tuatoru

Traditionally, female years of education, child mortality, and GDP per capita (in order of importance) explain 85% of fertility, and the residual is not biased in either direction.

source: Lant Pritchett, long-time development economist.

Edit: I don't think anyone outside the Taliban seriously wants to reverse the trends in any of those 3 factors.

A dead node. I don't think I've turned it on in six months. Hmmm...

No. The French Revolution was a revolution of lawyers, writers, and administrators, the elite who were shut out of the very highest positions. And it was unstable. The great majority of people were just cannon fodder for Napoleon.

This is true surprisingly often.

Nurse Ratched was not a sufficient argument for ceasing to protect the mentally ill from themselves, it turns out.

It also fails to point out the temporal fallacy, that energy that is available only at certain times, and not reliably so, is a substitute for energy that can be reliably and safely stored for decades and used when needed, not when generated.

The robotics Turing test: change the nappies of the designer's and company owners' baby daughters or grand-daughters.

Nuclear war is immanent to our civilisation and human nature, but perhaps not imminent.

Domestic appliances were extremely disruptive. (vacuum cleaners, fridges, washing machines, air conditioners, ...) Domestic servants were eliminated. But there was no paradigm shift.

People still live in houses and prepare and store food, and clean their houses and clothes. Minor tasks of domestic servants (making beds, tidying, etc.) were folded in to the job of the homemaker, who was demoted from a supervisory role.

Mainframe computers emptied out accounts departments in large companies, eliminating invoicing clerks, general ledger clerks, stock control clerks, payroll clerks and many more specialised roles. No paradigm shift. Accounting is still accounting.

Typing pools were emptied by the introduction of the Lasrjet printer and the personal computer. Their minor tasks (spell-checking, grammar correction, etc.) were taken over by other people. No paradigm shift, just a task automated.

Telephone operators were eliminated by automatic exchanges (central and customer-premises). No paradigm shift, that came later with digital radio phones ("smartphones"), and didn't cause wholesale job elimination.

The binary distinction between task replacement and paradigm shift is flawed. Reality is much more varied and fluid.

Domestic appliances killed domestic service jobs.

Telephones killed messenger-boy jobs.

The automatic telephone exchange killed telephone operator jobs.

Movable-type presses killed the job of scribes despite the huge expansion in book production.

Various farm machines together killed arable farm labour.

The Laserjet and Wang word processor killed typist jobs.

Mainframe computers killed invoicing clerk, general accounting clerk, and inventory control clerk jobs.

We could go on.

In each case, the minor tasks in each job that were not automated were just folded into other jobs.

Focusing on ATMs and claiming no impact is egregious, tendentious cherry-picking. Machines almost always eliminate occupations.

> Last I checked, the tractor and plow are doing a lot more work than 3 farmers, yet we've got more jobs and grow more food.

We do not have more jobs for horses.

In this context we are the horses.

> they're paying for someone to _figure out_ their exact needs,

Back in the 1980s this was called "systems analysis". The role disappeared a bit before the web came along, and coders were tasked with the job or told to just guess what the exact needs are, which is why so much software is trash.

I don't know, though, Claude Opus is most of the way to being a good systems analyst, and early reports say that having an AI provide descriptions/requirements to a fleet of code-writing AIs gives better results than having a human do it.

You never wrote any scripts to write code?

> jobs destroyed will be replaced with new jobs

Not for horses though, or at least not the majority of them. Some were kept as pets or essentially status objects. In this case we are the horses.

They are getting cheap electricity from PV and batteries and cheap air conditioners to run on the electricity.

If there is any technological progress, people in 3000 will be so much wealthier than we are today that fixing any problems arising from climate change will be trivially easy for them.

That is, if there are any people in 3000. Nuclear war is still the number one problem. AI is a candidate for number two right now; the next decade should clarify things.

Everyone is a climate skeptic.

"To know, and not yet to do, is not to know" - Aristotle.

Everyone still flies on planes. Ceasing burning kerosene is the easiest possible thing you could do to reduce your climate impact, but no-one does it.

Everyone hates being called out on it, but it is true. No-one really cares, because no-one is prepared to make a socially costly signal, costly in prestige or relationships or group membership. It's all posturing.

Down from 700,000. Not good news.

Exactly. If the political class no longer needs healthy, literate soldiers and workers, it's going to stop paying for them.

This time actually is different, though.

If everything that a human can do, a robot can do better and cheaper, then humans are completely shut out of the production function. Humans have a minimum level of consumption that they need to stay alive whether or not they earn a wage; robots do not.

Since most humans live off wages which they get from work, they are then shut out of life. The only humans left alive are those who fund their consumption from capital rents.

Idle power and sleep power are important for embedded applications.

I have seen AI improve the quality and velocity of my wife's policy analysis dramatically.

She doesn't like using Claude, but she accepts the necessity of doing so, and it reduces 3-month projects to 2-week projects. Claude is an excellent debating partner.

Crypto? Blockchain? No-one sceptical could ever see the point of either, unless and until their transaction costs were less than that of cash. That... has not happened, to put it mildly.

These things are NOT the same.

AI as normal technology take.

1. https://www.normaltech.ai/p/ai-as-normal-technology

Maybe have your children from 18 to 27, when it is safest.

Wow, 2022? Such age, many longevity.

> It’s a bit like trying to drive faster on a congested motorway.

> The solution is Continuous Delivery – being able to reliably and safely ship to production in tiny chunks, daily or even multiple times a day – one feature, one bug fix at a time. Not having to batch work up because testing and deployment have such a large overhead.

"Just one more lane, bro; that'll fix it."

Yeah, no. It'll have vanished next year.

This seems like one of those "hmmm, that's odd" moments that could lead to a scientific breakthrough.

It surprises me that economists are not advocating that Europe set up special economic zones, as have been tried in less-developed countries to some success. Hong Kong could be considered the Ur-SEZ.

On reflection it is not surprising that SEZs have not been tried. They would be too embarassing to Europe's political class.