Cant remember who said it now but it was a riff on science & experiment with one of the point being when you've put a theory together after having a bunch of ideas, you want to ensure that when explaining what the theory fits, its not just the sum of things that gave you the idea in the first place, it should bring something else out too. This note just feels like that, some ideas pretending to be unified theory of something
Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided....
Should the losers grow skeptical, the winners dazzle them with the wondrous feats of computers, many of which have only marginal relevance to the quality of the losers' lives but which are nonetheless impressive. Eventually, the losers succumb, in part because they believe that the specialized knowledge of the masters of a computer technology is a form of wisdom. The masters, of course, come to believe this as well. The result is that certain questions do not arise, such as, to whom will the computer give greater power and freedom, and whose power and freedom will be reduced?...
The tie between information and action has been severed. Information comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don't know what to do with it
I'd tend to disagree on the point around housing. I'd be surprised if there isnt a non-insignificant # of households who would happily move to lower cost of living areas (rent/house price wise) or areas with more nature perhaps but that is simply not feasible because there is no work there or the fields they work in are tethered to a particular city or cities in general. That severely limits their concept of choice in the matter.
There is a digression early in Knut Hamsun's novel Growth of the Soil, where for a paragraph or two he goes on about how great potatoes are and also mentions the same thing about man needing just potatoes and milk.
It's an incredible novel, and I have read it periodically since I was a teen, with so many great musings on the meaning of life but I always remember the passage on potatoes. Couldn't for the life of me tell you why that's stuck in my head so much.
EDIT
What was that about potatoes? Were they just a thing from foreign parts, like coffee; a luxury, an extra? Oh, the potato is a lordly fruit; drought or downpour, it grows and grows all the same. It laughs at the weather, and will stand anything; only deal kindly with it, and it yields fifteen-fold again. Not the blood of a grape, but the flesh of a chestnut, to be boiled or roasted, used in every way. A man may lack corn to make bread, but give him potatoes and he will not starve. Roast them in the embers, and there is supper; boil them in water, and there's a breakfast ready. As for meat, it's little is needed beside. Potatoes can be served with what you please; a dish of milk, a herring, is enough. The rich eat them with butter; poor folk manage with a tiny pinch of salt. Isak could make a feast of them on Sundays, with a mess of cream from Goldenhorns' milk. Poor despised potato — a blessed thing!
Well I'm for one glad it did. Never heard of this book, but it sounds interesting enough (and not just because of the potato paragraphs) that I just ordered a copy.
You're in for a treat. Its one of my all time favs. Very contemplative about man, nature, the search for meeting and really the whole emotional spectrum of a lived life. Won the Nobel prize for literature in the 1920s and still holds up very well as a very readable book by modern standards.
All you'll get is Jevon's paradox this and horses that, while continue to fundamentally undersell the potential upending of a not insignificant part of labour market.
FWIW, the only optimism I have is that humanity seemingly always finds a way to adapt and its, to me, our greatest superpower. But yeah, this feels like a big challenge this time
That's a pretty significant way to make money though.
I do think at this stage the best analogy is the offshore call centres. Yes, the excess in the market is likely because of misunderstanding about what LLMs can actually do and how close AGI is, the short term attraction is the labour cost savings. People may not think wages are high enough etc but the total cost for one hire to companies, particularly outside the US, is nothing to sniff at. And at current pricing of ai services, the maths would make complete sense for the bottom line.
I don't like it, because I ultimately err on the side of even limited but significant changes to people's livelihood will make the world a more hostile place (particularly in the current climate), but that's the society we live in
i also wonder about p/e ratio comparisons over time because our world view of what long term economic growth is going forward is less now that it was then. That is always subtly implicit when we think about p/e ratio. So what's to say a 30x p/3 isnt equivalent to a 40x then
Also it depends on where you start. Going from million to billion in price is currently pretty possible. Billion to trillion would be rare, but still could happen. Now from trillion to quadrillion. How much currency there is again...
A trillion dollar valuation doesn't imply there's actually a trillion dollars there. It's just the last price the stock sold for, times the shares in existence.
If Elon tried to sell every share of Tesla tomorrow, he would get a lot less than the face value of all his shares.
So in other words, there doesn't need to be that much currency, just that much hype.
he clearly states he doesn't understand the topic.
But you don't need to understand to explore the ramifications which is what he's done here and it's an insightful & fairly even-handed take on it.
It does feel like AI chat here gets bogged down on "its not that great, its overhyped etc." without trying to actually engage properly with it. Even if it's crap if it eliminates 5-10% of companies labour cost that's a huge deal and the second order effects on economy and society will be profound. And from where i'm standing, doing that is pretty possible without ai even being that good.
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