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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, many problems are last mile problems. If we could teleport medicine and technology to everyone who needs it, these problems would be mostly solved. And I'm sure drug companies would love to make money on those people since their marginal cost is so low. But coordination is hard, and it's not necessarily a problem money can fix.

It's like the math that takes # of homeless people times cost of an apartment, and then people claim we can solve homelessness for [reasonable amount]. Makes sense until you look how much US spends on homelessness every year already.

Cell phone technology was the closest thing we got to teleporting technology and wealth to the rest of the world. Most developing countries completely skipped a phase of development that required crazy amounts of infrastructure to be built out. More people have cell phones than running water. It's pretty incredible if you think about it. Hopefully AI will be a similar leap frog.

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I’m not sure - we have enough food to feed everyone on earth. We have cures to many diseases. We have enough homes for everyone.

Inequality is bad and getting worse. Big changes accelerate it because richer people can adapt and take advantage faster.

I enjoy playing around with AI for fun and find it amazingly useful. But I do not believe it can solve inequality - that’s a people problem.

I work in ML and honestly I agree. We live in a fairly post scarce world. We could already live in a much less post scarce world.

AI, as most technology, make these things easier, but they are power. It's all about what you do with power. You can build power plants or bombs. AI could (let's be hypothetical) free humans from all necessary labor. Robots making all the food, mining all the materials, and do the whole pipeline. But that requires a fundamental rethinking of how we operate now. That world isn't socialism nor capitalism. That's a world where ownership becomes ill defined in many settings but still strict in others. It's easy to income Star Trek but hard to imagine how we get there from here. Do we trust a few people to make all the robots to do all those things and then just abdicate all that power? Do we trust governments to do it? There's reason to trust no one. Because a deep dystopian can be created from any such scenarios. Going towards that hypothetical future is dangerous. Not because super intelligences, but because of us. Those with power tend to not just freely abdicate it... that's not a problem we're discussing enough and our more frequent conversations of ASI and the like just distracts from this one.

> It's easy to income Star Trek but hard to imagine how we get there from here

I'd like someone, amongst the tech bros for instance but it could be any influential politician in power, to set a target on when do we stop making life more miserable than it could for billions of people, by asking them to aim for no more than structural unemployment, 40+ hours weeks, steady economic growth in the name of progress.

Because as long as the end game isn't defined (and some milestones towards it), we won't have Star Trek, but a sci-fi version of a Dickens or Zola book, or at least an eternal treadmill augmented with marginally less useful innovations.

That's how I project over the next centuries the failed prediction from Keynes about everyone working 15 hours weeks in a near future, in a western world that yet did achieve post scarcity (at least for now)

tech bros by definition want people to be miserable

I'm not sure it's mostly last mile problems. A frequent problem I see is "costs now vs future costs". Worse is "costs now vs amortized future costs"

What I mean is let's say you are making something and you see an issue. You know it'll be an issue and if fixed now will cost $100, but if you fix it a year from now it'll cost $1000. Many people will choose the latter. On paper, I think most people will choose the former but in practice the latter is often hard to determine. An example might be a security risk. It only gets harder to fix as you generate more code and complexity increases. But of hacked this has high costs both through business and through lawsuits.

The amortized one is a nasty problem because it often goes unnoticed. Say a problem costs $100 to fix now but every day it isn't fixed it costs $1.00 every day you don't fix it costs 5% more (so $1, $1.05, $1.1025,...). These sneak up on you and you'll pay a lot more than that $100 by the time you notice

I think you misunderstood OP. The last mile problem was solved or being solved. Millions of lives were saved and fewer people were dying every year. It was one of the greatest successes in human history. Now we’ve stopped because our government decided to stop. Millions of more people will die unnecessarily and technology has nothing to do with it.

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