There is an interesting twist here. "Socialist" and "Communist" economic models where those who can't work are supported by spreading a portion of the GDP produced by an economy to support those (whether it is UBI or a 'free' living space, whatever) are more able to make the transition to a robotic workforce.
In the US, if we transformed to a robotic manufacturing base today our oligarchs would horde all of the resulting wealth that was generated rather than provide for folks who were no longer employable. As a result we get strong labor actions that resist the automation of factories because they know that if their jobs are replaced by robots, they won't be able to work.
The other twist has been the "GenAI" replacement[1] of technical workers today which is easier to do because of the lack of unions and collective bargaining leverage. They are getting screwed faster than the factory workers are.
The 'utopian' outcome when a society overproduces wealth relative to its population is distribution of that wealth across the population, a "post scarcity" society where people can do what ever they want without fear of poverty. A 'dystopian' outcome when a society overproduces wealth relative to its population is the concentration of wealth into individuals and their families and regulatory capture that prevents any distribution outside of that circle. Dooming the bulk of society to poverty and depredation.
While China has it's oligarchs, its communist roots may allow it to come out on the positive side of the transformation. The US, in its current configuration, would likely not become a post-scarcity society.
[1] Yes, I know, so far it hasn't actually been an productivity or efficiency 'win' yet, and may not ever be, but it is happening anyway.
Thanks Conrad however in the interest of clarity + transparency can you add some insight/details into how/why this statement came about in both the shut down email customers got today + what is currently posted on the Bench.co page?
"For continued support with your bookkeeping, we recommend exploring Kick, a modern accounting software, which has created an exclusive offer to handle your ongoing needs: kick.co/bench."
Having an "exclusive offer" listed in the initial closure communication/announcement + you having a landing page ready to go sounds like there was more to Bench just happening to mention Kick because your company has "onboarded a significant number of customers from Bench onto Kick before this happened"...
I really wanted Jolla to go big in the secure smartphone space. As it stands I can have absolutely 0 faith in the technology I use and it makes me feel like we are being treated as a slaves.
Crypto currencies consume more than entire countries.
AI has at least good uses compared to that.
I have yet to come across a single good use-case. It will never offset the damage that is has done and is currently still doing. But I am still looking.
Web3 is going great... maybe it is time to reduce the energy consumption that is only doing harm.
Is this less relative to broad historical trends, or less compared to the boom of 2020 and 2021, when people were flush with cash and suddenly spending a lot more time in their houses?
And even if it's less relative to more typical times, how much of that is people "pushing forward" projects back in 2020?
I wonder similar things about computer manufacturer sales. As much as they'd like us to all be on a one-year upgrade cycle for both phones and laptops, modern hardware happily lasts three to seven years depending on how you use it. Many people bought new hardware during the beginning of WFH times in the pandemic, and now they don't need to buy a new PC for a few years, but Lenovo et al act like the sky is falling when they see a lower quarter after a huge boom.
We are also only using it because of GDPR requirements of not transferring data outside of the EU. The slowdown is huge, preventing any chat use-case where users will get bored waiting for a 10 second response to trickle through.
That OpenAI themselves aren't spinning up a data center in the EU is beyond strange for me. The only thing I can imagine is that if this is stopped by some legal provision as part of Microsoft investing, but it has clearly not worked well for OpenAI which now has to deal with Microsoft's shitty delivery of a subpar OpenAI-branded service for EU customers.
We're currently using the swedish region btw, where model updates have been quite fast (weeks after official launch). Still, the slow response times makes them non-viable anyways...
I love this. Probably because I've been thinking of similar ideas for what seems like the last decade, I just have coders block when it comes to actually implementing it. Seeing it (well something like it) actually implemented makes me happy.
My use-case would be a "real-time" debug tool of sorts, that would allow the viewing of trees as they have, but also the modification of them, and the values at the nodes (think the hierarchy+inspector of unity3d, but a remote tool).
Anyway this post is food for thought and I'm going to read more about how it was done. I like the API they've created for sending views, really interesting.
When I was in Iraq/Afghanistan 2004-2010, one of my favorite things was working with the military hospitals (I sold satcom to a variety of clients, including medical use for radiology, and then worked on radiology PACS stuff).
The Army Combat Support Hospital (think MASH tv-show...) guys could set something up like this really fast, but it was expensive hardware, required their own personnel, etc. This makes sense for the US military (massive logistics, budget, etc.), but not for others. Also worked (volunteer/charity) with some local clinics who didn't have these kind of resources, but did have great personnel, who could use more locally-acquired or bespoke solutions -- problem was it was slow, not uniform standard, etc.
A cost-reduced, standardized, easily transportable hybrid is great. Ideally you'd use existing standardized readily available stuff with minimal medical/flown in stuff on top.
I began as a paid programmer in 1982 (wow, just realized that). It's been fun and programming is still one of the most fun things I do.
I think a lot of developers are unhappy because they either chose the career for the money or because most software development today doesn't involve a lot of programming. That is sad.
But there is still a ton which really is simply programming.
"We" as adults at least have the mostly-capable ability to discern good from bad, whereas a child until the age of 14-18 (depending on the topic at hand) does not have the sense of responsibility, especially about the crucial aspect which is his/her own health. Therefore you could expect an adult to be able to take care of him/her-self after the ~age of adulthood, whereas a children is very rarely expected to do so, because most of the times they're not even fully aware of it (consciously speaking, not talking about almost instinctive reactions).
> People don't like to talk about what the food supply looks like under a zero emissions scenario with our current nitrogen productions methods.
I, for one, love to talk about zero emission food production.
It's not scary, and in fact it will be somewhat straightforward to replace our nitrogen sources with zero emission production methods.
Electricity can be used to produce ammonia in many ways. The most obvious is electrolysis of water to hydrogen, and then through the Haber process. Large scale production is already being planned, for example by Fertiberia in Spain, who will deploy many MW of electrolyzers soon. Spain's target for electrolyzers is 4GW by 2030! We couldn't even build 4GW of nuclear by 2030, but we will be able to do elecrolyzers and the solar to power them.
There is also a startup (blanking on the name) that creates ammonia on site, off grid, using high voltage in a box. This eliminates the transport cost of nitrogen, which is not insignificant. By focusing on small scale production on site a small startup can break in to a huge commodity market.
I didn't downvote your comment, but your unnecessary pessimism does not accurately reflect the future that we can see already!
In the US, if we transformed to a robotic manufacturing base today our oligarchs would horde all of the resulting wealth that was generated rather than provide for folks who were no longer employable. As a result we get strong labor actions that resist the automation of factories because they know that if their jobs are replaced by robots, they won't be able to work.
The other twist has been the "GenAI" replacement[1] of technical workers today which is easier to do because of the lack of unions and collective bargaining leverage. They are getting screwed faster than the factory workers are.
The 'utopian' outcome when a society overproduces wealth relative to its population is distribution of that wealth across the population, a "post scarcity" society where people can do what ever they want without fear of poverty. A 'dystopian' outcome when a society overproduces wealth relative to its population is the concentration of wealth into individuals and their families and regulatory capture that prevents any distribution outside of that circle. Dooming the bulk of society to poverty and depredation.
While China has it's oligarchs, its communist roots may allow it to come out on the positive side of the transformation. The US, in its current configuration, would likely not become a post-scarcity society.
[1] Yes, I know, so far it hasn't actually been an productivity or efficiency 'win' yet, and may not ever be, but it is happening anyway.