I’m not sure if the agenty tasks you have in mind are considered part of manufacturing per se or business management. My impression from above is that production work and factory construction is being automated but design/engineering and business management are not. I’m not sure, but it does seem likely that humans could be out of the loop without AGI. (Though of course AGI could happen before narrow AI actually achieves this level in practice).
knb
Karma: 5,391
I don’t know, but I would guess that 90%+ of the industrial/manufacturing jobs done by humans even just 50 years ago are now done by machines. But this 90% automation didn’t lead to a near-doubling of GWP growth rates.
90% automation only gives a ~10x increase in per-worker productivity in manufacturing. Since manufacturing is only a fraction of GWP, a 10x productivity increase only makes GWP (per capita) a few times larger. Take humans out of the process completely and the bottleneck is gone. The feedback loop is only constrained the availability of resources.
Looks like it is still the global reserve currency.
Unless I’m missing something, looks like #1 is actually correct… 2019 GDP PPP per capita for Singapore was 103,181 according to IMF, which adjusts to 84775.10 according to the first inflation calculator on Google.
What did you mean by “fanon dwarves”? Is that just a fan interpretation or do you think Tolkien intended it? In Tolkien’s idealized world, all economic motivations are marginal and deprecated. The dwarves are motivated partially by a desire for gold, but mostly by loyalty to their king and a desire to see their ancestral homeland restored to them. To the extent the treasure itself motivates Thorin & co., it causes disaster (for example his unwillingness to share the loot almost causes a battle against local men & elves.)
Mint.com is popular.
I think it’s mainly about combining two click-friendly buzzwords in a novel way.
This is a good example of the type of comment I would like to be able to downvote. Utterly braindead political clickbait.
One thing to watch for would be top-level AI talent getting snapped up by governments rather than companies interested in making better spam detectors/photo-sharing apps.
This seems relevant These statistics do not support your claim that energy consumption per capita has been stagnant. Did I miss something?
Yep, your link is for world energy use per capita, my claim is that it was stagnant for the first world. E.g. in the US it peaked in 1978 and has since declined by about a fifth. Developed world is more relevant because that’s where cutting edge research and technological advancement happens. Edit: here’s a graph from the source you provided showing the energy consumption history of the main developed countries, all of which follow the same pattern.
I don’t really have a single link to sum up the difference between engineering an ICE car with adequate range and refuel time and a battery-electric vehicle with comparable range/recharge time. If you’re really interested I would suggest reading about the early history of motor vehicles and then reading about the decades long development history of lithium-ion batteries before they became a viable product.
Like a lot of reddit posts, it seems like it was written by a slightly-precocious teenager. I’m not much of a singularity believer but the case is very weak.
“Declining Energy Returns” is based on the false idea that civilization requires exponential increases in energy input, which has been wrong for decades. Per capita energy consumption has been stagnant in the first world for decades, and most of these countries have stagnant or declining populations. Focusing on EROI and “quality” of oil produced is a mistake. We don’t lack for sources of energy; the whole basis of the peak oil collapse theory was that other energy sources can’t replace oil’s vital role as a transport fuel.
“Economic feasability” is non-sequitur concerned with whether gains from technology will go only to the rich, not relevant to whether or not it will happen.
“Political resistance and corruption” starts out badly as the commenter apparently believes in the really dumb idea that electric cars have always been a viable competitor to internal combustion but the idea was suppressed by some kind of conspiracy. If you know anything about the engineering it took to make electric cars semi-viable competitors to ICE, the idea is obviously wrong. Even without getting into the technical aspect, there are lots of countries which had independent car industries and a strong incentive to get off oil (e.g. Germany and Japan before and during WW2).
Speaking of which, can anyone recommend any short, intelligent, rational writings on feminism for instance? My average exposure to anti-feminist thought is fairly intelligent, while my average exposure to pro-feminist thought is “How can anyone disagree with me?[...]”
There are some intelligent and interesting heterodox feminists who spend a lot of their time criticizing mainstream or radical feminist positions. I could recommend them to you, and you would probably like some of what they have to say, but then you wouldn’t really be challenging your current notions and wouldn’t be getting the strongest defenses of current feminist thought.
I’m not a feminist (or a marxist) but I do remember being impressed by the thoughtfulness and clarity of Friedrich Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State when I read it back in college.
Isn’t a VAT already basically a Robot Tax?
The same game theory would seem to apply equally well in both cases. In what way does it work better with climate change?
I think it’s a clear enough prediction, but putting some actual numbers on it would be useful. Personally, I would put the odds of a Trump landslide well under 50% even contingent on “supercharged” economic growth. Maybe 25%. Politics is too identity-oriented now to see anything like the Reagan landslides in the near future.
Kudos for making a clear prediction.
I voted for Trump but I don’t think there is any realistic possibility of a Trump landslide, even if the economy grows very well for the next 4 years. The country is just too bitterly divided along social lines for economic prosperity to deliver one candidate a landslide (assuming a landslide in the popular vote means at least 10% margin of victory.)
In terms of economic growth, I wonder what you mean by “supercharge”. I think 4% is pretty unlikely. If the US manages an annual average of 3.0% for the next 4 years that would be a good improvement, but I don’t think that could really be called “supercharged.”
Trump job approval looks pretty good right now considering the unrelenting negative press, so right now I think Trump is likely to be re-elected if he chooses to run in 2020.
I don’t think children actually have greater moral status, but harming children or allowing children to be harmed carries more evidence of depraved/dangerous mental state because it goes against the ethic of care we are supposed to naturally feel toward children.
I meant the Chinese public. The actual public of most countries is not all that engaged in the ins and outs of these things.
If true that’s mainly an argument against making pointless precommitments you can’t possibly enforce. As it happens, I doubt Chinese pay all that much attention to these kinds of diplomatic bugbears.
People always had a lot of free speech, it was just in unmediated human interaction. There was a lively civil society and people had closer relationships with neighbors and extended family and would naturally discuss things. This decentralized communication was a major way ideas and culture were shared. People suggest things like social media have widened the discourse, but ignore the fact that this kind of organic human interaction and community life has steadily declined (see Bowling Alone for more information). To some extent we have traded an unmoderated, uncensored private, in-person discourse for a heavily mediated, censored and monitored discourse.