If it's a shame that the brightest minds of our generation are working on UIs and advertising, what does that make this? (:
Who do you think made TensorFlow? Hint: it was Google.
But I also agree that there's not much point in dwelling on that point. So far, finding ways to leverage capitalism into solving problems has tended to be a lot more fruitful than looking for a replacement.
There are almost certainly better ways to search the solution space, but most serious attempts attempts thus far have been non-sensical or impractical.
Our population has a limited number of "smart people". I don't think any alien looking in from the outside, would think we are allocating them even remotely efficiently. It would be pretty difficult to design a system that does worse than ours on this aspect.
The solution isn't necessarily communism, but perhaps a hybrid. E.g. the government funds things capitalism has no incentive to optimize for, like scientific research.
On the other hand, humans are bad at predicting the future, so attempting to allocate resources perfectly is probably a waste of resources. see GPUs for video games, now used for deep learning - things that look trivial now might be important later on. If clicking ads gets us closer to AGI, maybe it's not so bad in the end.
>humans are bad at predicting the future, so attempting to allocate resources perfectly is probably a waste of resources.
It's hard to do worse than "random" or "not at all", which is basically what our current system is. Sure it brought us GPUs. But that's pure coincidence that what video games require happened to be what AI requires. If we weren't so lucky that two completely unrelated industries happened to require the same technology, we would never get AI.
Imagine tomorrow someone make a superior graphics chip. That's somehow highly specialized to 3d rendering in video games and does nothing else. Dropping all the general purpose computation and linear algebra stuff. Gamers would all switch to it and the market for GPGPUs would die and AI would stop advancing, or even reverse.
And GPUs aren't that weird or surprising of an invention to invest in. Increased computing power benefits many scientific fields besides AI and would be an obvious investment for a hypothetical central planner.
That's well over the line into dictator territory. The results never match the predictions in the brochure. That's pretty much a sure fire way to get a tribunal convened at the Hague or a not-friendly visit from a SEAL team.
We are humans, not unthinking machines.
I think you're confusing empirically for being significant numerically. I will offer a counter for your Wall Street example, look at how many go into teaching.
By 2006 about a quarter of MITs entire graduating class went to Wall Street. Some firms were offering $400K salaries to junior level positions. They weren't just taking huge numbers of people, but the ones they were taking were the best of the best. Other companies at the time had a terrible time recruiting anyone because they couldn't compete with that kind of money.
The problem with this is I don't think these firms are actually doing anything productive for society. The amount of work, money, and resources that go into getting a nanosecond edge for high frequency trading is just obscene. And all of the stuff they develop must be kept top secret and under NDAs. So even if they invent something cool by chance, they can't share it with the world or let anyone else benefit from it.
Wall St. doesn't even employ that many people, in total. I'd also be curious as to how many remained working there.
Now, to remind us of the subject, we're discussing how it is immoral to determine career paths for other people. To be clear, I have no issues with providing incentives to get people to select a career. I'm good with that. However, demanding or forcing is right out.
People incentivized are still exercising free will when they choose to do so. Capitalism isn't determining their career paths. You could offer $75/hour to people to eat horse poop and you're still not going to get a lot of takers. People choose their careers for many reasons other than expected salary.
If they chose with salary as the criteria, we'd have no teachers. We'd have no researchers. We'd have no field scientists. Nobody would work for the government. We'd have few artists, few musicians, few authors.
People choose their career for many reasons, salary sometimes isn't even in the top three reasons. Of course, some people do so for monetary reasons. I'm not sure they are actually the most suited for the job.
The next time you go to get emergency medical treatment, do you want someone who is there for the paycheck, or do you want someone who is there because they want to save lives?
Now, your final paragraph... You don't think they are doing anything productive for society. I'm not sure why that's a problem. We are not the arbiters. There are very few jobs that someone won't point to and say the people performing those jobs aren't productive. Usually, they are Ayn Rand fans but I'll assume you're not one.
They create wealth. They create a system that enables transfer of wealth. They enable companies to be partially owned by the public. They increase the incomes of those who employ them. They enable people to retire comfortably. They enable employees by getting them greater value for their share of the company.
In short, they do lots of things that are considered productive. If I made you $10,000 in profit per day, you'd probably think I was pretty productive. I know the reverse is true.
Anyhow, your last sentence kind of draws a more complete picture for me. First, you speak of insisting people do certain kinds of work which you decide the priority of. That struck me as misguided, but I was willing to see it through. Now, you're lamenting that you're not being given the output of someone else's investment.
You can't ethically own humans. Insisting they do only certain tasks and then wanting the output of their labor is, well, treating humans as if the are your property. That is not okay, at least according to my morals.
If I'm misreading you, feel free to explain. However, it looks like you initially wanted to make people, smart people, do certain kinds of work. You've since added that you think paying them above average is like forcing them, that they are equal. You're now asserting that their labor output shouldn't belong to them.
Err... That sounds remarkably like slavery.
The problem with this is that most people don't want to do this or think this is ethical in any way. (I'm more conflicted... you could take 5% of what the world spends on fashion to lift everyone out of poverty, too, as another example).
Except not everyone agrees on what is ideal, and therefore such an oracle is impossible even as a limit to be approached.
It appears that it works better when the two systems are blended and neither is used to an extreme. It's really quite a broad spectrum between unfettered capitalism and central management of resources by the State.