A good economy is an economy that benefits most of the population and not just a few percent at the top. I would argue it should be a political goal to keep income distribution relatively stable.
A good economy is also relatively stable. Big booms with a crash following are very devastating to not-rich people. In a crash rich people lose a lot of paper money but not-rich people may have trouble affording shelter or food. Or middle class may lose their savings.
> it should be a political goal to keep income distribution relatively stable
This penalizes economic dynamism and moves economic decision making from risk taking to whoever defies the baseline distribution.
> A good economy is also relatively stable. Big booms with a crash following are very devastating to not-rich people
Not necessarily–plenty of social systems let the market boom and bust without causing social distress. And again, smoothing out the business cycle penalizes risk taking.
Risk taking should be penalized harshly when the risk is high, that’s the nature of risk. If it pays off good, it was a good move but if it was bad one let the risk taker suffer.
> Risk taking should be penalized harshly when the risk is high, that’s the nature of risk
If the odds (and pay-outs) are 10,000:1 and you cap pay-outs at 1,000:1, you've made a high-risk/high-reward risk unworkable in your economy. Systems that target a distribution tend to wind up in that mode, with the risk takers taking their risks (and producing their rewards) outside the system.
Keeping distributions stable means capping upsides. There are better ways to redistribute wealth.
In a good economy, value can flow from source (supply) to destination (demand), easily. You have plenty of opportunities to sell your labour, and the compensation you recieve is good enough to buy you the things you need like housing and food
Restrictive zoning and the lack of walkable neighbourhoods makes it very difficult for small businesses that rely on personal service. This isn't just a slight inconvenience, but it completely changes the fabric of society. But in American libertarian circles taxation takes up all the oxygen in the room. People are generally blind to opportunity cost.
One should look at the real activity of the economy to understand it -- not at the flow of money.
A good economy is one where there is lots of value for the consumers. How does value flow to consumers? Through a price signal. A price signal which is accurate is one where the flow of money in one direction is commensurate with the flow of value in the other direction. One can think of the flow of money as if it were a nervous system: the nerves send signals, and the muscle moves.
In a competitive marketplace (such as restaurants), the most successful restaurants are almost always the ones with the best food, the best ambiance, etc. Money flows away from bad restaurants and to good restaurants, because there is a lot of market competition between restaurants. If you serve bad food, you're out of business. The muscle is well controlled by the nerve.
Now, in the US economy, in many sectors, there is no real competition. For example, in online advertising, there is only two companies that one can use. In groceries, there is only 3 major grocery chains. In insurance, in food, etc etc. There is functionally no competition in those sectors and very frequently there is outright collusion.
In this case, the signal is far less meaningful. What signal does it send to Google, if I drop them for Facebook? The answer is, not much of a signal, because there's not meaningful competition between these two entities. They both suck and they both know that they won't lose customers if they degrade their services, commit fraud, or stagnate.
Many many swathes of the American economy are like this. The obvious ones, like healthcare, are so monopolized that your signal means absolutely nothing. They will do nothing to keep you as a customer. They will do nothing to meaningfully improve their services. You will still pay. This is like a muscle that sucks nutrients but is completely disconnected from the nervous system.
That is a "bad" economy. Of course, the market value of these companies has never been higher. Why? Because there are very few sectors of the economy where capital can flow that are actually competitive. This has knock-on effects, like having capital flow into other assets like bitcoin or housing, in search of returns.
It's not that these corporations are "too wealthy" by some ethical definition. They are too concentrated, which makes them inefficient. Dealing with a large health insurance company today is not unlike dealing with USSR bureaucracy in 1970. Our economy is slowly being transformed into one where a very small group of private central planners manage the allocation of the whole of social resources. This quite predictably impoverishes everyone.
The USA economy today is like a paraplegic. We can still get around but there is a lot of dead nerves.
A "good economy" is one that isn't compulsory. One that doesn't require enslavement and genocide. One that doesn't require oppression. One that is aligned with the environments it operates in.
One that we can walk away from without necessarily risking premature death or enslavement for doing so.
One of the things LLMs destroyed was the writing-style sidechannel. You could tell with reasonable accuracy whether something was worth reading (and/or trusting) based on how it was written.
Now every idiot has access to well-formatted text. I preferred when idiots sounded like idiots.
I am 99% in favor of this, but the one place where I’d rather have the prompt _and_ the output is when the model had access to additional context that can’t be shared for some reason.
For example, if I’ve filed a support ticket with some software company, and they reply to me by prompting some LLM to “adapt the instructions from when we solved this with Acme Corp”, the prompt doesn’t do me much good without the (presumably confidential) correspondence with Acme.
I’d always rather read human written text, though.
Humans just need to adapt their pattern recognition skills. It's a continuous and changing effort. For some, not detecting it is the sign that they need to update their own systems not that the sign is wrong.
For many it's not worth the effort to even try anymore. Particularly when the content of a submission is about LLMs: why worry?
Do you want them to put googley eyes on it? If you can see it, it can see you. Pretty simple.
Eye contact matters for humans because they might be looking at their phones, or their McDonald's fries, or staring straight into the sun. None of these things happen with self-driving cars. It's a non-issue.
This argument is the one that shook me, I’m curious if you think there’s any merit to it:
Humans have essentially three traits we can use to create value: we can do stuff in the physical world through strength and dexterity, and we can use our brains to do creative, knowledge, or otherwise “intelligent” work.
(Note by “dexterity” I mean “things that humans are better at than physical robots because of our shape and nervous system, like walking around complex surfaces and squeezing into tight spaces and assembling things”)
The Industrial Revolution, the one of coal and steam and eventually hydraulics, destroyed the jobs where humans were creating value through their strength. Approximately no one is hired today because they can swing a hammer harder than the next guy. Every job you can get in the first world today is fundamentally you creating value with your dexterity or intelligence.
I think AI is coming for the intelligence jobs. It’s just getting too good too quickly.
Indirectly, I think it’s also coming for dexterity jobs through the very rapid advances in robotics that appear to be partly fueled by AI models.
I think you are right, but here’s a fun counter-example. I recently bought a new robot* to do some of my housework and yet, at around 200lbs, it required two people to deliver it (strength) get it set up (dexterity) and explain to me how to use it (intelligence).
Yeah and I think that extends to even trades we see as protected because they often work in novel and unknown setting, like whatever a drunk tradesman rigged up in the decades previous.
Eventually it will be more economical to just destroy all those old world structures entirely, clear the site out, and replace it with the new modular world able to be repaired with robots that no longer have to look like humans and fit into human centric ux paradigms. They can be entirely purpose built to task unlike a human, who will still be average height and mass with all the usual pieces parts no matter how they are trained.
Most of the “delivery” (getting it from the factory to its final installed location) was done by machine: forklifts, cranes, ships, trucks, and (I'm guessing) a motorized lift on the back of the delivery truck.
They're not hired to swing a hammer hard, they're hired to swing it at the right thing, and if they can't swing it hard enough they pick a different tool.
Harder than someone else. A bodybuilder and a normal person ham swing a hammer just as efficiently as each other.
Dexterity is more important - after all you may have the stamina to bang in 1000 nails in an hour. I have a nail gun. What’s important is we can control where the nails go.
You said there are three traits, but seems like you only listed two - unless you're counting strength and dexterity as separate and just worded it weirdly.
I think they’re separate. You don’t need to be strong or intelligent to put circuit boards in printers, but there are factories full of people doing that. Purely because it’s currently cheaper to pay (low) wages to humans than to develop, deploy, and maintain automation to do that task. Yet.
Physical labor, especially jobs requiring dexterity, will be left for a long time yet. Largely because robotics hardware production cannot scale to meet the demand anytime soon. Like, for many decades.
I actually asked Gemini Deep Research to generate a report about the feasibility of automation replacing all physical labor. The main blockers are primarily critical supply chain constraints (specifically Rare Earth Elements; now you know why those have been in the news recently) and CapEx in the quadrillions.
Yeah and until ChatGPT I thought even 50 years was optimistic, which is why current days feel like SciFi! However, at its essence, the current AI revolution has been driven primarily by a few key algorithmic breakthroughs (cf the Bitter Lesson), which are relatively easy to scale up through compute.
On the other hand, the constraints on robotics are largely supply chain-related. The current SOTA for dexterity in robots requires motors, which require powerful magnets, which require Rare Earth Elements, which are critically supply-constrained.
To be precise, the elements are actually abundant in the Earth's crust, just that extracting them is very expensive and extremely toxic to the environment, and so far only China has been willing to sacrifice its environment (and certain citizens' health), which is why it has cornered the market. Scaling that up to the required demand is a humongous logistical, political and regulatory hurdle (which, BTW, is why I suspect the current US adminstration is busy gutting environmental regulations.)
Now there may be a research prototype somewhere in some lab that is the "Attention Is All You Need" equivalent of actuators, but I'm personally not aware of anything with that kinda potential.
Some types of motors don't require permanent magnets. If we need more motors than we can make permanent magnets, we'll adapt, perhaps with an efficiency loss.
Motors with permanent magnets are preferred because they are much more cost- and energy-efficient, even with the painful reliance on REEs. There is a very strong incentive to find alternatives but nothing comparable has been found yet.
There are of course non-electric alternatives like hyrdaulic and pneumatic actuators but they are mostly good for power, not dexterity. The size and complicated fluid dynamics simply are not conducive for fine motor control. I do think these will play a large part eventually because even electric motors cannot economically produce enough force to be practically useful. Like, last I checked, the base-level Unitree robots can lift 2kg or so? Not even enough to lift a load of laundry.
At this point I suspect we'll end up with hydraulics for strength (arms, legs, torso) and electrics for dexterity (grippers)
Uh, out of all the things that are the bottleneck, you think it's robotics hardware that is the bottleneck?
In an age where seemingly every single robot company has a humanoid prototype whose legs are actively supported through high powered actuators that are strong enough to kick your ribs in?
In an age where the recent advancements in machine learning have given bipedal walking a solution that is 80% of the way to perfection with the last 20% remaining the hardest to solve?
Honestly, from a kinematics/hardware perspective the robots are already good enough. Heck, even the robot hands are pretty good these days. Go back 10 years ago and the average humanoid robot hand was pretty bad. They might still not be perfect today, but they are a non-issue in terms of constructing them.
The only real bottleneck on the hardware side is that robot skin is still in its infancy. There needs to be some sort of textile with electronics weaved into it that gives robots the ability to sense touch and pressure.
What has remained hard is the software side of things and it is stuck in the mud of lack of data. Everyone is recording their own dataset that is unique to their specific robot.
Note I didn't say the bottleneck is the hardware itself, it's the supply chain for production of the hardware. Specifically the Rare Earth Elements, as I explained here: https://hackertimes.com/item?id=47178210
The problem with that argument as I see it is that a lot of jobs can be described that way if you want.
And it's not just these; i.e. video generation is getting better every other week too. It's not yet good enough to produce full length movies but it's getting there and the main component that seems to be missing is just more control over the generated output, but that'll come too.
You might say these movies will be AI slop and you'd be right, but then that'll be enough for most people who just want to see a lot of shit blow up on screen and superhereos fighting other superhereos.
You will still have a niche for 'real actor' films, but it will become a niche.
Intelligence jobs are sort of the apex of the economy where everything coalesces around to serve those positions ultimately. E.g. any low skilled area even devoid of any resources that basically insists upon its own existence at this point (e.g. walmart workers need gas station, gas station workers need walmart, there is a sort of economy but these are straight up consumption black holes with nothing actually being invented or produced, maybe agricultural products but not by a large fraction of the labor force any longer).
So where does that leave our world without actual creation, production, ideas? I work at the gas station and sell you zyns? You work at the walmart and sell me rotisserie chickens? We both work doubles and eat and sleep in the time remaining? Remain in this holding pattern until World Leader AI realizes we are just waste heat and culls us? I mean, that is sort of the path we are on. Disempowering people. Downskilling them. Passifying them. Removing their abilities to organize themselves. Removing access to technology and tooling. Making the inevitable as easy at it can be when it comes time for it.
We are in a death cult called business efficiency. Fire them, it's more efficient. Lean up the company. Don't invest in research, cheaper not to and buy back stock instead. These are death spirals no different than what happens with ants. We are justifying not giving our own species a seat at the table out of pragmatism. Why create a job for someone? It is inefficient, do more with less and don't worry about the unemployed it is their fault. Why pay them well and let them live comfortably? That is profit you could be making. Eventually it is going to be why feed the human species, because that is the line of logic here with business efficiency. We don't optimize to uplift our species. Quite the opposite, we optimize to hold it down and squeeze and extract.
The key mistake you make is to believe that "first world" is sustainable by it's own. A lot of people are hired today because they are good at a physical tasks, globalized capitalism just decided that it's cheaper to manufacture it overseas (with all the environmental and societal downsides that hit us back in the face).
So don't worry if we lure ourlselves that it's ok to stop caring for "intelligence job" globalization will provide for every aspect where AI is lacking. And that's not just a figure of speech they are already plenty of "fake it until you make it" stories about AI actually run by overseas cheap laborers.
This ignores that the forces of capitalism, the labor market, value, etc are all made up. They work because people (are made to) believe in them. As soon as people stop believing in them, everything will fall apart. The whole point of an economy is to care for people. It will adapt to continue doing that. Yes, the changeover period might be extremely painful for a lot of people.
The whole point of an economy is to generate value. Very, very different than caring for people
Feudalism was the dominant economic system for millennia. The point is to extract value for the upper class. Peasants only matter as a source of labor, and they only get 'cared for' to the extent of keeping them alive and working.
Now think about what feudalism might look like if the peasants' labor could be automated
Well, yeah, "keeping alive" sounds like caring to me. Not to a great standard, that's how we got numerous revolutions, and feudalism did end eventually. People stopped believing it, and some kings lost their heads.
Apple is developing a tabletop robot as the centerpiece of its artificial intelligence strategy, with plans to launch the device in 2027.. The robot resembles an iPad mounted on a movable limb that can swivel to follow users around a room..The company is also exploring other robotics concepts, including a mobile bot with wheels similar to Amazon’s Astro, and has discussed humanoid models..
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