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Comment by zz865 | Hacker News Reader

I still dont really know about AI taking over the world. The most expensive things in my budget are housing, car, healthcare, childcare, flights/hotels, food. Does AI really change that much? There are definitely too many over-educated people out there already, I'd think this is more of an impact & setting up disappointment than the bots.

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Phrasing things as an optimization problem can result in better, more efficient arrangements than how things are presently, but only within the limits that people are willing to accept. It also depends what we're optimizing for - if we naively set it for "maximum number of humans fed and cared for", we really are all going to be eating bugs and living in pods.

A society built via capitalism just gives people what they want; not maximizing some arbitrary objective function.

We currently have no capitalist societies on earth.

Sounds like an instance of the No True Scotsman fallacy to me, friend. What is capitalism if not the systems that purport to be it? It's like saying "communism has never been tried". They tried _something_, and they certainly labelled it communism.

That said, I do find the Equity Fund idea interesting, though it's not entirely clear what this looks like in practice, especially for the unbanked, the mentally ill, homeless people, etc. who might not really know what to do with shares, since some of them don't really know what to do with cash, either. Seems to me these are the people most in need of uplift, no?

I'm not too worried about most lawyers getting automated out of a job anytime soon, after all, to the extent where I want to see the economy overturned for the likes of them.

Ah, fair. Yea, perhaps the capitalism we have tried is the closest that is practically possible.

I think we overweight how many people in society do not know what to do with cash. I think we may say that we believe they can do something better with it and sure perhaps, but it is bold to believe one knows what to do better with another's resources.

The time you spend in your car is more valuable than the cost of the car itself (including gas, repairs, etc). So insofar as you can free that time with an autonomous vehicle, it can absolutely slash the total cost of transportation.

To a lesser extent, similar things can be said about your other examples.

Robots building houses on cheap land due to mass work form home would make housing much cheaper. Robot doctors make healthcare much cheaper. Robot teachers make childcare/education much cheaper. Robot farmers + GMO make food much cheaper.

If a house is all I needed I could just move out to some 20km away location and get one for 60k€. You would have to do your own renovations but isn't that part of the deal when you buy a house? But I will concede that automation increases productivity and gives us access to more goods and services. It's absolutely necessary.

I don't think building costs are the main issue with availability of housing. You need the land to build on - and not just any land, but land in desired locations.

How are the artificial mega cities in China doing? Didn't they build several cities from scratch that are supposed to house several million people each?

That's why the ability to work from home is important. Sure there will still be expensive cities, but living on cheap rural land will be much easier.

sure but why would you want to live somewhere rural?

Plenty of people would like to live somewhere rural but can't because of work. Obviously not everyone falls into this category, but lower demand in cities = lower prices.

Most of those cities are filled up or filling up, so maybe there is something more to building new cities when WfH becomes even more viable.

> Does AI really change that much?

About all the things you listed - housing, transportation, education, food and travel are being impacted by digitization and AI.

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