291 karma · joined December 10, 2010
I see no harm in Google guessing.
Wheat is one of those plants that humans have mastered. One person can farm thousands of acres of wheat. Generally that's only true of plants that are very uniform and that you wipe out each harvest. It would be very hard to replace it with a plant you can't use the same techniques on as the labor would be 100x probably.
The things AI is able to do is growing rapidly too. Nothing looks like a big deal to the Freakonomics guy because the next thing comes out so quickly and replaces it that it doesn't seem like a big development, whereas we had decades to admire and reflect upon what a big deal our cars and light bulbs were.
In the investment world there are a lot that come to mind.
A large number of financial advisors' entire job is just sales: they get clients funneled to companies that do the stock picking. They know these companies will not beat the indexes but it's safe, accepted, absolves them somewhat of responsibility when things go south, and these companies give them all the talking points they need to deal with clients efficiently so they can collect more.
Those companies see their job as not being out of line with the stock market indexes. They have to be a little different to justify their existence but not different enough to risk being way short of the benchmark. It is impossible for them to beat the market with their levels of risk aversion + fees, and there is no real incentive to do so. Within these companies, a large majority of the effort therefore goes to marketing to financial advisors trying to get their clients' money.
That's putting aside the question of whether there is any societal value if these RIA's were even trying and succeeding at getting more returns for their clients.