I was not intending to be antisemitic. I just think is a salient example of a religion that no longer believes in God. Christians tend to profess a belief in God right up until they become atheist, at which point they no longer attend church.
1,002 karma · joined October 19, 2018
Perhaps we are approaching a time where capital can be converted directly into labor in a way that scales. If this is the case the market is ridiculously undervalued, almost comically so.
I have maintained high savings rates and acquired capital ever since I read that book, regardless of valuations. I consider my portfolio insurance against this scenario.
Even a scarf made of a t-shirt over the nose and mouth will likely reduce RO when used at scale on the population. The best way to protect healthcare workers is to reduce the R0 below 1. Nothing else will help. Widespread use of homemade masks, though not tested in a double blind trial, is low risk enough and seemingly effective enough to encourage.
Countries enforcing widespread mask use have lower ROs.
I doubt it. Consider how the greatest minds of the 20th century thought of him:
"I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Planck, von Laue and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother in law; Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends; and Albert Einstein was a good friend, too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Jansci [John] von Neumann. I have often remarked this in the presence of those men and no one ever disputed me."
— Nobel Laureate Eugene Wigner
"You know, Herb, how much faster I am in thinking than you are. That is how much faster von Neumann is compared to me."
— Nobel Laureate Enrico Fermi to his former PhD student Herb Anderson.
"One of his remarkable abilities was his power of absolute recall. As far as I could tell, von Neumann was able on once reading a book or article to quote it back verbatim; moreover, he could do it years later without hesitation. He could also translate it at no diminution in speed from its original language into English. On one occasion I tested his ability by asking him to tell me how The Tale of Two Cities started. Whereupon, without any pause, he immediately began to recite the first chapter and continued until asked to stop after about ten or fifteen minutes."
— Herman Goldstine, mathematician and computer pioneer.
"I always thought Von Neumann’s brain indicated that he was from another species, an evolution beyond man."
— Nobel Laureate Hans A. Bethe.
In his final days, Neumann tragically lost his genius to brain cancer. His friend Edward Teller said this about it:
“I think that von Neumann suffered more when his mind would no longer function, than I have ever seen any human being suffer."
Gwern has a funny essay about cloning Von Neumann here: https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection#glue-robbers-sequenci...
As Neumann seemed to be god-like intelligent, highly personable, and very kind, if we were to clone any historical figure, he seems like a good bet!
Yes it is. If you have tasks that cannot be automated, people's labour will have value. It would require AI that is as good as any human, and that is cheaper of course, to eliminate all jobs. And even then rich people may prefer human labour for nostalgic or signalling reasons. Eliminating all jobs is a tall order.
Absent human-level AI, there will remain tasks that only humans can do. Hence we will have jobs.
But truly, if we do get human-level AI, it seems to me we will have bigger problems than unemployment. I hate to get all Nick Bostrom, but it really does seem like the objective functions of the machines would be all that matters in this scenerio. As it is their objective functions, not laws, that would decide our fate. Either human-level AI is far off, in which case technological unemployment is not a worry, or it is not in which case technological unemployment is the least of our worries.