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Notes -
Scott: Highlights from the comments on British economic decline.
I’m interested particularly as a follow up to my discussion with @FirmWeird. Here we have an economy that struggles, where the citizens recognize it struggles, but the standard indicators look normal. I wanted to see if this would show up in the energy metrics we were discussing, but this data stops too early to say.
I really expect to see its energy per capita tank. Wealth getting swallowed up in housing has to push down energy consumption, at least compared to capital investment. I don’t think the UK has had anything like the shale boom distorting its cost per BTU, either.
Marginal Revolution linked to this on Britain today. Honestly felt like creating a post on it since I thought it added good points since UK failing is the current thing.
https://www.sambowman.co/p/britain-is-a-developing-country
Honestly a cheaper currency shouldn’t be causing their electricity and home building prices to blow out. Each would seem to have some influences from imports but they probably get a lot of their building products internally or from Europe which also has had its currency cheapen.
His thesis is England is no longer on the technology frontier. Looking at this data does make me thing England is sort of the poors now to be a little hot. They need a lot of reform.
The relative wages shown between England and low end US labor seems appalling. If I was English and rich and wanted to wake up my country I’d start running fake ads advertising cleaning labor jobs in America at relatively high wages. Could be a good political ad. “Come to America and be a janitor so you can send remittance home”.
The same is true for almost all Western Europe, it’s not a UK-specific problem.
And from the article you link:
Clearly this is not a smart man, as AI is vastly more significant than even either of the above.
Other than tail-end optimists and pessimists, who actually believes this with such conviction?
After all, AI has yet to bring forth productivity gains of similar magnitude to electricity and steam engines. I do believe it will happen, but not with 100% confidence.
It brings to me. Lately my job is just - I need this kind of sql for this type of db. I use it as typist that I just error check.
Really? As much as.. electricity? I don't know if you are underestimating electricity or overestimating llms. I too have not written much code in the recent past (gpt did), but I think electricity aids out productivity in a thousand other ways than just being a typist.
Electricity with information theory. Pure electricity is only good for making things spin and heat. It's when we harnessed it to move and process information that it became transformative. Also those kind of inventions are like a pyramid. Of course without the bottom layer the tops are impossible.
I am bullish on LLM - so far in humanity advancement the bottleneck was the human mind and energy. Right now there is possibility to be able to overcome the mind part.
I agree with your broader point, but... cheap indoor lighting and washing machines were transformative.
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