[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?

[KGIII]

That's a very small number of people, not all of whom are well paid. The work is intellectually stimulating and has the ability to have far-reaching impacts.

I think you're confusing empirically for being significant numerically. I will offer a counter for your Wall Street example, look at how many go into teaching.

[Houshalter]

>That's a very small number of people, not all of whom are well paid.

By 2006 about a quarter of MITs entire graduating class went to Wall Street. Some firms were offering $400K salaries to junior level positions. They weren't just taking huge numbers of people, but the ones they were taking were the best of the best. Other companies at the time had a terrible time recruiting anyone because they couldn't compete with that kind of money.

The problem with this is I don't think these firms are actually doing anything productive for society. The amount of work, money, and resources that go into getting a nanosecond edge for high frequency trading is just obscene. And all of the stuff they develop must be kept top secret and under NDAs. So even if they invent something cool by chance, they can't share it with the world or let anyone else benefit from it.

[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.