the problem is not efficiency itself, necessarily. The problem is, what are the side effects, what are the negative impacts?
In theory, efficiency in a competitive landscape should bring down production costs which then brings down consumer costs and thus raise material living standards. The problem is, all this efficiency is in bits not atoms. Digital goods are becoming cheaper every year but real products (housing, transportation, utilities, etc) show no improvement over the last 2 to 3 decades), in fact is even getting slightly worse.
Well, second problem is that we don't have any rules for access to the raised material standards for anyone who's not providing inputs to the system elsewhere. In plainer words you need to be employed to have money so you can buy things, because buying things with money is the only option. That is one of the chief negative impacts that looms: a large amount of people being left out of the economy because they don't meet the new efficiency bar.
This isn't the first time humanity has improved productivity. Productivity has already been increased by x10 or x100 in the last 10,000 years and yet the unemployment rate is at record low levels. this latest round of efficiency gains is no different.
This time is different because AI has the potential to have a similar impact on efficiency across all work. In the past, efficiency gains created totally new spaces of economic activity in which the innovation could not further impact. But AI is a ubiquitous force multiplier, there is no productive human activity that AI can't disrupt. There is no analogous new space of economic activity that humanity as a whole can move to in order to stay relevant to the world's economic activity.
We don't know that to be true, though, since it's a speculative prediction about where AI will be at some point in the future. So far, automation has always resulted in more economic activity for humans. We haven't seen anything like AI/Robotics that can replace all foreseeable human activity. Saying it will be different this time is just a guess.
It's not just a guess, its a prediction based on an analysis of LLMs and my understanding of human intellectual activity as information manipulators. AI is fundamentally different than what has come before, and those differences are relevant to how we can expect the economy and society to adjust to the new reality.
But yes, I don't know for sure this is the outcome. But then again, why should we wait around for the man made horrors to be realized before we can react? Why not use our ability to understand and predict the future and avoid these horrors?
production costs decreasing doesn't mean less wages. A widget worker in a factory who produces twice as many widgets an hour can still make the same amount of money or maybe even more.
Perhaps, but it will halve the number of jobs available. That worker might be earning the same, but there is another worker who will now be earning nothing.
I sympathize with the article's criticism of all those things it mentioned but someone's gotta like it (gas stations, cigarettes, junk food, bible versus, lawyers, etc), otherwise it wouldn't be everywhere, and probably a whole lot of someones, perhaps even the majority of people.
A tangent, but what i still can't believe is that at gas stations like WaWa or Royal Farms that have made-to-order food inside, why can't you order the food at the screen on the pump (and pay for it!), to pick it up inside after you're done pumping? I keep expecting this to be a thing, haven't seen it yet.
My guess is they want people to leave the pump and park elsewhere in the lot before getting food, to free up the pump for somebody else buying gas. For many people, ordering food is painfully slow and indecisive affair so it probably makes sense to move it away from the pumps.
Possibly yes, possibly no. It depends a lot on the margins. I wouldn't be surprised if food is a loss leader to get you in the door to make other higher-margin impulse purchases. In that case, letting you order food at the pump is an anti-goal because you'll complete the transaction before you're surrounded by other impulse buys.
It isn’t like that at Wawa. The reason they don’t take your food order from the gas station screen is because presumably they would have to serve you at the gas pump, which is not something they will do. You can just use the app to order if you want.
They also won’t bring your online/app order to the gas pump, you have to be parked in a regular spot.
There’s also the concern of updating the menu on the gas pump which (for Wawa) is a non-trivial problem.
In the case of the toilet games, I would expect the real goal is to (subtly) induce men to pay attention while they urinate, to prevent what is referred to in radonc as a "geometric miss".
"otherwise it wouldn't be everywhere" is not reasoning that holds up in practice. Startups pitch investors a compelling argument for why they're going to be the next big thing, then spend millions (or billions) on scaling up and out in order to prepare for the inevitable hockeystick growth that is going to ensue.
So we may just be seeing some point in the "spend and grow" phase of the startup that precedes it collapsing when it turns out nobody actually wants to play video games at a urinal.
in other words, shorting the dollar. it's the same reason you buy just about any asset that's not bonds or cash AKA real assets. People know, it's only a matter of time before the feds default on the value of the dollar.
i mean by having inflation run hot at 5-10% for many years or decades, they're defaulting on their obligation to provide a stable value currency for the people.
We hear this ALLLLL the time. I've heard it for nearly half a decade as I waited and waited and waited forever to buy a house, and yet through all of the disasters, house prices just kept going up and up and up.
The assumption is, since almost no one can afford a house, prices MUST fall.
Here's the thing no one gets: the "almost" part is very important. If, in a city of 100,000 people, only the richest 100 can afford (less than 1% of the population) a house but there's only 10 houses on the market, then prices can still continue to skyrocket.
Overall demand does not need to be super high for prices to go up. It's Demand relative to supply that matters. And in markets where supply is really really tiny then demand doesn't need to be very high in order to outstrip supply.
I've felt kind of similarly. My wife and I are young--graduated college in 2018--and I feel like I've been a bit lied to about what constitutes "good financial decisions" over the past couple years. We've been squirreling away cash to have an emergency fund, long enough to support us being out of work for 6months, paying down her student loans, trying to wait on buying a car, etc--but our friends have been buying houses, cars, etc etc, and it seems like that's been the more prudent decision time and time again.
We delayed buying a house to have a bit more in savings? House prices skyrocket, our friends who leveraged the crap out of themselves look genius.
We wait to buy a car to have a bit more in savings / wait for the used market to come down? The used market goes up, our friends who bought new cars look like geniuses.
There's part of me that keeps waiting for a correction, esp. in the housing market, both so that houses come back into our budget range, but also maybe because there's part of me that feels vindictive about the fact that everyone who, to my sensibilities, seems to be acting recklessly are making out better than we are.
Some of that is reasonable, I suspect: we're very financially conservative relative to our peer group, which means we're going to miss out on some opportunities, and I don't want to be "proven right" in saving for a rainy day by everyone else having economic hardship, but I do feel rather confused about how we're "supposed" to behave in this market.
We're also remarkably well off, as is our peer group, which will obviously skew the data radically, but it also scares the crap out of me: if these are the thoughts we're having with a household income just barely under $200k this young, what is everyone else thinking?
I know someone from FSU (former Soviet Union). Their grandparents saved for decades, literally keeping their cash under their mattress. The grandmother wanted to buy a car but the grandfather said it’s better to save. One day they woke up in December of 1991 and that money was almost worthless. “We should have bought a car”, that grandmother never let her husband live it down.
Financial decisions are not so black and white. IMO only basic rules apply: live below your means, save more than you spend, avoid debt, etc. Any advice beyond that is a crapshoot.
Banks push this to the limit by making it comparatively expensive for individual buyers to build, preferring to offer loans for already overpriced homes.
Edit: At least this has been my experience. Have people found otherwise themselves?
We are well aware of it and extremely unpleased with that. They force everyone to drive a minimum of 2-4 miles to get to the closest store and chances are it's a stupid mcDonalds or some other nonsense like that. i really don't know what they were thinking. it's almost as if the car industry paid off the city planners. I know early in US history the car industry bought up trains and put them out business which is despicable.
You'll see this huge mass of houses crammed together like some kind of concentration camp. and it'll be endless miles of uniform houses like pods in the matrix. no libraries, no parks, no trees, no community compost, (none of these things have to be expensive) nothing. but lots and lots of pavement. some of those side streets are I'm not kidding you like 5 almost 6 lanes wide, meanwhile people's front yard is less than 10 feet long.
Personally, I like to plant as many different types of fruit trees, fruit vines and berries as I can and as much diversity as I can. But, I find sticking just to natives is kinda limiting. It's nice to prefer natives but I wouldn't be too religious about it.
Just ensure that what non-native you do get is not an invasive species. There are websites you can check if the type of plant you are looking to plant is considered invasive or not. After learning about this, I was surprised by the number of invasive plants being sold at nurseries. I've learned which local nurseries are more trustworthy of being able to trust any plant they are offering.
Most regions do have tens of fruits and berries to choose from but some are hard to find. I don’t think most Apple or raspberry or peach trees are invasive so it’s not really that big of a deal to get some you like
Around me there’s a (non-native) pear tree (Prunus calleryana) which is the primary tree in old neglected fields with poor soil. I wouldn’t mind if it bore edible fruit, but alas those hard little pears are astringent to the point of being painful. The Eleagnus umbellata I don’t mind however, as they build the soil and the berries are delicious and produced in copious amounts. The bear like them, too.
I'm not a big fan of using 3rd party recruiters. but, one advantage of using those is that they do a great of job of lighting a fire under the buts of all those HR folks. They find a way to create FOMO in the hiring manager and their HR process. this sometimes, greatly increases the speed of the hiring, at least in the bay area.
what i find interesting: the chart that correlates gdp per capita with energy expenditure. If energy production ever declines (like peak oil), the implied results are quite dramatic.
Imagine the look on this guys face when he's the one who gets the layoff slip while the one's he thought would get it, get to keep their job.
Don't be so sure, you're a high performer. High performance isn't just about your own performance. All it takes is for the project you're working on to end up on the dead end list and all the sudden, you'll be on the dead end list too. There's too many factors that influence a person's performance besides just the work they put in.
In theory, efficiency in a competitive landscape should bring down production costs which then brings down consumer costs and thus raise material living standards. The problem is, all this efficiency is in bits not atoms. Digital goods are becoming cheaper every year but real products (housing, transportation, utilities, etc) show no improvement over the last 2 to 3 decades), in fact is even getting slightly worse.