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Say you own a well and sell the clean water.

I learn that boiling the stream water makes it safe and tell people about it.

What do I owe you?

Uber and AI are certainly more complicated than that, but you are pretty close to arguing that the constructed rights of some people inhibit the rights of other people.


How does that analogy apply to AI, where a handful of companies are attempting to replace the entire white collar market with computers? It fits neither qualitatively, nor quantitatively.

If somebody thinks the computer can make a better PowerPoint, what business is it of yours to stop them from using the computer to make a PowerPoint?

There's a big political problem to solve, but it's how to give most people decent material standards of living if computers are doing all the work, not how to freeze things in place so that people can keep doing tasks that (assuming success) the computer is better at.


Again, this analogy makes no sense. People use PowerPoint, they don't get replaced by it.

The goal of AI companies is to replace workers entirely; that is the only way their valuations make sense, and OpenAI's charter says this explicitly.


The displacement will rather obviously be task by task, not job by job.

Okay, edits it is. The displacement will rather obviously be incremental and be task by task, not job by job.


Basic familiarity with the paragraph styles in Word is like a 20 minute task.

If you are using markdown, you already understand the conceptual basis for it, so you just need to understand how it's implemented over there.

I'm not arguing that it is something you should do, just rolling my eyes at "I would be lost".


Not lost because it's hard to learn, but because I don't like writing in ms office products. It's not just word, I write formated long emails in outlook as well.

For the short, simple documents that most people make, a versioned, wysiwyg word processor is going to beat everything else.

I mean, they don't want to think about building the output, never mind controlling the process.


Building my resume in a wysiwyg editor was an exercise in frustration. Formatting was inconsistent, they were only searchable from inside the editor and versioning was useless because diff had no meaning.

My markdown resume has its own problems but having this level of control has been a huge load off my mind.


For most of the short simple documents I create, I don't want to redo the formating for every document. Simply writing it in something simple like Markdown ( possibly a markdown wysiwig editor) and having my software automatically apply appropriate standard formats to it is ideal.

This is what Word is to most people. They just use the default styles, or their company's template. No special formatting, styling etc.

Also if you do want to add a table or a figure, for most people Word will be much easier than doing the same in Markdown.


Having handled Word documents a few times in my years, oh, how I wish this was true.

Right, most people don't want to do that, they want the burden of applying styles to the couple headings or whatever.

Unfortunately, most people don't use paragraph styles, but if you do, it's a couple clicks.


Agreed. There is actually a lot better control in openoffice / libreoffice than most people know. You just have to set up your styles and be systematic about (virtually) never using direct formatting, instead always applying a pre-configured style. There is a distinct value in seeing your final product as you work, when the final product is visual.

This is more of a utopia than expecting the average office drone to learn emacs.

And if you define shortcut keys for your styles it's as quick to type as markdown.

I'm a programmer and even I like writing in a non-programmable environment. Programming in the document system just stimulates the more primitive parts of my brain that love the processing and programming more than the writing itself. So it's distracting in that way.

WYSIWYG pretty consistently leads to visual and structural messes. It's only going to "beat" everything else if you don't care about quality.

Most people don't—and don't have to—care about quality for their short, simple documents, but that is neither good nor inevitable, and it's always worth trying to do better.


Your analysis assumes our current politics where money roughly equates with power. That won't hold if people feel controlled.

AI of course also has the potential to concentrate power, but people aren't just going to ask the accountants who should be in charge.


Money buys drones, drones are the future of power.

Why? The current method is cheap.

Hopefully it changes. Male baby chicks are thrown into grinders. It’s horrendous

At least animals getting ground up live is a horror as old as time. We seem to always be moving in the other direction and creating more new horrors instead of making things better.

I agree we should focus more on reviving ancient horrors.

Agreed. Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn: there's a reason it's a classic.

The complete omittance of even acknowledging we have invented modern animal horrors far worse to work on first makes it sound like we just need to do better than other animals. Willfully ignoring that to act like doing so is a form of agreement between the statements is a bit gruesome itself.

I'm glad you want to handle some of the problem, but let's not act like we just need to do better than other animals is all to discuss. It's easy enough to agree with the full problem unless you're fine with the other parts.


like draw and quarter?

Pretty cool that the taxes high earners stop paying are not considered income taxes.

(Social security and Medicare)


Social Security tax is the only tax that has a limit. Medicare tax applies to all wages and high earners even pay an extra percentage.

SS tax has a limit because benefits are also limited. It is a forced retirement plan where if you live long enough, you might get back what you paid in.


Markets have a bid and an ask.

If you have robust supply and real competition, the ask should trend towards cost plus some profit, not whatever maximum price people will pay out of desperation.


what does robust supply and real competition look like when everyone gets a million a year? If everyone makes a million a year, you need a lot more than what we pay today to convince people to come into work. If you want to sell a burger, you have to sell it at a profit. Ergo, you must pay more for a burger if everyone makes a million a year. You have to convince the whole supply chain to keep working. The only way we know how to do that at scale, outside of force, is money.

Now the burger cost goes up, and working people have even more money than "normie" millionaires. I imagine people are going to be more free with their money, so they pay more for the burger. And this will settle, per the law of supply and demand.

That part is obvious.

What is not clear to me is how the new price would work out. Maybe it would work out to pretty much the same relative cost it is today, but in inflated dollars. And the rest of the market is doing the same thing. And landlords know you have the money. The squeeze comes back. Cue Econ 101/102.


This discussion sort of involves magic AI doing a lot of the work. That should be cheap.

Tight control of scarce resources is certainly something that would still be an issue. Hopefully we find ways to solve it with politics instead of violence.


I guess it's unlikely to be 12x, but people probably do consume more light, by way of being less worried about switching them off.


No scripting is a tell, it's about wanting other people to accommodate their concerns about running a complex browser, not about solving a real problem.

If it did somehow happen that a good deal of interesting content was published using the standard, the most popular client would probably be nonconforming, ignoring the rule to not render ambiguous content.


Every modern alternative web protocol is about accommodating the author's concerns and pet peeves about the modern web (and usually gatekeeping it from capitalists and normies.)

Protocols used to be limited by technology, now they're defined by ideology.


Owning is, like, a human construct man. If you can slaughter a herd of animals without facing any human imposed consequences, it's probably fair within the bounds of language and meaning to say that you own them.


Owning might be a human construct; but, arguably, a herd or a mountain or a tree is not. Which I guess was the point I was trying to suggest.

See also: Is it possible to own a cat?


I'm very open to the possibility that I am missing your point, but my point was that you are playing word games.

Do I own this T-shirt if it can burn? Do I own this stick or am I just carrying it for a while? Is this my banana, or does everything belong to the universe?


Not playing word games, but mostly just thinking aloud. Thanks for your interesting replies.


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