Maybe worth asking why so many highly qualified people with Chinese last names decide to work for US-based companies when Chinese AI companies have been hiring like crazy for the last six years?
"China can draw on a talent pool of 1.3 billion people, but the United States can draw on a talent pool of 7 billion and recombine them in a diverse culture that enhances creativity in a way that ethnic Han nationalism cannot." - Lee Kuan Yew
Defining an economic system as growth and profit driven is sort of tautological though, given the definition of "economics":
> The branch of knowledge concerned with the production, consumption, and transfer of wealth.
Original question was about "society" which is sort of nebulous, but I think (hope?) most people wouldn't define their relationships with their family and close friends, or with most of the world around them, through the lens of an economic system, be it capitalism, communism, mercantilism or feudalism.
Some important points about large language models verses self-driving cars:
1. The former is entirely in software and has the favorable economics that brings with it
2. Language models don't need to be that good to provide value, whereas self-driving cars basically need to be solved before they become significantly useful
3. There's a cottage industry of secondary startups being built around using language models for various applications, whereas no such thing exists for self-driving (probably because of 2)
Social security payments are inflation-adjusted actually. It's more an issue of solvency. The trust fund backing payments is projected to run dry in the mid-2030's [1]. Solving this either means raising taxes on working-age adults or lowering payouts; the UK is a good example of the former, where working-age incomes have recently fallen below pensioner incomes [2], and no politician wants to be the one to bite the bullet on the latter.
I'm surprised the article doesn't mention social security. A young person making $2,000 a month is paying $240 a month towards social security (half directly and half through their employer), and will likely never see any of it once they reach retirement age.
This seems tangential? Engineering and law aren't the only exemplars of these categories, there are lots of fields where the marginal problems to solve are interesting verses uninteresting, they were just contrasting the two in the article. For example, more productive artists usually leads to more experimentation and weirder artwork; more doctors usually leads to more specialization and advanced knowledge; more VC money for crypto projects usually leads to more Ponzi schemes; etc, etc
This sounds more like a sci-fi AI bot than the current route that AI research is going. How do you even get the training data or build a simulation for an agent like this...
I suspect we're about to enter a world where AI supercharges the average engineer's productivity, which is going to make it so that so much more stuff can be built. Using Copilot, the time to build a prototype for a simple app or API drops by a big multiple. Things that would take a week of work can be tried out in a weekend. Super cool future.
I think this is pretty apparent when you look at self selection into residency specialties. Everyone presumably has invested roughly same amount for college and medical school, but people choose residency programs with vastly lower earnings potential because it's what they want to do with their life. I mean, when you have to wake up and do something for 12 hours a day for 40 years, money probably won't sway your choice as much, especially when even low-paid doctors have a comfortable lifestyle.
The difference is that you have a choice about whether or not to engage with a corporation, but not for your union or government. If you don't want to engage with a corrupt corporation then you can switch jobs or start a new company, but if you don't want to engage with a corrupt union then you basically have to switch industries.
I mean, doesn't that necessarily follow from an implicit understanding that corporations are ruthless profit maximizers though? I fail to see the supposed ideological inconsistency...
People that make statements about what the primary goal of such and such a union would be seem to implicitly assume that the union would be run according to their particular vision, when in fact it would be run by majority rule at first, and later (once employees don't have a choice about whether or not to join) to satisfy whatever hidden constituents hold the new levers of power.
I'm not sure I understand what the alternative is - should you pretend that corporations are not ruthless profit maximizers, and allow them to have undue sway over our legislative system all the same? It seems like the root of the problem is that we've let the institutions which are supposed to hold our politicians to account when they exhibit blatant corruption fall into disrepair.
Taking the question literally, the answer is that because in this kind of system there's plenty of incentive to lie to get the maximum number of days of paid leave. So if you're in charge of scheduling employees and you assume that they're self-interested then you would assume that left to their own devices a lot of them would probably lie about being sick. I mean, it's a lot safer assumption than assuming that everyone in the rank-and-file takes some great pride in the success of the company and would never do something morally dubious.
Building housing should actually be a great investment, owning housing should be a bad investment. The problem is that with construction being so mired in inefficiency and red tape, there has to be an expectation of many years of great returns in order for anything to be built.
I find it strange that stopping advertising on some particular platform is a "big deal". It feels like it might have been so when ads were run in newspapers and on TV, but regularly adjusting your advertising strategy to be able to check its efficacy seems like common sense in today's internet advertising world. Given that the script for these companies is basically interchangeable among whichever internet platform, it probably takes a couple hours to spin up or spin down an ad campaign. Can't help but think that smart actors just use these events as cover / PR for evaluating their ad efficacy.
I switched to an iPhone about six months ago and have been shocked by how user-hostile the experience is compared to my old Pixel, primarily because of their ecosystem lock-in. For example, the watch randomly logged me out of Strava and started pushing me towards their random fitness tracking app, and iMessage won't let me click to open addresses because I uninstalled Apple Maps. I suspect (maybe hope) their anticompetitive behavior will start to draw more public scrutiny if they double down on their ad business.
This is a thought-provoking read. I'm currently going through Meta onboarding for the third time (once before as an intern and once full-time). The first time it was exciting; the second time it was interesting but seemed quaint, but still, neat for a first-time job; the third time it feels like a pipeline for molding the exact sort of Clueless people the article describes.
For the past few months I've been in a somewhat unusual housing situation. My wife is a medical resident in NYC, and the hospital system she works for is quite large and owns a lot of NYC property. They offer their employees subsidized housing at greatly reduced rates (meaning, an 1100 sq. ft. Manhattan apartment for $2300 a month). It has a "company town" feel, but it has been great for us, and the incentives seem like they're aligned in this case - employers have an incentive against being extractive because it reduces their employees' effective compensation. The residency program is 7 years which means we're stuck here anyway, and we don't have to worry too much about about her being fired or wanting to find a new job. In a competitive labor market like tech / finance / medicine it seems like employer-subsidized housing isn't a terrible idea, and is an alternative to just relocating corporate offices to a lower CoL area.
- 1-2 years: Work hard because you feel optimistic and self-assured, working on exciting problems with smartest people in the world, lots of great resources
- 2-3 years: Start to realize things aren't as great as you thought (e.g., a project you felt passionately about was junked for a random political reasons, people you thought were super smart start to just be normal coworkers, more of a premium on playing the game the right way than doing great work) but the salary and lifestyle is still attractive
- 3-4 years: Many people leave to do something else, a bit more experienced but a bit more jaded. Many who stick around have figured out a niche to fill and are mainly in it for the lifestyle rather than the technical challenge
Basically I wish it was more common to sustain and grow the early-days excitement and passion while developing as an engineer. I think with smaller companies there's often more self-determination for junior employees, so that when they "grow up" and start to see more problems they usually caused the problem themself, rather than having to live with someone else's problem, which makes it easier to stay excited. YMMV of course
My impression is that most people who start at a FAANG company are pretty hard-working but over time become less so, as they realize that it doesn't make much of a difference how hard they work and as they get too comfortable with the various benefits that working at a large company provides. Personally that's what I find kind of depressing, seeing highly-motivated people having their potential sapped by working on contrived pillars instead of using their talents to make cool and useful stuff.
When I first bought a Tesla in Tennessee we had the same problem with our condo's HOA board. We were lucky to live in a newer building but it still only had a single third party charger that would milk you dry if you used it (still not sure why it was so expensive). We just ended up charging at a supercharger when we got groceries. Would've been a nightmare if we had a Leaf or another electric car without that option. Maybe this isn't fully appreciated by the average Silicon Valley person since charging is so ubiquitous there (and in California more generally) - after we moved to Mountain View basically every apartment we looked at had plenty of charging options, if your workplace doesn't provide one for you already.
It seems boring as computer engineers but put yourself in the shoes of someone who doesn't know what "non-deterministic" means and thinks that tech companies are cabals intent on world domination and this kind of stuff would seem a lot more interesting