That is a 2+2 feature.

You forgot to mention bitcoins.

Or how any of this matters. There are much more important questions in the world.

Liquor is quicker,
But Mick is the quickest.

Why thank you. I don't feel like as much of a loser doing research in corporate innovation now compared to the work of some of the mathematical geniuses on this forum.

It seems a common historical trend.

New advance put large number of people out of work. This is better for society as a whole as the average standard of living goes up overall due to the new advances.

Unfortunatly lots of people are put out of work by the new advances. The more people put out of work as a result, likely the higher the increas in standard of living for the others.

This is not a problme for young people who have not learnt a skill yet, and now have new options avaliabel to them.

Its a small irriatation to people who have been put out of work but have the abiltiy to adapt and retrain in a new skill.

It completely sucks for the remaing people who have been put out of work but dont have the ability to change. Still thats only an issue for one generation, then everything is great

Doesn't matter (and I think you're optimistic anyway). As soon as you're lighting *any* of it on fire, it's a net negative.

People die with money all the time. Was it useless to them throughout their lives, even though they never spent it (even disregarding interest, etc)? If you're leaning yes, think about the importance of a poker player's roll as it relates to his ability to play certain stakes, even if he never ends up dropping back down or dipping into it.

You're kind of obsessed with economic activity levels, but it's a meaningless measure without looking at the activity itself. If you describe the charity and the activity in more descriptive terms.. the rest of society pulls some money out of their pockets, throws it in a pit, and then 1) some of them simply walk away, treating it as a lost cause, 2) others battle each other tooth and nail for it, spending MORE money and resources fighting each other for it. So the rest of society uses up resources to simply get back what was its own money to begin with. There's economic activity involved, but from the perspective of the aggregate rest of society, it's just lighting resources on fire and calling it GDP.

The "pie" is NOT smaller post-culling, as long as you use any sensible definition of pie. Society has more wealth, not less, that you can work to acquire by providing something of value. As far as sustained growth, how are you measuring it and why do you want it? If you mean growth in activity/GDP, that measure is just stupid as is unconditionally wanting it to increase (see previous paragraph). I'll buy that a society growing in both wealth and utility from consumption is a good thing, but the charity class provides no utility of consumption to the rest of society and drains its wealth in the process. It's just bad. (And innovation can increase wealth, consumption utility, or both by either using the same/fewer resources for better/equal stuff. When it leads to less wealth and more consumption, it can be the economic version of a giant hookers and blow binge. Lots of consumption utility, but you sure had to pay for it and you're worse off in the future for it.).

No way. The internet was already freaking amazing, in, say, 2006 before the iphone, or before there was nearly as much lower-class adoption. I consider the influx of simpletons and tablet tards to be a huge negative as far as my utility goes because they've overrun the place and everywhere they go and everything directed at them sucks in comparison to what it was (not to mention what it could have been). WWW2007 >>>>> WWW2014 and it's beyond not even close for me.

All or almost all of the supergeniuses have come from, for lack of a better term, good stock. I looked up 20 guys from Heaviside to Tao and the only who was even questionable was Grothendieck. There's really not much empirical support for spamming out randoms to even find AN Einstein in a reasonable amount of time, much less enough to justify the costs. If you want to argue that population replacement via the polar opposite of our inverted birthrate is better than ebola, that's at least conceivable to me. Population growth via inverted birthrate (from today), not so much.

I think people dont grasp the huge economical advantages of having the kind of automation described in the video. Yes people wont have jobs, but it wont matter, they can live of the robots basically. Eventually we all will as long as they dont become self concious and it would be immoral to have them as slaves. A job/money based economy wont make sense where only 1% of the people need to work. Obv in situations like this there would be plenty of people who would work for nothing in return but to maintain the luxury level for the rest of world. You might not find many on a poker forum though.

Hoping 60% of the world would be viped out because society gets so rich that people cant (wont need to) get jobs is kinda sickening.

It would be thy fate, not thine.

Use the driverless cars to lock people inside and drive them off cliffs in droves. Repeat 70 million times and the cab driver problem pretty much solves itself.

I'm pretty sure predictions of this scale tend to be wildly inaccurate, there's no telling the sort of revolution this many people are capable of producing if a few thousand people try to keep everything for themselves and the mess left behind could bring us right back to the 1900s and horses will enjoy peak population again.

Mrs Ed: I guess you were right
Mr Ed: I told you they couldn't maintain that trajectory

The welfare checks better be damn big or there's going to be blood.

Society advances and jobs are not lost. 95 percent of people in the United States today live far better than John Rockefeller did. Society moves on, and technology improves the lives of those in future generations. Years ago people talked about computers replacing people.

Just 20 years ago if you wanted to buy your favorite music/song you had to go to the record store and buy a whole album to get your favorite song. Or, send pennies to Columbia record houses and get your music sent to you. The advances since then in being able to enjoy music have had a huge impact on humans being able to better enjoy their lives. Who cares if there aren't record stores anymore.

You don't get it. Hardly anyone is going to have a job and that includes the CEO of Goldman Sachs. The real story behind all of this is that there are hordes of the smartest ppl in the world backed by essentially unlimited resources w/ the sole purpose of creating machines to do what humans do. If humans come up w/ something new they will get to work on that. What the machines won't have is the vote and unless they go Skynet on us those welfare checks are going to be pretty damn big, or else.

btw, I watched a show w/ a futurist that said computers are going to eventually be millions of times smarter than humans. That makes me wonder why theoretical physicists are wasting their time. We don't need to know what dark matter is right now so why not wait a while and just ask the machines?

What if the machines then lie to us? To placate those pesky always too curious wanting to know the answer(s) humans. Would we program that into the computing machines ourselves?

Unless stuff like the search for things like dark matter/energy can be worked out on chalkboards the scientists very much need the machines. Once they are that smart who knows if they can be trusted esp if they are given the chance to learn and mimic human behavior? Thankfully we can get along just fine w/o knowing most of these things anyway.

That's off topic, tho. I have a low opinion of human behavior and if the machines take away work I think we will see why, again. Even if the ppl get welfare checks big enough to let them do w/e they want something will be missing. I'm expecting very bad things but I won't be around to see them.