I think you can get high-quality 100k smartphone which will be relevant for a long time
So the relevancy part (my bold) is probably more true today, but the top-of-the-line smartphones from the 2000s and early 2010s very clearly have not been relevant for a long time. I think smartphone innovation is slowing down, so it’s possible that today’s smartphone would be relevant for a longer time than those from previous years. But I think this is because of slowing innovation.
As a counter point, the cars in a billionaire’s garage aren’t just many different Toyotas with custom rims.
because phones are small and expensive to design it’s just not worth it
This would imply that luxury watches and luxury fashion don’t exist, which they do. (I see you mention the watches later in the comment, but not the fashion, although your explanation for luxury watches roughly applies to fashion as well).
I don’t really think progress being fast is quite sufficient to explain things
I’ll agree here. I don’t think my theory fully explains certain things. Books, movies, and other creative works are things that don’t quite fit into this framework nicely. I suspect that these things are limited by creative innovation, but I’m not very certain about that belief.
I think it’s because a phone, or gmail, starlink, etc. has super high fixed costs, and the smaller market for luxury goods generally means the design will be worse
The super-high-fixed-costs hypothesis would imply that we don’t have luxury watches, cars, jets. I suspect it is a factor in what causes a luxury good to come onto market, but I don’t think it can be the only factor.
So my prediction would be that the luxury smartphone business only starts up when lots of rich people have different problems from the average consumer that need a custom device (security maybe?) or subscribe to a status game that results in the phone equivalent of luxury watches
I appreciate the concrete prediction, although I wouldn’t be surprised if these conditions are already met in some way. The ultra-wealthy definitely already need more security, privacy, etc than your average joe. And I believe that many of the ultra-wealthy already subscribe to status games.
Huh, this is interesting. I think there’s something missing in my original idea, because I feel like iPhone : Vertu :!: toyota : Bentley. The fact that the Vertu phone appears like a regular phone just bejeweled might be the difference, but I’m less sure now.
It’s possible that my prediction at the end of the essay (that there’d be luxury smartphones soon OR there’d be innovation) might just be arriving early. I’m unsure.
Asking for a $100k iPhone is like asking for a million-dollar Toyota Prius instead of a million-dollar car.
I disagree, there is no company that only builds >10k smart phones (from scratch, as opposed to taking someone else’s phones and adding expensive materials). Sure there are companies that will gold-plate your iPhone, but they’re not taking on the risk that innovations in smartphones would cause their luxury product to become worthless (since they can always gold-plate whatever the most recent innovation is).
I don’t think that the ratio from most expensive to least expensive is a constant as you are using it, I’d be very surprised if this ratio is the same for various different goods and services.
fine dining+private chef to prepack+fast food is ~1.5oom
I disagree, I’d be very surprised if a full-time expensive private chef + ingredients + alcohol is only 30x more expensive than fast food.
I agree that the 100k Rolex (and most luxury goods) are all about status signalling. Even for the private chef, you certainly get higher-end private chefs which give the material upgrade as well as the status signalling.
which quickly becomes too big to fit in one’s pocket
This assumes current technology and no innovation
I do believe gradual disempowerment to be a real risk, although I don’t think the incentives for automating human labour will result in the damage stopping there.
Not the solution you asked for, but tighter integration of prediction markets into social media could enable this. For example, making the tweet → prediction market UI/UX flow really good (and also surfacing relevant prediction markets next to the content) would make it easier 1. setup a market based on someone’s predictions and 2. keep track of those predictions.
Thanks! Although in light of Neel’s comment I’m uncertain about how to make this work without it becoming a significant burden on the researchers. I think this idea would reduce/not increase the burden on operational roles (since each person attempting the bounty would not require visas, funding, housing, etc) but it would likely increase the burden on research roles (since it would incentivize more people to write more papers that need reviewers).
I do think there’s something here though. I will keep thinking/discussing the idea.
the bad people apply over and over again everywhere
In general I’d agree that this is the case, but many fellowship mentors are publicly talking about the high standard of the applicants, which is evidence against the fellowship applicants just being the bad people cycling through the process over and over again.
I’m sure there’s some non-zero number of applicants who should not be accepted because they don’t meet the bar, but I still believe there’s some number of applicants who are turned away not because they’re bad, but because the fellowship has limited capacity and they weren’t in the top-k of applicants.
I don’t like to self-publicize, but I think you’d really resonate with a piece I wrote a while back, it went semi-viral and resulted in some very interesting discussion. It’s about the systematic biases that expertise invokes, and what that’s like as a novice: https://boydkane.com/essays/experts
I am less convinced by the prediction market style of verification
I’m also not super convinced, but I do think the problem of verifying solutions is a big one, so I wanted to put out some alternate answer out there.
the role AI tools themselves can play in easing the mentorship bottleneck
For guiding up-and-coming researchers I definitely agree that existing AIs can help, although I also feel that each person should find something that works for them.
For using AIs to review submissions, I’m not sure the AIs are good enough yet to do a full review, but maybe they can significantly reduce the number of low-effort papers that a researcher has to review. E.g. use an LLM to check for typos, style, prior work, whether the paper actually answers the question, etc.
The ability to draft your own contracts, mediate disputes through arbitration, and represent yourself in court all derive from legal rights which would be very hard to overturn.
Strongly agree. However I believe lawyers to be adept at the legal system, so they’d likely bundle job protections for lawyers alongside job protections for other more empathetic jobs such as teachers or 911 call agents or others. In general, I predict that lawyers see AI job automation as a valid threat, that they take actions against this threat, and also that they are much more competent at legal manoeuvring and politics than I am, so would come up with competent ways to achieve their goals.
Very interesting post! Do you think the recent work on model introspection 1 2 3 has an impact here? Could developing tools to monitor introspection assist with interp?