tuatoru

This seems like one of those "hmmm, that's odd" moments that could lead to a scientific breakthrough.

It surprises me that economists are not advocating that Europe set up special economic zones, as have been tried in less-developed countries to some success. Hong Kong could be considered the Ur-SEZ.

On reflection it is not surprising that SEZs have not been tried. They would be too embarassing to Europe's political class.

This seems like an argument from incredulity, and also static-world fallacy.

People are not thinking about the trend in AI. How good were AIs three years ago? How good are they now? How good will they be in another three years?

Kelsey Piper's analogy is good. How much smarter is a teacher than a room full of kindergartners? Who gets whom to do their bidding?

A future we didn't quite make it into.

PIC is short for PICTURE, which was the original form of the keyword. Picture the number printed this way.

Edit: the numbers in parentheses are repeats. PIC 9(9) means up to 9 digits in the printed representation of the value stored in the variable that has this PIC.

Microsoft's moat and cash cow is Active Directory.

If corps ever stop needing that, MS will be in trouble. Until then, few worries. They can play at following fads (not that I think AI is a fad) and not worry about execution.

It takes companies a long time to reorganise processes. Especially in ways that reduce headount, because manager status is tied to count of reports.

This study is far too soon. In 2030, if nothing changes meanwhile, we might know the effect of AI as we have it now in 2025 on employment.

If AI takes a fraction α of jobs, for it to be employment increasing, elasticity of demand for labor needs to be 1/(1-α).

China;s history has been one of repeated 300-year to 500-year cycles. But this time is looking more like slow decay everywhere, true.

Collapse? People need to know and understand Adam Smith's remark that "there is a lot of ruin in a nation".

Rod Elliott's sound-au.com[1] has a wealth of information about audio. But guitar effects pedals would be one exception.

Microphones, amplifiers, filters speaker crossovers and so on - all explained failry nicely. The site has two main areas, projects and articles.

1. https://www.sound-au.com/

There are a couple of things that bug me about these projections.

The first is the difference between capability and capacity - the ability to do someinthing, versus how much of it you can do. The transition from one to the other always seems blurred in reports of this sort. That transition is beset with all sorts of phenomena that are subject to Amdahl's Law (generalised to social processes). This always makes timeframes for general availability look implausible to me.

There is a large and venerable literature in economics on the diffusion of innovations; it appears that it is being totally ignored and that the report writers are failing to distinguish between invention, innovation, diffusion, and mass deployment. (It's reasonable to ignore maturation and decay/replacement, in this case. Probably.) Diffusion and mass deployment are probably the most difficult phases (because they are intrinsically social and political), and the least discussed.

The other thing is the microeconomic focus on productivity. If the claim is made that the whole economy will be affected, then the whole economy is the unit of analysis, and the tools of macroeconomics, not those of microeconomics, are appropriate for analysis. Short run, medium run and long run phenomena are salient as well, but the reports I have seen talk as though we are instantly in the long run. I'm in my 60s and I'm still waiting to live in the long run.

SHOUTY_CASE

Been reading reviews of IABIED (If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies). So, a bit pensive.

How old is that now? Must be 40 years. Edit: 50!

Also ask it "what questions should I be asking about this topic?"

Yeah, from memory Finland scores very highly in global surveys of honesty.

> What society, government or political entity prizes allegiance to truth above all else?

Exactly.

How is this a question? Do people not read the documentation anymore? Postgresql is, with OpenBSD, the type specimen of how open-source documentation should be done. Use the documentation.

"China" isn't "China". Like everywhere else, there's a maze of conflictiong incentives. The CCP measures regional governments on their stats. Gaming there. Regional governments measure administrative areas, ditto. More gaming. No stats can be trusted in a society that does not prize allegiance to the truth above all else.

I routinely reduce my Readmes by 30% or more in the third draft.

The AI hype was 1000% GDP growth per annum. That was crazy. The "snake oil" label was in reaction to that.

Anyway, you are shooting the messenger by downvoting me. Thanks for showing us all how intelligent you are.

Occam's razor says Kimmel was fired because he was costing too much. Any pretext in a balance sheet covered in red.

This all sounds like it has been covered in detail by the "AI as a Normal Technology"[1][2] guys (formerly AI Snake Oil - they decided they preferred to engage rather than just be snarky).

Invention vs innovation vs diffusion - this is all well-known stuff.

It's a completely different episteme than the one IABIED guys have ("If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies").

I don't think there can be any meaningful dialogue between the two camps.

1. Substack: https://www.normaltech.ai/ book: https://www.normaltech.ai/p/starting-reading-the-ai-snake-oi...

2. "Normal technology" like fire, metals, agriculture, writing, and electricity are normal technologies.

Engineers bring [quantified] data, not anecdotes.

The authors themselves use the analogy of electric motors, which changed factories. But also gave us washing machines, refigerators, and vacuum cleaners, changing society. And skyscrapers, because elevators, changing cities.

Ai may be more like electricity than just electric motors. It gave us Hollywood and air travel. (Before electricity, aluminum as as expensive as platinum.)

As economists they are wedded to the idea that human wants are infinite, so as they things we do now are taken over, we will find other things to do: maybe wardrobe consultant, or interior designer, or lifestyle coach - things which only th rich can afford now, and which require a human touch. Maybe.

No change since the 2010s, then. What was that distributed climate model experiment back then called? Like Folding@home, but for climate models. ClimatePrediction.net, that was it.

Anyway, all the model runs said this was going to happen. Robust to parameter variation, this result.

Yes, it was. And now you have! That's great. New intellectual tools for you!

Wow, people here clearly don't like it when I express delight in learning.

Congratulations on being one of today's ten thousand!

That's the best case. AI is like electric motors.

If you think electric motors are banal, then you don't understand the world around you, or what is was like before.