China has already mandated an end to retractable outside door handles and electrical inside door handles. That takes effect January 1, 2027.
There were two major incidents where people could not get out and could not be rescued.
The powered charger port door would make sense if there were robot chargers that used it. Tesla demoed that, but people disliked the snake robot approach. Technically, a snake robot is ideal for that, but too many people fear snakes and tentacles.
Rear view cameras are better than rear view mirrors. The field of view is better.
> Rear view cameras are better than rear view mirrors. The field of view is better.
As long as they work, yes. This is part of the trend to make everything more fragile with lots of failure conditions. There are many electrical parts + software needed to make that camera+screen work, any of which might break eventually.
A mirror is just a mirror, failure modes are few and unlikely. Even if it cracks it still works.
Weird comment. This whole thread is about them. Of course I know it's a thing. My question is how do you look in the rear when mud is on the camera? Or lots of water droplets?
I don’t understand what you are asking. I drive in very rainy Miami and I haven’t had an issue, but not much mud here. I do have a rear wiper and the mirror can be switched to analog.
There are some good designs which prevent them from getting dirty. For example, Mercedes and VW put them in the rear badge and they're only exposed when needed.
Rear view cameras might be better than mirrors in terms of field of view. This doesn't make them objectively better. Disadvantages are well argumented in the article.
They are an useful accessory but shouldn't replace real vision.
Why not both? My Honda has mirrors and a rear view camera. I always check both before backing up. The camera is viewed on a small (for today's standards) LCD screen (with physical buttons, no touchscreen) that also serves as the radio.
The discussion isn't as much about a common backing camera (which also falls under 'useful accessory' I mentioned), but about cameras replacing mirrors.
Real vision is fucked when you can’t actually see what’s behind your car.
Cameras will prevent a lot of unnecessary property damage, and more importantly, fully mitigate risk of killing humans/animals that are behind the car and outside the field of view.
No one is arguing cameras shouldn’t exist. In fact, back up cameras are mandatory in the US. But replacing mirrors and windows with cameras is bad, actually.
Rear view cameras are a) 2d not 3d like a physical mirror, so judging depth is inferior on them b) a nightmare for most of us in the second half of our lives who lose the ability to quickly adjust focal length between near and far (not a problem with a real mirror) c) yet another potential failure point and d) a dumbass idea in the parts of the world that salt their roads
The various cameras on my polestar2 are routinely getting caked in salt and dirt in the winter 30 seconds after I start driving down the road. I fail to understand why I'd want this for a critical system like rear or side view mirrors.
I drove in a Polestar4 with its rear view camera only view the other day. Did not like. Would not want as my only option.
I did drive in a Bolt that had dual mode and that was fine.
And e) although more relevant for wing mirrors, you can also move your head around to change/increase the field of view if needed. Try doing that with a camera + screen.
> First off let me get on my high horse and say the engineering in video gaming is generally more complex than the engineering I've done working in big tech.
Yes. Having done everything from mainframe OS internals to proof of correctness to autonomous vehicles, video games are the most difficult.
At the beginning, game dev looks easy, because the tools are good and modern hardware is very capable. But as you approach a big, highly detailed, photorealistic world, the easy approaches hit a performance wall. Then the necessary optimizations become insanely complex.
That's the tyranny of the frame rate. That's why I've complained about game engines in Rust.
Everybody writes My First Game Engine, then hits the wall about two years in.
The metaverse problem is even worse. All the problems of game dev, plus the problems of user-created content and large scale. With all the effort and money put into metaverses, none emerged that worked as well and looked as good as an AAA game title from the GTA V era. Roblox, Improbable, and Second Life are as good as it got. You'd think there would be some good examples still around, with small user bases, but there are not. There are a whole range of problems only metaverses have, and some of them are unsolved. For commercial games, much of the work takes place during level building and optimization. Unreal Engine Editor does much of the heavy lifting. Metaverses don't have that option.
The total failure of the metaverse industry comes partly from this. It's hard to do, and the problem was underestimated. Mostly by the people who really just wanted to sell their crap NFTs and coins.
The people and wage problem comes from too many people wanting to make games. It's like Hollywood. If you've spend any time around there, you've met the actress/model/waitress types. The male version has stand up comedy levels of ego.
That pushes wages down.
VRchat is impressive. It predates the metaverse boom, and it's not a big-world system. The metaverse was supposed to be like Ready Player One, but we didn't get there.
The amount of things you're trying to simulate within the the performance contraints (games push computers to their absolute limits).
An example - a 3d humanoid character. You need code to manage the mesh, the animation (probably skeletal), the animations themselves, all the blending logic, probably specialised code and data for facial animations, and then you need to make sure all of that can mesh with both input driven locomotion and AI driven locomotion - and that's just one problem domain.
And I'm grossly oversimplifying what's involved even in that particular area.
Yeah that's other part. What was PhD level computer graphics becomes table stakes a few years later and not only do you have to do that, but you have to top it a few years later.
Oh and all of these systems have to be aware of each other, because the higher fidelity they become, the harder it is to keep the seams hidden, because the seam between them become more jarring.
Sure, you have skeletal bone animation and all that stuff in 2003, but do your characters adapt their footstep placement to the terrain height? Does the run animation blend smoothly between states? Oh it blends smoothly but now player inputs feel unresponsive because you had the clever idea to make it inertial? Oh now do it all over a network at minimum latency because esports are a hundred million dollar industry.
> Even 5+ year old rigs can run most modern games just fine
AI-hardware demand is responsible for slowing down the AAA graphics frame-rate treadmill. Back when Nvidia and AMD were releasing improved mid-range consumer GPUs at a steady clip, there was incessant pressure on AAA games to have ever-increasing frame-rates and "photorealistic" graphic-fidelity. Making a game update at 144Hz at 4k resolution/max graphics quality, with no upscaling shortcuts would be a challenging problem, were it a common target.
In an alternate universe where the LLM boom didn't happen, we probably would have 24GB midrange GPUs (and 32GB/48GB Nvidia 5090 Ti), allowing for humongous textures, and likely games rendering at 8k, which 5+ y.o. rigs would struggle with except at low-quality settings.
India has the problem with farming that the US is starting to have with AI. Farming in India is still far too labor intensive by world standards. 43% of workers still work in agriculture. [1] For the US, that number is under 2%. China is at 22% as of 2023, and dropping steadily.
This inefficient agricultural system is not by accident. It is supported by heavy subsidies. Attempts to cut the subsidies resulted in riots.[2] Trouble is ongoing.
Comments from someone who knows more about this than I do would help here.
The US and most of the EU went through that transition over several generations, and farming is still heavily subsidized in both areas. The transition happened faster in China, and a hukou system was put into place to prevent people from migrating from farms to cities faster than the cities could absorb them.
Looking at how countries coped with a fast transition from labor intensive agriculture to an urban society gives hints on how an AI transition may look. All the Asian countries that went from poor to rich in a generation did this, with different approaches. How that took place may provide more useful info than philosophy.
I liked reading "The Box" about the transition to container shipping.
It was interesting to see this totally-unrelated-to-our-times process from the outside.
From our place in time, container shipping is obvious.
At the time, to people who wanted to ship something, it was ridiculously hard and expensive and risky.
If you were shipping something from cleveland to paris, you might just give up.
Say you were shipping alcohol - only part might arrive, the rest would disappear.
The shipping industry had all KINDS of forces at work to keep the status quo. trucking companies, trains, shipping companies, freight forwarders, longshoremen, stevedores, unions, people with older non-container boats, etc.
In all fairness, this is exactly why insurance was invented: unreliable shipping. You just took out a policy, and the shipment didn’t make it you took the payout.
It creates a system that diminishes risk, but simultaneously diminishes incentives for improvement.
>The industrial revolution was enabled by more efficient agriculture feeing labour to do other work
you're not wrong, but that's not exactly what happened. Agriculture itself was mechanized by the industrial revolution, affordable tractors (tillers, farrowers, etc.) and harvesters. mechanized railroads put more perishable agricultural goods "closer" to urban areas, etc.
if you look at the growth industry before that, it was mercantilist overseas trade.
The big productivity gains of the Agricultural Revoution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Agricultural_Revolutio... started considerably before the Industrial Revolution, though naturally the Industrial Revolution in turn fed back into agricultural productivity, in time.
Yea, the first few percentage points are underrated.
Dropping from 90% of the population being ~farmers to 80% of the population being farmers doubles the amount of time people can spend doing everything else including research, manufacturing, education etc.
In many ways it was equivalent to the drop from 51% being farmers all the way down to 2%. However, it wasn’t nearly as obvious because 90% farmers looks a lot like 80% of the population being farmers and the transition was relatively slow and unevenly distributed.
Seems like this and parent are referring to two different waves of improvement. Pre-IR improvements in plowing and cultivation (still draft and human traction), followed by post-IR mechanization for harvesting and transport?
Farm labor demands wax and wane with the seasons with harvest typically being the most labor intensive; so, it was actually stationary motors that did the most to reduce labor demands. Tractors mostly helped farmers eliminate the need for horses on a farm.
One of the leading economic history theories of why the industrial revolution happened was that it was largely a result of the Black Plague.
The theory is roughly that before the Black Plague, the population was stuck in Malthusian dynamics at the top of the logistic curve - population had expanded to the level that land could support.
The massive deaths allowed the remaining population to only farm the most productive land, leading to a massive surplus. The elite were able to capture that surplus and fund things like art, science, etc. Some of those scientists were able to create technology that led to further efficiency gains, so that technology could make the economy grow faster than population growth could catch up.
There are a ton of things that allowed that surplus to translate into technology and economic growth. But AFAIK the leading theory is that without the massive shock from population decline due to the bubonic plague, that surplus would have never existed to begin with, so how it was allocated would have been moot.
The first technology wasn't the steam engine, it was eating beef instead of just grain, and having cattle pull plows. We don't think of that as a huge technological revolution, but it was a dramatic efficiency gain at the time. It wasn't a new invention, but there wasn't enough surplus to deploy it widely before that.
Anything can be anything if you stretch definitions far enough. But normally industrialization is seen as distinct and antagonistic to artisanal culture.
There was a very marked change in the growth rate, which is why economic historians focus on that.
Yes, there were multiple further steps that needed to happen, as you note. But the black plague got the population "unstuck" from a local minimum that they could not grow from, to being able to have cattle plow the fields and eat meat that allowed them to have some surplus to capture the further gains.
It's not that the later gains were inevitable, but that they never would have otherwise happened, and the growth rate started with the plague.
It's like saying the current AI boom started recently, there's no way the steam engine was related. It is a clear causal chain, even though many things had to happen in between.
But before the black plague, at least the "western world" was stuck in Malthusian dynamics where there was no growth in technology or income.
The economy went from 0% growth for 100s of years to 3% growth that lasted many hundreds of years.
Yes, at each step keeping the 3% growth needed things to keep going, but the big thing was unleashing the nonzero growth rate, to get unstuck from the local minimum.
I will try to steelman watwut, a lot of people presume compound exponential economic growth is basically inevitable as a law, so you can always go back to some point in time.
However, economic growth was basically flat before the Black Plague, and increases were basically random events that went back to Malthusian dynamics.
Only since the Black Plague has the world enjoyed exponential economic growth.
Most people talk about the industrial revolution, a lot of other comments talk about the british agricultural revolution before that, but economic historians have identified the inflection point at the black plague - that's where compound interest really started to be a driver of growth, it barely existed before that, at least on long time scales.
The Justinian Plague was as bad or worse, but rather than result in flourishing it ushered in the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire and the start of the so-called Dark Ages. So maybe the Black Plague was an important element, but if so also had to have happened at the confluence of other critical events.
According to William Rosen in "Justinian's Flea," this plague also led to an agricultural revolution and population explosion in Western Europe.
<quote>
One cannot, of course, “know” this in the same way that one can know the date of the battle of Poitiers; applying economic analysis to the spotty record of commerce during late antiquity is a tricky business. However, as can be seen in a subtly reasoned 2003 paper by two development economists, Ronald Findlay of Columbia and Mats Lundahl of the University of Stockholm, it is compelling, as well, despite its reliance on a number of simplifications.
</quote>
That's a super interesting question and I agree! I am only saying the modern period of compound economic growth clearly started at the black plague with good explanations as to why.
Why other events did not have the same effects are very interesting questions for economic history.
Doesn't this article contradict your earlier comment? It claims that wages increased (elite were unable to capture the surplus) and as a result, workers were able to move from growing crops to farming animals, with resulting efficiency gains (i.e. they were able to acquire capital rather than pay all their surplus as rent).
It's a long arc, and as sibling comments say, there are many books about it.
The elites being able to capture some of it was what allowed for science and the enlightenment to happen, which eventually led to the technology that inspired the industrial revolution.
The big picture was it was the beginning of compound interest. This was a many step process over hundreds of years.
The events happened, but the mechanisms are subject to debate. Every school of economic thought has strong opinions on this time period. You've actually listed a source that contradicts your original argument (which came from where, out of curiosity?)
Basically, one common version is 'pro-elite' and blames the stagnation prior to this period on 'Malthusian dynamics' (over population beyond the productivity of the land). Another version is 'anti-elite' and blames the stagnation on the capture of all surplus by the landowning elite (who are not motivated to invest it other than the bare necessity to maintain status quo).
While there is considerable room for nuance and disagreement, Malthus is considered largely discredited by modern economics. As the population increased, so did the productivity of the land. Regardless, the fact people lived bare subsistence lives under feudalism does not imply the max population had been reached - they are still paying excess as rent. Peasants paid 1/2 their crop in rent, consumed 1/4 and replanted a 1/4 (crude approximation). This is very similar btw to modern US - there are 100M renters and the median rental household pays 50% of gross income to rent + tax.
Compound interest and capital investments predate the medieval period by thousands of years. There are cuneiform tablets documenting these kinds of financial arrangements.
'AFAIK the leading theory is that without the massive shock from population decline due to the bubonic plague, that surplus would have never existed to begin with, so how it was allocated would have been moot.' This is highly dubious/contentious.
Societal changes are slow beasts, they may very well take several centuries to develop. Nation-states were a direct consequence of the printing press, yet they didn't arrive until XIX century.
I thought the aftermath of the Black Plague also allowed people to charge a lot more for their labor and services, since most of the laborers, well, died.
I mean all part of the surplus - you weren't struggling to barely survive so could do other things with your time, and some of the people used that surplus to invest in efficiency.
Historically, more efficient agriculture meant a population boom. That's kinda the opposite of people starving to death. A lot of agriculture historically and in poor countries like India today is subsistence agriculture, yeoman farmers living off what they grow directly. More efficiency allows them to sell their surplus and to invest the proceedings, kicking off economic growth.
Yes, but the AI that is metaphor is comparing to does not create more food. More to the point, it may not create more jobs.
After a few decades of turmoil the industrial and agricultural revolutions netted out far more jobs. The verdict is still out on AI, but I wouldn't bet on it.
It also doesn't destroy food. Right now, we have enough food. After the AI revolution we have more food and more free labour and fundamentally more effective administrators to run a welfare system. I don't want my society to be the first one to try it, but if we can move the average administrator from an ordinary human to something that is a little better at math than Gauss with infinite clones to get into the details ... there is a chance that we can run an effective centrally planned welfare system.
It is really hard to see how the AI revolution would lead to any issues with food shortages. It looks more like previously unthinkable upside than anything else.
Your analysis is greatly under estimating the risk that the capitalists that control the system use it to build cheap, automated weapons to guard their cheap robots and lock everyone of us out, just because they can. They're far more likely to be narcissists and sociopaths than the average population, empathy isn't their strong suit.
> Yes, but the AI that is metaphor is comparing to does not create more food.
Mostly because food is incredibly cheap, so it's not the main focus of present-day economies. AI does however help provide many basic services that improve quality of life. The most natural and most cost-effective use of AI is arguably in helping answer simple questions, not really in cranking out tokens to somehow help write complex software. And other service work is perhaps in the middle of this range.
> But the answers it gives are not reliable. They sound plausible if you don't know anything about the subject, but they're not reliable.
Do not underestimate the utility of having a starting point overview on a topic you know absolutely nothing about. It may be immensely valuable even if some details are off. That's what made the XVIII's Encyclopedia such a valuable tool for civil society.
By the time you get to the point where those wrong details become relevant, you have gotten a basic understanding of what the overall topic is about, so you're prepared to get a second opinion from a different source - and this time you may know enough to start asking relevant questions, rather than starting from full ignorance.
> Do not underestimate the utility of having a starting point overview on a topic you know absolutely nothing about.
Perhaps, but we already had that in the form of search-engines and primers and how-to guides and Wikipedia. The actionable questions already had answers.
Adding an obsequious device that dynamically hallucinate half of a conversation with not-necessarily-true dialog is (if not a detriment) only a marginal improvement.
Hallucinations are not a matter of some "details" being off. They are a matter of plausible, confident-sounding claims that are just plain wrong. They don't help anyone to get a "basic understanding". All they "help" with is getting a wrong understanding, that the poor person who's asking can't tell is wrong, because it sounds plausible and is stated with such confidence.
When humans do this, we call them "bullshit artists", and we don't view them favorably. Why should AIs get a pass?
> Hallucinations are not a matter of some "details" being off. They are a matter of plausible, confident-sounding claims that are just plain wrong.
This is no worse than Wikipedia, or the original encyclopedia for that matter. Those contain dubious claims that you'll need to verify on your own too.
LLMs help because they have a gigantic amount of compressed knowledge, and they are able to find relevant information and present it incredibly fast. You wouldn't trust the ten first results of a Google search either, but you wouldn't say that having a search engine is totally useless and in no way an improvement over your local library, would you?
> the poor person who's asking can't tell is wrong, because it sounds plausible and is stated with such confidence.
True, but having to learn how to use a tool properly doesn't make the tool useless, even if it can hurt those who use it carelessly.
> AI does however help provide many basic services that improve quality of life.
Not yet. Like, not at all and there is a constantly expressed threat we will all become poorer and unemployable because of it. I dont believe it, but AI did not made life better ... and its creators claim it will make life worst for most of us. That is their literal sales pitch.
Comparable being the key word there. AI marketing is threatening to eventually eliminate most white collar work. The exact high paying jobs (at least in the US) that enable upward class mobility and fuel the consumption based economy.
Take those away and tell everyone "sorry, go do physical labor now for half or worse of the salary" and that's a big problem.
Automation is a boon when it automates physical labor, not when it automates away knowledge work.
The emphasis there should be on "marketing". The actual state of things is that white-collar work is alive and well, and if anything is being helped by AI.
Interesting there is a possible implication here. If salaries drop from more people doing physical labor instead of white collar work then the automation of physical work may be delayed even longer. It may be cheaper in the short term to pay humans than machines due to an oversupply in physical labor.
> Automation is a boon when it automates physical labor, not when it automates away knowledge work.
Says the knowledge workers, who have collectively spent the last 50 years talking down to the physical laborers with a smug "should have gone to college!" attitude.
You'll be fine. Automation of any kind is a boon for everyone. We massively over-allocated human talents to office jobs over the past few decades and stopped building anything in the physical world (like houses, infrastructure, etc), this is only the pendulum swinging back to reality. Graeber wrote about this astutely in his original 2013 Bullshit Jobs essay, long before AI was a thing.
How many people do we actually need sitting in meetings about meetings about powerpoint presentations for future meetings....or implementing react components into a dashboard UI in a slightly different way for the 3,000,000th time? Even without AI, this was bound to happen.
In the early 1900s there were literally hundreds of different automobile manufacturers globally. We didn't need that many, just as we don't need 1,000,000 people working on 100 slightly different versions of the same CRUD project management software. Humans will human. We'll find new stuff to do, as we have done since the dawn of humanity.
Funny you make this statement without giving examples of timeframes, what this looked like in real terms for real peoples lives living back then, nothing. Just 'between 1880 and 1950 we found new stuff to do'. It's all selling magic and hopium based on nothing.
Real example: 75% of the global workforce were farmers in 1880, most on a subsistence basis. The people who left the farm for the factories during that time period weren't forced to. They chose to, because working in a factory was better than staying on the farm. Just like a generation of rural Chinese people made the same choice more recently.
In fact, there's nothing stopping you from buying a farm and living like its 1880 today.
You can quite literally go out and start living a subsistence farmer lifestyle tomorrow. The average person in 1880 did not have the tools needed to cultivate a large parcel of land, so you'd approximate their lifestyle quite easily with a tiny parcel of arable rural land which is extremely cheap to acquire in most countries.
It's not magic and hopium, its simply automation and increased productivity via leverage. AI is the assembly line of the digital revolution.
Why is you're 'real example' 100% hypothetical? Give me real examples. Or at least real information from places like Manchester at the time. Not this hypothetical stuff the implies much ignoring things got worse for generations.
If you read up on the industrial revolution, those people that moved became less healthy, less happy, forced into dorm style housing. Give me real examples of what 'working out' looked like in the past. Because from my research, 'things worked out' meant worse outcomes for quite a long time (like generational timeframe). Give me examples please of what this successful transition in the past looked like for real individuals.
You need 0.5 to 1.5 acres per person for non-mechanized industrial argriculture. Nowhere with land that is truly arable enough for that is going to _sell_ you 1 acre at a time. In the U.S., you buy at least 40 acres at a time. In the U.S. Midwest, that's going to set you back (on average) $379,000. That's before you buy the equipment you need to be able to farm the land in the first place. Unless you industrialize and grow crops to sell to other people, you will not be able to afford the property taxes on the land to be able to keep it, either.
So, no, you cannot just go out and buy an acre and garden.
What? Yes, you absolutely can buy half an acre. You think in 1880 people went on Zillow to buy land?
You're just going to have to do this the 1880 way.
Knock on the door of a land owner and offer to buy/rent half an acre so you can farm. You'll find takers. My extended family literally has this arrangement with many people who farm different crops during different seasons.
Too hard to to do it that way? Welcome to 1880! Most people weren't land owners on the land they farmed back then and didn't have 'Perfectly arable' plots, and this was pre-fertilizer.
Oh and you'll have to use horse and buggy to get around to find land owners (no evil automobiles from those evil factories full of automation!) who will allow you to farm their land, just like 1880. So good luck.
I don't know how many times I need to explain this to tech doomers: nobody forced people out of subsistence farming. They chose to leave it. It was not a utopia.
The other big worry is, what if it just doesn't do what is promised and these trillions of dollars that were spent assuming magic would happen were all for nothing? I mean, other than to make a handful of extremely wealthy individuals even more wealthy at the expense of everyone's retirement funds.
Fiber buried in the ground in 1996 is still useful. Servers from 1996, not so much outside of the retrocomputing community. The bulk of those trillions of dollars on AI is not going into useful long term infrastructure. It's going into equipment that will only be useful to scrappers after its initial life is over in three to five years as the sorts of places that can handle the heat load of 25 clothes dryers on high stuffed into 3.5 cu ft of space aren't going to run second hand machines. They aren't useful as in-office developer machines unless your office has 1000A of power to dedicate to that one single machine and the air conditioner need to keep the room the server is in from bursting into flames.
> The other big worry is, what if it just doesn't do what is promised and these trillions of dollars that were spent assuming magic would happen were all for nothing?
Honestly? That's the best case scenario for humanity.
When AI can replace knowledge-based work, capital has no need for humans anymore. That's almost an ELE.
There are precedents for a lower workforce. It was not so long ago that women did not participate much in formal labor, but rather spent their creative energies improving their families and homes. That might not be an empowering choice today, and I'm not advocating for it, but it shows that the economy has in the past and probably still can get along perfectly well with a lot of sidelined labor capacity. The important thing is that the sidelined labor find some useful purpose outside the workplace rather than simply consuming welfare: in the past, domestic work like childrearing and social/emotional work like building community soaked up excess labor capacity and still had pro-social effects.
Just because they weren't paid doesn't mean women were not doing economically valued labour. The washing machine is probably the greatest productivity unlock since the steam engine.
If you focus on writing ricketty software or overblown emails then no it isn't real. But if you think of e-gates instead of border officers then it is.
There is a basic problem with framing though. Why does the labour need to find somewhere to go, but capital doesn't? Why can't the increase in productivity be captured by labour and denied to capital?
Do you mean to imply a political/social revolution? In any other scenario I can think of when my boss gets a new machine, he captures the value from my increased productivity or the machine eliminates my job entirely.
Changing the tax system to tax capital rather than labour would probably get you 90% of the way there without great societal upheaval (capital would fight back though).
> Historically, more efficient agriculture meant a population boom. That's kinda the opposite of people starving to death.
not necessarily. you're inadvertently conflating things. just more people alive doesn't mean they aren't starving. a population boom can be had in the starving population too.
While you are not wrong, it is still historically correct to say that "more efficient agriculture meant a population boom". We don't know what they were doing for birth control back then (because this was a woman's job and they didn't write history), but there is plenty of evidence they must have been doing something that was effective (rhythm is more than good enough to explain this, and so likely what they were doing). People had a good idea of how much the farm could support and they tried to get just enough kids to ensure it would pass on - with enough spares for war, infant mortality and the like.
> more efficient agriculture meant a population boom
More efficient agriculture meant a more efficient population. In cases where environmentally possible this obviously encourages a population boom but they're not necessarily synonymous.
Do you think they should be left to starve if they did not work for many years?
In most developed countries even someone who has been never worked in their life will get enough to live on (although they might get less than someone who has worked all their lives).
This is a false dichotomy, brother. People can, and do, pool their resources to give to those who have less. Most humans aren't so cold hearted that they are ok with others starving. So no, the options aren't just "trade for food" or "force people to give you food".
> People can, and do, pool their resources to give to those who have less.
Voluntarily, yes. If you want to make my list complete, you can add charity as a third option: if people judge that you're worth helping, they can voluntarily choose to help you.
But charity only works if the people doing it have things to give. Which means those things were produced. Somebody produced them. And the people who have them to give, through charity, got them one of the two ways I described. So it all still bottoms out to those two ways. Yes, some people can be helped out with charity. But you can't have an entire society all being helped with charity, because then nobody is producing anything that can be used to help them.
I am shocked you think letting people starve is OK. The word you are looking for is "revolution" or "uprising" - people will fight for the right to live if you deny them food.
If my family isn't eating and society is cool with that I could not care less about a label that such a society gives me.
Again, society can get ahead of things, or let it be decided later. The harder you make option 2, the more people will pick option 1. Society can figure out how to keep option 2 working if society prefers that. If society fails to do so it will deservedly get option 1.
> The harder you make option 2, the more people will pick option 1.
I think you have the options mixed up. Option 1 is voluntary trade. Option 2 is violence.
You appear to be saying that people would prefer voluntary trade, but that they will resort to violence if they see no other option. Which historically I think is largely true.
Or we take some small portion of that new surplus in productivity and share it among everyone by divorcing the need to work from the need to not starve.
Living off redistributed surplus is exactly what happens when you don’t work.
I’ve been there: no job = food pantry + food stamps.
I live in a nice area. Since we are wealthy, our local economy has quite a bit of surplus. The food pantries regularly have organic and high end food. Plenty of people with money go there just because - why not?
The poorer parts of the county don’t have as much surplus, so they’re food pantries had old cheese and peanut butter.
You are simply selecting new elites to be from the redistributor class (vanguard party, Nomenklatura, secret police etc), instead of the entrepreneural class.
Works well if you are the one redistributing stuff from "rich to poor", but it ends up as creating a new elite class, every single time
All modern Western-like societies involve some amount of indirect redistribution already. Outside of extremely peculiar places like Singapore or the Gulf states, it's just not seen as desirable or even sensible to have extreme wealth alongside people living in extreme poverty on the equivalent of less than a dollar a day. This actually used to be relatively common in the 19th century, it was the actual kind of widespread pathology that early social reformers railed against.
It is still extremely common today, if you look at the demographics along the Atlantic Coast of the US. The richest zip codes always have poor ones nearby.
By the standards of underdeveloped countries today or historical poverty in general, these "poor" people are nonetheless living in outright opulence: their genuine plight is mostly one of social marginalization, that can't really be solved by purely economic means. That's partly the effect of new technology (developed by capitalism) but partly redistribution in action.
Doesn’t seem like it did it in Norway. Or the Us from the new deal until the 1970s. Or the vast majority of western Europe. This red scare stuff is tiring.
It seems obvious to me that a complex society needs a privileged class to function, but I don't think it's self evident that every kind of elite class would behave in the same way.
This is a genuine problem indeed and part of the appeal of an UBI. The idea being that if the rules of redistribution are dead simple, then that helps minimize the potential for grift, which in turn minimizes the potential danger of a redistributor class.
That said, it is fundamentally important that nobody has too much power, and that power changes hands on a regular basis.
At a global scale, this necessitates taking power away from the capitalist class.
Ideally that power just doesn't go to anybody, but to the extent that it has to go somewhere, it almost doesn't matter where. Or perhaps it's better to say that there are many options that are acceptable and better than allowing power to continue to accumulate unchecked.
UBI has been tried experimentally around the world many places including the US and did not have that effect "the money people had received was not squandered on frivolous products such as drugs and luxury goods": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income_pilots
Which experiments were successful depends on what your desired outcomes were, but none were as bad a you suggest, I would say many succeeded.
I do not know how COVID support worked in the US, but one of the things you refer to seems to be loans to businesses, which is very different from UBI. Were people given a fixed and guaranteed income stream not linked to earnings during COVID?
I wouldn't use the COVID economy to understand anything except "What happens to an economy during a pandemic?" People had more money, but there was a lot less to spend on for a while. Not to mention the psychological effects of lockdowns, restrictions, or quarantining.
My impression is that China has a pretty high standard of living. They have been extremely successful in reducing poverty over the last few decades. You should see how shiny even some of the third tier cities are.
The fundamental problem is that power and resources are always captured by Cluster B types, and Cluster B types are poison to every form of social organisation.
So it's true it almost doesn't matter, because you can absolutely guarantee you're going to have growing inequality, political instability, and a culture of dishonesty, abuse, and contempt, unless you keep Cluster B types far, far away from resource dominance, strategy, and enforcement.
I don’t think that power and resources are always captured by Cluster B types, and that statement is doing a lot of load-bearing in your argument. You’re going to need to back it up somehow.
> it is fundamentally important that nobody has too much power
> taking power away from the capitalist class
An obvious and apparently irresolvable contradiction.
Capitalist power is inherently anarchic and isn't power at all. It's simply order emerging from the anarchy of the market. But the ability to take that power away from them, no matter how you measure it, itself falls into the category of "too much power" with wide margin. And with this amount of power there will be no change of hands that hold it.
You fundamentally misunderstand UBI. it does not stop anyone working, and where it has been tried people continue working because they want more than a minimal income. its not a universal high income, its a universal BASIC inome.
No, it's much better for an elite class of superhumans to hoard all the wealth. After all they guided us to our current utopia, the least humanity can do is give them the vast majority of wealth.
The post you replied to specified young people so 70M is the wrong denominator. The UK currently has far more than 1 million working age adults unemployed and the denominator for that is still less than 70M because Britain has plenty of retirement age adults too.
I chose the denominator of a society of 70 million to match the data link I posted.
It’s possible the unemployment rate among you adults is historically high, but I haven’t seen data on that. I doubt it, based on the overall unemployment rate.
edit: looked up the current data. Age 16-24 unemployment excluding trainees and students is 12.8% which is about double the current overall unemployment rate. Haven't found historical data on this cohort yet. We might expect youngsters to be less employed than experienced people, but double does seem high on the face of it.
I think it's important to put numbers in historical context when saying or implying that we're in some kind of crisis.
Youth unemployment sucks for the people involved and the people around them. Every one of them has my sympathy. We are not in a period of unusually high youth unemployment, according to the UK government data.
> Found it. Youth unemployment is currently at about the (eyeball) median rate for the last 32 years.
It is currently there. The economy doesn't seem to be getting friendlier to the youth though. That median also seems pretty heavily skewed by a seven-year jump in youth unemployment after 2008, which seems like a bad omen.
>The flipside is that there must be other work to be done or people starve to death
false. people are not helpless and jobs are not fixed in number nor social welfare gifts. Human creativity and industriousness can be put to task to produce things that other people want. In an absurd example, you could live next door to a new efficient sweater mill, and you could still knit handmade sweaters, customized with people's initials, etc., and their sale would measure the value of your output in. dollars. People don't do this very often because such an economy produces more lucrative jobs than that.
doomers have foreseen the end of the world in every generation going back. The bad speculations have never come true, but there have been some very negative outcomes of fearful people believing the doom and gloom, look no further than the seeds of Marxist revolutions, Fascism, and Naziism, they all start with people feeling economic uncertainty.
I'm not sure I understand your point. Someone who attempted to support themselves by hand knitting sweaters almost certainly WOULD be impoverished. So doesn't that support what you are calling "doomers"?
I said "but people don't do that because there are better alternatives".
I also said "with monograms" for example, i.e. there are irl handmade sweaters made today because people don't necessarily want a factory product.
I pointed it out because it illustrates a hint of the principles of "comparative advantage" which concepts are useful for analyzing more than international trade, analysis the majority of people aren't familiar with.
Comparative advantage falls flat on its face in the circumstances being described, though. It’s based on an assumption of opportunity cost that no longer holds true.
the principle of comparative advantage does not ever fall flat on it's face. An entire country can be worse at manufacturing/growing everything compared to the US, but they can still manufacture and grow things, and engage in trade.
an individual can be inferior to other individuals at every single job skill, but can still get a job and live a full life with family.
you don't know what you are talking about, at all.
That is indeed an absurd example, as any number of failed Etsy stores - and failed businesses in general - confirms.
Trad econ makes no distinction between creative profit, which produces new jobs and new opportunities, and extractive profit, which destroys jobs and opportunities while trashing the planet's carrying capacity.
Both can make stonks go up, but one has a predictably limited life before it ends in catastrophe.
Unfortunately that life is defined in centuries, not years. In the meantime everyone gets used to normalcy bias, the extractive types own the main social communication systems, and when their backs are against the wall they will simply lie about what's really happening.
The collapse is always a huge surprise to most of the population when it finally happens.
And in the lead up to that it gets harder and harder to start a viable small business, because the resources needed to make it work keep going up, and the resources that are actually available to most people keep going down.
Etsy is a successful business, and the people who engage with it come back and reengage, and separately read up on Schumpeterian creative destruction
when you learn physics (e.g. Newtonian mechanics) you idealize concepts like "frictionless" because it teaches you valid concepts that you can carry forward, and you don't soil your diapers at every step of learning. Do the same with economics if you want to actually learn it, don't think "what's wrong with this", think "what's right with it, what can I learn from it?" Look at history, what economics explains is what happened.
you can't learn classical mechanics from a few paragraphs, but that's how long an HN comment needs to be. I will promise you this, if you reject what I wrote and remember most of the doomer dreck here, you will not learn economics at all.
The problem with Newtonian mechanics, especially idealized frictionless versions, is that it gives you a wrong impression of how the world works. Much better to understand and accept friction, because it leaves you with an accurate understanding, instead of an easy-to-learn version supported by fundamentally flawed concepts.
Within physics, there are much, much, much better models than Newtonian mechanics for conceptualizing economics.
they never ever teach physics the way you describe, they teach it the way I describe, and they never stop at the frictionless assumption. I am intellectually advantaged over you in every possible way, yet you do have a comparative advantage; unfortunately it's at spewing tendentious argumentative not-even-interesting nonsense.
Man. You live in a world of fantasy driven by a pathetically shallow knowledge of some mainstream economic cliches that people like you love to repeat as if you really even knew the mathematical models, much less their limitations.
That's not how things have been happening for quite some time. Productivity gains have been absorbed almost by the capital for the last 40 years. Wages have mostly estagnated and whole industries and their jobs disappeared without a direct replacement for the ones who lost their jobs now for more than 20, 30 years. Auto industry automation jobs? Gone, and the people who had those jobs? Mostly in worst jobs if lucky.
Why the fuck do you think Detroit is a hell hole? Why the whole rustbelt is a hellhole of poverty and opioid addiction?
And don't you dare think you're immune just because you are a little above the masses. A few millions, even a few tens of millions in the stock market and on a cardboard/gypsum McMansion could vaporize in a trading afternoon if we end up in a 29s style crash.
It won't be one large one, it will be thousands of little ones.
Every time this happens throughout history (and I mean going all the way back way past industrial revolution, to dawn of agriculture, to the earliest documented history, to the mitochondria, to the earliest stars exploding...) the result of a better way to get work done is more complexity and more diversity in work done (processes for increasing entropy).
The author said not to confuse laws of nature with observations of history, and I take issue with the implication. My perspective is grounded deep in physics, chemistry, biology and anthropology and after spending 10 years fretting over what AI would do to our civilization this decade I am not worried about labor displacement.
What I am worried about is power struggles and brainwashing.
Note that several of your historical examples didn’t involve humans, and presumably most future occurrences of better work enablers won’t involve humans either. The contention isn’t whether there will be an increase in diversity and amount of work done, it’s whether any of it will be done by us. Which would only be the case insofar that there exists categories of work we do better than AI at that juncture.
Communism, or more accurately, mechanised collective farming practices in the early 1900s in Russia resulted in revolutions and world wars. When tens of millions of inefficient farmers were replaced by tractors needing only a fraction of the labour force the excess population was disposed of.
Sorry, bad phrasing!
They were put to work in new roles enabled by technological advancements:
wielding mass manufactured rifles and operating artillery.
This has played out over and over throughout history whenever a large fraction of the population suddenly becomes surplus to requirements.
They never get to enjoy utopia. They are expended in warfare or low value forced labour until the labour pool once again matches the requirements.
You don't even need to look at the Soviets. Life for the average person in Britain became worse between 1760 until about 1920. That meant about 3 generations of people were lost.
I'm super happy about this idilic AI future my great grandchildren will enjoy...
If anything, it will be the trades. We're still a solid time away from being able to replicating what muscles and skin do - and fundamentally, there will always be a need for someone to run cable, terminate wiring and unclog a sewer pipe. At the same time, the trades are desperate for staff after the "academization" push of the last decades.
That's true for a while. But shelf restocking and order picking will probably start to go robotic within a few years. That's a manipulation problem within reach. All those mass produced humanoid robots have to do something, and that's something they can do.
Having to do manual labor ruined three image of manual labor. Fathers and mothers with broken bodies. Backs, knees, just physically wrecked after decades of laying tile and into crawlspaces and sweating all day out in the heat or freezing in winter. There's something to be said for an honest days work, but let's not over romanticize it.
That greatly depends on how much handholding is required and for how long.
The difference between mostly right and actually useable without supervision is why self driving cars still aren’t ready. When someone says AI can do job X, they rarely mean it’s good enough for anyone to blindly trust the results of it doing that job.
Agricultural subsidies exist primarily due to lobbying, the "we don't want to starve" argument is nothing more than an excuse used to justify the fortunes handed out to corporate-scale farmers.
You can't just use percentages for this kind of thing.
Barring a very good cause that the vast majority of the population can get behind, there will be riots when the bananas and coffee disappear.
We grow enough in our garden that I could probably reach "100%" pretty easily if shit hit the fan, but I'm about tired of eating radish greens right now even that being related to a national crisis.
In the case of something like a world war, which is the type of scenario we're talking about here, I think people would begrudgingly accept that bananas and coffee are unavailable or very expensive.
> Agricultural subsidies exist primarily due to lobbying,
That's mostly true, but it's also true that we don't want to starve. There are 330 million hungry mouths in the US and we've got to keep production way above that level or it becomes a big political problem real quick.
If we just let the market set prices, in years where farms are all producing bumper crops, oversupply would push profits way down. This would force many producers to sell their farms (most likely to corporate-scale farmers) and leave the sector. Subsidies keep a nonzero number of producers producing independently. Granted, the corporate-scale farmers (who also accumulate funds via subsidies) can buy out producers who want to sell, but with subsidies, more producers can afford to say no and stay independent.
You're moving the goalpost from "prevent starving" to "fully self-sustaining".
You don't need 99% variety of cuisine in case of a big war, you need calories. A lot of calories.
UPDATE: and BTW, if world population is growing (no global starvation), then it's clearly self-sustaining, no? So some countries must be self-sustaining just by math. At least one country must produce more than it consumes, otherwise, if everyone produced less, then we would have global starvation.
Again, you can grant this and a huge number of agriculture subsidies still aren't justified.
People have an instinctive defensiveness over farms/farmers, but anyone who has studied farm subsidies in any depth knows there's no way to rationally justify huge swathes of them. I don't know anyone with the requisite knowledge who wouldn't agree with that including farmers and lobbyists (because they generally only like a subset of the subsidies themselves).
I’m from a historically agricultural state, and live in the farming area. Government interventions are regularly mocked
- always have been.
Demand for food plummets when it is no longer fresh. Throwing food away is politically toxic. This creates major problems.
As people get richer they don’t want more food, they want better food. Fresher and more meat based. Which is fine. But means the food when you talk about food “that which prevents us from starving to death” you are quite divorced from actual demand.
People don’t price food based on its anti-starvation capabilities.
Either they follow traditional diets, or they buy for convenience (highly processed), or they are health nuts who live off rice, beans, and kale.
Nobody is trying to maximize calories. Very few people are trying to match their food intake to their amount physical exertion.
All these ontological and teleological models are divorced from how food is actually valued: market “taste” is insanely important under normal circumstances.
Our agriculture sector won’t succeed if it’s based around preventing famine.
It is also the only alternative to a granary system to smooth out the variability of yields each year that might not average out for anything less than 10-15 year spans.
And the granary system regularly still resulted in shortages and famine. While crop subsidization has a bullet proof record of surplus.
You have to look at the population split between urban/rural. In China it is 67/33 and India it is completely reversed at 30/70. And agri continues to be the number one occupation.
Additionally, lack of opportunities is also a problem. India has been focused on services and trailed behind on industrialisation. The current government has been pushing for more industrialisation but they are behind in the curve.
Note that China is where it is because of efforts to do this, on purpose, over decades. 20 years ago, their urban percentage was somewhere in the 40s. We are even seeing more migration to cities in Europe and the US, even though it's unplanned, and it leads to big changes in cost of living thanks to this lack of planning.
So if China took 30 years, give or take, to get to where it's at, with its state capacity, I suspect India will take quite a bit longer.
> Farming in India is still far too labor intensive by world standards. 43% of workers still work in agriculture. [1] For the US, that number is under 2%. China is at 22% as of 2023, and dropping steadily.
Question about farming in India. How much of the process of mechanizing and scaling up agriculture in India is predicated on something like the more widespread use of diesel or other oil/fossil-fuel powered tractors? To replace manual hand labor. If energy costs continue to rise as they are, and all-electric/battery based systems remain costly and out of the reach of the purchasing power of many small to mid sized farmers, what will happen?
Most land holdings are very very small. 1 acre to 5 acres maybe the vast majority. These are all odd sized and shaped and most likely doing different crops based on water availability. To leverage the benefits of mechanization, we need larger land holdings. The farmers have no other ability or income sources, so they hang on it it. Electricity is free. There is no income tax on farming. Govts provide many incentives to get farmers votes. Each state does different things, but they end up copying each others schemes and it gets worse and worse.
Farmers in most regions are no longer poor. Land prices exploded 100 - 500x in a 100 - 150 km diameter around metro areas. Most farmers are now millionaires, yes millionaires in USD. They held on to their land because they didn't know better, the land was useless (no water) and nobody bought it. Now they are going to HODL.
There are mechanization instruments suitable for 5 acre plots, but manufacturers are limited and the potential gains are smaller. Its the same problem as small cheap consumer cars, big investors and capitalists don't want to put money into high volume low margin business with limited market cap. And without mass production costs are significantly higher. Thats why people still maintain 70 year old farmalls and planters and shit spreaders and plows, modern replacements are either crap to be cheap or expensive from low volume.
One difference though is that the agriculture transitions had somewhere for labor to go: factories, construction, urban services, export manufacturing, etc
The optimists will tell you this is just productivity gains. The economy has absorbed automation before; agricultural employment collapsed from ninety percent of the American workforce to two percent and civilization continued. David Autor at MIT has shown that roughly sixty percent of today’s jobs didn’t exist in 1940. New technologies create new categories of work. True. But there’s a difference between an observation about the past and a law of nature, and the optimists consistently confuse the two. The agricultural transition took a hundred and forty years. Carl Benedikt Frey at Oxford has documented that the Industrial Revolution took seventy years before wages and employment recovered for the workers it displaced. In the interim, wages stagnated, the labor share of income collapsed, profits surged, inequality skyrocketed, and the political consequences included the Chartist movement and widespread social upheaval. As Frey puts it: “Most economists will acknowledge that technological progress can cause some adjustment problems in the short run. What is rarely noted is that the short run can be a lifetime.”
I disagree with the implication the author is making with this though:
"But there’s a difference between an observation about the past and a law of nature, and the optimists consistently confuse the two"
For one, laws of nature are understood through observations. That's how science works. Secondly, I can point at many examples across history way past the industrial revolution, agricultural revolution, mitochondria, all the way back to the earliest supernovas...
Through a physics lens... With respect for the meta patterns that transcend emergence and exist in the relationship between complexity and entropy, there is a relevant law of nature.
When a method to do work more efficiently comes to be, and propagates at scale, an explosion of diversity of new kinds of work emerges.
> When a method to do work more efficiently comes to be, and propagates at scale, an explosion of diversity of new kinds of work emerges.
... work that can be done better, and cheaper, by AI.
That's the goal. The idea is not for the people who have invested trillions into AI to find another way to give you money. They think they've given enough money. Now it's time for them to make money. They do that by telling your boss that you're dead weight and that their AI agents can do the same work for a fraction of the cost without vacation days, sleep, office space, or any of the other things associated with humans.
And it's a law of nature that we have people in our species who will gladly take short-term financial gain over long-term social stability. If you can't observe that, then you're not looking very hard.
the USA already went through this when we opened up trade to China and displaced manufacturing workers in USA, the mfg centers in USA that could not adapt withered away. https://www.npr.org/2025/12/29/nx-s1-5660865/why-economists-...
We also did this to a lot of Mexican farmers when the first NAFTA deal went through and small farmers in Mexico were displaced by cheap US farm imports. We keep repeating this, it’s not quite crisis theory of capitalism but workers and small businesses bear the brunt of losses every time.
Ricardian models of trade seem to hold well in real life, and they'd work well too if a lot of work was done by not just AI, but robots. As long as there's limit to the production capacity of the high tech population, there's something that is worth doing where the disadvantage of doing it by hand is lower. It does lead to lower wages there though, and that would basically require investment as to make real necessities dirt cheap, like they are in places where labor isn't worth much.
There's still the fact that claiming to be the owner of the automation, while other people aren't, will be untenable in a world with sufficient inequality. We've seen that happen before when the only justification for the difference in wealth was basically inheritance. Nobles losing land and rights, churches being dispossessed an such things. It'd be a likely outcome if 5% of the people claim to own all automation ever. But that's not about having everyone be unemployed because nobody has any economic value: That's what is unlikely.
Whenever a method to do work more efficiently comes to be and propagates at scale an explosion in diversity of work emerges. This happens at every level of abstraction in nature and has recurred throughout history all the way back to the dawn of life.
Just because I can't predict exactly what work people will do doesn't mean they won't do work. I can take a stab at a few guesses, surely others have more prescience, but the thing about complexity and fractals is it's easier to predict meta qualities than it is specific manifestations.
There is no guarantee that this transition will lead to any type of desirable or meaningful job.
Around the time "Bullshit Jobs" was published, more than a third of people said they believed their job was not meaningfully contributing to the world. Graeber goes as far as saying that more than half of white-collar jobs are actually harmful and kept around only because people associate work with self-worth. There is no way that this number will go down with increased automation.
It's not uncommon to hear Boomers say things like "kids these days don't want to work hard anymore. Everyone wants to be an youtuber, no one wants to be a teacher or a doctor or an engineer". Well, guess what? We are heading to a world where being an youtuber might be the only option.
I mean oddly enough being a Youtuber I would say is not a bullshit job. The demand for entertainment is both genuine and necessary for our well being: soldiers in war play card games and see shows, since ages past the role of entertainer has always existed.
Cranking out some online commerce app looking for margin versus providing something which by definition can't be machine replicated sure doesn't look like a meaningless pursuit to me. The devil is very much in the details.
It doesn't. If it did there'd be massive unmet demand for labor in $sector. There is no value for $sector that is currently reporting being short roughly 100 million headcount. So unless you're counting currently non-existence social safety programs or CCC-style government make-work programs that light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train.
> Looking at how countries coped with a fast transition from labor intensive agriculture to an urban society gives hints on how an AI transition may look. All the Asian countries that went from poor to rich in a generation did this, with different approaches. How that took place may provide more useful info than philosophy.
There's only one problem with comparing urbanization with the AI transition: there were still jobs that the workers moving from farms to urban centers could do. Instead of planting and harvesting, they made things in factories or became professionals.
The idea of the GenAI bet that most companies are making is that you just don't have people doing work anymore. There aren't any jobs for the laborers to do anymore, at least not ones that are likely to fit their skillset and provide a standard of living that they're used to. If you're a software engineer - one of the higher-paying fields of the last half-century - and get laid off because the c-suite thinks AI can do your job for less, you're going to contract your spending.
The article mentions this, but it doesn't take into account that there will be some work (mainly manual labor) that will face at least some resistance to automation for the next decade. These people will try to get into those jobs, because they have bills to pay. It won't pay six figures. It very well might pay less than it is now due to the glut of candidates who are desperate to make any income at all.
The person who went from catered meals and foosball at the office to framing a house when it's 20 degrees F for a third of the money, none of the future, and a lot more body aches is going to be angry. In a society like the United States, it's the kind of angry that you can't solve with an internal passport system. It's going to mean violence.
Eventually, they'll figure out how to do more manual labor with automated systems. That means that there will be even fewer opportunities.
This is nothing like anything we've seen before, and no one wants to acknowledge that.
> There's only one problem with comparing urbanization with the AI transition: there were still jobs that the workers moving from farms to urban centers could do. Instead of planting and harvesting, they made things in factories or became professionals.
Mostly for export, in the case of the Asian tigers and China. Once wages reached developed world levels, an export-driven economy gradually became harder to sustain, because there was no longer a labor cost advantage. This is why Party leadership talks about "dual circulation", building up domestic demand within China, and about obtaining a technological edge that continues to make exports profitable. There's been considerable progress on both goals, especially in consumer electronics and the auto industry.
> The person who went from catered meals and foosball at the office to framing a house when it's 20 degrees F for a third of the money, none of the future, and a lot more body aches is going to be angry.
Yes. That happened to Egypt, where the government paid for college and then hired the graduates. Then the oil ran out.
It's called "elite overproduction" when new college graduates can't get jobs that actually use their education. Already, in the US, about half of college graduates have jobs that don't really need a college education.
Large population countries / economies reach point where there are more people than jobs, excess people gets dumped into subsistence farming or other inefficient sunk cost make job programs so angry horde doesn't burn it all down. You can replace 95% of subsistence farmers, i.e. billions of people with machinery. Probably replace 95% of knowledge workers, i.e. 100s of millions in OECD with AI, but maybe it's just better/stabler for political serenity for horde to keep generating useless make work email chains. Smaller pop countries can probably meander through for a while specializing in a few high value sectors, larger countries will have to deal with disproportionate idle hands, but also more are in favorable position to exploit / consolidate industrial / resource advances.. Hopefully end game dwindling demographics supported by fully automated luxury communism within sustainable carrying capacity. But there's a lot of probably violent steps between draw some circles and draw the rest of the owl. Ultimately we're likely entering period of placating surplus people and managing demographic relative automation / ai progress.
> 43% of workers still work in agriculture. For the US, that number is under 2%. China is at 22% as of 2023, and dropping steadily.
Don't you have to contrast these figures with import and export of produce, and environmental/ecological factors? Technology is one thing, but increasing yields by wasting resources (e.g. water, phosphorous, soil erosion, ...) may increase nominal productivity, but not efficiency. Not saying the conclusion is wrong, but I think your numbers are not necessarily causally linked to productivity/efficiency. I mean, the US also has a declining domestic fabrication percentage, but that's not merely indicative of productivity, but mostly outsourcing/loss of capabilities, I think.
In the US case the large industrial farms are the ones more concerned with things like soil erosion and fertilizer runoff. Both are things we measure and put a number on what is washing away. Smaller farmers know it can be measured but either are stuck in their ways, or just see that they are making money so they don't care.
My point was the possible disconnect of productivity/yield, and efficiency. A small potato and a large potato likely need the same amount of harvesting work. Now, if you dig up finite reservoirs of phosphorous in Morocco to increase yield in the US, you are not increasing efficiency. That's just planetary debt for a wasteful sprint. I think, in the US this is most evident with water usage, where now many aquifers and reservoirs are spent. Hardly indicative of desirable outcome. Sustainable farming usually has much lower yields inherently. And of course, soil quality and erosion dynamics naturally differ greatly across the globe.
When you pull a potato off a field, you're taking with it a bunch of phosphorus. That is why we have to have a replacement for that. I'm not sure how to solve the problem long term. I agree. Morocco wasn't the right answer, but what is?
The solution is easy: Recycle poop and pee. All that sweet nitrogen and phosphorous that has been DNA, ATP and protein is right there in the bowl. The problem is humans flushing all the good stuff down the toilet and into the ocean. With today's knowledge, using human excrement as fertilizer can be done safely. At least recover the phosphorous.
There's no manufacturing sector to employ them if you displace them from agriculture. They'd be displaced into gig economy. This would just increase the population of a handful of metropolitan cities which are already congested. India should fix its cities first.
Both of the preceding comments are true. These things are about to arrive in vast volume, because the factories to build them are already starting to run. And they're nowhere near ready for that.
It took over a decade for Waymo to get from "able to drive around SF for demos" to "3x safer than humans, with thousands of vehicles on the roads".
A lot of these things may end up in closets, next to the VR headset and the 3D TV.
Key statement: "The fact that the ratio between costs of constructing a home and the costs of the various materials is already so low is fundamentally what makes achieving substantial economies of scale difficult."
That's striking. Building houses looks labor-intensive, but, if that's correct, labor cost isn't that large a fraction of the final cost.
For a large part of residential construction if everything is new it only takes a few days to assemble for each step, the rest is just the logistics of choosing and buying the materials and getting delivery. Like even a large house can be entirely framed in a few days, a week at most, with two or three if all the materials are available and the frame design is finalized. With dimensional lumber construction there is a pretty simple way to stack and nail the floors then walls then ceilings then next floor if there is, then rafters. Work goes as fast as you can toss lumber and shoot nails. Everything so with simple blueprints of where the walls are, the height of the walls, and window and door placements. For a framer its like constructing with legos. Then a roof can be put on in half a day, siding 2-3 days, electrical and plumbing a day or two, drywall a day or two to hang and a day or two to mud and sand, painting can be done in a day or two. Getting decent trim might take longer, but it is also a more skilled and detail orientated work. With framing you can ignore 1/16th gaps and everything will settle and flex into a solid foundation. With pieces of trim a 1/16th gap could be a visible problem.
You could potentially go from nothing to an entire nearly finished house in 2 weeks worth of labor, however because the framers, electrocutions, plumbers, siding, flooring, drywall guys are often all separate contractors and the shipping for all those materials are all on different schedules it takes longer. Or if a few guys are doing it all, they will lose a bit of speed by not being specialists for each task, but can make up that time having a more centrally coordinated plan of attack.
Even then the permits and design planning and choosing the windows and siding and flooring and all that is often still the biggest speed bottleneck.
It's a strange way to analyze the situation. By that logic, building from premium materials makes economies of scale more difficult, and building from cheap materials makes it easy.
Also, labor inefficiencies clearly exist, as protectionism by definition creates artificial inefficiencies, and it is rampant in all aspects of construction. It's easy to buy an off-the-shelf and cheap window air conditioner that uses a far more efficient variable-speed heat pump than the fixed-speed heat pump most central HVAC's use, but that same technology is rare in installed central HVACs, because the licensing and certification requirements impede the adaptation of newer more-efficient technology, despite the requirements ostensibly existing to increase its use, but in practice providing protectionism at the expense of modern efficient technology. There's similar effects with protectionism slowing the adaptation of longer lasting, safer, or less error prone infrastructure in other fields of construction like plumbing, electrical, framing, etc.…
Licensing and certification is also easily hijacked by NIMBYists, and because it's not based on actual safety requirements it can vary significantly from region to region, as is demonstrated by nationwide home builders having an efficiency disadvantage over those operating in only one region.
Granted, repealing NIMBYism and protectionism is nearly impossible, so it's not an effective means to reduce the costs of building housing, but it does demonstrate that there is a lot of inefficiency in the process. It also means that the field is ripe for disruption, because a concerted enough effort to sidestep NIMBYism and protectionism could break through and create a significant and immediate impact on the field, as for example, Trader Joe's did with wine importation, Southwest did with scheduled airlines, and Uber and Lyft did with town car services.
> but that same technology is rare in installed central HVACs, because the licensing and certification requirements impede the adaptation of newer more-efficient technology, despite the requirements ostensibly existing to increase its use, but in practice providing protectionism at the expense of modern efficient technology.
In practice, the single stage condensing units tend to be significantly more reliable. Inverter units require specialized control boards and semiconductors. The most advanced piece of logic in my condensing unit is a macro-scale electromagnet that keeps a circuit closed. I have several replacements sitting around my garage somewhere in a box. These components are brand agnostic so I could probably help my neighbors out too (or vice versa).
A single stage condenser can often survive things like a direct lightning strike. Also, if you live in a place like Texas gulf coast region, there isn't really a point to having a speed lower than 100%. You'd have 2-3 weeks out of the year where that would actually be useful.
Most of the world builds low-end homes from reinforced concrete. Most US buyers don't like that.
(I live in a house built from cinder blocks filled with concrete and rebar, like a commercial building. It was built by a commercial builder as his own house. It looks industrial from the outside, and nice inside. I'm fine with that, but most people are not.)
Most of the world doesnt have access to good/cheap canadian lumber and we do. It would make sfhs and even small multihome projects more expensive not less if you start building them from concrete and steel. Also at the risk of stating the obvious - frame is on the order of 10-20% of the total construction cost so wouldn’t really make much of difference anyway
I’m unsure if this solves the problem. Like childcare, we may need to collectively subsidize housing construction to make it affordable. Example: China.
The problem is that the costs of labor and materials from the past are behind us, and there are potentially no material cost and productivity improvements to be had. The costs are the costs and potentially unavoidable.
Does China subsidize housing construction? Is your claim something like "China encourages/forces consumers to save at high rates which lowers interest rates and makes there be more construction"?
Right, as noted above, last week The Economist finally said it's real.
That's a reversal from their previous position. The Economist likes to look at actuals, which always trail real time, rather than projections. Now they can see it happening in past data.
AI deployment is going much faster than previous industrial revolutions, such as railroads and tractors and even computers. When these things take a generation, they get absorbed. When they take less time than a college education, there's a big jobs problem.
This guy tried to resolve a legal dispute without a lawyer. Any competent business lawyer should have been able to straighten this out within days. He even tried to do process service himself, which nobody does. You pay a process server $100 or so for that.
The video has Ed Mansell stating that all the lawyers he spoke to informed him that it would not be financially viable for him to pursue a suit.
Additionally, there is audio of one of the would-be defendants saying that they intend to drag things out as long as possible, basically taunting both Ed and Ben to sue him as they all understand that it is not a viable solution to the problem for Ed.
Part 2 starts with 10 separate $10,000 default judgements won against the store, but they are unable to recover any of the funds.
Ben brings a process server with him to serve new lawsuits against the owners as individuals, and 4 separate times on the same day in the same spot, cops are sent to him. The cops even take the papers from the process server, try to serve the defendant, and then give it back to the process server saying it was refused . After that they don't allow the process server to serve the papers, and then the cops show up the 4th time and Ben is eventually arrested.
Legally, it's one of those Uniform Commercial Code things that was worked out many decades ago - the rights of a consignor in a business transfer.[1] This is a routine problem with standard answers.
In this thread you have admitted to not knowing basic facts about this case. Yet here you are pontificating on the merits. Are you affiliated with B&M? Maybe an employee or franchisee? Why do you feel so strongly you need to defend them?
Sure, it's possible the serving was not done correctly. Even in that case, this does not imply, as you have claimed, that this is "just needless YouTube drama" (emphasis mine). There is clearly a lot going on beyond the obvious flashy setting which is chosen for the presentation.
Arguably, no attention would have come to this matter if not for such presentation, and the perpetrators would have just gotten away with it easily, so it is in fact understandable that things were done in such a way.
Yet you choose to ignore the way more significant issues from B&M's side and focus only on the choices of dramatization of the events, which, if a problem at all, are only marginal in comparison. While further trying to use that a way to try to in fact discredit the more relevant issue.
I feel like I once heard a great word/phrase for this thing where people attack the "civility" of the messenger instead of the actual injustice being reported on, but I can't remember what it was now. It came up a lot during black lives matter protests.
He's not doing any favors to a case that was essentially lost and dead by bringing tons of attention to it to the point where there's a chance it might actually see a positive outcome, plus a good amount of cash via GoFundMe? Sure...
>He is neither affiliated with the person who lost the legos
I haven't watched part 2 yet, but he absolutely is affiliated with the person who lost the LEGOs. He's explicitly working with the son, who was the previous person that was running point on trying to get the sets back until it ruined his life.
> He also didn't leave after the police were called, which is not all that unusual for someone who looks out their window and sees someone they're in conflict with has traveled across the country to stand in front of their door.
> This is just needless YouTube drama generation. I agree, he should have paid a process server to do the job correctly, but that wouldn't be good business for his YouTube channel.
Your ability to create a fantasy to defend the CEOs in this example is, well, frankly depressing. Like, none of what you said is true, but you just confidently made it up and then put it in a comment, why?
If you don't know what's going on, why comment? Why go beyond that and just make stuff up?
> False. I said that a 3rd party traveling across the country to serve papers himself and then sitting in front of the house while police are called 4 times is needless YouTube drama.
Notice how you ignore the second quote? Anyone can literally search these comments see what you said.
I guess there's not much you can do to try to argue that you're not defending the company, when you're claiming the people exposing them are just creating "drama" and are not trustworthy, so you default to just pretending you didn't say it.
This is not pancakes and waffles. This is someone putting out a video saying a corporation is poisoning pancakes, and you at the same time say "the video is not trustworthy" while trying to claim you are not defending the corporation.
> You are awfully obsessed with stalking my comment history and then misquoting what I said.
I'm not stalking your "comment history", I'm just replying to comments in this post. Again, are you incapable of factual accuracy?
> False. I said that a 3rd party traveling across the country to serve papers himself and then sitting in front of the house while police are called 4 times is needless YouTube drama.
Genuine question, how do you think serving papers works?
> These services cost less than traveling across the country to film yourself sitting on the person’s lawn for YouTube content.
Your claim was it costs $100.
This does not balance with the facts where they say they were quoted thousands.
> This is easily Google-able.
Google says it's far more than the $100 you suggested for evasive people.
> I’m baffled
That's clear. If you are baffled, maybe you should stop defending evil corporations until you get all the facts.
> that so many people think this is a normal thing to do
They don't think this is normal.
Why do you think these people think that having a YouTuber try to serve papers is normal? Please, show me the person who says that this is normal.
At least you're not the type who uses an anonymous handle on HN to defend evil companies.
I find it kind of pathetic to think so highly of HN points, to admit to gaming the system, to be so cowardly to say what you believe. Not that I would apply any of that to you. Those types of people are worthless.
The powered charger port door would make sense if there were robot chargers that used it. Tesla demoed that, but people disliked the snake robot approach. Technically, a snake robot is ideal for that, but too many people fear snakes and tentacles.
Rear view cameras are better than rear view mirrors. The field of view is better.
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