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> The moment the road widens, more cars fill it up to the brim. Jevon's Paradox is not a law of nature. - - - - Mark Miller pointed out, "A Computer's Perspe
by carapace 2y ago
> The moment the road widens, more cars fill it up to the brim.
Jevon's Paradox is not a law of nature.
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Mark Miller pointed out, "A Computer's Perspective on Moore's Law: Humans are getting more expensive at an exponential rate."
The explosion of AI means that humans are getting more valuable, but only for doing things that only humans (not AI) can do.
- ipython 2y agoWhat’s interesting in that statement is that modern llms are largely built off… reinforcement learning from low paid humans.
- visarga 2y ago> Jevon's Paradox is not a law of nature. It's probably related to the nature of human desire.
- carapace 2y agoDesire is like fire: feeding it only makes it grow, it consumes leaving ash. One of the primary points of human life is learning the undesirability of desire itself. - - - - Jevons paradox, on the other hand, isn't metaphysical. When you make the road wider more people drive on it, but widening the road didn't conjure up those people and their cars. The road was too narrow. If you kept adding lanes to the freeway eventually everyone who needed or wanted to drive on it would have enough space. Now metaphorically speaking we're considering a situation where widening the freeway is so cheap that we can make the freeway as wide as we like, and we're making free self-driving cars, and people can send the cars on the freeway to do anything at all, even really trivial things, and we imagine endless freeway and endless cars until the world is covered in freeways. Something like that? I guess we do have to solve the problem of human nature and our tendency to flagrantly waste our time and resources on dumb stuff, eh? How does AI help us do that?