This was a video I saw that covered this idea well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqiDqJMxg6o
> But closer examination reveals that OpenAI’s proof builds its unnatural force in a totally distinct way. The proof’s similarities to Buckmaster and Alpöge’s progress are superficial...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/openais-blockbust...
So I think more time needs to pass before a call can be made.
An interesting thought experiment is this: if we were to go back in time 150 years and tell our ancestors that Newton is just an approximation and give them a 5,000 page book about Special and General Relativity, QM and QFT, would we be robbing them? Initially the whole thing would be incomprehensible, but eventually they would chew through it and make sense of it. I don't really know the answer (and perhaps the analogy is not great since we're quite attached to our physics heroes from the last 150 years).
there is a difference between "knowing" and "knowing about". "knowing" is having it deeply ingrained into one's intuition by working at a solution over years, often without progress in the immediate sense, and often without success in the absolute sense either.
Maybe post-LLMs mathematicians will work on problems/topics that even ChatGPT can't solve? Like, P=NP remains unsolved, we can work on that. Sure, it's possible that it will get solved tomorrow by an AI or somebody else, but that possibility was always there.. Or, to be more practical, one of the claimed OpenAI results is that integer multiplication is sub n×log(n), so assuming it stands, now there's a new question: "What is the actual lower bound for integer multiplication?"
I have no proof, but I believe (i) LLM progress will converge at some point, (ii) that point will not be so far off from human intelligence, since they're trained on human intelligence, so.. not all problems will be solved/solvable by LLMs. But they'll be fast(er), like calculators are faster than us.
This is just what is happening. Techniques discovered by AI have already been used to solve other problems, or to extend the AI-discovered solutions.
I find this argument difficult to understand. As a math student in college with no ambitions (or realistic opportunity or aptitude) to pursue original contributions to the field, everything I learned was by definition already solved. Nevertheless I was able to - required to, in fact - work through each solution in order to develop understanding. And I did in fact learn by this method, as countless other students did before and after me.
So when I hear this argument from mathematicians, all I can hear is that they are frustrated at being out back into the position of being students, where the end result of the hard work of understanding is just the understanding itself without the prize of a new discovery. If they want to find the solution without reading it, they are still very much able to do so, just as their students do every day.
Difficult problem -> Developing new branches of mathematics to solve said problem -> solving problem, or failing to do so, it doesn't matter -> aforementioned new branches of mathematics are used to solve practical, real-world problems that benefit industry and economy.
The point of solving the problem is not the prize. The point of solving the problem is not even solving the problem. It is developing new methods and deepening understanding to drive useful applications.
Knowing that a solution exists is not an impediment to deepening your understanding of a problem.
For example: Knowing that there is a proof of Pythagoras’ theorem is not an impediment to thousands (millions?) of geometry students developing the intuition that comes from drawing the famous diagram where the number of squares visually add up to one another.
What about the existence of an AI-generated proof prevents a mathematician from working through the problem on their own to deepen their understanding, as if the proof didn’t exist in the first place?
That’s what is hard to understand.
I'm baffled that you find the mechanics of human motivation hard to understand, (presumably ;) being a human yourself.
Studies have shown that people that know a certain piece of knowledge is stored somewhere, are less likely to remember said knowledge.
The sense (thrill?) of exploration and discovery can in fact be part of a person's motivation. The popularity of open-world games (often derided as 'walking simulators') are a testament to that. Do you really not see how that could be undermined by knowing that a problem that interests you is already solved?
Basically all natural sciences work that way. Knowing the truth of an apple falling down a table when rolled over the edge is the beginning of discovery, not the end of it.
Mathematical discovery also worked more like theoretical physics 200 years ago. The modern way of formalization in maths might be dead now in some ways, but it's also only 100 years old. There's still many ways to do modern maths and have a lot of fun with it that are not taken away by AI.
it is qualitatively different
> If a set E in R^k has one of the following three properties, then it has the other two:
(a) E is closed and bounded.
(b) E is compact.
(c) Every infinite subset of E has a limit point in E.
Likewise, when given an exercise of the form "Prove P" or even "Prove or disprove P," you can be pretty certain 1. it is doable and 2. it is doable using techniques/theorems discussed in the course/book you're working through. But people are perfectly happy to do this for several years.
But that’s exactly it! The mathematicians are framing this as being bad for human understanding of math, but it’s obviously really about their own motivations for developing that understanding! Which, again, goes back to the obvious conclusion that what they have lost is the extrinsic motivation for being first, not the intrinsic motivation of developing understanding.
That is totally fine! I wouldn’t be motivated to do my job if I wasn’t extrinsically rewarded for doing so. But I am also not feeding anyone a line of BS about how it’s actually some other higher-minded motivation driving my work.
I’m empathetic to the instability of the extrinsic rewards for doing math research as a profession in the current moment. I am not at all empathetic to an attempt to manipulate me into thinking that the real problem is something other than that.
It’s like an entrepreneur complaining that they can’t build a business that would better humanity because of high taxes. That’s fine - but the motivation lacking there is obviously making money, not bettering humanity.
When you're learning/internalizing existing knowledge, you tread a defined path skipping unnecessary stops and diversion and heading instead directly to the destination. The destination, not the journey, is the point.
When you're discovering new knowledge in the form of proving/disproving, there's no defined path to follow, so there can be quite a bit of backtracking and diversions and detours into other areas you weren't planning on going initially and while there might be some well-defined paths to follow, you might have to cut your own path through uncharted desert or jungle.
All those diversions and detours make the journey just as if not more important than the destination because they create new destinations of their own for future travel that would not have been spotted or noticed for a while longer (if ever) otherwise.
So to bring it back to math, transitioning from having to develop proofs for theorems to validating/learning extant proofs completely changes the scope of future discovery. Everyone will tread the exact same path to a proof/theorem and then stand in the same place to look for future destinations and then use AI to build them a path to that new destination and then everyone will follow the same path to the new destination and repeat the process, so the chances of finding something curious along the way plummets. And something curious could be an entirely new field of math, or maybe just a new problem that isn't relevant to the intended destination but gives a view of many new never before seen destinations for future trips.
Demis Hassabis has talked about this a bit in regards to theoretical physics and it's an idea that I think I agree on. Every once in awhile we randomly get a super genius who's brain is seemingly able to conceptualise or visualise beyond the state of the art. But at some point I think we have to accept that we are just animals and inherently limited by our brains (and means of observing the physical world).
The scary part isn't that AI is solving the unsolved problems that will force people to act like students again. The scary part is that we may not be able to understand the work needed to get to the solution at all.
Obviously we're not quite to that level yet but it's entirely possible we do get there. And on the optimistic side ~ maybe that's what we need: better tools.
I see no reason whatsoever to expect that humans have any kind of limit to what we can understand as a species. We've had more unthinkable and incomprehensible discoveries than anyone cares to count. They become understood, normalized, and folded into our scientific canon. We went from inventing airplanes to landing on the moon in a matter of decades. We went from banging rocks together to quantum physics and string theory. I think we'll be alright.
But there's no guarantee that such "low IQ" intermediate steps exist. We do well with many classes of problems because of divide-and-conquer. But not all problems can be solved through divide-and-conquer.
For a rough analogy, see how AI plays chess and intermediate board positions often don't make sense to us. Imagine now an enormous chess-like game played in an enormous chess board where a match lasts longer than a lifetime and none of the intermediate steps make sense to any human.
I remember a recent "100 hundred mathematicians on AI" post recently. Some of them appeared truly excited even if the majority wasn't. Who's right? Who's biased? I don't know.
Scorpio!
He'll sting you with his dreams of power and wealth.
Beware of Scorpio!
His twisted twin obsessions are his plot to rule the world
And his employees' health.
He'll welcome you into his lair
Like the nobleman welcomes his guest
With free dental care and a stock plan that helps you invest!
But beware of his generous pensions
Plus three weeks paid vacation each year
And on Fridays, the lunchroom serves hot dogs and burgers and beer!
He loves German beer!It's a beautiful story, more and more relevant.
I'm firmly in the "programming is fun" camp, I enjoy thinking about the problems and solutions, but if I can get a LLM to deal with boilerplate then that's all the better for me.
1. AI agents aren't just typists. They'll fill in the blanks and implement something that works from extremely vague instructions and probably get it right too, because you and your users are predictable. You could be strict and throw out any changes that weren't explicitly what you asked for, but it becomes tiring and it will shape the way you think anyway. It becomes extremely tempting to increase the boundary of what you consider "boilerplate",
2. You probably have colleagues who don't like programming but please the managers because, of course, everything needs to get done right now, as soon as possible. Maybe one day we'll get organisations where enjoyment and understanding matters, but right now we've got tons of people who got in it for the money, just like to "build stuff" and don't care one iota about understanding (and they're oddly proud of this fact),
3. I'm starting to think the typing was a necessary limitation on output speed. I just don't think anyone can think as fast as LLMs can churn out code. You can easily get addicted to the speed and forgo understanding. Like point 1 this is insidious. If you're not really careful you just won't be able to keep up and before long you too will have a bunch of code you don't understand.
The broken economic system is the lack of perceived individual choice, and the priority of business decisions and business profit over individual satisfaction or autonomy.
If we lived in an economic system where maximising individual enjoyment and autonomy was priority, we could give AI to individuals to do with what they want. No sensible human/border collie would choose to give away the fun sheep herding part of their job if there weren't other forces and incentives at work.
But instead, AI is sold to businesses to profit, rather than given to individuals to do the right thing for everyone.
That's why I mentioned autonomy too. People like working and being valuable and choosing to add value. The issue is the current economic system doesn't consider things valuable if they don't directly generate a lot of money or profit for a business. An individual developer gets a lot of value from having a job they enjoy where they produce useful code that solves problems. AI removes some of that value for the individual developer whilst promising more profit and value for the business.
> Why would anyone choose to work with sewage? Or why would most developers choose to align with rest of the team or with user needs, when programming is most enjoyable?
Why do people choose to work with sewage now? They're not paid a lot. Programming is most enjoyable when it's useful. Writing code which is going to get thrown out because it doesn't align with your team is not valuable or fun, so why you or any other individual developer choose to do that given the choice?
Also, some things simply are not valuable within a system, regardless of the economic structures at play. Individual happiness is one of those things that has no value under any economic system, specifically because it is a moving target and follows Goodhart’s law.
It's not about giving it up, it's about it being taken away. You can't round the sheep up if they never leave the pen.
If something doesn't need doing then it's not work, it's a game. Many people enjoy decorating, but you wouldn't trash a room just to give yourself the excuse to decorate it. A few people might like programming just for the sake of it, but for most it was because we liked doing cool stuff that was hard. It's really important that it was hard.
If things aren't hard then it's just like doing the dishes: it's just time consuming and mildly unpleasant. There's no room for creativity or pride in doing the dishes. Nobody steps back, wipes the sweat from the brow and thinks, wow, that was hard, but I'm really proud of the result. Programming is becoming like doing the dishes.
Kennedy famously said we do things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. We need the challenge. We need it to be hard. If all we're left with is boring work like the dishes, or games, then we'll be like border collies left at home with endless treats and a ball. They can and do get depressed and we will too.
Not just the pay, but motivation doesn't work on math insight alone. If you look from a distance it's clearly a mix of status, money etc. If what you say was true, many of them would be recluses up in the mountains, but none of them are.
LE. Think about it this way: if someone truly only cares about his ability to do "non-AI-contaminated" mathematics, nothing stops them from ignoring all the AI-related papers and just carrying on on his own. The thing that they are passionate about is not taken away by the field being more rapidly developed. What's being potentially taken away is the impact of their potential contribution.
Except, for instance, Wiles and Perelman? And I’m pretty sure that mathematicians are rather more introverted and solitary on average than most people.
In any case, that just doesn’t follow. Mathematicians realize that collaboration is important in math just as it is in most other fields. Humans are also social animals and many of us enjoy collaboration and social interaction for its own sake. And yes, that means social status is a thing that motivates many humans. But nobody decides to study math in order to gain status! Any status stuff is entirely contextual to and conditional on having already decided to study math.
Humans are built to focus on some objectives and not others at any given time.
Humans naturally prioritize objectives differently. Drives have exclusionary impacts on each other. In both real time and lifetime frames.
Reinforcing experiences further differentiate objective prioritization.
This leads people's behavior to be driven by entirely different net objective directions.
--
This diversity would be inevitable due to genetic diversity. But it is also a survival advantage.
Lots of studies show that populations maintain stable diversity of genes for entirely different life strategies, because operating differently from the majority is an advantage.
--
We don't actually have a "status drive".
We have drives that tend to generate status seeking behavior but can be subsumed by many different status-like pursuits, such as self-status of solving problems or completing single-person video games, being good at a hobby nobody else cares about, pleasing certain people even to the point of harming any recognizable definition of social status, acting to please (raise status with) internally generated or deceased personalities, a need to be contrarian or difficult to the point of low-social status but high internal status, etc.
--
Your assumption that same basic nervous system -> same net drives/behaviors, fails in much simpler species.
--
So no, mathematicians are no more motivation clones than they are genetic clones.
And mathematics is not a field that is attractive to people who give social status high priority, because it impedes social status.
It's interesting to recall Turing's own position: "There would be great opposition [to AI] from the intellectuals who were afraid of being put out of a job. It is probable though that the intellectuals would be mistaken about this. There would be plenty to do, i.e. in trying to keep one’s intelligence up to the standard set by the machines, for it seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers. There would be no question of the machines dying, and they would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits."
On the other hand, Thomas Bernhard's The Loser is a horrifying account of the opposite standpoint---of an essentially second best piano student who cannot stand existing in a world with Glenn Gould.
Mathematics represents the rational skeleton that upholds and stabilizes our vague, formless but far more common belief-based thinking.
Without it, losing it from neglect, we would collapse back into a pre-rational state of fantastical, wishful thinking.
Pretty much exemplified by large parts of US society already, but there is no bottom otherwise keeping society from collapse.
> What would such a world look like?
Major religions, minor religions, cults will have a field day. Or more like a field century or a millennium or twenty, who knows.
Up to a few years ago, I would see or read some science fiction that was medieval times with spaceships (ala Dune) and I would roll my eyes and think “ffs, can’t people move on and invent something more original?”. Now I seriously believe that’s one of the most benign futures waiting for our species[^1]. Not that there aren’t lots of lights in this tunnel, it’s just that its shadows are very black.
They have nothing to fear if that is their motivation. New players get into chess every year despite computer vastly outperform us.
A whole lot of people. Anyone who got into mathematics for love of solving problems (which I'm betting is most of them, as it's not like the pay is awesome) will be unhappy if they have the joy of solving problems taken away from them. Your argument here is analogous to saying "who doesn't want to have more children in the world without having to have sex to do it?".
This is evidenced by the scant few people who get into math just so they can rediscover group theory or differential calculus on their own with no spoilers.
The argument was about mathematicians, and "anyone who got into mathematics for love of solving problems".
We're not talking about doing it as a hobby.
Or did you think the argment was that they'll be forbidden by force to do math, and come to refute that?
Now that all of the trite and boring intellectual work is automated, I can look forward to having it bottle-fed back to me at night. Now get me a gramme in time...
~ unnamed Gamma BNW elevator technician.
The reason most problems aren't fixed is because you and I rather take our family to Disney Land than feed starving kids. We're don't vote for a political system which taxes us significantly more to try to stop people starving around the world. The problems Tao is worried about already exist for a large part of humanity.
You have two problems here:
1. You're not going to change the human incentive to care far more about their own family and friends and resist the government taking their assets to help the needy they feel no responsibility for.
2. In a world where most people are economically useless people ultimately have no political power. If you're not funding the government or contributing to it's maintenance then government ultimately doesn't need to care about what you want. You could go on strike or tell them you're very unhappy, but so long as the trillion-dollar AI companies are funding them and AI is running the government it makes no difference to them what people think. In fact, from their perspective, all you're doing is consuming resources. AI will likely create a new kind of resource-curse where wealth concentration will cause political corruption.
That's typically not what happens - you either get bloody revolution or people just ignore the rules that aren't giving them a fair shot ( ie turn to crime - ie state disapproved activities ).
This is what has traditionally held back the elite from their worse excesses - they don't want to live in a world where either of those things happen.
ie what's the point of being rich if you are constantly worried about yourself or a member of your family is going to be violently kidnapped etc.
As to your first point - it's a bit like the first - if there is no social safety net, then it you could happen to you - you could get ill, lose your job etc. Even if you believe the system is created by total self-interest - then the past has shown that the equilibrium involves looking after everyone to some extent as:
1. It could be you one day.
2. Having lots of desperate people, even if it isn't you, is in no-ones self interest.
Good luck violently kidnapping the family members of a AI CEO in a world of flock cameras and humanoid robot patrol units.
And good luck withholding your labour when 80% of people can't even find paid employment.
Also, arguably if the unemployed masses are going to try to overthrow those provide them with at least the basics to survive and part take in a revolution, then those involved in the revolution shouldn't be surprised if what little they have is withdrawn. Strategically this sounds a lot of like punching your boss and demanding he pays you more or you'll punch him again. This isn't a reasonable negotiation tactic unless you hold some of the cards. The only reason threatening to quit a job can sometimes work is when it's a real threat of economic harm, absent that, it's just annoying and they'll probably be happy to see you off the payroll.
In fact the rise of things like cheap killer drones or robots makes that truth more real, not less.
> And good luck withholding your labour when 80% of people can't even find paid employment.
So those 80% are either being supported somehow to live a life at a level where they don't resort to violence or crime or they aren't. ie you keep them happy at some level or you fight. Note if you let them die/kill them, then you will likely lose the support of the 20% as they can see which way it's going.
I think this all calls into question your basic premise that "politics is downstream of what we humans want", ie that the state is an emanation of the collective will of the people, which it serves. The facts fit equally well, if not better, an interpretation in which the state is independent of society and seeks to extract resources from it. This is also consistent with the Weberian state conception in which the state starts as the "stationary bandit" that collects taxes from a village to protect it from other bandits.
Your conception of "economically useless people" is also incoherent. Economic science is about how to distribute rare resources to maximize utility. These people are no less able to work and no less able to benefit from utility and are therefore not "useless" from an economic standpoint. I think you would benefit from just using words like "rich & powerful" and "poor & weak" which if I understand correctly is what you actually mean.
It only questions "the government is downstream of what we humans want". politics != government.
What you're saying in this comment sounds _very much_ like politics, at least modern politics. There's been a few studies that suggest that people's position on the political spectrum is very correlated to their capacity for empathy for others (and in particular, strangers). First example I found on google: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10281241/ (note: I do not vouch for scientific rigorousness, I'm saying "some studies suggest that" not "it's proven that").
So:
> you and I rather take our family to Disney Land than feed starving kids
Speaking for myself, it's more true than false (although not that clear-cut). However:
> We don't vote for a political system which taxes us significantly more to try to stop people starving around the world
I sure do vote for that, as do a very significant portion of people. It's absolutely what I want, I am aware of my own biases (and other people's) to prioritise myself, and taxes are a good way to force this redistribution of wealth to happen despite these individual biases. That's kind of the whole point of the left, which is a very strong power in many countries (note: I'm not american and the "american left" is very different from other countries').
So "what humans want" is very much a political question: a very-much-reducted observation of the political spectrum is that it seems that right-leaning people want the best for themselves and their immediate social circle, whereas left-leaning people want the best for everyone.
You are obviously right in some sense that they are therefore political "problems", but politics is in the business of giving what people who have political power what they want.
Is extreme poverty in Mozambique a top 10 issue in any wealthy country? No, obviously not. Because politics barely registers this as a problem. If it did it could solve it, but like you I'm more concerned about the cost of eggs and being able to afford to take my family on holiday.
This is what I mean when I say it's not a political problem.
I of course would agree all of the negative social and economic impacts of AI could be solved with political solutions, but I also think most negative social and economic problems could be solved with communism.
Humans are kind and compassionate for those who share some sense of communion with, but struggle with even the most basic level of empathy for the people and animals for which they do not.
I don't trust people to implement communism and I don't trust trillionaire AI CEOs to redistribute their wealth. The people who put forward these ideas in my opinion are promoting a dangerous idea. At a minimum those advocating for these ideas should at least be implementing the empathy they require of their political preferences in their own lives. Most people pushing these ideas probably don't even acknowledge the existence of those begging them for cash in their own city streets, yet for some reason they think trillionaires will take sympathy on their own economically pointless existence.
There's a whole industry of people on LinkedIn, preaching that I don't exist, that I'm obselete or worthless or deluded.
You get mad fast at the torrent of lies and "come to jesus" thinking.
Then they help themselves to your software.
good ol' TINA is back in town...
That what it cannot do is to invent new drugs, cannot figure out cheap energy sources, find something better than Standard Model in physics, and anything that would contribute to overall human progress.
The result is that it can replace a lot of jobs, it will efficiently killed any research done and the level of master/PhDs, because majority of those can be done now with the help of AI (we already see this, the burst in new scientific articles - nothing groundbreaking, but publishable).
As a results we will have soon a gap, as only very determined people would go into science, analytical jobs, etc.
In one way, this is OK, we had too much science research that was done only for the sake of producing more "papers", we also had a lot of people in the companies doing "bullshit jobs".
But on the other hand, we might face soon situation in which there will be almost no people in Academia, so who will teach people, in addition, science worked often by doing wrong, unreasonable, crazy things, testing vague ideas and come up with something new and great. This required a lot of people doing science without any good results coming out, a lot of seemingly wasted effort just to hit several great ideas (a bit like Venture Capitals work).
This might also lead to decreasing number of white collar jobs. We can have a new "rust belt", the one for blue collar fall happened because of jobs offshoring, now we are "offshoring" white collar jobs to a few companies who offer AI models.
This all will affect badly society without any huge, visible benefits for it as a whole.
That has not been my experience.
Right now you're doing the equivalent of telling athletes that you've solved sports, and they need to sit back and stop playing so that we can enjoy progress in goal scoring.
Thanks.
It's just a law of nature man. Don't take it so personally.
And not just implied: it has been a repeatedly openly made promise, from the start of the industrial age to today, repeated again and again, by scientists, journalists, technologists, futorologists, businessmen, even by sci-fi authors.
But the promise of less work, and more free time, has been there from the beggining.
In the early/mid 20th century they even had big discussions and books about what people would do with all the "leisure" time that was coming.
Practically, technological progress does not implies working less, it implies higher productivity. Which implies more wealth for "someone". Who that someone is depends on political system.
That's on you. Implied doesn't mean "caused".
>Also, what sci-fi authors and futurologists write is utterly irrelevant here. We should distinguish fantasy and reality
A useless distinction, since what sci-fi authors were saying was taken to be a foretelling of things to come, adopted as such by many voices in the wider cultural space.
And of course futurologists were people who made (or attempted to make) informed predictions and even policy suggestions of things to come, not mere "fantasy" peddlers.
>Practically, technological progress does not implies working less, it implies higher productivity
That's your concept of it. Hasn't been historically the concept people (from technologists and journalists to politicians and sociologists) had of it. And even if it matches how things went, it's hardly the only way things could have gone (or should go).
> That's on you. Implied doesn't mean "caused".
It can mean both, actually (and usually someone insinuates something, not something, so I didn't find that this meaning of imply was a fit here).
Capitalism with AI would be exactly the same thing, but zero compassion (unless the AI has been trained for it).
The government does not have an incentive to run anything efficiently as they cannot go bankrupt. Imagine if AI was run like the DMV.
Putting monopoly control of it in the hands of government also makes it extremely likely that whoever is in power will use it to manipulate public opinion + elections as well as encoding their political values into it.
What do you think a Trump-controlled AI would say if I asked about the war in Iran? We’ve already seen examples of companies encoding their beliefs into the system (see Gemini saying nuclear war is preferable to misgendering Caitlyn Jenner), imagine how much worse it would be if politicians were given control instead.
I went to the DMV in Oakland and it was the most efficient DMV I'd ever been to.
Personally I remember waiting for hours in a line wrapped around the building for the chance to take my drivers license test.
Another example: have you ever tried to interact with the IRS? The most nightmarish bureaucratic system I’ve ever had the displeasure of interacting with. And guess what my recourse is for them treating me like garbage? Nothing. A company, if they treat me poorly, I can take my business elsewhere. The IRS? The DMV? Not so much.
Like Chevron, or Verizon, or Microsoft.
Chevron: Exxon, ConocoPhillips, BP. From a customer perspective there are tons of competitors which make your life better ranging from QT, AMPM, to Buc-ees (a favorite which people literally LOVE to visit).
Verizon: Starlink, TMobile, ATT, Comcast, etc
Microsoft: Apple, Google, Cloudflare, Amazon (differentiates itself literally on quality of customer service)
The IRS or DMV? No competitor. Unhappy with their service? Go fuck yourself.
The IRS is treating you bureaucratically and poorly because of lobbying from companies and politicians being bribed by said lobbyists.
My point being that you are beholden to a poorly functioning IRS because of capitalism; where companies have lobbied so hard against tax reform and simple filing that it more or less forces you to use their software.
How is this somehow the fault of “capitalism”? Regardless of how the system is structured, the government has a near-infinite budget, they could theoretically staff the agency with enough people to answer my call in a timely manner. They could also train their staff to treat me with human dignity. They don’t do this, and the reason is that they have no incentive to do so. If I am upset by being treated poorly what recourse do I have? Nothing. In fact if I ignore their system long enough, armed goons will show up with guns and arrest me.
There are many examples of government agencies that have this reputation, not only in the USA but the entire world.
“Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome” -Charlie Munger
Also the only reason we have to pay for Turbotax (etc) is due to lobbying. We had IRS Direct File for two years and it was great before being gutted by the current administration.
I dunno what reputation it has in your area, but my actual experience with it was indeed fast, efficient, and enjoyable.
They had to pass legislation to intentionally fuck the books to make them inefficient to fit their preferred narrative because government could be held accountable for inefficiency in ways private corps cannot.
Oh come on.
Here's another thing to get scared about: AI and other kinds of advanced automation has the potential to completely undermine the attributes that made capitalism work for the vast majority of people. Rehashing dated mid-century anti-Communist propaganda tropes isn't going to address that. You're gonna need some fresh ideas.
Also people who want to seriously recreate the Soviet Union don't practically exist (outside of some irrelevant weirdos), except in the minds of some really indoctrinated libertarians.
And the micromanaging from a distance produces catastrophic results.
I think this has historically been true, but it is worth revisiting now with AI and general tech advancement. Might be more feasible now.
> Socialism CAN not work due to human nature. The sociopaths hijack the centralized assets while exterminating via reallocation all opposition.
You could also argue that capitalism CAN not work due to human nature. Just look at the state of climate change.
The socialism that did exist didn't take environmental preservation seriously and rather tried to silence reports about the damage.
Am I missing the sarcasm here? The difference from the current system would be...?
Becoming a billionaire does not magically make you evil believe it or not.
Or did you mean "human nature" (I'm using huge air quotes there) as you have experienced it in late 20th century / early 21st century United States?
The current arrangement does not compute (or work), and gets us straight to doom, "taking into account the nature of human beings".
Historically socialism and central planning have been inefficient. With recent technological advancements it may be that the purported inefficiencies are no longer there, and I think a democratic, socialist government will be better at having the interest of the people than private for-profit monopolies. A society where everything is automated and you don't have to work could be pretty nice to live in.
What part of it wouldn't work?
Curiously, capitalism will work the moment capitalists understand options markets, but in their case they need to also understand put options, which is to say that capitalism is impossible.
The attempt never materializes because some kindly clerk deliberately buries the letter from the enthusiastic engineer, who clearly does not understand that writing Stalin to tell him you figured out a way to build communism better than him, would be suicidal.
It's a fun counterfactual to think about, given that the vast bureaucracy needed for the command economy was one of its major limiting factors. Anyway, interesting book if you are into economic policy or quirky ways that systems can go haywire.
This is the self-defeating contradiction at the heart of progressivism: it is a cult of good intentions. It doesn't matter if the promise of socialism has already been proved, on a global scale, to be illusory. It's the intentions that matter, and in their minds no amount of failure will ever tarnish good intentions.
I'm convinced that susceptibility to such pre-enlightenment "thinking" is a Great Filter.
Where they working on "slop"?