But that's just it. As you get more and more people on the social welfare system, you either have more and more people living as meagerly as possible because the jobs simply don't exist. You could up the amount of money you pay those on social welfare, so that they can actually enjoy their lives, but then you risk the workers jumping on to social welfare too early, and not being able to bring in enough tax money to support the social welfare system. If social welfare is too comfortable, nobody will want to work. If it's not comfortable enough, you'll have a lot of people who are on it because they have no other choice, and are therefore unhappy with their lives. These people will probably cause a lot of trouble.

Peter Gibbons: What would you do if you had a million dollars?
Lawrence: I'll tell you what I'd do, man: two chicks at the same time, man.
Peter Gibbons: That's it? If you had a million dollars, you'd do two chicks at the same time?
Lawrence: Damn straight. I always wanted to do that, man. And I think if I were a millionaire I could hook that up, too; 'cause chicks dig dudes with money.
Peter Gibbons: Well, not all chicks.
Lawrence: Well, the type of chicks that'd double up on a dude like me do.
Peter Gibbons: Good point.
Lawrence: Well, what about you now? What would you do?
Peter Gibbons: Besides two chicks at the same time?
Lawrence: Well, yeah.
Peter Gibbons: Nothing.
Lawrence: Nothing, huh?
Peter Gibbons: I would relax... I would sit on my ass all day... I would do nothing.
Lawrence: Well, you don't need a million dollars to do nothing, man. Take a look at my cousin: he's broke, don't do shit.

This describes completely what most people would do if they had the option. Even myself, given the option that I could have a house, food, and all essential bills covered (heat, electricity, water), I would probably do pretty close to nothing. I probably wouldn't sit on the couch all day, but most of the time I definitely wouldn't be producing anything of value. Wake up, go for a bike ride in the morning, spend time with friends, play all those video games I've always wanted to play. I might take up hobbies and actually produce something, but I wouldn't be adherent to any kind of schedule and whether or not I could produce any item worth exchange for money.

But who's going to do the 10% of the work that can't be done by machines? If the system is set up to distribute the wealth, and nobody has to work, who's going to do the 10% of the jobs that still require humans. Sure, some of them will be interesting jobs, and you might find people lining up to do them, just to keep their lives interesting. But there's still going to be jobs that nobody wants to do. These kinds of jobs exist already, but people do them because they need money, and they don't have a lot of other choices.

And that's at 10% of people working. Problems will become apparent in the current system way before that. Once you have 40-50% of people not working, it becomes essential that there's a system to redistribute the wealth such that people can live their lives. But then there's still 50% of people who need to work just to keep that going. And it's going to be very hard to convince people to go to work day in and day out when they can have a comfortable life doing whatever they please.

Now, I'm no optimist on the imminent-coming-of-strong-AI; but this I do know: The University of Chicago does not specialize in producing lefty-pinko-economists. They have departments with a much stronger liberal bent; but econ sure as hell isn't one of them. It's pretty much the altar of Milton Friedman, the school that made the 'Chicago boys' of Latin American, um, repute. If the UofC says that robots are screwing the proletariat, I'm going to err on the side of caution and suspect that the proletariat is screwed...

It's not clear that Apple could survive in isolation. A lot of their components are only as cheap as they are because of other lower-margin companies paying a big chunk of the R&D costs. When Apple was using PowerPC processors and were the only customer for IBM or Motorola for a particular chip, they found it very difficult to compete. They're designing their own ARM cores now, but they're benefitting enormously from the thriving ARM software ecosystem.

The problem is that the costs outweigh the revenue. Reducing costs in a way that also reduces revenue is probably not a good solution.

The overall compile-link step is roughly the same (although LTO changes it a bit), but the compilation process has changed hugely in the last 20 years. Dealing with code 'hand optimised' by people who still have a mental model of how PCC compiles code is a constant source of pain.

Why would they do that? If you're a cosmetics company and you can buy a startup that owns the patents on a technique that actually works, then you'd be stupid to keep competing on a level playing field when you could be the only company that's selling the real thing. Even if you multiply your normal profit margin by a factor of ten, you're still going to be selling huge quantities and raking in the money.

The problem with these conspiracy theories is that they assume that people with large entrenched interests and lots of money somehow have an aversion to turning their big pile of money into an enormous pile of money.

That's actually one of the impressive things about the brain: despite its complexity it is resilient enough that the medical literature is full of (sometimes literal) banging on the brain with a hammer that ends up being nonlethal and having some sort of interesting effect.

It's definitely a consideration, the question is whether it's a giant downside, or the absurdly amazing upside:

If your neurology-fu is good enough, you should be able to produce a stimulus of essentially unimaginable desirability. After all, while we (currently) have to do various things in order to experience pleasure, 'pleasure' is something that the brain does, not something we absorb from a wife, 2.5 children, and a golden retriever in the suburbs.

If you could bring to bear all the available apparatus devoted to the experience of 'pleasure' you could skip all the grind and go right to the reward.

Aside from the practical problems of getting people to work when they could be experiencing timeless ultimate bliss, I suspect that this prospect will strike many as somehow creepy or dishonest.

On the other hand, what innovation could possibly contribute more to the happiness of mankind than a direct supply of dis-intermediated happiness, delivered fresh and pure right to the brain?

At the prices the people growing the crops pay for that water, you bet it is. Now, about how those prices are made...

Be sure to put your EOL directives in order: an awful lot of people die in their own shit; but with substantially less happy expressions, as it is.

If you are going to directly stimulate the brain, why bother with the 'entertainment'? We bother with that because our direct means of stimulating the appropriate brain regions are not exactly ready for prime time on health and safety grounds.

There might be some affect states that we can't reach without both electrical and chemical stimuli; but if you are even approaching that level you certainly won't be paying much attention to your environment.

Then you're probably not going into an establishment where the only drinkable beverages are laced with sugar and milk to disguise how bad the coffee is.

So, in a predictable (honestly, surprising they made it to this market cap without doing it already) part of the maturation process; Uber is claiming that they'll rein in discretionary access to personal information by their frat-bro-asshole management, and instead put full database access to all the data ever in the hands of their advertising and customer analytics weasels.

That's the unpleasant flip side to a story like this. Yes, as it happens, Uber has some of the most punchable management shitweasels one could ask for. The very idea of one of them using 'god view' on you makes you want to take a hot shower and scrub yourself until the uncleanness is gone. However, while opportunistic assholerly is repulsive, it is also unsystematic. Once they grow up a bit, and put those data into the hands of solid, value-rational, systematic, people who aim to squeeze every drop of value out of it, then you are really screwed.