[mistercow]

I think there's a legitimate point to be made that it's a shame that the best way we've found to coordinate our resources to advance science and technology is capitalism. It's not like capitalism doesn't work, but if you envision a sort of "coordination oracle" which divides up resources ideally, and which everyone magically trusts, it seems pretty obvious that we would be advancing much more quickly.

But I also agree that there's not much point in dwelling on that point. So far, finding ways to leverage capitalism into solving problems has tended to be a lot more fruitful than looking for a replacement.

[Jack000]

Capitalism = greedy optimization with a Bayesian assumption. It tends to get stuck in local maxima and does weird things when the inputs are biased, but otherwise works ok.

There are almost certainly better ways to search the solution space, but most serious attempts attempts thus far have been non-sensical or impractical.

[Houshalter]

No one objects that capitalism isn't a good optimization processes. Just that it's optimizing the wrong utility function. At one point something like 50% of STEM majors at MIT went to work on wall street. And the ones that don't go there go to work making more efficient targeted advertisements or addictive smartphone games or other unethical shit.

Our population has a limited number of "smart people". I don't think any alien looking in from the outside, would think we are allocating them even remotely efficiently. It would be pretty difficult to design a system that does worse than ours on this aspect.

The solution isn't necessarily communism, but perhaps a hybrid. E.g. the government funds things capitalism has no incentive to optimize for, like scientific research.

[KGIII]

They may be smart, but they are still humans. You can't ethically assign them to career paths based on some vision of social good. That goes against the whole free agency thing and I'm pretty sure we've decided it's a horrible way to treat people.

That's well over the line into dictator territory. The results never match the predictions in the brochure. That's pretty much a sure fire way to get a tribunal convened at the Hague or a not-friendly visit from a SEAL team.

[Houshalter]

Capitalism already assigns people career paths. How is that any more ethical? Not many kids grow up saying "I want to work on Wall Street" or "I want to make better targeted advertising." They go into those careers because they offer piles of money, and the jobs they might want to do don't. We could fix that.

[KGIII]

No, it doesn't assign them, they choose them. Many people don't decide on a career path based on the greatest salary potential, but on things they enjoy, problems that interest them, and places they want to be.

We are humans, not unthinking machines.

[Houshalter]

I think empirically people do choose jobs because of money. Otherwise why would Wall Street firms pay so well to attract talent? Why would people go to work there if they didn't care about money?

[Jack000]

seems like we're basically in agreement. STEM majors working on ads are stuck at a local maxima.

On the other hand, humans are bad at predicting the future, so attempting to allocate resources perfectly is probably a waste of resources. see GPUs for video games, now used for deep learning - things that look trivial now might be important later on. If clicking ads gets us closer to AGI, maybe it's not so bad in the end.

[Houshalter]

It's not that it's a local maxima. There really isn't any economic incentive to care about investing in technologies that can't be turned into a profit in a few years. Capitalism is doing a fine job optimizing, it's just optimizing the wrong function.

>humans are bad at predicting the future, so attempting to allocate resources perfectly is probably a waste of resources.

It's hard to do worse than "random" or "not at all", which is basically what our current system is. Sure it brought us GPUs. But that's pure coincidence that what video games require happened to be what AI requires. If we weren't so lucky that two completely unrelated industries happened to require the same technology, we would never get AI.

Imagine tomorrow someone make a superior graphics chip. That's somehow highly specialized to 3d rendering in video games and does nothing else. Dropping all the general purpose computation and linear algebra stuff. Gamers would all switch to it and the market for GPGPUs would die and AI would stop advancing, or even reverse.

And GPUs aren't that weird or surprising of an invention to invest in. Increased computing power benefits many scientific fields besides AI and would be an obvious investment for a hypothetical central planner.

[icebraining]

if you envision a sort of "coordination oracle" which divides up resources ideally

Except not everyone agrees on what is ideal, and therefore such an oracle is impossible even as a limit to be approached.

[KGIII]

We've tried the 'coordination oracle' a few times. It hasn't worked out very well at the larger scales, and I'm not sure trust was the issue.

It appears that it works better when the two systems are blended and neither is used to an extreme. It's really quite a broad spectrum between unfettered capitalism and central management of resources by the State.

[edanm]

Well, if you had a "coordination oracle", you could probably convert most of the world's people to working on science and technology to advance the human race, and not spending any time on things like sports or fashion (or art). I mean, just cut 5% of the budget the world spends on fashion and use it to pay for science, and we'd have amazing advances.

The problem with this is that most people don't want to do this or think this is ethical in any way. (I'm more conflicted... you could take 5% of what the world spends on fashion to lift everyone out of poverty, too, as another example).