You quote correlation and then jump to causation. Any high quality evidence for causation that make you confident it's not depression that drives SM use (or something else entirely driving both)?
The EU is rich enough but will they stay "willing enough"? Unfortunately, many EU parties that are gaining popularity are also against spending money on Ukraine
The concept of the "end of the exponential" sounds like a tech version of Fukuyama's much mocked "End of History". Amodei seems to think we’ll solve all the "useful" problems and then hit a ceiling of utility.
But if you’ve read David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity, Amodei’s view looks like a mistake. Knowledge creation is unbounded. Solving diseases/coding shouldn't result in a plateau, but rather unlock totally new, "better" problems we can't even conceive of yet.
For instance, once you develop atomically precise manufacturing ala Drexler and have a complete model of biology, etc., drive solar panel efficiency to very near the upper theoretical bound for infinitely many junction cells for a raw panel of ~68%, then there isn't really anywhere to go that matters for humans. Material production would be solved, anything you could desire would be manufacturable in minutes to hours, a km^2 of solar panels could power 10-20k people's post-scarcity lives.
You eventually reach the upper bounds on compute efficiency and human upload model efficiency -- unknown but given estimates on upper bound for like rod logic (~1e-34Js/op), reasonably bounds on op speed (100MHz), and low estimates for functional uploading (1e16 flops), you get something in the zone of 0.1nW/upload, or several trillion individuals on 1m^2 of solar panel in space. When you put a simulated Banks Orbital around every star in the Milky Way in a grand sim running on a system of solar panels in space where the entire simulated galaxy has a 15ms ping to any other point in the simulated galaxy, what exactly is this infinite stream of learning? You've pushed technology to the the limits of physical law subject to the constraint of being made of atoms.
Are you envisioning that we'd eventually be doing computation using the entirety of a neutron star or (if they can exist) a quark star? Even then, you eventually hit a wall where physics constrains you from making significant further gains.
There is an ultimate end to the s-curve of technology.
I see your point, however, consider this: to a farmer in 1900, our modern food system is already "end of history" post-scarcity sci-fi.
Back then, one farmer fed ~4 people. Today, thanks to automation, GMO and fertilizers, one farmer feeds ~170. We effectively solved the "calorie problem" for the developed world.
But the economy didn't flatline just because we hit THAT manufacturing ceiling. Value simply migrated from manufacturing (growing wheat, assembling cars) to services (Michelin dining, DoorDash, TikTok influencers). Radio did not turn out to be the last useful invention it was predicted to be. Knowledge generation has sped up dramatically.
Your point is fair regarding hardware - eventually you do run out of stars or hit the Landauer limit. But this is exactly Deutsch’s distinction between resources (finite) and knowledge (infinite). Even in a bounded physical system, the "software" (the art, explanations, and social structures) isn't bounded by the clock speed. We don't need infinite atoms to have infinite creativity and knowledge
Not infinity. Only the path to make steady returns in a few short years. Take disease research. Pharmaceutical companies are not interested in curing disease. They would like to treat disease. That means recurring revenue. They would like to focus on the diseases with the most patients to maximize the market for their product. This is why a dozen plus pharma companies are pursuing glp1 while cutting internal r and d jobs and offshoring everything not specifically bolted to this country by the FDA to India.
This is what depressed me as an early career scientist. Money to do the work to advance our species is not being distributed. Only money to generate more money for a sliver of the ownership class is distributed.
The incentives are broken. We aren’t getting Star Trek in our future. We are getting CHOAM.
"Pharmaceutical companies are not interested in curing disease."
In practice, quite a lot of new drugs are curative. Gene therapy, for example, usually fixes the underlying problem once and for all. Even monoclonal antibodies are rarely of the type that needs to be used for the rest of your life.
If you succeed in putting someone's cancer into remission, that patient has to be monitored for the rest of their life, but they usually don't consume any expensive drugs anymore. The expenses are more on the necessary personnel side.
There is this unpleasant fact that most chronic diseases worsen in the last 2 decades of our lives, when our systems are already seriously dysregulated by aging. Hard to fix anything reliably in a house that is already halfway down.
>Pharmaceutical companies are not interested in curing disease. They would like to treat disease
This is nonsense. Pharma are never in a position where they can choose between curing and treating. 90% of clinical trials fail. Pharma is throwing things at the wall and picking whatever sticks.
Then explain the herd mentality if they were truly all trying all posibilities. No, same old same old. Pharma is not removed from the usual incentives of capitalism. FWIW the line about treatments not cures is pretty much a direct quote from a product manager at a major pharma company I heard speak at an internal presentation. Straight from the horses mouth.
Many of the biggest medical innovations have come from publicly funded university researchers, which then license or give away their findings to private businesses.
Haven't watched the video, but the end of exponential growth isn't the end of growth. It means the percentage growth per year decreases. The Internet also went through an exponential growth phase at the beginning.
You're describing a standard S-curve (logistic growth), which is definitely what happens to parameter counts or user adoption (like The Internet). But Amodei is applying this to scientific discovery itself.
He’s effectively saying the "S-curve of Science" flatlines because we figure out everything that matters (curing aging, mental health, etc.). My whole point was that science doesn't have a top to the S-curve - it’s an infinite ladder (as per Deutsch).
we're on the verge of getting to Moon and Mars in more than rare tourist numbers and with notable payloads. Add to that advancements in robotics, which will change things here on Earth as well as in space. The growth is only starting.
>The Internet also went through an exponential growth phase at the beginning.
If we consider general Internet as all the devices connected i think the exponential growth is still on as for example ARM CPUs shipments:
2002: Passed 1 billion cumulative chips shipped.
2011: Surpassed 1 billion units shipped in a single year.
2015: Running at ~12 billion units per year.
2020 (Q4): Record 6.7 billion chips shipped in one quarter (842 chips per second).
2020: Total cumulative shipments crossed 150 billion.
2024 (FY): Nearly 29 billion ARM chips shipped in 12 months.
2025: Total cumulative shipments exceeded 250 billion.
Anyone can become an artist with no skill and minimal effort while being a carpet installer requires skill and effort. If you are a carpet installer just call it art and get the money
Not true, the share of income going to living necessities has steadily dropped. Even not true for sunlight - the air quality was so much worse that you couldn't see much of the sun anyway
Why is tech high paying exactly? Maybe low supply of qualified labor? Maybe that can be solved with qualified immigration? We can call such a program H1B, for example, and it would benefit the American economy overall at the cost of slightly reducing compensation fir the already extremely highly paying tech jobs.
"I'm being short-changed!" claims rich minority whose high pay even fresh out of university leads to SF rents being unafordable by key workers.
Irony is, that doesn't prevent such sentiments as yours leading to people like Trump. I had a chance to live in the USA years back, I'm glad I didn't bother to take it.
Did Europe find a cheat code that gets free $$$ for education?
Nothing is free - once you graduate you are hit with 50% tax that gets back all you "free" tuition costs many, many times over.
Not saying education should not be subsidized via taxes (I think it's good overall), but it's not free at all - the price is just hidden and spread out over many years (similar to student loans but less visible).
It does. In large part due to Baumol's cost disease - higher overall incomes in productive sector like tech drive up costs for sector with low productivity growth - so professors and admin staff in US make 2x salaries compared to Europe (cost of living adjusted). Also, have you seen EU student amenities and dorm sizes?
Is it necessary for there to be student amenities paid for by the school? Why should tuition pay for a bunch of ancillary nice-to-haves instead of, ya know, the education?
Because schools are in competition with one another to attract students (who have the ability to broadcast applications to multiple schools). The campus life factor is a major part of a student’s decision.
Put yourself into the student’s shoes. If you had the choice between two schools of otherwise roughly equal academic reputation but one offered luxurious residences while the other housed students like medieval monks, which would you choose?
Public schools shouldn't oblige and instead offer the lower cost option. The market will then sort this issue out in a few years. Right now its public = expensive and private = absurdly expensive
EU universities, the amenities are quite meager, as they should be. But for dorms it’s usually single occupancy. Unlike the US where you’re expect to have roommates.
The roommates thing is just part of the socialization of US universities, since many kids are not living anywhere near home and if they aren't forced to become close friends with someone by, say, sleeping right next to them, they often go a little nuts. By the time you are an upperclassman you are generally given your own room or you live off campus.
I've done the US university dorm living. I was already pretty well socialized being involved in many social causes and clubs. Unlike the movies, my roommate and I didn't turn into lifelong friends. Our living arrangement was strictly business. Now, I am lifelong friends with my apartment roommates. We shared a house together but did not share a room.
Also, campus ties you closer to home more than you imagine. They shutdown campus for different breaks and you're more or less forced to go elsewhere, which is typically your family home.
But honestly, double and triple occupancy rooms are completely unnecessary and uniquely American.
>I am lifelong friends with my apartment roommates. We shared a house together but did not share a room.
It depends entirely on the person. I had a similar thing happen to me, except that I managed to get a single my first couple years of school. But I know from others, that it often creates a very intimate, fraternal bond which gives kids some semblance of a family bond before they are able to get a real social life, join clubs, make friends, find a partner etc.
I'm trying to follow you. I don't get how Baumol's has a higher degree of effectiveness in the US than it does in the EU? Are you saying there are more tech companies and therefore tech roles in the US than EU and thus those drive up non-tech wages even though they aren't as productive?
There are lots of reasons why US academics earn so much more than their european counterparts, but the income level of US tech employees is not high on the list, if it is on the list at all.
Also, Baumol's doesn't predict that wages in low productivity growth sectors will rise, it merely notes that the costs in such sectors do not fall, which means that whatever the sector produces (good, services, art etc) become relatively more expensive compared to other production. This is why it appears to cost so much to see the symphony orchestra, even in Cincinnati - it's not that the players all make a ton of money, it's that their productivity is flat, so the costs of the performance appear to rise relative to, say, toothpaste.
I asked Gemini 3 if your statement is true and got this, as expected: "That statement is false.
In fact, the prediction that wages will rise in low-productivity sectors is the central mechanism of Baumol’s Cost Disease"
Somebody asked Gemini 3 yesterday about a piece of music I was looking for. It said:
> Based on the details you provided—specifically the overlap with the poem "AM" (from Be Bop or Be Dead) and "Set The Tone" (from Bernie Worrell's Blacktronic Science)—the track you are most likely looking for is:
"Music" by DeadbEAT (featuring Umar Bin Hassan) Released in 1992/1993 on the album Wild Kingdom, this track was a cult hit in the acid jazz/trip-hop scene of the 90s and later appeared on compilations like the influential Red Hot + Cool (1994).
Very good, except that there is no album called "Wild Kingdom" by an artist named Deadbeat, and while Hassan does appear on "Red Hot + Cool" it is on a differently named track written by himself.
So forgive me if I call bullshit on Gemini 3 as well.
However, in this instance, it is a correct summary of the most visible popular summaries of Baumol's cost disease, so there's that.
I don't think it captures the essence of what Baumol (& Bowen) were writing about, but I accept that my presentation was misleading.
LLM hallucinations are still a thing for ultra niche topics. Not a problem for topics that have sizeable wiki pages, like Baumol Effect. Here is the first paragraph from wiki: "...tendency for wages in jobs that have experienced little or no increase in labor productivity to rise in response to rising wages in other jobs that did experience high productivity growth"
The problem with this summary is that it's not actually what Baumol & Bowen were really focused on in their original paper.
It is what most people nowadays connect with "Baumol's cost disease", but in their paper, the way in which rising productivity sectors cause wage increases in stable productivity sectors was more of a detail than the central part of their thesis. The core part was the observation that certain kinds of economic activity cannot reduce costs through productivity gains, while others can; the wage connection between them was, well, not an afterthought, but more of a consequence of the very specific sort of economic system we live in. One could imagine a society with different ways of distributing resources to labor that didn't really have this feature, and yet the same sectors of this imaginary society's would still suffer from "Baumol's cost disease".
When you break down how budgets have changed, the two biggest drivers of tuition increases are the growth of administration, and fancy amenities like sports facilities.
The cost of the person in front of the blackboard has not been increasing.
Ok, the prior link was comparing it to EU though, so perhaps costs for professors there went down even more, as professors make less there compared to US
From what I understand European education and degree programs are typically much more structured and narrow, and thus finish a lot faster. A student who finishes K-Ph.D. in the US will have a lot more breadth of exposure than such a student in most of Europe, if I recall what I read on the topic a while ago correctly.
When used in a social context, "free" has a different meaning than in many other contexts. It does not mean, for example, "there is no cost for this thing". Rather, it means "the person receiving this thing is not responsible for paying the costs associated with it (at least not at the time)".
Free health care doesn't mean "nobody gets paid to provide health care", it means "patients do not pay for health at the point of service".
If you'd prefer that we use some other term to describe this, please suggest it. I do find it interesting that the Scottish NHS uses "No fees at point of service" as part of their branding (or did, back in 2019).
For sure. The main benefit is that it allows smart, hardworking but poor students to get a degree and utilize their brainpower productively for the benefit of all. That's great.
Just don't say it's "free" - those who get the education pay back all they got via taxes (which in it's end effect are like paying down a student loan).
Just going to point out that this is semantic hair-splitting that usually comes from opponents of governments providing for the social welfare. Not saying you're doing that, but it's a thing that happens.
And nobody thinks free education doesn't cost anything, just like people don't think the military doesn't cost anything. Somehow, though, there is endless trillions for "defense", and a little moth flies out of the wallet when it's for something that doesn't involve drones.
Absolutely. I never would say it is "free". But in many ways it is a matter of what one values.
I had opportunities to move to the US and likely make 2x-3x what I make here and pay less taxes. I chose moving to Europe instead. It is the sort of society I prefer to live in.
People without a degree: Work and pay high taxes for years while their peers are studying, and then continue to pay high taxes to pay for the high salaries of degree holders who used their degrees to get government "jobs".
People with a degree: Get free education and free stipends, then get paid by the tax payers for the rest of their lives in their cushy government "jobs".
I'd reword the question: "was college paid for via higher income taxes for graduates (and others) or via a more direct approach of student loan taking?". I believe the latter but I don't see the fundamental difference. It's the same student loan but hidden from sight, as it's packaged as higher tax %
You're kidding. The former means all higher net worth individuals to take on both the cost (via taxes) and the benefit (a well-trained workforce for businesses, well-paid, highly taxed contributors for the state, an educated populace of voters, graduates with stable work and in-demand skills). The latter is another example of America's "Everyone for themselves" theme, with students bearing the entire cost of their education, while the graduate, public, state, and businesses reap the benefit.
If the benefits are spread so widely, why shouldn't the cost be?
The students bear costs but no benefit to themselves? No higher wages?
My point is that it doesn't matter in principle if one takes a loan and pays it down over time vs. one is taxed at much higher % and that tax "pays down" a phantom student loan of "free" education.
It does introduce a risk and hence the incentive for loan takers to choose their degree wisely though. Which should lead to better allocation of labor but at a cost of some personal risk.
I actually included the graduate as a beneficiary ("a well-paid, highly taxed contributor" or "the graduate" in the counter), but more importantly:
The entirety of society benefits from a well-educated populace. That's one reason even those without children pay for public education.
Following that, if everyone benefits, why is the graduate taking on all the risk (via a non-dischargeable student loan) instead of spreading the risk across the entirety of society?
I think that's fair that risk should be more spread. Comes at a cost of people choosing degrees more frivolously though and wasting their time and everyone's money
I'd like to push back on "useless" degrees here, as well. The idea that degrees that leave graduates struggling to pay their bills (especially with student loans factored in) are worse than degrees that maximize income is bad for society. Not every job that is good for society pays well - if they did, educators would be better paid, and many executives would not be compensated as well as they are.
Some degrees are less in-demand (at time of graduation) economically, but a well-educated populace that can apply critical thinking and remember lessons from history, can be its own reward. Notably, pushing for a population completely lacking these skills is an excellent way to topple a democracy over time.
The pay is determined by supply and demand, apparently there is a relatively large supply of educators (many just enjoy it despite low pay) relative to the demand.
I see your point on broader benefits, however, those are largely speculative while a shortage of e.g. doctors has very direct and concrete costs to the society.
On prior point regarding spreading risks - would you say government should bail out failed entrepreneurs? Because that is very similar in principle (taking risk, benefit for society)
I would struggle to define a truly useless degree though. That's what I'm pushing back on: that learning from our past mistakes, taking in different perspectives from other times, places, and cultures, and learning not only to learn, but to interpret media and think critically, are tremendously important to a healthy society. What you call "frivilous", I would call low-earning.
I'm not saying failed entrepreneurs should be bailed out, even if (through bankruptcy proceedings) they de-facto are. To your point though, they're given tax breaks by my government [0], which aligns with the goals we seem to have agreed are important and good for society at large.
Small businesses are given assistance when starting out and financially vulnerable; financial assistance that is paid for by all members of society, as we all reap the benefits of a stronger economy when they succeed. I'm not sure how one defends not extending the same courtesy to students.
This can only be true if the society gets richer over timer from this process.
Considering that EU has actually become poorer and the gap is becoming larger every year passing, your theory of benefits from a well-educated populace is not well funded.
In the EU, the risk has been loaded onto everyone but the benefits are meager at best, and inexistent in practice.
This is the typical problem of socialist system where everyone bear the cost but the benefits are only distributed to those in power or those who could manipulate the system for their own benefits.
If that wasn't true, France wouldn't be in the political turmoil and economic disaster that it is today. Unsurprisingly, France has been dominated by marxist adjacent ideologies, co-opted by the "resistants", the real winners of WW2. The US won on the ground but largely lost the ideological battle, we are now seeing the result of that invisible battleground.
> The students bear costs but no benefit to themselves? No higher wages?
Nobody said the student achieves no benefit. We keep saying that the student does not capture all the benefit of their own education in higher wages, but bears the entire cost.
Most of you here assume the "Human Capital" model (i.e. you pay to acquire skills), but that entirely misses the actual point of a college degree! 2001 Nobel Prize went for demonstrating that college is basically a quarter million dollar IQ and Marshmallow Test. It's a filtering mechanism that allows employers to tell who is smart and conscientious enough to be productive at work.
Offering education to more and more people via reduced cost mass online courses, lowering entry requirements or similar approaches will only erode the signalling value of a degree further.
Those degrees also don't lead to the jobs they want. My former boss would hire people with degrees in, to do basic admin tasks. I quit because a they hired a guy to be my manager, with a lawyer degree and paid him $20k more than me, to do the same job. But he would spend the whole day on his phone. I'm in a new job, hiring people, and I'm not looking at degrees when it's for a dispatch role.
That's the sad outcome of everyone getting _some_ degree in recent years. Something like 50 years ago 10% had college degree, now it's close to 50%. Meanwhile population IQ score stayed rather stable while willingness to work hard declined. So of course the quality of employees with degrees has dropped and hence the degree is no longer a good signal to employers
You don't think tradespeople are contientious, intelligent, or productive? That's the whole trouble with this filtering signal. It's bogus and has created elitism around professions that are just as hard if not harder than pushing computer keys.
Would you say all people have the same level of intelligence and conscientiousness? If not, we need _some_ way of saying who is, so that they could be matched to higher complexity jobs. It's far for perfect but it works somewhat
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