Dear PhD AI worker,

    How come you're not being paid 2x what you are now? Yes, 2x. Productivity of the worker has gone up 2x in real terms since 1973. Yet your pay is less than that, even YOURS, Dr. AI worker.

    Suppose most jobs are automated, and the few remaining jobs have many highly qualified people who need that job. What happens to the price of labor? Market forces push wages down--people underbid you just to work. THAT is why your pay doesn't match your productivity. And the trend is accentuating.

Those high paid high level creative jobs you like to imagine? They ONLY exist if there is market for them, i.e., if the 1% (or whoever controls the resources) decides to allocate resources for them.

  And they're not, hence the depressed wages ACROSS THE BOARD. I've got a PhD too, doing creative non-automatable work, and I SURE WOULD like to be getting paid 2x as much. But I'm not, and it's flatly because the rest of the labor market is depressed.

    I'd sure love to keep doing creative non-automatable work, but I can only do that if it pays, which in turn depends on how many creative non-automatable jobs the 1% wants to devote resources for. And guess what: the 1% is apparently deciding that research and technology investment needs to drop because it is a "cost". Government investment is declining too. So capital (the 1%) thrives on productivity increases and everyone who must labor, is, frankly, slowly starving to death.

    At least in the USA.

--PM

Those jobs will ONLY exist if people who control the resources want them done. Suppose 1% of the people control the resources. How many hairdressers do the 1% need? With 99% of the people competing for the jobs that the 1% still needs done, how much d'you think with that much labor offered, labor will be worth?

--PM

I had the same plan, keep my car until it was dead. Problem was, the death of my car happened a lot sooner than I envisioned.

Someone on the freeway was inattentive and slammed into me during a traffic slowdown. Result? Car totalled (and very minor damage to me, which I guess is kudos for Toyota.)

I don't think my new "used" car has a GPS in it, but one might've got snuck in without me knowing.

Good luck keeping your car "forever".

--PeterM

Whose heads will roll? If the elite control all the most powerful means of destruction (robot planes, etc.) as well as the means of production, then the masses' heads will roll, not those of the elite.

Consider Detroit. What we see there is the disenfranchised class reverting to subsistence farming. Is that the wave of the future? The elite controlling all technology and everyone else growing their own food because they have no way of getting any money?

Is the future of technology (in the US anyway) the complete domination of the elite and everyone else living in 3rd world conditions?

--PM

Yes, by pointing out that link I didn't mean to support one side or the other, I thought it was interesting in its own right.

I think GMOs probably ought to be the product of government nonprofit research which becomes public domain, that would remove some of the more significant objections and reduce the pressure to market something that is actually risky.

--PeterM

Hello,

    Please moderate up the parent post. The link is to a story which discusses how genes have moved between species via vectors such as ticks and viruses.

--PM

Hello,

    Our mindset at my research institution is very different. We generate a certain amount of data per year (several terabytes), but the cost of storage decreases so fast we just copy old data onto new media and never delete ANYTHING.

      In fact, we consider the cost of actually figuring out what data to delete to be higher than simply buying more storage.

    I would not call it "well-indexed" however.

    Our backup strategy is tailored to the nature of our data. Most of our data is simulation results. We back up "lightweight" data and analyzed results, input files, and log files. "Heavyweight" data we do not back up, since we consider the cost of reproducing this data (given the input files and the log files) modified by the low probability of actually ever needing it to be lower than the cost of backing it up. This results in our backup requirement to be maybe 5% of our "live" data archive.

    If it gets to the point where we can't afford the storage anymore, we'll delete the "heavyweight" data ourselves to reduce the data footprint.

--PeterM

If it has DRM, I don't buy it. I don't steal DRM or non-DRM either.

Get it through your head, publishing industries, I don't *need* your product and if you make your product unpleasant with DRM, you don't get my money.

This also applies to price-gouging: I will NOT buy a 20 year old song for $0.99. I'd pay $0.05 or $0.10. However, I will NOT "buy" songs from Russian sites at those prices because I don't consider the Russian sites to have legitimate rights to the songs in the first place. So I do without. Because I don't NEED your products.

Fair price, no DRM, and my wallet will open for you like a floodgate--anything less and you get NOTHING.

The fat-cat entertainment industry deserves a huge boycott anyway.

Come on consumers: abandon the price gougers and go for the real entertainment values, you can get hundreds of hours of good interactive entertainment from computer games for $50, why shell out ANYTHING for low-quality high price crap like today's music and movie industry produce?

--PeterM

Forget about gaming, how about a HUGE virtual desktop for work?

--PM

Even you say that they are not STRONGLY linked--not that they're not linked at all.

MY point is that even if obesity does NOT cause all the problems you mention, it is a problem in and of itself, and even if it is only 10% "cause" of the other problems, then diet pills will still help.

YOU seem to be claiming that the only way to fix things is to fix the diet, and I would say that YOU are being too simplistic. Fixing the diet would be great, but in the absense of that, my point is that pills can be beneficial. Pills are, after all, easy.

--PM

What's really sad is that the wealthy don't even have to give up their wealth. Lower classes with more money will lift the wealthy up to dizzyingly new heights. The wealthy GOT RICH on the shoulders of the middle and low classes! If the middle/low class have got no money, who's going to buy the products of the rich?

If the rich had an ounce of foresight and half a brain cell, they'd be doing what Henry Ford did--paying his workers MORE than the average wage so they could buy his stuff. A horde of penniless serfs will never buy a single iPod!

--PeterM

Part of my point is that you should not only care whether someone takes a "short cut" to good health, you should be HAPPY about it--because your health insurance premiums are going to go DOWN because other people are healthier.

It's flat-out in your best interest to make obtaining good health as cheap and easy as possible FOR EVERYONE.

--PM

However, a weight-loss pill would at least address all those issues caused by simply being overweight alone, such as joint issues, high blood pressure, and some fraction of diabetes incidence.

What's more, the less you weigh, the easier it is to exercise. Just imagine a 300 pounder trying to huff away on a hike or something. Losing the weight might be the springboard to a healthier lifestyle overall--something that perhaps would be unachievable with the extra 150lbs that are now gone.

And as you point out, obesity is partly due to consumption of low quality food. Low quality food is cheap--it costs maybe $2k more a year for a family to eat healther, I see in the news today. $2k isn't exactly peanuts to someone on minimum wage, and it could be "$2k and a lot of time" for someone who lives in a food desert.

Safe & effective "diet pills" might mitigate the damage and cost of a low-cost, low quality cheap diet--which is a win for everyone who pays into the medical system.

I agree that pills like "Pen Fen" or whatever it was called, that cause heart issues, need to be treated with caution. However, the premise of the article was that pills that are safer and still effective have come out, but they're not being used.

While it would be better for everyone to eat quality food and get appropriate amounts of exercise, a pill that mitigates the damage of NOT doing those things is just a big win for everyone.

The perfect should not be the enemy of the good, and we shouldn't leave an 80% solution on the table just because it isn't a 99% solution.

--PM

Hello,

    I'm a weight loss and weight long term control success story, more or less. But having done it, I know exactly how hard it is.

    I'd love it if the US population could dump their extra pounds by taking a pill. It'd just be a win for everyone, and the only people who'd "lose" are those who feel superior because they've managed to do it without the pill.

    And even THOSE people will be paying lower health insurance premiums because the population is healthier in general.

    If the pills really work, BRING 'EM ON! Who knows, if I can't exercise some day (I'm currently taking a few weeks off because I got rear-ended in my car!), then I'll need them myself!

--PeterM

For every 1 person that dies, 2 people suffer brain damage or deafness, per the CDC.

http://www.medpagetoday.cominfectiousdiseasegeneralinfectiousdisease/43268

For measles, it says that for every
500 deaths, you have:
48,000 hospitalizations,
7,000 seizures, and
1,000 cases of permanent brain damage or deafness each year, according to the CDC.

So brain damage/deafness is about 2x as common as outright death from measles.

--PeterM