That greatly depends on how much handholding is required and for how long.
The difference between mostly right and actually useable without supervision is why self driving cars still aren’t ready. When someone says AI can do job X, they rarely mean it’s good enough for anyone to blindly trust the results of it doing that job.
Yea, the first few percentage points are underrated.
Dropping from 90% of the population being ~farmers to 80% of the population being farmers doubles the amount of time people can spend doing everything else including research, manufacturing, education etc.
In many ways it was equivalent to the drop from 51% being farmers all the way down to 2%. However, it wasn’t nearly as obvious because 90% farmers looks a lot like 80% of the population being farmers and the transition was relatively slow and unevenly distributed.
A large fraction of the people using Google probably have no idea DDG exists. So the backlash is likely significantly larger than just the 0.2% who left to this search engine.
Net deaths is what matters here. Obviously they aren’t perfect, but no human system is.
The market for effective drugs is global. FDA regulations have a significant but not that burdensome influence on drug discovery. At the other end, the opioid epidemic is a demonstration of just how many deaths can result from insufficient regulation of just a single drug family.
Which is why FDA regulations vs zero regulation have saved vastly more lives than they cost. Conservative estimates put it somewhere in the 2 orders of magnitude range.
> Which is why FDA regulations vs zero regulation have saved vastly more lives than they cost.
The first book I linked to did the research and showed otherwise. The key aspect usually not admitted is the deaths caused by drugs not developed due to costly regulations.
I hope you can understand why a book with a “Publication date : December 31, 1974” might have some gaps here in terms of relevant research and current regulations.
As to the leaded gas issue, that’s a function of less strict regulations allowing unleaded gas. Many countries have banned it without issue.
Peltzman had 10 years of statistical data to make the case. Any subsequent study that does not take into account lives saved by drugs never developed because of regulation costs is not a useful study.
As for leaded gas, the problem was changing the engine designs would require recertification so expensive that people just keep using 1960s engine designs.
Regulations have an effect of stifling new development - in drugs and airplane engines.
As for drugs, there is a way out. Allow legally consenting adults the right to sign a piece of paper stating that they understand that drug X is not approved by the FDA and they take it at their own risk.
> Peltzman had 10 years of statistical data to make the case. Any subsequent study that does not take into account lives saved by drugs never developed because of regulation costs is not a useful study.
You say that as if no such study exists. They do and the costs are known to reasonable levels of accuracy, what’s generally excluded is the benefit of drug regulations. Regulations on opioids alone (granted there’s a lot of opioids) have saved million of American lives since that book was published, but it’s easy to exclude such numbers if you want to make regulations look bad.
> As for leaded gas, the problem was changing the engine designs would require recertification so expensive that people just keep using 1960s engine designs.
Nope, ~80% of existing light aircraft in the US can 100% legally fly on unleaded gasoline. This isn’t a technical problem or the burden of regulations. This is a group of people that didn’t want to spend money because the transition isn’t free.
> Regulations on opioids alone (granted there’s a lot of opioids) have saved million of American lives since that book was published, but it’s easy to exclude such numbers if you want to make regulations look bad.
Opioids were approved by the FDA, and were by prescription only.
How did your studies account for drugs never developed? The rate of new drug development dropped drastically after the 1962 Amendments.
By prescription only is a regulation. Without that Coca-Cola would still have coca leaves.
> drugs never developed
The way you get good data on that is to look at the actual drug discovery process and how decisions are made.
Automated in vitro testing has been used, but the number of potential compounds make that impractical even with essentially zero regulation at that point. Once you get down to some actual evidence for a drug funding is surprisingly plentiful. The often quoted 2 billion per drug includes all the failures, for any given candidate the cost is low at every individual stage until you have something with significant promise. Which makes sense as the average drug is worth vastly more than 2 billion so at every stage further investment looks viable.
Incidents that are over five years old have minimal impact in terms of current competition between Boing and Airbus.
The airbus A320 family is associated with 1,490 fatalities, there’s just a vast number of flights daily so tiny risks add up. Companies buying new aircraft care far more about maintenance to fuel efficiency than a few rare incidents due to already corrected issues.
Can you shed a bit more light on this? I can't find any evidence that there are that many fatalities related to that plane, at least related to its operations in flight. Seems like there are few or if my quick look shows even zero fatalities related to it flying. You wrote "associated" but can you define what you mean by that? During manufacturing, maintenance and other non-flight-related incidents?
That’s an overly simplified model. AI companies spending results in infrastructure beyond the company such as manufacturing capacity, power lines, software systems, and even individual expertise.
If they fail then the negative impact ripples through the economy due to misallocation of resources.
consider all the companies in a market and those that feed that market to be one virtual mega company, add up all the valuations and revenue streams, costs, etc and aggregate all the investors into one. Nothing changes about the picture I drew. We simplify models to make the real world understandable.
>negative impact ripples through the economy due to misallocation of resources
free or relatively free financial markets are the only way, the best way, the ne plus ultra of ways we know to allocate capital, we have no better way than for the owner of the capital and the reapers of the loss or reward to make a considered opinion that is risk "impedance" matched. By definition, the market does not "misallocate" capital, it optimally allocates it.
your theory is that we could somehow know the future, but that's a fallacy.
Free market efficiency is inherently tied to having multiple companies. Treating the entire economy as a single company gives nonsensical results because it fundamentally differs from what actually occurs. You might as well compare the economy to a game of tick tack toe, inherent complexity isn’t something you can simplify it has meaningful consequences.
Your ideas like many other ideas are simply wrong.
> could somehow know the future
Perfect accuracy isn’t the only possibility here, there’s levels of error.
Our system involves intermediaries between the actual owners of capital and the allocation of that capital who have very different incentives. When the worst possibility is missing a bonus there’s little difference between losing 10% of an investors money and 100%. That results in inefficiency through the misalignment of incentives.
That is actually true, and thus there’s no way to gloss over that truth without simply being wrong.
>Treating the entire economy as a single company gives nonsensical results
trust me bub, I've studied much more econ than you. If a competitive market sets the prices (check, that's what is happening), and you want to analyze statistics of a sector (check, that's what we are doing), you can take those competitive prices as "given" and hold them constant, and consolidate the assets of in industry into one virtual entity. No claims were being made about competition, the claim is that "it is validate to consolidate statistic of what you are trying to study.
"how much did the AI sector make last year? how much will it make next year?" is not answered by running a simulation of competitive marketplace with production functions.
>>could somehow know the future
>Perfect accuracy isn’t the only possibility here, there’s levels of error.
if you deviate from the market's prediction of the future, you are increasing your levels of error; why do that?
Then try and justify why you say shit this clueless:
> how much will it make next year?" is not answered by running a simulation of competitive marketplace with production functions.
Profits next year very much depend on the number of companies involved 1 vs 100 is not going to give the same results. Like I hope you realize how false what you just said was. Because if you actually believe this there’s literally no point in talking with you.
>That’s an overly simplified model. AI companies spending results in infrastructure beyond the company such as manufacturing capacity, power lines, software systems, and even individual expertise.
in a competitive marketplace, economic profit will go to zero. so whether an AI company buy or rents outside infrastructure, or builds it itself doesn't matter, it makes no difference. Therefore, if your argument is "outside infrastructure X", you can see the meaning of that by looking at "assume the company bought up the whole industry including outside infrastructure, then go back and look what I said and it still applies" A company monopolizing outside infrastructure for its own use would not abuse its monopoly against itself, but even if it did, makes no difference the extra profit and extra loss would balance out. Would it abuse its monopoly against downstream customers? if we use the existing market prices unchanged in our example, that is analyzing the case where it does not, which is the case that is comparable to the current situation.
or to put it another way, let's say these are all publicly traded companies competing. What if I told you "hey, i've investigated the ownership of all these public shares, guess what, Elon Musk owns them all, he owns every share of every company in AI, and all the infrastructure suppliers. Does that change the analysis from what we see in the marketplace? no, it doesn't. You want to draw a bigger circle around more affected parties, the suppliers to the infrastructure suppliers: OK, Elon owns those too it turns out.
nobody is analyzing the future here, we're talking about the case of AI going bust, not trying to predict AI going bust.
if were were going to project the future, we still would not do it with a simulation using functions to model companies to try to come up with meaningful profit numbers, we would project profits (and costs and revenues) based on margins of similar industries
> in a competitive marketplace … current situation.
Lots of words to say you don’t understand what you’re talking about.
At the most simple level monopolies extract profits through raising prices above that of a competitive market. This price increase reduces total sales even as it drives up profits.
As such the existence or non existence of a monopoly would change how much energy/etc AI was consuming among a host of other effects completely independent of how much utility it provided.
again, nothing that you are talking about has anything to do with the conversation I initiated. (IBM used to be a monopoly, now they're not. How much power did they do they use? we don't need economics, we just look at their power bill, it's that much, that's the impact they have on the power grid.)
if you want to sound like you know what you are talking about, don't talk about "total sales", you want to talk about quantity demanded at the market clearing price vs the monopoly price, and the effect that has on producer surplus.
and what is bad about a monopoly in economic terms is not that they extract a higher price and profit from their smaller number of customers (those customer choose to purchase the product because it's worth it to them), it's the dead weight loss which represents unmet demand which slows the economy overall
We can’t look at next year’s power bill today. Hell finding their power bills from 1930 isn’t trivial either, thus we model the universe and test those models rather than just making up nonsense models that look pretty.
> that's the impact they have on the power grid.
That’s only the direct effect, the indirect effects get way more complicated.
The fact you’re constantly demonstrating profound ignorance is why I am treating you like a 5 year old. You understood what I said and had no defense, thus my use of simple terms was entirely justified. Using more words to say exactly what I just said doesn’t change my opinion. Instead try and apply that line of reasoning to your earlier statements and find the issue, that would demonstrate some actual understanding.
PS: The economic harm from monopolies extends to R&D etc but …
Keep peddling that capitalist realism. “There is no alternative!” The market may not misallocate capital, by definition, but it very clearly and routinely misallocates resources. Let me guess: you’re doing relatively well for yourself?
I know what i'm talking about, and you don't. That does not come from me being rich, it comes from me being raised as a far left-socialist, and being on the spectrum, and then studying economics and finance in graduate school and realizing what was true and what was wishing. Capitalism and free competitive markets solve exactly the problem that centrally planned economies are explicitly trying to solve but always fail to. Not only that but with predictable results. As you can now see, I not only have a heart and I have a brain, and I have education. And I have the inculcated capacity to read the socialism no matter how its hidden and between what lines.
you tried to dismiss me by saying "oh but you're doing well" as if that meant anything. You brought it up, not me, but inasmuch as it does means anything, it suggests I'm winning the race that you purport to be an expert at.
I do not come from wealth, my family is largely working class. I have grown my wealth dramatically because I understand how the market works. I didn't know a priori what would happen, I just took what they taught me in school and applied it with extreme discipline and without fear. Turns out that works.
>The equity of the economy is not very similar at all to a game
the economy is about efficiency, and supply meeting demand, and fair exchange of factors and products for pareto optimality. that is what equity should mean but it's not what you mean by it. Your equity lifts only some boats and at the cost of lowering and even sinking others. Nobody can prove except by simple observation that your equity does not in fact lift boats.
Hilarious; such ugly arrogance. Of course it “works” to the extent that you describe, otherwise we wouldn’t be in exactly the situation that I’m against. Where you came from doesn’t matter at all. The system is working for you so you are for it.
You assume too much, that I am going to argue for centrally planned economies or something. I never claimed or implied I was an expert, or to what degree I’m “winning the race” (what a horrible way to think about human society!). I think it’s either an absurd failure of imagination or simple invested ideology, that we have to have either hardcore “free” markets (free for who?) or strict Soviet-style planning (typically with the assumption that we have only the knowledge and technology from that period too, for some reason). I think we can do a lot better than both.
Your impressive-sounding words about efficiency quickly fall apart for anyone who has actually looked at the dirty end of capitalist processes. Inefficiencies abound; the market optimises for only money which a lot of the time is a stupidly poor abstraction of the stuff of life that actually matters. And that abstraction enables and justifies untold cruelty and exploitation.
If you were a sort of capitalist-pessimist, saying that you didn’t like it but this seemed to be the least-worst option, I’d think you were woefully unambitious, but at least some way understandable. But you arrogantly defend this system, and brag about how your massive brain managed to exploit it. Welcome to HN, I guess.
economic efficiency does not refer to productive effiency, it refers to having prices that allow people to make optimal purchase decisions, and whether competition ensures prices will reflect costs.
so, according to you, you are not arrogant, you just legitimately know what's best for everybody else, and you are virtuous to boot?
writing tip: take all the emotionally charged words out of your prose, they don't have the effect you think they do.
I knew you were speaking more technically about economic efficiency, but what does that matter when the real processes are often so inefficient? Or when it results in so many bad outcomes?
I won’t be taking “writing tips” from you; my words are an expression, not pure calculated rhetoric. I never thought I was going to change your mind, I wanted you to face a teeny tiny bit of resistance.
Expressing an opinion and making observations is not arrogance. I said “I think” and “I’m against”, I never claimed any virtue, I didn’t brag, and I didn’t tell you that you don’t know what you’re talking about. According to me, I just have a view about part of the way the world works, that’s it. Reading tip: get better at it.
The difference between mostly right and actually useable without supervision is why self driving cars still aren’t ready. When someone says AI can do job X, they rarely mean it’s good enough for anyone to blindly trust the results of it doing that job.
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