4 ms·

> but all the ingredients for having society function in this way are attainable with a bit of a cultural shift It's awfully naive to think that you can solve

by ch4s3 2y ago

> but all the ingredients for having society function in this way are attainable with a bit of a cultural shift It's awfully naive to think that you can solve the information problem with a "small cultural shift". Statements like this strike me as deeply ignorant of economics and the history of attempts to plan society. People are messy and their needs are hard to predict in any meaningful and responsive way that respects their preferences. Imagine answering the question how many washing machines should we make. Assuming you could figure this out, you need to consider the different kinds of washing machines people may want and need. Apartment dwellers need small efficient one, and people with a lot of kids want big ones. This in turn has baring on the number of motors you have to make, feet of copper wire you need to product, plastics, rubber, and on and on. And don't forget that's just washing machines. Now you need to figure out how to get these washing machines to people. You just can't plan and automate everything, its far too complicated.

lurk2 2y ago
He's talking about automating labor, not economic planning.
- ch4s3 2y ago
  It’s the same thing. Anything that could be automated but isn’t automated is because it isn’t cost effective to do so or there is insufficient capital to invest. These are resource allocation issues. You can’t just wave that away.
  - lurk2 2y ago
    No it isn't. Using a script to automate a process frees me from having to carry out the process manually. It has nothing to do with central economic planning.
    - ch4s3 2y ago
      Most things in the world require physical processes. Automating those is quite a different task, and requires resources. How would you go about automating sewing a shirt? How about picking strawberries? Again this is tech hubris and a lack of understanding of economics and history.
      - lurk2 2y ago
        > Most things in the world require physical processes. No one ever disputed that. The principle still holds if we apply this logic to physical processes; by automating or reducing the labor necessary to conduct a physical process, I can enjoy the benefits of the process without having to engage in the labor of the process. > How would you go about automating sewing a shirt? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeSu9Vcu0DU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeSu9Vcu0DU > How about picking strawberries? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2gL6KC_W44 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2gL6KC_W44 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3SGScaShhw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3SGScaShhw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyA9XnW6BV4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyA9XnW6BV4 To respond to the edit you made to your comment: > Anything that could be automated but isn’t automated is because it isn’t cost effective to do so or there is insufficient capital to invest. These are resource allocation issues. You can’t just wave that away. This is true in the long run and I suppose the argument you are making is that any attempt to interfere with the present system of resource allocation will constitute a centralization that would be less effective than free market capitalism, so the notion that we could redistribute the surpluses generated by labor saving devices to the average person is inherently a call to economic centralization. This might be true, but I would propose an alternative reading: The surplus of labor-saving devices has primarily accrued to the owners of these devices. You might then claim that these owners are owners because they have found a means of servicing a market demand. Each dollar they possess is a vote from the market that these guys really know what they are doing, and that the world wants more of it. If we were talking about spherical billionaires in a vacuum, I'd agree with you - but this issue is complicated by the compounding impacts of inheritance and its correlation with access to credit, as well as with the existence of competitive moats (e.g. network effects, intellectual property, sunk costs, natural monopolies, etc). The optimistic read of the technology sector in the 2010s was that businesses would compete with one another to provide services that would ultimately improve people's lives. Instead, we got Windows 11. That wasn't a consequence of users voting with their dollars, it was a consequence of Microsoft entrenching itself into workflows that cannot be economically altered in the immediate future. There are lots of examples of the market not being particularly effective at economic allocation if we step outside of the logic that any purchase is a revealed preference which indicates approval of the good or service being purchased. Apply this logic to the purchases of gamblers, alcoholics, drug addicts, or murder-for-hire plots and the limitations of the logic become obvious.
  - Teever 2y ago
    > Anything that could be automated but isn’t automated is because it isn’t cost effective to do so or there is insufficient capital to invest. Is there any evidence to back up this wildly huge assertion?
    - ch4s3 2y ago
      It should be obvious. There are plenty of thing we can build robots to do, but we don't because its wildly more expensive than we can sell the resulting product for. We can mostly automate construction but it turns out the land acquisition dominates costs, installation still ends up being sloppy and human, building codes are different everywhere, and people want a different kind of dwelling than what prefab is suited for at the moment.
      - Teever 2y ago
        If it should be obvious then the evidence should be equally obvious. Or perhaps the world is a bit more nuanced and it may very well be that we're stuck in some local maximums that our current methodologies don't allow us to escape but escaping them is relatively easy if we chose to implement a meagre amount of resources for that purpose which is something we don't do because we're stuck in that local maximum and so on and so forth. Another way of looking at what you're saying is that we're doing things optimally and that there's no room for improvement when that very obviously is not the case. There are many gross inefficiencies in our system as it currently is -- look at food production for example. How much of the food produced globally is outright wasted? 30%? 50%? If we made a conscious effort to tighten that up we could reallocate those resources to solving the problems of automation issues that you're describing. The true hole in one for automation is a durable machine that can make a copy of itself as well as useful economic goods. Bonus points if this machine can be in a humanoid form to integrate into our existing economic infrastructure. Once you have a self replicator you can have it make as many copies as needed to solve any problem you need with minimal human effort. But a self-replicating machine isn't on anyones radar. Have you ever seen a politician or policy person discuss this?
        2y ago
  - spauldo 2y ago
    Hah, I wish that were the case. A whole lot more things would be automated if that were true. Automation requires resources, but it also requires vision, cooperation among affected parties, a workable regulatory framework, maturity and availability of required solutions, and availability of competent integrators. There are all kinds of reasons something remains manual besides mere resource availability. And all those things change over time. There's not much you can do about most of those things, but becoming a programmer and working to develop better solutions is one way to make a difference. Even if you don't work directly in automation, your work can trickle down to the people like me who do cencern themselves with automated sewing and strawberry harvesting.
    - ch4s3 2y ago
      What I mean by resources is the things you mentioned inclusive of vision. I picked those two examples because you can literally build a robot to do it, but it is either unworkable in the case of the shirt or financially not viable like the strawberry robot.
      - lurk2 2y ago
        Using your model, no technological development would ever occur because the fact that something had not happened yet would indicate that it could not possibly happen due to a lack of resources. This is the anecdote about two economists walking down the street and refusing to pick up a $100 because everyone knows that in an efficient market, someone would have already picked it up. At some point the resources necessary for development are there but the technology itself has not actuated. This invalidates your original claim that: "Anything that could be automated but isn’t automated is because it isn’t cost effective to do so or there is insufficient capital to invest."
TFYS 2y ago
People came up with the information problem at a time when our ability to collect information and our computing power were several orders of magnitude inferior to what we have today. I don't think it's as big a problem as people think. Sure, it was true when every single person didn't have a device capable of instantly sending any kind of information to and from any location on earth, and when we didn't have the computing power to process that amount of information coming in 24/7. Now we do, so I believe a well functioning planned economy would be a possibility today, although it'd be a massive project to build such a thing. Even with limited technology the soviet union functioned for multiple decades and was one of the most developed nations on earth.

by ch4s3 2y ago

lurk2 2y ago

He's talking about automating labor, not economic planning.

ch4s3 2y ago
It’s the same thing. Anything that could be automated but isn’t automated is because it isn’t cost effective to do so or there is insufficient capital to invest. These are resource allocation issues. You can’t just wave that away.
- lurk2 2y ago
  No it isn't. Using a script to automate a process frees me from having to carry out the process manually. It has nothing to do with central economic planning.
  - ch4s3 2y ago
    Most things in the world require physical processes. Automating those is quite a different task, and requires resources. How would you go about automating sewing a shirt? How about picking strawberries? Again this is tech hubris and a lack of understanding of economics and history.
    - lurk2 2y ago
      > Most things in the world require physical processes. No one ever disputed that. The principle still holds if we apply this logic to physical processes; by automating or reducing the labor necessary to conduct a physical process, I can enjoy the benefits of the process without having to engage in the labor of the process. > How would you go about automating sewing a shirt? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeSu9Vcu0DU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeSu9Vcu0DU > How about picking strawberries? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2gL6KC_W44 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2gL6KC_W44 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3SGScaShhw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3SGScaShhw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyA9XnW6BV4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyA9XnW6BV4 To respond to the edit you made to your comment: > Anything that could be automated but isn’t automated is because it isn’t cost effective to do so or there is insufficient capital to invest. These are resource allocation issues. You can’t just wave that away. This is true in the long run and I suppose the argument you are making is that any attempt to interfere with the present system of resource allocation will constitute a centralization that would be less effective than free market capitalism, so the notion that we could redistribute the surpluses generated by labor saving devices to the average person is inherently a call to economic centralization. This might be true, but I would propose an alternative reading: The surplus of labor-saving devices has primarily accrued to the owners of these devices. You might then claim that these owners are owners because they have found a means of servicing a market demand. Each dollar they possess is a vote from the market that these guys really know what they are doing, and that the world wants more of it. If we were talking about spherical billionaires in a vacuum, I'd agree with you - but this issue is complicated by the compounding impacts of inheritance and its correlation with access to credit, as well as with the existence of competitive moats (e.g. network effects, intellectual property, sunk costs, natural monopolies, etc). The optimistic read of the technology sector in the 2010s was that businesses would compete with one another to provide services that would ultimately improve people's lives. Instead, we got Windows 11. That wasn't a consequence of users voting with their dollars, it was a consequence of Microsoft entrenching itself into workflows that cannot be economically altered in the immediate future. There are lots of examples of the market not being particularly effective at economic allocation if we step outside of the logic that any purchase is a revealed preference which indicates approval of the good or service being purchased. Apply this logic to the purchases of gamblers, alcoholics, drug addicts, or murder-for-hire plots and the limitations of the logic become obvious.
- Teever 2y ago
  > Anything that could be automated but isn’t automated is because it isn’t cost effective to do so or there is insufficient capital to invest. Is there any evidence to back up this wildly huge assertion?
  - ch4s3 2y ago
    It should be obvious. There are plenty of thing we can build robots to do, but we don't because its wildly more expensive than we can sell the resulting product for. We can mostly automate construction but it turns out the land acquisition dominates costs, installation still ends up being sloppy and human, building codes are different everywhere, and people want a different kind of dwelling than what prefab is suited for at the moment.
    - Teever 2y ago
      If it should be obvious then the evidence should be equally obvious. Or perhaps the world is a bit more nuanced and it may very well be that we're stuck in some local maximums that our current methodologies don't allow us to escape but escaping them is relatively easy if we chose to implement a meagre amount of resources for that purpose which is something we don't do because we're stuck in that local maximum and so on and so forth. Another way of looking at what you're saying is that we're doing things optimally and that there's no room for improvement when that very obviously is not the case. There are many gross inefficiencies in our system as it currently is -- look at food production for example. How much of the food produced globally is outright wasted? 30%? 50%? If we made a conscious effort to tighten that up we could reallocate those resources to solving the problems of automation issues that you're describing. The true hole in one for automation is a durable machine that can make a copy of itself as well as useful economic goods. Bonus points if this machine can be in a humanoid form to integrate into our existing economic infrastructure. Once you have a self replicator you can have it make as many copies as needed to solve any problem you need with minimal human effort. But a self-replicating machine isn't on anyones radar. Have you ever seen a politician or policy person discuss this?
      - 2y ago
- spauldo 2y ago
  Hah, I wish that were the case. A whole lot more things would be automated if that were true. Automation requires resources, but it also requires vision, cooperation among affected parties, a workable regulatory framework, maturity and availability of required solutions, and availability of competent integrators. There are all kinds of reasons something remains manual besides mere resource availability. And all those things change over time. There's not much you can do about most of those things, but becoming a programmer and working to develop better solutions is one way to make a difference. Even if you don't work directly in automation, your work can trickle down to the people like me who do cencern themselves with automated sewing and strawberry harvesting.
  - ch4s3 2y ago
    What I mean by resources is the things you mentioned inclusive of vision. I picked those two examples because you can literally build a robot to do it, but it is either unworkable in the case of the shirt or financially not viable like the strawberry robot.
    - lurk2 2y ago
      Using your model, no technological development would ever occur because the fact that something had not happened yet would indicate that it could not possibly happen due to a lack of resources. This is the anecdote about two economists walking down the street and refusing to pick up a $100 because everyone knows that in an efficient market, someone would have already picked it up. At some point the resources necessary for development are there but the technology itself has not actuated. This invalidates your original claim that: "Anything that could be automated but isn’t automated is because it isn’t cost effective to do so or there is insufficient capital to invest."

TFYS 2y ago

People came up with the information problem at a time when our ability to collect information and our computing power were several orders of magnitude inferior to what we have today. I don't think it's as big a problem as people think. Sure, it was true when every single person didn't have a device capable of instantly sending any kind of information to and from any location on earth, and when we didn't have the computing power to process that amount of information coming in 24/7. Now we do, so I believe a well functioning planned economy would be a possibility today, although it'd be a massive project to build such a thing. Even with limited technology the soviet union functioned for multiple decades and was one of the most developed nations on earth.