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A 10-20% recruitment rate is pretty good as these things go, actually.
Yes but these effects can be very short-lived.
In response to
[LINK] Two articles on Bitcoin
On the subject of 2.
People have speculated "could a government stop Bitcoin".
The answer is an unqualified "Yes", and the project will tell you the same thing. All it takes is having over 51% of the computing power of the world's mining operations.
A fork of Bitcoin called CoildCoin was killed by Luke-Jr. He explains his reasons for it a few pages into that thread, but basically he considered CoiledCoin to be fraudulent and/or a threat to Bitcoin. He claims he used only his own resources but its possible he used a large mining pool he operates.
Now the Bitcoin FAQ will tell you that there are a lot of limits to what you can do with 51% - little more than double-spending your own coins. That is enough though - once people know that the blockchain is corrupt they will walk away from it.
I've seen estimates that for only $80MM you could have an order of magnitutde more processeing power than the entire pool of miners that were operating at the peak last summer (many of who could come back online quickly). This puts the destruction of Bitcoin easily into the operating budgets of most Nation states, lots of companies and quite a few individuals.
I am certainly not saying that.
What I am saying is that many of the products we buy every day are produced by cheap laborers whose lives are not-so-great. (This is obvious, of course.) It is not apparent that Western Europe could have its quality of life without this cheap labor. To only take into account Western quality of life when deciding our current society's utopia-status without taking into account the quality of life of our foreign laborers is, well, just not cricket.
Yes but this trade benefits both parties. While the labor is "cheap" it pays better than if there weren't so many foreign companies building factories in that labor market. So in terms of aggregate quality of life I do not think this can be much of an objection in itself - the fact that all sorts of exploitation typically accompanies such trade not withstanding.
I understand what you are saying though: the total cost in person-hours to maintain a particular standard of living should maybe be taken into account - although I think this can be misleading. For example in places where labor for personal servants is very cheap there are a lot more of them - some of my peers who are from India had several servants working in their home, driving their cars etc. It was almost looked at as an obligation to hire these people. In every other way to measure wealth they made more money after immigrating to the US but of course could not afford such services here.
I suspect the driving forces behind automating that sort of thing will ultimately be, not labor costs, but the relative slowness, messiness, and unreliability of humans.
That said, I also expect that the technology that can do those sorts of jobs more quickly, cleanly, and reliably than humans will be developed for different applications where minimally trained human labor just isn't practical (say, automated underwater mining) and then applied to other industries once it's gotten pretty good.
Maybe but its still easily 50 years away. People are "messy" but they are so cheap and you need so few of them - there is no capital tied up in them at all its just a month-to-month expense. Even if you lease equipment you are still paying for the cost of the capital tied up in it. The diminishing returns for automating such a small cost will ensure its continuity for quite some time I think.
When I was very young, I was something of a Maoist. Nowadays, not so much. Nonetheless, are you familiar with the notion of labor-aristocracy?
Current western civilization looks a lot like Utopia Gone Right to me, at least compared to the wide majority of human history.
I am imagining a hypothetical Spartan: "Current Laconic civilization looks a lot like Utopia Gone Right to me, at least compared to the wide majority of human history."
He is, of course, ignoring the existence of Helots.
today's Western Europe - warm water, light, and quality clothes for everybody! Even a peasant can afford to travel to the other side of the world in a few hours!
Certainly. However, do they not rely on cheap labor from other nations?
Are you saying we should not buy things from poor people?
In response to
Q&A with experts on risks from AI #3
i) Global warming. While not as urgent or sexy as AI-run-amok, I think it a far more important issue for humankind.
Reading these letters so far, the experts very often make such statements. I think that either they systematically overestimate the likley risk of global warming in itself, which wouldn't be too surprising for a politicized issue (in the US at least), or they feel the need to play it up.
I think a lot of people make this mistake, to think that "very bad things" is equivalently bad to extinction - or even is extinction. It is unlikely that large scale nuclear war will extinguish the species, it is far beyond unlikely that global warning would extinguish humans. It is extremely unlikely large scale biological weapons usage by terrorists or states would extinguish humanity. But because we know for a certain fact that these things could happen and have even come close to happening or are beginning to happen, and because they are so terrible its just not really possible for most people to keep enough perspective to recognize that things not likely to happen really soon but that will eventually be possible are actually much more dangerous in terms of capability for extinction.
... not to mention that a lot of food is being produced by machines, or at least in a heavily automated environment. I've visited food factories, I don't remember seeing many cooks. Even home cooking has been automated to a certain degree.
All these labor saving devices, even factories, are integrated by humans. While the productivity per worker skyrockets (fewer workers needed per X units of output), there is no factory that runs without people who do generally very easy tasks that are very difficult to automate.
The summer after high school I worked in a spray bottle factory. Yes, we made the spray nozzles like come on a bottle of windex. My job was to keep the bins full of the little parts that fed into the machine that assembled them. I also helped unload the boxes of the parts from the carts and stacked them near the bin where they needed to go. Someone else somewhere had a job to handle the "raw" plastic for machine that melted and molded the parts I needed. Someone else put the different parts in different boxes sorted for the cart driver.
These tasks were of course absurdly easy for any human to do with about five minutes of training. Somehow automating all this together into a single factory chain would have presented enormous challenges though. Because the labor is so cheap I could easily imagine that factory will run the same way for the next fifty years.
In response to
What jobs are safe in an automated future?
The safest job, the only one safe job - is to be the owner. You can't milk the cow better than a machine, you can't do a thing better than a machine on the long run. But you can own a farm and take the dividends.
I think that may the only job that could be safe for a given length of time. Eventually what you own will be superseded by something owned by someone else, and what you own will be worthless. If you are constantly investing in different products, markets and technologies you might stay ahead of it for a long time but that isn't what most people think of as a "safe job". I think what people are asking for in a "safe job" does not and will not exist.
Depends on who the European nobleman is. A noble-blooded merchant from Venice in the 14th century would have a different perspective to a Frankish Knight of the 8th century.
The set of average european noblemen from 500 years ago does not include 8th century anyones. Yes, I am aware that different people hold different opinions. You asked a very speculative question about what an average member might think. So, thats all I have to say about it.
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Immediate approximation of how I'd do it (warning: Dark Arts ahead):
"You may be right-- I myself have certainly felt like I've been being watched over by dead relatives before. But one thing that I realized is that this effect might not actually be supernatural.
The human mind and memory are powerful things. It could simply be that I was so close to my dead grandmother (may she rest in peace) that, in times of peril, my brain subconsciously looks to her memory for advice, since I remember so many times that she had good advice for me in the past.
In this way, I think it's possible that in some way our dead relatives really do live on with us, even though it's not really them speaking with us, but merely our memories of them."
I haven't tested this yet but I'm moderately confident that it would work, though part of that is of course in the presentation. There may also be a better way-- I haven't thought about this for five minutes yet-- but if I had to have that conversation right now that's the line I would take.
Comes off as transparent and condescending to me. I'm sure I can tell the difference between my dead grandmother signalling me with spoons and my own memories, thank you very much.