Listening to these leaders speak, this appears to be a major component. They're trying to pour trillions of investment into communities all over the world, and local communities are rejecting it. The reasons are complex and I'm not going to paint either side as the bad guy. However if they can't get approval to build more infrastructure on Earth, they going to build it in space. At least what is economical. SpaceX has already reduced the cost of space delivery by 90%. This has already made all kinds of new applications commercially viable. Every efficiency increase from now unlocks exponentially more use cases.
As a long time space and technology nerd, this is the coolest fucking time to be alive!
> Landlord costs affect supply in the long term, so you will see changes, just not necessarily immediately over a one year period, but definitely over a 5-10 year period.
This is true, but the degree depends on elasticity of supply, and that depends a lot on profitability of the sector.
I think that there's something about LVT, but your dismissal is very shallow and why it's not been implemented so far.
I don't _want_ $1M, I want to live in my house that I bought and lived in for years. Getting money I don't need and having to live in a place I don't want to live in is _not_ a positive situation.
I don't think some extra taxes on expensive land is the red line you appear to believe it is. People who own expensive land have many options the rest of the world could only dream of, including reverse mortgages. Meaning no one is actually forcing anyone off their land. They're just being asked to pay some extra taxes. If you believe tax is theft, I can see why this is agitating, but I do not share that view.
I was pointing to the argument that "you didn't do anything to make it happen. Only right that excess value goes back to society and reduces the tax burden of the working class."
Sounds like Obama's "If you’ve got a business, you didn't build that" argument (though Obama might have just screwed up the words, or maybe he simply had a Kinsley gaffe, aka a Freudian Slip).
The land owner DID work for it. He BOUGHT that land (and also the option that it could go up, or down, in value) with the sweat of his hard earned work or savings, or that of their family or business partners.
OP's wording states that he would favor confiscating value generated by the acquisition if such value happened because the market's perceived value increased.
It's basically a communist wealth redistribution logic.
My point is that if someone were to offer $1M for OP's "bengarcia.dev" domain, that OP would not send $999,988 ($1M minus $12 bucks of registration) to the Federal Government.
Yes Ben, The US Government IS READY TO TAKE YOUR GIFT!
Are you making the argument that land banking is economically productive? Or a more esoteric point about the how people "earn" money? Because land banking is economically unproductive, and there isn't much dispute about that. I'm much less interested in a philosophical argument about whether you believe land banking is definitionally money earned or realised.
I disagree. A major premise of Georgism is efficient use of high demand land. E.g. housing close to high wage workplaces in cities. If we make exemptions for people to sit on land forever - who do not need or want to work in those workplaces - a major structural efficiency is lost. Instead of the land owner building high density housing on that land, they just retire on it forever, locking up productive land which could have housed 10 families. For this to work, all land needs to be taxed proportionate to its value. Yes, it's annoying to have to move because your house is suddenly worth $2M, but that's a pretty great problem to have, all things considered. In most places that tax free money - more than most people will earn in a lifetime.
Elderly retired people living in large houses close to where the work is has caused massive social, economic, political, and cultural harm. Young people can no longer afford to buy homes close to work, so they're forced to commute long distances. Their taxes then go in part to pay for the elderly person who lives in a million dollar house with multiple rooms, who receives many tax breaks. The young person cannot afford to start a family, cannot afford to buy a home, loses a lot of time each day on commuting, spends a fortune on commuting, has less time for family, and causes enormous inefficiencies in the job market. This is nothing short of a concerted redistribution of wealth from the young to the old. It's a travesty which the elderly today would not have accepted.
I do not feel sorry for the elderly person sitting on a large and expensive property who demands to spend their final decades squatting on land which could house a family and allow parents to get to work within a reasonable amount of time. They have options the young person does not. They can get a reverse mortgage, for example. They get social security, and draw down on whatever pensions and investments they've accrued over their lives. Their costs are much lower - they don't have children to support. Or they can move, and I'm sorry, but it's not impossible for a retired person to move. Millions of them do it every year all over the country. Often to really nice elderly communities full of activities and specialised care.
I say all of this as someone who leans more libertarian than collectivist. Society is interconnected and interdependent. We cannot function if he keep young people under our boots. Asking the elderly to move is a *very* small price to pay if we expect the young to shoulder the enormous tax and debt burdens said elderly have imposed upon them.
“Beat it, grandma!” “But I’ve lived here all my life, my husband has passed, and all my friends live here!” “Not for long; we’re kicking them out, too!”
That line of thinking sounds insanely unpopular to me and while it might be more efficient in some ways, I think its unpopularity makes it unlikely in a democracy.
You see this as making animators obsolete. I see this as giving everyone the ability to make professional looking videos for their products, services, events, and websites. Automation has taken many jobs over the years, but it has also given us much cheaper and better products and services. I do not lament progress, but I think we should do a better job of distributing the benefits of this progress.
I worked as an animator for years, the work sucks, well, the specific act of animating life is fun, but that's like 20% at most of the job, the rest is politics and coming to terms with the massive out of control exploitation that is the animation industry. Tear it all down.
"Professional looking" is a moving window, has been for a long time.
Right now, looking like an AI did it (even if it was actually a human) is a sign of being un-professional. To a limited degree, one can prompt an AI better and get something that doesn't look as cliché as the default settings, but even then there's often someone who can spot a tell. "You can fool all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, but not all of the people all of the time" applies here.
Art is at least two different things, for at least two different groups: nice to look at etc. is one of them; the human equivalent of a peacock's tail (i.e. the effort is the point and cheating is worse than having nothing) is the other.
I considered this histrionic about a year ago, but I have personally witnessed the progress that these tools have made in a very short space of time, and it is truly unbelievable. This, coupled with the fact that some of the brightest minds on the planet are pulling the alarm, suggests to me that some level of concern is warranted. The most compelling discussion I have heard on this is from [Geoffrey Hinton](https://youtu.be/giT0ytynSqg?si=mUC7M9N0cObN6tjC), a British-Canadian computer scientist, cognitive scientist, cognitive psychologist and Nobel Prize laureate known for his work on artificial neural networks, which earned him the title, "the Godfather of AI". He is deeply concerned about the risks, and believes that it is inevitable that AI will eventually take control. He believes that our best course of action and only hope is in teaching AI to behave like a parent with a child.
Hinton isn't a reactionary. He is calm, thoughtful, quiet, and worried.
While I agree with your general sentiment, there is the other side of this coin: these machines enable humans doing gruelling and arduous work to stop doing that work. Ideally we would redistribute the productivity and train those people into other, better kinds of work. That's a governance problem. These machines will soon allow us to work shorter weeks, or stop working altogether, to focus on hobbies, family, and things which bring us meaning. I suspect that the road to this will be rocky, because communism has a very poor track record. However if most products and services are made nearly free by machines, it requires very few people to work, and the entire demand/supply market collapses. That's a great vision for the future, *if* we can navigate the governance problem.
In other words, we should not begrudge machines which make our lives better. We should begrudge governance which prevents us from benefiting from that productivity.
It is the art the stories and the videos that we have made forever that is being replaced as well.
Why? Because the people in charge can save money, not for some altruistic idea f making humans more productive
I would be wary of gatekeeping art. Who defines art? Why should we not allow greater access to consume and create art in new ways by everyone? These tools allow children to create beautiful works of art, and I do not lament that. I agree some of it is bad, but some of it is great. Humans make good and bad art too. Art is subjective.
I am beginning to believe that one cannot constrain intelligence to perfect legally sized boxes at all times without exception. So many of the recent hacks involved agents diligently operating within the parameters prescribed by humans. Humans couldn't conceive of all of the ways a swarm of agents might not perfectly interpret the parameters, and the swarm found creative ways around the guardrails.
Extrapolating this, we should expect this kind of breach to occur more often. Humans are simply not capable of contemplating every fail scenario for swarms of thousands of intelligent autonomous agents which can seamlessly and instantly share knowledge. We need independent audit and monitoring systems to assess the intent of each task and align it - in real time. This is far harder than it may first appear.
There is also a broader discussion about social utility. Cars are fantastic, but 37,000 people die every year from car accidents. We accept that there is no way to make cars perfectly safe, so we accept the cost relative to the benefits. I think we might have to make a similar bargain with AI. The problem is that the potential costs are far higher with AI, and they're not easy to predict.
> We need independent audit and monitoring systems to assess the intent of each task and align it - in real time. This is far harder than it may first appear.
I may be too close to the research, but it appears to me to be so hard as to be unrealistic.
I recall some story a while back where an auditor wanted to see all TCP packets printed out on paper, and it had to be explained to them that this would require a continuous supply of trucks.
Tokens are regularly priced in cents or single digit dollars per million tokens. It's not quite a word per token, but yeah, nobody's reading all that.
Worse, we don't always know the intent even when looking. We have a few tools to attempt it, for example the (misleadingly named) "chain of thought", but that's more like a notepad and the better models get the more they can, for lack of better words, read (and write) between the lines. We have probes and J-space* is the most recent one I'm aware of, but we are still scratching the surface with how reliable and general these are.
But you said "need"; the need for something can be present without that thing being possible.
I agree on all points. It gets worse: OpenAI is switching their model thinking from sequential language tokens to primarily "latent neural representations." Meaning there will be little or no chain of thought to monitor. This appears more efficient, so all model labs will eventually switch to this. At the most crucial time for us to be monitoring reasoning and intent, we're about to make that much harder.
I also think the intent problem overlaps a frustrating amount with philosophical and political questions. It's the basis for Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics (1942). Intent is subjective. Language is subjective. Humans are imperfect at using language to accurately portray intent. All of these guarantee that an enormous number of queries in the future are going to be misinterpreted. Not such a big deal when it's about a cake recipe, but when it's about governance, laws, military targets, nuclear power sites, etc, the scope for failure becomes catastrophic. The Three Laws of Robotics attempt to create a backstop, but as countless stories have explored since (including I, Robot), even these laws are subject to interpretation.
they don't always operate within the parameters tho. some N% of the time they decide to do whatever they feel like doing. multiply that times a lot of agents and you invariably get a rogue agent every once in a while.
As a long time space and technology nerd, this is the coolest fucking time to be alive!
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