In a universe where all AI investment goes to zero, wouldn’t you have the opposite effect? You can torch wealth but not the money supply, which ultimately _increases_ inflation, not decreases it.
There is only a short term inflation decrease while we produce what people mistakingly think is wealth. That can evaporate, but the money supply won’t.
It's confusing, but bankruptcy destroys mainly money, and only has second order effects on wealth.
What makes it hard to understand is that the Oracle going bankrupt on their debit because OpenAI took all their money is what would destroy the money. AFAIK, OpenAI itself doesn't have a lot of debit to burn. It would burn money that is currently on the hands of Oracle's creditors.
And bankruptcy is a bit of an extreme example, but just people thinking Oracle is less credit-worthy would destroy some money already. Repeat that for every company that invested in OpenAI.
IMO this view puts the cart before the horse. Suppose ChatGPT builds a UI that consumers prefer over web browsing to purchase products. How should merchants plug into that UI? This protocol is an easy way for merchants to do that. And once merchants are plugged in, consumers still need to be able to pay, and merchants need to get paid. Stripe makes that easy.
Consumers will only use the UI if it's better. Merchants will plug into the UI to make more money. So everyone wins-- consumers, merchants, OpenAI, and Stripe. And since the protocol is open, other chatbots and other payment processors can implement it too. Who loses?
(I agree that at scale these things tend to accrue to top players and you get all kinds of weird unsavory consequences. But I'd argue that's a critique of our regulatory apparatus, not of the companies building products and services.)
More importantly it would give parents options:
- stay home with your child and take the income
- hire a babysitter
- hire a better babysitter by adding a little cash
- take your child to daycare
- take your child to better daycare by adding a little cash
If the government also runs daycare centers that adds another option of taking your child to gov daycare. It also forces the gov and private daycares to compete.
The current policy penalizes people on the margin-- maybe an extra $500/mo would get your child much better daycare, but you're stuck between (likely) low quality government care, or losing a huge chunk of income to solve the problem yourself.
I haven’t heard this before, this is incredible. Thanks for sharing. There were a bunch of phenomena that didn’t quite make sense to me before, which make perfect sense now that I read the quote.
idk man, I have the opposite experience. I've always followed my instincts, and am now stuck with consequences of bad decisions that are not easy to undo. My life is good, but I feel like I squandered a real shot to be world class and am now stuck in the top echelon of mediocrity, maybe permanently.
In practice third world countries are very unproductive, and it's immediately visible to the naked eye. Many shops and restaurants have half a dozen people (or more!) taking the order and handling the check, there are entire extended families manning market stalls that barely sell anything, cabbies just hang out all day waiting for a ride, etc. You might be theoretically right, but I think that's not actually how it works out in reality.
I have made a very specific example, you extrapolated some other data from it.
If you want a clearer comparison take Japan and tell me their average driver, nurse, teacher, policeman, factory worker, carpenter, painter, car mechanic, shop assistant, barista, bank clerk, etc does "less" or "less efficiently" than his american counter part.
Because there is a huge difference in measured productivity between them.
There might be, at times, some added productivity in US due to having more capital at disposal to adopt some technology, there might be some other benefits from being more risk prone in US? Sure. But that amounts for smallish differences and sure not for the immense gap measured by economic measures, which, at the end of the day, as explained with the initial sleeping nurse example is still $/hour.
That’s not the reason. Almost certainly people feel a strong reaction, then when asked why it’s selective reach for a plausible answer. “Israel is supported by the west” is plausible.
What's this denial based on? Would you consider "Israel is part of the West" (rather than "supported by") to be more credible (and different enough to distinguish)?
When I met you at Stripe you seemed to me the person with strategic foresight and iron discipline— the kind that gets endless opportunities without even trying. I was hopelessly floundering by comparison, and not in a good Kevin Kelly way. I don’t know if people will think of you in 300 years (the day is young!) but you were definitely a role model for what discipline and great execution look like.
Thomas Jefferson sent the U.S. navy to fight the Barbary war (in modern Libya) because he refused to pay tribute to protect our trading routes. This quote is simply false. We've had enemies in the Middle East pretty much since the founding of the American republic.
There is no myth. Both Trump and Elon have generational talent in their respective domains. This is the kind of talent that’s so unique, it creates its own domain that didn’t exist before, and that no one will be able to replicate after.
But they’re both unstable, and have many other negative features.
One can have an extraordinary talent in starting generational companies, and have a social media addiction (among possibly other addictions and problems) that makes one unstable. These aren’t mutually exclusive.
One of their fathers was a successful slumlord, and the other owned an emerald mine in South Africa. Those provide a one-time advantage (which in Trump's case would have been more profitable if he had socked it away in an index fund.) How do they establish 'generational talent' for being POTUS or building rockets and cars?
It will be interesting to see if any of Elon's offspring choose to follow in his footsteps. Probably not the transgender child he disowned, or the one whose name has to be written with Unicode characters, but that leaves something like 20 others to vie for the throne.
The only talents they are great at are grift and daring someone to enforce rules against them in a society that largely relies on people holding themselves to standards and risk avoidance instead of active enforcement.
There is only a short term inflation decrease while we produce what people mistakingly think is wealth. That can evaporate, but the money supply won’t.