Comments by "Digital Nomad" (@digitalnomad9985) on "The Epidemic That Dare Not Speak Its Name | Stephen J Shaw | EP 338" video.

  1. Agree with most of this except "Robots don't pay taxes". That would be true if the world tax structure were a "head tax", and everybody payed the same regardless of income. In fact it is not population that is taxed but income=profit. If technology increases productivity, it will also increase tax revenue and, all other things being equal, the purchasing power of the revenue collected. The purchasing power of currency is proportional to the ratio of money supply to the supply of goods and services. We don't live on income tax return paper, we live on goods and services. The question is "Are robots really going to be as good as they claim?" That is the question, and I'm afraid the answer is "No". They say that near human level AI is less than 5 years away. They said the same thing when I was 5. They have been periodically saying the same thing all my life. I am 63. Forgive me, but I find the "imminent inevitability" of this development less plausible with every passing year. According to Roger Penrose, what Goedel's Theorem really proves is that understanding is not algorithmic. I am not against AI research, we keep getting useful and informative stuff from it. We also keep not getting human level intelligence. There is some hope that technology in some form, even partly electronics and information processing, will increase productivity enough to get us through, if we also renew our civilization. But we can't advance our productivity and choke off our industrial activity at the same time. All the reigning political obsessions are perverse. We are forming a bucket brigade carrying water FROM the burning building TO the sinking ship in the harbor.
    1