It's actually a much less dystopian situation than the more traditional theory of AI worker displacement - that only highly-skilled and creative jobs would still be needed. Most physical labor jobs are relatively quick and easy to learn, and the jobs are needed in huge numbers - they don't scale like knowledge work does.
It could perhaps even be a utopian situation - it would quickly put an end to skyrocketing education requirements, allowing underpaid highly-skilled workers to quit their jobs, get a job as a construction worker or farmer and come out with more pay.
It absolutely was key. Communist mockery of the inequality in capitalist societies was the only pressure short of domestic revolt keeping inequality in check. The threat of revolt activates in conditions so extreme that it isn't enough to keep the middle class large and comfortable.
The fall of communism as a credible threat threw open the floodgates of inequality in capitalist societies.
This is a good example of the "charity model" of economics that the belief of the rich being "job creators" relies on. It also meshes well with the ass-backwards concepts of supply-side economics.
According to this model, the rich use their excess money to hire some people whose work they don't really need, basically out of the goodness of their hearts, and keep them on if demand rises to sustain the need for their employment. Therefore it makes sense to pile as much money on the rich as possible so they'll hire more people, duh!
It's putting the cart before the horse and mistaking which one powers the vehicle. It's perfectly backwards.
Demand actually drives the need to hire more people, and employers hire more people based on demand once they can afford it. Giving them more excess millions will do exactly nothing to spur job creation, they actually need very little excess cash by today's standards. Therefore it would make sense to maximize consumer spending money - piling more money on the middle and especially lower classes.
What giving insane amounts of money to the rich actually does is further accelerate wealth concentration. They spend this excess cash on opulent luxury goods like megayachts and supercars and mansions which require relatively little labor to produce for their value, with most of the profit going to other 1%ers.
It's a shame the last few decades in which traditional capitalism was viable were squandered by trying to run the engine backwards. Automation is coming now.
That's basically what he's saying and he may be right. Capitalism only rewards one broad skillset when you think about it - business skill. You can be a genius at anything you like, even if it's in demand, but without the ability to "be a good salesman of yourself" to summarize the GP's post, you'll never make good money doing it.
I like to think about what the world would be like if success were based on some other random skill that has little in itself to do with being productive. Doing yo-yo tricks, maybe. The best yo-yo-ers would be billionaires and those who are hopeless at it would be poor, and we'd all just accept it I guess.
I think I could make six figures in such a world, when I was a teenager I could do loop-de-loops, the sleeper, walk the dog, rock the cradle and probably some others I can't remember.
Those rules only apply to workers though. Board members and executives get ludicrously hyper-rewarded with all the money that was saved from so carefully paying workers only exactly what they must be paid to not quit. Why don't the rules apply uniformly to all employees? Board members and executives aren't that productive or hard to replace.
The GP is right however - according to white-hat philosophy, we should stick our heads into the sand and pray, for to test the security of the system without explicit permission to do so would be just as evil as anything the most ill-intentioned black-hat could do!
Yep large aircraft will be the last type of vehicle to run on liquid hydrocarbon fuels. Land vehicles, small planes, and small boats can run on batteries. Large boats can run on a combination of nuclear, solar, and wind power (yes, as in bringing sails back, for certain values of "sails").
It was for real last time, the luddites and their children died in grinding poverty, only their grandchildren started to get work. Most people don't know that and think that the luddites worked themselves into a tizzy for nothing and were back to work the next week. Not so.
Good point. We should probably move the estimate closer since there are semi-autonomous cars already for sale and on the roads. I'm thinking 5-10 years is a good estimate now.
This is the best support I've seen so far the for the "rising tide causes inflation" theory. Next I'll have to see if the inflation is enough to neutralize any increase in spending power as UBI & minimum wage increase opponents often assert.
I don't see how it would create inflation, that idea doesn't mesh with any existing theories of how inflation works. In fact, that's the "rising tide causes inflation" argument often used by opponents of UBI and minimum wage increases.
Natural climate changes could affect salinity in the same way. It doesn't pose much of a risk to marine life compared to other effects of global warming.
The current pH is lower than the last 2 million years, and looking at the graph, the rate of change appears to be the fastest on record.
I couldn't find any historical data for ocean oxygenation. There are records for temperature going back to 1880 that could be helpful in estimating oxygen exchange rates, but that's about it.
Again, I can't do anything about the fact that there are people who think that climate change is real who are blowhards, know-nothings, and even bullshitters out to make a buck. If that fact turns you off, you REALLY won't like the denialists...
Reporters who make elementary mistakes get corrected on science blogs instead of the mainstream sites where they posted the mistake. Reporters screwing up on science stories is hardly new or restricted to climate science.
I'd guess the 1% has 99% of the disposable income because huge amounts of cash are hoarded by them instead of spent, while the rest of us spend most or all of what we earn on relatively basic stuff that's required to function in a modern society.
A lot of rich people are very conversationally pleasant and polite people, and it isn't until you get to know them better and how they look at the rest of society including their employees, that you learn that they're actually massive assholes.
The iPhone was a total joke when it came out. It was pretty and different, but there were no applications for it other than what it came with (!), you couldn't even download files or copy and paste text. It was a few years before it got within reach of the capability of the Treo 650 I had at the time, which was my second smartphone more capable than the original iPhone and not even the best smartphone available at the time. Even then, the iPhone was and remains a toy to enable consumption, not a real computer. A real computer puts you in control of what it can do, allowing you to write and run your own programs on the device and download and run applications at will.
The iPhone's success damaged computing itself more than any device or event in history by popularizing curated computing in place of general-purpose computing.
I'd say there is plenty enough science to say that doing nothing is about the worst alternative for the environment, short of actively destructive options like switching the planet to 100% coal power (or possibly chopping up trees and burning them for power, but we're already doing that!). This is basic stuff as climate science goes.
The best alternative for the environment would very clearly be to cease all CO2 release right this second and put all resources toward sequestering CO2 to bring it close to pre-industrial levels, but that's not remotely practical.
The tricky part comes in balancing what's best for the environment with what's practical for our civilization. Doing nothing (let's say locking power sources at what they are today, because renewable power and electrics would naturally become the cheapest options in under a century otherwise) will certainly hasten the demise of civilization and cause many medium-term and long-term problems so that can't be the best, we can afford to do better. The cost of suffering through those problems will be far greater than whatever we can spend to avoid them in the short term, the only question is what we can afford to spend now and how deep into the diminishing returns we should go.
The "too late" argument relates to milestones like +2C where certain consequences can't be avoided, it certainly doesn't mean that there's no point preventing warming over +2C. It still gets worse with more warming, it's a sliding scale that we've just put artificial markers on. There's no point where we "might as well give up 'cuz it's already broke."
150 years is a blip in geologic time, but it's a decent chunk of time for our civilization and represents most of the post-industrial era. So the fact that it's a blip by geologic standards is hardly relevant to the discussion of anthropogenic climate change and its effects on our civilization. It's certainly not too short a period in which to measure climate change.
If you're only concerned with avoiding mankind's total extinction then I'll admit, you should perhaps not worry about climate change at all. The only effects of climate change that could even threaten total human extinction are ocean acidification and now perhaps ocean deoxygenation, and we'd likely suffer a population crash that would drastically cut CO2 release before causing an oceanic mass extinction. If you want to keep our civilization running about as well as it is right now though, you should be very worried about climate change. Changes in coast lines can cause massive property destruction, mass migrations, and unrest. Changing weather patterns can cause crop loss leading to famine, mass migrations, and unrest (see how the Syrian civil war started).
The ocean can kill off species due to habitat encroachment. Whole coastal and island habitats radically changed. It can drive further human habitat encroachment due to those mass migrations from changing coast lines/rainfall patterns and flooded cities, and human habitat encroachment drives animal habitat encroachment.
He's right though, carbon is the problem, and while there are non-carbon-reduction workarounds for some of the problems that carbon causes, there are no workarounds for all of them, most prominently ocean acidification. Those workarounds also all carry downsides that addressing the actual problem doesn't, so it's not a free lunch. If you think of the different options as geo-engineering efforts, reducing carbon emissions carries the least risk, since we're just going back to where we've been before instead of blazing a new trail with a new method.
Addressing carbon emissions isn't an especially expensive or difficult approach either. So why are you so set on only treating the symptoms when treating the cause is a comprehensive, safe, affordable solution?
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Came here to make a fart analogy, was beaten.
It's actually a much less dystopian situation than the more traditional theory of AI worker displacement - that only highly-skilled and creative jobs would still be needed. Most physical labor jobs are relatively quick and easy to learn, and the jobs are needed in huge numbers - they don't scale like knowledge work does.
It could perhaps even be a utopian situation - it would quickly put an end to skyrocketing education requirements, allowing underpaid highly-skilled workers to quit their jobs, get a job as a construction worker or farmer and come out with more pay.
It absolutely was key. Communist mockery of the inequality in capitalist societies was the only pressure short of domestic revolt keeping inequality in check. The threat of revolt activates in conditions so extreme that it isn't enough to keep the middle class large and comfortable.
The fall of communism as a credible threat threw open the floodgates of inequality in capitalist societies.
This is a good example of the "charity model" of economics that the belief of the rich being "job creators" relies on. It also meshes well with the ass-backwards concepts of supply-side economics.
According to this model, the rich use their excess money to hire some people whose work they don't really need, basically out of the goodness of their hearts, and keep them on if demand rises to sustain the need for their employment. Therefore it makes sense to pile as much money on the rich as possible so they'll hire more people, duh!
It's putting the cart before the horse and mistaking which one powers the vehicle. It's perfectly backwards.
Demand actually drives the need to hire more people, and employers hire more people based on demand once they can afford it. Giving them more excess millions will do exactly nothing to spur job creation, they actually need very little excess cash by today's standards. Therefore it would make sense to maximize consumer spending money - piling more money on the middle and especially lower classes.
What giving insane amounts of money to the rich actually does is further accelerate wealth concentration. They spend this excess cash on opulent luxury goods like megayachts and supercars and mansions which require relatively little labor to produce for their value, with most of the profit going to other 1%ers.
It's a shame the last few decades in which traditional capitalism was viable were squandered by trying to run the engine backwards. Automation is coming now.
Then you should be angry at lawmakers, not somebody who happens to have better circumstances than someone else.
Less eloquently written as "Don't hate the player, hate the game," the criminal's creed.
That's basically what he's saying and he may be right. Capitalism only rewards one broad skillset when you think about it - business skill. You can be a genius at anything you like, even if it's in demand, but without the ability to "be a good salesman of yourself" to summarize the GP's post, you'll never make good money doing it.
I like to think about what the world would be like if success were based on some other random skill that has little in itself to do with being productive. Doing yo-yo tricks, maybe. The best yo-yo-ers would be billionaires and those who are hopeless at it would be poor, and we'd all just accept it I guess.
I think I could make six figures in such a world, when I was a teenager I could do loop-de-loops, the sleeper, walk the dog, rock the cradle and probably some others I can't remember.
Those rules only apply to workers though. Board members and executives get ludicrously hyper-rewarded with all the money that was saved from so carefully paying workers only exactly what they must be paid to not quit. Why don't the rules apply uniformly to all employees? Board members and executives aren't that productive or hard to replace.
The GP is right however - according to white-hat philosophy, we should stick our heads into the sand and pray, for to test the security of the system without explicit permission to do so would be just as evil as anything the most ill-intentioned black-hat could do!
Yep large aircraft will be the last type of vehicle to run on liquid hydrocarbon fuels. Land vehicles, small planes, and small boats can run on batteries. Large boats can run on a combination of nuclear, solar, and wind power (yes, as in bringing sails back, for certain values of "sails").
The best solution for large aircraft is biofuel.
...when you have a vested interest in a matter, your opinion on that matter becomes worthless.
It was for real last time, the luddites and their children died in grinding poverty, only their grandchildren started to get work. Most people don't know that and think that the luddites worked themselves into a tizzy for nothing and were back to work the next week. Not so.
This time it could be not only for real, but permanent.
Good point. We should probably move the estimate closer since there are semi-autonomous cars already for sale and on the roads. I'm thinking 5-10 years is a good estimate now.
This is the best support I've seen so far the for the "rising tide causes inflation" theory. Next I'll have to see if the inflation is enough to neutralize any increase in spending power as UBI & minimum wage increase opponents often assert.
I don't see how it would create inflation, that idea doesn't mesh with any existing theories of how inflation works. In fact, that's the "rising tide causes inflation" argument often used by opponents of UBI and minimum wage increases.
Maybe they think the soul forms on day 14.
That's right, melting ice caps can alter ocean salinity, which could alter ocean currents, leading to further climate changes:
https://www.llnl.gov/news/atmo...
Natural climate changes could affect salinity in the same way. It doesn't pose much of a risk to marine life compared to other effects of global warming.
Ocean desalination? I assume you mean acidification or deoxygenation.
Here's some info for acidification:
http://www.eea.europa.eu/data-...
The current pH is lower than the last 2 million years, and looking at the graph, the rate of change appears to be the fastest on record.
I couldn't find any historical data for ocean oxygenation. There are records for temperature going back to 1880 that could be helpful in estimating oxygen exchange rates, but that's about it.
Again, I can't do anything about the fact that there are people who think that climate change is real who are blowhards, know-nothings, and even bullshitters out to make a buck. If that fact turns you off, you REALLY won't like the denialists...
Reporters who make elementary mistakes get corrected on science blogs instead of the mainstream sites where they posted the mistake. Reporters screwing up on science stories is hardly new or restricted to climate science.
Not drunk, talking about two different issues, wealth (which is known) and disposable income (which I'm guessing at).
I don't make a typical programmer salary, especially not a typical US-west-coast programmer salary.
I'm not talking after-tax income, I'm talking wealth:
http://www.theguardian.com/mon...
I'd guess the 1% has 99% of the disposable income because huge amounts of cash are hoarded by them instead of spent, while the rest of us spend most or all of what we earn on relatively basic stuff that's required to function in a modern society.
A lot of rich people are very conversationally pleasant and polite people, and it isn't until you get to know them better and how they look at the rest of society including their employees, that you learn that they're actually massive assholes.
They have 50% of the wealth, but probably closer to 99% of the disposable income (it's a guess...but I'll bet it's good)
The iPhone was a total joke when it came out. It was pretty and different, but there were no applications for it other than what it came with (!), you couldn't even download files or copy and paste text. It was a few years before it got within reach of the capability of the Treo 650 I had at the time, which was my second smartphone more capable than the original iPhone and not even the best smartphone available at the time. Even then, the iPhone was and remains a toy to enable consumption, not a real computer. A real computer puts you in control of what it can do, allowing you to write and run your own programs on the device and download and run applications at will.
The iPhone's success damaged computing itself more than any device or event in history by popularizing curated computing in place of general-purpose computing.
I'd say there is plenty enough science to say that doing nothing is about the worst alternative for the environment, short of actively destructive options like switching the planet to 100% coal power (or possibly chopping up trees and burning them for power, but we're already doing that!). This is basic stuff as climate science goes.
The best alternative for the environment would very clearly be to cease all CO2 release right this second and put all resources toward sequestering CO2 to bring it close to pre-industrial levels, but that's not remotely practical.
The tricky part comes in balancing what's best for the environment with what's practical for our civilization. Doing nothing (let's say locking power sources at what they are today, because renewable power and electrics would naturally become the cheapest options in under a century otherwise) will certainly hasten the demise of civilization and cause many medium-term and long-term problems so that can't be the best, we can afford to do better. The cost of suffering through those problems will be far greater than whatever we can spend to avoid them in the short term, the only question is what we can afford to spend now and how deep into the diminishing returns we should go.
The "too late" argument relates to milestones like +2C where certain consequences can't be avoided, it certainly doesn't mean that there's no point preventing warming over +2C. It still gets worse with more warming, it's a sliding scale that we've just put artificial markers on. There's no point where we "might as well give up 'cuz it's already broke."
150 years is a blip in geologic time, but it's a decent chunk of time for our civilization and represents most of the post-industrial era. So the fact that it's a blip by geologic standards is hardly relevant to the discussion of anthropogenic climate change and its effects on our civilization. It's certainly not too short a period in which to measure climate change.
If you're only concerned with avoiding mankind's total extinction then I'll admit, you should perhaps not worry about climate change at all. The only effects of climate change that could even threaten total human extinction are ocean acidification and now perhaps ocean deoxygenation, and we'd likely suffer a population crash that would drastically cut CO2 release before causing an oceanic mass extinction. If you want to keep our civilization running about as well as it is right now though, you should be very worried about climate change. Changes in coast lines can cause massive property destruction, mass migrations, and unrest. Changing weather patterns can cause crop loss leading to famine, mass migrations, and unrest (see how the Syrian civil war started).
The ocean can kill off species due to habitat encroachment. Whole coastal and island habitats radically changed. It can drive further human habitat encroachment due to those mass migrations from changing coast lines/rainfall patterns and flooded cities, and human habitat encroachment drives animal habitat encroachment.
He's right though, carbon is the problem, and while there are non-carbon-reduction workarounds for some of the problems that carbon causes, there are no workarounds for all of them, most prominently ocean acidification. Those workarounds also all carry downsides that addressing the actual problem doesn't, so it's not a free lunch. If you think of the different options as geo-engineering efforts, reducing carbon emissions carries the least risk, since we're just going back to where we've been before instead of blazing a new trail with a new method.
Addressing carbon emissions isn't an especially expensive or difficult approach either. So why are you so set on only treating the symptoms when treating the cause is a comprehensive, safe, affordable solution?