I don't see much evil to that (limiting the "the entire globe to some level of prosperity"). Nor it has anything to do with being anti-science. You could be pro-science (pro understanding the world, physics, math, etc), and against continuous growth.
Better that models that treat the environment as externalities, or which convolute and stress the daily life for ever more trinkets to fuel the growth machine...
Second, evil needs agency only when we talk of evil deeds.
An outcome can be evil in itself though - not evil-doing, evil, in the sense of bad, ominous, deleterious, etc.
We need to constrain growth to science and efficiency, and pull back on population and land use.
I'd rather the human race is happier, more self-fulfilled, friendlier, with more solidarity, and better allocation of its resources, than it expanding forever...
If anything, I see much evil in "not handicapping" the human race, and ruining the planet, the animal life, and the human race in the process.
This would be basically limiting the possibilities of all future humans in the name of some "greater good". That is textbook evil for me.
I think the main problem with this kind of thinking is that it is always based on what you know now, and not on what is possible. The world we live today, our technology, and the way we use resources would be unimaginable 200 years ago. The same is true about our knowledge of what will be possible 200 years from now.
> The same is true about our knowledge of what will be possible 200 years from now.
The same _might_ be true. I think it's really a race in the current moment of time - will our knowledge of the physical world evolve fast enough to allow us to undo/transform the damage our growth does to the ecosystem? Or will the damage our growth does ultimately limit & maybe even revert our ability to grow?
The truth is... we don't know, I think both scenarios are plausible. For all we know, civilization might end in 50 years due to either one of multiple potential causes (war, global warming, etc) - or on the contrary, we may discover something truly transformative (like the ability to convert energy to matter and vice-versa) and all today's problems will seem silly. Or anything in between, I guess :)
Also - I agree that growth in the first world came at the expense of the middle class - but in much of the rest of the world, it didn't. I was _massively_ poorer 20 years ago (and not just me, most of my country, really). And it's not a singular thing - AFAIK a lot of people came out of poverty in those last 20 years. In east asia & pacific this seems to have been dramatic: https://ourworldindata.org/exports/share-of-population-livin...
> Except medical advances and science, I'd be all willing to trade ALL the economic "growth"
I don't understand if you're making a larger point or not, but the "first world" is the focus of the discussion of whether or not growth economics is harmful. It worked fantastically well for the first world for many years, possibly even the 200 year scale that the commenter above challenged. The issues have arisen in the last 50 years (opinion incoming) and particularly since the US, and UK embraced the Trickle Down model that Reagan pulled over the American people's eyes.
Western Civilisation spent some 600 years taking their freedoms from those who held them down -- the politically, and economically, elite. In 8 years President Reagan convinced the American people that these overlords no longer needed to be held account for taking the bulk of the wealth of the masses for themselves, on a promise that it would come back to them, and that this was a required measure to encourage growth of the economy as a whole.
This was a bald-faced lie, wealth-capture and the chasm of wealth inequality was at an all time low in the developed world circa 1970, the last 50 years have served only to restore the land- and robber-barons to their political city on a hill.
They used the oldest tools in the despots handbook to achieve this: propaganda and agents provocateurs.
Today it is easier than ever for the political class to deploy these weapons against their citizens (whom, by the way, should be their peers in a democracy), and to obfuscate the use of these tools from those worst affected.
In the absence of discovering a natural resource bounty, GDP (economic) growth comes from two sources:
1. More people working harder.
2. Better technology.
If you exclude "medical advances and science" you're basically excluding (2) which means the only source of growth is (1). More people working harder. Saying the world can only get better by increasing the number of hours we work is dystopian and doesn't make sense to wish for.
Ultimately, all progress comes through technology.
It seems to me that conflating humanity's progress and economic growth is exactly where our problems start.
I'd be extremely happy with the education + costs of 50 years ago, or just online education -- I'm not talking about content, but delivery and costs.
It boggles my mind that people don't see it for what it is -- the feudal lords are back and they take a lot more of your production just so you stay alive.
They are not helping humanity(except for some benevolent ones) progress, they 99% help themselves.
Progress and wealth creation actually occur when prices fall, not when they rise, even though it may not feel like it if you happen to be the owner of a fixed asset whose price is falling i.e. a house. In a static system if money is printed via the issuance of loans, and that causes house prices to rise whilst the prices of everything else remain stable, then all that's doing is reallocating wealth from non-home owners to homeowners and banks. But it's not actually increasing wealth.
For wealth to increase everyone would need to find it easier to buy things, and the only way to do that is for things to become cheaper in real terms. For instance the smartphone industry has created enormous wealth in the past 20 years. Smartphones got massively cheaper so everyone can have one, and they got massively better. This is what economists mean by wealth creation.
And just because I was perusing this earlier today: the UK Government's plan for the future /is/ to have people work for longer[1].
I agree with you. Make no mistake in that. Denying that those who push growth economics seek only to further their own interests, not those of humanity, is a curious and dangerous position in the face of the evidence. This graph[2] shows that since deregulation they have increased their relative gain, at the expense of those worse off. It would be trivial to show that these same people made their money by eroding the welfare of everyone else, environmentally and economically.
[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6f/19...
Besides crime, there is- Education, computer literacy, drug problems, etc. Huge swathes of Africa lacks even basic sanitation, many people in US don't have healthcare, the list is endless.
Lastly, there is a difference between science and industry. Case in point: we have the technology for genetic engineering of humans, but we aren't doing that. It could probably increase GDP too.
I think the view that one president screwed you over is a bit myopic... It didn't happen in US, it happened all across the developed world. That shows it's a systemic thing - caused not by some policy, but by global forces. Those millions that came out of poverty did it pretty much at the expense of the western middle class (and yes, this was enabled & encouraged by the rich - who benefited from it; that much is true). It's not just a few people that got richer - many millions got richer. It's just that those millions are not in the developed world.
[edit]PS. I wonder if OP didn't add the "except" after my message... I don't remember seeing it initially (though it's entirely possible that I didn't pay close attention).
Environment has gotten obviously shittier since then; looks like a good trade to me!
genome research: CRISPR etc.
space flight: reusability is a massive game changer. The Falcon 9 once they start reliably catching the fairings is about 90% reusable. The Falcon 9 makes things like constellations of 12,000 satellites feasible. The Starship is planning on 100% reusability which will reduce costs a futher couple of orders of magnitude. Elon is talking about sending 1000 Starships to Mars every 2 years in about a decade, and people are starting to learn that Elon might not be as crazy as people originally thought...
Environment: not so obviously shittier. For example, tree coverage has increased by 7% in the last 35 years. In general local environments in developed countries have gotten a lot cleaner. The global environment on the other hand suffers a massive tragedy of the commons type problem so it overshadows massively local improvements. So yes, you can say the environment has gotten worse, but it isn't "obviously" so.
Genome research: so far a big nothing burger. Zero impacts on average people's daily lives. The entirety of genome research results on the real world seems to be enabling people to eat more sugar without dying.
Space flight reusability: dude, where's my space shuttle? Falcoln 9 isn't reusable when using its actual cargo capacity, and isn't cost effective when it is reusable; no game changer there. Neat trick though and it certainly looked cool.
Environment getting better: citations needed. Doom porn abounds at the very least. Maybe they're all lying about melting polar caps, plastic in the oceans and insane levels of chemicals in the eco system.
IF ML works great, yeah it could have a big positive impact, but not much for the average person so far, meanwhile it does work for the chinese dictatorship, hedge funds, the military, the scummy corrupt politicians to influence ellections; self driving cars will be a HUGE benefit, but guess who will take the lion's share of that benefit -- the 0.5% that will own the tech; maybe a little bit for you and I, but the milions of professional drivers will be crushed.
I'm not against tech, but the way it will be use to further re-feudalize the world and promote the accumulation of wealth to the 0.5% -- which will be terrible for the overall progress of humanity.
All that said; I 100% agree with you, the fruits of supervised learning will entirely accrue to oligarchs, governments and other such dirtbags who have the databases to fit against, do not have the well being of average people in mind. If we notice at all, it will be via blackmail, creepy ad tracking and late night knocks at the door.
I think I'll take removing the last 20 years of environmental destruction and go back to using a 6 digit pin. Or a thumbprint reader.
FWIIW Dweeb Learning still has problems with image recognition, and people still don't understand how it works. Pretty sure that "progress" was mostly people writing frameworks for video cards.
Pretty sure you either don't know as much as you claim, or are knowingly claiming things that are blatantly false
If you have an actual example of a past 20 years developed machine learning idea which has pushed the needle for normal people in the same way the Haber-Bosch process did (making an extra 6 billion lives possible); I'd love to hear about it!
Whereas you did claim that speech to text and translation were about as good 20 years ago. Basically, to use your chemistry analogy... you're saying "Haber Bosch was nothing new, Cavendish produced the same kind of results hundreds of years ago!"
Your analogy is faulty: Haber Bosch was obviously something very different and new. Nothing in use today differs appreciably in accuracy or capability in speech to text or machine translation as it was 20 years ago.
It's exactly the difference you suggested with Haber Bosch vs precursors - "we know how to do it" is a far cry from "it's cheap & repeatable enough to be actually available in practice, to everyone".
I was there back in 1990s using speech recognition software which worked just like it does today, with vastly more than 50% accuracy. Dunno where you were. Romania I guess.
What did you use, Dragon Speech? Maybe it worked better for you? I can assure you for non-native speakers it was pure crap. Also, what was the usage in western world? I know they had _some_ sales, but I don't remember it exactly taking off.
Lastly - you're obviously willfully ignoring progress, like translation for instance works so much better with RNNs and attention. The basics of RNN were indeed there (LSTM was just published - though e.g. GRU is more recent), but attention was not. And attention is critical. That's just one of the things that's not "basically the same" and "worked just as well 20 years ago".
I thought the previous KNN based approaches worked better than the RNN based ones. Which is more or less my point here. The main piece of "progress" we got was the result of a giant corporation having a large corpus of data. The actual technology hasn't improved or changed a whole hell of a lot.
I'm eventually going to write a history of technological progress documenting this. Progress is very obviously slowing down other than the improvements in lithography which are now fading out. Throw away anything with a screen in your household and life is basically identical to what it was 20, even 40 years ago. That wasn't true within my lifetime: there were huge strides made in technology in decades gone by -in my lifetime even. We're at the point where a lot of "progress" is just changes in fashion; KNN versus neural approaches. People buying the latest iphone (which is really no more capable than the early iphones); wondering at the facial recognition IR thingee. Oh sure, DL can do some tricks that were not possible before, but their actual real world impact is marginal, and sometimes, it's not even an improvement over other techniques.
You have grounds to be skeptical about the future and to believe it is dark; but IMO you don’t have grounds to claim that there was no progress.
re: face recognition: Viola Jones is almost 20 years old (we've been talking about 20 years periods). Eigenfaces is over 30 years old.
I don't believe in Driverless trucks, and it is emblematic of current year whenever I talk about technological progress, people bring up something that only marketing departments claim actually exists in the corporeal world.
FWIIW by "KNN" I don't mean the O(n^2) classic; the thing Google was using before was a bit more sophisticated than that, and it worked just fine. For some languages it worked better than the "advanced" RNN version of things.
How exactly do you do face recognition with Viola Jones? Nevermind an accurate-enough version to be used for biometric identification... just one that can distinguish you in your photo collection.
There is something hollow about the technological advances of the last 40 years.
I'd be willing to bet that a lot of the said growth is really just asset price inflation -- just let people overburden themselves with debt and a house costing 50000$ now costs 300000$ -- not just any house, EVERY house -- boom, you have huge "growth" and "wealth".
EDIT: I meant that it is disingenuous to look at 200 years because huge REAL advances have indeed taken place since then.
I'm totally against the financialization that has happened in the last 40-50 years, which is really 90% of the growth that has actually happened.
I mean, don't you think there's something deeply wrong and worrying with the fact that the financial industry is 80% of US GDP?
Well if we are just totally changing what growth means...
Just check real wage growth in the western world, after inflation it is stagnant or negative in the last decades; add in hugely inflated housing prices, education prices, and it is very clearly a big NEGATIVE outcome for the average person; this is only offset a bit by women entering the workforce, now you have 2 slaves instead of 1.
Yeah, the developing world might fare better -- for now -- as they are much cheaper then workers in the developed world, but the same trap awaits them, the same asset price inflation, education costs and so on is happening in the developing world, it's not fully our turn yet, but the writing is on the wall.
technology also won't save us - we are within 2x of theoretical limits in plenty of technologies, e.g. internal combustion engines for cars, and large turbines for electricity generation are way closer.
On the flip side, France typically has slower economic growth than the US, but that growth is spread much more evenly across the population. What good is growth if only a small portion of the country is benefiting from it?
Growth rates matter.
Also, my intuition suggests that if the mean and the median are further apart ([1] suggests France's mean and median are half the distance apart as the US's) the French income curve should be mostly above the US one. Could you point me to some graphs?
[1] ten minutes on wikipedia.
I see a report from the Quarterly Journal of Economics that says: "The bottom half makes more in France than in the United States today, even though average income per adult is 35% lower in France (partly due to differences in standard working hours in the two countries)." [1]
If you look at people "with disposable income between 66 percent and 200 percent of the country’s median income", France has a larger percentage of citizens in that middle class. [2]
France spends less than half of the US per capita on healthcare and has a longer life expectancy. [3]
[1] https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/133/2/553/4430651 [2] https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/04/euro-vs-american-middle... [3] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...
World bank data seems to differ:
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locat...
USA GDP PPP per capita in 2018 according to the IMF: $62606
Mexico, ditto: $20602
20602×1.01^100 = 55724.6
The difference is closer to 1.1177% compounded over a century, but I wouldn’t quibble over the extra digits when most news reports of economic growth are rounded to the nearest 0.25%.