Infinite growth

Investing / Others
24

I’ll give you leads afterwards for each of you to explore. I’m not a scientist doctor developer just a simple sheep that spends time searching and inquiring as everyone else should.

Not expect any magic and yes brain can be fooled by a simple picture. Intelligence is for me not well defined yet because a plant is as smart as an animal or a human in his own level. If you say a human is smarter, why are we destroying our planet knowing this for money ? A plant or a animal not destroy his own planet and only take cares about his own survival.
Quantum physics may look like magic, but it’s not. The Greeks (Hero) used the steam engine without probably know what is a steam engine. The Baghdad battery probably used for electrolysis without know what is electrolysis. We just not have type of computer/code for AI yet. AI = computer can take its own decisions and write its own code for his own reasons. Actual computer are calculators programmed by humans.

Calculator worlds isn’t random at all because you ask 0 or 1 and can’t be really random and not be chosen randomly by computer itself. The first AI code/computer can probably generate random numbers yes.

No a worm is programmed and can even be updated remotely but still a calculator that does exactly what it’s asked to do. If something hasn’t been planned, it’s over for a worm. That’s the work of an antivirus.
Anti-virus are said “AI” with heuristic work. But just follow to block all activites modifying “explorer.exe” or a registry key for Windows if this file/registry not planned the worm/virus win and continue…
Self replication is what is done inside each cell for an human body. But when something goes wrong a cell continue replicate bad DNA and propagate what we call a “cancer”. There’s no intelligence for solve this issue. We get older because the cells don’t reproduce the same thing at 10 as they do at 70.

You have read ?
It’s just a compilation improvement instead of process 6 lines compressed to 2 line of code so faster processing for CPU. Actual typed language is compiled or modified to a computer language for be understand by the processor and that’s the main problem of AI yet.
I known it can be hard to made the difference between a calculator and a brain because even the brain have some calculator functions and we are just a big computer with a lot of different sensors. It’s why marketing play with AI world everywhere. Everyone think at Terminator but we are far away of that.
During the first years of life we observe and self replicate what’s around us when an animal should learn to walk some hours after else he dies but a computer can’t observe and self replicate without following an human algorithm/code.

If you want tomorrow true AI. We need a computer can process itself these own generated lines of code. You buy a raspberry pi put an empty sd card and with power supply the processor/brain learn to use itself these sensors for generate and process some lines of code like a baby who use eyes for look what happen near him and begin to interact with his world begin to use his sd card/memory for store some informations. We are at 0% of AI due to that not any CPU or even code/library can do that actually.

Yes everyone stop because no one want to spend time for search by itself and prefer take marketing for truth. Like an electrical car is 100% green but it’s just not green and depend a lot of country power source. Even a solar panel take a lot of resources for be manufactured and solar small charger are a plague for planet because used less than 10 years 24/24h that’s time needed for a solar panel to be more efficient than costly to environmental resources. I’m a simple sheep I just spending time to go search all on Internet like everyone can do because we have all the same Internet unlimited access we aren’t in China with a great firewall.

25

Manually… :sweat_smile: thanks for the tip. I’ve added the sources.

interesting, is this law a consequence of Fukushima?
In any case Laws can be changed

26

Before people need to learn on their own. Take a lot of time to build slowly a “safe” power plant and it’s probably already too late for replace our current power plant already unsafe due to years attacked by radiation. These type of power plant are already all shutdown around the planet since years but without any other power source they can’t and need to run indefinitely.
Laws take a lot of time to be modified and we don’t have time. The production is already negative with this power plant closed in December 2019.

27

I thought that (most) nuclear power plants generate energy by fission.
And Switzerland has 4 of them active - Nuclear Power in Switzerland - World Nuclear Association.
Perhaps it is meant in the context of building up new ones?

28

All nuclear power plants generate power by fission.

Very simplified:

  • Fission: Take an atom, shoot a neutron into its core, then it falls apart and releases energy. Harvest this energy by getting water to boil, then use the steam to power a turbine and generate elecricity.

  • Fusion: Take two atoms and get them to fuse to form a new atom, whereby a lot of energy is released. The sun fuses nuclei to generate its power.

Mankind has succeeded in “taming” fission and using it peacefully to generate power. Yet so far, research is still ongoing to build fusion nuclear reactors. Fusion reactors are expected to yield much more energy.

Switzerland has banned new power plants that use either technology.

Yet nobody has even succeeded in building a functioning fusion power plant.

4 Likes
29

I hope we see market ready fusion reactors by 2050. This might solve a lot of problems. But it seems like it’s going to take several decades.

1 Like
30

Fusion reactors, 70 years of human research & still so many problems to solve - this clearly isn’t a task for us humans, but for AI to solve! :thinking:
Tesla will be announcing the solution begin 2021.

1 Like
31

What if Elon Musk has been sent back in time by the machines to help develop AI so that it can take over the World? “Cybertruck”? “Starlink”? Be very afraid…

image

3 Likes
32

No there is a third : molten salts using thorium who can reuse some nuclear waste
And probably other way for use energy stored inside current called “nuclear waste”. But radiation = pure energy

Molten salts power plant have already running successfully before first nuclear weapon who force world to go with fission but it’s safe. Build for 20-25 years and run now since 47 years and more for other nuclear power plant but we just can’t shutdown due to this law that’s great to have the older power plant in the world thank you people who not go read how work a nuclear reactor before writing yes or no.
Look Chernobyl like that you can know and spend useful time.

I’m curious to view old dam too with so many pressure and movements due to water pressure. It can probably cause structural damage over time.

33

This is truism because saving/investment by definition is delayed consumption. The whole point is what is the proportion of saving/investing to consumption and what is the nature of consumption (let’s say reading books is a better consumption than for example taking heroin). They in the end determine the economic growth and improvements of quality of life. If you save for example to build a building (investment) or take heroin all the time (consumption) - which activity contributes more to economic growth and well being?

34

Bojack: 1. AI kills us all or turns us into slaves

Cortana: Well looking forward to your 1st option

Who cares about slavery/death when you can get those sweet sweet returns. :joy:

1 Like
35

It’s been a while since @jcd posted and I do not want to elaborate on AI or nucler energy. Instead I would like to point out a blind spot that most economist seem to have: they try to explain how markets work without trying to explain how crises are made.

Maybe crises are the secret sauce that allow growth in between. History is a long chain of traumatic events and if we try to look beyond the smoke screen of booming markets, crazy amount of money printing and momentaneous news, we might realize we are headed towards a crisis of 1929 size. Not sure all Boglehead theories will still hold up with such an event.

Maybe good to look up from our splendid isolation and try to make sense of what is happening out there. I wrote a post about the health of our economy for dummies (which I consider myself to be), maybe it helps to further our reflection on growth and the temporary end of it. Because after a crisis there is always much room for new growth.

Are our portfolios, beliefs and life expectancy ready for a fundamental crisis?

5 Likes
36

Thanks for this post. I agree that we will probably see slower growth going forward, given the exceptionality of the last 100 years or so in the history of mankind.

I see the main problem going forward coming from our short-sightedness (fuelled by greed, which the FIR movement is not free from) which is bringing about the destruction of the very same environment that we rely on for sustaining our civilisation and existence itself.

Climate change and loss of biodiversity will be the two biggest crises ahead IMVHO.

1 Like
37

Unfortunately this does not (always) translate to less resources being used (there’s a name for this effect, can’t recall it now).

Look at cars: great improvements in efficiency have been totally wasted by people wanting bigger and heavier cars, even though they live in the city. Same thing for the internet: we are using (I’d rather say “wasting”) an insane amount of energy to store and stream an inconceivable amount of crap like videos of cats and porn.

38

Interesting post, thanks for sharing. Are you an economist btw? :wink:

One outcome would be to shift our portfolio more towards bonds as you mention in the conclusion of your post but then with which kind of bonds? Swiss bonds have negative interest rates and other foreign bonds such as US bonds have since a year a falling USD/CHF exchange rate…

39

@mabi Does it show I’m not an economist? :wink:

For now, money is the better bond, as there is usually no negative interest and AAA rating for cash. I never invested in bonds as I considered it too boring, but at a point it will make sense, e.g. if coupon interest rate will be in the area of what makes us happy, debtor rating will be adequate to our risk appetite and the currency is what we need for a good asset allocation.

The current madness on the stock exchanges is such that all feel the need and urge to participate. Maybe a limited sell order can lock in your stock gains when the market turns south before interest rates come up?

40

I agree that the median for economic growth is maybe lower for the next couple of decades. But in expectation it’s much larger. It’s also much larger in the very long-run (centuries).

Don’t have time atm to get into details, but reasoning goes something like this:

Medium-run expectation: narrow AI could increase productivity substantially
Long-run expectation: General AI will most likely happen some time over the next centuries.

There is uncertainty about how scaleable and useable narrow AI will be, and how resource intensive. But if you look at GPT-3, for example, it seems quite possible that many jobs (coding, writing, accounting, data aggregation, etc.) could be automated within the next decade or two by similar AI.

An article about GPT-3:
OpenAI’s latest breakthrough is astonishingly powerful, but still fighting its flaws - The Verge

Some random examples of GPT-3 capabilities:



In-depth article about GPT-3 writing capabilities:

41

We may also be headed toward a social unrest crisis, as people suffering the brunt of the effects of the virus without much outside support may get fed up of people who can protect themselves at their expense. The U.S. have already been pretty close to implosion this year, some other changes to the world order may happen.

Which brings me to think: if we really want to become resilient, what we need is friends and skills. You may want to pack some assets (including food, warm clothes and medicine) in hidden places in case you end up needing them and some wealth in different kinds of vehicles but if you’re set with them, then you can loose almost everything to an economic crisis and still be fine. After all, most people around you will have lost everything as well.

This to mean: I think it’s worth it to cover our asses against the fundamental threats we’re facing. Past that basic level, we can take risk: we’re only just playing with gravy.

I like the idea behind your blog, by the way. :wink:

1 Like
42

Warning: lengthy philosophical post ahead! :slight_smile:

Portfolios aside, this is one of the fundamental questions of human beings, has always been and will always be.

We live in a world that doesn’t explain itself. As Kierkegaard said: ”life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards”.

How we deal with this uncertainty is a very personal matter. Depending on the times that we live in, we’ll be influenced by one scary scenario or the other. For example, my parents grew up during the cold war and for them, an escalation to a World War 3 was a very real threat. On the other hand, if we read a book like “1913” by Florian Illies, we see that almost nobody had any clue that World War 1 was about to destroy their lives; they all had their own worries and were caught by surprise. Us nowadays, we think about the impact of AI, social inequality, government debt, hyperinflation, etc. Or maybe China is indeed going to be a problem, as this article in Foreign Affairs suggests (English, not paywalled)?

Interestingly, I think that many people don’t think about these things at all and just presume that nothing will ever change. Unsurprisingly, the topic comes up regularly in this forum: people who have the analytical skills to bother about their finances will end up seriously thinking about the future. Which is of course a good thing.

Yuval Noah Harari writes in “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” that driven by technology and AI (quote) “not just entire classes, but entire countries and continents might become irrelevant.”

There’s also an interesting interview with the historian Edward Chancellor in NZZ (German, not paywalled), where he expects increasing social unrests.

I believe they are both right.

Scay prospect; however, I do not believe that we’re going towards a total collapse of law and order (at least in developed countries). Unrests, crises: yes; apocalyptic collapse: no. Of course, there are people who say otherwise, but they don’t know any better than I do. If it really comes to a total collapse however, then Bitcoin will be as worthless as gold. You won’t be able to walk to your local farmer and exchange that gold nugget for corn. You’ll be ambushed ten times over before you get there. As @Wolverine says, we’ll need friends and skills; but hopefully not guns and ammo, I might add. At least I’m not expecting and preparing for that.

My investment strategy is thus: I agree with @dom.swiss that rather than bonds, money is currently the better option. I would consider short-term government bonds for the risk-free part of my portfolio, but as long as they have a negative yield, I’ll stick with cash.

I do not hold gold as I believe that it works based on the “greater fool principle”. Gold can only gain in value if there are other people who are more scared when they buy it than I would have been when I bought it. It is an unproductive good, it generates costs, it is not as negatively correlated to e.g. stocks as it should be, and its historic yield is rather low. And as I said above, I don’t expect a “Walking Dead” world where I’ll exchange it for food.

I also do not hold Bitcoin for the reasons that I’ve written here in this forum: I consider it as digital gold, though its easy tradability gives it some characteristics of a currency; but I don’t concede it the capability to replace government issued currencies.

The risk-exposed part of my portfolio is in stocks. Not only because of the historic and expected returns, but also because by investing in companies, I invest in people: there are billions of people out there who go to work every day, companies that compete with each other, technologies that are evolving and new products that hit the market.

Or to say it differently: I have trust in my government (cash, bonds) and in humanity’s potential to innovate and grow (stocks). I balance these two in a way that I’m comfortable in bearish and bullish times. Been doing it since 2006 and went through the 2008 crisis and I’m fine this way.

That would be the old and infamous market timing trick… :wink:

8 Likes
43

Great thoughts! I love a philosophical backdrop to the penny counting we are practising most of the day :wink:

I hold it with @San_Francisco who in his response to @OogieBoogie mentioned some truly devastating times. Going back to the 2000 internet bubble burst or even the 1973 oil crisis does not cut it for me anymore.

There are developments that follow natural or quasi-natural laws and developments that are random or political. WW1 may have been caused by a series of random events and unfortunate alliances. The relationship of capital and GDP seems to be a quasi-law, and we are at a point where capital is mostly funneled into stock and housing market, which are mostly outside the real economy. There will have to be an event to enable further growth. Could be a war, a crash or - here come AI and clean energy again - a fundamental innovation - anything to allow capital to be converted into meaningful production.

This is not a criticism, but more a note to self: it might help to dissect topics for absolute thruths (if there is even such a thing) or natural laws and avoid comparisons. The frog in the boiling pot only ever feels a slight temperature increase, while an observer with a thermometer would have a more objective view of the real risk involved.