  Until AI comes into the scene. Then it scales independently.
  - simonh 3y ago
    True human level AI yes, but we’re still a long way from that IMO. For the singularity to really kick in AIs need to start optimising and improving AIs faster than we can. Then we’ll be in a feedback loop that is beyond our ability to forecast.
    - fnordpiglet 3y ago
      I don’t think that’s correct. There’s an awful lot of human intelligence that’s entirely orthogonal to productivity, despite all social and cultural constructs telling us our only purpose is to produce. All that has to happen is for AI to be able to expand its own production based on demand and improve in the tasks it’s got at hand. That doesn’t require the AI to improve itself - or be able get a girl to go to the prom with it. It just requires it adapt and observe it’s environment in a way that allows it to improve things. I think in some ways we already have that ability to develop into AIs. What we are missing until now was something that can navigate an abstract semantic space and interpret the environment in non trivial and in ways that can adapt to unexpected situations. LLMs lack agency, the ability to plan, the ability to optimize, reason concretely, etc. But we have already have that tools. LLMs can do the other stuff. By constraining and informing and putting them in the mix as a glue between different models and techniques, multimodal LLMs can provide much of what’s needed to build agent based AIs that can autonomously produce at increasing scale independent of human input. Certainly once AI takes the task of improving AI, things go off the rails. But there’s a lot of steps along the way and the materiality of human labor I think is an early thing to go.

pixl97 3y ago

>If productivity goes up, the product gets cheaper and demand goes up. Only if I have money to buy it. That's why monetary velocity is a very important economic measure. If I have a 1 trillion dollar economy, and 999 billion is in the hands of one person, and the last billion is spread across 1000 million people, then the average monetary velocity is apt to be both low and only exchange between a few actors. It will be a very unhealthy economy.

simonh 3y ago
That’s not how wealth works though. Billionaires don’t literally have tens of millions of $100 notes in their hands. So where is all that money? Almost all of it is in the form of shares and bonds, which represent control of and investments in the economy. The control is in the form of deciding what products are produced, where and how. Those investments create jobs and produce goods and services. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet don’t have huge money piles in warehouses. Their wealth is active in the economy. Wealth is actually economic control. The people who have it run large chunks of the economy. Historically there have been two answers to the question of who do we want running most of the productive forces in the economy and directing investment in it, private citizens or politicians and government bureaucrats? The former is capitalism and the latter is socialism. Even the Chinese Communist Party eventually went with option 1. Who should run Microsoft or Ford, investors and professional managers, or the federal government? Actually there is another option, Russian style oligarchy. That’s what real corruption looks like. Every system has some corruption and waste, the question is how we manage and limit that.
fnordpiglet 3y ago
Money in this construction is a means of allocating scarce items. Post scarcity means money is less relevant. But, as we need little bits of paper to give meaning, universal basic income speaks directly at monetary velocity. By giving everyone money, everyone participates in the economy at some basic level. But it really depends on whether we can get over the industriousness is godliness meme.