> If robots produce so much value that it is actively not even viable for humans to work, the only real logical solution is to distribute the profits
You don't understand. Almost nobody actually thinks about this in the right way, but it's actually basic economics.
Salt.
We used to fight wars for salt, but now it's literally given away for free (in restaurants).
If "robots produce so much value" then all that value will have approximately zero marginal cost. You won't need to distribute profits, you can simply distribute food and stuff and housing because they're cheap enough to be essentially free.
But obviously, not everything will be free. Just look at the famous "cost of education vs TV chart" [1]. Things that are mostly expensive: regulated (education, medicine, law) and positional (housing / land - everyone wants to live in good places!) goods. Things that are mostly cheap: things that are mass produced in factories (economies of scale, automation). Robots might move food & clothing into the "cheap" category but otherwise won't really move the needle, unless we radically rethink regulation.
Regulation might be one part of the equation, but I would like to understand a bit deeper on how much of cost driver it is.
Healthcare is heavily regulated in some countries and less in others. It should be possible to get some comparisons.
I somehow feel that making many humans healthy is fundamentally a really hard problem that gets harder every year because the population ages and expectations rise. It feels to easy of a talking point to put it all on regulation.
This is very well thought-out. But if regulation has such power, shouldn't we find better ways to use it?
Yeah, I know, it's very hard to craft good legislation. In fact, there's this problem of agency: the will to have things be a certain way is not always in the humans, or does not always emanate from the direct needs of the people. Many of the problems of modern capitalism are because there's emergent agency from non-human things, i.e. corporations. In the case of US, agency emerging from the corporate world has purportedly sequestered democracy. But there also agency emerging from frenzied political parties that define themselves as opposition to each other with a salted no-mans-land in the middle. This emerging agency thing is not new; it existed before in other institutions, e.g. organized religion. In any case, the more things there are vying for power, the less power people have to govern themselves in a way that is fair.
With AI, there's a big chance we will at least super-charge non-human agency, and that if we can avoid the AIs themselves developing agency of their own.
Um, what?! The Earth is currently in an ice age - it used to be hotter most of its history.
How did life survive if it was too hot for photosynthesis?
It’s one thing to say that the planet is warming up (from freezing to normal temperature) too fast, but saying that it will be too hot for photosynthesis is just not credible.
The last million years had comparable temperatures, you'd need to go back to 50 Myr ago to have a significantly warmer climate, and without inland glaciation anywhere on Earth.
I think that misses the point (or at least my point). Yes it was warmer then. But it was even warmer 50 Myr ago. For example one thing that sets the two periods we are discussing apart was if Antarctica had glaciers at all or not.
So why is "distilling from N-gram" better, why does it make the transformer learn English faster?
Hypothesis: it's the standard "teacher-student" or "distillation" trick - if you're learning next-token-prediction, you only learn what the correct answer is (i.e. the spike in probability), but when you're distilling from a teacher model, you learn the entire distribution of potential answers.
Curious, can anyone more experienced in AI research comment on this?
The idea is, if you live in your own house, you’re no better off than if you lived in another property and rented out your property, and paid the tax on the rent you get.
It’s supposed to reduce friction / bias in the market (though you could also obviously argue the reverse).
Suppose you buy bread, meat, and cheese and pay sales tax for each of them. You make a sandwich. You eat the sandwich.
Do you now owe the government the difference in sales tax on the market price of a pre-assembled sandwich versus on the market price of the individual bread, meat, and cheese?
Is it "fair" to owe the government the incremental sandwich sales tax? Should someone who can buy separate bread, meat, and cheese ingredients get such marginal sales tax benefits relative to someone who only can buy pre-made sandwiches? Or does owning the bread, meat, and cheese mean that whatever marginal value you extract from the ingredients' use is fully yours?
Supporting imputed rent seems consistent with supporting my hypothetical sandwich marginal sales tax. It's ridiculous.
Switzerland doesn't have property taxes, so it's better to think of the imputed rental tax as a more progressive implementation of a property tax. Low earners pay less tax on a home of the same value than high earners. And the tax is less distorted by asset price bubbles, since you're taxing the imputed rent instead of the market value.
Now it's abolished, owner-occupied homes will mostly go untaxed, while investor owned ones will be taxed just as before. This is distortionary, but it seems politically infeasible to also abolish income tax on investment income.
It’s not a really good analogy because it’s mostly labour (whereas housing is mostly an investment) but yeah, this argument of “fairness” is common, e.g. by feminists (“housework should be paid or at least accounted for pension”) and governments (e.g. in Slovenia, it’s illegal to help neighbors for free).
I think it’s mostly ridiculous, though on other grounds than “fairness”.
Do you think it would be better to have a democracy during war? (I mean in individual military units, not in a country overall - note that military is controlled by a civilian democratically elected president)
"The enemy's forces are shelling us. Do we want to attack back? Who votes for/against?"
Interestingly I read a history of the French Army mutinies in WWI. One thing that came out of that is lower commanders had a duty to question orders from superiors if they didn't think the goals were achievable. Previously any hint at not following an order was considered "cowardice" and millions of men were led into insane situations with impossible objectives because nobody thought orders from the top could be challenged.
US military doctrine does often play out like this in the field. We prefer maneuver warfare strategies and tactics to positional and attrition ones as a general rule, and a key element of maneuver warfare is the units doing the work having the unilateral ability to maneuver or retreat regardless of some greater plan.
The battlefield is not a democracy, nor a top down dictatorship. In proper combined arms maneuver warfare its more akin to a network of syndicates working towards a common goal.
If we're making odd analogies to politics I think most high performing teams tend to end up in the Marxist "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs". Or instead of the military, think of a basketball team. How do five excellent athletes work together. The coach is not a "dictator", nor is anyone on the team, but they also don't vote on plays. They know what each other is good at and, based on the situation given to them, execute in a way that is most likely to succeed.
Communism is not theft (that only computes if you have a neoliberal viewpoint of taxes = theft) and the second point is just a polemic (also: capitalism is directly and indirectly the cause of hundreds of millions of deaths, all the US led color revolutions, anti-communist killings like in Jakarta or Vietnam etc., all the shock doctrine countries that still are not sprawling hubs of capitalist paradise).
Also, the purpose or end of a country is not to produce some widget at high efficiency for a client, or to rapidly respond to the whims of a despot. It is just a structure around the essential activity of humans simply living their lives.
The problem with your solution (and similar solutions - e.g. implementing "salary auction" for H1B - i.e. it's not a lottery, but it's that the most paid get the visa) is:
It requires changing the law.
Which is very difficult, and requires a broad coalition in 2 houses of parliament.
On the other hand, executive orders are very easy.
I wish the better solutions get implemented, but until they are, we have to seek alternatives.
> Which is very difficult, and requires a broad coalition in 2 houses of parliament.
In the current moment the same party controls all three branches of government.
There's a more basic reality that the idea I'm mentioning simply wouldn't be popular. I just think that people talk about market forces in these discussions and the lock-in effect is so clearly something that's affecting the market, yet not mentioned nearly enough IMO.
This is a common thing to hear, but I'm not sure how true it is. It would be nice to hear from a historian, but Hitler and the Nazis did many things that were not legal in the early days. They did dodgy and possibly illegal things to give Hitler German citizenship so that he could run in German elections. He literally employed a private army which was committing violent acts across Germany. Not long after being appointed chancellor he personally ordered murders and assassinations including the night of long knives.
Alas, this is the same argument that can be used against the 1st amendment and the political opposition: "Rejoicing in Kirk's death is immoral, therefore the 1st amendment doesn't apply, and let's abusively prosecute anyone we can tie to him in any way".
You said that morality must be above the laws. That means that one has priority over the other. aredox is arguing based on that, not confusing the two.
Not really, the Nazis did manage to push a lot of pro-nazi judges everywhere, who judged that what their friends were doing was legal, but fair judges wouldn't have danced to the same tune.
A Brown shirt killed by a communist/socialist was always illegal, but a communist/socialist killed by a brown shirt was always self defence and always legal.
That's why the rule of law is so important, and that's why it shouldn't have exceptions for anyone, even policemen (arguments could be made for elected people as long as they are elected though).
You don't understand. Almost nobody actually thinks about this in the right way, but it's actually basic economics.
Salt.
We used to fight wars for salt, but now it's literally given away for free (in restaurants).
If "robots produce so much value" then all that value will have approximately zero marginal cost. You won't need to distribute profits, you can simply distribute food and stuff and housing because they're cheap enough to be essentially free.
But obviously, not everything will be free. Just look at the famous "cost of education vs TV chart" [1]. Things that are mostly expensive: regulated (education, medicine, law) and positional (housing / land - everyone wants to live in good places!) goods. Things that are mostly cheap: things that are mass produced in factories (economies of scale, automation). Robots might move food & clothing into the "cheap" category but otherwise won't really move the needle, unless we radically rethink regulation.
[1] https://kottke.org/19/02/cheap-tvs-and-exorbitant-education-...