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An article is making the rounds on rat-adjacent twitter entitled "The Nerdy Escorts Cashing In On Silicon Valley’s AI Boom."
I can't bypass the paywall, but someone posted on X:
I know that aella, the famous rationalist whorelord, popularized this niche of pseudo-intellectual prostitutes appealing to rationalists and other tech nerds for extreme amounts of money. It's obvious that aella has become obscenely wealthy and gained a ton of social status from her pursuits, but I'm still somewhat shocked at the sheer amount these women are making.
I work a pretty boring, standard corporate marketing job, and apparently these prostitutes are taking home almost my entire after-tax yearly income in one weekend.
Even regardless of the moral aspect of the situation, the fact that a prostitute can make so much money is a huge slap in the face to people working hard for a living. That, combined with the fact that close to 18% of the economy is now in healthcare, has got me a bit depressed on the economy.
Also, Tyler Cowen had a bit of a viral moment yesterday saying he wouldn't be surprised if 15 to 20% of all jobs in the near future are elder care. This of course sandwiched in a talk where he insists AI is great and making jobs not losing them!
Anyway, all of this recent discourse combined is making me feel more and more like a retarded schmuck for working a 'real job,' as opposed to just leeching off the government, doing some sort of NGO/media grift, or even just getting a random remote job and going to live cheap in Thailand or some other extremely cheap country. And this is someone who has a pretty chill office job where I don't have to work too hard, and get to work from home a few days a week. I can't imagine how people who actually bust their asses in physical labor and make less than me feel!
Either way, the optimism from the pundit class around AI and the economy is feeling more and more hollow to me by the day. If the numbers keep going up but everyone is employed wiping the asses of boomers and sexually pleasuring tech AI millionaires, have we really improved society? How will things go otherwise without some sort of relatively radical disruption? I try not to be a 'doomer' about AI, but I'm increasingly finding it hard to be optimistic on the impact of it on society.
I work in elder care myself - can you expand on why you feel negatively about it? I tend to agree that it would be bad for a huge proportion of the population to be involved in it, and that mostly relates to concerns about the birth rate and demographics, but insofar as the elderly population is growing, needing more people to look after them seems inevitable. Lifespans are increasing and medical care is improving, so the number of elderly people is also going to increase.
Unless one wants to bite the bullet and say that increased life expectancies are bad, and it would be better if more people died at 70, there are going to be more elderly people, and through no moral failing of anybody, they will need care. What is your preferred response?
Have more controls on provision of medical care to the elderly when it's not passing any cost/benefit calculation especially on public purse. Bump the retirement age substantially upwards for public assistance since an increasingly vanishing minority are working jobs with any real physical toll.
If you want to self-fund your tilting with death sure but incentives are currently massively misaligned
Should we distinguish between medical care, and elder care in general? It's often somewhat blurry, since aged care facilities are at least partially medicalised, but I am thinking about people in their 80s and up who, for example, need assistance showering and toileting, who cannot make their own meals, who need to be accompanied for walks or activities due to high falls risk, who might be on anti-depressants or some other prescription to help cope with cognitive decline and need assistance taking their medication on schedule, and so on.
I would hope we can agree that people in that vulnerable condition should be cared for. Alternatives like "letting them die", or "trusting that families can always take care of them (they can't)", or even something truly drastic and inhumane like "euthanasia for everyone at 75" are going to either produce tremendous innocent suffering, or are radically contrary to most people's moral instincts.
It seems to me that firstly we want some sort of system to provide care for vulnerable elders, secondly we want that system to be well-funded and not an excessive drain on the public purse, and thirdly we want people to work in that system and provide the required care. Of these, the difficult, controversial part is the second one. Maybe tinkering around things like the retirement age is a reasonable step to take; I'm not particularly inclined to argue if you want to bump the retirement age up a year or two. Australia recently bumped it up to 67. There was that recent dispute about this in France.
But I also wanted to say, in response to ThomasDelVasto's comment about "wiping the asses of boomers", that I think that aged care is a necessary and honourable profession.
I'm not convinced this really is a solvable problem.
Lifespan has increased without meaningfully increasing the amount of healthy years. Age of retirement can be raised a bit but we're starting to hit hard limits of what is possible (at least for the general population, some jobs can be done by some groups of elderly more reliably).
It isn't really a problem insurance or redistribution can solve because this is something that happens to everyone and welfare states are already stretched to the limit and running massive deficits. This is a demographic and biological problem, not a redistribute one.
A stop gap measure is probably increasing the retirement age where possible and cutting back on non-essential elderly entitlements but at some point we have to ask ourselves what we're doing here.
Let's say we treated this as savings instead and people got a an account of money at retirement that they can spend on healthcare, assisted living and pension; what do we do when that money runs out? That's the situation we're getting into societally, regardless of whether we have insurance based or socialised systems.
We have no treatment for aging so no-one is getting out of this alive, and that is something we as a modern society have to come to terms with. Our current attitude is more than a little childish, imo.
Hopefully AGI really comes and solves aging for us or this is going to get ugly.
We don't need to solve aging, we just need to automate enough work that good living standards can be maintained despite a shrinking and aging population. Like does it really matter if the seniors at a nursing home get their food cooked by a sweaty 16 year old vs a (possibly even higher and more consistent quality) automated cooking machine? Does it really matter if the medical treatment and analysis they get is done by (possibly even higher and more consistent quality) machines and not extensive human labor?
Not really.
In many sectors "build another machine" is already far more efficient than throwing another human laborer in (to the point some run lights out/near lights out), so birthrates and youth stop mattering for them as much. As we automate more and more, this will become increasingly true of the general economy.
That would be nice but I'll believe it when I see it.
I cleverly used examples that we already have (at least to some degree).
Automated food production? Already the case for many steps and products, both at the farms themselves, and in preparing/packaging/etc. Combine this with self driving trucks (self driving cars are already looking better than humans like with Waymo, probably not too long for the trucking industry to start getting more automated) and even stuff like drone deliveries from store to house, and maybe in 20-30 years there will barely be any humans involved in getting food from the fields to your home. Heck, you might not even be a part of that process, COVID has made grocery deliveries really cheap and I use them from time to time and that's with human drivers still not the drones yet.
Medical care? Ok sure a lot of it will remain human, patients will want a human doctor to talk to and a human nurse to look after them but automation is already here and getting better. In all sorts of ways even. Like I got a sleep study recently and all the devices they put on me could read my pulse, detect my breathing, etc without a human monitor. And an auto generated report from what I can tell! Yes a human was there to set it up and look over it, and an expert looked the results and the report but it was mostly technology.
Heck technology even makes a lot of things possible that wouldn't be before. Consider the sleep study again and how they had constant monitoring of my pulse and breathing and oxygen levels. A human doctor, even if they taped their end of a stethoscope to me and listened all night long wouldn't be able to record with nearly as much accuracy as the machine can.
Now of course, automation still has a long way to go. But given the miracles we have already achieved and the amazing standards of living we already get from it, I don't think we should be so doubtful.
Heck one of the only reasons why automation hasn't already solved the crisis is that our living standards keep ratcheting up to match the increase in productivity. Like we're at the point where internet is being considered a basic human right despite most not even having it ~30-40 years ago. Imagine going back to the 1980s and telling people the Internet will be considered a human right. Many would be like "whats the internet?". That's how much we've ratcheted.
You realise of course that even with these inventions we're falling further behind, as does the derivative and in some places even the second order derivative.
The scale of the improvements are not commensurate with the worsening dependency ratios.
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True. I have more faith in the Chinese having the will and the ingenuity to actually accomplish this but the current meta in the West is awash with so much inefficiency and stupidity that it cannot last without alterations.
I'm sure a better scalable approach to eldercare exists but the current trajectory seems ill equipped to arrive there
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