Jane Street will be using tons of AI in math, but boy are they going to need a lot of humans to try to keep it all under control.

We need humans to help guide all this, need to learn all we can.

I agree with Sanderson that the opportunity seems larger than in the past. The challenges are quite different, but if somebody loves math, loves learning about it, like I do, I see so much opportunity.

There's going to be so many more connections to evaluate, so much work needed for unification and simplification and pedagogy, and above all there's going to be intense demand for mathematical taste.

https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174

Even though I personally expect them to be readouts of things that don't affect healthspan much, I don't have any more evidence than those trying to work out what they are. I've been wrong before, and also most tech development does not end up living to its promises, but without the investigation we'll never know.

> Big Pharma gold rush where the profits dwarf any eventual regulatory fines

With pharma malfeasance, the penalties are actually big enough, unlike most other fields. Unless you have something particular in mind?

What is your note, precisely?

If you replace "government" with something like anarcho-syndicalism you shift the money question to asking people to behave according to some social norms. You replace the allocation problem with a different system of social relations, that's more opaque and harder to understand, but there's still the same allocation question: who gets what? Who gets to be close to the funny people? Or the artists? Who gets the better view from their house? Who gets all these things which now become the focus of the scarcity question?

This is an expression for which I can imagine a multitude of specific meanings, can you clarify? I don't know of anybody who is actually using control over scarcity as a proxy for consent (consent of whom?)

Physics still puts bounds on production, and what we can have. Land is the perfect example.

Gold was only ever used as an accounting mechanism, and fiat money is definitely an improvement but accounting must still happen. We were never richer or poorer because of the amount of gold we had in our possession, it was merely used as a token of how much of others' labor we could have. As many current things that are scarce become less scarce, we'll still keep accounting for them. And as new things become scarcer, accounting will be just as necessary, by US dollar or by crypto or by handmade pieces of art that AI can't produce, or whatever.

Georgism's failures have been through landowners getting control of the taxation mechanism and taking the money back that belongs to the rest of society. Literally any other social change is going to have to confront that same question of power and allocation of resources too, it's nothing specific to Georgism.

Even if we vastly increase productivity beyond our current wildest dreams, the production system takes time to adjust to changes in demand, creating continuous points of scarcity.

But Georgist economics are way ahead of how to deal with this. Tax the ownership/control of things that can not be increased (e.g. land).

Whereas social media users are talking about an entirely different type of bot which is injecting manufactured discourse into people's feeds.

This is exactly the sort of thing that Apple avoided when it had strong management from Jobs. Now...

This is why distributed solar is actually cheaper than utility scale solar all-in: you need less of that very very expensive grid, even if you pay 3x on the initial install costs.

People working on the grid and in utilities are coming at this from a completely different perspective than degrowthers, in my experience. Grid ops are extremely conservative, and utilities have not adopted new tech in decades if ever, so they look at the trend of the past decades and think "the future is going to be exactly the same." They are not thinking of the grid change we need to deal with climate change, at least in the US.

I only have deep understanding here in the US, but the "degrowth" subfaction of progressives are completely ineffectual, despite being very loud. They have zero influence, zero ability to organize into any sort of group with influence, and little desire to do anything except critique others. They can be safely ignored, because even their critiques are based on either very fundamental misunderstandings of the world, and they can only infect a very tiny subset of the population with their mind virus of ignorance.

Perhaps other places, like the UK, has a more politically effective group of degrowthers. But in order to even believe the things they believe they have to dumb themselves down quite a bit so if there are politically effective degrowth movements it may be time for me to reevaluate my position. Anti-vaxxers are far more effective politically, despite having just as poor critical thinking skills, but with the anti-vax movement individual action has big impacts, unlike with grid decisions.

The far lower costs in Australia are not due to executive pay, it's due to basic efficiency. Americans are doing things in horrendously wasteful ways, because the system is set to act that way, and changing our system of government is too difficult due to political infighting. One of many examples in the article:

> These things are highly optimized that companies will try to do the scheduling so they’re doing two or three jobs on the same street or in the same suburb on the same day, so they don’t have to drive across town to do the second job. If there’s a delay of a couple of days, it’s because they’re trying to make sure that they’re going to do your neighbors at the same time they’re going to do yours. The thing that costs you money in contracting is what they call truck rolls. I believe in the US there’s something like five or six truck rolls per solar installation. In Australia, it’s as few as one or two.

See also the US healthcare system. Or residential building.

The "structural" deficit would be easily fixed by repealing the Trump tax cuts for the wealth from his first term. None of us benefitted from those but we all pay for them.

Here's a long podcast episode talking about why it's so much more expensive in the US versus Australia, with a solar expert from Australia that had just added a bunch of C&I solar here in the US:

https://www.volts.wtf/p/whats-the-real-story-with-australian

Local permitting, utility fuckery, tariffs, etc. all add up.