No they don't want that, because it could lead to an uprising against them. They want us provided with the essentials in exchange for being dutiful workers, so we have something to lose.
Everyone should live in pods stacked together, eat insects, not drive our own automobiles around or fly places, we should be able to get our entertainment and everything to keep ourselves happy from their subscription entertainment services. Basically we are to consume as little as possible to barely keep ourselves alive and sane while they sail themselves around to pat one another on the backs at their climate and economic conferences on their billion dollar luxury yachts.
Actually no that would be stupid they don't have the time or patience to sail their yachts around. They have crew for that. They will fly in one of their handful of private jets and have the yacht meet them there.
People do this to themselves and willingly, no spooky evil capitalists behind the curtains are necessary.
People love money and what they can bring on the table, people often hate each other ie within families stiffed by peer pressure and expectations of mentalities formed in another very different era, people love discovering new countries and cultures. And so on and on.
Ie me - I love my parents, my childhood was normal, only later to find and compare with others to see how such childhood was... abnormally uncommon. But I very much prefer seeing them few times a year only, even though we love when they help with kids. Some of their opinions are very outdated, their ramblings are often out of touch with reality, they tend sometimes to spoil kids (even after setting boundaries), and overall generational gap is absolutely massive. It is a form of freedom. Make that 10x more in much more strict societies where pressure and expectations from parents on kids are massive and then they wonder why kids stay the heck away from them once adults.
And fuck local communities, for every good-hearted neighbor who just wants to socialize and help out and otherwise stays away from one's life, there is easily 5 or 10 who are the epitome of nimbyism, voyeurism or similar hobbies of people with empty lives, clueless on how world and people actually work but always with very strong opinions on everything and will to push those on everybody else.
> And I mean, you idea of local comunity is all about other people doing free work for you and then tolerating your peculiarities with no reciprocation.
When it seems to you like everyone around you is the problem, you may actually be the problem.
Maybe I phrased wrongly (not a native speaker) but what you say is incorrect. I am not free coasting on parents, in contrary my first years all my earning went into providing them a good home for rest of their lives, while living in tiny rental rooms. You have no idea from sort of poor background I come from, most western kids have no clue. It was a massive improvement of QoL for them that they would never be able to afford themselves and they still appreciate it massively. Since we live 1500km from them they help with kids literally few hours per year, not a burden for anybody involved.
But freedom to chose with whom we spend our time is a thing, no matter how much people like you try to force their righteous values that are the only proper true way (TM) on everybody else. I am old enough and over time met plenty of folks like that, be it religious or other forms, they are at the end the same as your comment.
I suspect that's beyond what the Hackernews crowd can cope with contemplating. Billionaires bad except on that subject in which case billionaires good and working class bad.
At that stage, owners will very likely have enough drones and robots at their command to not need to worry about petty things like flesh and blood uprisings.
All the value will be diverted. I don’t know if you noticed, but in the last few years, you’d have come ahead if you gambled on the stock, crypto or commodities market than if you busted your ass.
> Everyone should live in pods stacked together, eat insects, not drive our own automobiles around or fly places, we should be able to get our entertainment and everything to keep ourselves happy from their subscription entertainment services.
Yes of course capitalists love when economy is bad. Sorry, these dystopic visions do not pass even simplest smell test.
It’s less complicated than that. Externalities are when an individual profits but others pay the price. Think of climate change. And when a small number are so rich they control the government, so there’s nothing to stop them. It’s narrow incentives driving the whole thing.
They love it when the richest people do well. They dont care about how anyone else lives. The poorer other people are better they feel about winning.
Those you call "capitalists" love monopolies as long as they are theirs. They love captured market. They dont care about competition unless it is someone not them competing to provide for them on lower price.
As of now, billionaires dont want or need strong economy as a "middle class and lower class doing good". They want the "our wealth goes up, we are getting tax breaks, if lower class pays for it cool" kind of economy.
It is not realistic - we are consuming way more than any of the previous generations. Poverty is at an all time low and steeply dropped since the last century. We are curing diseases, people are living long. What's the pessimism about?
I just thought you could make your point without calling other people cringe for disagreeing. I agree the average now is better than any century before, while also agreeing there's many interests of the type the comment you replied to illustrates, trying to either reduce personal freedoms or perpetuating a certain order of things. Both things can be true and they are both realistic view points, specially because there's multitudes of people all with their own priorities fighting for their own ideal futures and a few of those have a crazy amount of power.
Mat and protein consumption peaked around 20 years ago too.
> Poverty is at an all time low and steeply dropped since the last century. We are curing diseases, people are living long. What's the pessimism about?
It's not pessimism, it's reality. The ruling class are demanding we reduce consumption while increasing and flaunting theirs. That's just what is. If you're denying that or think it's pessimism I really don't know what to tell you.
That's because of efficiency gains. Easily explained by the fact that consumption over all other products increased.
>Mat and protein consumption peaked around 20 years ago too.
Meat consumption is not a realiable indicator of anything in developed countries. It is the same in Netherlands as well. But increased dramatically in India and develping countries.
>It's not pessimism, it's reality. The ruling class are demanding we reduce consumption while increasing and flaunting theirs. That's just what is. If you're denying that or think it's pessimism I really don't know what to tell you.
What's the proof that we reduced consumption? Without cherrypicking?
Go repeat that to the nearest homeless guy. Wealth inequality is rising rapidly, and around a billion people on this planet still can't eat as well as they should.
Not true of at least several major indicators of consumption vs previous generations according to data I posted in other thread.
> Life expectancy is at an all time high.
> How do you explain this?
The more important question is, how do you believe these things you wrote disprove the comment that the rich and ruling class wants us to reduce our consumption, even if they were true?
Because they do. Up until some time maybe around the end of the cold war, progress and development of countries were measured by (among other things) metrics like energy consumption, meat and protein consumption. The consumption based metrics have basically disappeared and the mantra these days is that we are consuming too much. We should minimize meat, energy consumption. There are many proposals to tax such things directly or indirectly, or even just outright limit the amount of animals that are farmed and so on.
I agree that poverty rate flatlined in USA but world poverty (counting India and China) reduced dramatically in the past 20 years. How do you explain this?
>Not true of at least several major indicators of consumption vs previous generations according to data I posted in other thread.
You posted energy consumption per capita which was due to efficiencies.
>Because they do. Up until some time maybe around the end of the cold war, progress and development of countries were measured by (among other things) metrics like energy consumption, meat and protein consumption. The consumption based metrics have basically disappeared and the mantra these days is that we are consuming too much. We should minimize meat, energy consumption. There are many proposals to tax such things directly or indirectly, or even just outright limit the amount of animals that are farmed and so on.
I don't know why you insist on licking rich people's boots for these. None of these good thing came from them.
I'm telling you: around a billion people are still hungry, and that number has been stable for 50 years. In the face of massive, global wealth inequality, this is unacceptable to me.
I have agency and I'm very happy with my lot. I'm not "blaming" anybody for anything. But unlike you I am not in a naive infantile delusion about what the ruling class are and want and work toward.
The difference between an observation and blame is, blame implies moral judgement and the implication that "it ought to be different". It is clear from this post and other posts that this is your agenda.
If you don't claim that it ought to be different, what are you arguing about?
You're the one arguing!! What TF are you arguing about??
Why don't you start by explaining how "not everything is getting worse / some things are getting better" addresses in the slightest what I wrote, or somehow proves that what I wrote is wrong. That would be a good start.
For sure, but most bridges aren't in scenic places and robocops will still be limited in numbers, so no worries, just ask your LLM assistance in case of doubt under which bridge you won't get evicted from. Altough, that would probably be illegal advice, but they can try to help you with therapy should you end up in such a situation. Not the top model of course, but hey, it is a benefit.
Based on extensive academic research on trickle-down economics, in particular looking into the evolution of real wages of different sectors of population, since 1980s.
See the work of recent Nobel prize laureates in economics. Many argue for redistribution and investment back to the society.
But the past few revolutions benefitted everyone and we are better off. Look at industrial revolution, digital revolution. Why do you think it is different this time? If trickle down economics don't work, why is world poverty at all time low and consumption at all time high?
I really don't see how one can separate the industrial revolution from colonialism, considering we have chiefs of government in colonial countries on the record saying that colonies are a necessary outlet for industrial goods [1].
Once you've established that link, it's hard to explain that "everyone" benefitted from the industrial revolution.
Even disregarding that, the working conditions created by industrialization allowed for situations that can hardly be described as "beneficial" [2][3][4].
What percent of the population in places which experienced the industrial revolution would be better off if they time-travelled back 200 years? 1%? 0.2%?
> in places which experienced the industrial revolution
People experienced the industrial revolution everywhere.
I suspect, when you think "places which experienced the industrial revolution", you think about a small subset of areas where some development happened as a result of that, likely the areas where industrialists lived.
But you would also have to consider other places' experience of industrialization. For instance, Congo under EIC colonial rule did experience industrialization - it was the place where industrial amounts of rubber were harvested to allow for plants elsewhere to produce joints, pipes, motor belts, etc. It's not really hard to believe that, had Congo not experienced that, its citizen would almost certainly have been better off now.
Does Congo lack electricity, modern medicine, and air conditioning?
If the industrial revolution has made their lives worse, it's a double-whammy because they are forced to suffer almost twice as long, as their life expectancy at birth has approximately doubled since 1870.
Yeah it’s a complicated picture and of course nobody knows, but it would be helpful to split “benefits” into things like;
- net benefits to the average person (considering drawbacks)
- overall relative benefits compared to income groups
- benefits in certain areas of society and topics
I think there’ll be some “benefits for all” in terms of things like medical advances and health technology. There will also be broader benefits to all in general areas but as a parent poster said it’ll benefit equity holders most and there might be some bad tradeoffs (like we’ll have access to much better information and entertainment but it may also affect the overall employment rate). It’s a very nuanced picture and it’s probably disingenuous of some tech leaders to say “we’ll all benefit) but some do believe that will be the future.
What you mean is those with some form of ownership of the technology. If development eventually results in full automation, with the expense of production reduced to zero, money will be irrelevant.
Energy, raw materials, and logistics still remain. I don't think we'll ever get to a place where there isn't some input to a production process that is not infinite and free.
Theoretically possible? Maybe (but still an extremely slim chance).
Practically possible? No. People (and countries) own land. Raw materials for robots comes from land. Energy for robots consumes land. Farming food requires massive inputs beyond just the land and energy (but also needs those).
I don’t imagine we’ll get to a world where my great-great-great^20-grandkids can hold out their hand and have a plate of steak and potatoes (or the then-equivalent) placed into it for free, anytime they want.
The expense of production and on-demand delivery of just a simple plate of steak and baked potato will not ever get to zero. If we can’t even get that simple of thing for free, I don’t believe in a world without the notion of money.
Expand that to even better dining, vacation, and leisure/recreational activities and I think the argument becomes even more solid that some form of rationing/limiting will be in effect and there will be a unit/notation of ration and trade that will be indistinguishable from money.
Believe me, ruling them out is the last thing I'd do. I fully expect them in the next decade or two.
A practically possible path to both: Starship is perfected and mining companies begin operations in space. Vast data centers training spatial ai using virtual simulations perfect it well enough for general robotics to become practicable. Automation is then as follows: robotics manufacturing and maintenance is handled by robots. Mining is performed by robots. General manufacturing performed by robots. Potential manufacturing scales increase by orders of magnitudes. Where are the costs in this scenario that would prevent prices falling to zero? And if prices for all goods and virtually all services* fall to zero, what possible role can money have at that point, other than sitting on a shelf as a memento of a vanished system?
The cost is in transportation (aside from the cost of developing and producing all those automated systems). Where do you expect extra-terrestrial mining to occur and why do you think what's mined there would be used on Earth? The nearest place to mine would be the moon, and it's on the order of 1 million dollars per kg to bring things back. We could potentially drop that, but that's a hell of a base cost just for material transport. What makes you think that's going to be happening soon?
In the next couple of decades? Starship is real, space mining companies are real, NVIDIA Cosmos is real, robotics development is nascent, but real and thrilling. Ordinary market forces will ensure the uptake of robotics.
You're calculating the expense of returning mined resources using past metrics that are superseded altogether in this scenario. For instance miniaturization suddenly won't be necessary for mining companies wishing to send gear to asteroids.
>metrics that are superseded altogether in this scenario. For instance miniaturization suddenly won't be necessary for mining companies wishing to send gear to asteroids
Nothing in the near future is superceding the tyranny of the rocket equation. It'll still be extremely expensive to send equipment to and retrieve material from space even if the spacecraft and mining equipment were literally free.
You are simply incorrect.[1] Starship will change it all if it succeeds. The space sector is abuzz with the possibility of orbital refueling and the opportunities it will open up, eg [2]
It was a reply to the assertion that land restrictions mean the resources for full automation will always be unavailable. I don't agree with his contention, but offered a likely workaround anyway.
The wealth gap widening is quite independent from AI being involved. A natural progression which was always happening and continues to be happening. Entil some sort of catastrophe reshuffles the cards. Usually a war or revolution. The poor simply rising up or a lazy and corrupt ruling class depriving their country of enough resources and will to defend itself that some outside power can take it.
There are many places on earth where people live no different from what we lived like 10,000s of years ago. You can just go there, you know, you can just do things. You are an adult.
Thought experiment - Startrek replicators are real.
This basically means almost everything can be built without human involvement. The guy who owns the replicators is the richest.
The wealth gap is so massive you get revolts (because we're educated, not serfs, right?) So then government needs to step in. Either tax->ubi?, socialize it, or make it a state asset?
If you can make many replicators, money stops making much sense. You probably end up with energy (if these devices take a lot of energy to operate) as the new currency.
My gut says that _somehow_ the middle class will get screwed as always, but I struggle to articulate the way that abundant cheap goods lead to that outcome.
Maybe because the very few that control the replicators will be able to cut people they don’t like out of partaking from them? That’d make some sense.
If replicators were replicatable, that control evaporates quickly. Remember how nervous we all were about LLM censorship, then suddenly a $2000 MacBook Pro could run pretty great open source models that seem a few months behind SOTA?
> If you can make many replicators, money stops making much sense.
There are many, many, many, many positional goods. Beachfront properties, original art, historical artifacts, elite clubs, limited edition luxury goods, top restaurants, etc.
The notion that we'd all live happily and contentedly without money if only we had some more iPhones and other goods produced by replicators strikes me as false.
Remember that Keynes predicted about a century ago that 100 years thence (in other words, now) everyone would just work 10 hours a week at most, and the biggest challenge would be to avoid boredom? He predicted productivity growth accurate enough, but assumed that people would have enough with 4x, 5x as much as they had back then while simultaneously working 4x, 5x less. Instead, people opted to work just as much and consume 16x as much.
What does it mean in practice to have energy instead of money as currency?
People would still want to be able to trade with lower friction than lugging batteries around, so don't you just re-invent money on top of it? orrrrrr just keep having the current money around the whole time?
--
The general limiting factor with the "one person controls the replicators, only they have income" idea is that they would rapidly lose that income because nobody else would have anything to trade them anymore. (If you toss in the AI/robotic dream scenario, they don't even need humans to manage the raw material.) But then does that turn into famine and mass-die-off, or Star Trek utopia?
> What does it mean in practice to have energy instead of money as currency?
Something like Bitcoin. When the progress in miners efficiency stalls any kWh of energy not used for something else will be used to make some amount of bitcoins. If you have energy you can make btc. If you have btc you can give your btc to someone in exchange for their energy so that they give you their energy, instead of using it to mine bitcoins themselves.
It sounds terrible when you approach it from the point of money. Of course you can do money more efficiently. But if you approach this form the side of energy it's a way to organically tie a value to any energy produced. Even the energy produced at times when production vastly exceeds the demand. And that's going to be most of the energy produced since we need to develop renewables capacity and can't really wait for the storage technologies that lag horribly so we can match the supply the demand.
This is a way to make all energy valuable and providing incentive to build renewables even when 90% of the energy they produce will find no traditional buyer.
Only if you assume people's major motivation is wanting what they don't have, as opposed to wanting a little more to survive. History shows the opposite.
> If you can make many replicators, money stops making much sense. You probably end up with energy (if these devices take a lot of energy to operate) as the new currency.
If you can make many replicators, you certainly won't be providing them to anyone else. You'd be using them to ensure that money starts funneling into your revenue stream, and use that as a cash cow to pursue other projects.
What are they replicating? Patented things, copyrighted things? Or groceries? Do they want to replicate things? In Star Trek, they travel light, wear uniforms, and have few personal possessions, because they're on a ship, in the navy. That's why everything has to be digital and everybody stuffs their life inside a phonecorder and drinks synthale. When he's back on earth, Picard has a horse. I could be wrong but I don't think he replicated it.
> Remember how nervous we all were about LLM censorship
You're taking the wrong lesson from that observation. Models that people actually use are just as censored now as they ever were. What changed was the the hysterical anti-censorship babies realized that it's not that big of a problem, at least acutely.
> I struggle to articulate the way that abundant cheap goods lead to that outcome.
It has nothing to do with how cheap the goods are
The problem is that at some point people won't be able to afford literally anything because all, and I mean literally all, of the wealth will be hyper concentrated in a super small percentage of the population
Simple hypothesis. Top 5percent of US wealth now belongs to top 50 richest American. Even if you ignore corruption, lobbying and any ill intent you can definitely conclude that this top 50 individuals have better way of getting return from money than rest of the population. Even if if their delta of return is 5% we can assume that withing next 50 years there is a high probability that these guys will own 30-50% of wealth. I have a strong belive AI will acclerate that further.
But all your numbers (except maybe top 5% one) are completely made up. Strong beliefs don't prevent one from being completely wrong. Neville Chamberlain has a strong belief that he had ensured peace; Einstein had a strong belief that quantum theory's "spooky action at a distance" was incorrect. Both were wrong. Fifty years is a long time, and anything could happen. The last fifty years had the fall of Communism, the EU, China going from an impoverished countryside to a superpower, video phones in our pocket, social media upending communication and mental health, renewable energy displacing coal, Trump, etc.
That's the key. The poor are useful to business so long as they are a source of money and power. What happens if the time comes that the poor have nothing the rich want?
The poor will always have the only thing the rich want. Labor. Without labor Trump cannot slather the white house in gold. Without labor Zuck cannot smoke meats. Without labor Musk cannot troll people on X.
The rich do not want anything you have, they want you. Body and soul.
Not in our lifetimes and certainly not in our form of society. Robots will only drive down the price of labor. People will always be able to supply labor at costs below the price of materials for robots.
" People will always be able to supply labor at costs below the price of materials for robots."
Why? What critical materials do robots need that will always be more expansive than raising a human?
Also, from the point of "the rich" - the benefit of a robot is, that it will (stupidly) do as command, unlike a human. They don't have a family they want to take care first.
I mean, eventually like 1 person is going to have more wealth than 60% of the nation combined. At that point, why even bother trying to earn customers or appeal to the lower half when you can instead curry favor with that 1 person.
If you scratch under the hood of UBI, it's a mechanism to keep revolutions at bay. The balance of tax the ultra wealthy vs giving people enough to "live comfortably" is always the job of governance.
> If you scratch under the hood of UBI, it's a mechanism to keep revolutions at bay.
It's also putting money in the hands of the consumers so the rich can compete between themselves at how much each can scoop back up.
Something like feeding animals in the forest to compete with your friends at who can hunt better.
When poor have nothing then you have to shift to taking money of the other rich, but they are clever, so it's easier to take a little bit from the hands of all rich equally, give that money to the poor and reduce the new problem to the old one, how to extract as much as you can from the poor.
The first sentence is definitely. But, UBI is a nerd/socialist fantasy. It would nevet work and will never happen. Everyone with these sci-fi fever dreams of what will happen if AI collapses white collar jobs are coming from people that don’t know how the world or people actually work outside of their daydreams. People aren’t going to just be like “ok, well I guess it’s time for bread and water and Soviet style tenement housing, all this progress in livings was great while it lasted.” And other people are talking about using batteries for money or something. People need to touch grass.
We're nearly-there. The humans then become the capital/resource to be acquired, not money.
That's why every country is somehow chasing that elusive "population growth". It creates more "things" to own, whether that be money by virtue of more people creating more money through economic activity or simply more people to claim as "yours" (for the elites/leaders).
Or use any of the wonders of military technology invented in the last 200 years to take back society. These fuckers have lived in prosperity for so long that they don't even think it is possible. But so many people throughout history thought they were untouchable until the masses decided they had enough of their shit. Kings with professional armies, full plate knights, men with cannons, mens with guns, machine guns, bombs, planes, tanks, helicopters, and yet at the end of the day when enough random people are pissed off enough the mass of people with nothing to lose are the ones who "win" in the end with the powerful dead or hiding.
When unrest happens the military sides with the ones that give better hopes of keeping the stream of money that funds the army flowing.
It sides with the poor only if the powerful (gov) are hopelessly inept at gathering money. If there's a chance that current civilian power can reform and keep collecting the money from the people and funding the army then the army sides with them and help quell the rebellion.
Those who hold kinetic power will never side with poor against the rich.
Im not talking about the military siding with the people, im talking about the military's side not being enough to prevent the people from rising up and taking down whoever is in power. Militaries require logistics, random people do not. Military needs a government or people to follow for direction, masses of angry people do not.
Every time a government or military force has decided they were unstoppable or untouchable, history has proven them wrong. Hell we spent 2 decades in Iraq and Afganistan with the most powerful military and military tech the world has ever known backed by the strongest economy in the world against guys with 60+ year old bolt actions and guns filed out by hand in caves living in mostly desert landscapes, and we still ended up abandoning it because it was too costly. How would the military fair any better against the best armed population in the world with direct access to their supplying economy and logistics networks?
Yeah sure masses of people aren't making aircraft carriers, but you don't need aircarft carriers to win a war at home. We have modern engineering and chemistry text books in every library across the US that will tell you how military technology works and its flaws, what technology you can utilize find or make yourself, and a supply of nearly any material someone could possibly want or need sitting in scrapyards across the nation.
Economies can work without currencies. It's a little inconvenient, but bartering/trading goods for services was common in the depression when nobody had any cash.
Printing money is lucrative for the printer so any time it might get even a little bit useful and feasible for other parties somebody will start printing.
No I had the speculative ponzi front of mind when making that comment.
Governments love crypto because it lets you seize lots of money from criminals across borders. And it is legal gambling where you can tax the winnings without reimbursing the losers (unless they can offset it but most probably can not)
> Okay, but why would we die on the vine? Wouldn’t we just… make a parallel economy without the AGI? The world works today without AGI.
Because you need things they want. Like why would they spare the electricity to heat your home, when it could go to "better" use powering a few dozen GPUs serving a billionaire? Why would they spare the land for you to grow food, when they could use it to build ziggurats dedicated to their power (or whatever else is their whim)?
The market sends the scarce resources to those with the most money.
What is the fantasy AGI supposed to be that's so great for billionaires to have? A human baby is an <s>A</s>GI, it won't tell you the Ultimate Answer, or even a penultimate one, because it has no way to know.
No, seriously, what? You think an AGI is going to be a willing slave and endowed with special knowledge? Where does either part of that come from?
Ultimately labour goes and works on something else instead. And the availability of free labour makes that possible. New industries and markets develop as a result. But a huge number of people will be left behind. But people will focus on things that were a lower priority before.
I have bad news for you, we've run out of sectors to pretend labor could be funneled towards. Manufacturing and agriculture are highly automated, service industry is full tf up, and nobody can afford more construction.
What about medical, elder care, fitness, leisure. Even service industries that focus on a more human connection. Or jobs focused on nature, the environment etc.
And i don't think this would nbe an easy process or something that could or would be managed. But it is probably already happening.
Thought experiments in science work because there are falsifiable scientific theories that make definite predictions about the world than can be tested.
Is the average person actually better off after the late 90’s internet is probably a harder question than it might seem.
The long tail may be closer to what I want, but the quality is also generally lower. YouTube just doesn’t support a team of talented writers, Amazon is mostly filled with junk, etc.
Social media and gig work is a mixed bag. Junk e-mail etc may not be a big deal, but those kinds of downsides do erode the net benefit.
Are you being objective or just romanticizing the past?
Just to use your example: YouTube is filled with talented writers and storytellers, who would have never been able to share their content in the past. *And* the traditional media complex is richer than ever.
I don’t think average quality matters. Just what you want to consume.
If anything, I’d be more open to the opposite argument. Media is so much richer and more engaging that it actually makes our lives worse. The quality of the drugs is too high!
Media is so much richer and more engaging that it actually makes our lives worse. The quality of the drugs is too high!
I am not sure it's the quality, it's more that it's optimized for dopamine shots. Heroine is highly addictive, but I think that few people would argue it's a quality drug.
Recently there was a TV item that was filmed (in NL) just before the broad adoption of mobile phones (not smartphones). People looked so much more relaxed and more oriented towards others. I am happy that until my 18th or so mobile phones were not really a thing and that smartphones were not a really a thing until I was 25-27. I was an early adopter of smartphones, but I don't think we realized how addictive and destructive social media + smartphones would become.
The early internet was very cool though. Lots of info to be found. A high percentage of users had their own web page. A lot of it was pretty whacky/playful. Addictive timelines etc. had not been invented yet.
Does the answer to "is the average person better off" have a lot to do with "how many TV shows are out there"...
or does it have to do with:
- how often their boss bugs them after hours
- how much their boss uses technology to keep an eye on them, their friends, their political views
- how often random strangers might get mad at them and SWAT them, make false claims to their employers, etc
- how often their neighbors are radicalized into shooting up a school
- how hard they find it to talk to a real person to resolve an issue with a company or government service vs being stuck on hold because of downsizing real support staff relative to population size, or with an ai chatbot?
I was trying to be objective which is why I didn’t try to compare individual shows.
Thus average production quality seems like a useful metric. There’s currently a handful of “traditional media/streaming” shows with absolutely crazy budgets today and if you happen to like them then that’s great. However, if you don’t things quickly fall off a cliff in terms of production quality.
The same is true of YouTube. The quality of 50,000 one man operations is irrelevant if you happen to like MrBeast, but if you don’t like MrBeast budgets drop off fast. A reasonable argument is you and everyone else may prefer a specific YouTube cooking show over Baking with Julia or other 90’s show with a much her budget, but there where several options to chose from.
Thus purely objectively even if 90’s TV had lower maximum budgets the floor being relatively high is worth taking into consideration.
It's worth noting that due to advances in technology, it is possible to deliver the same show for less money and time.
The average "how to cook on a food network" show was, ultimately, one person in the kitchen of a large home cooking for the camera, produced once a week. There are plenty of people delivering that style of cooking show with high production quality today. Obviously it's not the same because some things are less deliverable with smaller or one-person teams (Miss Piggy is not going to visit some Youtube show the way she visited Martha Stewart) but there are people making this content ranging from big shops like NYT Cooking to smaller outfits like Binging with Babish, Glen and Friends Cooking, etc. and there are even outfits like this dedicated to more niche topics like Tasting History or Emmymade.
> Many YouTube channels make great use of Zoom calls for example. It’s still generally a compromise vs an actual face to face conversation.
A lot of today's news footage with experts etc. these days is also not shot from studios but from online calls. Actually flying somebody out onto location is pretty uncommon; and I would say with the rise of filmed podcasting, that podcasters are more likely to have people on set than television news is.
Daily TV News is limited by travel times. If some story breaks finding the right person and getting them on an airplane and then into a studio can be impractical.
> it is possible to deliver the same show for less money and time
Do we, though?
I recently learned about the controversial scene "Baby, It's Cold Outside".
Ignoring the content of the scene for a moment, the quality of the choreography stood out to me as something you would never see in a movie today. Certainly not in one take.
I would say that has more to do with the decline in musicals involving small numbers of people doing choreography, and the current movie system de-prioritizing dance as an important skill. The highest grossing musical movie happened in 2024 with Wicked, and the second half of that movie is probably going to do the same thing next year.
Youtube has some marginal value, but I'm not sure "storytellers" bring a materially positive impact (and I reject the "richer" aspect outright). We had libraries in the 90s and they didn't force you to watch ads.
That’s my point. We still have libraries! And most have online lending programs, so you can access way more ad-free books than you ever could have in 90s. How is this not richer?
show business and things like it are famously pyramidal in shape. there are decades' worth of people who couldn't make it in previous generations in Los Angeles and New York.
i think what is relatively new is the unaffordability crisis making it so doing such pursuits and not being that successful is no longer a way to make a living on its own.
I wish this argument would die. We're asking for a better future among futures, not a better future compared to the past.
It's like buying a car, receiving a bike, and then being told, "A bike is great because you don't have to walk anymore." If you feel like that's unfair and the response misses the point, that's how that lands. I don't know who, when hearing that, feels better. It feels out of touch and dismissive.
I think in the near term social media can actually have a stabilising effect just because of how much it paralyzes people. It takes emotion and redirects it into something with little real world effect. Whilst most actual power is exercised offline. This sometimes breaks down and the crazy escapes from the internet and reeks havoc. But mostly the geriatrics are left alone to pull the levers of power in relative peace.
I question this narrative. While social media is certainly having a negative impact, most democratic societies have relatively short life spans historically speaking. There’s also a tendency for economies to falter, for irrationality to increase, for birth rates to drop, and so on. It would seem that the same trends (roughly) occur in every democracy as it starts to fail.
Yes. The meta problem is the trend toward “I dont’t like X, and I don’t like Y, therefore X is causing Y” thinking.
It’s always been the reactionary’s argument: immigrants cause crime, inter-racial marriage causes poverty, etc, etc.
The real collapse we’re seeing is the liberal / progressive adoption of these fallacies. Social media causes fascism (nevermind the absence of social media in previous collapses into fascism), etc.
Many of the people rightfully dismayed by trends are unwittingly contributing to the changes they dislike.
The correct answer to “I think social media leads to fascism” is not “let’s ban social media”. The correct answer is “let’s study the problem and see what science says”. Abandoning that is giving up.
Undeniably better off in every single way. Minimum is that the price of long distance phone calls is now zero, let alone video calls. Being able to speak to family and see them nonstop is incredible.
Do people actually visit family in-person at least less often? And to the degree they augment rare family in-person visits with a lot of phone calls and/or video calls.
I can believe a lot of friend get togethers IRL have been replaced with video calls. There's a tradeoff. I have a group of older friends and we still get together in-person but Zoom calls are a nice adder.
I'm in a few organizations where we also find Zoom a nice alternative to people schlepping somewhere for an hour meeting that mostly works as well online--and we still have a few physical get-togethers over the course of the year.
Young people are forced to move to wherever job opportunities are due to how hyper optimized the economy has become, so I would say most people spend way less time with family than 30 years ago
It's complicated and you can look at a lot of studies. People have always moved where opportunities existed--including across oceans pre-aircraft. Yes, when there were company towns, people moved less.
More precisely, Americans are more diagnosed with depression. In the five years prior to COVID it's shown as rising by 3.3 percentage points. Is that surprising? The trend isn't likely to be flat. Also, is this happiness? Also, does a graph starting in 2015 relate to the question about the 90s? Also, do you expect happiness to be driven by having new things, or for people to adjust their expectations and remain constantly unhappy? Isn't disruption the main cause of unhappiness?
I wonder what event started in 2020 that might have caused major social and economic disruption, and could have had that effect. Maybe something that drastically limited peoples social mobility and lead to mass isolation.
Expand the thinking to include impact on developing countries, the poor, minority groups who have few people like themselves in their local area, etc.
I’ll grant that for comparatively wealthy, privileged people who were always going to have an easy time (which frankly include me), the internet has been a mixed bag.
But for the kids growing up in comparatively poor countries, who can now access all of the world’s information, entertainment, and economy.. I think it’s a pretty clear win.
I expect AI will be similar: perhaps not a huge boon to the best off, but a substantial improvement for most people in the world. Even if we can sit back and say “oh, but they also get misinformation and lower quality YouTube content”
Would you rather be a 22 year old starting in life in 2025 or 1995? Unless you pick one of the few countries that underwent a drastic change of regime in that time, the answer’s pretty clear to me.
Given my skillset at age 22? Yeah, I'll take 1995. I was old enough to grow up hearing how great the world was going to be if I learned computer programming just to enter the job force at the start of the dotcom bubble burst. 1995 would have been a major upgrade.
Also, knocking that almost decade off my birthday would assure that I spent most of my adult life with the luxury of thinking that energy didn't have negative externalities that were being forced on later generations.
We had Chomsky-esq "any major world power is kind of fascist if you think about it" instead of literal talk by politicians about putting people in camps if they don't like your diet or country of origin.
TV was pretty bad I guess but music was great and I read more back then.
There was a lot of huffing and puffing about gang violence. I grew up on the street the local gang named themselves after and it only marginally touched my life at all.
Housing was dirt cheap, food was dirt cheap, gas was dirt cheap. There was undeveloped land everywhere around the city I live in and it gave a general sense of potential.
Yes, the US was in a particularly prosperous and exciting period compared to much of the rest of the world in 1995. If you’re, say, Chinese, chances are you find life in 2025 much more appealing
Overall, life is better in 2025 for the vast majority of humans. Life expectancy, child mortality, health (despite the obesity epidemic, which is a result of an abundance that has eliminated hunger and food insecurity from large swathes of the globe), purchasing power, access to technology and entertainment, etc, etc…
That some people in the US are feeling disillusioned because housing has become more unaffordable (partly because of regulations and technological advancements that have improved their quality and safety) and that they don’t have the same incredible economic trajectory as the preceding generations, especially since WWII, doesn’t negate that. A run like that can’t last forever, especially since it to a large extent depends on having a relative advantage over the rest of the world - at some point, they’ll start to catch up
Bezos didn't define "society", but knowing Devil is what Devil does, we can infer:
1. Amazon files the most petitions for H1-B work visas after Indian IT shops.
2. Amazon opposed minimum wage increase to $15/hr until 2018!
3. Amazon not only fires union organizers, it's claiming National Labor Relations Board is unconstitutional!
It is all society as long as they have access, and they do. Even if the big labs get more closed off, open source is right there and won’t die.
AI increases everyone’s knowledge and ultimately productivity. It’s on every person the learn to leverage it. The dynamics don’t need to change, we just move faster and smarter
> AI increases everyone’s knowledge and ultimately productivity. It’s on every person the learn to leverage it. The dynamics don’t need to change, we just move faster and smarter
This is incomplete in key ways: it only increases knowledge if people practice information literacy and validate AI claims, which we know is an unevenly-distributed skill. Similarly, by making it easier to create disinformation and pollute public sources of information, it can make people less knowledgeable at the same time they believe they are more informed. Neither of those problems are new, of course, but they’re moving from artisanal to industrial scale.
Another area where this is begging questions is around resource allocation. The best AI models and integrations cost money and the ability to leverage them requires you to have an opportunity to acquire skills and use them to make a living. The more successfully businesses are able to remove or deprofessionalize jobs, the smaller the pool will be of people who can afford to build skills, compete with those businesses, or contribute to open source software. Twenty years ago, professional translators made a modest white collar income; when AI ate those jobs, the workers didn’t “learn to leverage” AI, they had to find new jobs in different fields and anyone who didn’t have the financial reserves to do that might’ve ended up in a retail job questioning whether it’s even possible to re-enter the professional class. That’s great for people like Bezos until nobody can afford to buy things, but it’s worse for society since it accelerates the process of centralizing money and power.
Open source in particular seems likely to struggle here: with programmers facing financial downturns, fewer people have time to contribute and if AI is being trained on your code, you’re increasingly going to ask whether it’s in your best interests to literally train your replacement.
> This is incomplete in key ways: it only increases knowledge if people practice information literacy and validate AI claims, which we know is an unevenly-distributed skill. Similarly, by making it easier to create disinformation and pollute public sources of information, it can make people less knowledgeable at the same time they believe they are more informed. Neither of those problems are new, of course, but they’re moving from artisanal to industrial scale.
Totally agree with this
>The more successfully businesses are able to remove or deprofessionalize jobs, the smaller the pool will be of people who can afford to build skills, compete with those businesses, or contribute to open source software
I'm mixed on this, ultimately its the responsibility of individuals to adapt. AI makes people way more capable than they have ever been. It's on them to make something of it
> but it’s worse for society since it accelerates the process of centralizing money and power.
I'm not sure this is true, it enables individuals like they never have been before. Yes there are the model infrastructure providers, but they are in a race to the bottom
Once upon a time, society was all of us, but Society were the filks that held coming out parties and gossiped about whose J-class yacht was likely to defend the America's cup.
Society with a capital S are the beneficiaries of the bubble.
Counter prediction. AI is going to reduce the (relative) wealth of the tech companies.
AWS and Facebook have extremely low running costs per VPS or Ad sold. That IMO is one of the major reasons tech has received its enormously high valuation.
There is nuance to that, but average investors are dumb and don't care.
Add in a relatively high fixed-cost commodity into the accounting, and intuitively the pitch of "global market domination at ever lower costs" will be a much harder sell. Especially if there is a bubble pop that hurts them.
The fact that Bezos is saying this is precisely why the commenter is asking this. He clearly stands to benefit massively from the bubble. Statements like this are meant to encourage buy-in from others to maximize his exit. Presumably "rich" refers to those, like Bezos, who already have incredibly disproportionate wealth and power compared to the majority of people in the US. I'm honestly not sure what the thrust of your comment even is.
That's a very relevant question. And as your question implies, we all know which society the billionaires talk about. But AI is just a technology like any other. It does have the potential to bring great benefits to humanity if developed with that intent. It's the corruptive influence of the billionaire and autocrat greed that turns all technologies against us.
When I say benefits to humanity, I don't mean the AI slop, deepfakes and laziness enabler that we have today. There are niche applications of AI that already show great potential. Like developing new medicines to devising new treatments for dangerous diseases, solving long standing mathematical problems, creating new physics theories. And who knows? Perhaps even create viable solutions for the climate crisis that we are in. They don't receive as much attention as they deserve, because that's not where the profit lies in AI. Solving real problems require us to forgo profits in the short term. That's why we can't leave this completely up to the billionaires. They will just use it to transfer even more wealth from the poor and middle classes to themselves.
What are the actual benefits? Where are all these medicines that humans couldn’t develop on their own? Have we not been able to develop medicine? What theorems are meaningful and impactful that humans can’t prove without AI? I don’t know what a solution to the climate crisis is but what would it even say that humans wouldn’t have realistically thought of?
You're most likely correct in thinking 'we would get there eventually'. But in the case of medicine, would you like to make that case to those who don't have the time to wait for 'eventually' - or who'll spend their lives in misery?
It's a matter of prompt engineering, you have to be a really good engineer to pick the correct words in order to get the cure for cancer from ChatGPT, or the actual crabby patty recipe
May I ask why people immediately imagine AI slop whenever anybody mentions LLMs? This is exactly what I meant. Those companies ruined their reputation. LLM/AI applications extend well beyond chat and drawing bots.
> What theorems are meaningful and impactful that humans can’t prove without AI?
I'm not a mathematician. I cannot give a definitive answer. But I read somewhere that some proofs these days fill an entire book. There is no way anybody is creating that without machine validation and assistance. AI is the next step in that, just like how programming support is advancing from complex tools to copilots. I know that overuse of copilots is a reason for making some developers lose quality. But there are also experienced developers who have found ways to use them optimally to significantly increase their speed without filling the code base with AI slop. The same will arguably happen with Mathematics.
The point ultimately is, I don't have definitive answers to any of the questions you ask. I'm not a domain expert in any of those fields and I can't see the future. But none of that is relevant here. What's relevant is to understand how LLMs and AI in general can be leveraged to augment your performance in any profession. The exact method may vary by domain. But the general tool use will be similar. Think of it like "How can a computer help me do accounting, cook a meal, predict weather, get me an xray or pay my bills?" It's as generic as that.
I have a phd in mathematics and I assure you I am not happy that AI is going to make doing mathematics a waste of time. Go read Gower's essay on it from the 90s. He is spot on.
I would have loved to engage in a conversation, if only to learn something new. But something in the way you framed your reply tells me that that's not what you have in mind. Instead, here's what Dr. Terrence Tao thinks about the same subject [1]. Honestly, I can relate to what he says.
I'm not someone who likes or promotes LLMs due to the utterly unethical acts that the big corporations committed to make profits with them. However, people often forget that LLMs are a technology that was developed by people who practice Mathematics and Computer Science. That was also PhD level work. The fact that LLMs got such a bad reputation has nothing to do with those wonderful ideas, but was a result of the greed of those who are obsessed with endless profits. LLMs aren't just about vacuuming up the IP on the internet, dumping kilotonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere or endless streams of AI slop and low effort fakes.
Human minds process logic and the universe in extraordinary ways. But it's still very limited in the set of tools it uses to achieve that. That's where LLMs and AI in general raise the tantalizing possibility of perceiving and interpreting domains under Mathematics and Physics in ways that no living being has ever done or even imagined. Perhaps its training data won't be stolen text or art. It could be the petabytes of scientific data locked up in storage because nobody knows what to do with it yet. And instead of displacing us, it's likely to complement and augment us. That's where the brilliance of mathematicians and scientists are going to be needed. Nobody knows for sure. But how will one know if you close the doors to that possibility?
I admire Dr. Tao for keeping his mind open to anything new at his age. I wish I had as much curiosity as him.
(Terence Tao is his name.) Yes, he takes a rather measured view on AI, but I think for myself, not in terms of what X great person thinks. He is smarter than I am (you probably are not even aware how amazing he is, frankly, and I only say that to convey my immense admiration), and more successful by a million times, and is a millionaire with a tenure track job, and he's basically a fields medalist among fields medalists. The effect of AI on his life is very little compared to the effect of AI on mine. I am always impressed by Terence Tao, but there's basically no life lesson the average mathematician can glean from him. He is truly astounding (to be fair, there are a few other astonishing people in mathematics).
The truth is that with a few more innovations, even Terence Tao will have little to add to an AI's problem solving ability. I will personally enjoy having mathematics explained to me by the AI, but it will be in relative poverty and material insecurity caused by the AI.
A recent AI data point occurred this last weekend with many coming together to answer MathOverflow post, because Terence Tao answered it with some tedious parts done by AI. https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/115325229364313459
Yes, Facebook is a benefit. Among other things, it gave me React which much of the modern web is built on, and React Native, PyTorch, GraphQL, Cassandra, Presto, and RocksDB just to name a few.
The question is, what are billions of people doing on Facebook if it's harmful? I don't know. My daycare sends me updates, my barbershop tells me when they're closing and I used it to sell my fridge.
This hole Facebook irrational hate is ridiculously overblown. It's an app, and compared to things like TikTok that is essentially a Chinese psy-op, it's really a great product.
I don’t want to spoil anything for you, but ethanol is actually a very reactive molecule — and in some ways, it acts similarly to opioids like heroin. It, among other things, stimulates endogenous opioid pathways, leading to the release of β-endorphins and activation of mu-opioid receptors. So, alcohol works indirectly, heroin directly – but both enhance opioid signalling. If you’re curious, this study explains it really well:
Food activates it within normal biological limits, alcohol and heroin artificially push the same system far beyond normal range, forcing the brain to compensate by downregulating receptors or reducing endogenous opioid production, so it's totally legit to compare alcohol to heroin
I think it's incredibly naive and arrogant to tell billions of people who use a product through their own free will "ackchyually its really bad and you should stop".
Almost everyone would give you a response similar to mine. They use it because its easy way to plan events since so many people are on it, or a small business can easily create a website, sell something or just kill some time on the can.
Would you say the same about cigarettes? Billions of people used to smoke it as well, it was (and still is) quite popular, is it arrogant and patronising to tell them: this is unhealthy for you, and affects society in harmful ways?
> My daycare sends me updates, my barbershop tells me when they're closing and I used it to sell my fridge.
To consider the other side of this, read "The age of surveillance capitalism" by Shoshana Zuboff (really read it though, not chatgpt the summary :).
All the benefits you mentioned are real. But, at what cost and could we have reaped the same benefits without surrendering all agency to those who can't be held accountable?
What are the costs? Seems like a huge benefit to me considering the alternative would be... I don't know. No updates? Maybe some shitty custom app that would 100% for sure have worse data security and privacy rights than something like Facebook?
Everyone's talking vaguely about the costs but no one actually makes a concrete case, where I made a concrete case of the benefits.
Facebook and many of these other VC companies have worked by building a moat through network effects by burning money to build something free and awesome. Then once you HAVE the network effect then it becomes hard to leave. Your history is on there, people know you through it, your friends and family are there; are you really going to leave? That’s when Facebook starts turning the screws. Ads. Manipulative algorithms. Polarizating recommendation algorithms. Social isolation. Making deals with dictatorships. Censorship of the worst crimes humanity can commit against itself (genocide).
Why? They are making money through all of it. It’s called rent extraction. You OWN something valuable. You no longer have to produce something of value. You can just charge people money for what you own. Rent. It’s various forms of rent. Sucking out money and souls into it. One of countless ways we’re leeched on by these companies and their billionaire owners.
Do the benefits outweigh the harms? Facebook and the VC playbook is boiling a frog and we are the frog.
It’s fast because there already gobs of people on the internet because of all the other products that came before. Facebook didn’t grow as fast because there weren’t as many people on line then. Gmail didn’t grow as fast because there weren’t as many people online then.
I don't understand this argument. Speaking as a kid who grew up middle-class as an 80's teen obsessed with (the then still new) computers, a non-rich person has access to more salient power today than ever in history, and largely for no or low cost. There are free AI's available that can diagnose illnesses for people in remote areas, non-Western nations, etc. and which can translate (and/or summarize) anything to anything with high quality. Etc. etc. AI will help anyone with an idea execute on it.
The only thing you have to worry about are not non-rich people, but people without any motivation. The difference of course is that the framing you're using makes it easy to blame "The System", while a motivation-based framing at least leaves people somewhat responsible.
Wealth may get you a seat closer to the table, but everyone is already invited into the room.
The problem is if the system leads to demotivating people more than motivating them on average, which risks a negative feedback loop where people demotivate each other further and so on
What is demotivating people is negativist-framing-obsessed doomer assholes like you dooming and glooming all the possible negatives and absolutely none of the positives. There's no actual unmanageable bad things occurring, and a ton of upside occurring.
People are literally quitting CS majors because of this BS. Hopefully only the people who aren't meant to do it in the first place, but anyway.
You have an incorrect reading of history and economy. Basically none of the wealth and comfort we (regular people) enjoy were "gifted" or "left over" willingly by the owner class. Everything had to be fought for: minimum wage, reasonable weekly hours, safe workplaces, child labor, retirement, healthcare...
Now, ask yourself, what happens when workers lose the only leverage they have against the owner class: their labor? A capitalist economy can only function if workers are able to sell their labor for wages to the owner class, creating a sort of equilibrium between capital and work.
Once AI is able to replace a significant part of workers, 99% of humans on Earth become redundant in the eyes of the owner class, and even a threat to their future prosperity. And they own everything, the police and army included.
> Everything had to be fought for: minimum wage, reasonable weekly hours, safe workplaces, child labor, retirement, healthcare...
Fair enough. True.
> Once AI is able to replace a significant part of workers
But it won't do that. It's going to shift people around a lot, like literally every other technological development in the history of mankind, sure. But there's literally no evidence that it's going to do what you're claiming, which means you're arguing against a spooky strawman. It's not like people are going to just sit around doing nothing and going homeless, dude. Ideas (and activity that ends up being economically-tangible) will fill the vacuum.
I bought a Mac IIci computer in 1990 from my savings working throughout high school, for my freshman year of college. It cost over $8k, which in today's dollars is over $20k.
So imagine my lack of sympathy when people complain about things being literally free (as long as you don't mind signing away your social media profile data)
