myrmidon

If you can capture a significant fraction of the gains made by automating lots of white-collar work, then those billions/trillions look more reasonable.

"Correct" investment volume towards early industrialization might have looked just as unreasonable without the benefit of hindsight.

I don't disagree with most of what you say, but one crucial point you miss in my view is that letting public trust in banks & "the economy" collapse is really "expensive" (in hard productivity, not just on paper).

This is what was allowed during the great depression and what we desperately tried to avoid in later crises.

Western democracies are not set up at all to let the government direct and compensate millions of workers on the turn of a dime; micromanagement by government in such a situation can be expected to be extremely wasteful and ineffective, and this only got worse, because we have less generic/unqualified use for human labor than in the past (construction, railroads, motorways, heavy industry), and specialists are even harder to manage.

If everyone stops even just believing in the ability of local supermarkets to provide toilet paper next week or, on the other end of the spectrum, starts distrusting the banking system/dollar entirely, then the consequences can be extensive, expensive and slow to recover.

It might even be worth it to feed taxpayer money to rich greedy capitalists because the public comes out on top still by avoiding that trust collapse.

Because (some) investors with money still believe that this overspending (tbd.) on R&D is gonna pay off in the form of market share (or the generosity of our future AI overlords ;), and (some) dumb money is just following it.

To be fair: You'd need to make at least several billions of revenue by selling pencil sharpeners while mostly spending the $100b on R&D (not the production of individual sharpeners)!

The market for AI is very clearly there; people are willing to pay more than enough so that providing LLM infrastructure (inference) is profitable.

Just the SOTA model R&D is pretty unsustainably expensive right now, but this only means that if the status quo "bursts" (because people realize that pushing the frontier is not paying off), model improvement will (probably) be slower afterward.

Note: this could also happen because expensive SOTA progress fails to keep ahead of "garage-trained" models, in such a case SOTA-AI lab investments collapsing would not really slow AI progress anyway.

Doomsday scenario is a self-reinforcing feedback loop of:

1) economy tanks, people earn less disposable income or become unemployed

2) consumers spending less tanks the economy even more

We have historical precedent for this in the great depression, and the government going hands-off back then made the problem almost certainly much worse.

You could even make a pretty credible argument that the Nazis only got into power thanks to this, so there's your doomsday scenario.

What I find really interesting is that black holes don't really "require" infinite density; the mass density inside the event horizon never exceeds neutron star levels, and becomes in fact lower the heavier the black hole gets (=> event horizon enclosed volume grows faster than mass).

Largest operational/planned AI datacenters are in the 2GW+ range, so ~600min for one of those.

But a more typical size would be around 200MW, which could run over a week on 20GWh.

It's around 1MWh within a fraction of a second.

That means very high peak power, making your whole capture infrastructure extremely expensive, but even capturing 100% of an average lightning bolt is worth <$100 in electricity.

Which is why nobody even attempts this.

How is electricity outrageously expensive? We get power in the most flexible of forms (electrical) delivered directly to our homes at a rate that no human in history would have ever performed voluntary physical labor for (the equivalent of thousands of horses or people for a few hundred bucks an hour, assuming <500$/MWh). Even complete energy autarky has become feasible for private individuals if you are willing to invest.

Just because power used to be even cheaper in the recent past, by doing non-sustainable shit and pushing all the resulting costs onto others/the future does not mean that was ever appropriate, necessary or desirable, and everyone advocating for chasing that model is a greedy, selfish asshole in my view.

> Eating a hamburger or driving a car is not the problem at an individual level.

Strongly disagree. Oil is not getting produced because a handful of companies want to ruin the planet-- that happens because billions want those oil products, for personal mobility, cheap goods, cheap energy.

A lot of people simply don't care enough about the future consequences; they want to continue cheap consumption for as long as possible, and find justifications and excuses easily enough ("China emits so much more anyway", "I can't afford to pay more for gas", "why should I have to make any sacrifices that my parent generation did not have to make", etc.).

If you could disperse every last one of those companies into tiny 20-man operations, you would solve absolutely nothing. What would solve things is if a majority of people (in industrialized nations) would become willing to pay the cost for fast and extensive (green) electrification, to downregulate the size and frequency of personal transport, to pay a premium for green concrete and steel, to accept higher prices and worse availability in order to sanction any trading partner that is not similarly serious about emissions.

We can't get any of the above not because of evil corporations or politicians, but simply because most people just don't want to pay the price and make the sacrifice now for a better future.

This might shock you because it happens outside your social bubble, but there is an insane amount of people (double-digit percentages for sure) that is simply unwilling to make even the smallest sacrifice in order to mitigate climate change, and they vote accordingly.

That does not make climate change any less of an emergency, but it limits politically feasible countermeasures a lot.

I'm not saying that wage level is the only factor for growth. But it is extremely significant.

If you want to keep higher local wage levels, you rely on other comparative advantages (easier access to capital, better education, better political stability), and all those tend to erode over time. As they do, you either lose your wage advantage or the whole industry, there is no alternative.

> Otherwise Mexico and Russia would be industrial superpowers catching up to EU and the US, if all it took was neighbouring you and having cheaper labor than you.

They are! Just compare vehicle production for an easy proxy: Mexico had >100% growth over the last 2 decades, while US numbers are basically flat. Russia is a bad example now because of war, but they did a lot of catching up before.

If your theory is that all western manufacturing struggles just because every single company is stupid and spends too much on lawyers and accountants then I don't know what to tell you.