mysterypie

> It’s actually having the resources and economic capacity to make millions of them, enough to “replace all jobs.”

Like that newfangled invention called the automobile. We could never produce millions of them to substantially replace all other means of transportation.

EDIT: Joking aside, I think that when humanoid robots get good enough (I'm predicting 5-10 years), there will an insatiable demand for them in every possible residential and commercial application. If we have as many cars and portable supercomputers (i.e., cellphones) as we have people, why is it hard to imagine producing as many robots as we have people?

> it's socially acceptable to do 'yet another translation', but not a newer version in the same language

I wish they'd teach with modern English translations of Shakespeare in high schools. Maybe then kids would like it a lot more. But it seems like it's taboo to read Shakespeare in anything but the original.

> allocating a large part of my portfolio into AI companies

Even if you were certain that AI would take over virtually everything, the problem is deciding which AI companies to invest in. Thinking back to 1996, just when this new thing called "the web" was gaining tracking and assuming you were certain it was going to be huge, what companies would be the best investment? A lot of the companies doing web stuff went nowhere. Many of the biggest successes didn't even exist in 1996. It's not obvious which (if any) AI companies are worth investing in even if you're positive that AI is the future; the current companies might be massively overvalued; the best AI companies might not even exist yet.

As someone who hasn't used Windows in a long time, could you explain the benefit of doing a double install like that? I.e., if you stopped at step #1, it's activated, so what purpose does step 2 serve?

> $600 in the 1920s (1930s?), not inflation adjusted

I consulted the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator:

$600 in 1925 would be $11,264 today

$600 in 1935 would be $14,329 today

A lot of money, but I've heard that it can easily cost $10-20K today to erect a couple of poles to bring power a hundred feet to your property in a rural area these days. Do you know what distance was being covered to bring power to your grandfather?

> With widespread AI adoption we plausibly could consume 10x or more of the service: Legal services, for example, plausibly fit this bill.

A ten-fold productivity gain in legal services sounds simply awful for society. Imagine the time and money sink if everyone can sue you for every frivolous thing because AI can prepare and file the paperwork instantly without needing a lawyer. You'll need your own AI to defend against the onslaught of legal disputes.

Every contract for jobs and every terms & conditions for services will be 10x longer because AI has a much higher complexity threshold compared to a human. My belief is that one reason tax returns became much more complicated in the last ~30 years is because of tax preparation software. In the era of paper tax returns, there was a limit to the complexity that an individual or even an accountant could handle, so there was a limit on how complicated the government could make it.

Most normal people rarely need a lawyer in their lives. With AI's productivity explosion in the legal services, you're going to need legal services every day. Your neighbor wants to borrow your chainsaw? Your AI legal agent will negotiate a liability waiver with his AI agent.

> ChatGPT has more than 800 million weekly active users

0 to 800,000,000 in 3 years?

The fastest adoption of a product or service in human history?

Do you still get fingerprinted under the visa-free transit policy for foreigners?

I can accept a facial scan, but I draw the line at fingerprints and more invasive biometrics.

Why don't early investors put clauses in their investment to protect themselves against being screwed over by later investors? It seems like an obvious thing to ask for if you're giving someone a lot of money, so I'm assuming there must be a very good reason it's not done.

> go to about:config and setting privacy.resistFingerprinting = true in your Firefox browser

Two questions jump to mind:

Why isn't this the default in Firefox?

What is the downside? I.e., what can break by enabling this parameter?

> As someone who worked in airline revenue management, it always seemed odd that the sales tactics people use everywhere else weren't being used by airlines

Remember the really old days when air miles were awarded solely by distance flown rather than by dollars paid? This made no business sense. It meant that someone who flew the cheapest tickets could rack up as many points as a last-minute first class business traveller who spent massively more ticket.

With the airlines I’m familiar with, it seems that pricing anomaly has been corrected. Air miles are much more correlated with the price of the ticket these days. Eg., you don’t even get air miles on the cheapest tickets on one airline I know.

But I still wonder why the airline industry created an air miles formula so disconnected from the value of the passenger in the early days.