Our innate then cultivated morality enables trust and reciprocity necessary for the creation and maintenance of stable market trading and economic growth.

Morality is a meme which enables lower economic friction (lower waste of energy in petty squabbles, etc), overall having the effect of banishing social friction to the boundaries of larger and larger in-groups and enabling co-operation (whether market based or not) within the co-operating in-group. It also allows the size of the in-group to be increased by growing trust and co-operation with neighbours. Morality is a natural consequence of the max-entropy rule of non-equilibrium thermodynamics; it is a spontaneously evolution-discoverable feature of stable complex systems, allowing them to configure for more energy efficiency in activities and structure that builds toward increased survival probability.

Edit: VAT reduction for companies retaining more human workforce.... is what I meant.in the third sentence.

Hey slashdot, I know you probably can't afford innovation, but 5 minutes of editing power on a post would be amazing.

I think AI will continue changing rapidly (to substantially self-directed multi-agent Agentic, among other changes) so a tax on input token use or something like that is probably not feasible.

So instead, probably an increased value-added tax (VAT) is the way to go, but where companies are given VAT credit for their human labor force size measured in both wages and number of people, and excluding senior executives.

So higher VAT rate is charged.to low or zero human-workforce companies that to companies that have fewer human workers.

Can anyone think of a better way to tax the automated economy for wealth redistribution?

Bigger question. Assuming very low human employment, is there even any VAT or profit taxation rate that is sufficient to keep a wide-participation economy working? Or is it always more expensive to buy end-product/service stuff than the average universal basic income recipient can afford?

I get that AI+automation reduces end-product/service prices, but if VAT/profit tax revenue is always just a fraction of that, it won't be sufficient to support everyone to biuy those products/services to subsist, will it?

Maybe we also need to have higher VAT on non-subsistence products/services (not housing, not food, not basic energy amounts, etc) than on essential products/services.

Is there another technical model of AI+automation wealth distribution that works better? Ideas?

Fair enough. Thanks for the numbers.

Worth noting that the radiative forcing factor (global heating energy) of excess greenhouse gases is estimated at about 0.003 to 0.004 of the solar radiation incoming. (Source: leading answer sourced and/or calculated by Google Gemini lol).

So yeah, an order of magnitude or two difference in heating, if all human energy would be supplied this way.

Ok I'll take your word for it that you've done the (at least back of envelope, remember envelopes?) math. Just saying it's important to think and analyse at the system level, and define a sufficiently large system boundary.

Too lazy to calculate final answer myself: Showing work:

e.g. degrees C atmospheric heating (eventually settled atmospheric surface temperature delta after accounting for temp buffered by oceanic heat capacity) per GWh energy added to Earth system at surface, assuming otherwise in equilibrium at current average surface temperature.

+ heating from embedded and direct emissions of production and launch of space based solar power system.

vs
How many tCO2-eq / GWh for coal, for gas, times 0.00000000045 degrees C per tonne of CO2 added to atmosphere.

Would have to make an adjustment on each side to account for efficiency of converting the energy beamed (and energy burned) to usable energy across the range of uses, because the fair comparison is the global heating per amount of usable energy in each case.

Is it worth noting that such a system is (at least sometimes) capturing solar energy that would otherwise have missed the earth and beaming it onto Earth.

That is a positive global heating factor.

Someone needs to do the math to show that the fossil fuel GHG emissions avoided by using this system for energy outweighs the direct heating of Earth by this system.

exists?

If not I guess I would have a keyboard plugged into my keyboard.

It's not an SUV unless it can comfortably go up an old logging road with exposed rocks embedded in the road and many potholes, on a mountain.

A Pathfinder was an SUV, as was a Forerunner, or a Range Rover.

These new "SUVs" (grocery getters, kid soccer transporters) are a marketing joke that we all seem to have accepted. Those are cars. with a slightly more upright seating position.

The transformers used by LLMs discover and encode the relationships between words IN HUMAN THOUGHT EXPRESSIONS. The multi-layer nature of the deep neural net into which the transformers encode these relationships results in increasing levels of abstraction of the relationships being encoded in different layers of the neural net, along with the ways and strength that each more abstract relationship-aspect is involved in each more particular relationship. By focus on contextual relationships that humans attend to in their communications, and by having the ability to capture abstract aspects of the relationships, the LLM is effectively learning a semantic network of the concepts that words and word sequences utttered by humans represent. The carefully hierarchically organized and represented statistical properties of human syntax (when averaged over many many uttereances so as to ignore accidental, non-essential differences in expression) ultimately result in a usable (cheaply associatively tourable) representation of the semantics (MEANING) behind human communications. i.e. a general and specific knowledge base has been represented in the deep neural net.

It is then possible to design and implement various query-driven and goal-directed associative touring algorithms to visit the concepts in the knowledge base in appropriate touring orders (nearby concepts are nearby in the neural net representation, more general ones are "above", more specific ones are "below") so that we could say these algorithms are thinking abouit the queries and appropriate answers to them.

I think I think therefore I think I am.

But seriously, as some have said here, there appears to be no possible scientific test of whether subjective consciousness is present or being faked.

Therefore one is led to question whether that distinction is meaningful, or matters at all.

This remains the hard problem of consciousness.

My fascination with AI is for us to develop information processing (and storing) technology which helps us answer exactly how far you can go with a created "thinking" mechanism which we cannot demonstrate has subjective consciousness. How far you can nevertheless go with creating general cognition, including introspective cognition, and cognition guided and prioritized by emotion-like symbolic tags which encode and prioritize ego-desired vs ego-undesired outcomes in experience-encoding world models and also hypothetically future-extended world models. Does any of this require subjective consciousness? I would certainly wager not. Does subjective consciousness spontaneously emerge, if enough such general, associatively-interlinked information storage and processing is occurring (a la Tononi)? Who knows. How would we tell?

This statement shows a profound misunderstanding of how computational complexity works.

Yes, computer algorithms can output things that are not (intentionally) programmed into them.

There are two or three secret magic things which result in that happening:

The first is (effectively) random input. An algorithm may be attached to an input device (e.g. a sensory device, or text inputter aimed at most of all human Internet text expressions...) which sends the algorithm an effectively random sequence of input data.

The second is loops which can be designed to feedback a functional result of one piece of random input as input to the next processing round so that the first random data helps determine the direction/extent of algorithmic processing of a subsequent different random input. I say the feedback loop "helps" determine the further processing, because a third magic element, the conditional statement, branches the processing (in the loop) this way and that depending on this or that small detail of the (effectively random, remember) input or the (even more complex and completely unpredictable) combination of past and present inputs.

No programmer could possible keep up with the complexity of how this looping, conditional execution with random input sequences will go. No programmer can, in general, know where this kind of processing will end up, and with what result, nor even, can they predict if the program will keep looping or stop with a result.

Finite, simple algorithms, particularly with random input sequences (although those is not even strictly necessary) can generate arbitrary, unpredictable results. There is actual well-known math behind what I've tried to say in lay terms here.

(i.e. god)

i.e. people on average aren't empirical or rational at all, but rather, mostly tribal-social.

so it's not surprising that people with ferretman's climate-denial beliefs abound.

People don't actually know HOW to believe properly (i.e. how to use scientific method to weight and adjust their beliefs), never mind what to believe.

Or perhaps some inexpensive to scale batteries:

https://energydome.com/co2-battery/

https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/long-term-energy-storage/

There will come a time, and it's almost certainly within a generation from now, when AI and automation will be better than let's say 90% of humans at the things that those humans do in the economy. 90% figure pulled out of orifice. Could be 80%, could be 99%. Doesn't qualitatively matter from a socioeconomic problem and policy perspective.

And the AI and automation will also be better than 90% of humans at whatever new "replacement" jobs people or AIs come up with as a spin-off of the new automated economy.

This is qualitatively different than many previous technological revolutions, in that NO faculty/capability of the average human will be more effective for work than the new automation.

Previously, when strong men wielding shovels and scythes were replaced by combine harvesters, those men could go on to another job, like construction, or plumbing, or computer programming, in a new urban economy. Horsemen and stablehands could become truck or taxi drivers and mechanics or oil workers or gas jockeys.

When hand weavers were replaced by looms, they could go on to become administrative functionaries or apparatchiks in some business or bureaucracy.

Soon, almost all of the replacement jobs or new functions needed in a re-jigged automated economy will themselves be more cost-effectively done by more AI and more automation. That is the difference.

If you get that (how it really is different this time), then you may be agile of mind enough to be one of the last to be replaced. If you can't grasp it, well good luck to you my fine fellow human.

You're saying getting rid of coal power will make no measurable difference to CO2 at all?

Just so I have that clear what you're saying.

Lifecycle emissions analysis:
    Solar PV electricity + Li-ION BESS is on the order of 50 grams CO2-eq embedded emissions per kWh of electric energy.
    Coal electricity is on the order of 1,000 grams CO2-eq per kWh.

So coal is 20 times more CO2-emitting per unit of energy generated.

Yet you're claiming that if Australia, and other countries in the world reliant on coal-fired electricity, switched to renewables + energy storage there would be no measurable impact on CO2 emissions to the atmosphere.

Things that make you go hmmmmm.