Julian Seidenberg

[Julian Seidenberg @candidasa4]

I did this talk yesterday at the Loft Yoga Lounge in Auckland.
“Why are you here? Four Motivations for Spiritual Growth”
https://t.co/gxpk7pOH7W

[Julian Seidenberg @candidasa4]

@hnshah Yes, but ChatGPT can also tell you about the content of other conversations that are not in the same thread. There must be some RAG built in for that. Or some tool use to enable loading in a summary from other conversations.

[Julian Seidenberg @candidasa4]

@sama Finally. Thanks

[Julian Seidenberg @candidasa4]

@elonmusk @SciGuySpace @raikohtech Without a change in human consciousness, the same short-sighted greedy tribal consciousness that afflicts current humans will also afflict humans on Mars, resulting in all the same problems. In addition to building Starship we should be developing enlightened human consciousness

[Julian Seidenberg @candidasa4]

@bryan_johnson What about Vitamin D?

[Julian Seidenberg @candidasa4]

@JDVanceNewsX 👍🏽

[Julian Seidenberg @candidasa4]

@TuckerCNews 👍🏽

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

Why AI Won't Cause Unemployment

Marc Andreessen
Reposted Jan 24, 2025

"In retrospect, I wish I had known more about the hazards and difficulties of [running] a business." -- George McGovern

Fears about new technology replacing human labor and causing overall unemployment have raged across industrialized societies for hundreds of years, despite a nearly continual rise in both jobs and wages in capitalist economies. The jobs apocalypse is always right around the corner; just ask the Luddites.

We had two such anti-technology jobs moral panics in the last 20 years — “outsourcing” enabled by the Internet in the 2000’s, and “robots” in the 2010’s. The result was the best national and global economy in human history in pre-COVID 2019, with the most jobs at the highest wages ever.

Now we’re heading into the third such panic of the new century with AI, coupled with a continuous drumbeat of demand for Communist-inspired Universal Basic Income. “This time is different; AI is different,” they say, but is it?

Normally I would make the standard arguments against technologically-driven unemployment — see good summaries by Henry Hazlitt (chapter 7) and Frédéric Bastiat (his metaphor directly relevant to AI). And I will come back and make those arguments soon. But I don’t even think the standand arguments are needed, since another problem will block the progress of AI across most of the economy first.

Which is: AI is already illegal for most of the economy, and will be for virtually all of the economy.

How do I know that? Because technology is already illegal in most of the economy, and that is becoming steadily more true over time.

How do I know that? Because, [see chart].

This chart shows price changes, adjusted for inflation, across a dozen major sectors of the economy.

As you can see, we actually live in two different economies.

The lines in blue are the sectors where technological innovation is allowed to push down prices while increasing quality. The lines in red are the sectors where technological innovation is not permitted to push down prices; in fact, the prices of education, health care, and housing as well as anything provided or controlled by the government are going to the moon, even as those sectors are technologically stagnant.

We are heading into a world where a flat screen TV that covers your entire wall costs $100, and a four year college degree costs $1 million, and nobody has anything even resembling a proposal on how to systemically fix this.

Why? The sectors in red are heavily regulated and controlled and bottlenecked by the government and by those industries themselves. Those industries are monopolies, oligopolies, and cartels, with extensive formal government regulation as well as regulatory capture, price fixing, Soviet style price setting, occupational licensing, and every other barrier to improvement and change you can possibly imagine. Technological innovation in those sectors is virtually forbidden now.

Whereas the sectors in blue are less regulated, technology whips through them, pushing down prices and raising quality every year.

Note the emotional loading of the interplay of production and consumption here. What do we get mad about? With our consumer hat on, we get mad about price increases — the red sectors. With our producer hat on, we get mad about technological disruption — the blue sectors. Well, pick one; as this chart shows, you can’t have your cake and eat it too.

Now think about what happens over time. The prices of regulated, non-technological products rise; the prices of less regulated, technologically-powered products fall. Which eats the economy? The regulated sectors continuously grow as a percentage of GDP; the less regulated sectors shrink. At the limit, 99% of the economy will be the regulated, non-technological sectors, which is precisely where we are headed.

Therefore AI cannot cause overall unemployment to rise, even if the Luddite arguments are right this time. AI is simply already illegal across most of the economy, soon to be virtually all of the economy.

[Julian Seidenberg @candidasa4]

@bryan_johnson Have you looked into saffron to help with brain health?

[Hon Judith Collins KC @JudithCollinsKC]

It is incredibly important that Universities should be bastions of free speech without people being subject to ‘cancellation’ if their stated views do not ally to ‘perceived wisdom’. Strengthening Free Speech in Universities | https://t.co/fH1X6IBmLT https://t.co/zbPfbXOtl9

[Alvaro Cintas @dr_cintas]

OpenAI has released a new o1 prompting guide.

It emphasizes simplicity, avoiding chain-of-thought prompts, and the use of delimiters.

Here’s the guide and an optimized prompt to have it write like you:

[Julian Seidenberg @candidasa4]

@sama You have a right to perform your prescribed duty, but you are not entitled to the fruits of action. Never consider yourself the cause of the results of your activities, and never be attached to not doing your duty.

https://t.co/LTqL45GX6h

[Julian Seidenberg @candidasa4]

@sama More important than any technological solution is reforming the corrupt bio-pharmaceutical complex that has captured the media and government and has burnt any trust and credibility they might once have had.

[Julian Seidenberg @candidasa4]

@lexfridman @benshapiro @TheOmniLiberal What metric do they both favour for measuring the success of the country? Some options: GDP, Gross National Happiness (Bhutan's metric), US Hegemony, Lobbyist Happiness, Gun Deaths, Life Expectancy, Mental Health, Trust in Institutions (https://t.co/Zf5lZjrS7E), Drug Overdoses...

[Julian Seidenberg @candidasa4]

@lexfridman @benshapiro @TheOmniLiberal How about this: How can the left and right come together, discuss, and reach agreement via compromise, rather than inflame each other and head towards civil war?

[Nat Torkington @gnat]

A 🧵 on dissent, social tension, vaccination, infinite games, and YouTube chucklefucks.

Sorry not sorry, I had to get it off my chest.

[Julian Seidenberg @candidasa4]

@atpfm in Ep 438 you talked about “big camera” file import workflows. I work for Narrative, we make software specifically to solve the import and photo selection process with AI assisting the user and a lightning quick UI. You might find it useful. https://t.co/COfzuIOTSN

[Brightstar @BrightstarNZ]

Join us at Advancing Digital & IT Law conference this November! Learn how to comply with New Zealand’s tech laws and regulations from legal experts and experienced sector leaders including Chris Webb, Hayley Miller and Julian Seidenberg.
Learn more: https://t.co/gSmN4Mz9RO

[@[email protected] @aurynn]

To refer to the 10x engineer nonsense, I have now started to use the even sillier `10x ninja rock wizard`

[Julian Seidenberg @candidasa4]

@SoftSkillsEng Google study shows that the 7 most important skills for employees are soft skills https://t.co/nwhDOr4mid