"exporting your own oil and gas to be able to have a 'clean' (and up to recently heavily subsidized) transportation network is in a way just a gigantic bookkeeping trick"
How so?
If every oil exporter used some of their oil revenue to switch to EVs, that would, all things equal, hasten the transition to EVs. The U.S. is not doing that.
> the drug dealer that knows you don't consumer your own supply unless you must
So true. There's nothing incompatible at all with:
a) realizing that earth has gifted you with a valuable but limited & polluting energy source
b) realizing that you'd be foolish to get you own country hooked on it, but it's not a bad business if you can get other countries hooked on it.
Instead we get oil rich areas seemingly determined to show off how much of their oil they can waste.
Wow, so now the US oil barons who lobbied Trump to kill renewables and EVs are even worse than Mohammed "Bonesaw*" bin Salman Al Saud? That's really something, if you look at it that way...
Either you're too smart for me or I just can't follow you, but could you please expand a bit on your comment? I find it hard to link it to the parent, but I realize that may be on me.
Sorry, it was referring more to the grandparent comment, that referred to Saudi Arabia behaving more responsibly than the US, and Mohammed bin Salman is of course the crown prince and prime minister of Saudi Arabia.
They're comparing Saudi Arabia to a drug dealer; I don't think they're ascribing any moral virtue to the Saudi regime. They just believe the Saudis are acting more intelligently.
Yes? I don't think you can argue in good faith that the latter causes more total harm and damage than the former. It's really quite something to look at it in a different way..
The funny thing is the US doesn’t really consume much Saudi Oil. The US is a net exporter of oil, though they do import some specific types of oils and export more of others.
The US’s interest in the Middle East oil is a lot about stabilizing oil prices. At least it used to be when there was a rational policy and competent executors.
Transitioning to renewables makes economic sense for the Saudis because they make more money selling a barrel of oil for transportation fuel and generating power with wind and solar.
The US has vast reserves of coal and natural gas. We generally don't use oil to generate power either -- oil is something like 0.4% of the total power generated, because we have vast amounts of natural gas and coal to use instead.
The situation isn't the result of some crafty master plan on the part of the Saudis. It's jusut what makes sense.
The oil market is global and the US is a big part of that but it’s not the only one. You can always make changes to energy sources later and as new technologies are unlocked perhaps we can even skip some headaches now. Obviously there’s the geostrategic angle now which you see play out in Iran and Venezuela.
As other countries move to reliance on Chinese rare earth processing for renewable technology, it drives their oil and gas consumption down which means more oil and gas for those who are still using it.
If you really want to look at this analogy about drug dealers then really what you see is that America is the big boss here and an energy and military super power, and Saudi Arabia is just another dealer under American protection and if they don’t do what we tell them to do they’ll get the boot.
Like the drug dealers where I grew up they are making the neighborhood a really terrible place to live. They might have a nice house right now, but the homes around them are burning.
The US is moving the grid renewable. The guys at top might not think so and yell loudly not to, but they can't stop things, only put the brakes on a little.
They've pumped the brakes pretty hard by cutting EPA standards,
subsidizing coal,
suing to stop wind and solar projects,
cutting green energy grants by $8B,
yoinking solar tax credits,
trying to rewrite the Clean Air Act to block states from regulating emissions,
shield Big Oil from litigation for climate deception,
and repeating Big Oil's lies and disinformation.
Those rollouts are seeing massive cutbacks from what I've read, as half the country is straight up banning new solar. Good luck ever getting that off the books.
I don't think it will be that hard. Banning solar is a feel good thing now that doesn't affect many people - but that means when the next election is gone it won't be opposed when lobbyists (and greens) try to roll it back. Of course each state is different, so some it will take more than a few elections. In some states solar is already widespread enough that you can't ban it because too many people already have it and know enough about it to tell their friends. Those friends who live in other states will start to ask why they don't.
Remember you need to keep the 20 year plan in mind. If you only look to the end of 2026 things are hopeless, but look to 2050 (and compare to 2000) and things look much better.
As I said there, it's inherently something the LLM can't do, at least not without lots of engineering. So I'm assuming you're talking about "as a human" here.
Some of it is just trial and error. You notice it makes an incorrect assumption, it takes longer to find something than it should, and so on. Some of that can be predicted, simply by you knowing the codebase. If you sat down with a new hire to walk them through it and get them up to speed, what would you tell them? It'd be a waste of time to tell them about things they can easily figure out on their own within a minute by looking at filenames and so on. It's the low effort thing to do, but it also achieves nothing.
For example, "A's B component has a default C which should be overridden unless desired". If A is an internal library then you could just fix that if it goes against the LLM's common assumptions, but maybe it's an external dependency and it's not worth it.
Or maybe you're building a game, and there are a few core mechanics that are relevant to much of the logic. Then you can likely explain in a few sentences what would otherwise need hundreds of lines of code read across multiple files. So you put that in an AGENTS.MD file in a relevant folder so it gets autoloaded when touching any of that code.
"If every oil exporter used some of their oil revenue to switch to EVs, that would, all things equal, hasten the transition to EVs."
The premise is all things aren't equal. The oil Norway would have used just gets used somewhere else so what difference does it make what Norway does instead. I don't know if that's the reality of the situation but if it is just an offset, it does sound like a bookkeeping trick doesn't it?
Norway switching from ICEs to EVs objectively reduces global oil consumption+burning by exactly that much.
Norway exporting oil increases oil supply, but doesn't increase consumption. The world's oil consumers are not supply-constrained; the producers are not running at 100% capacity, and they'll happily pick up the slack if Norway just stopped exporting oil for no reason. And there's a large amount of consumption that can't be offset by electrification in the first place (petrochemicals, long distance flight, etc) so there's not even a theoretical future end-state where they require a non-EV-using counterparty to buy their oil to fund their EV usage.
Calling it a "bookkeeping trick" is just verbal sleigh-of-hand.
"Norway switching from ICEs to EVs objectively reduces global oil consumption+burning by exactly that much."
Meaning what they are in fact doing has the same effect as if they stopped producing/exporting oil exactly to the extent that it gets replaced by EVs over there? I could only see that happening if they undersell everyone in the world so they create no new consumers. I guess the truth is somewhere in the middle. I imagine the truth be known though? When Norway enters the market, how much other producers' sales go down?
This would be true but you're not accounting for OPEC and other groups (e.g. historically the Texas Railroad Commission in the United States, not sure how relevant they still are) to balance production and price per barrel to what they think is agreeable.
Oil hasn't been supply constrained since the 50's, it's price is largely based on what producing countries agree on, as well as geopolitics.
Additionally, governments levy a decent amount of taxes on certain end products such as gasoline. They might very well, as they have in the past, decide to simply up their tax revenue as prices of crude and derivatives go down.
Only if Norway's lack of internal consumption must be met with equal and similarly destructive consumption elsewhere.
Consider if others followed their lead. Then oil would be used less for transportation, one of its most destructive and singular uses, and more for manufacturing or medical or less wasteful uses.
metal, the bending, joining, of metal for humans to use for something™,who find me through the interwebs , which I have been useing since the dawn, off and on, clumsily, but since grade school. the apple store was one room above a chinese resturaunt and had painted chip board walls.
I have two web sites, one is a rental and I own the other, but I am focusing more and more on my core strengths in dealing with physical realities, which sometimes I call "applied geometry", though often there are curves and shapes that dont realy have names.
But as a good deal of the work is designed and comunicated about with the use of computers and phones, I also spend a lot of time thinking about how that could be better, so hanging out here , trying to fight the good fight, is part of most days.
According to that chart 2021
was anomalously low and it has been linearly returning to normal for the past four years.
AFAICT, the general populace is anxious about AI. So, the news knows they can get clicks with “You are right to be afraid. AI bad.” Meanwhile, CEOs know they can get stock boosts by saying “We are so AI we don’t need expenses. Infinite ROI!”
Put together we’re getting a ton of scary reporting on what looks like a quite normal business cycle (at least as far as layoffs go). And, everyone being afraid to hire is the only thing actually making it self-fulfilling.
I wouldn’t call the massive levels of investment by both private equity and municipal/state governments “business as usual.” The sums being thrown down and/or promised are staggering. People/groups that lose are going to lose big.
Habermas was truly a giant. Regardless of your political outlook, some engagement with his texts is time well spent. For an accessible on-ramp to his work, I recommend:
"Frankfurt School Critical Theory" went through several generations with different commitments and each of those generations was quite politically and theoretically diverse.
The only true statements that hold for all writers at all times are largely uninteresting.
What can be said with confidence is that Frankfurt School theorists were not "counter-enlightenment".
Adorno and Horkheimer were explicitly trying to explain why the ideal of the enlightenment - greater rationality in social and political affairs and a fuller realization of individual moral autonomy - had not been achieved in their time. They saw themselves, rightly, as more faithful heirs to the tradition in their attempt to "rescue" it than those who insisted it did not require rescue. You may disagree - many within the tradition of critical theory have - but I don't think readings of their texts which see them as "counter-enlightement" can be sustained.
"I wondered to which extent Habermas with the Frankfurter Schule and Critical Theory could be held partially responsible for postmodernism's march through the institutions, identity politics, and indirectly for Trump's two election victories."
With all due respect, this sentence betrays a complete unfamiliarity with "postmodernism", "the long march through the institutions", and "identity politics". It wildly anachronistic to conflate these. It makes about as much sense as saying that Mitterand was an Avignon pope.
Quantitative measures of this are very poor, and even those are mixed.
My subjective assessment is that agents like Copilot got better because of better harnesses and fine tuning of models to use those harnesses. But they are not improving in the direction of labor substitution, but rather in the direction of significant, but not earth-shaking, complementarity. That complementarity is stronger for more experienced developers.
"Baumol's cost disease hurts the lower classes by restricting their access to services like health care and education, and LLMs/agents make it possible to increase productivity in these areas in ways which were once unimaginable."
You've expressed very clearly what LLMs would have to do in order to be economically transformative.
"If you can get high quality medical advice for effectively nothing, if you can get high quality individualized tutoring for free, that's a pretty big game changer for a lot of people. Prices on these services have been rising to the stratosphere over the past few decades because it's so difficult to increase the productivity of individual medical practitioners and educators. We're entering an era that could finally break this logjam."
It's not that process innovations are lacking, it's that product innovations are perceived as an indignity by most people. Why should one child get an LLM teacher or doctor while others get individualized attention by a skilled human being?
> Why should one child get an LLM teacher or doctor while others get individualized attention by a skilled human being?
Is the value in the outcome of receiving medical advice and care, and becoming educated, or is the value just in the co-opting of another human being's attention?
If the value is in the outcome, the means to achieving that aren't of much consequence.
More subtly, what is an education? What is care? As you point out, the LLMs are (or probably will become) perfectly good at the measurable parts of those services; but I think the residual edge of “good” education/care is more than just the other human’s co-opted attention.
How many of us have a reminiscence that starts “looking back, the most life-changing part of my primary or secondary education was ________,” where the blank is a person, not a curriculum module? How many doctors operate, at least in part, on hunches—on totalities of perception-filtered-through-experience that they can’t fully put into words?
I’m reminded of the recent account of homebound elderly Japanese people relying on the Yakult delivery lady partly for tiny yoghurt drinks, but mainly for a glimmer of human contact [0]. Although I guess that cuts to your point: the value in that example really is just co-opting another human’s attention.
In most of these caring professions, some of the value is in the measurable outcome (bacterial infection? Antibiotic!), but different means really do create different collections of value that don’t fully overlap (fine, I’ll actually lay off the wine because the doctor put the fear of the lord in me).
I guess the optimistic case is, with the rote mechanical aspects automated away, maybe humans have more time to give each other the residual human element…
> How many of us have a reminiscence that starts “looking back, the most life-changing part of my primary or secondary education was ________,”
For me it was a website with turotirals on how to make flash games. It literally launched my career and improved the quality of life for my whole family by an order of magnitude.
I am primarily the naysayer of AI but I admit that current LLMs could have easily replicated the whole website.
I love, love that. And if even one of my weird little side projects—including the ones I build with AI-powered tools—connects with a young person like that, I’ll be satisfied.
To me it’s not the “how” so much as the “what,” though.
I can only speak to my own experience with that sort of thing, but how much of what moved you was the invisible authorial hand behind the tutorials—deciding what’s fun to them to write about, and how to talk about it in a way that clicked with a young you?
I guess, what’s the difference between that website, the official docs for the language in question, the formal spec for the language, the .h files themselves that mechanically define the engine that compiles the language, a big pile of examples of working code in the language…
For that matter what’s the difference between what’s fun to do in the language and what’s boring?
I would grant that LLM tech would probably shine at the grunt work part of “please translate these docs into a grade-school-pitched, engaging, example-driven tutorial website; make it dinosaur themed.” But equally it could pitch it for a billion other audiences, and most will not bear fruit without guidance and refinement. And LLM frontends are already same-y, what will distinguish it to your young eyes? Knowing (or finding out) what’s worth doing is the tricky part—and that’s hard to separate from the humans on the receiving end.
I think about when tiktok made it “easy” to recut songs and memes, and to do basic compositing effects. The “how” required specialized software and serious skill for a long time, then suddenly it didn’t. But when it comes to the “what,” there are still people who are good at using the tools and ones who are bad—ones who make good content and ones who make bad ones… and the difference seems to cleave along the normal human lines: innate talent + practice + persistence.
As the old saw goes, contemporary art: “But I could do that!” “Yeah, but you didn’t.”
Alternatively, as the fox said, “C’est le temps que tu as perdu pour ta rose qui fait ta rose si importante”…
After reading your comment I take back my last sentence. I dont think the LLM would have been able to create that website becaue what LLM would have created would have been an uninspiring husk of tutorials. The website had a certain personality to it with the choice of games he would make and the "interesting" problems he would demonstrate and give solutions to.
The supply/demand picture here is more complicated than it looks.
If AI displaces human educators, yes, their supply shrinks -- but we can't assume what direction its demand will go.
We've seen this pattern before: as recorded music became free, live performance got more expensive, and therefore much less accessible than it used to be.
What's likely to happen is that "worse" (read: AI) education will become much cheaper, while "better" (read: in-person) education that involves human connection-driven benefits will become much less accessible compared to what it is today.
Most people may be consider it a win. It's certainly not a world I'm looking forward to.
Important follow-up to my comment: as fewer people do X -- live music, medicine, education, you name it -- fewer talented people do it as well.
Fields need a large base of participants to produce great ones. This is exactly why software has been so extraordinary over the past 30 years: an unusual concentration of gifted minds across the entire humankind committed themselves to it.
In my view, Bach, Rachmaninoff, Cole Porter equivalents today probably aren't writing symphonies. They've decided to write code for a living. Which is why any Great American Songbook made today won't hold a candle next to one from 1950s.
Disagree, we do have the Bach's and Rachmanioff's today: John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, Bear McCreary, Yuki Kajiura, Hans Zimmer, and probably a slew I'm not even aware of today.
We're in the greatest era of symphonies IMO, it's just that they're hiding in surprising places; movies, TV shows, games, etc.
I don't think we can know whether or not this is the case in our own lifetimes, because we are so immersed in popular culture that we can't be objective about it. Enough of our historical great composers weren't venerated until after their deaths, and to describe composers as "hiding" within the most popular media of our era is a great disservice to the many composers that don't have the fame, connections and reputation to be hired to write for these.
I would also point out that composing for a medium like a game or a movie places a great deal of constraints upon the composer, in terms of theme, cost of instrumentation, duration and most importantly: what is safe and palatable for an executive to approve of.
And AI is stuck in the past. As we prepare to launch a new product… people using AI won’t know about it for months or years, potentially. This will make startups have to seed the planet with text so an AI learns about it, not to mention normal SEO and other shit. I’m sure it is only a matter of time before you can pay to inject your product into the models so it knows about it faster, but incumbent companies will pay more to make sure they don’t.
> I’m sure it is only a matter of time before you can pay to inject your product into the models so it knows about it faster, but incumbent companies will pay more to make sure they don’t.
You have just discovered the fully enshittified version of the business model ai companies hope to reach.
> Is the value in the outcome of receiving medical advice and care, and becoming educated,
Absorbing information doesn't make you "educated". Learning how to employ knowledge with accountability and trust with beings in the real world is what's important, and a machine can't teach you how to do that.
> or is the value just in the co-opting of another human being's attention?
Why is it "co-opting" if it involves a mutually consenting exchange?
Neither does traditional human interacting education - those are things you learn in your first jobs in the real world, regardless of how you were educated.
Even if you have perfect medical information and advice through an LLM, can you perform surgery on yourself? Can you prescribe yourself whatever medication you think you need?
For education, if you know as much as the average Harvard grad, can you give yourself a Harvard degree that will be as readily accepted in a job application or raising funds for a new business?
It's interesting that you assume there's value in being educated in this hypothetical world of complete passive consumption.
The world you're describing is one where the entire economic value of humanity is in reminding the AI to put out the food bowl and refill the water dish at the appropriate time.
The interesting thing here is less about what people aspire to, and more about the lack of imagination and thought when considering the world they want to create.
It would be funny if the sleepwalkers weren't trying so hard to drag humanity along.
The premise of your argument is that "the outcome" can be separated from the process. This is true enough for manufacturing bricks: I don't much care what processes was used to create a brick if it has certain a compressive strength, mass, etc.
But Baumol's argument, which you introduced to the conversation, is that outcome and process cannot actually be distinguished, even if a distinction in thought is possible among economic theorists.
> But Baumol's argument, which you introduced to the conversation, is that outcome and process cannot actually be distinguished
How is that Baumol's argument? How is 'outcome' vs 'process' relevant to his argument at all?
'Cost disease' is just the foundational truth that the cost of the output from industries with stagnant productivity will increase due to the fact that the workers in that industry can be more valuable in other industries, reducing the number of relative workers in the stagnant industry.
If you want to make the output from a stagnant industry available to a broader spectrum of the population then you have to improve the productivity of that industry.
I think he means that when you go to watch the symphony orchestra, you are going to watch a bunch of people sitting with their instruments, manually playing them.
There is no way to separate this process from the product of the process.
You're not buying the sound of the music. You can just stream that. As far as that is the product, it has already been automated and scaled so millions of people can hear it at once, whenever they feel like it.
You're buying the sound AND the people sitting in their formal clothes manually moving their strings over a violin, with painstaking accuracy developed through years of manual practice.
You couldn't make a robot do it, for example. You could maybe make a robot play a violin, but that again isn't what the product is.
The product is tied to an expectation of what it is that does not allow for it to be done more effectively.
By contrast manufacturing processes are not tied to this expectation. If I buy a loaf of bread, I don't care whether the wheat was manually harvested or harvested by a huge machine.
The musical performance example is just one example. The general problem of services being resistant to increased productivity, however, is not restricted to this somewhat unique case. That's why I pointed to medical advice and education: when I need a medical consult or personalized tutoring, I don't specifically care if I have to lock down irreplaceable moments of another human being's life in order receive them.
It's misguided to focus on one special case of the cost disease problem where human by definition must provide the services, when most of the time this is not the case.
It's very true for healthcare (especially mental healthcare) and education today as well, because for most people, the choice isn't LLM vs. human attention - it's LLM vs. no access at all.
It's not inherently insolvable, it's just nearly impossible to solve because the alternative solutions tend to have "overhaul the global economy and human nature" as their prerequisite.
Pretty much all of humanity's tough problems, the ones we can't seem to make much progress on despite centuries or more of trying, are at their core coordination problems. We only really make progress on those when we can sidestep explicit coordination in some way. Every other kind of problem is usually amenable to technology, and we've solved most of them already, largely in the last 200 years.
> the value just in the co-opting of another human being's attention?
Thats a weird way of describing it.
A machine telling me to exercise and eat right will be ignored, even if the advice is correct. A person I trust taking me aside, looking me in the eye and asking me the same would be taken far more seriously.
That may well be true if you need to be persuaded to exercise and eat right.
OTOH, if you don't need to be persuaded and just want information on how best to go about doing it, then I think it makes little difference where the information comes from as long as it's of reasonable quality.
The specific example was indeed a poor one since we have extensive data on that, and even high-touch non-surgical interventions involving hours per week from multiple specialists (read: incredibly expensive) with very-willing participants have proven a lot less effective than one might hope (somewhat effective! But only moderately so, which ain't enough given the price tag). Docs saying "eat better and exercise" at an annual check-up has basically no effect whatsoever.
Turning dozens to hundreds of decisions per week for which the correct decision must be made in nearly every case, into a single decision per week for which the correct choice must be made, has proven wildly more effective than any of that (I mean glp-1 agonists).
It also seems like the value of quality tutoring that doesn't primarily function as social/class signaling goes down as tools capable of automating high quality intellectual work are more widely available.
It depends on outcome again: is the value of tutoring the social class elevation, or is it in the outcome of becoming more skilled and knowledgable?
There's also the deeper philosophical question of what is the meaning of life, and if there's inherent value in learning outside of what remunerative advantages you reap from it.
I feel like lobster’s history might be relevant here - will at some point having a flawed forgetful human being give medical advice be for poor people?
That's reasonable, but don't feel like you're safe letting the humans rest on their laurels. Human medical errors kill thousands upon thousands every year.
How so?
If every oil exporter used some of their oil revenue to switch to EVs, that would, all things equal, hasten the transition to EVs. The U.S. is not doing that.