Shirayuki3
new account for Shirayuki2
User ID: 4553
Shirayuki3
5d ago
It's entirely possible that the current culture shifts considerably now that anti-earthquake tech has got good enough that you can broadly assume buildings are going to hang around for 100 years.
You could well be right, but when and how much these things shift is of course impossible to predict.
The obvious examples that comes to mind are pork taboos; the cultural taboo against eating pork in many cultures and religions has lasted well beyond the actual danger of eating pork.
Shirayuki3
5d ago
If the Nobel Prize is any indication, they'll probably keep awarding them, but much like modern scientific Nobels they'll become increasingly divorced from being awarded for the flashes of brilliance of individual people, and lean towards being awarded to people at the head of massive agglomerations of capital.
People just really like venerating figureheads and leaders, and I doubt this will ever change.
Shirayuki3
5d ago
To me, it's kind of like asking what happens if an amateur managed to prove the Riemann hypothesis or a billionaire self-funded a cure to Alzheimers; perhaps it's possible in theory, but in practice if it was so easy it would already have been done.
We can see that even pre-AI the romantic idea of another Ramanujan arising from outside the establishment was risible in reality, and now post-AI all of the most significant advances are being made with the contribution of some of the smartest mathematicians in the world backed by internal models and enormous amounts of compute; I see no reason for this trend not to continue.
In some senses it's not really all that surprising. It's already impossible to push the frontier in biology or physics without significant amounts of capital backing and a decade of training to even begin to understand a tiny fraction of the existing frontier; mathematicians will just have to deal with this reality as well. The fields medal is kind of a symbol of the mathematical fetish of youth and the lone genius, which AI is now killing for good; see Terence Tao on the end of the age of heroes.
Shirayuki3
5d ago
Well, the point is that culture shapes economics and politics.
Anglo people (and many other cultures e.g Chinese) view housing as an investment and hence over time laws are shaped around this preference e.g strict zoning laws to keep property values high and the population happy. To the extent that boomers are at fault it's because most are homeowners, but millennial homeowners have all the same impulses.
Japanese people don't value housing as an investment as much, and so the economy and politics are less captured by the interests of homeowners. It's not to say that this is perfect e.g Chinese investment into Tokyo has become a hot topic lately, and urban land is fundamentally scarce, but it's clearly a lot better than whatever Anglo society is doing in this regard.
Shirayuki3
6d ago
Is every developed country implementing PHP?
Tokyo (and Japan more generally) doesn't implement PHP. Houses are culturally considered depreciating goods that are worthless after a few decades, and zoning is extremely liberal compared to all other developed countries.
To some extent you're correct, part of the problem is just urbanization, and inevitably lots of money chasing physically limited space drives up the price. The best areas of Tokyo are still extraordinarily expensive despite every pro-development policy possible and significant amounts of Japanese housing would be considered unlivable by American standards.
Despite this, there's clearly a massive difference in house price growth between Anglo PHP major metros where prices have been exploding, and Tokyo where growth has been much more sedate in comparison; even within the States, the difference between Austin and SF is palpable.
Shirayuki3
6d ago
How would that look?
Probably much like it does right now, a mathematical priestly caste who spend their lives training to understand and disseminate the arcane knowledge of frontier mathematics.
Even prior to AI, modern pure mathematics was already impenetrable to 99.99% of the population, and even mathematicians of different disciplines mostly struggled to understand each other's work.
Now that we have AI it's really no different; nearly everyone has no ability to even approach the starting line of understanding the superb works of the AI, and it's mostly through the lens of mathematicians that we assign value and meaning to the new results. I don't see why such a dynamic can't continue once the mathematicians manage to reconstruct their shattered egos.
Shirayuki3
7d ago
In our current situation, a better adaptation for those outside the ranks of the elites might be to blame everything on the rich and to scare the living shit out of them until they give up their resources.
The American and French fiscal problems are not because the rich are hoarding too many resources. Primarily they're being caused by the fact that spending is out of control because every interest group needs a cut to secure their votes in a democracy, and it's politically intractable to cut back entitlements to the base once they've been offered.
To the extent that every elite billionaire got fully expropriated at the full paper value of their assets, and without considering any of the obvious second-order effects that this would cause, neither France nor America could fund their current level of spending for even a year longer; much like the NBA players who end up going broke, you can always spend more money no matter how much you make.
To he degree that I have any socialist tendencies, they are purely selfish -- I'm not primarily concerned with what economic system is more moral or is better for the majority of people.
If AI really does unlock infinite labour and productivity, then sure, I'll be alongside you in the socialist protest lines for whatever good it'd do. Clearly we're very far from that point in the current state of the world though, and rampant welfarism is what's actually breaking the backs of pretty much every modern democracy.
not because they haven't been obsoleted. They have.
Well, what does it mean to be obsoleted?
Viewed from one lens, chess players were obsoleted by DeepBlue and Go players by AlphaGo a long time ago. If you want the best chess sparring partner, your phone can trivially outclass the best humans alive without any reason to ever play another human being.
Viewed from another lens, human chess and go has been exploding in popularity over the last few years; there are likely many more people who play chess and go now when compared to two decades ago, and it would be ridiculous to claim the human acts of playing chess or go are obsoleted. In practice, the best human players are still high status and make a lot of money, while the overwhelming supremacy of Stockfish is free and generates almost no economic value.
For those who had dreams of being the greatest chess player on the planet or etching their name into history as the next Euler, then I'm sure losing to the computer is a blow to the ego, but realistically this wasn't on the table for the vast majority of even the best chess players or mathematicians alive, AI or not.
There's no reason why the human practice of mathematics can't reorient itself around the supremacy of AI while continuing to draw down salaries and playing petty academic status games; god knows none of it was any practical importance in the end.
Shirayuki3
15d ago
Red China has done it in the relatively recent past.
Public executions have a very lindy history in China, but my point was that even they abolished public executions well before live-streaming even existed. Even the Muslim nation states and North Korea that still carry out public executions don't livestream them for the gawking world at large to see, it's really only the cartels and jihadis that do that.
That being said, this is the reverse case to America, where many Chinese people would actually quite like to see public executions return, and in general the death penalty holds massive public support.
And there’s always streaming on X.
I would be moderately surprised if Elon would want an execution prominently streamed on X, but perhaps I'm wrong there.
While my preferred method of execution here would be hanging
Why do you prefer hanging, for the spectacle? As someone who does not support the death penalty, if it must be carried out, the firing squad seems like the best method in terms of lethality and dignity. Botched hangings are extraordinarily cruel, and of course lethal injection is both cruel and undignified.
Christian commenters have lamented what they see as the barbarity and vulgarity of the live-streaming aspect
Personally, I am concerned that the Trump administration will, yet again, find some way to botch the aesthetics of the occasion, reveling in low-class pandering and/or ostentatious cruelty.
If your goal is to RVTURN to lindy public executions, which I can at least understand the argument for, then jumping from zero to one thousand by breaking new ground in live-streaming the execution (which I believe has no precedent from an internationally recognized nation state, only via terrorists and cartels) as red meat for the base is obviously not the way to do it.
Many have warned that this will generate photogenic martyrdom propaganda that will inspire and energize future jihadists.
This is also just plainly obvious; public executions, before even bringing in the live-streaming aspect, are currently still well outside of the Overton window. It seems fairly clear that this will turn into a massively polarizing event amongst Americans and the developed world more broadly, while the actual jihadists will be the ones to benefit in finding common cause and a new martyr to rally around. It's clearly counterproductive in terms of actually winning in the marketplace of ideas.
There is also the possibility of visible corruption: perhaps viewers will need to pay for a bespoke streaming platform which will put revenue in the pockets of Trump, Trump’s family, or a consortium of Trump donors
I am somewhat morbidly curious how this is going to be streamed. I can't imagine any of the existing platforms wanting anything like this anywhere near them, but perhaps the administration will try and force them to bend the knee. Otherwise, as you say, it will probably be a bespoke streaming platform that's the stuff of nightmares.
Shirayuki3
18d ago
While AI continuing to be exceptional at mathematics doesn't particularly make me think that it's more likely that most/all labour is imminently automatable, I do agree with your point that if this is truly the case, there's really no point in trying to get rich to avoid dying on the streets when the 0.01% decide to mass unemploy the entire population or whatever. Coordination issues amongst the powers that be aside, it is obviously just not a stable equilibrium for the middle class to be unemployed and starving, while some dude who happened to own the right stocks at the right time is allowed to enjoy a nice lifestyle in perpetuity.
Either most everyone manages to secure material abundance via some combination of make-work and redistribution, which honestly already describes significant swathes of modern economies as you say, and having been rich perhaps confers some marginal status advantages and nothing more, or Something Happens that having a bunch of cash doesn't meaningfully insulate you from: e.g communist overthrow of the state (for real this time), violent state repression and expropriation of most the population, or AI loss of control where everyone dies.
I don't think I'm really all that sanguine re: the question of meaning though. The middle-class in developed countries are already mostly post-scarcity relative to a pre-industrial and a pre-computing basis in nearly all ways (the big exceptions would probably be in zero-sum usage of land and the decay of the body). Yet despite this, most people in the middle class are various flavors of miserable, generally aren't able to generate their own meaning ex nihilo, and mostly drive themselves mad via status comparison and/or the culture war.
If you thought hyper-partisan politics and status competition was bad in 2026, just wait until it's impossible to better your position via actual economic contribution, and the only way to access more resources, status and positional goods is to take it via the political process out of the arms of another. Even if the "utopian" world pans out, I frankly can't see this leading to anything but mass misery even if material needs are met in abundance.
I guess I'd say that like most things it's a spectrum rather than a binary; I know little about Texan culture (or the Hispanic culture that Texas is increasingly intertwining with) but I'd guess it's probably between SF and Japan in terms of treating housing as an investment, and thus the level of zoning also lies between SF and Japan in rigidity.
For sure I agree that high housing prices are poly-casual and not solely because of boomers or whatever; e.g geography, Houston can sprawl in all directions while the most expensive places in the world like SF and Hong Kong have to deal with mountains and ocean.
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