If I use a drone to look over a fence to count the amount of inputs and outputs of a factory, and only I know this, it is perfectly legal for me to trade on it. Not insider trading! I'm just a really good information-finder and I'm morally just in how clever I am at finding an edge.
If I work at the company and count the inputs and outputs, and trade on it, I am a morally bankrupt scumbag and I have hurt society and all of the traders in the market.
If you work at the company you have almost certainly signed an agreement not to disclose such information; if you do so, you are violating the agreement. But that isn't insider trading.
If you hold a position of fiduciary responsibility within the company (or gain information from someone who does) that's a different matter. But the analogy there would be hacking into the company to read internal records, not just looking over a fence. in both cases, it's a crime.
The reason insider trading is illegal is because it undermines confidence in the markets by establishing a pattern by which insiders with privileged, secret information leverage it to profit off people who cannot access this information.
It also incentivizes insiders to leverage their position within a company to manipulate the business in order to profit. This also undermines integrity of markets.
Your second example, setting aside all your troll bait inflammatory verbiage about moral bankruptcy, is an illustration of this risk. I don't care if it rises to the level of moral bankruptcy, it is harmful to a capitalist society in a serious way.
Your first example is a depiction of someone leveraging information that anyone can gather. It does not undermine the integrity of markets because it is just an investor acting on publicly-accessible information.
Correct, but they can access the information as soon as it is revealed.
Consider the case where a company knows that the drug they are selling is dangerous but keeps it a secret. Insiders know of the dangers and so bet against the company in the market (obviously this is illegal right now). The insiders make a profit in the short term, and investors also in the short term lose out (which they were going to do anyway, the losses come sooner), but in the long term the secret information is revealed to the benefit of everybody.
I don’t see the harm of insider trading. I would make the trades public and mark someone as an insider. The “cat and mouse” game played now leaves for endless suspicion
The only thing worse is trying to get a denied Google Play review to change… considering you can’t even provide a comment to the reviewer objecting to your update
I heard this canard my entire life. It’s been said for centuries. If you want maximum employment pass a law that says all grass must be cut with scissors. Otherwise let productivity gains diffuse out - that’s the only way to increase true wealth
You need to explain, from a systems point of view _why_ the gains must diffuse out as you suggest. We have analogs we can compare to: massive wealth injections through a natural resource such as oil. Now what happens to that wealth is not obvious; for some countries it's a curse with radical inequality and pernicious and robust power structures, in fewer it has been bestowed to the heritage of the people (think Norway)
Now, the nature of AI is to change the balance of the labour trade. We have a notion of the “economic value of the average person” which is presently very high in the western world.
What happens when the median figure drops through 0 thanks to AI?
Do the remaining wealth owners share their wealth? How often does this occur in existing systems we can compare against?
The cost of primary resources to products also goes toward 0, perhaps this offsets the decreasing economic power of the average person. But what forces protect them if their bargaining power is lost?
> You need to explain, from a systems point of view _why_ the gains must diffuse out as you suggest.
Do we? I mean, isn't "because they always have" enough of an argument on its own?
I am hardly a libertarian ideologue nor AI-first LLM jockey. But I do think people tend to catastrophize too much. Blacksmiths were killed dead by the industrial revolution. "Secretary" is a forgotten art. It's been decades since an actuary actually calculated a sum on an actual table. And the apocalypse didn't arrive. All those jobs, and more, were backfilled by new stuff that was previously too expensive to contemplate. We're eating at more restaurants. We can find jobs as content creators and twitch streamers.
Life not only goes on after rapid technological change, it improves. That's not to say that every individual is going to appreciate it in the moment or that regulation and safety net work needs to happen at the margins. But, we'll all be fine.
AGImageddon is, at its core, just another economic phenomenon driven by technology. And that's basically always worked to society's benefit over the long term.
The 1880s blacksmith didn't become a 1950s American suburbanite. They moved to shared housing in Manchester and a shorter lifespan working for poverty wages, lost fingers/arms in machines, maybe ended up on skid row, the section of town for failures who couldn't 'adapt' to the new modern world. Their children died in WW1 in a trench to industrial produced gas. Their children's children were transported around the world to die storming a beach in WW2. And their children's children's children lived on meager 1940-60 diets as the world rebuilt it's food stocks destroyed by industrialized war, eating new industrial food replacements like margarine and SPAM. There were hundreds of millions of industrial enabled deaths. There was industrial enabled famine and near famine.
That all gets waived away with 'always worked to society's benefit'. It took almost 70 years and the post WW2 destruction of the rest of the worlds economies/infrastructure to create that 1950s American suburbanite world. 'always worked to society's benefit over the long term' is just handwaving not based on the reality of adapting, or if those societies even wanted to join in.
Because not all peoples/nations even had a choice. Japan among many originally opted out. But they were forced to 'modernize'. Peoples around the world were forced into the industrial world by railroads and machine guns and the industrial need for rubber/banana whatever plantations or lumber or strip mines. Once one nation passed through the door, every nation had to follow or be subjugated.
> The 1880s blacksmith [...] moved to shared housing in Manchester and a shorter lifespan working for poverty wages, lost fingers/arms in machines, maybe ended up on skid row
That's... just not remotely true, unless you're talking about it as a maybe-it-happened-to-someone story. In fact it's basically a lie.
Every income group in the US (and recognize that "blacksmiths" represent skilled trades workers who earned well above median and had for thousands of years!) saw huge, huge, HUGE increases between 1880 and 1950. I mean... are you high?
> It took almost 70 years and the post WW2 destruction of the rest of the worlds economies/infrastructure to create that 1950s American suburbanite world.
Again, big citation needed on this one. Western Europe was very close to US quality-of-life numbers by the 60's, and the more successful nations started to pass it in the 90's. (Also recognize that the US had already pulled ahead in the 30's, Germany and France were lagging even before the war). You're looking at something along the lines of a decade to rebuild, tops.
You need to tighten up before you call someone a liar. Manchester is the poster child city for the industrial revolution. The blacksmith moving to Manchester had a lower lifespan/quality of life, it's not in question or up for debate. He is who we will be in the AI disruption, not the person in 1950.
You don't think there are 70 years between 1880 and the end of WW2 and the real start of suburban American prosperity we think of when we think of the end results today? And I need a citation? Or are you saying I should use 1960 not 1950s as the point, since it took a decade to rebuild in much of the world?
> Manchester is the poster child city for the industrial revolution.
Which is to say, you cherry picked the data rather than looking at aggregates. Manchester industrialization being terribly managed isn't an indictment of steel machining or electrification, it means the government fucked up.
What you are claiming (that the industrial revolution led to lower quality of life generally) is simply false, period. And it won't be true of AGImageddon either, no matter how deeply you believe it. Economics just doesn't work that way.
Oh look, I didn't lie. No apology? Nope, just more attacks.
I picked THE Industrial Revolution city. THE CITY where it all happened. Did your high school not have a history class? I picked where it went wrong, the first go live site. That's what you do for analyzing things. You don't pick go live 500. That isn't cherry picking, that's what we do when we discuss scenarios that INITIALLY came up so they don't happen again. We don't just whitewash like you would like.
I claimed the industrial revolution led to lower quality of life for the blacksmith. The modern narrative when talking about AI implies they just turned into 1950s style suburbanites and waives away any thought/planning/discussion like you are trying to do. The reality, as it factually happened, was a much worse life and it is worth considering when implementing something that could be just as impactful.
People like you want to just handwave away the inconvenient fact that I am more likely to be the blacksmith in Manchester than to be born in some post-work AI Utopia that may exist in 70 years after things settle. why can't we even discuss this? Why do we have to stumble blindly into it, to the point you call me a liar/cherry picker for pointing out basic history taught in high school and basic root cause analysis concepts?
The reason that Manchester is taught about in American high schools is so that we learn from it and we understand our current world didn't just magically happen. Good and bad happened along the way, and that we have to work within that reality. Good can come in the end, be positive IF progress IS being made. Bad will happen, fix it don't just accept it, challenge it. Think about it. Look to history to prevent the easy things to prevent.
Just stop. Your ability to show a handful of negative externalities from industrialization doesn't invalidate the progress of the last century and a half, and to argue so (as you clearly did) is laughable.
And all the same logic applies to AI. Do we need to be willing to re-regulate and adjust as this is deployed? Almost certainly. Will it make us all wealthier? Undeniably.
We will need to re-regulate and adjust but talking about it ahead of time and moving forward intelligently is laughable? talking about how the last huge revolution played out initially is laughable? Come on. And yes, when you are talking about the start of something you normally only have a handful of examples. That is how things start, with a few instances.
You didn't know basic level history, called me liar, then a cherry picker for using the gold standard example.
You might want to check yourself before you tell people to stop, call them liars, cherry pickers, or make claims. No need to mis-represent me. My point is that 70 years of upheaval prior to the modern version of the world get ignored in the discussion. My point is that original people impacted, the proverbial blacksmith or buggy whip maker that 'adapted' had worse, shorter lives because of adapting.
This pattern continuing indefinitely without the need for analysis would be certainly nice but we do need to confront recent data. In the US, multiple metrics of quality-of-life peaked around 2015 and have declined since then, with some showing 11% decline while US total wealth has doubled! (with the majority of that decline pre-covid and pre-AI) [0][1][2].
What forces act on this trend? How can we make predictions? An interesting metric, which tracks the aggregate of many complex factors is the distribution of wealth, which could be seen as proxy for the distribution of power or agency of a person in their society. Median income as a fraction of total wealth decreased nearly 50% in real terms over this same period. [3]
Now inversely, during the period where life quality increased most the last century (1920 - 1980) inequality was _falling_.
How is super-human AI advanced through 2030, 2040, 2050 likely to affect things? Will it sharpen the inequality or relax it?
With AI the cost of raw resources to products goes down, but it's likely inequality increases. It's not obvious which force has a bigger impact on human quality of life as things shake out. However, I think the strongest argument – which also explains the steady improvements in QoL through previous changes you mentioned – has been to follow inequality, or median share of power in society.
>This pattern continuing indefinitely without the need for analysis would be certainly nice but we do need to confront recent data. In the US, multiple metrics of quality-of-life peaked around 2015 and have declined since then, with some showing 11% decline while US total wealth has doubled! (with the majority of that decline pre-covid and pre-AI) [0][1][2].
It's hard to take that metric seriously when the top city is Raleigh, NC. If that were the best city you'd expect people to vote with their feet and move their in droves.
There's an argument about the speed of change though, a society going through the technological evolution from blacksmithing to industrial metallurgy didn't experience it happening in the short-medium term (1-10 years), it had a gradient of change.
Over time with the speed of technological development compounding on itself, the rate of change becoming much more acute, there's a debate to happen on the "what if this change happens over 5-10 years"? Can you imagine a world where in 10 years most well-paid office jobs are automated away, there's no generational change to re-educate and employ people, there would be loads of unemployable people who were highly-specialised to a world that ceased to exist, metaphorically overnight in the span of a human life.
Pushing this concern away with "it happened in history and we're fine" leaves a lot of room for catastrophising, at least a measured discussion about this scenario needs to be had, just in case it happens in a way that our historical past couldn't account for. No need to be a doomer, nor a luddite, to have the discussion: can we be in any way prepared for this case?
I mean, arguably AI is faster (but it's equally arguably oversold, certainly we aren't seeing that kind of change yet). But the stuff I cited was faster than you think. In the rural US, in 1900, most routine transport was still done with horses. By the 20's it was basically all in trucks, and trucks don't need hand-forged shoes that the blacksmiths were making[1]. Likewise professional typists were still clacking away in 1982 but by the mid 90's their jobs[2] had been 100% automated.
[1] "Blacksmithing" didn't disappear, obviously, but it survives as an expert craft for luxury goods. That's sort of what's going to happen to "hacking" in the future, I suspect.
[2] Likewise, some of the best positions survived as "personal assistants" for executive staff too lazy to learn to type. Interestingly these positions are some of the first being destroyed by the OpenClaw nonsense.
The professional typist' role evolved - to serving through other ways, as you say - by become executive assistants. Much like a Bank Tellers' role also evolved.
And its not because they (executives) are too lazy to type. They actually need people to manage their calendar, monitor emails etc. Moreover, the personal computing revolution led to an expansion of firms that needed more of said people.
Could this be disrupted by things like OpenClaw? Maybe. Personally I doubt it. Trust is a huge element that LLMs have yet to overcome and may never over come. Its the same reason Apple pulled "Apple Intelligence". I know this place is full of doom and gloom, but I am not a SWE by trade so I can see the bigger picture and not get bogged down by the fact it might affect my income.
Moreover, work is more 'fun' with people around. So to you it may seem irrational to keep employed for that basis (call it Culture) but to others, and in particular the executive class - nope. People will start realising things like this once the hysteria dies down.
The "role" might have evolved, but the jobs disappeared. There are, what, maybe two or three orders of magnitude fewer "executive assistants" than there were typists in the 70's? I was making an argument about economics, not job classification.
If there is a need that people pay for, and it took 10 people, and technology comes and it can now be done by 1 person, that is a great thing. That’s not a bad thing at all. That’s exactly how the world progresses forwards. Everyone can get the need met, and at a cheaper cost, while freeing the other 9 people to do something else useful.
That is why we have the standard of living we have today
I genuinely cannot understand why this comment was killed. Even if you disagree with the position, there's nothing at all objectionable about how it's being presented.
I think it’s because it’s ignoring the impact of concentration and the range of affected jobs. When, say, people switched from animals as the primary source of motive power for shipping, relatively few people immediately lost their livelihood because the things now using engines still employed tons of people (a delivery guy had to learn to drive but the rest of the job was similar) and a bunch of new jobs were created.
Now we’re being promised a wide range of white-collar jobs all being affected at the same time, always in a way which reduces the number of total jobs and concentrates power in people with assets. The position that people will find new things is begging the critical question of whether those people will have the money to get started or customers who can afford to buy from them, especially when sharecropping using someone else’s models with no guarantee of non-competition.
Perhaps white collar employees have felt jobs not conducted in an office are beneath them. Because a wide range of physical jobs pay a lot more than office work already
Not many pay “a lot more”—your plumber is not taking home what she charges you—and that often comes with unpleasant working conditions, overtime, or extended time away from home. That’s like talking about tech salaries as if most people are L7 staff engineers at big tech companies.
Most people are not making that much in blue collar work, but even if they were, it’s also not like freshly-laid off people can just switch overnight. Lots of that work isn’t great for middle aged people, etc. and anyone retraining is going to need support for training, certifications, etc. but that’s happening when they have the financial obligations of a successful mid-career person.
For example, say Google actually developed AGI and canned everyone. What happens to the market in Mountain View when everyone is trying to enter construction work or become auto mechanics at the same time that those industries are hammered by a lack of customers, and the real-estate market suddenly has entire blocks for sale?
That last part might seem extreme but I saw it in San Diego in the 90s: the defense contractors laid tons of people off after the Cold War collapse, and that meant that entire neighborhoods went from having streets of engineers who worked at the same places all scrambling at the same time. Fortunately, that wasn’t permanent or every sector of the economy (and some of them were able to repurpose things like carbon fiber aerospace techniques into golf clubs and bicycle frames) but there were literally people with engineering Ph.Ds competing for $15/hour QA jobs just to have health insurance.
and (likely) your entire life we've seen concentration of wealth and resources in the west. It's not about maximum employment but about much more basic things like utilization and purpose. There has been no general productivity diffusion on a national basis. Gains have come from outsourcing the lower productivity jobs without acknowledging the cost: the destination subsidizes by not investing growth in their own people but by maintaining an artificially lower-cost region, and the outsourcer (i.e. the US) finances with their currency.
I haven’t seen any evidence of an army of agents producing unicorn companies. If this was the case we’d see a rash of < 10 employee startups being worth $1 billion, and to my knowledge that’s zero
I hate predictions, but when the dust settles, Copilot will take the lead. They are deep in the enterprise ecosystem, and they practically give it for free.
The first QC that decrypts previously undecipherable text will have incalculable value to the government that surrounds it. QC companies are bullshit because they will take whatever free non-gov money they can, why not? They exist to absorb government money, rightly so, but their public profile is simply to get money from private sector sources
The UK is poor and getting poorer every year. People simply don’t start companies there. Making the labor market even worse isn’t going to fix the structural issues that are reducing living standards year after year
>the number of employing businesses decreasing by 9,000 (0.7%), but the number of non-employing businesses rising by 201,000 (4.9%)
Isn't "non-employing business" an euphemism of sorts for "Uber driver"? No idea though if the UK is already forcing Uber to hire drivers and couriers as employees or not yet.
I am self employed electrician in Germany. I will never ever hire someone due to sick regulations here. I can work with clothing and tools I want. I can use my old stable ladder. For my employee I must get very expensive hardware and be liable for his work and his health. So thanks, it will never happen. I work all the time with other self employed people and they do share same opinion.
I don't want to misinterpret you, and your point about very expensive hardware surely has merit... But what makes it a "sick regulation" for you to "be liable for his work and his health"? That seems like the absolute bare minimum?
To be honest I would prefer addicts could get heroin prescribed. The primary danger of street drugs is the inconsistent purity and chemicals it’s cut with. If it was pharmaceutical grade and everyone prescribed was on a list, we would have fewer overdoses and a better understanding of who to put in treatment
Most heroin overdoses happen either from a sudden increase in supply purity, or from an abstinent addict relapsing and taking their regular dose without realizing they have lost their tolerance.
Any kind of rational change in policy is not happening as long as entire lucrative industries of policing, health care and religion-as-a-social-service are dependent on the dependent.
It's such things that reveal the cruelty in our sociaties. The evidence is very clear; it reduces deaths and improves health, while also reducing crime. But its still not the default the world over because its apparently a hard sell to give addicts anything for free. The other comments here show the sentiments nicely.
There is no need to give it for free. It costs very little to produce, most of the cost is just risk and irregular logistics. Just sell it over the counter at walmart for $5 just like they do rat poison, bottles of vodka, and ammunition.
You might say they won't be able to sell enough foodstamps or welfare even then to come up with the money legally, but it'd still be way less crime.
People don't get addicted to rat poison or ammunition (usually). But you have got a point on vodka. There is little reason to treat alcohol (and worse, nicotine) as any different than most addictive substances. Drug policy is totally irrational
alcohol is a far cry away from opiates. they should just allow everything. its actually effective in drastically reducing abuse. since use is normalized it become easier to have social control form peers etc. and that works really well actually. Additionally it would allow for stable products which means more safe products.
The US did this dance with the devil in the pale moonlight before anyone, way back in the 19th century. Tens of thousands (millions) of wounded soldiers came back from the civil war in chronic pain and addicted to morphine. They put them on "lists" and prescribed them dope and it spiraled out of control. It got so bad that they engineered Heroin to be a safer alternative. And people forget, but the temperance movement wasn't just focused on alcohol. They were the primary forces behind the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914. And these people weren't bible thumping crusaders, many were like early feminists that lost children\husbands to drugs and alcohol. I think Europe eventually comes around to this same conclusion when enough damage has been done. Metering out hard drugs has always been a road to ruin.
This seems only partially correct. If by "they" you mean Germans then yes, Heroin was engineered by them, or at least first made commercially available by Bayers. The US government had nothing to do with it. It was marketed as a less addictive alternative to morphine although I highly doubt anyone who made it actually believed it was safer. I have no source for this but I think it is a safe assumption to make.
The temperance movement was mainly related to alcohol. There were groups who wanted abstinence from everything but that was not its primary focus. They may have played a part in said act but I don't know. They were definitely not the driving force behind it though. Racism played a bigger role than the temperance movement. The government was also aware there was a very real problem with drug addiction.
Notice the word „decriminalize“, not „legalize“.
It’s about not throwing people already struggling with addiction in jail but rather offering safe alternatives (counseling, safer use, etc.).
The government‘s not passing out drugs in the street, like US media likes to suggest.
Nowadays they're just given methadone or Buprenorphine (other opioids). Having known family members that worked in the clinic, there is no plan to get most of them off of it. It is like other opiate addicts, ~most of them take it until they are dead unless they are just dead set on getting off and willing to live with the fact they might never quite feel 'right' again, although at least it is safer.
Is that such a bad thing? Plenty of people will take medications for the rest of their life -- statins, antipsychotics, antidepressants, ADHD meds, antiretrovirals. The stigma of chronic medicine use needs to go away.
I don't know it's a bad thing, just pointing out, the US does just prescribe opiate addicts more opiates basically for life without a plan to stop it. Responding to "They put them on lists and prescribed them dope and it spiraled out of control ... metering out hard drugs has always been a road to ruin" with the facts that's what we're already doing writ large. The thing many people argue shouldn't become the case is already the case and many are oblivious to it (thinking that it was just a thing in the past we stopped).
It isn't the same drug as fentanyl, but it never really stopped being the plan that we will take people from 'the list' and just keep metering opiates out indefinitely. GGP posted this in a way that seemed to allude this was not currently the case.
Hmmm probably the only thing I’ve consistently noticed around the US is they can pave highways and roads very quickly. That’s the American skill: tons of sprawl and highways. You may have been confusing road repaving with gas or water pipe replacement
America is a global superpower. Trump is not bound by laws, anymore than Bush 1 and 2 were restricted in Iraq, LBJ in Vietnam, FDR in everything, and on and on. It really doesn’t matter. Some loophole will be found. It’s meaningless
Elect a new president who decides they care again about restrictions on American trade. Your only hope
America wasn't always a global superpower either and maybe it won't remain one. But it's still useful to operate within the context of the reality we live in, which is what monero was describing.
Because the Senate had the votes to convict and remove him from office. Presidents don’t resign absent the rule of law, largely because that constitutes a death sentence.
Like common, American top level politicians are protected against the law like no one else. They can commit any crimes, literally, and norms are to look away and celebrate them anyway.
If I work at the company and count the inputs and outputs, and trade on it, I am a morally bankrupt scumbag and I have hurt society and all of the traders in the market.
Hmmmmmmm
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