Nassim Taleb: The world in which we live | Hacker News Reader

Nassim Taleb: The world in which we live

substack.com

Missing from his analysis:

* The potential impact of humanoid robots currently in development.[a] What happens in the US, in Europe, in China, and other countries if (when) anyone can buy/lease a humanoid robot that speaks human languages, for less than the price of a cheap car, capable of performing any task performed today by human beings, at a tiny fraction of the annual expense (a few hundred dollars a year per robot)?

* The potential impact of AGI, should it become possible.[b] What happens in the US, in Europe, in China, and other countries if (when) anyone can buy/subscribe to software that speaks human languages, for less than the price of a phone plan, capable of performing any task performed on a computer today by human beings, at a tiny fraction of the annual expense?

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[a] Examples include humanoid robots by Tesla, Agility, 1X, and others. Videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpraXaw7dyc&pp=ygUNb3B0aW11c... , https://www.youtube.com/shorts/mOIxtSSa1NE , https://www.1x.tech/neo .

[b] There's no agreement as to whether AGI is possible, but predictions by people like Hans Moravec, Ray Kurzweil, and Vernor Vinge, going back to the 1980's (half a century ago), so far , are proving... right. We cannot blindly dismiss the possibility of AGI.

I saw it described as "we suddenly discover a new country with millions of super geniuses who are willing to work 24/7 essentially for free". And III add these super geniuses can be instantly cloned on demand.

> Examples include humanoid robots by Tesla,

This was remote controlled.

I thought the S-Curve piece was interesting, but not complete. It's definitely true that Europe, Japan etc. are experiencing slowing wealth growth, but this specific visual makes it seem like once a society is wealthy, you're absorbed into a list of wealthy countries and that's it.

Meanwhile, many countries have gone from some of the world's most prosperous to countries people want to emigrate from (Argentina, Venezuela come to mind).

the S-curve doesn't end there.

> Meanwhile, many countries have gone from some of the world's most prosperous to countries people want to emigrate from (Argentina, Venezuela come to mind).

This is oft-repeated misinformation.

Latin American countries experienced massive growth in the early 20th century and large incomes from grain export. That income was distributed in a very unequal manner. And back in the day there were no reliable statistics of the huge segment of the population living in complete poverty, both in urban shanty towns with no census to speak of, nor the masses of agrarian workers living in systems not too dissimilar to slavery. Every economist who has dealt with the issue has mentioned frequently that economic time series extended that far back are mostly extrapolation and speculation, and much of it is not particularly rigorous in its methods.

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