If you have machines that substitute for human labor, wages fall to the cost of manufacturing & running the machines, which is well below human subsistence level. Fortunately, you also get very high economic growth rates. So even people with small amounts of money invested will end up far richer than when they had a job. Then the question becomes, "What happens to people when machines are far more intelligent & powerful and are doubling every few months?"
Falling below subsistence means people starve and cease to exist until supply and demand equalize or “something else” happens. That’s what Smith was getting at. Thus subsistence is a price floor for human labor.
Something else could mean developing a new concept of ownership or a new form of redistribution.
I said that wages would fall below human subsistence level, not that income would fall below subsistence level. People would still get income from other sources such as investments, charity, and government (via taxes on others).
If people’s wages are below subsistence levels they’ll sell their investments to survive. There can be no possibility of upward class mobility in this scenario.
An economy needs people and stuff. Productive people take a long time to make. We can make stuff in factories really quickly, but most stuff quickly hits diminishing returns. For example, a worker with two laptops won't be twice as productive as a worker with one laptop. Right now, developed economies mostly grow through innovation. We make better stuff. But if there are substitutes for people that can be mass produced in factories, then you can grow the economy very quickly without increasing the number of people.
Average wealth per person would skyrocket in such a scenario, though of course individuals will vary greatly in how much wealth they accumulate in this sort of takeoff. But if the economy doubles every year, even a small investment (of one year's wages) would be enough to live off of indefinitely. Likewise, governments will vary greatly in how much they tax & redistribute the wealth of their citizens.
After a decade of such doublings, it's hard to say what the world would look like. A 1024x increase in wealth would be more than the difference between us and hunter-gatherer tribes. And all of this assumes that AI will be benevolent.
Yes every time I tried to understand ffmpeg I got a little of it for a little bit and then lost it by 2 days or so. Just getting LLM's to do their thing for ffmpeg is great. the other one is socat an utility I used before but LLM's can do magic with it.
EverQuest and Ultima Online had a huge overlap with MUDs of their time. Both in terms of developer experience (parts of EverQuest allegedly came about by starting from a Diku MUD codebase; several UO designers such as Raph Koster had been MUD devs and/or "wizards"/admins) and also player experience (many of the earliest players and their vocabulary coming from MUDs of the day and/or playing both).
Well, my career started in 2000, so maybe that would be better. Just imagine a shop entirely staffed by white kids quoting whatever the zeitgeist had spat out last to each other while boiling over about trying to make a static website look right across IE, Netscape 4 and the oddity that was IE on Mac (way ahead of its time in CSS, but support was all over the place).
Start with the “Whazzzzzuuuppp” of the Budweiser Frogs in the first episode, end with your favorite Chappelle Show quotation for the last.
I'm just describing my personal situation at the time (and the author's, judging by the pictures) because I have found in the 25 years since that having diverse views makes for better products.
Also, it's exciting that you signed up just to post about races. Is it F1, NASCAR, rally, what's your poison?
"Show me your [code] and conceal your [data structures], and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your [data structures], and I won’t usually need your [code]; it’ll be obvious."
If you would share your data structures for your MUD?
My previous thought was to use XReal glasses with my existing iPhone but that’s not realistic in an office environment.
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