No …
The main reason is that AIs will themselves be part of the economy. …
One of the things I’m doing today is getting rid of lots of interesting links that have hung about on my computer since I don’t know when, without actually getting rid of them, in other words by putting them here. The idea was I’d have clever things to say, somewhere, about each of them, but all I really have to say about all of them is: Hmmm interesting.
My designated official mission, to photo the supermoon, failed, but when up there, I photoed other photos, including this one:
Now, and as Instapundit would say, I’m not saying that it’s aliens.
But …:
… it’s aliens.
That second one would make a good book cover.
His question, and his answer:
Cheer up mate, it may never happen.
Earlier this evening, I (and a great many other people) attended the 19th Hayek Memorial Lecture:
Photo 1: I got there very early, hence all the empty seats.
The Official Photographer was Jean-Luc Picard. Not really, but photo 3 makes him look a bit like the noted space voyager.
Photo 4: The (large) room fills up.
Photo 5: Celeb sighting. Dominic Frisby. And is that his dad Terence he’s talking with? I think it just might be.
Photo 6: Syed Kamall, a recent IEA appointment. He gave someone a prize.
Photo 7: IEA boss Mark Littlewood does the intro.
Photos 8 and 9: Professor Bryan Caplan gives the lecture.
Photo 10: The first questioner was Vera Kichanova, one of the very few people in the audience whom I recognised.
Photo 11: Someone else photoing from the audience.
So, what did Caplan say? Briefly: poor country governments are often to blame for their bad economic policies, rich countries are often to blame for their bad immigration policies, and poor people, especially poor people in rich countries, are often to blame because they make bad decisions, especially bad decisions which hurt their children. That last one is the one you aren’t allowed to say, but most people still think this. When questioned about this, Caplan pointed out that refusing ever to blame poor people for their poverty is often a cause of bad policies. Instead of doing nothing (because it should be up to many poor people to help themselves), governments often do bad things. To “help”.
Another interesting thing about this lecture was that big multi-national enterprises came out of the story very well, basically for doing very well in poor countries, thereby proving that lots of people in poor and otherwise badly governed and badly managed countries could be doing far better, if they got the chance. That being why restrictive immigration policies do so much harm. They are keeping people who could do far better out of well governed countries.
There was also a guy videoing everything, so you won’t have to rely for ever on me to learn what Caplan said.
Here.
This is a Tweet where you have to show it all or it makes no sense:
"Bill if you take this TV thing, you're finished. You're an actor, for God's sake! Theatre! Movies! I've seen that script too – it's kid's stuff, embarrassing! Not even a medical drama! I'm begging you, Bill – do not do this." pic.twitter.com/j9NV5hbRMT
— Danny Baker (@prodnose) October 20, 2019
(LATER: In the first version of this posting, it said “22 people are talking about this”. And I put, at this point: “Make that 23”. Ho ho. But now I note that the above manifestation of this tweet automatically updates itself. Blog and learn.)
Maybe, to you, that tweet still makes no sense. Well, on the right there is a black-and-white fifties British film actor, saying all that stuff. And on the left, William Hartnell, about to become the very first Doctor Who.
It was surely this attitude, that television didn’t matter and would never amount to anything, which was all part of why some of those early Doctor Who episodes went missing. Shame. Selfishly, I don’t much mind, because I never got excited about Doctor Who when it first happened. But I have a friend who still does mind.
Indeed:
That’s a detail in the middle of a device I spotted on a lorry in Victoria Street this afternoon. It’s a grab crane.
Here’s the lorry:
As you can perhaps see, the job of Palfinger Epsilon is to grab bags of bagged aggregate.
I have taken to always having a fictional book on the go, and currently that book is Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky. Palfinger Epsilon sounds like one of the characters in this story.
Here:
It reminds me of the scene at the end of Starship Troopers (a scene which I may now be imagining (but I think it happened)) where the victorious Starship Troopers celebrate their capture of The Queen Bug.
Again from designboom, this posting about a Ukrainian rug-maker who is souping up his designs with modern references. I particularly like this one:
This works for many reasons, one of them being that there is something very medieval and nostalgic about the whole Star Wars franchise, and lots of cinematic and other scifi in general. Faster than light travel, for instance, isn’t modern. It is a bogus technology trick for turning the future back into the Middle Ages, into a world full of faraway wonders and monsters, but not so far away that you can’t reach them soon enough to still be alive when you get there and make your visit count.
By the way, I think “designboom” postings are very badly designed. The basic problem, although not the only one, is their juvenile refusal to understand capital letters, and their determination instead only to use capital letters for acronymic organisations (like, in this case: “OLK”), but never to signal the beginning of a sentence, or the beginning of a heading. Or for something like Star Wars. This is stupid when you are simply writing a chunk of prose. But it is seriously stupid at a website, because websites are tricky to make clear at the best of time. Boom? No. Fail. Pity, because they seem to have a lot of good stuff.
This blog, the one you are reading now, is much better designed. To look at I mean. Not how it works, which is very badly.
This makes sense:
There are three separate things the larger Twitter user base demands from the company:
– the ability to send messages out to the entire world
– the ability to interact with fellow users
– the ability to send messages without the fear of toxic responses
The problem is it’s basically impossible to guarantee all three at once. Call it the “Twitter impossibility theorem,” to ape Kenneth Arrow. You can have an open Twitter, you can have an interactive Twitter, and you can have a troll-free Twitter, but it is basically impossible to have all three. One of the demands must be dropped.
Twitter reminds me of that fish in The Hitchhiker’s Guide, which jumps into your ear and translates all the languages of the gallaxy into your language, which started wars because it meant that everyone could understand what you had said, and hate it, and be understood by you hating it.
Twitter doesn’t translate, but it connects the hitherto unconnected.