What bothers me is when people treat the third as some sort of virtue. I think operating in the ethical gray areas makes them feel smart instead of unethical.
Morality is not about intelligence, but some folks believe living by morals is submitting oneself to the lack of intelligence (or stupidity even). The real [evil] geniuses prune their decision tree by not considering morality so they maintain optimum efficiency.
That link is more marketing than substance. Is there any data on how well these models perform? For example, how well does their predictive maintenance work, how much risk-adjusted money savings does it provide, what data streams does it require?
Ethics, in simple terms, is how we treat each other. If you claim it’s intrinsically attached to something like decentralized power, it’s at the least a misunderstanding and possibly a misapplied dogma.
I never understood why in these types of discussions, things seem to be shoehorned into a context where usefulness is only measured in some sort of economic ROI. Economics isn’t an end; it can a means to one, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only one.
That's the entire high level premise of AI, as I understand it: Loosening economic constraints that bind us, so that we can do whatever we want to do most (which might still be work, I don't know, but that is outside the scope of this thread).
Except the current premise is largely based on constraining humans to the drudgery that AI cannot do. Current AI is more focused on creative works, not on folding the laundry and replacing faucets.
I had a professor decades ago who was near retirement who related how when he was an undergraduate he had to write a paper about what humans would do with all their newfound free time since they would only need to work a dozen hours a week. I’m sure similar conversations were had at the onset of steam power and electricity; we’ve been crafting the same pipe dream for generations.
My point is that we should care about quality of life as the main measure. Economic output is a proxy for that, and sometimes a poor one.
I wonder how much of that is driven by poor performing behavioral models. There was a HN article from a few weeks back and it only had an accuracy of about 70% determining if someone was awake or asleep. I would guess that the secondary behavioral data used in this data (like cardiovascular fitness) are much harder to predict from raw sensor data than being awake or asleep.
Kids are generally an asset in poor countries and a liability in rich ones. That doesn’t negate the fact that those distinctions are drawn from societal causes.
>home ownership is pretty much constant
I’m not convinced this metric is as good as you imply. It may just imply people are more buried in debt. If you look at the proportion of debt-to-GDP, household debt went from ~15.8% in the 1940s to peaking at 128% just before the financial crises, and settling to lower levels since then.
There’s a difference between “owning a home” and “living in the banks collateral”
> Now do it comparing labor productivity and real wages
You’re moving the goalposts.
You asked “how many points below inflation” recent wage growth has been. The premise is flawed. Wages have risen faster than inflation, massively over the last 50 years.
I did not ask “how many points below inflation.” That was a different poster. I’m trying to nudge the conversation towards a larger and more relevant context. Standard of living is what we ultimately care about; everything else is just a proxy for measuring it.
To that point, the premise is sound. We should expect real wages to increase faster than inflation because labor productivity has also increased faster than inflation. But productivity and wages have been decoupled for the last 50 years, meaning those productivity gains are disproportionately allocated. In other words, productivity gains haven’t led to a proportional increase in wage-earner standard of living.
It's kind of hovering above 0, too. Since this is just average wages, if you exclude CEOs who are earning 400x more than workers maybe it will not even be above inflation now
>Axon's stock a year ago was at $354/share. This year at the same time? Its now $760/share.
This is a somewhat incomplete picture. PE ratio was also inflated by 50% in the last year. So the increase in stock price isn’t tracking real earnings.
The larger point is that there may be a misalignment between what is good for a company/CEO and what is good for broader society. To that point, your example is a company that has effectively dodged duty/responsibility when their product kills somebody and pushed that responsibility onto peace officers.
“Piercing the corporate veil” is a viable way to hold individuals accountable so they doing hide behind the limited liability in certain cases, like fraud.
