As more and more people become super-rich, that class of individuals spends more and more conspicuously, but it doesn't trickle down.
The loop through resource identification, extraction, processing, manufacturing, and delivery only needs two things: resources ownership and automation. One person by themselves could conceivably operate that economy.
This is no different from any hermit or commune at any time. Just a richer more technological hermit and a more geographically distributed commune.
Another perspective: If 99.9% were slaves only given enough to eat and work, would there be an economy? Yes. If the slaves were replaced by automation would that stall the economy. No.
> an incentive to make their technology seem transformative and powerful
I have no frame of reference to process this.
Humans species perhaps 300,000 years, we are essentially the same. Transistor, 79 years, explosive growth in numbers and power. Integrated circuit, 68 years, explosive growth in numbers and power. "Attention is all you need", 9 years. ChatGPT, 4 years, explosive growth in instances and power. Humans species, not getting smarter. [0,1,2,3]
There is a syndrome where many people seem unable to perceive or reason about rates of change in technology.
We are going to spend the vast majority of our future lives without the intelligence crown.
In terms of verbally expressible knowledge, models are passing many people completely, and passing all of our individually respectively weak reasoning areas.
Other modalities are progressing very quickly.
There will be short periods where progress happens quickly, but the impact feels slow. There will be radical changes that feel slow too, because if something anticipated or important isn't instant, we tend to perceive it as slow.
But it won't be slow. And it won't be long. We are smart in a kind of pick the-best-of-us at the-best-of-times way. We are rarely consistently or broadly smart individually.
We are not in the same galaxy as "ready". What would that look like?
Agree with most of this, it's well articulated and captures how we react to change.
However - 'Humans species perhaps 300,000 years, we are essentially the same' is an enormous misconception. That fact that we lack gross anatomical changes during this period, ignores everything we now know about punctuated equilibrium and rapid evolution. It's highly probably we've had an enormous number of evolved psychological changes during the last few hundred, and even tens of thousands of years. Changes that relate to our capacity to live in large groups, adapt to urban environments, resist disease and so on. We know that's the case simply because acute pandemics become epidemics through herd immunity, and through the acquisition of lactose tolerance etc.
It seems highly unlikely that adaptations stop there. Altering the environment (in the last 10K years that means the built environment) alters the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness. It seems likely that we've essentially domesticated out much of our propensity for violence and increased our capacity for mood regulation.
Obviously it's incredibly tricky to pair these specific behavioural changes to genetic changes -> protein synthesis -> behaviour. Bearing in mind though we're only 20 years out from the first study to link allele variant to behaviour (the COMT Val/Met polymorphism), and the potential controversy around such research, this shouldn't be surprising.
Good point. The rate of cognitive improvements would be slow, imperceptible even over many generations, and virtually non-existent over the less than 100 years of digital automation.
It would be interesting to know how much we changed cognitively since our species bifurcated, and also since civilization scaled up social density.
Relative to the discussion, AI tech is progressing in time frames that are a fraction of a human generation. So we are at a complete standstill in that context.
You're applying broad, long-term, and high-level reasoning to motivations that are more likely short-term and driven by simplistic incentives.
Begging for regulation (and input into precisely what that regulation is) relieves competition, consolidating dependency among the established players, and spreads a very effective fear narrative that what these companies are doing will change everything and therefore they are worthy of mind-boggling capex and valuations.
We have to quit seeing humanist visionaries where the evidence shows businessmen with access to the best strategy and PR counsel around.
You> you could use his exact explanation to claim that good founders will soon become trillionaires,
PG> I don't want anyone to accuse me of using unrealistic numbers, so let's take a more conservative growth rate. Let's see what happens at 15% a month. That's not rare at all.
You> it is anyway limited by the size of the market(s) it is operating in
PG> how long you can continue to grow at that rate depends on the size of the market.
You> Then, he completely hand waves away the externalities, lawlessness, self dealing and similar issues
Not addressing an issue, that doesn't undermine the points he does make, is not hand waving.
Hallmarks of clear instead of reactionary thinking: you don't lash out at people for things they said, that you agree with, or things they didn't say, that you would have disagreed with.
Make your own (good) points. No need for framing around disagreement or other misleading tie ins.
I feel just as disgusted and frustrated by some rich people. But lots of people quietly become billionaires now, from normal companies that produce sensible services or goods people want. Substitute "rich" for "billionaire" to account for inflation, and increased globalization, and this has been true for a long time.
He does put caveats around his initial, condescendingly worded points. The problem is that those caveats are either too small, or they completely contradict his initial point.
Again, if all it takes to become a billionaire is 15% growth rate for 5 years, which is easy, then if you start with two billion dollars and grow at 15% per month, you'll be a trillionaire in 5 years. And 5 years after that, a quadrillionaire. If the billionaires are literally generating billions of new value, what explains why trillions can't be generated in the same way?
If the market is limited, then it means that you can't grow your way to a billion dollars, you have to displace others - either competitors in the same market, or other markets as well. So now there's a much clearer chance that you're using underhanded means to actually get your billions - you're not growing a new pristine market that people just love, you might just be edging out competitors or snuffing out other markets that had existed before - and perhaps were limited by things like regulations or externalities that you simply choose to ignore.
And the question of externalities and unfair competition and corruption is not tangential, it is the whole point that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders or others in this anti-billionaire movement are making. Not talking about it is simply ignoring their argument. The problem isn't "oh, I didn't realize that simply growing at 15% every month for 5 years will make a million dollar business into a billion dollar business". It's "the actions that you need to take in order to continue growing at 15% every month for 5 years are going to include things like un priced externalities, corruption, cartel behaviors, etc". Addressing how you can sustain this growth, and how the markets can have so much money in them, are exactly the most important things - not the trivial math of exponential growth that he discusses, condescendingly, at length.
Apple didn't do X they just shipped the new X components.
Apple takes the time to evaluate new components, bothers to adapt to the new components, re-optimizes other components around the new components, ships the new components.
Eventually,... eventually someone else does too.
Not always the pattern.
But the number of ways people try to punch holes in an earned reputation is remarkable. They got the reputation for doing some things right. Maybe not everything right, maybe not the things someone thought were right, or someone thought should be right, or what they would have done, or what someone thinks they claimed they did, that they actually didn't claim...
As more and more people become super-rich, that class of individuals spends more and more conspicuously, but it doesn't trickle down.
The loop through resource identification, extraction, processing, manufacturing, and delivery only needs two things: resources ownership and automation. One person by themselves could conceivably operate that economy.
This is no different from any hermit or commune at any time. Just a richer more technological hermit and a more geographically distributed commune.
Another perspective: If 99.9% were slaves only given enough to eat and work, would there be an economy? Yes. If the slaves were replaced by automation would that stall the economy. No.
There
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