Pretty much all of the kerfuffle over AI would go away of it was accurately priced.

After 2008 and 2020 vast (10s of trillions) amounts of money has been printed (reasonably) by western gov and not eliminated from the money supply. So there are vast sums swilling about - and funding things like using massively Computationally intensive work to help me pick a recipie for tonight.

Google and Facebook had online advertising sewn up - but AI is waaay better at answering my queries. So OpenAI wants some of that - but the cost per query must be orders of magnitude larger

So charge me, or my advertisers the correct amount. Charge me the right amount to design my logo or print an amusing cat photo.

Charge me the right cost for the AI slop on YouTube

Charge the right amount - and watch as people just realise it ain’t worth it 95% of the time.

Great technology - but price matters in an economy.

Just throwing one of my favourites in:

As JFK never said:

“””We do these things, not because they are easy,

But because we thought they would be easy”””

Complete tangent but “produced at is Sodom Facility”

Wait what?

Really - “ At ICL’s Sdom facility, the Dead Sea brines…”

I always assumed it was gone for good … weird. I did not know that name was still in use …

Why wouldn't it be used?

To be honest I thought it had been destroyed, wiped out, gone forever and no-one knows where it was.

It’s not a huge issue but a bit surprised to find out during a dive into consequences of Iranian blockades

I mean, a good portion of American cities are named after destroyed historical ones. Sodom the city itself doesn't exist anymore, it's a wider geographical naming AFAIK.

See 29:00 minutes for the quote that for me posting

A fairly good look at drone tech over the past few decades, and a real feel for the impact of basement lab tech of Ukraine.

Now I want this for London Zoo :-)

Sorry for the tangent, but you sterilise a whole room with UV light? Is that efficient ? Do you do it after tidying / cleaning ? Is there a medical reason for the extra part? Is it just cool :-)

The house came with a bacteria that would normally be hard to get rid of. UV, bleach and peroxide took care of it. I just repeat the process to ensure there is no bacteria or mold. This seems to bother people in this thread which I find fascinating. A part of me wants to bring my black light to their dwelling.

I have mold problem in one of the bathrooms. What would be your recommendation? Seal off bathroom and run UV, then vent? Or do I need to do entire house? I can also seal off bathroom and bedroom. Thanks!

No, UV is unrelated to your issue.

First you need to figure out if it’s a surface infestation because of condensation or if it’s a constructive thermal bridge. The latter can be solved by raising the surface (wall, ceiling, etc) temperature through insulation or more inefficiently special heaters designed for this purpose.

In both cases, the contaminated material is removed down to the plaster or masonry. Wood, wallpaper and similar materials will likely be deeply contaminated and must be removed. For areas larger than 1 sq meter, it’s better to get a specialized contractor which will use HEPA vacuum cleaners, special bags, etc to ensure that the mould spores don’t spread in other rooms.

For small areas the agents of choice are bleach or hydrogen peroxide, both available in products for home use.

Was it from flooding or how did it get there? How did you detect it?

There needs to be a believeable legal framework behind this.

Imagine a option on your iPhone that says “Enable this to allow geo-location tracking for organisations registered under the NOADSJUSTPUBLICGOOD Act” - then any wifi endpoint could locate you as long based on signal strength etc and that data could only be made available to people registered under the act.

Would we see new understanding of how people move around in cities, would we see better traffic information, Inthink so - as long as people believe that there are real teeth to the laws and they enforced loudly and publically.

We should embrace the benefits of a society wide epidemiology experiment - the benefits for public health are incredible. (Add to that supply chain logistics on open ledgers and many of the new things that just were not possible before and the future of open transparent but well regulated democracies is bright.

Let me know if you spot one.

But ... they are only able to live their lives and amass wealth (good on them btw) because modern western society is arranged like it is - Maritime trade, international rules based order (mostly) with compatible legal systems, free and fair elections and half decent government accountability, individual rights and property systems.

Basically England Circa 1851, plus democracy.

And because it was all put together more or less accidentally, it can all fall apart. So worrying about that and trying to do something about it is like discovering that under the deck of the ship are engine rooms, rudders, riveted steel plates and navigation maps.

Its not a slight on your friend, but one would expect him to have a mental model of a rudder, even if he does not know about the impact of cavitation.

More Black pills flying around are just an indication that the rudder is hanging off or the rivets are leaking a bit. It can be fixed, as long as no one tells the passengers the ship is actually flat or the engine room is how elites maintain power.

None of modern society and economics was put together accidentally, IMO. It was purposeful, a mix of success & failures, serendipitous, and filled with mixed motives... but that's not quite the same as an accident.

A mix of political scientists, politicians, investors, entrepreneurs, lawyers, judges, scientists, technologists, and economists have tried to mold society to their own theoretical vision for at least 150+ years. Society then reacts to that in both good and bad ways. This distorts the vision, as society changes it to its concerns. And the cycle repeats.

I think of Karl Polyani's The Great Transformation has a great way of looking at the attempts to force "market society" on England in the 1700 and 1800s, and the reaction that all societies exhibit in the face of unconstrained technological or economic change. Both the imposition of change and reaction to it can be violent, it's hard to predict. We've had such a relatively steady state since WW2 in the developed nations that we're not used to this cycle.

Accidentally is the wrong word, but considering it was never done before and had some very unusual constraints (large coal supply and coal industry, sufficient centralised state that could provide peace within its borders but had been neutered into compromise with parliamentary middle class, finance centres, maritime trade etc etc) that it was done at all does feel … unplanned?

The image that sticks in my mind the most is the Meiji Emperor in a 1870s photo dressed in a saville row suit and bowler hat. For Japan the most incredible social card to play that says “we are going to be like these foreigners and their secrets to wealth”

Nothing accidental there, but that still leaves visible joins on the Japanese soul.

Maybe I am being naive but I think there will always be room for smarts.

Every professor at any university has a dozen more project ideas than they have graduate students, every factory boss has a dozen more optimisations than ways to implement them, and looking up into the night sky we have 95% of it that cannot be explained.

The gap is not too few smart people, nor too few "jobs" that need smarts. The gap is being prepared to arrange society and wealth so the "job" is discovery, science, sharing. We are no longer hunter gatherers, no longer a feudal society, perhaps we shall stop being whatever this one is and try a new one.

(and no, I don't think there is a name for the new one yet (its not socialism, maybe not capitalism).

Lets just not fall back to Feudal if we can help it

Yes, we have an infinite amount of knowledge work that needs done. But if AI is better at it than humans, we aren’t going to use humans.

We don’t use chimpanzees for any knowledge work today, even though they’d be better at it than some other animals.

I think the evidence that AI is better at knowledge work without a human in the loop... is very limited.

Humans with many agents will be more productive, but the tendency has been for these models is to regress to the mean when it comes to strategic insights.

So far, I think you're right. But the rate of progress just seems so crazy that I'm not seeing any moats that look fundamental. I hope I'm wrong and you're right.