For example, the total amount of wealth in the world is about 250 trillion USD according to Credit Suisse. There are about 7.5 billion people in the world today. 250T/7.5B = 33,333 USD per person. This really isn't that much wealth per person. So the total amount in existence still needs to increase dramatically.
Partially related to this, but my parents live in a village on the Lower Danube (the second largest river in Europe, after the Volga). I remember that when I was a kid (in the '80s) you had no problems catching enough fish during a day in order to feed a family of 3 or 4 if you wanted, and even sell something on the side for some extra cash (not much, but it mattered). I remember my uncle telling me that back when he was a kid (the '70s) the fish resources were even more plentiful, as in whenever the river was flooding the marshland-like areas he and his friends would go in there and catch the fish using their bare hands.
Nowadays you can barely catch a fish. Some former colleagues of mine spent an entire day trying to catch something in the Danube and at the end they hadn't catch anything (bare in mind, they were using more modern tools compared to what people were using back in the '70s and '80s). The struggle is real.
1st, you do realize that you include babies and elderly in that 7.5B?
2nd, you do realize that if we were living like touaregs instead of north americans we would all feel like f'ing rich with $30k?
3rd, and, spinning this back to social partnership, we could very well live in a world with no money, or at least a society in which money is not the only measure of contribution (i.e. where narcissistic douches like the donald wouldn't be seen as useful contributors).
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I like my central heat and air conditioning, and Netflix, and Spotify, and my comfortable and spacious car, and my ability to use air transport, and the restaurants that exist to serve me delicious food, etc...
Come now, we're human beings! The world is our domain! We should be working to create more things for more people, not settling for less!
Living well and living sustainably are both important, we don't have to sacrifice one for the other.
And then you talk about living sustainable. Well buckle up, your lifestyle, and mine--I dunno for sure, since you mention Netflix and traveling I assume you are a relatively normal middle-class or upper-middle class westerner--are going bye bye. It simply does not scale to 7.5 billion people, so we are all are either going to have check out early without having kids or find a way to maintain our lifestyles using less energy, less food, less travel, and overall fewer goods, and then explain to our kids how they are going to have make do with even less than that.
The fantasy of a tech utopia run by machines on sustainable energy and the environment being all rosy like in the movies is just not going to happen. Unless we invent the Matrix--in which case, we'll all probably gladly enter it.
Pointless statement because you are anthropomorphizing the planet. The only way the plan ceases to exist is if we manage to blow it up. Otherwise it's fine. Be more precise in your words.
>the ocean is full of trash
Again, it's not full. Don't be hyperbolic when convincing someone of an argument.
>It simply does not scale to 7.5 billion people
There is no evidence of this. The lifestyle of a vegan westerner who does not travel frequently scales extremely well.
If by 'sustainably' you mean some hand-wavy 'no impact to anything on the planet' then no, we cannot. We will certainly need to farm a lot and that takes land which will displace something.
Also, the ecosystem of the planet itself is not sustainable because of the competitive and evolutionary nature of life. Even without humans, animals and plants continually go extinct and have mass extinction events and yet life continues.
The Earth isn't a being with a utility function, you can't have a beneficial or harmful impact on it, only on people who attach positive or negative value to certain conditions on the Earth.
If everyone were a doctor that skill would be worthless. People are (mostly) paid according to the amount of value they bring to a company. That value is relative to others in the industry. Knowing how to competently use Microsoft Office (which puts you ahead of 99% of the world population) gets you nowhere in a AI focused startup because it doesn't make you more valuable to them.
>I'm not sure wealth per person is a great way to measure economic prosperity. If you have lots of wealth, does that necessarily translate to more income down the line?
I totally agree with you here. The metric I think matters more is relative wealth. Say you are a software developer making $120,000: in the Silicon Valley that is about average, but in Kentucky that is three times what the average person makes. So in SV you live a "normal" life, but in Kentucky you are decidedly upper class.
I am ambivalent about the relative wealth. I think it is fair and helps, up to a certain level, but globally, money attracts money, which means that certain people, with certain background and certain jobs would be deemed worth leaving in California. And this relative wealth-based system is already in place (e.g. designers in Cuppertino, IT in N. Dakota, assembler in Shenzhen).
The point you made was 100% correct, but that wasn't my meaning. I said right out of med school because I meant to focus on the problem in terms of cash flow - you can be in heaps of debt but still be well off. If the world were in huge amounts of debt (negative wealth) it seems like it could still be well off.
They been sayin' this since the wheel, methinks!
Jesus said, "The poor will always be with you." Not being a Christian, I still see the wisdom in this statement.
In wealth-oriented societies, rich people have been fighting a war to get rid of poor people since the beginning of time--throw them in jail, lock them in ghettos, deport them, wall them out. The structural change needed is in people's attitudes, society's values, not our technology.
It's getting worse, not better, and the more hopes we pin on our techno-fantasy, the harder the crash is going to be.
Would only quibble in that it's not getting rid of them that's the general goal, but leveraging them for their own benefit (which in some cases might involve the former).
I believe we have yet to fully appreciate the ability of a developed economy to produce jobs and work for people to do. Even if we automate the entirety of the food production, mining and energy generation industries, new forms of work will spring up to absorb anyone that may have been displaced by automation.
Whenever some work is automated, people insert themselves on top of that layer of production to form a new layer. This process continues ad infinitum. At least that's been the case for the entire history of organized human society.
If machines are doing everything, and I’m not taking resources away from anyone else, why should I work?
It's easy to just say machines will take care of everything. That is a long stretch from it actually happening and I think there are many fundamental problems you'd encounter trying to achieve that. Just looking for books, novels, whatever that might explore the idea a lot further.
Accountants, corporate lawyers, clerks, receptionists, schedulers... so many jobs that will either be eliminated or made so that 1 person can do the work of 20, leading to outsourcing and consolidation.
'First they came for the accountants, but I did not speak out because they were paying me really well to design weak AI to replace the accountants...'
The 1 in 20 left - is so clearly going to happen to that profession - I suspect they'll be hit harder than truck drivers.
Once you get every symptom, every generic fingerprint, every prescription and every outcome for a decade in to a TensorFlow model - it's going to smash current results.
It won't be guessing at 100mg or 200mg, it will be prescribing 127mg/day for first week, and 122mg/day for the second - a year later it will bring that advice down to 126.
On the other hand a RL system that pokes and prods a living persons brain with electrified needles and uses a conv net to watch for feedback from the resulting facial expressions is completely possible -- with enough training experience anybody could convince me of anything using it. One 30 second session to ensure a lifetime of compliance and happiness -- the promotional material can have a guy drinking a glass Kool-Aid with a look of tranquil bliss on his face.
And sure, you can make the argument that charts and graphs themselves will not end poverty. But your missing the point. You should be asking what arguments you can make with those charts. They are often made to help you make a decision. Like everything, finding small improvements will help us understand what is working and what isn't. And with that information we can build better systems with the goal of reducing poverty.
[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-i... [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK2659/ [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/09/08/...
It's clear that analytics creates knowledge, but from what I've seen that knowledge isn't always helpful.
It really must be judged on a case by case basis, but analytics often just confirms what we've already known or suspected. We already know that mental illness is responsible for homelessness. The utility of additional analytics here is probably marginal. What is needed are treatments and cures for mental illness itself.
In order to bring about structural change of the scale needed to end poverty, we need to reach levels of technology, productivity and social organization that we have not yet reached today. We will not ascend to this level by analyzing some set of socio-economic data. We will reach this point by building machines that can do work for us and automating entire supply chains so that labor no longer impacts production costs.