The fact that so many people fear loss of income as a result of better AI is a real indictment of our economic system. A better system that more fairly distributed economic productivity would make people welcome better AI because they could be confident it would make everyone wealthier instead of just a few people rich enough to be Goa'uld.
I don’t know what country you live in, but I can tell you how it is in Sweden. As a freelancer I pay appropriately 70% of what I charge in taxes. How high do you think taxes can get before people stop putting energy into raising their productivity?
Better distribution is through capital tax, not income tax. Taxing workers even more is the opposite of sharing productivity gains captured by shareholders. Are capital gains and dividends taxed at least at 70% in Sweden?
1. Salary is your company's money that becomes your money.
2. Capital tax is tax on your company's money.
3. Income tax is tax on your money.
With either tax, the economic system that consists of you and your employer is being robbed.
Speaking of which, if someone takes your groceries and runs, just before you have paid for them, that is shoplifting. If it's just after you paid, it's robbery. You might think you're better off with the former, but shoplifting raises prices; some of it is shifted onto you, so that it is effectively robbery.
1. Companies only have money because of the work I and others do.
2. It doesn't follow that when companies have more money their workers get more. Evidence is: record profits concomitant with layoffs, corporate profits vs wages, etc etc.
3. Taxes fund a government that answers to me. Capital powers corporations that not only don't answer to me but likely want to exploit me.
If what you were saying were true, there would be no corporate tax, and probably no worker protections, no social safety net, no building safety standards, no regulatory apparatus, no antitrust, etc etc.
I like that stuff, and I'm pretty confident corporations wouldn't have done it themselves without a democratic government forcing them to.
There's a meaningful difference between democratic governments and corporations, and governments don't have to be perfect for this to be true.
The situation is trickle down from laissez-faire is definitely proven wrong just by the situation we are in and is the starting point of the discussion. Tax is just a tool to correct the failure of the system of failing to correctly redistribute productivity gains from workers starting a few decades ago (and the point above is with the promises of LLM it’s crucial we address that situation). Robbery or not is not the debate here, income tax higher than capital tax is just a good candidate cause and solution (given historical data), but of course we can discuss alternatives.
>With either tax, the economic system that consists of you and your employer is being robbed
Except differences in tax rates will have significant impact on what type of income people want to earn. If personal income is taxed lower than capital, then people will want to increase their income through work.
If personal income is taxed higher than capital, people are incentivized to build more machines than the economy needs and this will put people out of work.
by tax revenues
In China, corporations pay more than 2 times more taxes than individuals (in the US, individuals pay almost 6 times more taxes than corporations).
China: corporate income tax (19%), individual income tax (7%)
USA: corporate income tax (7.6%), individual income tax (41.1%)
IMHO that is very misleading in this context where there are a lot of Americans.
If the VAT rates went to 0% you would still get to keep the exact same amount as with the current 25% rate. And when discussing B2B prices VAT is never included, as it is generally not an expense for the company but rather just an accounting detail.
I would include VAT. No matter B2B or not, it's how much your end customer pays is what matters. Yes, business will pass on this tax further, but end consumer won't be able to claim it. It's the same as a sales tax in the US. To include it in price or not is more a psychological thing (in the US it's not included in price). When I pay $106.25 for something it makes a little difference for me that $6.25 goes to my state or passed to the previous business, and if I only have $100 you lost me. That's the reality.
Basically it's very similar to debates about US taxes. Sure, it's not 70%, but things add up quickly. Income tax, social security, medicare, medical insurance, sales tax. The usual argument is "but, but ... it's not me who is paying my medical insurance or half of social taxes, it's my employer, so it's not my tax". Well, it is. That's the money your employer would have paid _you_ if those taxes hadn't existed.
Not to mention, things that fall outside of capital / income taxes which increase the overall percentage in sneaky ways in the US: car registration fees, the death tax, property taxes, student loan repayments (depending on your view of subsidized university).
We can actually be certain that humans work the other way since we ran huge experiments in labs called the Soviet Union and China. In those experiments we found out that people worked way less/not at all when there was no economic incentive to do so.
Sure that’s risky for 100% of population. But for 0.1 percent of population who makes many millions a year, who cares? No one is that special of a snowflake we need to optimize for their productivity. Most of those people are either already workaholics or already retired on a yatch.
Societies taxing their entrepreneurs at 10 and at 90% are always vastly different. This difference in turn heavily influences every participant’s system of motivations, so comparing these two numbers alone is usually not very helpful
That’s not true. Many companies people work at provide them little to no incentive to work harder or better, yet still a lot of people try to do so. Lots of places have almost no possibility of promotion just the ability to go elsewhere. Some professions like teaching, nursing pharmacy treat all workers as interchangeable with no performance incentives.
I can tell you that there is no way I’d be doing what I do if it wasn’t for the money. I’d be developing useless keyboard firmware or some other junk no one but me would care about. It would provide minimal value to the world.
Who pays nurses more just because they are good? In a lot of professions rates are set by governments or institutions and there is not enough competition between businesses for wages.
Any private clinic would pay the better nurse more? You can check this quickly on job-listing portals – nurse wages are in the 20000-100000k/year range, so clearly supply and demand as well as qualification are determining it. Which socialist country is it where wages are ceiled by the government?
Agreed. After all, that is the equivalent rate for all work done in the commons, on free software for example. Zero dollars earned, but somehow the incentive is still there. Money is not the only thing that motivates human beings.
Sure this works for creative endeavors. Now what would motivate someone to pick fruit in the summer Sun? Or clean toilets in a corporate office?
Sure you could say, "there are some people who just enjoy picking fruit." But are there enough people to satisfy the demand? And even if there are, what do you do with them as that demand decreases? The people who love picking fruit will have to clean toilets.
I believe this is why the income tax is so popular with economists. Other taxes create some type of negative feedback where raising the tax decreases transactions and shifts capital elsewhere. But with the income tax people have no choice but to keep working and may even have to work more. So the "economy" benefits because more labor/capital can be squeezed out of individuals without slowing anything down.
I wonder why people endlessly argue how much they should tax the rich and the poor, there is only one answer: 100% of everything, i.e wealth, income, gifts etc. It's a nice round number and everybody is taxed fairly.
Interesting, my understanding is exactly the opposite. In my opinion the reason why so many people don’t care much (or are so in love with admin jobs) in Sweden is precisely because it’s too safe?
The Nordic countries are actually the easiest place in the world to earn at least 30 million dollars (or become billionaire for that case) exactly because of the welfare system: https://youtu.be/A9UmdY0E8hU
When you don’t have to struggle for a living, you’re more free to take risks and start your own business. Workers accept disruptive innovation and being let go, knowing that the state will help them reskill if necessary.
Edit: Changed sentence from "earn a million dollars" to "30 million dollars" to reflect the actual video contents. (Mea culpa.)
USA demolishing most everyone else, as you'd expect if you own what you create. Almost 10% of 400 million people are millionaires in the USA! Insanely productive all things considered.
Also kind of shockingly the USA has the most progressive tax system, I believe -- the vast majority of those paying are high earners, low earners pay barely any taxes and can save a lot.
People in the USA who want to have a European-style welfare state don't realize that American high-earners already pay European levels of tax. The American lower and middle classes pay a lot less of their incomes - that would be the group that would have to pay for an American welfare state. That won't go over well...
Having a single payer healthcare system would increase taxes but could decrease overall costs by 50% (since US pays 2x what other equivalent countries pay).
Beyond that, we have an issue where corporations and high-net worth individuals aren’t paying taxes, which could prevent onerous taxes on the middle class. No nation really taxes the rich (cf. the Panama Papers).
We are talking past each other: I'm saying there are lots of ways that the wealthy avoid taxes, such as borrowing against equities for expenses (https://www.wsj.com/articles/buy-borrow-die-how-rich-america...). Trump had a private jet but paid $750.00 in income tax for a couple of years. Additionally, capital gains taxes are lower than many income brackets (cf. Buffet's famous quote about being taxed more than his assistant). Finally, carried interest loophole allows private equity managers to classify services as capital gains.
Basically, if you have enough equity, a bank will loan you the money you need, while you can leave those stocks untouched. You don't have to pay any tax, let alone the extremely preferential capital gains tax.
US has a tax gap of perhaps $1 trillion, and much of that is wealthy Americans who are too hard to pursue: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/13/business/irs-tax-gap.html. That could be 50% of the bill if we were able to cut healthcare expenses by dropping insurance companies, removing pharma control of prices, etc., to try to attain similar OECD healthcare costs.
The US is in a unique situation. We have to both reduce the amount of rent-seekers within the healthcare system while increasing the taxes we levy on the wealthy. Universal care might mean an increase in taxes on the middle-class, but universal care will ultimately reduce their expenses since it's more efficient.
PS. Please don't attack people personally: it's much better to say, "This comment does not account for X," than "You seem very uniformed [sic]?"
PPS. If you need a poignant example of the failure of the US healthcare system, look no further than maternal mortality rates. What a disgrace.
It's not necessary about amount, but about distribution. Let's say a medical tax in Germany is 14.6% (correct me if I'm wrong), my medical insurance here in the US for a family of 2 is around 14% (yes, it's paid by my employer, but there is no free lunch and I consider it _my_ tax). The only problem here is that payment is fixed, so if I had 50% of what I have now (and that would be a median salary in my state) it would be 28%. Also if I lose my job I will have to pay it in full myself, from after-tax money. Unlike Germany. Oops. So I'm already paying on par with Germany (when I'm employed), and I would pay twice, of even triple of that if I was an average worker.
The tax rate in Germany is 42% on income over 62000 euros. That covers everything, but doesn't include any local or municipal taxes. The VAT is 19% on top of that.
In other words, a 42% federal income tax plus (roughly) a 20% federal sales tax.
You are conveniently leaving out payroll taxes which constitute another ~35%. So 42% becomes ~77%. 19% doesn't technically apply to the payroll, but it does apply when you buy something.
The maximum payroll tax is 42% for incomes above 62k Euros. The part of income below has a tax excempt amount of ~10k, then a linear progressive tax. (There is an rate of 45% for incomes over 250k, but let’s skip that for the argument.)
There are also some tax reducing things, but let’s say you have a taxable gross income in the range of 60k. The deductions are as follows:
- 25% payroll tax (which is the tax _average_, only the amount above 62k is taxed with 42%)
- 7.3% healthcare (or 14.6% if you are self-employed)
- some percentage for other public insurances
Gives you around 65% net income, from which you pay 19% VAT for most things you buy as consumer. But e.g. rent doesn’t have a VAT.
If your income is higher (as I wrote in my other comment), the healthcare / public insurance cost is capped, so every Euro above 62k is taxed with 42 (or 45) percent. If your income is lower you simply pay less taxes (relatively) and might have 80% or more net income.
Yep, but you need to count employer paid taxes too to get the whole picture. Tax base will be different (+ 7.3% healthcare + 9.3% pension + 1.5% unemployment), so if your base is ~1.17 of your "official" base, the effective tax becomes (0.35 + 0.17) / 1.17 = 45% (leaving you with 55%). Which is in line with the chart I posted.
Now here's how it works in the US. Let's take my $170K household income (it's 2x of state median in Massachusetts, but 1x in my town). My effective tax rate (without medical insurance and without employer part of payroll taxes) is 33%, but with employer taxes and after tax base adjustment it's going to be (0.33 + 0.08) / 1.08 = 38% (I'm ignoring social security cap here, but it won't make a big difference). But we left out a very important part, and it's medical insurance. Let's add 24K/year (14%) to the mix, then it becomes (0.33 + 0.08 + 0.14) / 1.22 = 45%. Oops! Sounds like I'm paying the same percentage as in Germany. Sure, I have 2x of median, but for 1x things are getting even more ugly, because 24K will stay the same, and while the income tax is lower, medical will take its part and more.
Of course I still bring home more than an average German family, yet expenses are different too so it's hard to compare. Sure, I can buy more junk, and I have a bigger home so I still have some place to live after I placed all that junk :) But to the original comment:
> The American lower and middle classes pay a lot less of their incomes - that would be the group that would have to pay for an American welfare state. That won't go over well...
No, American lower and middle class doesn't pay "a lot less of their incomes", it's simply not true.
Now do the VAT. Almost everyone who does the math on this (counting healthcare as a tax in the US) finds that only considering the income portion of your taxes, it's about equal. In most places in Europe, you also have the VAT acting as an extra tax. Your tax burden would be a lot higher.
Also, you must be thinking of your marginal rate being 33% - your federal taxes should be under 20% of your income at $170k, even if filing as single. In Germany, your tax rate would be about 27%.
Agree on VAT, but MA also has 6.25% sales tax which I didn't consider, that is if you want to start from revenue. So the difference will be less than 19%. Also VAT in Germany is not 19% on everything, there are exemptions and low rate of 7%.
33% is not a marginal rate, it's an effective tax rate (filing jointly) including payroll taxes which are deducted from my wages, I mentioned it. Also we have a state tax in MA which is also included in 33%.
In any case there are other taxes too (e.g. gas excise, vehicle excise, property tax etc.), so I'm not trying to compare the whole tax burden, that would be too much for HN. But regarding payroll taxes -- they are pretty close even if you consider VAT, certainly not a "lot less", it's a myth propagated by politicians. So the question is: we pay (almost) "welfare state" taxes, where is my part of a welfare state?
Yeah, you live in a high-tax state - counting that and payroll tax would make it to 33%. However, you can deduct a good fraction of that tax (actually all of it) from your federal taxes. Also, you included the cost of your healthcare in your calculation, so you are getting "welfare state" benefits for that cost. As to your taxes, those are paying for a welfare state for people who are less well off than you. I'm pretty sure you are in the 90th percentile on income, by the way, so you're not actually in the lower class, and arguably not even the middle class (although that level of income in a rich state like MA feels middle class).
All those other taxes exist in Germany too, by the way, and are much higher.
MA is not a "high-tax state", it's in the middle by an overall tax burden (depending how you count), so it's another myth. Check this for example: https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-highest-lowest-tax-bur.... Also I'm not in the top 10% percentile, more like in the top 20% in MA. Give me your definition of the "middle class". Also I explained that for the "lower class" medical payments are even higher.
No, I'm not getting "welfare state" benefits, I'm getting a pretty crappy medical service for a price which is waaay higher than in Germany. And if I lose my job I will be paying 2K/month + copays and co-insurances, not mentioning deductibles, unlike in Germany. And God forbids you get into a hospital without insurance, your jaw will drop to the floor when you see the bill.
Have you ever been in the Boston subway? Compare it with almost any city in Europe, hell, even with Montreal. Tell me which welfare state has subways like Boston or NYC? Commuter rail like in Boston? NYC commuter rail is a bit better, but still is not even close to German railways.
And all of the above we get for taxes which are very similar to Germany. No, they are not much lower, it's something with your math. And in absolute value we pay waaay more than in Germany given higher salaries.
Here's some comparison, but it is misleading when it comes to the US. Technically medical insurance (de facto mandatory) can be from ~15% to >25%, depending on the income. It's not reflected on the picture, so in reality tax burden in the US might even be more than in Belgium (VAT aside).
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/Payroll_...
The public healthcare rate is indeed 14.6% but half of that is paid by your employer. Of course in the end it doesn’t matter, just that only 7.3% from your gross income will be reduced (also there are rates for nursing care insurance, pension insurance, unemployment insurance – a middle-class income pays 35–50% for tax and insurance).
Public healthcare is obligatory for all employees except you’re earning more than ~65000€/year or are a civil servant. In which case you are entitled for private health care which might be (or in fact is) more expensive but has more options for treatments and some prioritizing on waiting lists and doctor’s appointments.
Family (husband, wife and children) is always insured for free except they are also employed. Children have to pay seperately after reaching age of 25, and if they still study they pay only a low flatrate.
The rate is always 14.6% of gross income except for very low incomes, in which case the employer pays everything, or very high incomes. There is a cap: everything above 65k is not rated – which seems unfair to me.
I assume that’s a product of house price inflation. Or because you count mandatory retirement savings. If you did the same calculation in France for NPV of pension you would probably get a similar or better result
Ok but correct for taxes subtract healthcare, add npv of pensions, dental and child care. I think you would end up much closer maybe even ahead for France. Also mean per capital lies because you have to average in besos and musk. Median is a better metric
Having rich neighbors is great, gdp per Capita seems to be a nice measure.
If you don't make a lot of money in USA you pay basically no taxes... cars are cheap (or were)...
Big problem is govt being terrible with money and overbudensome with regulations, which reduces supply. Think about how many more doctors/specialists we'd have if systems weren't purposefully setup to be ridiculous.
Look into what residency takes. Not everyone has to be an amazing incredible 80hr week doctor. We could easily double supply of doctors...
The American Medical Association restricts med student slots. You could say it’s government but it’s regulatory capture rather than government regulation. Remove Citizen’s United, close the revolving door, and fund congressional research offices so that legislators don’t have to depend on lobbyists for research and writing legislation.
You know, this is the first comment I’ve ever read on government participation in the economy (socialism, if you will) that seems to make great sense to me. I would happily pay into a tax fund that was locked to educating or re-educating participants in the workforce. I like this way better than plain UBI because of the potential for increased dignity, pride and self-esteem.
This is like trying to get govt to invent flight, when instead you just give markets as much power as reasonably possible. Cheap goods and services lead to innovation way better than govt capturing and "redirecting money to their brother's school."
Please don't ignore the thousands and thousands of examples of govt being terrible at this, for the handful of somewhat useful examples of shit sticking to the wall. It's still flinging shit
You know, there's some significant issues that aren't touched on.
Any statement that's all upsides no downsides poorly reflects reality over time.
Or, in other words, if it sounds too good to be true it probably is.
The main one being how would you pay for it?
Basic accounting says the moment population growth stalls you have more outflows than inflows. You can't print money without consequence, and there are other factors that confound these issues further.
Its the ideal of socialism, but the reality is you run into the economic calculation problem. Shortages happen because we live in a world of scarcity, and when they do the system collapses usually causing death (historically).
The Norwegian tax system is not socialist as much as it is _georgist_: Norway taxes natural resource use (mainly extracting oil from oil fields and using waterfalls for power generation) _hard_. This tax policy makes the "more outflows than inflows" calculation a bit more complex than in most countries. The country is not immune to the effects of population decrease, but less so than others.
The main threat to the Norwegian tax system today (in my opinion) is that new industries (fish farming, wind farming) are actively lobbying against georgist tax policies directed at their industries: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/05/17/norway-the-once-and...
Georgism is pretty great, consistently incentivizing people to utilize their land. However, I wonder how much it would change with non-land-based productivity, ie people or AI making money through the internet.
Strict georgism emphasizes taxing limited resources, i.e. resources that can be hogged, preventing others from innovating. If what you're using can be made more plentiful, it's not worth taxing.
For example, taxing your use of transmission capacity would go against georgism: It's possible to make better equipment that transfers bits faster. There are, however, resources that can be hogged on the Internet. For example, domain names: Short (non-trademarked) domain names, e.g. flowers.com, are more valuable than a random string of characters from a lesser known top-level domain, e.g. lrchcu.hat. As there is a limited number of single-word domain names, the owner of the former domain should pay a higher fee or tax for their domain than the owner of the latter.
The economic calculation problem exists form any type of economy regardless of whether it is dezentralized or centralised.
The difference is that a central miscalculation impacts the entire economy while a decentral miscalculation usually only impacts a small area surrounding that person.
If a group of independent people makes a miscalculation like during the global financial crisis then you end up with the same problem it is just less frequent.
I’m still a high earner so I’m fine. I still have approximately $7500/month after my taxes are paid. That’s a lot since all medical care, 1 year parental leave, my kids education from kindergarten through high school etc are “free”, e.g. paid with my taxes.
My point was not to complain but to say to the guy that claims that we need a new system with more wealth distribution that those systems already exist. There are a limit though to how high you can tax someone before they stop producing.
You made a good point. But I don't think people are advocating taxing people like you but the super rich. The disparity between the few super-rich and the poor is so huge in many countries. Wealth that is not being put to use by the super-rich is money wasted. All this hoarded wealth could be put to so much good.
I'm sorry but it's just true that a few people are incredible. Elon musk. Steve jobs. These people are basically worth infinity, their potential and vision is extremely useful to humanity.
Sorry a few make it to the NBA, but everyone can try.
The problem with the super-rich is that they have more money they can spend. The not spending is the problem. Money is good for public welfare only when it is earned and spent. Investments are supposed capitalist solutions to this - to make money "work" for you. But it's a broken circular system that seems to only make the wealthier more wealthy. (It's also becoming dysfunctional with speculations). It doesn't seem to be creating an egalitarian society because people with money often have access to better opportunities. And that's a huge hurdle tomorrow for your kids trying to compete with Elon Musk's or Steve's Jobs kid who are born with wealth.
And if you need that millions throughout your lifetime, that's fine. But imagine you have so much money to spend that you don't really know how to spend it in your lifetime? That's the problem.
There is no amount one couldn't spend -- why are you even saying it this way?
You could get by on like $1,000/mo. Live in a tent, eat rice + protein supplement or whatever, and donate the rest to Africa.
Why don't you do that? If you're posting on this forum: you are in the top 1-5% of the entire world. You have a refrigerator? You should be ashamed and sending that refrigerator to someone who really needs it. You can get by with dry food.
Obviously this is ridiculous. We live in capitalism, which just means _you_ own stuff and control it. If you own a company and that company makes 10,000,000 people happy every day, you're going to make a gorillion dollars. You deserve it, you're literally making that value... ugh..
Then you can do with that whatever you like, just like you can do whatever you like with your refrigerator.
Where's the inherent evil? 10,000,000 people giving $1/day is 365 * $10,000,000 a year in revenue. Where is the evil?! Of course with that money you'll at least put it in the bank, which helps with liquidity, bank runs, funding millions of mortgages, etc... ugh...
I was earning similarly in Europe. The moment I realized how much tax I was paying (51% bracket), I moved to Asia to work remotely. I honestly don’t care what’s being paid from my taxes, but to me that amount felt like theft. I now pay ~20% while being well above 10k after taxes.
This is why comparisons between the US and Europe regarding wages are always fraught. For some people, it makes sense to pay a lot of tax for the benefits it confers. For others, like you and me it seems, it is not really worth it to pay that much tax and not really receive the rewards. But everyone who discusses conflates some people's preferences to suddenly be everyone's preferences, and this is simply not a true comparison.
For one, it's not even clear that democratic politics can work post-AGI. Democracies work because together citizens hold more power than any government or any other individual or collective in society. In the past that was largely expressed as physical power, and why things like gun ownership was important because it allowed the collective to revolt against their leaders, but in more recent times our collective power comes from our economic power.
In a world in which governments can just print money with AGI, then they don't need us. In fact, in this world we're just leaches on state resources and space. And now the dynamic shifts from the state be dependant on the people to the people being dependant on the charity of the state. I see no reason to believe that this would be a stable long-term arrangement.
Also, what you're saying is just hopeium. In reality we don't have this economic system. So AGI is going to be bad for us. And how are you going to change that? Are you going to strike when you're unemployed? Is the government realistically going to be able to tax an AGI company which is doing $100T in revenue 95% of profits? Why wouldn't they just relocate or lobby for lower tax?
Secondly even if we assume by some miracle we can change the economic system and tax companies 95% without them relocating or lobbying to reduce taxes, have you considered that some people actually want to work?
I've been poor most my life. The idea of being a state dependant doesn't really bother me, but what does upset me is that I've spend 20 years of my life skilling up in a profession which will now have no value. And no knowledge professions can ever have value again in post-AGI world.
Perhaps I can go into a manual labour job for a little before manual labour starts being automated too. And then maybe after that the only jobs that will remain are a handful jobs where interaction with real human is valued (hospitality, etc). Perhaps we're just spoilt in the present because we have so many cool jobs. Today people genuinely like working and want to work. I got into coding not because I had to for financial reasons but just because I loved doing it in my spare time so I might as well be paid to do it. But maybe we need to just accept that this was never a sustainable dynamic and that the economic benefits of AGI out weigh us living a fulfilling life...
Well maybe shift to "real world" professions will occur resulting in us addressing abysmal infrastructure and housing situation. I am looking at picking up a trade because of this coming shift.
I don't think people appreciate the mass disruption of a shift like this happening across so many industries all at the same time. This sort of professional shift works when automation comes for a subset of a single sector, but we're looking at an everywhere all at once situation. How many plumbers are we going to need, exactly?
I also don't think people appreciate the absolute social turmoil that will occur as a result of this because of our complete lack of planning for it.
Afraid you won't have a useful job due to the rapid rise of AI replacing vast amounts of knowledge workers? Get to work building guillotines. You won't be able to sell them for very much but you can make up for it in volume.
To the wealth class: Massive amounts of people don't just quietly disappear when they suddenly can't feed or house their families because they've been automated out of a job.
People are very good at creating work. Every time tech creates a paradigm shift and people cry that there will be not enough work, the exact opposite happens.
Exactly, we’ve been automating the living crap out of almost everything for hundreds of years, but employment has never been higher. Automation leads to higher productivity, cheaper goods and services, increased need for technical skills, thus higher wages and higher demand.
Of course there can be some painful periods of adjustment, but that’s often caused by misguided policy trying to hold back the tide and delay the inevitable.
Ultimately yes, full no holds barred human level AI may well render human labour obsolete, but we’re a very long way away from that.
I know some people think LLMs are close to that already, but no, not even remotely close. I do believe strong AI is possible and maybe even inevitable. They’re a huge step forward, and are easily the biggest advance towards strong AI in my lifetime, but these things are just tools.
We have been automating at the beginning of the production chain , mostly.
This is the first automation that targets directly knowledge workers, and hit almost all of them but those in profession where error can cause people deaths.
Traditionally knowledge workers were the bulk of the middle class, because well it takes 30 years to produce one and not all make the cut, so they are paid market prices instead of minimum wages.
And by that nature, knowledge workers cannot reinvent themselves overnight, there will nowhere left to go for them.
Maybe lawyers and medics and a few other can entrenche themselves with legislation, but if you are a knowledge worker in a non union field things look scary.
Real human level strong AI would be that, but the LLMs we have now are nowhere close. They are just a powerful new software tool in the hands of specialists.
Maybe GPT10 might get there, but I suspect we’ll quickly reach diminishing returns with current and near future architectures.
This is a real hand wavy way to look at it. How about on the individual level? How is an individual affected by this and can you put yourself in their shoes?
I can’t tell you which individual people will lose their jobs, or even which specific jobs will end up being cut and why. Can you? We’re both just making different estimates of the likely overall effects. I’m basing mine in the known historical effects of automation on economies and employment, and the fact that previous arguments that were all doomed by it have every single time turned out to be false.
No, nobody can and that’s the point. Except the flaw in your thinking is your applying what happened in the past to the present. Nobody has every automated a human brain before, they mostly automated muscles away. This time is different so therefore you cannot assume that since a welding robot didn’t destroy the world that AI won’t. Automation and AI are not the same and we should quit calling it as such.
I certainly won’t claim that capitalism is immune from abuses or failures. It’s undeniable that it has its failures. But criticising its failures is one thing, while criticising it as a failure is another. To make the latter claim credibly you’d need to argue for a better alternative that either further minimises or eliminates the flaws. What is it?
When people cry that there will be not enough work, the exact opposite happens.
Nevermind that these people aren't crybabies - and that it is incredible condescending to paint them as such.
More fundamentally - what you're asserting as a self-evident fact is massively contradicted by what is probably the single largest sea change in many Western countries in the last 50 years - the systemic disappearance of solid middle-class jobs (and at least some form of community in many places), due exactly to these nifty "paradigm shifts" you are referring to.
Right. The last time a labor saving device came around, letting you do in 2 hours what it used to take 8 to do, it didn't give you 6 hours of vacation, it just meant you were more productive over your 8 hour day. If your job is now 90% "copy and paste into ChatGPT", you're still getting paid to know what to type into it.
Then again, I'm also reminded of a story of a homebuilder, hiring two workers. Together they held up the material and one of them measured the hypotenuse. Well, after someone showed him the Pythagorean theorem, the boss no longer needed the two workers to hold the materials up, and so sent one of them home. That day's labor market didn't expand to hire the guy who's job was replaced by a calculator. Does that extrapolate to the whole labor market, over a longer period of time, given a calculator for words?
In the US at least we have used every technology that increases productivity to keep hours of labor constant and make the rich richer. Millions of Wal-Mart workers have to do a year of hard labor just to earn the cost of a set of new tires for the CEO's 10th supercar.
> Millions of Wal-Mart workers have to do a year of hard labor
Working at Wal-Mart would be miserable in many ways, however nothing I've ever seen their employees do is even 10% of what I'd call "hard labor". Probably even their warehouses are not even close to farm/ranch/factory labor people associate with that term.
These jobs are not hard on the back, they are hard on the soul. Tilling a field can feel rewarding at the end of the day. Dealing with the living nightmare that is most Walmart shoppers is soul crushing.
Your viewpoint is rather callous. Just standing on your feet bored out of your mind can make even the most hardy miserable.
Agreed. I don’t know if I could be on my feet 8 hours a day like when I worked retail. When you work in a big box store it’s easy to walk 8+ miles a day.
If the Walmart employees aren't needed, Walmart would just fire them. They're still there because their work is still required, as people are continuing to buy more stuff from Walmart. It's not some conspiracy to keep hours of labor consistent, the workers aren't getting paid 8 hours just for no reason.
First of all the LM002 is not what many would call a "Supercar". At least not modern day. An actual supercar, the Ferrari 296GTB, uses Michelin Pilot Sport 4S tires, the same tires you would put on a Porsche. Or your WRX. Further I looked up the CEO of walmart, he doesn't drive an LM002
Even the Lamborhini Revuelto uses Bridgestone Potenza Sport tires which clocks in at about $500/each
I'd say biggest displacement would be in
IT,
Insurance/Financial Services,
Creative,
legal,
Thats not even 10% of the work force
and it would prob. take a decade for it to fully play out.
It is only a displacement if one assume that the total demand will remain the same, that professionals will be replaced by the cheaper AI while the total volume of work needing to be done remains steady. Take law, there are a great many legal activities that are not done today because of the cost of entry. AI will make lawyers cheaper. That will meant previous tasks that were forgone due to costs will now be financially possible. A small claim that wasn't worth a lawyer's time today will, in a future of cheaper AI-supported lawyers, be financial viable. Complex legal structures like trusts or life estates, once only available to the élite, may now be available to all. The next result may be an actual increase in the demand for lawyers as the total pool of work increases, both AI-possible and that which AI cannot do.
So too for complex accounting/insurance structures.
This isn’t the greatest example as there’s some glaring issues. With more small claims taking up the court’s time then how will we have time to litigate actual important matters? Will we then have to result to AI judges? Slippery slope.
Also customer support, and various flavors of clerical and administrative work.
Under the BLS classification scheme, these jobs are sprinkled around under various industrial categories such as medical, logistics, business services, etc. they add up to a large number of jobs in the aggregate (probably another 10%)
I think we still do not know exactly how it will shape our sociaty, but one thing is for sure, the products businesses will make with the help of AI, people have to buy them in the end. If they have no money how will people using AI benefit.
i did that, i got injured at work and now can't do physical labor. Trades are hell on the body and bosses will toss you aside without any care. Join a Union if you're gonna go into the trades, i would've had protection and better safety.
I took so many people to the ER for work injuries that were preventable but the bosses skimp on everything.
Risk of injury comes from two things: Environment and stresses on the body.
Environmental risks can be mitigated, if the job location inherently has risks, you will be better off with a regulated industry where the regulations have teeth, and probably in a union. Stresses on the body are largely mitigated by having a job that takes more brain than back, but watch out for repetitive motion stuff and mitigate that yourself.
Mostly in the trades you get paid more for some mix of a) having in-demand skills and experience that aren't easy to acquire fast, b) putting up with unpleasant environments, or c) accepting risks. You can probably trade off c against a mix of a) and b).
So for example being a tool and die maker in general is way safer than being a faller. Watch for industry specific stuff too. Kicking carpet is more pleasant and less dangerous than electrical, but it won't pay well and your knees are likely screwed by your mid 40s.
Robotics will rapidly pick up improved capabilities. With so many people out of work and so much automation being consolidated, what do you think all the entrepreneurs and researchers will look to next? It will be breakthroughs and efficiency improvements in robotics .
I think this "learn a trade" plan has maybe 5 years max. By then the trades will also be automated.
I'm not a gambling man but if I was I would put a very large amount of my net worth on a bet that no trades will be automated in 5 years time. Not a single one.
I think trades will be around for a century. The problem is dealing with crazy existing stuff, like houses that are not to code and have been repaired by the last 3 owners, all of whom made it up as they went. Good trades people are able to figure out what the last idiot was thinking, know how it is supposed to work, and can make it work (without callbacks) for a long time with minimal intervention.
I remember a college professor who cashed out his retirement in the mid-1990's to start his own online college. He went broke in less than a decade, and we still have not removed professors from the colleges.
As a teacher, I do think that ChatGPT will replace most textbooks and teachers, but I don't know how long that will take.
Progress is slower in the world of atoms than in the world of information. I watched the progress from the first DARPA Grand Challenge for self-driving cars (2004, no car made it to the finish line) to the Urban Challenge in 2007 (many cars succeeded in a much more complicated environment) and thought that self driving vehicles would soon be commercialized. But there are 10,000 "last 1%" cases left to handle and we still don't have good enough systems to replace truck drivers or cab drivers today. Replacing jobs like plumber or electrician looks even harder than self driving vehicles because it requires far more intricate physical manipulation and perception than driving on public roads.
I mean I think that's with every system a problem. Not just ours. Wealth distribution has been a challenge since we've moved away from spending our day solely focused on gathering food / farming. Every shock to our current system will take time to adjust.
Probably not, but Norway is generally an anomaly. It's got massive natural resource wealth, a small homogeneous population, and is surrounded by allies and falls under the US security umbrella
> I mean I think that's with every system a problem. Not just ours.
This doesn't mean that different economic systems have equivalent or comparable problems. Just like you can have a worse economic system than today's global capitalism, you could, in principle, have better systems.
Capitalism is not an economic system, it is a description of fundamental economics.
Countries can have a highly regulated form of capitalism where trade and ownership is strictly controlled… and they’re often called socialist or communist, or a laissez faire system.
However, so long as people are using land, buildings structures, designing equipment… the laws of capitalism will apply.
Capitalism isn’t a fundamental law like the speed of light or thermodynamics.
We can use other systems that suit our goals better. Even if it’s a better form of capitalism than what we’re dealing with now.
This post-monetarist form of capitalism is killing people and this planet and enriching but a few. That’s not the kind of society most people want. A matter of time before there are enough have-nots and upheaval becomes a real problem for the capital owners.
Capitalism is too broad a term to be useful in these conversations.
At it’s core capitalism just means that private individuals can own property, instead of the state owning everything. Which is absolutely critical for a free society. It’s paramount that individuals not be dependant on a ruling class for survival.
Ownership is a term that is loaded and the argument between socialism and capitalism is actually not really helpful.
For instance, if we removed the concept of capital and implemented socialism, there would still be a concept of "responsibility for". So if there were community bicycles, individuals would still have responsibility if they threw the bicycles in a lake. The community officially "owned" the bicycles, and the individual acted against the community's best interests.
Capitalism as written about by Adam Smith seeks to solve the same problem by putting the "ownership" in the hands of the individual, so that the individual is given incentive to care and maintain the bike.
These are both potentially-effective systems that seek to solve the problem of "who's responsible for this bicycle". There are trade-offs for each.
When we simplify complex market-based problems into choices between either capitalism or socialism, we have created nice ways to describe the problem, but neither of them serves as an effective solution to the problem.
For the solution, we have to dig deeper and that means not being beholden to ideologies that can prevent us from seeing good solutions.
The problem with ownership is that it isn't that easy.
With land people don't own the land itself they only have exclusive usage rights for a specific period of time. Once that time is over they are no longer responsible. Thus even with private ownership you still can have the tragedy of the commons problem, it is just divided over time instead of space.
The most common example is soil depletion from industrialized agriculture.
If you wanted to solve this problem you would need a regulatory body that inspects the quality of the soil and fines people who degrade it. Governance becomes essential
to balance the micro and macro economy.
The concept of property has been warped to include the value of shares of a corporation, whose value is generated by the labor of its employees. This is the primary way the richest people steal wealth from labor.
Only if you believe in the Labor Theory of Value, which most don't. If I own a ship that's going on some expedition (as how shares originally started), I raise capital and reduce risk by issuing shares that people can buy. I have to, well, share my wealth but I have more money now to do the expedition. Corporations are just bigger versions of the same idea, they're still run by people, any of whom can decide not to work there anymore, for better or worse.
What you and other students of Karl Marx always ignore is the fact that if company owners was not allowed to earn profit then there would be no companies founded, meaning that the workers would not have jobs.
They can do that, nothing stops people from setting up co-ops today, I've been in one as well in fact. But at the same time, if I'm making something lucrative, I'd want to profit from it. That other people I hire are willing to work for the wage I give them is their problem, since if they don't like the wage, they can always go elsewhere (given that they are skilled workers, not workers who can find no other job in some company town or something).
Your argument possesses a fundamental mistake that most venture capitalists make: that the demand is infinitely elastic but supply is completely fixed; in other words, the manufacturers being able to perfectly impose what consumers want to consume.
I don't see where I imply that supply is fixed. I don't think that makes sense even from a VC point of view, since the company they fund is itself another manufacturer or producer of goods, thereby increasing the supply.
What you and other billionaire boot-lickers ignore is that earning $10 million from starting a company is very reasonable, "earning" $100 billion is just stealing from many thousands of employees. We really should NOT need a logarithmic scale when talking about wealth inequality.
Except the labour theory of value is utter nonsense. It lead Marx to argue that railway workers, helping transport goods to where they were needed, contributed negative value and were parasitic on manufacturing labour.
Ideas, leadership and capital are vital to a functioning economy. Every time a system has been set up that denied that, and it has been tried many times, the results were catastrophic. In several cases tens of millions of people dead catastrophic.
Indeed. Eventually the interests of capital owners force them to fail. Like when the CIA backed a military coup by a fascist general to overthrow a democratically elected socialist. Because US investments were threatened.
No economic system can mitigate toxic politics. Regulatory or political capture by economic interests is always a threat. As is political seizure of economic assets or resources. These are human failings you find in any system. This is why rule of law is so important.
A society doesn't simply implement socialism (or any system) and call it a utopia. There will always be forces and counter-forces. Fascism will continue to find a way back into any system it can.
We can both completely completely agree on both points. There are no magic wands that will solve corruption and rent seeking. These are both human flaws. I’m not even against a dose of socially managed resources and services where it makes sense. Cheers.
Cheers! Indeed a bit of planning can work, even in a mostly capitalist system. Take WalMart as an example. It's annual revenues dwarf the GDP of many small countries. And yet it is centrally managed, planned, and rather efficient!
The Ludlow Massacre was a mass killing perpetrated by anti-striker militia during the Colorado Coalfield War. Soldiers from the Colorado National Guard and private guards employed by Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I) attacked a tent colony of roughly 1,200 striking coal miners and their families in Ludlow, Colorado, on April 20, 1914. Approximately 21 people, including miners' wives and children, were killed. John D. Rockefeller Jr., a part-owner of CF&I who had recently appeared before a United States congressional hearing on the strikes, was widely blamed for having orchestrated the massacre.[6][7]
The massacre was the seminal event of the 1913–1914 Colorado Coalfield War, which began with a general United Mine Workers of America strike against poor labor conditions in CF&I's southern Colorado coal mines.[8] The strike was organized by miners working for the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company and Victor-American Fuel Company. Ludlow was the deadliest single incident during the Colorado Coalfield War and spurred a ten-day period of heightened violence throughout Colorado. In retaliation for the massacre at Ludlow, bands of armed miners attacked dozens of anti-union establishments, destroying property and engaging in several skirmishes with the Colorado National Guard along a 225-mile (362 km) front from Trinidad to Louisville.[6] From the strike's beginning in September 1913 to intervention by federal soldiers under President Woodrow Wilson's orders on April 29, 1914, an estimated 69 to 199 people were killed during the strike. Historian Thomas G. Andrews has called it the "deadliest strike in the history of the United States."[2]: 1
The Ludlow Massacre was a watershed moment in American labor relations. Socialist historian Howard Zinn described it as "the culminating act of perhaps the most violent struggle between corporate power and laboring men in American history".[9] Congress responded to public outrage by directing the House Committee on Mines and Mining to investigate the events.[10] Its report, published in 1915, was influential in promoting child labor laws and an eight-hour work day. The Ludlow townsite and the adjacent location of the tent colony, 18 miles (29 km) northwest of Trinidad, Colorado, is now a ghost town. The massacre site is owned by the United Mine Workers of America, which erected a granite monument in memory of those who died that day.[11] The Ludlow tent colony site was designated a National Historic Landmark on January 16, 2009, and dedicated on June 28, 2009.[11] Subsequent investigations immediately following the massacre and modern archeological efforts largely support some of the strikers' accounts of the event.[12]
It’s inexorably true that means of production control the outputs.
It’s unavoidable that whoever has power over production has power over those who rely on those outputs.
Unless you’re advocating for the destruction of factories, the razing of homes, etc. you’re in favor of capital. We’re just discussing who is going to control the capital.
> However, so long as people are using land, buildings structures, designing equipment… the laws of capitalism will apply.
Capitalism is the system
where someone can claim ownership of land/buildings/ideas(typically due to prior ownership) aka "capital". If the laws don't allow someone to make and hold that claim of private ownership, how would the "laws of capitalism" still apply?
> Capitalism is the system where someone can claim ownership of land/buildings/ideas(typically due to prior ownership)
Typically due to paying someone to invent/build them, then continuing to capitalize on essentially someone's else work.
That's the problem. I think we would be in much better situation if the person who worked on something reaped majority of benefits, and not boss of their boss.
Instead we have IP producers needing to produce thru their whole productive life, while having their IP ownership assigned to corporations because that's what their employment contract allows, and nobody else in society being able to benefit (without paying not-the-author of it), even tho near everything relies on what came before.
That then can be used by corporations either long enough to stifle innovation and competition (patents), or even long enough that nobody involved is alive anymore (copyright law), all while paying far lower taxes than people they hire.
Like, capitalism might have some problems but they are by far exacerbated by how law around it works. Any technology that increases performance by far benefits the owners of company the most and they pay less taxes on top of that.
>Capitalism is not an economic system, it is a description of fundamental economics
Silvio Gesell has developed an economic system inspired by Darwin. I don't mean social Darwinism, I mean that he deconstructs the economy down to self preservation and group preservation instincts which are biological necessities.
Self preservation is necessary to survive. A biological organism that does not self preserve will be selected out. This means that self preservation instincts represent egoism.
You might now say that this is the end, capitalism has won, except there is also group preservation.
Group preservation requires self preservation as a prerequisite. If you cannot meaningfully self preserve, you will most likely contribute nothing to group preservation as there aren't many situations where dying outweighs the cost of raising a member of the group.
This means self preservation instincts play a significant role all the way until they start threatening group preservation.
An organism that exclusively specializes in self preservation would always be a lone wolf with no socialization. The problem with this theory is that it would imply subsistence which is the opposite of capitalism. In other words, capitalism cannot be the result of simple egoism and self preservation because people would simply leave the capitalist society for the sake of self preservation if it were to become too stressful.
Thus there must be a significant group preservation instinct in humans and they have been evolved to survive in groups. In other words, capitalism has to leverage group preservation instincts somehow and therefore it is just another flavor of socialism or communism except in favour of people with capital.
Now, you can take it too far and entirely rely on group preservation instincts like communists claim but that doesn't work in practice either as self preservation overrides group preservation. Only people who have their basic needs met can engage in altruism.
Thus you can't expect a society consisting exclusively of altruists or egoists. Instead you would expect evolution to hit just the right balance between the two and that would imply the absence of both capitalism and socialism. It means both are an aberration that cannot be explained biologically.
Yes, that would imply that people can choose to participate in a market economy but it doesn't mean they have to and market economies don't have to be capitalist.
>Capitalism is not an economic system, it is a description of fundamental economics.
Theoretical economists have no concept of capitalism except maybe Keynes. In classical and neo classic economic theory there is no such thing as "capitalism". In theory it doesn't exist. There is a market economy with zero coercion and it does not intrinsically favor capital. You can't get richer through unfair means or corruption in these models either.
The gaps between the model and the real world are then filled with dogma and ideology. For example, you can just say that a positive return on capital represents a voluntary high time preference even if the return is higher than what would bring the economy into equilibrium.
The real world starts exhibiting cycles that make no sense in the model, meh. Let's claim capitalism is a constant of the universe even though biological dynamics imply the opposite.
> Wealth distribution has been a challenge since we've moved away from spending our day solely focused on gathering food / farming.
Have you ever considered that this may be due to the fact that our brains evolved to exist in a world where our day is largely focused on gathering food? We're not well-equipped to exist in other modes.
I said, "majority of the day focused on gathering food, not "spent gathering food". If this seems like an arbitrary distinction, allow me to provide an analogy. Most teenage boys spend the majority of their day focused on having sex, but very few of them spend the majority of their day actually having sex (if they're even having sex at all).
As for a citation, ask anyone who's spent any amount of their life with not enough food available. If you ask them how much of their time is spent focused on getting food or thinking about food, or worrying about food, they'll probably tell you "most of it".
It certainly depends much on the regional setting. Humans pushed to the boundaries of landscapes which support their existence. If you are a hunter gatherer in fertile jungle setting you might make do with 2 or 3h per day of hunting or gathering. If you live further north or south or in more arid regions that might take more time.
If we could just stop being economically gaslighted it would help.
The economic system can't be simultaneously unproductive enough to require us to keep raising the retirement age and so productive that job loss is a big problem.
It is possible that a political war on labor is being waged at both ends.
It's possible to have certain things be abundant and other things be scarce simultaneously, because technology doesn't make everything abundant at the same time. That means certain types of labor are abundant and others scarce at the same time as well.
There may be a war on certain kinds of labor but having to raise the retirement age and having job losses from tech aren't evidence of it.
>Yet you internalized a belief that we have to do it [keep laboring] when so much of the labor it would produce more of is already abundant. Why?
If there is so much abundance and labor isn't needed, why is almost every country on Earth currently experiencing food inflation? Abundance would mean prices go down, not up. We would need fewer farmers, not more.
Before you say it's being caused by corporate greed and price gouging, this is why I said globally. If for example Vietnam locally produces rice, and it's not even a capitalist country, there shouldn't be rice inflation there. Yet there is, and rice farmers in Vietnam aren't retiring because human labor and rice are so abundant.
Why pretend that just because some things have become abundant with technology, we can make society wide proclamations about labor no longer being needed?
It seems more like war on paying people fair wage for the work. Suits don't want to live in age where shit job doesn't come with shit pay coz that cuts into profits.
The changing demographics is what causes the retirement age to be increased.
In the 1960's, the average lifespan was in the 60s. So a retirement age of 65 meant that around half of retirees would die before collecting retirement.
Now the average lifespan is 80. And the median age of the population is older than ever.
Not really much to do with an "unproductive" population. Except that retirees are unproductive I guess.
>Not really much to do with an "unproductive" population.
If we pretended that there had been 0% increase in economic productivity since then then, then yes, changing demographics are a problem.
This is indeed, what most justifications of increasing the retirement age quietly assume. It's probably quite easy to assume because the % of increase in productivity captured by the working class since 1970s as wealth has actually been quite small.
Compounded economic growth since the 1960s has, I think, been something of the order of 200% though.
>In the 1960's, the average lifespan was in the 60s>So a retirement age of 65 meant that around half of retirees would die before collecting retirement.
For Switzerland life expectancy for men went from 26 years at 50 years old in 1981 to 33.1 at the same age in 2021. That's more than 7 years. (At birth it increased from 72.4 to 81.6 at bit more than 9 years).
So can we now please stop to mention all the time that the increase in life expectancy is only caused by infant mortality reduction when it's clearly not the case?
> So can we now please stop to mention all the time that the increase in life expectancy is only caused by infant mortality reduction when it's clearly not the case?
My point was in regards to the GP:
>> In the 1960's, the average lifespan was in the 60s. So a retirement age of 65 meant that around half of retirees would die before collecting retirement.
>> Now the average lifespan is 80. And the median age of the population is older than ever.
This makes it look like the pension system is doomed to fail due to a massive increase in the average lifespan today compared to earlier.
> That's more than 7 years.
If you're looking to balance the pension system, people just need to work 3.5 years longer given that increase.
It's gone from about 70 for average people in 1920 (when life expectancy was at a local minimum, probably due to pollutants and terrible diet) to about 80, not counting infant mortality. That still means tripling the years in which someone is retired.
If you look at the pension system today, people work for about 40 years, and are retired for about 20 years.
If the average life expectancy for the retirees increases by 1 year, they'd have to work 6 months longer to keep the system balanced with those numbers.
I am currently reading the late Daly’s 2014 book “From Uneconomic Growth to a Steady-State Economy” that seems to address exactly your concern for a more fairly distributed economic system. A real eye-opener that would require us to change three things to build a more sustainable economy and future:
(1) stop fractional reserve banking and nationalize money again to avoid the very quantitative easing/tightening fiasco we are seeing today,
(2) measure economic progress with a quality of life index instead of GDP to accurately reflect the cost of products/resources and put more emphasis on life quality improving services, and
(3) replace the current international trade rules and system run by the IMF with a more equitable system where capital costs are accurately reflected at the source to avoid “outsourcing” problems to third world continues.
While all three changes are difficult to achieve in our current society, I am amazed at how clearly Daly’s life work can outline how we could build a much more sustainable economy and healthier society.
Maybe his amazing last summary book is of interest to others on HN.
I am sorry but fractional reserve banking isn't the problem, nor is debt based money the problem. You can't solve the problem without allowing interest rates to be negative when people want to pay off their debts at a faster rate than people wanting to spend off their credits/deposits.
The problem is quite simple. Money has no maturity but debt has a deadline. This asymmetry causes problems regardless of whether you have a gold standard, full reserve fiat or fractional reserve fiat.
In other words, if you can fix the asymmetry or eliminate the zero lower bound it doesn't actually matter what form your money takes.
I don’t think Daly is suggesting to move away from debt as an instrument in his work, only to establish a 100% reserve system for commercial banks, including the Fed. He was suggesting to nationalize money supply via the Treasury, to avoid bank runs and fiascos like they happened just now to CS and SVB.
Apparently, this was already the direction of thought among some economists in the 1920s (like Frank Knight and Irving Fisher), but then got overruled by the eternal growth mindset that evolved during the Great Depression (which Daly claims leads to “uneconomic” growth). Printing money as an instrument should very much be available - but only to the Government/Treasury.
Just to expand on the above, as two days later I now feel it is hard to understand how my reply is related to imtringued‘s last paragraph (“if you can fix the asymmetry or eliminate the zero lower bound it doesn't actually matter what form your money takes”):
If you don’t allow banks to “print debt” out of thin air by eliminating fractional reserve banking, as Daly suggested in his work, I believe you eliminate that asymmetry. Actual money is lent, actual money has to be returned.
The question that remains then is if it is valid to ask for interest on that money. But I believe that is acceptable, and the rate might be set to 0% or even negative in the right circumstances.
The fact that anyone today thinks that any other economic system we’ve ever tried is any better than the one we have is a damning indictment of our education system.
The fact that USA's brand of late-stage capitalism is even considered capitalism is an even more damning indictment of our education system.
Somewhere between Feudalism and Karl Marx, Adam Smith is spinning in his grave. How much we don't have capitalism and are living, globally, under an oligopoly, replete with robber barons in tech clothes; one can only laugh at.
The amount of misery under "capitalism" says there's got to be a better way.
I’m open to suggestions, at the end of the day it’s what works that matters, it’s just that every other system ever tried is minimum an order of magnitude worse. I’m not particularly a fan of the ‘red in tooth and claw’ brand of capitalism in the US. It’s a bit raw for me, but undeniably very dynamic.
Meanwhile in my lifetime capitalism has raised hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and into solidly middle class lifestyles globally.
My wife is Chinese so I’ve seen first hand how economic liberalisation has transformed that country. The Chinese brand of capitalism is severely flawed, largely due to an almost nonexistent rule of law, but compared to what they had before its night and day. It’s a shame the CCP seems to be thoroughly mismanaging it at the moment.
Mayor Unterguggenberger introduced a demurrage currency in Wörgl during the great depression before WW2. He "printed" 10000 shilling worth of Arbeitsbestätigungsscheine (work confirmation coupons). The coupons are valid until a certain period, then you have buy a stamp and glue it on. This approximates a -5% interest rate. People didn't hoard the coupons and the town accepted them for tax payments. The town was out of debt within a year and unemployment has shrunk by double digit percentages. The depression was effectively over and all it took was the equivalent of food stamps/unemployment benefits except transferrable between businesses and consumers with a demurrage fee.
The system doesn't have to be adopted by every business or citizen. For instance, 10% of unemployment benefits could be paid out as a demurrage currency with tax acceptance and you would see large scale welfare benefits with almost no burden on the general population.
The only burden of this system is juggling two different currencies and an insignificant 5% annual fee on the issued demurrage money supply. If pay out 10% of unemployment benefits or 15 billion dollars it would only cost 750 million dollars in the liquidity fee and that is assuming the money doesn't immediately go back to the government for tax payments at which point the costs keep shrinking and shrinking.
The problems with the Chinese brand of capitalism and the USA brand of capitalism is that both are called capitalism and the general public hasn't developed a better language for debating the nuances of each. If anyone dare say that the USA brand of capitalism is imperfect, they're automatically assumed to be a communist (I'm not even kidding - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35497892), which totally misses all nuance.
The claim that it's capitalism that has raised hundreds of millions of people out of poverty is a common one, but it's our technology that's advanced. If we were still living under feudalism and the industrial revolution and the Internet happened, hundreds of millions of lives would still have transformed. Thanks to John Deere and Monsanto and the like, billions of lives have been raised up from subsistence farming to where we are today. There's the argument that we wouldn't have this technology without capitalism, and the length of the Egyptian and Roman empires without the Internet lend credence to this possibility, but it's also impossible to deny that we've never and can't test whether a system other than capitalism wouldn't also lift millions out of poverty, given the same advancements in technology.
It turns out that centralized, long-term planning is necessary for certain advancements. Eisenhower's US highway system, for example. Or the Manhattan project. Yes, the market is great for a large number of things. One of my most favorite is the food bank story, where they created their own internal market, with credits, and used that to more efficiently organize actors and allocate resources *.
I'm also just done pretending that USA's brand of capitalism is perfect, or that we have a free market in the first place in places where we don't (eg pharmaceuticals) but still try to run it in a capitalistic way, and then get surprised when someone like Martin Shkreli plays the game according to the rules, buys a company with a monopoly on a product, and then raises prices when that's just the rules we've set up for ourselves. Yes he went to jail, but that wasn't because he raised prices on Daraprim, but because he was also running a ponzi scheme and the attention made that finally catch up to him.
We're not going to get to a better system by upending what's been working well enough, but with smaller, more specific changes to the existing system to make it work better. Framing any changes to the system as a moral upheaval and equivalent to communism is the problem. We can have a better system. Yes, some of it involves sharing with others and caring for your fellow human. Some of those humans don't look like you and you may not like them. That's okay, you don't have to. There are people I don't like either. But what we have that works for some, also isn't working for others. When baby food is locked up because people are stealing it, if we assume it's mostly not being stolen and used for nefarious purposes, like cutting cocaine; if we assume people are stealing baby formula to feed babies, and that's criminal behavior according to the rules of our society; stepping back and looking at that from first principles, that all the rules of society and capitalism are for the benefit of humanity. If we really stop and think about that, something has gone wrong.
> The claim that it's capitalism that has raised hundreds of millions of people out of poverty is a common one, but it's our technology that's advanced.
The main factor there was economic liberalisation in south east Asia. Mainly China of course but not only. There was nothing inevitable about that, it was a political decision. The Soviet Union didn’t do it, North Korea didn’t do it, but China had Deng Xioping and he did do it. He or someone else could have easily gone a different way. My wife is Chinese and I’ve visited frequently in the last 20 years and seen the transformation for myself. My wife’s family there are among those who went from grinding poverty to a comfortable lifestyle owning several properties with 2 cars.
Owning properties privately, in China, before Deng that would have been unimaginable. My wife’s sister even owns shares. It’s capitalism gone mad.
Proto capitalism is what lead up to feudalism. The Roman empire didn't have modern capitalism with banking, company shares and insolvency but what they did have is a silver/gold standard with debt bondage. Debt bondage is still a thing in Pakistan and the dynamic is exactly the same. You borrow a little money, the interest payments become overwhelming, you are forced to work on behalf of the creditor who can decide your wage and the interest rate.and whether they pay you in food and shelter or in money. There is no reason why they wouldn't abuse this power.
You see it all begins very benign. A farmer has a bad harvest. He needs to bridge over this year until the next harvest. So he borrows money with interest. When the next harvest fails then he becomes unable to pay and is forced to sell his land and perversively, hired to work on his own land. He has functionally become a serf. All it takes is for this to spread to the rest of society and you end up with feudalism.
In other words, feudalism is what happens when proto capitalism is exaggerated to an extreme extent.
If you were to exaggerate modern capitalism I am not sure what would happen. Maybe hyperinflation, maybe world war 3, maybe a reform of the banking system, maybe mass starvation or maybe a revolution or maybe modern feudalism except serfs aren't allowed to own intellectual property or shares in companies.
So no, I don't think the problem is that we don't have capitalism. We clearly have more capitalism than we want or need. Robber barons are an intrinsic part of capitalism.
The answer is a market economy without capitalism. I don't even see why anyone would care about capital obsession in a free market anyway. That sounds inherently autocratic. At some point in the capital accumulation process one person owns the entire economy, how does that not make them a monarch eventually?
It actually seems to be about distributing power as much as possible. The effort right now with LLMs such as by Microsoft and Google is to rush to make them available to as many people as possible as cheaply as possible, even for free. That’s because this way they can create the maximum amount of value as efficiently as possible, with MS and Google skimming off the top of it all through advertising.
I’m sure premium private services will be a thing, but right now the sheer scale of the mass market seems to be a powerful democratising force. Let’s hope it stays that way.
I'm OK with accepting a certain amount of it. It's a thing. Is there a configuration under which there is no misery? What's the minimum possible amount of misery we could hope to achieve? My problem is that when people's thinking tends to go along the lines of "misery is bad therefore we must eliminate all of it" they come to conclusions that are counterproductive because they're trying to break the laws of physics.
If I came to a ludicrous conclusion, like we should eat babies because that would reduce misery, then attack that ludicrous conclusion. But being pro-misery because some people make bad conclusions from being against misery is, well, ludicrous.
The fact that you jump straight to Communism (without having the balls to openly say it) when nobody even mentioned it, that's a damning indictment of your education system. Or religious doctrine, I should say.
Ever thought that maybe Capitalism is just a small step in human history and that we can definitely do better? I wonder what happened to innovation, is it fine only as long as it doesn't threaten the status quo that keeps you complacent?
There are loads of other economic systems. Feudalism, oligarchy, tribal pastoralism, you name it.
I was mainly thinking in terms of critiquing the idea that value is created by labour, since HyperSane mentioned it twice in comments.
It happens that the labour theory of value in central to Marx but it’s not exclusive to him. Adam Smith indulged a lesser form of it in one of his uncharacteristic slip ups in economic theory. However it is in Marx that it achieves its most vertiginous heights of absurdity, and through his disciples that the most damage was done by it.
There is a direct causal line from the LTV and some of the direst economic disasters in human history. The most egregious case, despite some strong rival examples in Soviet Russia, is probably Mao’s Great Leap Forward which among other things fetishised steel production. Production creates value and steel is the most important economic product, so everybody should make steel.
It’s the damage the LTV caused itself that I was talking about. Communism is a political project associated with it but not directly what I had in mind.
As for innovation, I’m all for it. Capitalism maximises individual freedom by putting ownership of capital and rights of self determination of labour directly into the hands of citizens. By maximising individual economic freedom it maximises opportunities for economic innovation. This is why free market capitalist economies are so creative and dynamic.
Capitalism is responsible for chattel slavery in the Americas, the genocide of untold native populations in Asia, Africa, Ireland, the South Pacific and the Americas; famines and environmental destruction around the world; destroyed the stability of most of Africa, the Middle East, Central and South America; and it has rewarded bad behavior like pumping so much carbon into the atmosphere that we have irreversibly altered the climate of the entire planet. That's literally just skimming the surface - tetraethyl lead, CFCs, an anthology of chemical-related explosions and spills, the great Pacific garbage patch, depleted fisheries around the globe, the obesity crisis, the opioid crisis, the homelessness crisis, and so on.
I still stan (a version of) capitalism, I agree it's better than the other systems, but I do always get a giggle when people act like communism caused the worst disasters in history. They're not great, to be sure, but at least the Communists were mostly killing their own people through incompetence rather instead of killing the entire planet for avarice. It's humans all the way down, doesn't matter what system. Either you have accountability, or you don't and if you don't bad things happen.
Are you aware of the utterly catastrophic environmental devastation caused by the Soviet Union, and to this day by Chinese state industries? This is the problem with undemocratic centrally planned systems, with state controlled media. Complete lack of accountability.
Who's "we"? The West? The US? Humans? If it's the latter, we have had (and have) better - check out the Islamic financial system. It does have certain "capitalistic" principles (competition, no taxation by the government) but also places red lines against immoral practices. Best of all worlds basically.
Who said anything about knowing any good alternatives to the current system that could be switched to? If it was that easy, some country would have done it already, and they’d be winning the OECD.
I think the suggestion is rather that we are morally compelled as a society, to invest real effort into inventing something new to replace neoliberal capitalism.
States could, for example, be sponsoring experiments to validate new economic models, through e.g. low-barrier-to-entry applications for charter cities and other autonomous zones, as long as the applicant can show that 1. there is a novel economic model at play, and that 2. the zone is being carefully monitored to collect data for analysis by the Economics department of a major academic institution.
Economic experiments are going on all the time. Basic income, profit sharing, kibutz, all sorts. It’s not as if every western country is economically identical either. Neoliberal capitalism runs the spectrum from America to Scandinavia, via France.
One of the major advantages of neoliberal capitalism is it’s not exclusionary of alternative forms of economic organisation. It can exist very well alongside state capitalism, or almost anything else. After all individual freedom to organise as you choose is precisely its core characteristic.
If you want to establish a workers collective, or whatever you like, there really aren’t any barriers to doing so. In fact they do exist, some have been very successful. That’s great, but the fact that they are vanishingly rare I think says a lot more about the inherent problems with such systems than they do about capitalism.
This problem isn’t specific to AI. Luddites were concerned about machines taking their jobs. Marx recognized the role of “capital” (of which AI is the intellectual type) in suppressing the incomes of the working class relative to the owning class. Both Marx and the Luddites conceived of different solutions.
One solution (the Luddite one) is to eschew the technology. If nobody adopts the technology, nobody has to, but nobody can benefit. On the contrary, if anyone adopts the technology, all can benefit, but all also have to suffer the negative impacts. Without everyone on board, the Luddite solution cannot work.
Marx saw a different solution: communism. If the state owns the means of production, the working class and owning class benefit equally. It’s unlikely that we ever move toward this, in my opinion, due to the other issues inherent to communism (unfair (from the perspective of most policy makers) distribution of resources, corruption, etc.).
We need to find a new solution; one which enables people to benefit from technology while minimizing the downsides, or at least localizing the downsides to those who choose to adopt it. Right now we have, IMO, one of the worst situations of both worlds: privatized benefits with publicized costs. For instance, any taxpayer funded bailout.
Eschewing technology is not what the Luddites were initially after. At first they asked for a minimum wage, minimum labour standards and taxes on the new technology to support laid off workers [1]. This was rejected so they tried to protect their wage power by smashing up the machines.
A Luddite response to AI might be to tax the value AI created (Microsoft's profits) and use that to fund minimum wages/retraining. Not sure how that would work when the AI value is in one jurisdiction and job losses in another.
Tax the corporations more than the people would be a good start. Make profits from savings in manpower go back to the social programs, maybe ven universal basic income.
Banks can evaporate billions and nobody bats an eye. Zero persons responsible, zero persons to prison while the most vulnerable always pay the price for it.
> It’s unlikely that we ever move toward this, in my opinion, due to the other issues inherent to communism (unfair (from the perspective of most policy makers) distribution of resources, corruption, etc.).
It's because communism has the same issue Luddites have. Unless everyone is onboard, it doesn't work.
You can't stop people from trading between themselves for profit in a communist country without the threat of violence. This is what leads to all the other problems.
I mean Marx literally says you need to cull off the non believers for communism to work.
My own pet idea for economic reform would be to have people democratically vote on the services they want and if there aren't enough volunteers/robots/AI to perform them then you draft people. In this scenario people will get the services they themselves are willing to put in the work for. Such a system wouldn't need money, would be fair, and technological advancements would bring freedom.
> Right....and all the people not working would get paid how exactly ?
There's no money in this system.
> Or does this system just assume they're all homeless and jobless?
If people want "homes" then they democratically vote that they do and, if the vote passes, then people volunteer to build those homes. If there aren't enough volunteers to build the homes, then people are conscripted. This is not unlike the military where if there aren't enough soldiers you draft more.
Everything we have today is because someone built it. What is stopping people from continuing to build in the absence of money? It seems money is more or less a "hack" to circumvent the shortcomings of human nature. There needs to be a culture shift towards a labor-first mindset and better role models (i.e. don't glorify the wealthy, glorify those who build amazing things and share them for free). People should build and innovate because they want to, because it means a better life. In the system I've described the standard of living people have is directly tied to what they and their neighbors are willing to work for. If folks don't want to work, then we'll go back to living in caves, but if we continue pressing forward then we'll eventually enter a Star Trekien techno-utopia.
Exactly this. Advancements in technology should better peoples lives not destroy their livelihoods. We shouldn't suppress technology, but rethink the role of our economy.
Loss of income kind of understates the issue I think. I'm an already long term unemployed programmer, and I've been playing around with copilot. It makes me think I'll never have income again from that trade, and possibly no other related field.
Yeah it will ultimately lead to a better life for everyone but technological disruption has always been totally destructive to the generation it is replacing. Like the coal miners who Obama said should “learn to code”. Getting rid of coal is a huge net win but it sucks for them.
Yes! So many people in information fields think that their relatively high earnings are a result of their economic contribution. The truth, which they are often mentally unwilling to face, is that their earnings are more do to being on the profitable side of Intellectual Slavery laws (copyrights and patents).
The artificial scarcity created by these laws is what has generated such vast accumulations of wealth, not some intrinsic value to their unique creations. ChatGPT is exposing this uncomfortable truth to many people for the first time, apparently.
??? What else can we do, save for reward merit and performance? Sorry technology made the horse obsolete, but uh, that's good .. performance goes up, potential to show merit goes up
it did not, there are plenty of situations in which technology is less preferred to a horse (or mule), like say climbing everest or various other difficult terrains. it did reduce the amount of working horses though
Have you actually seen a helicopter? Know anything more than they are rotary wing aircraft? Do you know about rotor wash or range, especially when carrying a load? Do you know how difficult flying with a hanging load it is and how much stress it puts on the airframe? Did you know airframes can bend since the entire aircraft is supported by its rotor head while the airframe itself is actually carrying the weight?
Your robo horse thing also ignores the energy usage of an animal vs robot. The animal has a distinct advantage.
Again, you have no idea what you’re talking about. Hopefully you’re not an engineer by trade, as you’re failing at pros and cons here.
Interesting take — I also think these arguments come from a place where people have (subconsciously?) come to terms with doing something monotonous or repetitive to survive.
Ah yes, I'm sure you have a solution from one of the most difficult problems ever?
It's easy to condemn the system but without a solution you're just barking in the wind...
Just to be clear, I also think there are major issues with "the system", but I also don't think this is an easy problem to solve or everyone would be living in magical happy land already...
When circumstances change, people's behaviour must change. People don't like to change, some even fear change. If some people are insulated from reality, such that they don't need to change, other people will have to bare the cost. There is no economic system that can spare us from the need to adapt.
Wealth inequality in the US is already at absurd levels. The top 1% of Americans have a combined net worth of $34.2 trillion (or 30.4% of all household wealth in the U.S.), while the bottom 50% of the population holds just $2.1 trillion combined (or 1.9% of all wealth).
The Fed estimates that the wealthiest 10% of Americans hold more than 88% of all available equity in corporations and mutual fund shares (with just the top 1% controlling more than twice as much equity as the bottom 50% of all Americans combined).
Personally as a noob programmer, I feel like a superhuman because of GPT-4. Feel like my creativity has been unleashed and I can compete with the big boys.
I think that is where the scare comes from though. It used to be that churning out good code really did take a lot of experience. But as we lower that bar, the value a computer programmer has may begin to diminish. If everyone can spit out 200 lines of code in a day, thrn hiw valuable are you, really?
I analyze malware for a living, and don't consider myself a strong developer, though I can write programs, obviously. As an example, this last week I had a task that I would normally have employed one of our developers to do because they do it better and faster. Instead, I used GPT. I effectively took a couple days of work from someone. This is all fone now becuase it is new, but after a few years managers may start to evaluate output of certain people and question the utility of having duplicative skills on payroll.
To be clear, I'm not actually entirely sure this will happen. I think there was a similar discourse back in the days when excel was making the rounds because it brought "computing" to everyone-and it did. However, it wasn't catastrophic to the developer community in terms of employment.
> But as we lower that bar, the value a computer programmer has may begin to diminish.
As a developer, I feel like it's the opposite. If anything, it's going to raise the bar by replacing low skilled coders who are only good at cheaply producing piles of future tech debt, GPT4 will do that sort of work for 'free'. On the other hand it's going to empower non-programmers to write or debug low complexity scripts on their own, which is great.
I don't believe that any sort of "AI" short of AGI is going to replace developers doing "real work" on even medium complexity codebases. The reason for that is simple - GPT lacks logical reasoning capabilities. It can 'fake' them on the surface level, it might even fake them really well for extremely common problems, but as soon as you prod deeper or tack on an extra requirement or two, it starts spinning in circles indefinitely.
"Real" long-term software development is about taking (often poorly defined) requirements written in natural language, evaluating them in the scope of an existing software system, finding solutions that preserve behavior of the system (without introducing new bugs), and lastly implementing those changes in a way that follows the boundaries and abstractions defined in your system.
A single feature often touches many files at once. During this process you might spot a chance to introduce new abstractions or remove unnecessary ones. Unless you're planning on completely replacing developers with AI, the codebase must remain maintainable by mere mortals after you complete the next 50 revisions using AI that's mindlessly hacking away at your current codebase.
All of this requires logical reasoning capabilities that are, in my opinion, many orders of magnitude outside of GPT4's reach and you need those to maintain a software system for many years - decades even. That's before we get into the day to day communication and coordination effort required to sync with stakeholders, clarify requirements, and so on.
If I had to compare it to the security field, I believe that GPT will replace developers as much as automated vulnerability scanning tools have replaced pentesters. ;)
Do some more testing. Try putting it in a debug loop. Imagine tooling that has access to the files and a longer context window. If this is truly your judgement then GPT4 already has better reasoning capabilities than you. Imagine improved versions every 3-6 months.
I've done all of those things. It wasn't even operating on code but a problem described in plain English language with clear bullet points describing constraints of the problem. There were no context window limitations at play.
When it broke requirement or constraint "A", I reminded it about it. It apologized and formulated a new "solution" that broke constraint "B", when reminded about that, it apologized again and proceeded to break constraint "A" again.
The conversation went on for 20 odd turns where I tried to iterate and arrive at a solution - a custom algorithm to solve a problem it's likely never encountered before (at least in that form). It wasn't a particularly difficult problem, it just had many logical branches and steps it would have to reason about holistically. Instead it kept breaking one or more requirements that were clearly explained just 1 or 2 turns ago.
Your response is needlessly rude, perhaps the reality is that you haven't pushed it enough to discover severe limitations of GPT's logical reasoning capabilities.
> If this is truly your judgement then GPT4 already has better reasoning capabilities than you.
Wouldn't it stand to reason that someone with poor reasoning capabilities would be easily impressed by something or someone with better reasoning capabilities? ;)
"The reason for that is simple - GPT lacks logical reasoning capabilities. It can 'fake' them on the surface level, it might even fake them really well for extremely common problems, but as soon as you prod deeper or tack on an extra requirement or two, it starts spinning in circles indefinitely."
Those unqualified statements are false. GPT4 may not have been able to pass your particularly complex reasoning task, but that does not mean that it can't reason.
My tone is really out of extreme frustration because misjudgement like you are displaying literally puts the fate of the human race at risk.
Is this supposed to be some kind of joke? If someone disagrees with you, you whack them with rhetoric about existential risk? What are you? A cult member who has heard a prophecy from tech priests?
GPT-3.5 for this specific example, but I've been experimenting with GPT-4 via Bing Chat and it hasn't really changed my impression. I'm going to reevaluate once OpenAI releases ChatGPT + GPT-4 for free users.
The problem with this idea is that at some point you end up with a good approximation of AGI so humanity at large would become redundant, not just software developers.
Everyone talks about how the act of software development is being automated, nobody thinks about the impact of the software that is being developed, as if that had no impact on anyone else. Given enough effort you can replicate any human skill faster than people can retrain to an unknown skill.
I’ve personally been asking chatGPT design decisions about databases and app structure. I give it some starting ideas and ask it what would be the best path to achieve some stated goals. It gives me the options and tells me what would be the best path.
I’ve asked experienced developer friends and they say that they would likely have similar discussions among themselves. Except now chatgpt is doing that.
Right, I'm not disputing that it can be an extremely useful tool. I often use it myself to bounce ideas or to ask an open-ended questions that search engines are failing to answer, with mixed results.
My belief is that there's a huge rift between GPT-n being an extremely useful tool (which it often is) and it being able to outright replace your job.
What is the difference between me using a search engine and using a machine learning tool? The knowledge is external to me in both cases, I am just the interface between business requirements and the technology being used.
If I use an AI to use external knowledge faster then how is this supposed to threaten me? If I am a garbage scavenger and I get my resources from digging in the landfill, then wouldn't a robot that detects the valuable waste make me wealthier? I still have to pull it out myself. Ok next iteration there is a robot that can take the garbage out the land fill but not to my house. Ok next iteration is a self driving robot that can also transport the garbage to my home where I sell it. Ok next iteration the robot sells my garbage.
The real question in this situation is, does the robot cost me more than I get out of it?
You used to have to be an expert/specialist to have direct access to a computer, or understand precisely how to give them commands to work with them over an expensive connection (and on a limited basis in terms of time and how many could do it).
That scarcity wasn't a good thing. People are drastically more empowered with computing today, the barriers were dropped in a rather extreme way (compared to where it started), and that is a good thing.
These are conceptual groupings of advancement. One layer of complexity is going to be removed (broadening access), there will be further advancement and complexity where the skilled group can navigate to in order to best unleash what they're capable of.
Writing the vast majority of code isn't special or super difficult (it's time consuming and mildly difficult at worst; quite obviously there are exceptions to that). There are a million plus software developers in the US alone. It's time to add new layers of complexity and advancement. Those million software developers will have to evolve, again, myself included.
I feel the same after programming for about 25+ years. Now I get an idea, ask GPT how to do it, or if there are other options, choose and adapt to my use case.
[edit] after reading the article... Why Priya couldn't use GPT and do the job much faster?
When the colleague said s/he could do it 10x faster it was with the current GPT4 prompt limits which wouldn't exist for a "partner" company. From the last sentence we can infer that the job is outsourced, so someone "in the US" could spin up many more bots to do the task 1000s or more times faster, thus obsoleting the need to outsource the entire task at all across the whole industry, perhaps offering it instead a cheap bulk service.
And to add, many companies are going from open source back to proprietary licenses explicitly due to being unable to compete with closed companies like Amazon. Elastic, Sentry, and Docker come to mind. So any discussion of the super/inferiority of open source should include this phenomenon too.
> Open source is not an economic system in the sense in which this term is generally used.
We should move to a society where we look at software engineers as we look at road builders. City workers build roads, the people use those roads. Likewise, engineers build software, the people use said software. Our current system of (c)opywrong is bizarre and unnatural.
> "Superior" by which metric?
Well, I'm responding to your comment using an open source operating system running an open source web browser on an open source platform and you will likely read it on the same. I still use a handful of closed source products (Sublime Text comes to mind) but that's the exception, rather than the rule. This is vastly different from 25 years ago.
I'm assuming that you don't pay for a license for Sublime Text.
How do you propose that the authors of Sublime Text make a living?
Road projects are funded by the government at some level - taxes and municipal bonds. I'm not sure how that would work for software which has a potentially worldwide audience.
And do you want to run a government funded operating system and web browser?
I don't see a model where this works... unless you're thinking of toll roads as micro transactions and advertiser supported billboards while playing games.
Yes, I do pay for Sublime Text (one of the few exceptions I make and it does bother me).
I think the government should still pay for software but with the stipulation that it can only be public domain.
Governments can pay for textbooks but with the stipulation that they have to be public domain.
So contractors will bid for the work. They will do the work. Good contractors will get further work. Everyone will be able to build on the prior work done.
What do you mean by fairly distributed? If all my machines are better than you intellectually and all my machines are stronger and faster than you physically...
Then it is completely fair for me to not give you any wealth because the machines out perform you.
People fear AI because the fair outcome is in fact detrimental for a good portion of humanity.
That is the paradoxical irony. In theory to save people you must function as a welfare state with things like ubi. You must deliberately distribute income unfairly. The practical course of action goes against our moral instincts.
> In theory to save people you must function as a welfare state with things like ubi. You must deliberately distribute income unfairly.
This is only true for perverted definition of the word "fair" which allows owners/investors to perpetually capture 99.9% of the value produced by people who research, develop, build, and operate "your" machines.
When this is your ground truth, I can see how you would perceive a truly fair distribution of value created through thousands of years of collective human ingenuity, creativity, and hard work, as "unfair". Particularly in a post-singularity world where AGI and robots replace the majority of human work.
Right so if I'm a janitor and I use chemicals to clean things which is the result of hundreds of years of human ingenuity and chemical engineering I suddenly owe humanity money?
No. That is the perverted idea. I'm simply talking about fair as in fair trade. As in what is defined as a fair trade and a fair transaction according to economic theory and common sense. I am using the absolute most normal and most common sense meaning of the word "fair."
You are the one in your words: "perverting" the meaning. Perversion is actually too strong of a word. I would say you are definitely twisting the meaning and using an uncommon and sort of made up definition.
According to the most common usage of the word fair those who own AI only owe what they paid for. If they give away money then the economy is becoming more socialist or in another words an even distribution of wealth, but certainly unfair in the eyes of capitalism and fair trade and the fair exchange of goods.
Keep in mind though I'm not blindly supporting capitalism. The future of society may rely on a more practical but more unfair distribution of wealth. But we have to face the fact that such a distribution is fundamentally unfair.
"Fairness" in this definition is tied to a belief that everyone deserves a decent life.
The thought is this: we are not a society of cavemen or subsistence farmers. We're the richest society in our history by far, so all people should enjoy the fruits of such a society.
Let's say you develop a debilitating illness that robs you of your ability to produce income. Or, you have a loved one—a child—that is debilitated and will never participate in the normal "fair trade" society.
Society condemns them to a life of poverty and suffering because of their debilitation. Is that "fair" in the context of our economic surplus? If it is fair, how much more should our economic surplus be in order for these debilitated individuals to have a decent life? Will they never ever have a decent life and that's just what we decide for ourselves?
This is ultimately a moral question. Can we imagine or create a society that yields better standard of living outcomes regardless of that person's status or capability? Andrew Yang's UBI policy was essentially because he had a son with down syndrome.
If you had down syndrome, would you prefer the "fair trade" definition of fairness, or the "fair living" definition?
No. I agree that it is morally right to help people in need. But it is not a fair trade.
You cannot redefine the term "fair" to be inline with your moral values. We have different terms for what you are referring to. When you donate to a charity you use the word "donate". You have not conducted a fair transaction.
In the eyes of capitalism, it's certainly legal and to a certain degree, expected that profits accumulate at the top, but I don't believe the majority of the population ever thought of it as a "fair" arrangement.
What I'm trying to say is that your framing of the issue in terms of "fairness" isn't very productive. It may be your opinion that any given arrangement is fair, but the concept of "fairness" is really just a social construct. If your fellow citizens disagree, they are ultimately the ones who will rally to change the system. At first electorally, and failing that, through violence.
What do you mean..? the status quo is like this already. People choose the most competitive product so if a machine is the better performer then payment is made towards purchasing and maintaining a machine instead of paying a worker.
The current electorate 100 percent supports this and considers this fair. You actually have to create a new nation state if you don't want this.
> People choose the most competitive product so if a machine is the better performer then payment is made towards purchasing and maintaining a machine instead of paying a worker.
how do you explain the significant market for hand made products?
regardless, this wasn't my point
my point was the electorate aren't going to support e.g. Microsoft replacing every single worker in the US with a piece of code
regardless of Microsoft's opinion as to what it thinks is fair
>how do you explain the significant market for hand made products?
Because a segment of people think the hand made product is superior. So they purchase it. I never made the claim that machine made is superior to hand made. I made the claim that If machine made was superior then people won't employ others to make hand made things.
For a vast swath of products, machine made is often more superior. With AI, that swath becomes even larger.
>my point was the electorate aren't going to support e.g. Microsoft replacing every single worker in the US with a piece of code
The electorate is not clear about this. Morally it's a strange situation because free trade is a liberty that's part of the American Dream. If a machine can automate all jobs then it's a persons god given right to use that machine rather then pay someone to do the work. The implications of AI nor the morality of the change AI will bring is so muddy it can bring a democratic electorate into a deadlock via conflicts of interest and slow decision making.
>it's no more a god given right that it's an incited mob's right to burn down the fab or datacenter that someone else "own"s
If you change societies current outlook on morality and law then yes you are right. But currently society has laws in place that define burning down a data center as wrong. Those laws do not differentiate between whether it was done by an individual or a mob. These laws are also agreed upon by most people. You can make up your own personal morality, but good discussion should be founded on a shared reality and the status quo majority interpretation of it.
>property rights in liberal democracies will not survive a starving middle class
And this is the paradox I am referring to right? Our current interpretation of morality is at odds with practicality.
What matters is the real effects of being wealthier. If it means you and everybody else can afford a place to live, then "feeling" it's unfair just doesn't matter.
Here's an idea: a UBI that's pegged to GDP and population.
Make it comically small to start, like say 0.25% of GDP split evenly between all citizens. Based on 2021 US stats, that's $176 per person per year. That seems relatively unobjectionable regardless of your politics, even assuming that the % is likely to drift higher over time.
With increasingly advanced AI and cheap energy, GDP would rise over the long run independently of population, ultimately increasing the UBI to a livable salary.
Here is even simpler idea to make that feasible: Start actually taxing the corporations in a way that can't be trivially avoided. And don't tax them less than your own citizens. Maybe tax a bit of income on top of revenue. Maybe tax a bit more if income per employee is on high side.
If you're talking about a five-figure UBI, I don't think that would be simpler to pass through Congress.
In terms of legislative complexity, I can't see how closing all major corporate tax loopholes would be simpler than implementing whatever minor tax revenue increase is necessary to offset a $176 UBI.
Doing that is actually more complicated. There are a variety of questions regarding taxing them, and there are many more ways they could get around it. In contrast, an income tax actually collects revenue because people can't really get around having to pay it.
Well, then we have been living in a system that's as close to fair as possible since global individual wealth has been growing for a long time. The few times we had it shrink significantly over some period of time is when local populations attempted forced wealth distribution.
Our present system, by this definition, is amazing!
No it's not. If the property of fairness is that everyone grows wealthier then a system that makes everyone wealthier is a fair system. That's as close to a tautology as possible.
The resulting absurdity is why OP was right to ask what fairness was: everyone has their own belief in it, oriented towards equality or proportionality or some notion of deserving.
In order to claim that the system is “as close to fair as possible”, you would have to demonstrate that the system has optimized everyone’s wealth growth as much as possible. Something going up for a long time isn’t proof of optimization.
Well, no you don't have to optimize each person's wealth growth. It could be incredibly uneven so long as you optimize the number of people whose wealth grows.
And clearly, since it is better than every other method, it is the best by definition. If other things were not done it is because they were not possible: since possibility requires an agent to execute and since no agent succeeded in executing a better plan it is, by definition, impossible.
>And clearly, since it is better than every other method, it is the best by definition.
That isn't how "by definition" works. For that to be the case you would have to define everything to be inferior which is a purely subjective choice.
What you should have said is something along the lines of "based on our best efforts this has had the most success" which has completely different implications, such as failure to discover or adopt better systems.
It is especially strange since what you are talking about violates neoclassical models. There is no wealth inequality built into those models so why would it be obvious that this will be the best solution forever?
>. If other things were not done it is because they were not possible: since possibility requires an agent to execute and since no agent succeeded in executing a better plan it is, by definition, impossible.
Except The Wörgl Experiment succeeded in every respect. Stop rewriting history. Your theory is also unable to explain the success of the Chiemgauer [0], which is severely limited by legal problems and the ability to find loopholes.
After all, if your theory was correct and no improvement is possible, then why does improvement occur anyway? Feels like you are just taking the stance of an authoritarian thug.
[0] The Chiemgauer makes money off of ending capitalism, which is a paradox if we assume it is impossible for anything to be better than capitalism.
I was using “everyone” in the same way that I assume you were using it—everyone in aggregate. You seem to be basing this on a rather dubious position—that we’ve thought of, tried, and optimized every conceivable system for growing wealth and that the result of this exhaustive history is our current system.
You don't need to do an exhaustive search because optimality here did not account for different amounts for each. A thing is optimally fair in this world if everyone's wealth goes up. That doesn't need exhaustiveness.
A thing that gives me 1 million and you 1 is as fair as one that gives us both 500k.
And yes, we did actually search everything possible because if something did not get done it was, by definition, impossible. After all, the agent that could have made something possible could not have acted as such because we know they did not. If they could have they would have. If they could not conceive of a better thing then the thing was impossible because it was not conceivable by anyone.
Except even Fisher Black recognizes a potential currency trap at the zero lower bound and Fisher Black is someone who strongly believes in economic equilibrium.
At that point I can't help but think that most people who think capitalism works are delusional since this is such a fundamental problem with capitalism that can at best be handwaved with eternal inflation.
The US had both higher growth and higher wealth redistribution after world war 2 (extremely progressive income taxation and steep wealth taxes). The 70s ended wealth redistribution and the US has lower growth. At least get your basic history right.
Not that person, but I don’t believe that sentence approaches a definition of “fairly”. “Make everyone richer” is all fine, until you realize that you’re only a penny richer. But maybe it’s justified. That justification is what the “fairly” definition would require, and is extremely important.
The video "Wealth Inequality in America" <https://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM?t=35> at timestamp 0:35 shows a definition most respondents to the question agree on.
Why would anyone contribute more than is required to get what they need, if they’ll never see any benefit beyond that?
I prefer a system where people that work harder get more so they can have what they want, rather than just the bare minimum to survive (which is presumably what is meant by “what they need”).
Defined by man that have never worked honest day in his life and lived off family, repeated by people that don't know human nature well enough to know it doesn't work
