All the richest sociopaths in SV have latched onto the meme that democracy and (their) freedom (to do whatever they want to the lower classes) aren't compatible, and these people bought control of the algorithms that are currently brainwashing anyone within eyeshot of a screen.
I mostly feel bad for job losses due to AI, but I won't shed a tear for journalists who make a living spreading misinformation about the results of research.
> They found that the risk of heart attack and stroke jumped in those that paused GLP-1 treatments for as little as six months, compared to those who continued taking the medication.
(Emphasis mine) The 'jumped' would more correctly say 'tended to revert to baseline' if you just had a basic LLM summarize this study for you...but then that wouldn't drive clicks and shares on your article.
A few critical items beyond oil are also now in short supply:
Fertilizer, which is kind of important right now since it's springtime and farmers are planting crops around the world.
Plastic, without which modern hospitals can't operate.
Aluminum.
The list goes on, this was the dumbest war in our lifetimes but it's the culmination of a lot of previous stupidity that made it all possible.
The people who started this war are authoritarians and, let's be honest, straight up criminals, who did it to entrench their grip on their own domestic politics.
The sentiment I see is more like, "Are war crimes, mass deaths, a global depression, and maybe WWIII really worth keeping the earlier crimes of Trump and Netanyahu out of the headlines?"
Even if there's plenty of supply, this is still a major supply chain disruption that will have ripple effects. Combine this with all the other major supply chain disruptions.
This might only raise costs a few percent. Yet for some firms that were just barely keeping their heads above water with the tightened monetary policy, and the tariffs, and now spikes in energy prices, this will be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
I agree this is a major disruption, but I don't agree it's the plastic portion to worry about.
Oil, fertilizer, helium. These are the things I'm most worried about especially for their knock-on effects. Fertilizer is going to have a long tail. Like, don't expect a food spike this year, but expect prices on food to go wild next year. That alone is going to majorly effect everything worldwide.
It's not price, it's availability. You construction will slam to a halt. Plumber neighbour is now hiring security dogs for his supply yard as they now have to deal with theft of pvc and PE pipe, in addition to tweakers going after copper.
I'm convinced that the Japanese government is terrified of EVs because all the small and medium-sized businesses which support the Japanese auto industry will be absolutely gutted when vehicles contain drastically fewer parts.
That, and Japan is deeply screwed if they go all-in on EVs and then China decides they shouldn't be allowed access to any more rare earths.
> China decides they shouldn't be allowed access to any more rare earths
This is a common misunderstanding. There are plenty of alternative locations to mine rare earth minerals, particularly Australia. China cornered the market because it's a high pollution low margin business. If geopolitical concerns cut off access to Chinese sources, alternatives will be developed.
Mining isn't the only bottleneck with rare earths. There also the processing, which is an industry China has monopolized through sustained investments over decades. They have also improved processing efficiency through investments in technology. It's going to take a while for anyone else to catch up.
> There also the processing, which is an industry China has monopolized through sustained investments over decades.
I don't think this is the right way to characterize it. China invested when other countries didn't, but they didn't monopolize the market, they have no moat beyond expertise and some tech advancement that could be replicated easily enough. The only moat they have is related perseverance and other countries simply not wanting to put the work in.
I think they do have a moat because they dominate the supply chain not just in the raw material and processing but also in some of the actual technical experience, i.e. the experience of running such processing facilities, and also a monopoly on making the equipment that you need to build such a facility. They put export controls on those equipment and restricted their citizens who work in the rare earths industry from traveling aboard.
Basically, if we want to replicate what they did, we will have to do it mostly from scratch -- Japan and Australia has done some of the work already so it's not totally from scratch. It's obviously not impossible but it could take almost a decade for us to do that.
That said, I don't think this should be enough for Japan to stop investing in EVs. If Japanese car makers are really worried about this then they can build their plants in the US and leverage any deal the US has with China on real earths. They've already starting importing Japanese cars made in India and the US back to Japan so that's an established practice. Then once they've secured their own supplies they can make the EVs in Japan too. I think OP's point about the suppliers have more merit as a reason why Japan might not want to develop EVs.
I have worked with the Chinese REE industry, and we've often bumped heads and shared ideas together with them and I can confidently tell you, the Chinese don't use anything novel that has not been established in Western science already. What they do have is executing rarely-used techniques confidently at scale, but all of that is already often published in the West. The only reason the West hasn't done it is because these techniques are less profitable, and, surprise, the CCP actually forces processors to minimize ecological damage, which further bumps up the costs to the point only large-scale players can exist making such lower profits. You'll often find them using some obscure process alteration that was published minutely in the West.
As an addendum, companies in the REE Sinosphere are often encouraged by the CCP to exchange ideas with each other quite often, while Western companies often lock them behind proprietary patents and competition. While both systems have their pros and cons, the former allows for faster process proliferation (and a lower profit incentive for the innovator).
> the Chinese don't use anything novel that has not been established in Western science already
Like they say: in theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice, they aren't.
It's all well and good to have knowledge of the techniques, or to even have published or created them. But applying them successfully, working out all the kinks, and streamlining everything to become profitable doesn't happen overnight.
I have no doubt alternate sources can exist, but not without significant time and effort.
> my experience with theory is that it includes time and effort considerations
I would never disagree with you here. But the point is that the time and effort you spend on theory doesn't translate to time and effort spent on practice.
What I mean is that since the peak of American REE in the 1970s and 1980s(?) a lot of the engineers who have working knowledge are retired. There's nothing theoretical we can't dig up but I think there will need to be a number of years for the US to catch up in terms of craft knowledge or "metis" (as Dan Wang likes to call it) and processing equipment and plants.
Maybe I'm wrong. I gained my knowledge second-hand/third-hand from books and podcasts so I would defer to you to your actual experience and observations about Chinese REE. What is your estimate on how long it would take the West to catch to at least supply some of the rare earth components and what the real barriers might be? Would love to hear your take on this.
Thanks for sharing your observations. I had no idea about the minutiae of that industry, i.e. the ecological control and its effects on the industry.
No, you're right. China, and even India and Russia, also do not have the same talent problem of the West, in that there is an undersupply of engineers, especially in the geological, processing and chemical sectors. In the US, the average age of the chemical process engineer was touching 50 a few years back. The average age of a process safety engineer is well past 50. While Russia and India lose their technical talent to brain drain, the Chinese govt has done quite a lot in trying to reverse that.
The real barriers are talent and the regulation vs profit motive balance. What I mentioned in my previous comment was effectively an effect of the intersection of the two - you can't find novel ways of processing harmful substances without having the technical talent to find these out in the first place, nor without giving them a free reign after deprioritizing profit.
Let's take arsenic for instance, a substance that's a harmful byproduct arising out of most mining operations. We already have the technology in the West to lock away arsenic into glass, but a.) apart from the big ones, most companies are unaware of them, and b.) even if they were aware of it, the tech is a significant line item that shies investors and companies away from investing into it.
> What is your estimate on how long it would take the West to catch to at least supply some of the rare earth components and what the real barriers might be?
Never. Yes, there are a few companies still engaged in trying to secure REE supply (Glencore being the most notable), but due to Western regulatory and policy limbo, the answer is never. For this to change, you need regulators open to experimentations and a concerted effort by the government in trying to reestablish REE independence, both in extraction and in processing, but I have yet to see either happening. It's telling when frankly the US is the country in the West most likely to catch up still, but the gap is deeper than the Darien Gap .
>they have no moat beyond expertise and some tech advancement that could be replicated easily enough
Moat is decades of process / tactic knowledge built by disproportionate amount of talent on geologic formations others didn't invest in. Right now they generate 15x mining graduates, university of mining tech alone enrolls more than all US mining programs combined. Then you throw all that into a mining city like Batou with 3 million people running vertically integrated operation. That's ecosystem scale with compounded advantages beyond "wanting" to put work in, it maybe scale on PRC has demonstrated ability to produce.
Between shallow kiddy pool and Mariana Trencth in terms of ease of replication, I wouldn't lean towards kiddy pool. I don't think "right way to characterize" their lead is "no moat" beyond... all the things that are actually, in fact very deep moats, as if any country can persevere their way to replicate decades of work and execute industrial policy of a 3 million large city dedicated to mining/rees.
I surmise, PRC will build out EUV (technical problem) and produce them at scale before west+co meaningfully tackles HREEs supply chain (technical and regulatory and industrial problem).
> they have no moat beyond expertise and some tech advancement that could be replicated easily enough
Incorrect, de facto, the only firms invested heavily in the rare earth refineries technology are Chinese for the last 20-30 years. Their moats are as deep as TSMC moats so to say.
Processing is the thing china does, you don't really mine rare earths, they are in many areas. Sure there are substrates it's easier to extract from, but the massive pollution of the processing that china was willing to accept when others were not that allowed them to corner the market. It can be done more cleanly, the US has some processing for strategic reasons (not enough though), but doing it clean is _very_ expensive.
Lets hope the people modifying plants to concentrate elements make work.
As I understand it, some of these processes also require a sufficiently large industrial base to be even remotely economical due to a reliance on industrial 'byproduct' (for want of a better word). Because of this, some of these processes are not something that can be quickly stood up in isolation over a few years. It would take concerted large scale planning over a long time period - something the Chinese system of government is almost uniquely capable of.
Japan is also particularly well positioned because China had used rare earths against them first in 2014. Since then they've created basically a strategic rare earths reserve and done research on how to build some components without them. It's not an absolute solution but between this and future development in friendlier nations, I don't think the rare earth risk is as acute for Japanese automakers.
I do think the original point about lower complexity vehicles being a threat to the suppliers has some merits though. Germany faces a very similar dilemma and made similar decisions.
There are also non rare earth magnets being explored. Niron - Iron nitride - magnets and ultrasonic compaction and other tech that wasn't feasible a while back are now becoming very practical. Japan could probably get to a dominant place with a solid research program, it'd give them a huge advantage for EVs and other motors.
Ford: It recorded a loss of $1.2 billion in EBIT in the third quarter on its EVs, bringing its losses on the segment for the first three quarters of 2024 to $3.7 billion
Honda: Honda to Write Off $15.7 Billion as EV Winter Arrives.
> I'm convinced that the Japanese government is terrified of EVs because all the small and medium-sized businesses which support the Japanese auto industry will be absolutely gutted when vehicles contain drastically fewer parts.
For what it's worth, this theory is blown up by hydrogen based vehicles, which Japan has gone heavily in on. Yes, slightly more parts than an EV, but not a ton. And the drivetrain is electric.
It really shows the bias in Honda’s management here. They’ve also spent years trying to develop and promote their hydrogen fuel cell cars and it’s just as much of a failure as their EV division yet they aren’t axing that golden child.
That's a fundamental misunderstanding of why they're going in on hydrogen so hard - it's something they can generate domestically and without geopolitical implications.
If there is a war with china or in the middle east, hydrogen vehicles are somewhat immune to oil or rare earth spikes.
They will likely never roll out hydrogen power in any large capacity but the capability will be there if they need it
If we get into an actual shooting war with China, I don't think there's enough hydrogen generating facilities to make much of a difference. If maybe 20% of vehicles on the road were using hydrogen, maybe?
Considering how much money and effort both Toyota and Honda have poured into trying to kick start a hydrogen economy over the past decade and a half, and how much EV technology was evolved over the same time span, would it not make more sense to switch to the technology that actually is proven and actually has consumer demand for?
It's not like they're switching all that military hardware to hydrogen too.
Japan can't solve all of its energy woes, but it can ease it a lot by restarting all the nuclear reactors they shut down after Fukushima, and to be fair, they've been trying [0], but stuff breaks after not having been used in over a decade.
Is there a place somewhere in the world where Hydrogen powered passenger vehicles are a success? I know that the one Hydrogen filling station here in Australia's Capital City has shut down after opening with great fanfare a few years ago. And the approximately 20 or so Hydrogen cars it supplied are no longer being used.
I just looked it up for Germany[0] and there were a whopping 3 (0.0%) new hydrogen fuel cell cars registered in Februrary 2026. Even LPG cars were more with 397 registered.
For comparison 21.9% were BEVs, 11.5% Plugin hybrids, ~51% pure petrol or non plug-in hybrid, and 14.8% Diesel.
They have not gone heavely in on hydrogen based vehicles. They have talked about it a lot, and given some subsidies, but nothing so major as to make any impact at all.
Also, they invested in in hydrogen internal combustion engines just as much.
Japan is the only other country besides China and Korea that produces magnets of high quality (higher in fact than the Chinese), they just don't do the volume. But there is absolutely no doubt that they could scale up if they wanted to.
They're just more expensive, but not even that much.
India is looking to produce 6000 tonnes of NdFeB magnets per year with the first batch coming out in mid 2026. This is great news because India has large rare earth reserves and are producing using the full supply chain of ore to oxide to magnets. 6000 tonnes is like 3% of the global supply but that’s not bad for year one.
They manufacture the magnets, but they don't produce the rare earths themselves. They're still getting something like 60-70% of their supply from China.
Right, and that 20-30% drop took them fifteen years. That's not exactly the blink of an eye, they're still looking at many decades to fully wean themselves off Chinese sources.
Toyota just had three large EV announcements and they are putting large incentives on some of them. Feels like they're serious about it and with so many others exiting the EV market lately they may have timed it well.
> all the small and medium-sized businesses which support the Japanese auto industry will be absolutely gutted when vehicles contain drastically fewer parts.
EVs have lots of the same parts as an ICEV - the differences are engine and power systems, fuel tank, transmission... Most of the car is still there. There is a lot of churn - lead-acid is out, fuel injection, sensors are different and sense different things, and so on, but it's still a car.
I've read that the Japanese electrical grid would be hard to upgrade to charge lots of electric vehicles, and that somewhat explains their enthusiasm for hydrogen.
I live in Japan and IMHO the problem is that it is an extremely conservative and risk averse country, "if it ain't broke don't fix it" taken to the extreme. They had a period of innovation after WW2 out of necessity, but after the bubble crash of 1990 they reverted back to their old selves.
Japan is just being the usual USA vassal. Since now China absolutely dominates EV and batteries, they rather align themselves with the oil-thirsty war monger.
To clarify: in a number of states a Real ID doesn't include a citizenship indicator, and a Real ID in those states is not sufficient identification for voting purposes.
For the majority of existing Real IDs, they will not be valid proof of eligibility to vote.[1]
> While your REAL ID would count as a photo ID when voting, in only a few states would it be considered proof of citizenship. Only five states — Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Vermont and Washington — offer the type of enhanced REAL IDs that explicitly indicate U.S. citizenship.
> Outside of those states, you would need another document to prove you were born in the U.S.
> If the AI determines you’re impaired (blood alcohol ≥0.08% or showing fatigue), it can prevent ignition startup or limit vehicle speed.
Tesla does absolutely nothing like this. The closest things are that it'll kick you out of AP/FSD if you're screwing around with your phone, and it'll advise you use AP/FSD if you're driving manually and pinging between lane lines.
I’m talking about general attention tracking, but this is still just an extension of that and not “surveillance.”
It’s also a hypothetical at this point because the system doesn’t exist, and there’s no consensus about whether it’s “fail open,” vulnerable to a centimeter square patch of electrical tape, or if it can randomly brick your car when it has errors. I would bet on the former.
I agree that it's worth understanding that the law does not ask for any of this information to leave your car, so "federal surveillance tech" is a bit exaggerated. I have an unimpressive Honda Accord, and it will ding and display an alert if it suspects I'm drowsy.
But this law would step beyond that. It does require that the car "prevent or limit motor vehicle operation if an impairment is detected."
I'm not a transit safety expert, but that itself seems potentially dangerous - even just limiting speed, if it happens on a highway, could be difficult to handle. And of course, the detection systems will have false positives.
Since the rules don't seem to be in any real form of finality and the government largely exists at the pleasure of corporations these days, I am skeptical that Big Government is going to suddenly be forcing Elon to brick your CyberTruck if you have an imperial IPA.
My prediction is that, in the end, this is simply going end up being a system to steer you off to the side of the road if you pass out at the wheel.
The technology that the NHTSA wants to mandate as soon as it is commercially available is not a warning, but "prevention". From the NHTSA report, page 3: "prevent or limit motor vehicle operation if an impairment is detected" - https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2026-03/Report-t...
I don't know anything about Teslas - you were the one that wrote "Many vehicles, IIRC including Teslas, already have this safety feature". The $BAD_THING I was talking about is the one in the NHTSA report. I took you at your word that the two "safety features" were the same. My mistake.
> Contrary to popular belief, "$BAD_THING is widespread" is not a defense of $BAD_THING.
in response to my pointing out that Tesla does something like this now. So I'm asking: why do you believe that Tesla alerting drivers that it looks like they're driving while fatigued is a $BAD_THING? Your stance seem to be a nonsensical knee-jerk reaction against a simple safety feature, so I'm trying to understand your thinking. Do you also oppose anti-lock brakes?
It's not even required by 2027. The title isn't true. The 2027 deadline is for a standard to be created. The tech won't make it into cars for years after that.
> My prediction is no, because productivity gains must benefit the lower classes to see a multiplier in the economy.
Baumol's cost disease hurts the lower classes by restricting their access to services like health care and education, and LLMs/agents make it possible to increase productivity in these areas in ways which were once unimaginable. The problem with services is that they're typically resistant to productivity growth, and that's finally changing.
If you can get high quality medical advice for effectively nothing, if you can get high quality individualized tutoring for free, that's a pretty big game changer for a lot of people. Prices on these services have been rising to the stratosphere over the past few decades because it's so difficult to increase the productivity of individual medical practitioners and educators. We're entering an era that could finally break this logjam.
"Baumol's cost disease hurts the lower classes by restricting their access to services like health care and education, and LLMs/agents make it possible to increase productivity in these areas in ways which were once unimaginable."
You've expressed very clearly what LLMs would have to do in order to be economically transformative.
"If you can get high quality medical advice for effectively nothing, if you can get high quality individualized tutoring for free, that's a pretty big game changer for a lot of people. Prices on these services have been rising to the stratosphere over the past few decades because it's so difficult to increase the productivity of individual medical practitioners and educators. We're entering an era that could finally break this logjam."
It's not that process innovations are lacking, it's that product innovations are perceived as an indignity by most people. Why should one child get an LLM teacher or doctor while others get individualized attention by a skilled human being?
> Why should one child get an LLM teacher or doctor while others get individualized attention by a skilled human being?
Is the value in the outcome of receiving medical advice and care, and becoming educated, or is the value just in the co-opting of another human being's attention?
If the value is in the outcome, the means to achieving that aren't of much consequence.
More subtly, what is an education? What is care? As you point out, the LLMs are (or probably will become) perfectly good at the measurable parts of those services; but I think the residual edge of “good” education/care is more than just the other human’s co-opted attention.
How many of us have a reminiscence that starts “looking back, the most life-changing part of my primary or secondary education was ________,” where the blank is a person, not a curriculum module? How many doctors operate, at least in part, on hunches—on totalities of perception-filtered-through-experience that they can’t fully put into words?
I’m reminded of the recent account of homebound elderly Japanese people relying on the Yakult delivery lady partly for tiny yoghurt drinks, but mainly for a glimmer of human contact [0]. Although I guess that cuts to your point: the value in that example really is just co-opting another human’s attention.
In most of these caring professions, some of the value is in the measurable outcome (bacterial infection? Antibiotic!), but different means really do create different collections of value that don’t fully overlap (fine, I’ll actually lay off the wine because the doctor put the fear of the lord in me).
I guess the optimistic case is, with the rote mechanical aspects automated away, maybe humans have more time to give each other the residual human element…
> How many of us have a reminiscence that starts “looking back, the most life-changing part of my primary or secondary education was ________,”
For me it was a website with turotirals on how to make flash games. It literally launched my career and improved the quality of life for my whole family by an order of magnitude.
I am primarily the naysayer of AI but I admit that current LLMs could have easily replicated the whole website.
I love, love that. And if even one of my weird little side projects—including the ones I build with AI-powered tools—connects with a young person like that, I’ll be satisfied.
To me it’s not the “how” so much as the “what,” though.
I can only speak to my own experience with that sort of thing, but how much of what moved you was the invisible authorial hand behind the tutorials—deciding what’s fun to them to write about, and how to talk about it in a way that clicked with a young you?
I guess, what’s the difference between that website, the official docs for the language in question, the formal spec for the language, the .h files themselves that mechanically define the engine that compiles the language, a big pile of examples of working code in the language…
For that matter what’s the difference between what’s fun to do in the language and what’s boring?
I would grant that LLM tech would probably shine at the grunt work part of “please translate these docs into a grade-school-pitched, engaging, example-driven tutorial website; make it dinosaur themed.” But equally it could pitch it for a billion other audiences, and most will not bear fruit without guidance and refinement. And LLM frontends are already same-y, what will distinguish it to your young eyes? Knowing (or finding out) what’s worth doing is the tricky part—and that’s hard to separate from the humans on the receiving end.
I think about when tiktok made it “easy” to recut songs and memes, and to do basic compositing effects. The “how” required specialized software and serious skill for a long time, then suddenly it didn’t. But when it comes to the “what,” there are still people who are good at using the tools and ones who are bad—ones who make good content and ones who make bad ones… and the difference seems to cleave along the normal human lines: innate talent + practice + persistence.
As the old saw goes, contemporary art: “But I could do that!” “Yeah, but you didn’t.”
Alternatively, as the fox said, “C’est le temps que tu as perdu pour ta rose qui fait ta rose si importante”…
After reading your comment I take back my last sentence. I dont think the LLM would have been able to create that website becaue what LLM would have created would have been an uninspiring husk of tutorials. The website had a certain personality to it with the choice of games he would make and the "interesting" problems he would demonstrate and give solutions to.
The supply/demand picture here is more complicated than it looks.
If AI displaces human educators, yes, their supply shrinks -- but we can't assume what direction its demand will go.
We've seen this pattern before: as recorded music became free, live performance got more expensive, and therefore much less accessible than it used to be.
What's likely to happen is that "worse" (read: AI) education will become much cheaper, while "better" (read: in-person) education that involves human connection-driven benefits will become much less accessible compared to what it is today.
Most people may be consider it a win. It's certainly not a world I'm looking forward to.
Important follow-up to my comment: as fewer people do X -- live music, medicine, education, you name it -- fewer talented people do it as well.
Fields need a large base of participants to produce great ones. This is exactly why software has been so extraordinary over the past 30 years: an unusual concentration of gifted minds across the entire humankind committed themselves to it.
In my view, Bach, Rachmaninoff, Cole Porter equivalents today probably aren't writing symphonies. They've decided to write code for a living. Which is why any Great American Songbook made today won't hold a candle next to one from 1950s.
Disagree, we do have the Bach's and Rachmanioff's today: John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, Bear McCreary, Yuki Kajiura, Hans Zimmer, and probably a slew I'm not even aware of today.
We're in the greatest era of symphonies IMO, it's just that they're hiding in surprising places; movies, TV shows, games, etc.
I don't think we can know whether or not this is the case in our own lifetimes, because we are so immersed in popular culture that we can't be objective about it. Enough of our historical great composers weren't venerated until after their deaths, and to describe composers as "hiding" within the most popular media of our era is a great disservice to the many composers that don't have the fame, connections and reputation to be hired to write for these.
I would also point out that composing for a medium like a game or a movie places a great deal of constraints upon the composer, in terms of theme, cost of instrumentation, duration and most importantly: what is safe and palatable for an executive to approve of.
And AI is stuck in the past. As we prepare to launch a new product… people using AI won’t know about it for months or years, potentially. This will make startups have to seed the planet with text so an AI learns about it, not to mention normal SEO and other shit. I’m sure it is only a matter of time before you can pay to inject your product into the models so it knows about it faster, but incumbent companies will pay more to make sure they don’t.
> I’m sure it is only a matter of time before you can pay to inject your product into the models so it knows about it faster, but incumbent companies will pay more to make sure they don’t.
You have just discovered the fully enshittified version of the business model ai companies hope to reach.
> Is the value in the outcome of receiving medical advice and care, and becoming educated,
Absorbing information doesn't make you "educated". Learning how to employ knowledge with accountability and trust with beings in the real world is what's important, and a machine can't teach you how to do that.
> or is the value just in the co-opting of another human being's attention?
Why is it "co-opting" if it involves a mutually consenting exchange?
Neither does traditional human interacting education - those are things you learn in your first jobs in the real world, regardless of how you were educated.
Even if you have perfect medical information and advice through an LLM, can you perform surgery on yourself? Can you prescribe yourself whatever medication you think you need?
For education, if you know as much as the average Harvard grad, can you give yourself a Harvard degree that will be as readily accepted in a job application or raising funds for a new business?
It's interesting that you assume there's value in being educated in this hypothetical world of complete passive consumption.
The world you're describing is one where the entire economic value of humanity is in reminding the AI to put out the food bowl and refill the water dish at the appropriate time.
The interesting thing here is less about what people aspire to, and more about the lack of imagination and thought when considering the world they want to create.
It would be funny if the sleepwalkers weren't trying so hard to drag humanity along.
The premise of your argument is that "the outcome" can be separated from the process. This is true enough for manufacturing bricks: I don't much care what processes was used to create a brick if it has certain a compressive strength, mass, etc.
But Baumol's argument, which you introduced to the conversation, is that outcome and process cannot actually be distinguished, even if a distinction in thought is possible among economic theorists.
> But Baumol's argument, which you introduced to the conversation, is that outcome and process cannot actually be distinguished
How is that Baumol's argument? How is 'outcome' vs 'process' relevant to his argument at all?
'Cost disease' is just the foundational truth that the cost of the output from industries with stagnant productivity will increase due to the fact that the workers in that industry can be more valuable in other industries, reducing the number of relative workers in the stagnant industry.
If you want to make the output from a stagnant industry available to a broader spectrum of the population then you have to improve the productivity of that industry.
I think he means that when you go to watch the symphony orchestra, you are going to watch a bunch of people sitting with their instruments, manually playing them.
There is no way to separate this process from the product of the process.
You're not buying the sound of the music. You can just stream that. As far as that is the product, it has already been automated and scaled so millions of people can hear it at once, whenever they feel like it.
You're buying the sound AND the people sitting in their formal clothes manually moving their strings over a violin, with painstaking accuracy developed through years of manual practice.
You couldn't make a robot do it, for example. You could maybe make a robot play a violin, but that again isn't what the product is.
The product is tied to an expectation of what it is that does not allow for it to be done more effectively.
By contrast manufacturing processes are not tied to this expectation. If I buy a loaf of bread, I don't care whether the wheat was manually harvested or harvested by a huge machine.
The musical performance example is just one example. The general problem of services being resistant to increased productivity, however, is not restricted to this somewhat unique case. That's why I pointed to medical advice and education: when I need a medical consult or personalized tutoring, I don't specifically care if I have to lock down irreplaceable moments of another human being's life in order receive them.
It's misguided to focus on one special case of the cost disease problem where human by definition must provide the services, when most of the time this is not the case.
It's very true for healthcare (especially mental healthcare) and education today as well, because for most people, the choice isn't LLM vs. human attention - it's LLM vs. no access at all.
It's not inherently insolvable, it's just nearly impossible to solve because the alternative solutions tend to have "overhaul the global economy and human nature" as their prerequisite.
Pretty much all of humanity's tough problems, the ones we can't seem to make much progress on despite centuries or more of trying, are at their core coordination problems. We only really make progress on those when we can sidestep explicit coordination in some way. Every other kind of problem is usually amenable to technology, and we've solved most of them already, largely in the last 200 years.
> the value just in the co-opting of another human being's attention?
Thats a weird way of describing it.
A machine telling me to exercise and eat right will be ignored, even if the advice is correct. A person I trust taking me aside, looking me in the eye and asking me the same would be taken far more seriously.
That may well be true if you need to be persuaded to exercise and eat right.
OTOH, if you don't need to be persuaded and just want information on how best to go about doing it, then I think it makes little difference where the information comes from as long as it's of reasonable quality.
The specific example was indeed a poor one since we have extensive data on that, and even high-touch non-surgical interventions involving hours per week from multiple specialists (read: incredibly expensive) with very-willing participants have proven a lot less effective than one might hope (somewhat effective! But only moderately so, which ain't enough given the price tag). Docs saying "eat better and exercise" at an annual check-up has basically no effect whatsoever.
Turning dozens to hundreds of decisions per week for which the correct decision must be made in nearly every case, into a single decision per week for which the correct choice must be made, has proven wildly more effective than any of that (I mean glp-1 agonists).
It also seems like the value of quality tutoring that doesn't primarily function as social/class signaling goes down as tools capable of automating high quality intellectual work are more widely available.
It depends on outcome again: is the value of tutoring the social class elevation, or is it in the outcome of becoming more skilled and knowledgable?
There's also the deeper philosophical question of what is the meaning of life, and if there's inherent value in learning outside of what remunerative advantages you reap from it.
I feel like lobster’s history might be relevant here - will at some point having a flawed forgetful human being give medical advice be for poor people?
That's reasonable, but don't feel like you're safe letting the humans rest on their laurels. Human medical errors kill thousands upon thousands every year.
>If you can get high quality medical advice for effectively nothing
This is an area where a confident, but wrong information is extremely costly. It’s like saying an LLM can give you high quality directions on how to tap into a high voltage transformer. Sure, but when it’s wrong, it’s very very wrong with disastrous consequences. That’s why professions like doctors and Engineers are more regulated than others.
It is definitely too early to expect AI medical advice to be usable (except in very limited instances) but the question is how long and how far will that change? After all, human doctors don’t do so well with new or under documented or rare conditions (consider the history of alpha-gal allergy or lyme disease sufferers even now).
By the time it replaces doctors, nobody but today's investors will be able to afford anything at all. The X-shaped economy would have owners in the V and manual laborers (assuming this doesn't translate to gains in automation) in the ^. This outcome is worth avoiding...
I'm not certain that a already observable negative impact of AI on some areas of education could be offset by "high quality individualized tutoring for free".
Can a robot write a medicine prescription? A medical procedure prescription? If yes, that would be a game-changer. But the medical insurance providers would be very cautious about honoring these. Then, if things go wrong, what entity would be held accountable for malpractice?
You already can get a good-quality medical advice "for nothing", unless it requires e.g. a blood test. The question is, how actionable such an advice is going to be, and how even the quality is going to be.
There's a simple solution. If a medical malpractice happens, law suit against the LLM company. If their license is revoked as part of that finding, unfortunately that applies to the "doctor" (e.g. ChatGPT).
Same for self-driving. Just hold each car like a normal driver, the owning AI company has liability. So after ~20 tickets and accidents in a week, a few ambulances being blocked, the only option is to revoke the driver's license (of which, all the cars share one, as they have the same brain).
This would make AI companies more cautious and only advertise capabilities they actually have and can verify. They would be held to the standard of a human. I think that's reasonable (why replace humans if the outcome is worse, and why reduce protections for individuals).
To make the analogy more clear: even if a telemedicine doc sees 10,000 patients a day all over the world, they would be held liable for any medical malpractice. Bad enough, and their license would be revoked, regardless of the fact that they see many patients all over the world. Same deal with AI / LLM -- if ChatGPT is making medical advice and it hurts someone, that's the same as a human doing so -- its malpractice and lawsuits can happen.
If they are somehow licensed, well then that license can be revoked. We would revoke a human's license for a single offense in some cases, the same should occur with AI.
Well, there's always wars as the way to get rid of people. I really don't rule out that the people that benefit from this sort of thing will purposefully steer the world in that direction because the poor won't have any choice other than to enlist as a way out of their situation, and never mind the consequences. You can already see some of this happening.
You could get high quality medical advice 20 years ago on the internet, or 40 years ago in the library. Doctors aren't there to give you advice, they are mostly gate keepers. Every person who's chronically ill knows that doctors are totally useless for anything beyond the 10 most common diseases and primarily exist to approve or reject your pleas for lab work. They won't go away, neither will psychotherapists and all the middle managers that can be easily automated, because their real purpose is not the practical work that they do.
I’m sick of this idea that “free” services are beneficial to society. There is no such thing as a free lunch; users are essentially bartering their time, attention, IP (contributed content) and personal/behavioral data in exchange for access to the service.
By selling those services at a cost of “free”, hyperscalers eliminate competition by forcing market entrants to compete against a unit price of 0. They have to have a secondary business to subsidize the losses from servicing the “free” users, which of course is usually targeted advertising to capitalize on the resources paid by users for access. Or simply selling to data brokers.
With the importance of training data and network effects, “free” services even further concentrate market power. Everyone talks about how AI is going to take away jobs, but no one wants to confront how badly the anticompetitive practices in big tech are hurting the economy. Less competition means less opportunity for everyone else, regardless of consumer benefit.
The only way it works if the “free” service for tutoring or healthcare is through government subsidies or an actual non-profit. Otherwise it’s just going to concentrate market power with the megacorps.
This 1000x. "Free" is only a viable business model if the govt funds it. Otherwise, the $$ has to come from somewhere else in the company - how long will it take for the company to lose interest in a loss-leader when they're making $$ from other parts?
Look at all the deprecated Google products. What happens when Gemini-SaaS makes billions from licensing to other companies, and Gemini-Charity-for-the-poors starts losing money?
Sadly, the bigger the $$ in the tech pie, the more we have attracted robber barons, etc.
> I’m sick of this idea that “free” services are beneficial to society. There is no such thing as a free lunch; users are essentially bartering their time, attention, IP (contributed content) and personal/behavioral data in exchange for access to the service.
In aggregate, this is true, but there are many ways to game the system to one's advantage and get a true "free lunch." For example, people watching Youtube with an adblocker and logged out don't provide Google with any income or useful telemetry. Likewise you can get practically unlimited GPT/Claude/etc by using multiple accounts.
No, you are misunderstanding th economic principle. There is still a cost associated with serving that user, and the user is still paying for the cost of their internet connection and the opportunity cost of spending time on the service, or of setting up new accounts to get past usage limits. “No useful telemetry” I don’t really agree with in the YouTube example, as view counts are still vital for their recommendation algorithm.
TINSTAFL has two main implications. First that nothing is free, someone has to pay for it. Second is that money is not the only thing you pay with; every choice has an opportunity cost. Gaming the system costs someone something.
No human doctor needs to do that either - today, they just IR scan your temple or forehead. In a dedicated medical environment, there’s no reason that couldn’t automatic be fed into the AI.
You're implying that insurance companies will allow prices to fall and lower their profits. That seems like a really unlikely event in the current economy. They fire a lot of doctors and nurses, but they won't lower prices.
The ACA requires 80-85% of health insurance to go toward medical care (medical loss ratio). The way they work around that is to figure out how to charge more for medical care.
Yes, because the designers of the system were well-read and understood that raw democracy, like oligarchy and autocracy, is something that republics devolve into.
Rule by the many is great, but the historical evidence shows it's clearly unstable. The Constitution is designed to maximize the advantages while hedging against its inherent instability.
> The game is rigged in favor of big money and has always been so rigged.
I would say the game is rigged in favor of production, of which capital is a big part, because those who don't produce end up being governed by those who do.
> Yes, because the designers of the system were well-read
Well-read in the 18th century. And they borrowed heavily from 17th century philosopher John Locke. Imagine relying on 17th or 18th century medicine now.
The founders weren't nearly as wise as they're alleged to be. For example, they thought their system would suppress political parties, and then political parties arose almost immediately.
> Rule by the many is great, but the historical evidence shows it's clearly unstable.
Which historical evidence are you referring to? Most of history is nondemocratic.
In any case, the US broke out into an extremely bloody civil war less than 75 years after the Constitution was ratified, so it hasn't been "stable", not that stability is even desirable under a plutocracy.
> I would say the game is rigged in favor of production, of which capital is a big part, because those who don't produce end up being governed by those who do.
Let's see a rich dude produce anything all by himself. We like the pretend that the one rich dude is producing everything and his thousands of employees are basically superfluous.
> Let's see a rich dude produce anything all by himself. We like the pretend that the one rich dude is producing everything and his thousands of employees are basically superfluous.
We're certainly in agreement here, but I would say that most modern wealth is fictional: based on equity, which is based on credit, which is based on confidence, which at the end of the day is just vibes. So most of the 'wealthy' people exist as such with social permission because they're employed in production, and if they fail at that job the wealth rapidly evaporates. However, they're definitely wildly overpaid in the US. That, imho, is because culturally this country still wants to cosplay at having an aristocracy.
> So most of the 'wealthy' people exist as such with social permission because they're employed in production, and if they fail at that job the wealth rapidly evaporates.
It's misleading to say "they're employed in production", using the present tense. Many were engaged in production, and some choose to remain engaged, but others don't. It doesn't seem to matter much. Bill Gates quit his job 20 years ago, claims to be trying to give most of his money away, yet he's still one of the wealthiest people in the world. The dude was already ultra-wealthy by age 30. Sure, he engaged in production for a number of years, but most ordinary workers have no choice but to engage in production for 40 or 50 years or their life at least.
The ultra-wealthy are not wage earners, paid by their labor. They are capital owners, and capital continues to earn returns regardless. If you're smart with your wealth and diversify, and by smart I mean not dumb—safe long-term investment doesn't take a genius—it's extremely hard to lose it all. That would happen only if you put all of your eggs in one basket. I'm not aware of too many riches to rags stories, except among professional athletes for example. But those athletes were wage earners rather than capital owners. They don't own the sports teams.
Your question is ambigious. Are you asking what a different system would look like, or how we would get there?
As for the first question, there are many obvious ways to improve the system. Here are some suggestions: abolish the electoral college, abolish the Presidential veto and pardon, abolish the Senate, abolish lifetime Supreme Court terms, add term limits for Congress, publicly fund political campaigns and outlaw campaign contributions as illegal bribery, allow public recall campaigns against the President, Congress, and Supreme Court, etc.
As for the second question: "The biggest problem with the US is that we haven't had a political revolution in 250 years."
An Orwellian dystopia has grown unabated, regardless of who is in power. Remember that the Snowden revelations came out in the Obama administration. The pervasive surveillance that has invaded every aspect of our lives is not even a political issue that leaders debate. The political duopoly has been bought off. I'm not sure exactly who you think "the good guys" are.
It's a feature.
All the richest sociopaths in SV have latched onto the meme that democracy and (their) freedom (to do whatever they want to the lower classes) aren't compatible, and these people bought control of the algorithms that are currently brainwashing anyone within eyeshot of a screen.
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