> If people succeed in making that truly lifelike and humanlike, it will actually out-compete us for resource control. And will no longer be a tool we can use.
I believe it is almost certain that we will make something like this and that they will out-compete us. The bigger problem here is that too few people believe this to be a possibility. And when this becomes certainty becomes apparent to a larger set of people, it might be too late to tone this down.
AI isn't like the Atom Bomb (AB). AB didn't have agency. Once AB was built we still had time to think how to deploy it, or not. We had time to work across a global consensus to limit use of AB. But once AI manifests as AGI, it might be too late to shut it down.
I very much agree with this line of thought. It seems for humans it is the default mode of operation to just think of what is possible within the foreseeable future, rather than thinking of a reality that includes the seemingly impossible (at the time of the thought).
In my opinion, this is easily noticeable when you try to discuss any system, be it political or economical, that spans multiple countries and interests. People will just revert to whatever is closest to them, rather than being able to foresee a larger cascading result from some random event.
Perhaps this is more of a rant than a comment, apologies, I suppose it would be interesting to have an online space to discuss where things are headed on a logical level, without emotion and ideals and the ridiculous idea that humanity must persevere. Just thinking out what could happen in the next 5, 10 and 99 years.
> I suppose it would be interesting to have an online space to discuss where things are headed on a logical level, without emotion and ideals and the ridiculous idea that humanity must persevere.
Absolutely. Happy to be part of it if you are able to set it up.
>the ridiculous idea that humanity must persevere.
Could you expand on what you mean by this? Specifically, is it OK with you if progress in AI causes the death of all the original-type human people like you and I?
That comment was meant in a more general or universal sense. Perhaps consider it in the context of 'saving the earth'. There is no earth to be saved. The universe exists, and that's it. Life in all it's forms will find some way to survive. Or not. Wether it reverts all the way back to the size of insects or bacteria before it has a chance to flourish again, well, who knows, but so be it.
Positioning the animal known as 'human' as some God-like entity that must survive at all costs, is extremely arrogant if you ask me. Obviously I wish for humanity to thrive and survive, as this is self preserverance and a bit of pride or ego. But the notion that we are special in some way just rubs me the wrong way and doesn't help think ahead on a large scale and timeline.
> I believe it is almost certain that we will make something like this and that they will out-compete us. The bigger problem here is that too few people believe this to be a possibility. And when this becomes certainty becomes apparent to a larger set of people, it might be too late to tone this down.
I think the bigger problem is that too many people are focused on short term things like personal wealth or glory.
The guy who make the breakthrough that enables the AGI that destroys humanity will probably win the Nobel Prize. That potential Nobel probably looms larger in his mind than any doubts that his achievement is actually a bad thing.
They guy who employs that guy or productionizes his idea will become a mega-billionaire. That potential wealth and power probably looms larger in his mind than any doubts, too.
That is why the government should help the researcher and the tycoon do the right thing by shutting down the AI labs and banning research, teaching and publishing about frontier AI capabilities.
It can’t outcompete us on the global level due to energy restraints.
It would require a civilization to consciously bond with its capability to do so (in such a way that it enhances the survival of the humans serving it). Not sure this would be competition in the normal sense.
The model is interesting. This is similar in parts to what we are building at nonbios. So for example sensory inputs are not required to simulate a model of a mind. If a human cannot see, the human mind is still clearly human.
Model training seems to me to be much closer to simulating the evolution of the human mind starting from single cell bacteria, rather than the development of the mind of a baby up to a fully functional human. If so, then sensory inputs and interaction with the physical through them were absolutely a crucial part of how minds evolved, so I find your approach a priori very unlikely to have a chance at success.
To be clear, my reasoning is that this is the only plausible explanation for the extreme difference in how much data an individual human needs to learn language, and how much data an LMM needs to reach its level of simulation. Humanity collectively probably needed similar amounts of data as LLMs do to get here, but it was spread across a billion years of evolution from simple animals to Homo Sapiens.
> If so, then sensory inputs and interaction with the physical through them were absolutely a crucial part of how minds evolved, so I find your approach a priori very unlikely to have a chance at success.
If that was the case, people who were born blind would demonstrate markedly reduced intelligence. I dont think that is the case, but you can correct me if I am wrong. A blind person might take longer to truly 'understand' and 'abstract' something but there is little evidence to believe that capability of abstraction isnt as good as people who can see.
Agree that sensory inputs and interaction were absolutely critical for how the minds evolved, but model training replaces that part when we talk about AI, and not just the evolution.
Evolution made us express emotions when we are hungry for example. But your laptop will also let you know when its battery is out of juice. Human design inspired by evolution can create systems which mimic its behaviour and function.
> If that was the case, people who were born blind would demonstrate markedly reduced intelligence. I dont think that is the case, but you can correct me if I am wrong. A blind person might take longer to truly 'understand' and 'abstract' something but there is little evidence to believe that capability of abstraction isnt as good as people who can see.
No, because the mind of a blind person, even one blind from birth, is still the product of a billion years of evolution of organisms that had sight, sound, touch, smell, etc.
Not to mention, a person who has no sensory input at all (no sight, no sound, no touch, no smell, no taste, nothing at all) is unlikely to have a fully functioning mind. And certainly a baby born like this would not be able to learn anything at all.
Of course, the situation is not 1:1 by any means to AI training, as AI models do get input, it's just of a vastly different nature. It's completely unknown what would happen if we could input language into the mind of an infant "directly", without sensory input of other kinds.
Still, I think it's quite clear that humans minds are essentially born "pre-trained", with good starting weights, and everything we do in life in essentially fine-tuning those weights. I don't think there's any other ways to explain the massive input difference (known as the poverty of the stimulus problem in cognitive science). And this means that there is little insight to draw for better model training from studying individual human learning, and instead you would have to draw inspiration from how the mind evolved.
> but it was spread across a billion years of evolution from simple animals to Homo Sapiens
Hard disagree. Evolution made a bigger/better neural processor, and it made better/different I/O devices and I/O pre-processing pipelines. But it didn't store any information in the DNA of the kind you're proposing. That's not how it works. The brain is entirely "field programmable", in all animals (I assert). There is no "pre-training".
A simple counter example here is instinctual behaviour. A sea turtle is born, and with little to no guidance, experimentation, or exploration heads to the sea. That knowledge is embedded at birth.
I think the analogy of the brain as hardware devices ("neural processor", "I/0 devices", etc) is misleading. I think I understand the very strict mind-matter dualism you're alluding to here. But so far attempts at using actual computer hardware to reproduce human-like cognition has gotten nowhere close, despite consuming order of magnitude more energy and data.
That is certainly false. You're born with plenty of very specific reflexes, and with lots of information about how to use our neural wiring to control much of our body. We are born with certain associations built in (good and bad smells, good and bad tastes, certain shapes that scare us, liking shiny objects, and many others).
This is all somewhat hard to gage in human babies, as we take a relatively long time to become functional. However, it's clear when looking at many other mammals - baby reindeer or horses, for example, are able to run within minutes of being born; they can see, they can interpret the images they see as objects, they understand things like object permanence, they can approximate distances and speeds, they have a simple theory of mind and can interact with other agents, they can recognize their mother's udders and suckle at them for food, and many many other tasks that they have 0 training for. The only possible conclusion is that their brains are pre-trained, and they are only performing some quick fine-tuning based on experience in their first hours of life.
> What frightens me is the scenario of human thought being overwhelmed and left in the dust. Not being aided or abetted by computers, but being completely overwhelmed, and we are to computers as cockroaches or fleas are to us. That would be scary.
I suspect our expectation of GAI is unreasonable and we will sooner or later have to reconcile it with a different and less anthropomorphic expression of intelligence and consciousness. It might not be required for AI to be (anthrophomorphically) intelligent or conscious for it to 'take over'. Infact it might be a huge advance over mankind that it is not.
It was a bit shocking to me when I first walked into an American super market to see tomatoes all the same big size and shining red color. This is in sharp contrast to what we get in India - they come in all sizes and different shades of orange, green and red.
Even though the American ones were instantly attractive, it slowly dawned on me that perhaps something is wrong. Now I appreciate the Indian vegetables a lot more.
Fundamentally, Bitcoin is software eating the Fed-Bank-Retail ecosystem. The Fed governance is replaced by code. The banking utility is replaced by miners.
I think the march of bitcoin is actually a better example of how AI is taking over the world. People in AI are fascinated by AGI - but the bitcoin ecosystem is actually a real world example of how AI will take over the world.
Specifically, the march of AI won't happen at 'edge' nodes, it won't be incremental, it won't happen by replacing humans with machines. The march of AI will start at the core, at a rethink of the fundamental infrastructure that powers an industry making it more amenable to machines and 'hostile' to most humans.
People underestimate the amount of resources required to articulate monetary policy by a central bank. Bitcoin can already do that much better than maybe 70% of the worlds central banks. India, China and US can think about banning/regulating bitcoin. But there are countries in Africa who can already do better by simply leapfrogging to bitcoin and ditching their national currencies.
> But there are countries in Africa who can already do better by simply leapfrogging to bitcoin and ditching their national currencies.
I doubt this would do any good for them.
* Their currency would be totally exposed to 3rd parties.
* They would loose the control over the rates, which are an important tool to attract investments, if are stable and controlled well.
* AFAIK some Chinese private companies control large part of the mining network. Basically the central bank would be in private, and foreign hands.
* The slow transactions would make it totally infeasable for use in everyday life, especially as people there have limited access to necessary technologies (stable network connections all round the countries, stable electric power everywhere), so daily transactions of the ordinary people would either fall back to barters, or use some fiat paper money, eg. USDs.
I totally don't get how could you reach tis conclusion, your whole post is a SV bubble wishful thinking with some trendy bullshit, eg. software eating the FED, fed is replaced by code. Bitcoin does better than centralbanks. If some currency looses 30% of its value a single day, that is not a sign of health, and this happended the very week with bitcoin. Actually Bitcoin does its job worse than an african dictatorship's currency, if its job is being a fiat currency, which is useful for the people in daily life.
I doubt its job is that, so it may do its job well, but for this task it is unsuitable.
Everything that you mentioned is most likely a shortcoming of the current version of Bitcoin. That being said, it is not a big leap of faith that each of these will be rectified in due course. If not with updates to Bitcoin, then with another coin.
My post wasnt just about Bitcoin specifically, but around the entire blockchain ecosystem.
You specifically talked about "already" and "bitcoin":
> But there are countries in Africa who can already do better by simply leapfrogging to bitcoin and ditching their national currencies.
Also: The concern about infeasability in everyday life is network based and not a shortcoming of bitcoin. So it's not dependent on the coin you are using.
All other points seem to be inherent to public blockchains, so it is quite the leap of faith to believe they are fixed in any public blockchain cryptocurrency.
>"People underestimate the amount of resources required to articulate monetary policy by a central bank. Bitcoin can already do that much better than maybe 70% of the worlds central banks."
Bitcoin only has totally clear monetary policy because it's increase of the money supply is entirely predetermined: It is created at an ever decreasing rate approaching a limit.
The result of this certainty in monetary policy is a currency that is naturally deflationary (literally by definition). This makes Bitcoin perfect as digital gold but shit as a functional unit of currency. You don't want to spend an asset that will naturally appreciate in value, discouraging using it.
You could have a cryptocurrency that generally trends at the same inflation rate as regular currencies: 2-3% annual and use that to pay the miners (or just give everyone a wealth endowment through giving any current owners a 1% increase in their current wallets and use the other 1-3% for the miners) and you would have a currency that could stay price stable with out Fiat currencies instead of always increasing in price like BTC has (at least over a sufficient moving average to reduce the volatility from speculation).
Knowing that there will be better hard drives in the future for less money has some effect on your willingness to purchase. Expectations of the future matter. The US Treasury is getting considerably less revenue right now from capital gains than usual because tons of financial entities are holding off on realizing returns from their investments now and are holding them until possible tax reform in the hopes of paying future taxes and thus getting greater returns.
In your example, HDD space is purely a good to be consumed though and not a currency (or an investment beyond an actual capital investment because it does work for data storage). Thus, if you need to store data, you will buy storage simply because you need it then. But you can't sell that storage in the future for a positive return, so the incentive I'm talking about doesn't really exist in the example you used.
You can make a positive return in terms of hard disk space. Refrain from swapping USD for hard disk space, and you can get more hard disk space in the future. This applies to all sorts of goods, like TV's, music players, etc. The value of USD is increasing against these goods, yet people still make the trade of USD for goods. I suppose if we increase the inflation of USD such that the price of hard disk space increases in USD terms, then people will be more inclined to swap USD for hard disk space sooner, and it will be a boon for the hard disk industry. But is that real economic growth? It smells more like malinvestment to me. One could even make the argument deflation is good for the environment, people are only inclined to consume that which is necessary, and the structure of the economy's physical capital will be realigned to support that pattern of consumption instead.
Production can't easily saved in grain silos, so money must be used to buy it, or it should be lent to someone that will use that production productively. If no one needs to buy hard drives ATM, then the hard drive company goes under and there is no better next generation.
Money is a means of allocating production. If it is just stored under a mattress, it isn't being useful and production is being wasted. We capture the negative effects of that waste with inflation.
Deflationn is basically a death spiral for an economy, as everyone consumes only essentials because everything will be cheaper tomorrow; lots of production is wasted because it can't be saved easily for tomorrow, people are laid off, companies go out of business, it sucks. Wars have even been started over silver and gold's deflationary tendencies (e.g. See the opium wars).
Don't confuse inflation with hyperinflation, the latter of which just destroys trust in the currency and makes it useless to save at all, causing runs on all production and starving investment. A bit of inflation is all that is needed to put money's use into a positive state without flipping in the other direction.
If you believe that we should have UBI (and it seems like many here do), deflation is the exact opposite of it -- it slowly concentrates wealth with those who already have it, and all they have to do is hold the currency.
Whereas inflation at least basically forces the wealthy to invest in real assets or else slowly transfer the value of the cash towards debtors.
Currency isn't wealth - wealth is real estate, stock, furniture, computers. Deflation makes it easier for wage earner savers to increase their tangible wealth. The economic data matches this - economy was a lot more equal on the gold standard until 1971, and have become a lot less equal once a policy of inflation is implemented. Are we going to act on theories that match the data or does not match the data? With deflation, UBI income will increase in value over time, the deflation occurring from technological change accruing to UBI receivers.
> Currency isn't wealth - wealth is real estate, stock, furniture, computers. Deflation makes it easier for wage earner savers to increase their tangible wealth.
Yes, we agree on that. However, I think we need to also acknowledge that 1) a large proportion of wage earners have very few, or negative net assets, so deflation actually hurts them and 2) even though deflation helps savers, the biggest savers in the economy are actually the rich. Deflation helps savers, but the people with 80%+ of nominal assets are the already-wealthy.
In fact, the most common form of household wealth is a house, where you own a real asset and owe a nominal debt.
Under inflation, your house value grows at inflation while your debt remains constant, so this even benefits the saver. Under deflation the opposite happens.
> Are we going to act on theories that match the data or does not match the data?
You need more data. The developed world has been on the gold standard since the late 19th century through to the 1970s. During that time the US has seen:
- the Robber Baron age and the Long Depression (where the rich got much richer)
- the roaring 20s, when wealth was more distributed
- the subsequent crash and the Great Depression, where the entire world was in misery (but inequality was very high)
- WW2 and the post-war era, which saw large decreases in wealth inequality
Seems a bit silly to say that 'the gold standard was responsible for lowering wealth inequality', given the huge swings back and forth in inequality while we were on the gold standard over 100+ years.
"Knowing that there will be better hard drives in the future for less money has some effect on your willingness to purchase."
It'd probably be surprising to know how many businesses have been killed by intentionally or inadvertently releasing information about an upcoming product.
Do you think people were queuing to buy the iPhone 7 once Apple announced the September event? No, because there's a new model and old models would become cheaper
Let's say you need to store an extra 1Tb per year, for the next 5 years. Do you think it's better to buy 5 1TB HDs now or one every year? (disregarding backups/raid/etc, this is an economics question, not a storage question)
I don't get why people are obsessed with inflation. It is not the only thing that is required to stimulate an economy. On the other hand for majority of developing nations, it is a sink hole that eats their earnings alive. You can still use a deflationary currency just like an inflationary one. Just use satoshis to track bitcoin increments. I'm sure if Zimbabwe was using bitcoin, they wouldn't have ended up in the shit hole they were a few years back.
Think about it: for every dollar you earn, the government can print its own one dollar to basically halve your earnings. Why would anyone want such a thing. With bitcoin, you don't need to invest in stocks/real estate and other inflation resistant things to beat inflation. You can hold your earnings in it and you are already beating inflation.
Significant inflation is obviously a bad thing. Zimbabwe or Venezuela prime examples. But being deflationary where the currency increases in value obviously causes a disincentive for spending that currency. You are encouraged to buy and hold it because it will be worth more in the future relative to the cost of goods, services, and other fist currencies.
Even just minor deflation is disastrous for economies because if there is 3% deflation, you could get 100% of what was generally typical GDP growth for developed countries without spending any money to produce anything. This encourages everyone to be risk averse towards spending money on anything at all.
Thus, monetary policy over the past century has settled on a steady but small amount of inflation as the ideal policy for balancing economic growth and unemployment.
> You are encouraged to buy and hold it because it will be worth more in the future relative to the cost of goods, services, and other fist currencies.
A currency being inflationary shouldn't really affect spending because lots of different investments already exist, so you can make money holding them instead of the dollar. The dollar being inflationary (or shouldn't, for rational actors) incentivizes trading it for something else, but not necessarily increase spending in unnecessary, depreciating, products.
> lots of different investments already exist, so you can make money holding them instead of the dollar
That's true, but someone has to end up holding the nominal assets.
Like yes, a saver can trade all their fiat currency for real assets by buying a house or stocks, but then the person who sold them those stocks would get hit by inflation. At the end of the day, if the 'real assets' in the economy are worth say $10 trillion and there is $1 trillion of currency in circulation, then whoever is holding those dollars will pay for the inflation.
Btw, the most common nominally-denominated asset is debt. Savers who hold debt (Treasuries, mortgages, etc.) get hit the most by inflation.
Even just minor deflation is disastrous for economies because if there is 3% deflation, you could get 100% of what was generally typical GDP growth for developed countries without spending any money to produce anything. This encourages everyone to be risk averse towards spending money on anything at all.
Here, prices fell slowly: 1-2%/year, caused by sharply rising productivity. The period was also called the Gilded Age, and it was a mixed bag economically. On one hand, the structure of American society dramatically changed through massive technological advance, consumer goods became abundant, and businesses who adopted those techniques became fabulously wealthy. OTOH, many small farmers went bankrupt and were forced to sell off their land to service debts they couldn't pay with money that was now more valuable than when they took out the debt. Ditto lower-class laborers, who were squeezed into tenements with dozens of families living together as their wages remained stagnant for a generation but their employers became fabulously wealthy and bought up much of the prime real estate.
The Long Depression is largely forgotten today (unless you're an economic history geek), but it was a prime impetus for the monetarist school of thought. The whole idea that the government needs to continually print money to catch up with rising productivity and availability of goods is largely based on the experience of the U.S. in the Long Depression, when they didn't print money.
Also, there's a good amount of evidence that our current period of history resembles the Long Depression a lot more than either the Great Depression or 1970s stagflation, and will play out in similar ways. I'd personally put us around the mid-1890s in terms of historical parallels.
The late Roman republic also fell into a deflationary spiral, as the currency was repeatedly debased by successive governments desperate to fund the military.
This triggered massive hoarding of currency, despite harsh legal measures that tried to outlaw it. Everyone had an incentive to hoard the old, higher silver coins while shunning the new debased coins being issued [1]. 'Bad money drives out good' [2].
Eventually, the majority of the Roman economy became demonetized, and people had to resort to barter again. Welcome to the feudal ages.
* Note that there is a confusion of terminology here -- things look inflationary if you are counting the number of coins it takes to buy something, but highly deflationary if you measure the amount of silver to buy the same item, as silver was sucked out of the economy and then hoarded.
From a certain perspective, both factors actually came together to destroy the late Roman monetary system -- the real 'store of value', silver, was removed from the system and hoarded because it was deflationary. And hyper-inflation in the fiat currency simultaneously made the coins totally worthless and therefore unsuitable for doing transactions.
> People underestimate the amount of resources required to articulate monetary policy by a central bank. Bitcoin can already do that much better than maybe 70% of the worlds central banks. India, China and US can think about banning/regulating bitcoin. But there are countries in Africa who can already do better by simply leapfrogging to bitcoin and ditching their national currencies.
Could you elaborate how you think bitcoin monetary policy is better than 70% of world's central banks? To me, one of the most important tasks of monetary policy is to have a stable value of a currency (not against other currencies but against stuff people actually buy). And with that measure, I have difficulties identifying one single central banks that is worse than bitcoin within the last few years. (Maybe Zimbabwe or Venezuela?) But 70%? No way.
(Note that bitcoin also fundamentally lacks a mechanism for price stability, not that anyone actually owning bitcoin would that want.)
And Africa ditching national currencies for bitcoin? How do you propose that an illiterate farmer in rural nambia is going to use bitcoin? Even if you figure that out, do you think that the african governments - crappy as they may be - are that stupid that they don't figure out that instead of paying the seignorage to bunch of bitcoin nerds who currently own the currency, they can make their own fork and pocket the seignorage themselves?
Bitcoin has no future as an usable, official currency anywhere. That should be obvious.
> But there are countries in Africa who can already do better by simply leapfrogging to bitcoin and ditching their national currencies.
This may be technically true, but probably won't happen anyhow. There's a reason that those currencies are terrible, and that reason is that a person or people in power benefit from the seigniorage that is the cause of the currency inflation.
Nobody in Africa is seriously using bitcoin to do business.
None of the BTC startups, even the remittance ones, want to touch that market with a ten foot pole (Despite their slide decks shouting from the rooftops about banking the unbanked.)
Maybe it's because BTC doesn't actually solve any of their problems.
Bitcoin can easily be stopped by governments, at least in countries that are not failed states. All they have to do is declare it illegal, and enforce the law.
It would be trivial for them to shut down exchanges. Without that, it would hard, and expensive, to convert to fiat.
Legit businesses would not accept Bitcoin. The only uses would be black market, and I doubt they would continue using bitcoin on the darknet markets. Without the ability to easily convert to the currency of the country you live in, Bitcoin would have little to no value.
Yes comrade we want to bring equality and low fees to poor nations which are oppresed by capitalistic banks! March of new era will bring better future for everyone. They want to stop our revolution, China with JP Morgan as they stand for old order. We have to get rid of those monopolistic pigs. /s
I hope those bitcoin guys won't get guns to actually execute people who are not buying.
AI? Bitcoin has nothing even remotely to do with AI - on the contrary, most support for Bitcoin is based on the idea that a totally pre-determined algorithmic management of currencies would be beneficial to the economy. So, what AI are you talking about?
please don't focus only on technical details. digital currencies, btc in particular, are breaking the bank's monopoly of creating money. that's the real revolution. states and banks get into the topic of such technologies not because its better but because they see what may happen and they want to control the outcome.
there's high potential for people gaining freedom from the west's monetary system. but i'm very pessimistic about us getting this right and not loose "control" to state and corporate powers exactly like we did with the internet.
Let me rephrase this for you:
It's great that some Chinese private entrepreneurs (connected with the intelligence services or not) are doing the fiat. That by itself is reason enough.
The author might be missing the woods for the trees. ICO's are at heart a rethink on the angel-vc-ipo funding cycle. ICO's offer very clear advantages in terms of increasing distribution, decreasing friction, aligning investors to product success and builds upon emerging ideas around equity/control structuring.
That they offer a diversification of bitcoin is merely an oversight in the grand scheme of things.
The most important advantages to ICO issuers are: lack of transparency, reporting requirements, no dilution, no oversight, the ability to 'print coins' as they please. In other words, absolute power over the speculators that buy them.
I'm not sure if I want to be on the other end of that deal ...
This is mostly inaccurate, the code behind the token creation and distribution is public. And while it's technically possible, in practice most token contracts do not give the creators the ability to mint to tokens on a whim.
However, as we see with stocks, there's nothing stopping an entity from doing whatever they please in the end.
Like issuing a second set of coins, at par or equal value to the 'current coins'. Possibly requiring that the first tranche be redeemed for the second.
Or whatever shenanigans they want.
With the Kik ICO, they've kept a huge flood of coins to do with as they please. And they will in fact do whatever they please with them.
For these 'company managed' coins, I think they serve as a de-facto 'central bank'. They'll find a way to change the rules if they choose to.
Your connection between developers keeping a large portion of the coins, and being able to "change the rules" doesn't make any sense. Developers keeping coins is actually very positive, and if I were to buy into an ICO, I would greatly prefer this. Otherwise the developers have no incentive to keep working hard and meeting milestones, since they already have more cash than they would be able to increase the value of their holdings by.
Very interesting. I immediately liked the product when I read this, but giving it a few minutes of thought and it doesnt seem too exciting anymore.
The fundamental problem I see is that it kind-of 'corrupts' gratification. When I make a post, or do a vote, or write a comment, I dont want to think about the monetary value of it. There is 'value' inherent in creating/sharing interesting content and thats all I want to think about.
Adding money to the mix makes it a distraction from a 'pure' experience and takes away value than adding it. Ads do something similar - but imo ads are less distracting than putting a monetary value on an upvote.
Still this is very interesting experiment. Would love to follow updates on hn.
I am just adding high quality content because I think I'm better off directly charging for my content rather than going the ads-route. I hate ads. I (and probably everybody else on this platform) sees as the greates-valued addon in his browser the ad-blocker.
I will run a few tests, see if people are willing to pay for high quality content.
I don't see this as my facebook-replacement. Facebook is fun, to watch cute little videos while enjoying my "extra privacy" during the day. Facebook isn't for high quality content. Facebook isn't good anymore for staying in touch with friends (for me) - Facebook messenger yes, but the Facebook wall - no.
I also don't think that "yours" will be the next Facebook. I see it as direct payments channel for independent high-quality content creators. Something like steem, just more straight forward for me. I like the concept and I'll see if it works for me.
It is complicated for sure, and it took me some time to get my head around it. But it seems to me that the complications arose because of compromises needed to be done to get this passed. Also, the current dispensation is to make it simpler over time.
This GST was probably what was possible right now and full marks to the govt. for getting it done. They made compromises which will nullify immediate gains, but at the same time made sure that the structure is put in place to get full benefits over time.
That being said, even in the current form it seems to be a huge jump from what we had.
You are right! While they can improve from there, anything strong would not have sold, not just now but even later. This govt has a very strong mandate and it would have been stupid to wait for a stronger one.
Considering the impact of this reform, and the historical messiness of doing something of this scale in India, it is surprising that the govt. even pulled it off.
On the ground in Bangalore, the clock stuck 12 and every retail shop started giving receipts with the simplified tax system. Im sure there will be hiccups ahead but the start looks pretty neat.
The Indian govt. should be given honorary entry to YC. The world's biggest startup is going lean.
A retail shop of Bangalore(metropolitan) doesn't speak for entire India. The shop you visited already had a computer/software but ground reality is much different among traders in tier II & III cities.
> The Indian govt. should be given honorary entry to YC. The world's biggest startup is going lean.
The government face-planted themselves miserably with demonetization experiment. They thought it would be easy to muscle everyone to use electronic payment without understanding the ground realities. The economy is performing below expectations solely due to it and they still haven't disclosed what they have achieved(good) with demonetization.
They could have planned the implementation in stages so that the transition could be done smoother. The same is going to happen with GST. They can be anything but sultans of implementation.
We Indians are so resilient that without traffic signals we adjust, during floods we help each other without expecting the government - so we will be ok eventually. Wish the government cared for its majority of the people instead of catering to elitist alone.
> The government face-planted themselves miserably with demonetization experiment. They thought it would be easy to muscle everyone to use electronic payment without understanding the ground realities. The economy is performing below expectations solely due to it and they still haven't disclosed what they have achieved(good) with demonetization.
You're completely missing the point of demonitization. Modi got elected partly on the promise of doing something about black money and corruption - which is what pulled down the previous government.
Demonitization was basically a way to demonstrate that he was keeping that promise. For months on the end, towns were filled with stories of the corrupt rich desperate trying to get rid of their unaccounted for cash and government officials getting raided.
In other words, it was primarily a political exercise designed to show he will take action if he makes a promise. The vicarious pleasure the common man got hearing about the discomfiture of the corrupt rich I reckon is more than sufficient to get his government re-elected and also give him some slack from people if the GST thing falls flat - given they trust him more due to demonetization.
> The vicarious pleasure the common man got hearing about the discomfiture of the corrupt rich I reckon is more than sufficient to get his government re-elected
Just to be clear, I think the reduction in currency note availability which has forced a large number of traders, businesses and the unorganized sector to accept bank payments a positive thing and reduced bribes anecdotal well worth the point of growth sacrificed.
I was just outlining that the political rationale is primary.
Not one person is doing this. People did temporary hacks like PayTm because they didn't want to take hits on their business.
Today no one. Not one single person is taking cards or PayTm. If you wave a card in front in front of their face they ask you to withdraw cash from the nearby ATM and come. In fact its already a few months since I did a electronic transaction to buy anything near my home.
This whole act achieved nothing at the end.
Your best measure is Police constables, especially the traffic ones. They are back to asking bribes on the street. In Bangalore every 1 km has a police party doing this.
> They could have planned the implementation in stages so that the transition could be done smoother.
Is that really true though? Seems like the whole point of this was to surprise the market and force people into the banking system on short notice so then you can tax them.
But if you give people notice, then they have a chance to come up with alternative cash-like arrangements in advance so that when you take away their notes, they just switch to a different 'black money'-like asset.
Not saying this couldn't have been planned out better, but if you follow the logic then the 'big bang' change is inherent to what they're trying to do.
Did this come out all gun blazing approach yield the desired result?. After all the suffering we went through and hearing all the BJP promises on why this is so necessary don't we require a report on the rewards we got from this process?.
Who will suffer due to improper implementation of GST?. Not the super rich or rich but everyone else. GST requires monthly three returns to be filed in each operating state and an annual report. How will small traders cope up with this sort of requirement with no government initiative?. Please read: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-biz/policy-trends/...
Isn't it that UP elections, which happened after demonetization, were a clean sweep in favour of BJP? From what I understand UP voters are a good proxy for sentiments of traders, daily wage laborers and middle class. They seem to have accepted it with a bang.
In the article you shared, there are mentions of celebrated economists siding with both camps. I will leave up to the chosen government to weigh in those opinions and make a move.
Coming to GST - the earlier tax system was much more complex and leaky. If your turnover is below 75 Lakhs (small traders) you can opt for composition scheme which is even simpler. If your turnover is higher, it should be fair to assume your business is big enough to have a computer operator who can file 3 returns (excel sheet I guess) every month with benefits of input credit.
The popular theory for why the UP election was won by the BJP was that their candidates had advance notice of demonetisation and stocked up on lower-denomination notes (and later were the first ones to receive the new notes) whereas other parties were left with worthless stacks of old cash. I shouldn't have to explain why in India more cash to distribute means more votes.
And it looks like increasing computer literacy and confidence with online transactions in the larger population as well. If it lasts 10 years, then the new ones taking over the small businesses will be fine with it all.
Absolutely. Pre-GST business could get by without computer/online. GST works online ONLY. This will result in short term pain and cost but bulldoze all these guys online. Companies like ClearTax (YC) will make a killing.
In a city like Bangalore, if it rains an hour. There are power cuts of up to 12 hours. Expecting people to invest in long back up UPS, internet infrastructure in every single part of India is bonkers.
To start with fix basic infrastructure first.
What's happening today is putting cart before the horse.
I'm sure the national (federal?) government will try to ensure that the transition is a memory by the time of the next elections - I gather from OA that small business people are a part of Modi's base.
Unless you don't get your salary with all the things deducted and you have to worry about filing 3 different kinds of GST and have to file for input and take care of all things and hire a person to do all this and after all this, if you make a mistake and you are fyuked, you can't understand that pain. Don't be over-enthusiastic, think for other people as well.
So you mean the older tax system which had 10+ taxes without input credits was a simpler and more reasonable? Now at least people can learn few things and do it on their own.
I might not know too much about the topic, but imo American healthcare system has a lot of learn from the Indian healthcare system. My guess is that America should simply copy-paste India's model and it should be good to go.
For the resources that it spends on healthcare, the Indian healthcare systems offers perhaps the most efficient system in the world. There is insurance if you want, but you can choose your health providers in the free market too.
Hospitals, Doctors, Medicines, Tests, Procedures, Post-op care/services - everything can be comparison shopped. And if you have more time than money, you can show up at any one of the almost-free govt. funded hospitals to get treated by who is often a very good doctor.
The inefficiency of the American system might as well be a result of extensive litigation around healthcare, but I suspect that its simply an oligopoly defended by pocketed politicians.
I would guess that for any hospital expense above a few thousand dollars, and for someone who cant afford, it might make a lot of sense to just hop on a plane to India.
While I agree that the US could learn a lot from India's billion-payer system, the big drivers in cost differences wouldn't apply.
India's system is cheaper specifically because it doesn't have the complexity of the billing system that the US has (and, for that matter, European countries as well). But in addition, India explicitly does not recognize a wide range of drug patents that the US does. By paying more for prescription medication, the US market funds a huge amount of medical research (50% of the medical research in the entire world) which countries like India are able to access essentially for free.
Your point about the US effectively funding pharma research for the whole world is well taken (I think it's often kinda ignored by a lot of people), but the billing complexity is not inherent to healthcare—it's a result of the system, so I don't think it stands as an argument.
Also, while drug costs can be explained, there are a lot of other costs in the system that are not necessarily affected by that argument (for instance, for a surgery, how much of the cost is actually due to said drugs, and how much is due to all the other factors?)
I guess, the complexity of the billing system in the US is the outcome of an insurance driven market which has kept a status quo due to vested interests.
India also has a complicated insurance system, but it is kept in check by a parallel free-market and state funded system. There is competition not just between carriers, but also pressure on them to keep their policies simple, lest customers circumvent and pay themselves.
You are right about enforcements about drug patent, but if I am not wrong this is true only for a small set of medicines which are marked essential. My guess is that vast majority of drugs sold are generic copies of off-patent drugs.
I believe it is almost certain that we will make something like this and that they will out-compete us. The bigger problem here is that too few people believe this to be a possibility. And when this becomes certainty becomes apparent to a larger set of people, it might be too late to tone this down.
AI isn't like the Atom Bomb (AB). AB didn't have agency. Once AB was built we still had time to think how to deploy it, or not. We had time to work across a global consensus to limit use of AB. But once AI manifests as AGI, it might be too late to shut it down.