> A currency can arise from any fungible, tradable, generally-durable commodity that the bulk of society decides to accept as being worthwhile. In prisons cigarettes often fill that role; in pre-agrarian hunter gatherer groups it's often little baubles like shells. Government isn't necessary for this, but social contract is. You need to have enough faith that your neighbor will accept the currency to accept it yourself.
Are cigarettes really currency in this case? Aren't they more like one of many possible barter units? Can't you also price things in ramen packs in prison?
Similarly, I thought the sea shells thing had been sort of debunked. In that scale of society you don't need currency, you know the guy. David Graeber summarizes this rather intuitively. Why would you need to give a guy a sea shell in a "hunter gatherer group"? You're gonna see him every day of your life and everyone is gonna know/remember he owes you one. It would be like giving your sibling a sea shell because you did them a little favor or something. It doesn't actually happen that way because it would be a complete waste of time, just actually return the favor next time. I believe the sea shell thing is more like a gift, rather than a currency. Like you might give someone a flower to tell them you think they're swell. Presumably you think that because they helped you at some point. That doesn't make it currency. People just liked giving each other shells.
I think on most modern theories, currency really comes about from conquest. The idea is as you expand these informal IOUs are not enough. You don't want to have to lug around ramen packs or cigarettes. So at the point of a sword or w/e you say hey take this coin and give us food and then you honor the coin enough and people trust it, not because it's "fungible, tradable, generally-durable commodity that the bulk of society decides to accept as being worthwhile" but because if you don't accept it the government will kill you. And if you do accept it then not only will they not kill you but they'll give things back to you later, which you will end up being a positive incentive for everyone. Now instead of a presiding over a killing field you've created a market. But without the threat of the state, it is not coherent. That's what government is.
That's basically what it says on American money. "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private". So sure a business can refuse you service, that's a separate issue. But if you have a debt in the United States and you try to give them US dollars and they refuse and say, no thanks actually we demand cigarettes - well now they are breaking the law, aka inviting the wrath of the state. So everyone uses dollars because the last thing anyone wants is to be in debt and think a pack of ramen is gonna work and they just get to say no thanks cigarettes for me please.
And of course, you also don't want to get impaled on a spike by a dude who looks suspiciously like that guy on the coin you probably should have taken.
Currency is used for trade between multiple distrusting groups, credit is used for trade within a social group. There was an article recently on HN about the highland tribes of Papua New Guinea [1] and it described how the natives would trade amongst tribes using shells.
You actually see this on a small scale today in the functioning of many small communities, eg. you don't actually exchange currency to pay the host of a party, but you are expected to reciprocate and host sometimes yourself if you want to keep getting invited. There's a surprisingly large amount of these unpaid micro-transactions that happen, eg. my wife has gotten free childcare, free advice, free (used) furniture, free baby clothes, etc, all in the heart of Silicon Valley, because she reciprocates and also gives away her old furniture, baby toys, baby clothes, advice, introductions, childcare, etc. But when we have to pay the contractor for work on our house, we need dollars. When we buy a computer, we need dollars. When we buy all those goods that we give away new, we need dollars. That again reinforces the "credit is for people you know, currency is for people you don't" distinction.
Barter is used when a previous currency system collapses. The currency is no longer guaranteed to be accepted, so people want hard goods that they know they can use. But barter is an unstable equilibrium: as you mentioned, currency is just barter where one particular good becomes so widely accepted that people will take it not because they want it, but because it can be traded for other things that they want. There are reports of the Bosnian War [2] that described how alcohol and ammo quickly became pseudo-currencies because they were universally accepted and could easily be traded for what you actually needed.
Graeber isn't wrong, but as an anthropologist he over-indexes on the within-group interactions. There are lots of documented examples of currency emerging spontaneously from trade between groups where the groups all mutually decided that one type of object had value.
Hmm... do you not have a credit card? I often reflect on how paying with dollars seems so disadvantaged in today's economy. If you plan to pay back on time, why would you ever use dollars?
I'm not sure your in group/out group thing really holds up. I think of your credit/wife examples as not "credit" but something like basic reciprocity, closer to barter.
I think it's just a bit of blurring of terms. In my mind, bullets and ammo are just not currency in the same way a coin is. You can call it a "pseudo-currency" but the pseudo is kind of cheating.
I'm also not sure "There are lots of documented examples of currency emerging spontaneously from trade between groups where the groups all mutually decided that one type of object had value" disproves the point about violence/government. Can't I do the "pseudo" move back at you? What is the mechanism of the "mutual decision"? Would it be unlike the ones that lead to states? It sounds like everyone agrees something has value so we can have a dispute resolution mechanism. The implication being if you don't agree the other choice is violence? What if I say this "spontaneous collective of groups" is a "pseudo-government"?
I'm talking about "credit" in the David Graeber sense, where people effectively just remember who has done good things for them and reciprocate, not in the modern sense of credit cards and bank accounts. They're connected, but the former is more general.
I do think that the development of currency is intimately connected with the development of government. The core problem government solves is dispute resolution, and I would bet that the majority of disputes come from transaction where one side does not hold up their end of the bargain. In small communities you just have the tribal elders adjudicate, but as you start doing more currency transactions between mutually-distrusting groups that can't agree on their authority figures, you need a system in place for dispute resolution. Cue states.
My point is simply that currency comes first. State formation is a consequence of extended trade networks transacting with currency, currency and trade is not a consequence of state formation. To my knowledge this is historically accurate, and there are a lot of examples of currency spontaneously arising without a state to back it.
Hell, cryptocurrency itself is a good example. We now have a viable transnational, trustless, instantaneous currency. We do not have a viable transnational trustless dispute resolution process. And we very much feel the lack, because crime and fraud is rampant in cryptocurrency transactions. Currency creates the problem that government solves. Creating a government that can go along with cryptocurrency is an unsolved exercise left to the reader.
It's interesting, your point makes sense with the caveat of a blurring of terms.
I mean in the sense of, state formation was of such significance that I don't think you can say something like "currency came first" as if currency prior and post state formation is the same thing. It feels like the same sort of "pseudo-currency" with "currency" equivocation.
So if your model is - basic credit in that communal reciprocative sense, then you start trading with more distant outgroups, for this credit doesn't work, so everyone agrees on a currency, someone off in the distance doesn't agree, then states form to adjudicate disputes.
Then it is sensible as a primitive model, but I would just merely suggest that in the same way trying to say currency comes first is kind of a blurring the meaning of currency perhaps to the point of being a stretch, I think in this case to, it will be less orderly. One way this is blurred almost intrinsically in your articulation is via the term dispute resolution process. This could mean anything. It occurs to me that outright conquest and banditry is one way to resolve a dispute. Perhaps in places were there was "spontaneous" centering around a particular currency, this sort of violence was a predicate. I tend to think the need for violence and domination (and mitigations against the same) - what I think of when I think of states "resolving disputes" - was baked into the germ of humanity much earlier than what we might term "state formation". This gets back to the "pseudo-government" point I was trying to make earlier. I think of these things in parallel, rather than in sequence. If at their core humans are violent, such that they make violence, fear violence, and seek tradeoffs to manage violence, then this violence is a driver across currencies and states and trade networks, regardless of a determination of which "came first", if such a determination is even meaningful without greater specificity.
Similarly, I'm not sure if "State formation is a consequence of extended trade networks transacting with currency, currency and trade is not a consequence of state formation" is accurate in the same way. I suppose we have to unblur what "state" means.
I thank you for the back and forth though, which I enjoyed. I feel a need to do more reading on this topic, though I would guess much of these questions are not really falsifiable, as some of the answers are surely lost to history. Thanks, have a good day!
We should be careful to distinguish when credit-cards are used for credit purposes versus the common scenario where they're just the default/convenient payment method and a debit-card could substitute just fine.
Kind of like how the local church might traditionally manage birth/death/land records, but that doesn't mean the documents are sacred or a religious observance.
In the context of the current discussion (minus the part that's accidentally derailing it by focusing too much on other meanings of the term credit), credit card vs debit card is not relevant at all: they are both denominated in currency, so they are currency. This is not a discussion about cash vs electronic.
Currency vs credit, as it was used some posts up is more like quantifiable vs not quantifiable. It's not about the exact catering expenses of parties thrown ("they had champagne, we have to invite them twice!") it's about inviting or not inviting. Not about the number of hours taking over the children, it's about being there when needed.
> We should be careful to distinguish when credit-cards are used for credit purposes versus the common scenario where they're just the default/convenient payment method and a debit-card could substitute just fine.
Well I mean technically they are always for credit purposes, even if they are the
"default/convenient payment method"? That's part of the advantage, but it's still credit. You get to spend and pay later. It wouldn't be a very good evaluation for credit purposes if it didn't work like credit? Or am I misunderstanding you?
It's just to say that "credit" isn't just about an in vs out group anymore than debt is. Or anymore than "currency" is? I'm not sure how the distinction you make helps clarify that question. The point is why would credit be for people you know, and currency for people you don't? Isn't credit just a particular agreement around said currency?
1. I live in a village. I buy flour on credit from the miller, because I lack funds and they know I'll be able to pay them back after I sell my own textile goods at market.
2. I travel overseas to a store I've never seen before and I will never see again. I transact $100 on my credit-card purely because my debit card won't work for some reason. I leave with the goods, reminding myself to pay off the balance ASAP with funds I already possess when I get back to the hotel and a laptop.
Technically they both involve "credit", but it's not really equivalent. The first case involves a direct relationship in a community, while the second is indirect, a stranger trusting my card-company. In the first, incurring a debt is an intended feature, in the second the temporary debt is just a weird inconvenient quirk that I'd rather skip entirely because it makes more work for me.
In short, just because someone uses a credit card doesn't necessarily mean it's "credit" in the anthropological sense.
I mean fair enough but we were already talking about credit cards, not villagers.
You said (emphasis added):
> We should be careful to distinguish when credit-cards are used for credit purposes versus the common scenario where they're just the default/convenient payment method and a debit-card could substitute just fine.
So it wasn't about "credit" in the anthropological sense, as credit cards are never used in such a way. Unless you are going to suggest there is some bifurcated way of using credit cards where one offers a more "direct relationship to my community". In short, my misread wasn't as you indicated - about failing to misunderstand something about credit cards. Rather it was conflating a general sense of "credit" (such as credit cards) with what they had meant, "I'm talking about "credit" in the David Graeber sense, where people effectively just remember who has done good things for them and reciprocate, not in the modern sense of credit cards and bank accounts." - which is what you term the "anthropological sense".
So I appreciate the nudge in the right direction, but I hope you see my point given what you actually conveyed. Thanks, have a good day!
I've heard many arguments that barter came before currency, if I'm not mistaken that was even one of Adam Smith's tropes in his writings that influenced currencies and economies we have today.
I don't necessarily buy the idea that someone with a chicken and needed bread wandered around looking for a baker in need of chicken, but their argument does fly in the face of the idea that barter follows failed currencies.
If nothing else you have a chicken and egg problem to unwind there, and barter does seem a bit more basic or simple than currency so I'd have guessed it came first.
There's a book Debt: The First 5000 Years (by the David Graeber that parent commenter references several times) that observes that there’s no documented case of a society that ran mainly on barter and then invented money to escape it. The "barter first, then money" story is mostly a thought experiment. I'm not in a position to confirm or refute this based on my own knowledge or to do the research to develop that knowledge, but I'm not aware of anyone seriously challenging Graeber on this point.
IIRC, Graeber suggests that debt comes first. Initially it is tracked by memory, then when that gets too complicated, some kind of item is chosen to represent debt, which then in some cases evolves into currency. I believe this process has been observed.
It's less "I have bread and want a chicken" and more "I'm mostly self-sufficient by necessity, and provide what I need, but I have extra bread this week and Bob over there has a chicken ..."
You can watch both barter and currency develop in groups of children almost spontaneously.
While your assumptions about barter societies are pretty much true, I think you're off on the origins of currency being tied to force. This is overly influenced by modern fiat currencies whose values are derived from government requirements rather than valuable assets. There was a long period of time where precious metals and other valuable items were used as stores of value without a central authority requiring their use. People used official coinage because its weight and purity was standardized and it made things easier, and the value changed alongside debasement, often in spite of official attempts to prevent this. People also used different currencies alongside each other based on their weights and purities. The only times in ancient societies where we have something similar to what you're describing where a specific currency must be used is in taxation, and even then, most taxes were settled in equivalent values of other goods and not specific currencies. The only example I can think of for what you're describing is the Jewish temple offering system in the second temple period, in which certain obligations to the Temple were ruled to have to be paid in Tyrian sheckles specificall
But what do you mean? We have multiple currencies today? Each one is still based on force within its jurisdiction. Yes people try to get around the law. That doesn't change the nature of force. People speed all the time. This is not evidence that the government does not have authority over the interstates, rooted in force.
Sure it's evolved, but I don't see anything in your comment that really disputes the tie to force. Of course, taxation is connected to force. Additionally, as I addressed in another comment, a lack of modern "central authority" does not mean a lack of connection to "force" or violence. People can come up with distributed or atomized versions, which nevertheless arise under a similar tradeoff with respect to the fear of violence.
All other things being equal, why would it matter if a suspect instead of saying something obviously incriminating, had instead said something diametrically opposed? Is that what you are asking?
If so, I'm confused. Why wouldn't it matter? Wouldn't this necessarily only be the case where the Google search doesn't really matter at all (i.e. there is sufficient other incriminating evidence).
Anyway I also think you're missing what was merely meant to be a comment in jest. But now I'm actually confused what point you are trying to make.
If the implication is the Google search is an implicit confession, because in a Google search you think you are not being watched, and thus are confessing your honest desires, why would his search of love be a "claim of innocence" rather than a "confession of love"?
I actually am curious if they were able to volunteer the information to the government of their own volition, without a government subpoena first. I would think that could violate their own terms if done sloppily. Maybe different if an employee or maybe they had to invite the government to ask for them or something? In any case, the mechanism aside, the state would have asked anyway (say if he used another company's chatbot) so the fact that it's the "same company" is rather irrelevant. The evidence would have ended up in the state's hands one way or the other, and I would think a search warrant in this case would have been rather routine. Search warrants are infamously not a high bar to climb in most jurisdictions, as often the presiding judges tend to default to deferring to the state.
> I actually am curious if they were able to volunteer the information to the government of their own volition, without a government subpoena first
Do you think Target has any legal restrictions on sharing surveillance video of a shoplifter with the police when they report a crime? This is the same thing - logs are evidence, and when you report a crime you can volunteer said evidence without restriction if you choose to do so.
Well usually you don't enter into an agreement with Target regarding your data privacy with respect to such surveillance video as a predicate to walking into the store, so I'm not sure this is the slam dunk point you apparently think it is. Maybe it is implied when you walk through the door, I don't know. I know you don't explicitly agree to anything or have an option to govern what Target does with its surveillance video of you. At least, I don't recall ever being offered this option.
When you signup to ChatGPT you agree to some terms as a predicate to access. You can also instruct them to and opt in or out of certain data sharing arrangements, violations of which I would think would (or at least, should) be punishable by law. Many of these agreements are taken quite seriously, especially in the cases of enterprises who want their chats, logs, IP, etc. protected.
Now perhaps there is already a clause in the terms I never read that says something like, "If we suspect you of plotting against our company, we may share your data with the authorities (a third party) even though we agreed to keep your data private". Or maybe under a more general suspicion of a crime, though as OpenAI is a frontier lab, not a detective agency, I'm not sure how they would make that call. Usually, those calls come from outside the house. Idk how it works. But I am far less confident than you that the instructive model here is Target. You may be right though. I simply find myself less reassured by your knowledge of Target security protocols and petty theft as instructive in this case than you are. As I say though, you may have it right.
I don't think you are describing how criminal prosecution evidence works at all, you may enjoy studying about it.
Common sense would tell you that if someone burgles your house and you have video surveillance, then you can use that as evidence in prosecution. Whatever more profound knowledge you have about privacy or criminal law, is making you doubt of the basic common sense which shapes the very law and proceedings.
Think simple, if bad man rob your house, and you have camera recording house, you can give police recordings. That's evidence, and bad man go in jail. No think harder than that, make your brain hurt.
> Remember kids, uncle Sam can see anything you tell your AI and will use that against you.
Not just your AI.
You could have stopped the sentence at "uncle Sam can see anything" and these days it's pretty much true. They will use all of it against you if they can. Unless you truly want to live off the grid, if the state takes a sufficient interest in you, expect everything you do to be seen.
Uncle Sam tried to get MLK to kill himself by sending him letters alleging knowledge of an affair [1]. Getting some idiot's wife's chatgpt logs represents a fairly routine law enforcement action these days, and as such is really rather unremarkable. The State is always something of a terror. Really under most (if not all) conceptions, it necessarily has to be. The monopoly of force is a comfort until the Leviathan knocks on your door.
What is "taking accountability" supposed to look like in this case?
As an aside, trying to enforce some cultural more without the backing of senior leadership is a waste of time. You should probably follow your colleagues example and get a better return on your time with Claude and stop caring. If you are the only one at your company who cares and you aren't the largest shareholder I have to ask under what economic theory you are operating. Unless you work for a charity or something you should probably either find a new job or stop complaining about the relative luxury of being handed a fistful of money just to be able to say "Claude wrote that".
Apparently no one at your company cares, so why do you?
> What is "taking accountability" supposed to look like in this case?
Admitting that you didn't validate the AI output carefully enough, and committing to do better in future.
> Apparently no one at your company cares, so why do you?
I'm not the other commenter, but this is part of my job. I'm often called in to deal with issues that have been created by bad developers, offshore developers, contractors or consultants who've helicoptered in and out, and now AI.
The basic requirements are the same in all these cases: identify the problem, recommend and/or implement fixes, and recommend process improvements.
Sometimes those improvements involve negative effects for the people perpetuating these issues.
It may not be wise to assume you can abdicate all responsibility for your work if you're somewhere that does, in the end, care about results.
With UBI it won't be expensive anymore. So much of the economy is simply extractive, most people's jobs are really already highly algorithmic and involve much less "thinking" than they think. Being able to sit around and think has often been a historical luxury - of the elite or those lucky enough to be subsidized by them. I suppose the common (as they all were) man of prehistory also had more time to think, which was doubtless the germ of humanity's religious and speculative impulses. But they also had to contend with a brutal world where death was around every corner.
The economy doesn't want you to think. Knowledge workers really have far too high an opinion of themselves in this regard. Your "thinking" was merely more instrumentally useful than the alternatives. Most of us have done very well while inventing nothing. But an even better day dawns.
When humans don't have to rely on their own labor to survive, more humans will think. The opportunity to afford to indulge your curiosity as if you were among the wealthy and privileged. A society that can afford the Enlightenment and its myriad avenues at scale. What else will there be to do?
UBI is not going to be a thing, ever. The ogliarchs want every penny for themselves -they'll turn you into biofeul long before they give you a single penny they're not forced to.
There are a 163 million working adults in the US. Giving each of them $10k a year is already 2 trillion dollars. And $10k is not going to allow anyone to retire.
UBI is pure fantasy, tantamount to the rapture for AI bros.
Would 1$ per year be affordable? Somewhere between that and your straw man figures would be affordable.
Also don't forget nearly every developed country has a progressive tax system and other benefits. You would flatten that when adopting UBI.
>And $10k is not going to allow anyone to retire.
You would be surprised how little some people get by on.
>UBI is pure fantasy, tantamount to the rapture for AI bros.
I don't think the AI bros give a shit about the average person. They mention UBI because it diverts the conversation away from the impact of their technology.
>Would 1$ per year be affordable? Somewhere between that and your straw man figures would be affordable.
Straw man? What about providing a concrete number is a straw man. You can wax nebulously about the benefits of UBIs as much as you want, but the economics are shaky for a population of this size.
This is one possibility, but it is not a given one. Being able to think will require capital. The whole problem here is will your thinking be worth anything and how will you feed yourself until the point it is.
Of course. You haven't really articulated a problem though. You've merely stated the obvious - the path from the present to a possible end state is not clear.
History teaches us changes for the good only happen after changes for the worse percolate deeply enough through the system. The idea that there will be hard times ahead is therefore not incompatible with my view at all, rather it is taken as a given.
Personally, I think the chances of most humanity surviving to the next century are already pretty slim (AI only marginally increases the chances of the worst case here imo). Hitler was not that far from a nuclear weapon. Our collective capacity for terror and self-destruction has only increased since 1945, while the lessons that have held the world together since increasingly fade. I have found it amusing to note that the demonization of AI has come with an accompanying valorization of human judgment as if all the evils of the world have heretofore not been the proud acts of some human somewhere, often with throngs of fellow humans in support.
Whereas, AI increasingly offers a chance that the best case (UBI, human survival through the next century), however unlikely in totality, is still far more likely than without it.
You are not incorrect. I am merely endeavoring to be optimistic. If only for the self-interested reason that I need to be able to sleep.
It helps to be optimistic I think, even if accompanied with a wry acknowledgement of futility. The future has always been frightening.
Where did you hear this? Hitler wasn't anywhere close to a nuclear weapon, Nazi Germany lacked both the necessary theoretical nuances and industrial capacity to create nuclear weapons. Even if they magically had made one, they lacked a credible delivery system for it which is its own enormous can of worms especially in the early 1940s.
Even Britain which did have good theoretical foundations and even a headstart on the American programme was obliged to merge its efforts with the Manhattan Project because it lacked the resources to do it so quickly alone. The largest empire on the planet at that point couldn't fight the Second World War at home and develop the bomb fast enough to be relevant, the Nazis had no chance.
> History teaches us changes for the good only happen after changes for the worse percolate deeply enough through the system. T
Where do you get that from? History teaches us that only when changes for the worse are so severe that the elites' heads start rolling, will change for good come.
> The idea that there will be hard times ahead is therefore not incompatible with my view at all, rather it is taken as a given.
It's a tautology, hence useless: there will be hard times ahead, followed by good times is always a tautology. What we're concerned about is if the hard times last 10 years or 10000 years.
After all saying "the idea that there will be hard times ahead" is not incompatible with your view, and is also not incompatible with the view "the idea that there will be good times ahead".
Right. I'm sure that the real reason for extracting more profits at the expense of labour is to give it back to people without getting any labour in return.
I don't think we should be using the term "spam the AI button".
We should name the explicit mechanism that was employed - telling the model to "believe in yourself".
There is something quite humorous but also poetic about how the manipulation of this term worked. Doubtless in the model's weights lies the echoes of generations upon generations of humans telling each other to believe in themselves.
In pursuing the "new frontier" as you rightly put it, mathematicians would do well to remember the same. It's ok, don't be afraid of the future. Believe in yourself.
While poetic, I suspect that the utility of including this in the prompt is much more pragmatic: models refined on datasets of turn-based interactions will have weights biased toward checking in with the "user". Saying "believe in yourself" probably introduces just enough of a counter-bias to push the model into a local basin of deeper thought.
It's going to be funny when there are more fatalities on the roads where people are trying to avoid the robot trucks...
Humans are such terrible drivers. Most of them don't want to drive. They want to get a private chamber to wheel them around while they look at their phones.
I'm continually shocked that people criticize autonomous vehicles along these lines... like where do you live in the US that gives you such a high opinion of human drivers? Daily dipshit human driving behaviors and a frequent cadence of bad accidents or fatalities seems the norm across major metro areas.
If more robots can drive we can actually have a hard test to pass for driving. Right now basically anyone can drive because it is too expensive to tolerate it being any different given the extent with which transportation and the economy in America is built around cars. The only people who will manually drive are people that really want to. Which is how it should be. You shouldn't be operating a vehicle if all you really want is just to appear x miles away while being able to dick around on your phone or fall asleep or whatever is causing all the lazy driving behaviors we all see around us everyday.
Why over-index on a handful of autonomous driving related fatalities? How many humans kill other humans in cars? Do we ban all cars? Why do you think robot cars will necessarily always be worse drivers than human ones?
> Humans are such terrible drivers. Most of them don't want to drive. They want to get a private chamber to wheel them around while they look at their phones.
Many of them can't even stop looking at their phones even when piloting their private chamber. It frankly frightens me far more than robots driving.
The problem with talking is it lacks rigor. It's fun to get you from 0 to 90. Then the last 10% sucks and you don't really understand how you got there.
It's an engineering problem humans and AI will solve together. The same discussion is happening in math. It's a question of meaning. In this case it's even more obvious. Fairly soon, your weather apps and your ski games are not going to be interesting. I predict within a year.
Everyone will be able to ride their own version of whatever app. They will increasingly all be good enough, so why does anyone care about your "first"? Who cares about a first when cloning is cheap?
The last 10% is always the differentiator and talking is not going to be enough. Even if it doesn't make it better for someone else, for you to care we will see people return to something like programming.
The rest of the vibe coding people will slowly drift back to being consumers, because they don't care enough and because when everything can be good enough the only thing that matters is what you want, not anyone else. If you care about something talking about it isn't good enough. You will talk to your weather app because really you don't care that much. It's rather transparently for most people a mere question of utility (do I need an umbrella today vs meteorological phenomena are so fascinating).
The optimistic part of your story isn't what you've accomplished it's that your "accomplishment" will be duplicated to the point of such eventual economy shattering irrelevancy (post bubble, post UBI) that no one will have to care.
What this synthesis of recentering human intent for activities a human wants to pursue for no good other than the intrinsic, "thing in itself" with LLM capabilities ends up looking like I'm not sure. But I am certain it will not simply be talking. Likely it will be something multi-modal, but one where users also invent their own programming languages from the axiomatic principles that most agree with their interests/intuitions.
> Everyone will be able to ride their own version of whatever app. They will increasingly all be good enough, so why does anyone care about your "first"? Who cares about a first when cloning is cheap?
Everyone is probably already able to make their own version of whatever app from 1995.
Even before AI coding tools, the number of people who could write a 1995-functionality app (let alone a 1985-functionality) one was massively higher in 2020 than 1995.
So "what's next" probably isn't "everyone just clones what already exists" - instead, it's probably going to be determined by what's hard to clone that someone clever spots and then sells. What's the "I could write Facebook in a weekend" of the future, where the ability to clone isn't sufficient? I think there's likely something beyond "network effects" that we haven't found yet.
One probably-wrong guess I've had would be software that itself configures itself so well around the user that the user could only trivially clone it for themselves, not for anyone else. The "agentic" version of "I could write the 20% of Excel that's useful easily, with a better interface!" -> "oh, not everyone uses the same 20%".
You may be right. For my part I don't agree. I think the scale will be so much greater than the jump from 1995 to 2020. The moat will be data, or anything derived from hardware/the physical world. That is the tie back into "the ability to clone is not sufficient". You can clone Amazon app but how will you ship a package? Especially as their dominance in that area rests on their monopoly power?
Eventually they will fall too. It will just take longer. I think really the reason I disagree is simply that AI will get good enough where necessarily no human will have an edge. The super advanced ones will be on the whole time ambiently and likely adversarially self prompting. Your great idea already exists somewhere out in latent space. They will either get their first or just copy you. You will not care about anyone's edge. When you care about something you will necessarily engage with it manually. I mean this in the definitional sense. How did we know Alice cares about task x? Because she did it manually. She doesn't really care about the weather, so she just asked the computer in enough ways to make her own version of that. In the same way you wouldn't think Alice cared about Bob if she delegated correspondence to him to someone else. You know she likes him because with all her needs met and all her knowledge of the weather, she still chooses to spend time with him. For everything else compute/intelligence as utility will have you covered.
> What's the "I could write Facebook in a weekend" of the future, where the ability to clone isn't sufficient? I think there's likely something beyond "network effects" that we haven't found yet.
The every other part of the business is what's hard. Oh, and doubly so if access to markets will be controlled by a few giant incumbent gatekeepers. We're heading straight into a new gilded age.
Tldr: Don't talk to the police. Another reminder - familiarize yourself with your 4th, 5th and 6th amendment rights and remember to invoke them audibly (for an example of the risk of failing to do so - see Salinas v. Texas [1]) and then shut your mouth. When possible, record every interaction. Cops will lie. Do not argue or be belligerent. Invoke your rights, record, comply with any legal orders, and never physically resist. But do not agree to talk or consent to doing so. A cop on the street is neither judge nor jury. Do not surrender your rights under the pretense of a "voluntary" or "consensual" visit.
Nothing can be more patriotic in a country that fought off a King and passed the Bill of Rights than telling an armed agent of the state without a warrant who "just wants to talk" to get off your property.
Are cigarettes really currency in this case? Aren't they more like one of many possible barter units? Can't you also price things in ramen packs in prison?
Similarly, I thought the sea shells thing had been sort of debunked. In that scale of society you don't need currency, you know the guy. David Graeber summarizes this rather intuitively. Why would you need to give a guy a sea shell in a "hunter gatherer group"? You're gonna see him every day of your life and everyone is gonna know/remember he owes you one. It would be like giving your sibling a sea shell because you did them a little favor or something. It doesn't actually happen that way because it would be a complete waste of time, just actually return the favor next time. I believe the sea shell thing is more like a gift, rather than a currency. Like you might give someone a flower to tell them you think they're swell. Presumably you think that because they helped you at some point. That doesn't make it currency. People just liked giving each other shells.
I think on most modern theories, currency really comes about from conquest. The idea is as you expand these informal IOUs are not enough. You don't want to have to lug around ramen packs or cigarettes. So at the point of a sword or w/e you say hey take this coin and give us food and then you honor the coin enough and people trust it, not because it's "fungible, tradable, generally-durable commodity that the bulk of society decides to accept as being worthwhile" but because if you don't accept it the government will kill you. And if you do accept it then not only will they not kill you but they'll give things back to you later, which you will end up being a positive incentive for everyone. Now instead of a presiding over a killing field you've created a market. But without the threat of the state, it is not coherent. That's what government is.
That's basically what it says on American money. "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private". So sure a business can refuse you service, that's a separate issue. But if you have a debt in the United States and you try to give them US dollars and they refuse and say, no thanks actually we demand cigarettes - well now they are breaking the law, aka inviting the wrath of the state. So everyone uses dollars because the last thing anyone wants is to be in debt and think a pack of ramen is gonna work and they just get to say no thanks cigarettes for me please.
And of course, you also don't want to get impaled on a spike by a dude who looks suspiciously like that guy on the coin you probably should have taken.
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