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Demand and primary resources are effectively infinite.
by treis 4mo ago
Demand and primary resources are effectively infinite.
- rglullis 4mo agoWhat?! The primary resource needed to build a home is land. Do we have infinite availability of land in desirable areas to build on?
- twoodfin 4mo agoIn a world where it’s dramatically cheaper to build infrastructure like roads, power, and plumbing, lots more land becomes desirable as a place to live. Take Phoenix, for example, once air conditioning became cheap and pervasive.
- rglullis 4mo ago> In a world where it’s dramatically cheaper to build infrastructure... You can not make things dramatically cheaper by bringing only the cost of labor to zero. Your argument is circular!
- hunterpayne 4mo agoIts also the 'labor theory of value'. That's the economic theory that Communism is based on. It has never been accurate and wasn't even considered legitimate during Marx's lifetime. It has possibly the worst track record of predictions of any theory ever conceived by people. Yet somehow academics still reference it. Nobody who actually is impacted by making the wrong economic predictions does though. Funny that...
- chadgpt3 4mo agoSolve the diamond/water paradox?
- twoodfin 4mo agoThe argument isn’t that AI brings the labor cost down to 0 in isolation. It brings the labor cost of the same amount of production down. So you get more production (more things = more supply -> lower prices) out of less labor.
- rglullis 4mo ago> So you get more production out of less labor. We don't need "AI" to figure out that technological advances increase productivity. The problem with yout argument is assuming that increased productivity mean overall reduced costs. It does not. Healthcare, housing, education all have gone up despite increased productivity. Then you have things that are already so automated that there is no way to make them cheaper unless sacrificing quality - food, clothing, etc. Then we have all the types of consumer products that have prices completely decoupled from the cost of labor. No one in their right mind the "cost of labor" has any relation whatsoever with Apple charging $1000 for an iPhone and/or Motorola charging $180 for a Moto G.
- twoodfin 4mo agoHealthcare, housing, education all have gone up despite increased productivity. The hypothesis of Baumol’s Cost Disease is that these industries are exactly where we should expect prices to rise because they’re still dependent on low-productivity-growth human labor.
- rglullis 4mo agoBaumol's Cost Disease is about relative costs. We are talking about productivity enabling absolute reduction in costs. Don't mix them up.
- twoodfin 4mo agoWe were talking about infrastructure costs under increasing labor productivity. Now what are we talking about? If the premise is that AI won’t improve productivity in industries like healthcare, education, and housing construction, then why are we worried about “the dead economy”?
- treis 4mo agoEnough that it's effectively infinite, yes. Especially if we are imagining a world where subways cost 1/20th of what they do today.
- rglullis 4mo ago> where subways cost 1/20th of what they do today. 1) We are talking about reducing the cost of labor, not overall costs. 2) Your logic only applies in the micro, not on the macro. If the cost of producing one thing goes down while population keeps their purchasing power, then what you are saying would make sense. The whole point of the article is that accelerated automation can bring a scenario where the cost of producing "things" would go down, but the economically active population would shrink drastically.
- djeastm 4mo ago>primary resources are effectively infinite You just solved economics?
- kys11 4mo ago[dead]