Hon Chong Chang
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You are all going to die because big business poured their shit into the sea....thinking nothing would happen...and did not care if it did.
Greed.
thats the world for you.
buy until you die.
turn to God and be saved as he is coming soon.
Greed.
thats the world for you.
buy until you die.
turn to God and be saved as he is coming soon.
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Read the whole thing xD
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Watch this video... Twice, but before it scares you (That scene at the end, is a completely automated factory with ZERO humans in the picture):
This is only a problem if we sit tight and let things be exactly as they are today...
This won't be a problem if either humans expand our horizons to brand new frontiers, so aggregate demand and productivity both goes much higher... Or we stop applying an economic system that was founded on efficient allocation and distribution of scarce resources on everything, even when certain things become "solved" and is no longer scarce...
The first, vastly increasing aggregate demand and productivity (and by definition, availability of resources and energy) requires us to think big, much bigger. I'm talking Elon Musk style big. Like space mining, colonizing Mars, building hyper loops, etc. If we have super efficient tools now, then it's our fault if we don't let our imagination and demand grow to lofty heights as well... Think about it, the world used to run with fleets of pc with 640 kb of memory. (And it did run word processor, in case you're wondering) If we had stopped growing demand, stayed static with the same exact software for 40 years, yet we kept with the Moore's law (which signifies a super supply of power), where would we end up? Without growing demand, the entire world computing requirement would fit inside an iphone 7, or two. Apple would sell exactly two computing device and then go bankrupt.
So the onus is on us to dream wildly and then execute them, if we're truly armed with AI. Think Tony Stark style build "impossible" things.
The second, is to start realizing that of all the technology we've vastly improved, our economic system has seriously lagged behind. (Hint: the other one that's obsolete like this is politics) It's mostly been incrementally developed from the same core from thousands of years ago, all the way to using seashells as coins and doing trades... It always had to deal with scarcity, It never had to deal with extreme productivity or abundance to the point of worthlessness... What happens when the economic math reaches zero? For an example of how badly this system deals with zero, look at the other side when "zero" occurred: the "environment" seemed endless, seemed incredibly abundant and inexhaustible (we know now this is not true), so our flawed system thinks offloading costs into the environment costs nothing! This is how terrible this system deals with zero... It cannot. So why would it work when supply becomes zero cost?
To illustrate further boundary conditions where/how our current economic system math breaks down:
Say there's a world, with fish, and you can sell fish you catch to make money.
The first failure: Unable to deal with external "nearly zero" variable. This comes from straight up thinking as a modern capitalist economist: Let's catch as many fish and sell as many as we can!
This will work, until the "almost-zero" external variable starts kicking in. And this kind of "Zero-like variable" might start with something "is obviously impossibly small", then go through some stage that still "seems impossibly small", and the suddenly have escalating dislocations, and then bang: huge dislocation.
For example, who worries about running out of fish when a single individual catches one fish? The math is infinitesimal. Even if you have a party of 100 people and catch fishes, the math is still at a "seems impossibly small" level.. The creeping escalation from the near-zero is impossible to detect.
If the person catching and selling, still don't realize that the fish will run out, and in fact, if there is no fish, there's probably no human and hence no "Seller of fish" -- his system of sales will never adjust until he fish himself out of existence.
This is the first failure of our system.
The second failure:
If let's say there's a special system that absorbs sun energy, makes fish and makes then into food, essentially makes the amount of fish food you can sell, "infinite". At first the merchant will be happy -- making money!
But then, after a short time, everyone in the world who wanted a fish has gotten them, perhaps several times over... Fish will become so plentiful in this scenario, so plentiful: That it becomes free! Now, if we really have free/infinite fish, this really solves WORLD HUNGER! Solving world hunger has a real social value to the world! To the entire human civilization!
However, to the modern capitalist economist -- this is now nearly free to the point that he's not interested in marketing it. Imagine that, "World Hunger" is worthless in this system!
So we have an economic system that breaks down at boundary conditions
Yet we insist on following the same system, when our technology is now allowing us to APPROACH THE SAME BOUNDARY CONDITIONS! How can we expect our system to still work at these boundaries? That's insanity....
Thus, we need a new system to deal with allocating "robotic-ally nearly-free" stuff. If world hunger has a value to society, then we need to acknowledge that and not relegate it to "free=zero=I won't sell it" modern economic math.
Doing both the dreaming-up new frontier to solve; and then also conquering the boundary economic behavior/condition of "when things approach zero"... If we can do this, we'll breakthrough and become almost like a "new human" civilization. It'll be a new Golden Age.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
This is only a problem if we sit tight and let things be exactly as they are today...
This won't be a problem if either humans expand our horizons to brand new frontiers, so aggregate demand and productivity both goes much higher... Or we stop applying an economic system that was founded on efficient allocation and distribution of scarce resources on everything, even when certain things become "solved" and is no longer scarce...
The first, vastly increasing aggregate demand and productivity (and by definition, availability of resources and energy) requires us to think big, much bigger. I'm talking Elon Musk style big. Like space mining, colonizing Mars, building hyper loops, etc. If we have super efficient tools now, then it's our fault if we don't let our imagination and demand grow to lofty heights as well... Think about it, the world used to run with fleets of pc with 640 kb of memory. (And it did run word processor, in case you're wondering) If we had stopped growing demand, stayed static with the same exact software for 40 years, yet we kept with the Moore's law (which signifies a super supply of power), where would we end up? Without growing demand, the entire world computing requirement would fit inside an iphone 7, or two. Apple would sell exactly two computing device and then go bankrupt.
So the onus is on us to dream wildly and then execute them, if we're truly armed with AI. Think Tony Stark style build "impossible" things.
The second, is to start realizing that of all the technology we've vastly improved, our economic system has seriously lagged behind. (Hint: the other one that's obsolete like this is politics) It's mostly been incrementally developed from the same core from thousands of years ago, all the way to using seashells as coins and doing trades... It always had to deal with scarcity, It never had to deal with extreme productivity or abundance to the point of worthlessness... What happens when the economic math reaches zero? For an example of how badly this system deals with zero, look at the other side when "zero" occurred: the "environment" seemed endless, seemed incredibly abundant and inexhaustible (we know now this is not true), so our flawed system thinks offloading costs into the environment costs nothing! This is how terrible this system deals with zero... It cannot. So why would it work when supply becomes zero cost?
To illustrate further boundary conditions where/how our current economic system math breaks down:
Say there's a world, with fish, and you can sell fish you catch to make money.
The first failure: Unable to deal with external "nearly zero" variable. This comes from straight up thinking as a modern capitalist economist: Let's catch as many fish and sell as many as we can!
This will work, until the "almost-zero" external variable starts kicking in. And this kind of "Zero-like variable" might start with something "is obviously impossibly small", then go through some stage that still "seems impossibly small", and the suddenly have escalating dislocations, and then bang: huge dislocation.
For example, who worries about running out of fish when a single individual catches one fish? The math is infinitesimal. Even if you have a party of 100 people and catch fishes, the math is still at a "seems impossibly small" level.. The creeping escalation from the near-zero is impossible to detect.
If the person catching and selling, still don't realize that the fish will run out, and in fact, if there is no fish, there's probably no human and hence no "Seller of fish" -- his system of sales will never adjust until he fish himself out of existence.
This is the first failure of our system.
The second failure:
If let's say there's a special system that absorbs sun energy, makes fish and makes then into food, essentially makes the amount of fish food you can sell, "infinite". At first the merchant will be happy -- making money!
But then, after a short time, everyone in the world who wanted a fish has gotten them, perhaps several times over... Fish will become so plentiful in this scenario, so plentiful: That it becomes free! Now, if we really have free/infinite fish, this really solves WORLD HUNGER! Solving world hunger has a real social value to the world! To the entire human civilization!
However, to the modern capitalist economist -- this is now nearly free to the point that he's not interested in marketing it. Imagine that, "World Hunger" is worthless in this system!
So we have an economic system that breaks down at boundary conditions
Yet we insist on following the same system, when our technology is now allowing us to APPROACH THE SAME BOUNDARY CONDITIONS! How can we expect our system to still work at these boundaries? That's insanity....
Thus, we need a new system to deal with allocating "robotic-ally nearly-free" stuff. If world hunger has a value to society, then we need to acknowledge that and not relegate it to "free=zero=I won't sell it" modern economic math.
Doing both the dreaming-up new frontier to solve; and then also conquering the boundary economic behavior/condition of "when things approach zero"... If we can do this, we'll breakthrough and become almost like a "new human" civilization. It'll be a new Golden Age.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
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Wood Pollution
The Earth once had the opposite problem of the one we are all facing today. Since the Industrial Revolution we have released into our atmosphere, too much of the carbon that was once trapped deep underground in fossilized plant material, by retrieving and burning it as coal and oil for energy. But, there was a time when plants, which are largely made from the carbon they absorb from the atmosphere, evolved a harder, more rigid, support material called lignin that allowed them to get higher into the air. This was good news for the plants, but some then grew so tall that their leaves could no longer be reached by the herbivores of the time, digested and converted into animal material and waste. Worse still, when these lignin supported plants died, the prevailing bacteria and fungi could not (for the most part) break them down, and the world slowly became swamped with dead trees and lignin.
But why was all this lignin laying around in the first place? Plenty of organisms had found a way to make use of cellulose, so why didn't they jump on this new source of energy that was laying around free for the taking? The are several reasons: first, whereas cellulose was made of glucose, which can be readily converted to energy, lignin was based on phenol, a derivative of benzene, which is only a good energy source when it's on fire. This isn't a solution for your average bacterium. Digesting lignin was so difficult that lycopods had free reign over the planet for over 40 million years, leading to the world's first and only wood pollution crisis. Finally, however, a fungus belonging to the class Agaricomycetes – making it a distant cousin of button mushrooms – did find a crude way to break down lignin. Rather than devise an enzyme to unstitch the lignin molecule, however, it was forced to adapt a more direct strategy. Using a class of enyzmes called peroxidases, the fungus bombarded the wood with highly reactive oxygen molecules, in much the same way one might untie a knot using a flamethrower. This strategy reduced the wood to a carbohydrate-rich slurry from which the fungus could slurp up the edible cellulose.
More here: https://goo.gl/4Zjq5P
Related post: https://goo.gl/EXNZ3A
Image: https://goo.gl/ykgOPr
The Earth once had the opposite problem of the one we are all facing today. Since the Industrial Revolution we have released into our atmosphere, too much of the carbon that was once trapped deep underground in fossilized plant material, by retrieving and burning it as coal and oil for energy. But, there was a time when plants, which are largely made from the carbon they absorb from the atmosphere, evolved a harder, more rigid, support material called lignin that allowed them to get higher into the air. This was good news for the plants, but some then grew so tall that their leaves could no longer be reached by the herbivores of the time, digested and converted into animal material and waste. Worse still, when these lignin supported plants died, the prevailing bacteria and fungi could not (for the most part) break them down, and the world slowly became swamped with dead trees and lignin.
But why was all this lignin laying around in the first place? Plenty of organisms had found a way to make use of cellulose, so why didn't they jump on this new source of energy that was laying around free for the taking? The are several reasons: first, whereas cellulose was made of glucose, which can be readily converted to energy, lignin was based on phenol, a derivative of benzene, which is only a good energy source when it's on fire. This isn't a solution for your average bacterium. Digesting lignin was so difficult that lycopods had free reign over the planet for over 40 million years, leading to the world's first and only wood pollution crisis. Finally, however, a fungus belonging to the class Agaricomycetes – making it a distant cousin of button mushrooms – did find a crude way to break down lignin. Rather than devise an enzyme to unstitch the lignin molecule, however, it was forced to adapt a more direct strategy. Using a class of enyzmes called peroxidases, the fungus bombarded the wood with highly reactive oxygen molecules, in much the same way one might untie a knot using a flamethrower. This strategy reduced the wood to a carbohydrate-rich slurry from which the fungus could slurp up the edible cellulose.
More here: https://goo.gl/4Zjq5P
Related post: https://goo.gl/EXNZ3A
Image: https://goo.gl/ykgOPr
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Watch this video... Twice, but before it scares you (That scene at the end, is a completely automated factory with ZERO humans in the picture):
This is only a problem if we sit tight and let things be exactly as they are today...
This won't be a problem if either humans expand our horizons to brand new frontiers, so aggregate demand and productivity both goes much higher... Or we stop applying an economic system that was founded on efficient allocation and distribution of scarce resources on everything, even when certain things become "solved" and is no longer scarce...
The first, vastly increasing aggregate demand and productivity (and by definition, availability of resources and energy) requires us to think big, much bigger. I'm talking Elon Musk style big. Like space mining, colonizing Mars, building hyper loops, etc. If we have super efficient tools now, then it's our fault if we don't let our imagination and demand grow to lofty heights as well... Think about it, the world used to run with fleets of pc with 640 kb of memory. (And it did run word processor, in case you're wondering) If we had stopped growing demand, stayed static with the same exact software for 40 years, yet we kept with the Moore's law (which signifies a super supply of power), where would we end up? Without growing demand, the entire world computing requirement would fit inside an iphone 7, or two. Apple would sell exactly two computing device and then go bankrupt.
So the onus is on us to dream wildly and then execute them, if we're truly armed with AI. Think Tony Stark style build "impossible" things.
The second, is to start realizing that of all the technology we've vastly improved, our economic system has seriously lagged behind. (Hint: the other one that's obsolete like this is politics) It's mostly been incrementally developed from the same core from thousands of years ago, all the way to using seashells as coins and doing trades... It always had to deal with scarcity, It never had to deal with extreme productivity or abundance to the point of worthlessness... What happens when the economic math reaches zero? For an example of how badly this system deals with zero, look at the other side when "zero" occurred: the "environment" seemed endless, seemed incredibly abundant and inexhaustible (we know now this is not true), so our flawed system thinks offloading costs into the environment costs nothing! This is how terrible this system deals with zero... It cannot. So why would it work when supply becomes zero cost?
To illustrate further boundary conditions where/how our current economic system math breaks down:
Say there's a world, with fish, and you can sell fish you catch to make money.
The first failure: Unable to deal with external "nearly zero" variable. This comes from straight up thinking as a modern capitalist economist: Let's catch as many fish and sell as many as we can!
This will work, until the "almost-zero" external variable starts kicking in. And this kind of "Zero-like variable" might start with something "is obviously impossibly small", then go through some stage that still "seems impossibly small", and the suddenly have escalating dislocations, and then bang: huge dislocation.
For example, who worries about running out of fish when a single individual catches one fish? The math is infinitesimal. Even if you have a party of 100 people and catch fishes, the math is still at a "seems impossibly small" level.. The creeping escalation from the near-zero is impossible to detect.
If the person catching and selling, still don't realize that the fish will run out, and in fact, if there is no fish, there's probably no human and hence no "Seller of fish" -- his system of sales will never adjust until he fish himself out of existence.
This is the first failure of our system.
The second failure:
If let's say there's a special system that absorbs sun energy, makes fish and makes then into food, essentially makes the amount of fish food you can sell, "infinite". At first the merchant will be happy -- making money!
But then, after a short time, everyone in the world who wanted a fish has gotten them, perhaps several times over... Fish will become so plentiful in this scenario, so plentiful: That it becomes free! Now, if we really have free/infinite fish, this really solves WORLD HUNGER! Solving world hunger has a real social value to the world! To the entire human civilization!
However, to the modern capitalist economist -- this is now nearly free to the point that he's not interested in marketing it. Imagine that, "World Hunger" is worthless in this system!
So we have an economic system that breaks down at boundary conditions
Yet we insist on following the same system, when our technology is now allowing us to APPROACH THE SAME BOUNDARY CONDITIONS! How can we expect our system to still work at these boundaries? That's insanity....
Thus, we need a new system to deal with allocating "robotic-ally nearly-free" stuff. If world hunger has a value to society, then we need to acknowledge that and not relegate it to "free=zero=I won't sell it" modern economic math.
Doing both the dreaming-up new frontier to solve; and then also conquering the boundary economic behavior/condition of "when things approach zero"... If we can do this, we'll breakthrough and become almost like a "new human" civilization. It'll be a new Golden Age.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
This is only a problem if we sit tight and let things be exactly as they are today...
This won't be a problem if either humans expand our horizons to brand new frontiers, so aggregate demand and productivity both goes much higher... Or we stop applying an economic system that was founded on efficient allocation and distribution of scarce resources on everything, even when certain things become "solved" and is no longer scarce...
The first, vastly increasing aggregate demand and productivity (and by definition, availability of resources and energy) requires us to think big, much bigger. I'm talking Elon Musk style big. Like space mining, colonizing Mars, building hyper loops, etc. If we have super efficient tools now, then it's our fault if we don't let our imagination and demand grow to lofty heights as well... Think about it, the world used to run with fleets of pc with 640 kb of memory. (And it did run word processor, in case you're wondering) If we had stopped growing demand, stayed static with the same exact software for 40 years, yet we kept with the Moore's law (which signifies a super supply of power), where would we end up? Without growing demand, the entire world computing requirement would fit inside an iphone 7, or two. Apple would sell exactly two computing device and then go bankrupt.
So the onus is on us to dream wildly and then execute them, if we're truly armed with AI. Think Tony Stark style build "impossible" things.
The second, is to start realizing that of all the technology we've vastly improved, our economic system has seriously lagged behind. (Hint: the other one that's obsolete like this is politics) It's mostly been incrementally developed from the same core from thousands of years ago, all the way to using seashells as coins and doing trades... It always had to deal with scarcity, It never had to deal with extreme productivity or abundance to the point of worthlessness... What happens when the economic math reaches zero? For an example of how badly this system deals with zero, look at the other side when "zero" occurred: the "environment" seemed endless, seemed incredibly abundant and inexhaustible (we know now this is not true), so our flawed system thinks offloading costs into the environment costs nothing! This is how terrible this system deals with zero... It cannot. So why would it work when supply becomes zero cost?
To illustrate further boundary conditions where/how our current economic system math breaks down:
Say there's a world, with fish, and you can sell fish you catch to make money.
The first failure: Unable to deal with external "nearly zero" variable. This comes from straight up thinking as a modern capitalist economist: Let's catch as many fish and sell as many as we can!
This will work, until the "almost-zero" external variable starts kicking in. And this kind of "Zero-like variable" might start with something "is obviously impossibly small", then go through some stage that still "seems impossibly small", and the suddenly have escalating dislocations, and then bang: huge dislocation.
For example, who worries about running out of fish when a single individual catches one fish? The math is infinitesimal. Even if you have a party of 100 people and catch fishes, the math is still at a "seems impossibly small" level.. The creeping escalation from the near-zero is impossible to detect.
If the person catching and selling, still don't realize that the fish will run out, and in fact, if there is no fish, there's probably no human and hence no "Seller of fish" -- his system of sales will never adjust until he fish himself out of existence.
This is the first failure of our system.
The second failure:
If let's say there's a special system that absorbs sun energy, makes fish and makes then into food, essentially makes the amount of fish food you can sell, "infinite". At first the merchant will be happy -- making money!
But then, after a short time, everyone in the world who wanted a fish has gotten them, perhaps several times over... Fish will become so plentiful in this scenario, so plentiful: That it becomes free! Now, if we really have free/infinite fish, this really solves WORLD HUNGER! Solving world hunger has a real social value to the world! To the entire human civilization!
However, to the modern capitalist economist -- this is now nearly free to the point that he's not interested in marketing it. Imagine that, "World Hunger" is worthless in this system!
So we have an economic system that breaks down at boundary conditions
Yet we insist on following the same system, when our technology is now allowing us to APPROACH THE SAME BOUNDARY CONDITIONS! How can we expect our system to still work at these boundaries? That's insanity....
Thus, we need a new system to deal with allocating "robotic-ally nearly-free" stuff. If world hunger has a value to society, then we need to acknowledge that and not relegate it to "free=zero=I won't sell it" modern economic math.
Doing both the dreaming-up new frontier to solve; and then also conquering the boundary economic behavior/condition of "when things approach zero"... If we can do this, we'll breakthrough and become almost like a "new human" civilization. It'll be a new Golden Age.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
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Watch this video... Twice, but before it scares you (That scene at the end, is a completely automated factory with ZERO humans in the picture):
This is only a problem if we sit tight and let things be exactly as they are today...
This won't be a problem if either humans expand our horizons to brand new frontiers, so aggregate demand and productivity both goes much higher... Or we stop applying an economic system that was founded on efficient allocation and distribution of scarce resources on everything, even when certain things become "solved" and is no longer scarce...
The first, vastly increasing aggregate demand and productivity (and by definition, availability of resources and energy) requires us to think big, much bigger. I'm talking Elon Musk style big. Like space mining, colonizing Mars, building hyper loops, etc. If we have super efficient tools now, then it's our fault if we don't let our imagination and demand grow to lofty heights as well... Think about it, the world used to run with fleets of pc with 640 kb of memory. (And it did run word processor, in case you're wondering) If we had stopped growing demand, stayed static with the same exact software for 40 years, yet we kept with the Moore's law (which signifies a super supply of power), where would we end up? Without growing demand, the entire world computing requirement would fit inside an iphone 7, or two. Apple would sell exactly two computing device and then go bankrupt.
So the onus is on us to dream wildly and then execute them, if we're truly armed with AI. Think Tony Stark style build "impossible" things.
The second, is to start realizing that of all the technology we've vastly improved, our economic system has seriously lagged behind. (Hint: the other one that's obsolete like this is politics) It's mostly been incrementally developed from the same core from thousands of years ago, all the way to using seashells as coins and doing trades... It always had to deal with scarcity, It never had to deal with extreme productivity or abundance to the point of worthlessness... What happens when the economic math reaches zero? For an example of how badly this system deals with zero, look at the other side when "zero" occurred: the "environment" seemed endless, seemed incredibly abundant and inexhaustible (we know now this is not true), so our flawed system thinks offloading costs into the environment costs nothing! This is how terrible this system deals with zero... It cannot. So why would it work when supply becomes zero cost?
To illustrate further boundary conditions where/how our current economic system math breaks down:
Say there's a world, with fish, and you can sell fish you catch to make money.
The first failure: Unable to deal with external "nearly zero" variable. This comes from straight up thinking as a modern capitalist economist: Let's catch as many fish and sell as many as we can!
This will work, until the "almost-zero" external variable starts kicking in. And this kind of "Zero-like variable" might start with something "is obviously impossibly small", then go through some stage that still "seems impossibly small", and the suddenly have escalating dislocations, and then bang: huge dislocation.
For example, who worries about running out of fish when a single individual catches one fish? The math is infinitesimal. Even if you have a party of 100 people and catch fishes, the math is still at a "seems impossibly small" level.. The creeping escalation from the near-zero is impossible to detect.
If the person catching and selling, still don't realize that the fish will run out, and in fact, if there is no fish, there's probably no human and hence no "Seller of fish" -- his system of sales will never adjust until he fish himself out of existence.
This is the first failure of our system.
The second failure:
If let's say there's a special system that absorbs sun energy, makes fish and makes then into food, essentially makes the amount of fish food you can sell, "infinite". At first the merchant will be happy -- making money!
But then, after a short time, everyone in the world who wanted a fish has gotten them, perhaps several times over... Fish will become so plentiful in this scenario, so plentiful: That it becomes free! Now, if we really have free/infinite fish, this really solves *WORLD HUNGER*! Solving world hunger has a real social value to the world! To the entire human civilization!
However, to the modern capitalist economist -- this is now nearly free to the point that he's not interested in marketing it. Imagine that, "World Hunger" is worthless in this system!
So we have an economic system that breaks down at boundary conditions
Yet we insist on following the same system, when our technology is now allowing us to APPROACH THE SAME BOUNDARY CONDITIONS! How can we expect our system to still work at these boundaries? That's insanity....
Thus, we need a new system to deal with allocating "robotic-ally nearly-free" stuff. If world hunger has a value to society, then we need to acknowledge that and not relegate it to "free=zero=I won't sell it" modern economic math.
Doing both the dreaming-up new frontier to solve; and then also conquering the boundary economic behavior/condition of "when things approach zero"... If we can do this, we'll breakthrough and become almost like a "new human" civilization. It'll be a new Golden Age.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
This is only a problem if we sit tight and let things be exactly as they are today...
This won't be a problem if either humans expand our horizons to brand new frontiers, so aggregate demand and productivity both goes much higher... Or we stop applying an economic system that was founded on efficient allocation and distribution of scarce resources on everything, even when certain things become "solved" and is no longer scarce...
The first, vastly increasing aggregate demand and productivity (and by definition, availability of resources and energy) requires us to think big, much bigger. I'm talking Elon Musk style big. Like space mining, colonizing Mars, building hyper loops, etc. If we have super efficient tools now, then it's our fault if we don't let our imagination and demand grow to lofty heights as well... Think about it, the world used to run with fleets of pc with 640 kb of memory. (And it did run word processor, in case you're wondering) If we had stopped growing demand, stayed static with the same exact software for 40 years, yet we kept with the Moore's law (which signifies a super supply of power), where would we end up? Without growing demand, the entire world computing requirement would fit inside an iphone 7, or two. Apple would sell exactly two computing device and then go bankrupt.
So the onus is on us to dream wildly and then execute them, if we're truly armed with AI. Think Tony Stark style build "impossible" things.
The second, is to start realizing that of all the technology we've vastly improved, our economic system has seriously lagged behind. (Hint: the other one that's obsolete like this is politics) It's mostly been incrementally developed from the same core from thousands of years ago, all the way to using seashells as coins and doing trades... It always had to deal with scarcity, It never had to deal with extreme productivity or abundance to the point of worthlessness... What happens when the economic math reaches zero? For an example of how badly this system deals with zero, look at the other side when "zero" occurred: the "environment" seemed endless, seemed incredibly abundant and inexhaustible (we know now this is not true), so our flawed system thinks offloading costs into the environment costs nothing! This is how terrible this system deals with zero... It cannot. So why would it work when supply becomes zero cost?
To illustrate further boundary conditions where/how our current economic system math breaks down:
Say there's a world, with fish, and you can sell fish you catch to make money.
The first failure: Unable to deal with external "nearly zero" variable. This comes from straight up thinking as a modern capitalist economist: Let's catch as many fish and sell as many as we can!
This will work, until the "almost-zero" external variable starts kicking in. And this kind of "Zero-like variable" might start with something "is obviously impossibly small", then go through some stage that still "seems impossibly small", and the suddenly have escalating dislocations, and then bang: huge dislocation.
For example, who worries about running out of fish when a single individual catches one fish? The math is infinitesimal. Even if you have a party of 100 people and catch fishes, the math is still at a "seems impossibly small" level.. The creeping escalation from the near-zero is impossible to detect.
If the person catching and selling, still don't realize that the fish will run out, and in fact, if there is no fish, there's probably no human and hence no "Seller of fish" -- his system of sales will never adjust until he fish himself out of existence.
This is the first failure of our system.
The second failure:
If let's say there's a special system that absorbs sun energy, makes fish and makes then into food, essentially makes the amount of fish food you can sell, "infinite". At first the merchant will be happy -- making money!
But then, after a short time, everyone in the world who wanted a fish has gotten them, perhaps several times over... Fish will become so plentiful in this scenario, so plentiful: That it becomes free! Now, if we really have free/infinite fish, this really solves *WORLD HUNGER*! Solving world hunger has a real social value to the world! To the entire human civilization!
However, to the modern capitalist economist -- this is now nearly free to the point that he's not interested in marketing it. Imagine that, "World Hunger" is worthless in this system!
So we have an economic system that breaks down at boundary conditions
Yet we insist on following the same system, when our technology is now allowing us to APPROACH THE SAME BOUNDARY CONDITIONS! How can we expect our system to still work at these boundaries? That's insanity....
Thus, we need a new system to deal with allocating "robotic-ally nearly-free" stuff. If world hunger has a value to society, then we need to acknowledge that and not relegate it to "free=zero=I won't sell it" modern economic math.
Doing both the dreaming-up new frontier to solve; and then also conquering the boundary economic behavior/condition of "when things approach zero"... If we can do this, we'll breakthrough and become almost like a "new human" civilization. It'll be a new Golden Age.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
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I also thought a lot on this. However I believe the problem is opposite of what everyone thinks.
The problem isn't just too much automation, or that producers are not raising/distributing profits. Sure there's some effect worsening an already bad problem, but the root cause isn't.
The problem is that some problems are much easier to automate than others. This inequality in automation, creates fractures in the production chain & ultimately society.
I can already prove this. "Information", which used to be very "expensive", is now incredibly cheap. Thanks to Internet and Google. I would say even the homeless have access to information/google search and the plethora of knowledge that used to be only accessible by the very rich, the very insider in ivory towers, or someone who could afford an encyclopedia or library. We can argue that information have become almost free -- that the limiting factor is no longer the cost or availability of information, but the ability to absorb, digest, find and distill it timely.
Ditto to many things, that used to be very expensive, are now plentiful. Cell phone minutes, long distance calls, even the concept of "video rental" has plummeted thanks to Netflix. And Taxi and car ownership is on it's way, thanks to Uber. They will be plentifully cheap.
In the era of these plentifully cheap things, however, there are opposite forces/factors creating increasingly expensive things. Some are irrationally man made, going so far as being "built into" the system.
Ask anyone who expects their next "average" TV to be more expensive than their last, "average" TV they bought 10 years ago, with the same criteria as "average"? Almost nobody will expect TV to be more expensive than it was. Then turn around, and ask anyone about "average" home prices. Suddenly, everyone goes nuts. They all expect "their home" to be worth a lot more in 10 years. This is DESPITE that material production cost, raw shipping or even energy costs have gone done during the period.
This is a "built in" climb. Even how mortgage is structured, banks, insurance expectations, taxations -- everything expects this "thing called home" to keep climbing, everything else be damned. In fact, many people cite population -- the fact the houses have climbed several times the growth rate of population, or that the peak buying population has passed due to boomers aging, or that even China, who are facing steep drop in population, still expect homes to climb in 30 years? "Everything be damned" indeed!
Supposed robots can indeed "print" a home in 30 hours -- our systemic expectation will suffer more than you'd expect and this robot will be regulated into the void.
There are other things like this, that is irrationally climbing. Education (not just the school type), more precisely "the cost to prove yourself so you can stand out to have a livelihood/employment", the bar (and hence cost) for medicine "approvals", the cost of lawsuits, taxes, etc.
So in the face of ever shrinking income because of automation -- if costs of everything else shrinks at the same time or is faster. The shrinking income isn't a problem. So if everything followed the "Google" or "Netflix" or "Uber" effect on prices, we can easily absorb 10% YOY pay cut and probably be better off.
But the root cause is "not everything is". Some are hard to automate. Some are made to be un-automatable due to limitations in policies and regulations (See how hard States are fighting Tesla's 'direct factory to consumer' sales model?) As a result, it takes more and more % of income, to buy these remaining "inflating" items, and we siphon away whatever gain that we should have made, by decreasing burdens of cost.
Thus the answer isn't less automation; it isn't less capitalism. It is MORE COMPETITION. It is LESS BLOCKAGE/BARRIER to automation and price re-discovery. If we really can 3D print our next home, we shouldn't all stand in the way just because we'll selfishly worry about our own home prices. (but humans will do that, ditto to City/States who depend on home prices for tax revenues)
Automate more, a LOT more. Then perhaps we can indeed work 12 hours a week only.
As of today, unfortunately different measures of "irrationally growing burden" continues to grow. See how "tax independence day" gets pushed back every year. Measure the same, for "mortgage independence day", it also gets pushed back. "education cost independence day", we can go on forever. And the "final last day" of this fictitious payment-year, covers everything else that is automated, including Google and other robots -- that we end up worrying about.
That makes no sense.
The problem isn't just too much automation, or that producers are not raising/distributing profits. Sure there's some effect worsening an already bad problem, but the root cause isn't.
The problem is that some problems are much easier to automate than others. This inequality in automation, creates fractures in the production chain & ultimately society.
I can already prove this. "Information", which used to be very "expensive", is now incredibly cheap. Thanks to Internet and Google. I would say even the homeless have access to information/google search and the plethora of knowledge that used to be only accessible by the very rich, the very insider in ivory towers, or someone who could afford an encyclopedia or library. We can argue that information have become almost free -- that the limiting factor is no longer the cost or availability of information, but the ability to absorb, digest, find and distill it timely.
Ditto to many things, that used to be very expensive, are now plentiful. Cell phone minutes, long distance calls, even the concept of "video rental" has plummeted thanks to Netflix. And Taxi and car ownership is on it's way, thanks to Uber. They will be plentifully cheap.
In the era of these plentifully cheap things, however, there are opposite forces/factors creating increasingly expensive things. Some are irrationally man made, going so far as being "built into" the system.
Ask anyone who expects their next "average" TV to be more expensive than their last, "average" TV they bought 10 years ago, with the same criteria as "average"? Almost nobody will expect TV to be more expensive than it was. Then turn around, and ask anyone about "average" home prices. Suddenly, everyone goes nuts. They all expect "their home" to be worth a lot more in 10 years. This is DESPITE that material production cost, raw shipping or even energy costs have gone done during the period.
This is a "built in" climb. Even how mortgage is structured, banks, insurance expectations, taxations -- everything expects this "thing called home" to keep climbing, everything else be damned. In fact, many people cite population -- the fact the houses have climbed several times the growth rate of population, or that the peak buying population has passed due to boomers aging, or that even China, who are facing steep drop in population, still expect homes to climb in 30 years? "Everything be damned" indeed!
Supposed robots can indeed "print" a home in 30 hours -- our systemic expectation will suffer more than you'd expect and this robot will be regulated into the void.
There are other things like this, that is irrationally climbing. Education (not just the school type), more precisely "the cost to prove yourself so you can stand out to have a livelihood/employment", the bar (and hence cost) for medicine "approvals", the cost of lawsuits, taxes, etc.
So in the face of ever shrinking income because of automation -- if costs of everything else shrinks at the same time or is faster. The shrinking income isn't a problem. So if everything followed the "Google" or "Netflix" or "Uber" effect on prices, we can easily absorb 10% YOY pay cut and probably be better off.
But the root cause is "not everything is". Some are hard to automate. Some are made to be un-automatable due to limitations in policies and regulations (See how hard States are fighting Tesla's 'direct factory to consumer' sales model?) As a result, it takes more and more % of income, to buy these remaining "inflating" items, and we siphon away whatever gain that we should have made, by decreasing burdens of cost.
Thus the answer isn't less automation; it isn't less capitalism. It is MORE COMPETITION. It is LESS BLOCKAGE/BARRIER to automation and price re-discovery. If we really can 3D print our next home, we shouldn't all stand in the way just because we'll selfishly worry about our own home prices. (but humans will do that, ditto to City/States who depend on home prices for tax revenues)
Automate more, a LOT more. Then perhaps we can indeed work 12 hours a week only.
As of today, unfortunately different measures of "irrationally growing burden" continues to grow. See how "tax independence day" gets pushed back every year. Measure the same, for "mortgage independence day", it also gets pushed back. "education cost independence day", we can go on forever. And the "final last day" of this fictitious payment-year, covers everything else that is automated, including Google and other robots -- that we end up worrying about.
That makes no sense.
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