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$20/kg is a wild claim.

A typical American semi-truck (18-wheeler) can carry between 40,000 and 45,000 pounds (20 to 22.5 tons) can travel only 160k miles (2/3 distance to the Moon) on a budget of $400k (i.e. $20/kg).

Do you expect us to believe that rocket transportation would be in the ballpark of truck prices in the near future?

No I don't. The entire nature of revolutionary change is that it's something that seems unimaginable, at best a fantasy, from a distance. 5 years ago you certainly wouldn't have believed that chatbots would be writing meaningfully complex programs from plain language instructions, and posing a viable threat to various forms of cognitive employment, yet here we are. Even now that we're in that era I think many haven't entirely come to terms with what this means.

With rockets, the fundamental viability is there through full reuse, airplane style. The majority of the cost of a repeatedly reusable vessel ends up being fuel, which is around a million bucks for Starship. Add another million for refurbishing, amortizing costs, and so on and you get a baseline launch cost of around $2 million. With a payload of 100 tons, you're at $20/kg.

The major difficulty is creating a system that's fully reusable, and that's exactly what's being done with Starship. I don't know if they'll succeed to the point of $20/kg, but it's a viable possibility. And if they do succeed then everything is going to get very weird, because the economics of transport become absurd, to say nothing of the entire frontier of space suddenly becoming 100% accessible at a reasonable cost for development.

Why should we believe that Starship launch costs will be that cheap when we don't believe Musk's other numbers? Where does that number come from? Has anyone looked into it?

It doesn't cover launch costs directly, but here's a bearish take on reusability of the second stage:

https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/how-should-we-think-about-...

Yes, it's been extensively analyzed. Space is a massive industry with a huge base of people, disproportionately made up engineers and the like, who love digging through the nitty gritty of pretty much everything. Nasa space flight forums [1] are the analog of hacker news, but for space. That link is just for discussion on Starship, and currently has hundreds of thousands of posts.

[1] - https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?board=72.0

So what's the consensus? Any article in particular that you recommend?

Peruse the forum. There's a topic on near everything relevant you might imagine. If you want a topic starting from a bearish premise, here is one. [1] In general I think there's little doubt that Starship is viable, but the exact implications are open to a wide range of speculation. Prices are going to go down, and payload sizes are going to go up, but the exact degree is open to speculation varying by orders of magnitude.

[1] - https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=63166.0

These links seem to be blocked now. Edit: working again.

"""For instance if there ends up being substantial labor disruption due to LLMs" ""

.. who are they gonna sell to if people don't even have money to buy? We live in circular economy... everyone's dependent on someone or the other... you take one leg out of this, and the whole thing stops. UBI won't work either because it will lead to runaway inflation and extreme levels of invasive control over people's lives and what they can and cannot do.

I hope no one here is naive enough to believe that AI would actually be used for general welfare of people.

> UBI won't work either because it will lead to [...] extreme levels of invasive control over people's lives and what they can and cannot do

I've never heard this before. I thought UBI would be very freeing and without much control. If it is universal then there needs to be no control of who gets it or not. What am I missing?

I think "The Expanse" offers one of the most viable portrayals [1] of what a society under UBI would look like. One practical issue is that you'll end up with people who earn and create and those who passively consume, and that will lead almost immediately to a class system and segregation. And it's likely that basic criminality and other issues will come disproportionately from the consumption class, which will lead to calls from the production class for further regulations on their behaviors.

And in cases where the strain on resources is significant, you could easily see things like efforts to restrict the fertility of the consumption class which would enter into the domain of defacto eugenics. And from all of these sort of issues you're going to see a conflict arise between the two classes, but one holds all the power. It's not going to be pretty. FWIW, a decade ago I was a huge advocate for UBI, but my outlook on the realities of political leadership, and it's probable inescapability, has changed my opinion over time.

[1] - https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Basic_Assistance

One simple 100% effective way of control is to control the livelihoods of the dependents. UBI does exactly that by giving that control to governments(politicians), which in turn generally serve corporates interests, thegerby extending that control to them. We can already see it happening with data-centers.

What do "corporate interests" even mean in a world with UBI and automated production?

Your fight against the data centers is misguided. All so they can be built somewhere else so what you have a few extra years of getting paid to fill out a spreadsheet or something? You're applying pressure on the wrong side of the equation.

> What am I missing?

Nothing, it is nonsense. UBI is just expanded social welfare in Europe. There are some checks that you are not abusing social welfare (i.e. living in a huge house while taking housing subsidies) but with UBI these checks are nonsensical from that first letter U = Universal. There are no checks by default.

UBI is really one of the few positive end states. You can't put the genie back in the bottle. People against UBI really need to get over themselves unless you are part of the mega capital class its simply not in your interest to oppose. This will be hard for many software engineers who even in today's market are used to being overpaid and overvalued.

I think a common mistake people making is viewing an economy as fixed, but everything is based on supply and demand. Tech is a tool, like a hammer. But right now it's a hammer that very few people can wield, and that alone is what drives its value. LLMs, if they reach their potential, stand to turn tech into just another hammer that anybody can use. And so being able to use that hammer will no longer be valuable, but there will likely be an explosion of new things being made, with our new-found hammer literacy, that fill the vacuum and then some.

I’ve always been wondering how they are actually planning this scenario. If they cut human labor on a massive scale due to AI, consumption is about to drop heavily. AI doesn’t pay healthcare insurance or taxes, it doesn’t buy groceries or cars or gas and it doesn’t rent apartments. How do people imagine to compensate that?

i am not ready for our weyland-yutani overlords