It will - and z2 explained why, in response to my post
707 karma · joined October 5, 2017
I said labor would have “lower value” after AI progresses further and further.
My statement reflects that increased productivity means that fewer people are required to generate the same amount of economic output.
You twisted my statement and said “nobody is hiring.”
Which isn’t what I said.
The world is changing fast.
“We?”
This isn’t “our” money.
If you buy shares, you get a voice.
You’re ignoring the fact that gaming is going to the cloud.
That industry is bigger than Hollywood.
Desktop computers will invariably follow.
The RAM shortage will drive the transition.
For instance, my wife uses her personal laptop about four days a year.
People like that won’t be buying personal desktops or laptops, five years from now. The RAM shortage will drive a transition into thin clients.
I already see it with our kids. They use an iPhone, unless they need to type. Then they use an iPad with a BT keyboard.
Apple will be around in a hundred years.
Will the USA?
It’s not a challenge at all.
To win, all you need is to starve your competitors of RAM.
RAM is the lifeblood of AI, without RAM, AI doesn’t work.
I agree, and would add that it’s contributing to inflation in hard assets.
Basically:
* it’s a safe bet that labor will have lower value in 2031 than it has today
* if you have a billion to spend, and you agree, you will be inclined to put your wealth into hard assets, because AI depends on them
In a really abstract way, the world is not responsible for feeding a new class of workers: robots.
And robots consume electricity, water, space, and generate heat.
Which is why those sectors are feeling the affects of supply and demand.
Absolutely.
And guys like Tim Poole got famous off Occupy, then parlayed that fame into building an audience for themselves.
The libertarians at OWS never went away, they just found new causes.
I was at the HUMONGOUS rally that Obama held in Portland in 2008.
The epicenter of OWS was based a few blocks away, years later, and reflected the optimism of 2008 hardening into frustration over Wall Street excess.
Because the fundamentals are basic:
Creating money out of thin air generally creates inflation, because theirs is more currency chasing the same amount of assets.
But the Devil is in the details, because there are hundreds of currencies, one currency can be exchanged for another, and interest rates vary all over the world.
Then once that starts to make sense, you open up a box called “derivatives,” and now the complexity just went off the charts.
I only need to understand it in the context of loans on assets, so I can do the math in my head or in excel. Occasionally I’ll vibe code this stuff in Python.
Because I’m not diving into the deep end of complexity, the books I absolutely LOVE are the cautionary tales of when it all blows up.
In that respect, I think “when genius fails” is an all timer.
Nearly everyone knows about the Great Recession, and the depression and the dot com bubble.
But the collapse of Long Term Capital Management was the canary in the coal mine.
LTCM blew up for all of the most predictable reasons, and as the name implies, nearly everyone involved in LTCM were at the top of their game.
Another book that is more folksy is “a man for all markets“, a book about the dude who revolutionized stock options, largely due to a fascination with Blackjack!
(The LTCM guys were big time gamblers too.)
https://www.google.com/search?q=a+man+for+all+markets+by+ed+...
I really wish that people would wake up to the danger posed by meme stock BS “leaking” into the general markets.
Just as voters are responsible for changes in society, uninformed investors can impact society too, especially when they’re amplifying their purchasing power via leverage.
For instance, I’ve been buying real estate forever, and I’ve enjoyed the Reventure app.
But I’ve REALLY noticed that his YT videos are exclusively doom and gloom.
This ceaseless negativity moves markets, just as the irrational exuberance for real estate in 2005 moved markets.
But the exuberance for real estate was driven by people who were buying real estate.
The endless doom and gloom of YT finance videos is for a much different reason:
It drives page views.
That’s not a good thing. Because it’s really easy to get swept up in the negativity. And that negativity has a downstream effect, where it’s often used to convince people to invest in things that the YouTuber is promoting.
Basically, I don’t know if we need an “SEC for YouTube,” but we might.
Yes, I know we already have an SEC for YouTube (it’s the SEC), but nearly none of the people doling out financial advice on YT are trained professionals. It’s the fundamental defect of internet advice; who to trust?
Two words:
*New Coke.*
Free money is never free.
Basically, when currency is scarce, its value goes UP.
When currency is plentiful, its value goes DOWN.
The first scenario lowers inflation, the second raises it.
After Japans bubble economy popped in the early 90s, they had asset values FALL.
So the BoJ began stimulating the economy - trying to push UP inflation - by adding currency to the markets.
The Carry Trade illustrates one of the dangers:
Japan was trying to stimulate their own economy, to counteract the deflation caused by their bubble popping.
But money doesn’t know borders, and though the money was intended to stimulate JAPANS economy, there was nothing stopping ANYONE from purchasing that currency. It’s not like you have to live in Japan to buy Yen.
So the money (yen) was created in Japan, but ended up all over the world.
This has consequences:
* Japan ended up with mountains of US dollars. This is one of the reasons that Japan has more US Treasuries than China. This mountain of dollars lowers YOUR cost of living. Because USD is being acquired for The Carry Trade. This creates artificial demand for USD.
* Because the yen is created in Japan but is then used for international commerce, it dramatically reduces the inflation that “printing money” would normally create. This is why Japan has more debt per capita than any country by far, by a factor of over 2X
I am just an I.T. dude who invests in real estate. So what I just posted may be completely wrong.
The carry trade has existed for about four decades; that’s my summary of how it affects us, from the perspective of a small time real estate guy.
Working in management is infinitely more soul crushing than being Peter Gibbons.
I literally brought up The Peter Principle when I quit a job like that.
Office Space is a parable about a software developer who doesn’t want to be promoted beyond his core competency. Peter Gibbons is fighting the Peter Principle.
The smartphone stuff, a lot of that development was running in emulators, which likely reduced the time-to-market.
I distinctly remember seeing devs working on future phones in emulators, but most of the devices we sold were just upgrades to existing devices.
That was probably the moment when Nokia and Ericsson and RIM should have been paying attention to what was happening just south of Microsoft in Bellevue. But none of those three companies had a significant presence in the area at the time, AFAIK. The Silicon Valley folks were flying in every single day. I'd argue that this is what killed Sprint too; they were five hours from anyone. The predecessor of AT&T Wireless was so close to T-Mobile, you could drive from one HQ to the other in under fifteen minutes and you could stop off at Microsoft on the way over.
Definitely an example of the synergies that are possible when you have a couple of tech titans who are less than 90 minutes away from each other via Southwest Airlines.
Cursed marketing.
Besides the fact that we didn't have any real money to promote phones at T-Mobile (and I think we were the only US carrier with the hiptop) -
Would you believe that the first hiptop came out the same week as 9/11?!
So it was this phone that was arguably two-ish years ahead of the iPhone, but nobody seemed to know it existed, until it got some traction via sheer word of mouth. Everyone who used the HipTop basically wouldn't go back to anything else at all. The HipTop had that 'addictive' quality that the iPhone had. It was nothing like the Blackberry, where people largely used it for a single killer app.
I kept my job.
It turned out that the reason that Paris Hilton and so many celebrities got hacked was:
* the password to her cloud storage account was the name of her dog
* once the hackers had access to her cloud storage, they could use that to get authentic phone numbers for half of the entertainment industry, because Paris Hilton was so well-connected socially.
AFAIK, nobody ever managed to get access to the servers illegitimately. The demise of the service was a failed back up of the Hitachi SAN.
https://availabilitydigest.com/public_articles/0411/sidekick...
Details are on page 3.
* The Sidekick servers were moved to Microsoft, and I believe they were moved from where I last saw them, which was at T-Mobile's data center in Washington.
* There weren't a heck of a lot of Solaris experts at Microsoft at that time.
* According to the PDF above, someone had posted a job ad for a database administrator for the project, two months before the database blew up.
So if we connect the dots (this is speculation Microsoft, don't sue me):
It seems possible that the database for the Sidekick service was the responsibility of someone at T-Mobile or Danger, until Microsoft acquired Danger. My hunch is that it was probably TMo, because the founder of Danger left to go start Android in 2003. By the time Microsoft bought Danger in 2008, a lot of the original Danger folks were working on Android.
It sure seems like the outage was most likely caused by an inexperienced DBA taking responsibility for a database that had been the responsibility of the same DBA (at Danger, or more likely, TMo) for over half a decade.
And that ONE database outage probably changed the entire course of mobile phone history. IMHO, Microsoft wouldn't have purchased Nokia in 2014 if Danger hadn't blown up in 2008. And Danger was way ahead of the iPhone and Android in 2005.
In some alternate universe, there is no Android, there is just Microsoft Sidekick and Apple iPhone.
Here's the story:
I worked on the infrastructre for the predecessor to Android, the Danger Hiptop, AKA "The T-Mobile Sidekick." (This is my real name, you can see when I worked on it on LinkedIn.)
The "Danger Device" as everyone called it, had cloud storage and a full web browser before Android and before iPhone.
In fact, the first Android basically looks like the successor to the T-Mobile sidekick, because many of the people that worked on Android, including the founder, were from Danger.
*Here's the funny part:*
This is hearsay, so please do not sue me Microsoft. I once saw an article online that confirmed the following story, but the article is long gone (this was more than 20 years ago.)
Again: Don't sue me Microsoft. I am telling a story here, that I heard through the grapevine:
*Microsoft blew up the entire "Sidekick" project.*
But they didn't blow it up intentionally. Basically, Danger ran on Sun Solaris, and when Microsoft bought them, a great deal of the infrastructure was trucked over to Microsoft. As I understand it, nothing was ported, they basically just plugged the gear in.
At some point, the backups failed.
Keep in mind: ALL THE USERS DATA WAS IN THE CLOUD. Nobody was doing this at the time, not Android, not Apple. Just Danger - and then Microsoft.
While restoring from backups, someone was feeling the heat for the mobile devices being down for so long. It takes a long time to do a restore.
One thing led to another, a decision was made... and they lost all the data.
*poof*
Gone forever.
The death of the Sidekick has been documented in various articles, but there was only ONE that got the story correct, and it was nuked over a decade ago. Here's one of the (partially correct) details: https://abcnews.go.com/Business/sidekick-disaster-shows-data...
I've got a story about the first big celebrity hack too, that was the Sidekick also. (And likely was possible because of the Sidekick's cloud storage.)
1990s Beavis and Butthead episodes seem completely bizarre/pointless without the music.
When Mike Judge started releasing new episodes back in 2012-ish, it's noticeable how he mostly avoided music clips and focused on satirizing reality shows that were on the same network (MTV.) I assume this was to avoid licensing nightmares.
He seemed almost proud of his inexperience, and nearly said that it gave him an "advantage" because existing engineers weren't willing to "innovate."
But when I first started tinkering with AI, I found it so addictive, it reminded me of how I used to play videogames in my 20s obsessively. I think it's the randomness of the rewards that makes AI possibly addictive. It sometimes felt like a slot machine, the way that tweaking a setting or two would get me closer to the goal.
https://www.cbsnews.com/baltimore/news/elderly-man-reunites-...
He's doing great, still sailing.
That was the third boat he sunk. This was the most famous sinking:
https://www.latitude38.com/lectronic/an-inspirational-sailor...
Three shipwrecks in ten years might be a record?