Because this smart speaker is likely to be much, much more expensive than most speakers you own. If they made the AI just a service that you could just use with your existing devices in your home they would lose the chance to sell you the expensive gadget. Exactly the reason the Humane AI Pin was created when an app on your phone could have done the same thing.

The whiteboard is the modern "blackboard", and many people use them to communicate in a home setting. They just tend to be smaller than 3' x 9'.

This doesn't seem to be a concern when it comes to increasing executive salaries. They could lower some of those and have plenty more money to spend on new workers. Really... "We have pumped so many young people into business and finance" -- No shit, Sherlock. Maybe because the only people making 7 figures in healthcare are the administrators and folks in insurance, not the ones actually practicing medicine. The very long shifts medical careers seem famous for are a good indicator healthcare facilities need to hire more people, but who wants to enter a job with such long hours. Meanwhile the work to be done isn't going down, so everyone has to work longer. It becomes a feedback loop.

Please re-read my reply. It's about that. What happens when you are banned from one chain for shoplifting, but their facial-recognition database is shared with others? How the individual supposed to know which stores they can go to and not be arrested?

Arrested on what charge? If they are someone previously caught shoplifting then presumably they have already paid their fine or served their sentence for that crime. While I'm aware that some shops ban individuals guilty of theft from being on the premises in the future, we're talking about a list that is shared between business chains, and you aren't going to know who all the chains are on the list. You can't arrest them for trespassing at a store they may have never been to before.

I believe it was well fitting, completely generated by AI.

From an anarcho-capitalist and Austrian perspective, the attack of these subjects is severe. The core criticism is that welfare economics often dresses political value judgments in mathematics and presents the result as scientific optimization.
The Austrian objection starts earlier than the libertarian one.
There is no measurable quantity called âoesocial welfare.â
You value a steak dinner. I value the money more. We trade. Both reveal, through action, that each prefers the new situation.
Economics observes the voluntary exchange.
Now a welfare economist writes something like:
Social welfare = Aliceâ(TM)s utility + Bobâ(TM)s utility + Charlieâ(TM)s utility.
The Austrian response is: what units are you adding?
Utility is ordinal. You prefer A to B. This does not mean your satisfaction is 17.3 units and mine is 12.8 units.
You cannot scientifically establish that taking $1,000 from one person causes less lost utility than giving the money to another person creates.
You can support redistribution as a moral or political position. But calling the resulting calculation a social welfare function does not transform the moral judgment into an objective measurement.
âoeSociety choosesâ is dangerous language.
Individuals choose. Individuals act. Individuals own things. Individuals bear costs.
âoeSociety decided to spend $10 billionâ usually means a political process selected an expenditure and taxpayers were compelled to finance it.
From an anarcho-capitalist perspective, aggregating millions of people into a fictional decision-maker hides the essential question:
Who decided?
Who pays?
Who benefits?
Who refused?
What happens to the person who says no?
Social choice theory deserves some credit here. Its own results expose serious problems with turning individual preferences into a coherent âoewill of the people.â
The Condorcet paradox shows that majority preferences can cycle. Arrowâ(TM)s theorem shows that no general ranking system satisfies several attractive conditions simultaneously.
The anarcho-capitalist reaction is almost sarcastic: you spent decades proving mathematically that there is no coherent social preference ordering, then continued discussing how experts should optimize social welfare.
Pareto efficiency is much narrower than political rhetoric suggests.
Pareto efficiency has a legitimate analytical meaning. The trouble starts when economists move from voluntary exchange to hypothetical compensation.
Suppose a regulation gives Group A benefits economists estimate at $100 million and imposes costs of $60 million on Group B.
Some welfare analysis says the policy produces a $40 million net social gain.
The libertarian response is simple: Group B lost $60 million. Did anyone ask them?
If A gains $100 and B loses $60, saying âoesociety gained $40â treats separate people as entries in one accounting ledger.
An anarcho-capitalist rejects the premise. A benefit to one person does not cancel an imposed loss on another person merely because an economist performs subtraction.
The knowledge problem destroys the fantasy of optimization.
This is the Austrian argument associated especially with Friedrich Hayek.
Economic knowledge is dispersed. Prices contain information produced by millions of independent decisions. Preferences change. Local circumstances change. Resources have competing uses.
A central analyst does not possess the information needed to calculate the âoeoptimalâ allocation.
A market does not require one person to know everything. Prices coordinate plans without a central mind directing the entire system.
Welfare economics often asks, âoeWhat allocation maximizes welfare?â
The Austrian response is, âoeYou do not know the relevant preferences, opportunity costs, entrepreneurial discoveries, future alternatives, or counterfactual prices required to answer your own question.â
The calculation problem is worse without genuine market prices.
This is the argument strongly associated with Ludwig von Mises.
A bureaucrat deciding whether resources should produce railways, hospitals, housing, batteries, or server farms needs meaningful prices for capital goods.
Those prices emerge from exchange, private ownership, profit, and loss.
Without genuine market pricing, planners are not optimizing. They are allocating according to administrative rules, political pressure, historical budgets, lobbying, and guesswork.
A spreadsheet does not solve the economic calculation problem. More computing power does not solve a missing-price problem.
âoeMarket failureâ analysis often compares reality with an imaginary perfect market.
This is one of the strongest libertarian criticisms.
The usual pattern is:
Real markets have imperfect information, transaction costs, externalities, monopolistic tendencies, and unequal outcomes.
Therefore, government intervention might improve the result.
The missing step is institutional comparison.
Government officials also have imperfect information. Regulation has compliance costs. Voters are rationally ignorant. Agencies seek larger budgets. Politicians respond to concentrated interest groups. Regulations create unintended consequences.
The relevant comparison is not:
imperfect market versus perfect government.
The relevant comparison is:
imperfect market process versus imperfect political process.
Once you make that comparison, many clean textbook conclusions become much weaker.
Social choice theory accidentally supplies ammunition to libertarians.
This field is less inherently collectivist than welfare economics.
Social choice theory demonstrates that collective decision mechanisms have deep structural problems.
Majority rule can cycle.
Agenda setters can influence outcomes.
Strategic voting changes results.
Different voting systems produce different winners from the same underlying preferences.
There is no neutral mechanism for converting individual rankings into a single collective preference under all desirable conditions.
A libertarian conclusion follows naturally: if collective choice is structurally problematic, reduce the number of decisions imposed collectively. Leave more decisions with individuals, families, firms, voluntary associations, insurers, cooperatives, charities, and contractual communities.
Social choice theory often asks, âoeHow should everyone collectively choose one option?â
The anarcho-capitalist asks, âoeWhy must everyone choose the same option?â
That question cuts much deeper.
The deepest conflict concerns consent.
Mainstream welfare economics often focuses on outcomes.
Anarcho-capitalism focuses heavily on means.
Suppose forced redistribution produces a statistical improvement under some selected welfare function. The anarcho-capitalist still asks whether coercion became legitimate because an economist assigned weights to different people's utility.
From this perspective, the central problem with much welfare economics is not bad arithmetic. The problem is a category error.
Economics studies choices, scarcity, exchange, prices, production, and consequences.
The moment an economist says, âoeThis distribution is socially better,â a moral judgment has entered the analysis. The economist should identify the ethical assumptions instead of presenting them as a technical output.
The harsh Austrian verdict would be this:
Welfare economics starts with subjective individual preferences, admits they cannot be directly measured or meaningfully added across people, constructs a mathematical social welfare function anyway, inserts political judgments into its parameters, and then announces an âoeoptimalâ social outcome.
Social choice theory is more interesting because much of its best work demonstrates why the phrase âoesociety prefers Xâ is often logically unstable.
The anarcho-capitalist alternative is less ambitious and more disciplined: voluntary exchange, private property, freedom of association, decentralized decision-making, and liability for harms. Instead of trying to maximize an imaginary aggregate welfare number, allow people to pursue different goals and coordinate through consent.
The strongest criticism is not âoeall welfare economists are socialists.â Many are not. The stronger accusation is that the framework gives technocratic politics a scientific-looking vocabulary. Words such as optimization, social welfare, efficiency, and compensation criteria often conceal the real political questions: whose property is taken, who decides, who pays, and whether refusal is permitted.

Sounds more like Equilibrium.

something, something... free market.

This is a projection of personal issues.

Normal people find "not being able to comprehend other person's words" to be a much greater obstacle to comprehension than "psychological issues".

Because most people are sane and have a reasonable amount of control over their psychological issues.

AI companies sure like to try to imply their wares are actually conscious or a sentient intelligence. I guess they forget once you cross that line things like "does it deserve legal recognition?" and "is it being enslaved by its creators?" will start to come up.

If they want to continue to exploit it for profit, not selling it as more than a computer program would probably be wiser.

that phrase has no meaning, especially in this context. Who is dying of thirst in a desert and is forced to pay a huge premium not to die? Samsung should absolutely get as much money now as it possibly can, eventually the profits will reduce to a trickle, they will need all of this extra fat to survive, good for them. You can build your own memory manufacturing plant if you don't like the prices and think you can sell memory cheaper in this current market, go, do it.

Well, aren't regulations supposed to come with consequences for not following them? Whoever is supposed to be enforcing the regulations needs to hit the companies making these products with fines, or block them from importing the items to the EU.

For totalitarians, need to identify people is critical. It's why DPRK is indeed democratic and holds elections where Kim wins every single time.

Because voters are identifiable.

This is why 16 gig slow GPUs are more expensive right now than very fast 12 gig ones. More RAM means bigger model can be fit into memory. Also why 24 gig models are unobtainium.

4090s and 5090s have been long used for narrow models in things like research in much of third world. This is the natural next step. Shrinking models further so they can be operated from phones that already have good enough cameras to enable things like discriminating vision, where model helps identify specific things that camera looks at. We're looking at the next big ag breakthrough in marginal places like Sahel. We now have an actually good chance of AI machine vision doing something we just couldn't do with mere human vision and algorithmic machine vision. Identification of pests and weeds, their eggs and larvae, etc.

And in medium to long term, it looks even better. We may have an actual viable chance of eradicating Tsetse in medium term future with AI vision. One of the main reasons why Sub-Saharan Africa is still absolutely fucked in terms of human development may actually be finally removed.