It’s amazing to use technology to save humans from toil. The question is, who owns the robot? Who benefits from the labor it produces?
The techno utopia we imagine is a world where nobody has to work. All our needs are taken care of and we live a life of leisure. But as long as there is ownership of the automated systems, those owners will hoard all the wealth generated by that automation.
Labor expenditures and taxes are the only times the wealthy have to share their wealth with the rest of us. If they succeed in disintermediating labor, and governments fail to tax them, the oligarchs will live a life of unlimited luxury while the rest of us die in poverty.
These can't be simultaneously true. If all of our needs are taken care of, that is the same thing as unlimited luxury. Someone hoarding wealth is not that important when everyone has everything they want. Society is already being helped by all of the needs they are fulfilling. We don't need to also take their wealth too.
>That utopia can not come if there is private ownership of those automated systems.
Who controls an automated system and whether enough automated systems exists to fulfill everyone's needs are separate things. You could have one person providing for the entire needs of the world by scaling themselves using AI.
> Who controls an automated system and whether enough automated systems exists to fulfill everyone's needs are separate things.
Again, nobody said that they were. You are arguing with yourself.
> You could have one person providing for the entire needs of the world by scaling themselves using AI.
Sure, and if one person owned all the automated system he could blackmail others, choose not to use those automated systems to fulfill the needs of some... it is beyond me that in the world we are currently living in somebody doesn't see it.
> "Today it's gambling advertising, tomorrow it's alcohol, then it's sugary drinks, fast food, critical minerals and who knows what else comes next," chief executive Kai Cantwell said.
We have already learned our lesson. Prohibition doesn’t work. But advertising does work. Banning advertising also works. We should allow people the freedom to participate in vice, but ban all advertising for it. Anything harmful to society should not be advertised. No ads for cars, guns, recreational drugs including alcohol, unhealthy food, fossil fuels, or gambling.
Who knows what comes next Kai? Hopefully everything.
I gotta admit I laughed heartily at the quote. I expected the slippery slope argument, I did not expect it to be made so clumsy :)
btw. what followed is worse: <<He accused the government of blindsiding a sector that supports 30,000 jobs and "provides critical funding to sport, racing and broadcast industries".>>
Gambling business is not a positive force. It's not even zero sum. It's a negative sum game. I hope no one is nodding along to these kind of arguments, they are nonsensical.
“provides critical funding to sport, racing and broadcast industries”
I foresee that the amped-up sports gambling will destroy professional sports as all results will be tainted with the probable interference from the gambling industry and those trying to “game the system” (irony noted).
It’s too late. Professional sports is already ruined by gambling. You don’t always see it in the results but in the weird side bets (how many tackles, home many metres).
It should be more heavily regulated and the advertisements are so blatant and intrusive they ruin any pleasure you might take from watching sport in Australia.
> Courtwright’s The Age of Addiction has the statistics: “Per capita consumption initially fell to 30 percent of pre-Prohibition levels, before gradually increasing to 60 or 70 percent by 1933.” That suggests a 30 percent reduction, at a minimum, in consumption — although that was less than the initial effect, as people figured some ways around the law.
> We should allow people the freedom to participate in vice.
There is literally no individual upside to gambling and don't say "winning". For sites like FanDuel and DraftKings, you get banned or your bet sizes severelyl restricted if you consistently win [2]. Why? Because it discourages the marks if they don't win occasionally.
Suicide rate is highest among gambling addicts than any other form of addiction [3]. Gambling measurably increases credit score drops, debts and bankruptcies [4]. The entire business is predatory.
At least back in the day when you had to go to a casino there was some barrier to gambling. Now? Just pull out your phone.
> For sites like FanDuel and DraftKings, you get banned or your bet sizes severelyl restricted if you consistently win
Can confirm this in Australia too. They give you progressively worse odds if you win. And they give you progressively better odds if you keep losing, to keep you coming back.
You laugh, but thanks to those critical minerals ads during cartoons, my kids are now begging me for praseodymium and scandium. Prices for rare earths are through the roof but my 10 year old just won't accept that she can't refine advanced alloys in this economy.
If she wants to refine advanced alloys then should look into the environmental regulations first, there's a reason nearly all such processing is done in China, or South East Asia.
If there were ads promoting breeding mosquitos or deliberately inducing cancer, we could look at banning them. But there aren’t so this is a pointless take.
The thing with “harmful to society” is that in practice it's so arbitrarily decided what is “harmful” and in practice it comes down more to “arbitrary moralist reactions”.
It really depends on the speed. I went through it in the past few years, and it was too fast. One day I knew everybody in the whole organization, what their responsibilities are, and what they are working on. I turn around and there are more employees than I can ever know.
Exactly. Same as you I am just paying for search. I never used the assistant, and never will. Right now Kagi is good enough at search that it would be annoying to lose. But if I was forced to go back to Google I could survive by using adblock. I really wish Kagi would just put all their engineering efforts on search to make it so good that I couldn’t possibly live without it.
I don’t need a new browser. I don’t need a replacement for Google Maps, since Google Maps is actually good and Kagi will never even catch up to Apple Maps. I don’t need any AI trash.
Just have everybody work on the search engine to make it is faster, more reliable, and free of content farms or slop. That is the only reason I’m paying for Kagi.
A job is a machine that takes money from someone who is very wealthy and gives that money to someone who does not already have enough wealth to live a safe and secure life of idle leisure. The people who have wealth want there to be as few jobs as possible. If they can eliminate a highly compensated job, all the better.
I think a lot of this scourge is actually caused by the elimination of the headphone jack. For nerds it may come as a surprise, but many people do not have wireless headphones, or don’t know how to set them up. Or because wireless earbuds are small without any cable attached, people lose them. Or people have them, but they run out of power.
Any of these problems could force a person to resort to using their speaker instead of headphones. But if we had standard heapdhone jacks like the old days, there would be far fewer excuses.
It also doesn’t help that it’s been a very long time since phones came with headphones included.
I would guess some people will say traffic is down because people are using LLMs to get news and are not reading news sites anymore.
My hypothesis is that all these tech sites are writing about are LLMs. People are sick and tired of reading about that, so they are not going to those sites anymore.
I’ve been to many very large office buildings with turnstile systems, and I have never seen any kind of line, even during the busiest hours. Yes, they are security theater to a large extent, but they do legitimately help to make the elevators run a lot more efficiently.
I’ve only worked two places as big as OP described, but you probably see this more when your company leases a third of a floor on a giant office building. Or a floor and a half, or two half floors because it was easier to expand onto the 12th floor.
Elevators do back up, especially when everyone has to scan for their floor. Not like the author suggests, but you can lose a good few minutes a couple times a day that way. It does start some people on an exercise kick of using the stairwell to leave the building. Not great exercise though.
The one place solved this by not building parking garages. Flat parking that went to the horizon. By the time I got to work the spot I parked at was going to be over half a mile from my desk. I bought a grownup scooter with oversized wheels, first day I used it security tracked me down and said those aren’t allowed on company property (I had half a mind to use it on the sidewalks around the outside of the property but didn’t, since I’d still be carrying the stupid thing into the building). But I spent a lot on that scooter and had no other use for it, so I was mad.
My coworker had convinced me that this was billable hours (court precedent about a factory that had a bad setup for employees to get to the time clock) so I started phoning into standup when I was on site but still eight minutes from my desk.
When you’re walking half a mile to the security doors it tends to stagger the arrival times. Which is a feature, if the dumbest one.
The techno utopia we imagine is a world where nobody has to work. All our needs are taken care of and we live a life of leisure. But as long as there is ownership of the automated systems, those owners will hoard all the wealth generated by that automation.
Labor expenditures and taxes are the only times the wealthy have to share their wealth with the rest of us. If they succeed in disintermediating labor, and governments fail to tax them, the oligarchs will live a life of unlimited luxury while the rest of us die in poverty.
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