The great tragedy is that we already have a practically unlimited and environmentally safe source of energy, which is nuclear fission. And we simply don't use it at a significant scale because of irrational fears about meltdowns.
It is not rational aversion. Nuclear is currently 10,000 less dangerous per unit of energy produced than the largest sources of energy: coal, oil and natural gas. We could afford to let nuclear get 10x less safe, so that it becomes vastly less costly to deploy, and a very possible result would be that it would replace the largest sources of energy, and would still be three orders of magnitude less dangerous than the sources of energy it replaced.
Regulation is inescapable, because the maximum damage from a nuclear accident would exceed the value of the company operating the reactor. A rational business treats any liabilities larger that what it could pay as equivalent, regardless of how large they could become, and hence will underinvest in safety measures.
And I'm sure you will agree there is a great and sorry history of nuclear efforts failing to achieve their cost targets. At this point, it is clear that such targets are sales numbers, not something one should actually believe. One cannot make this history go away just by wishing, as nuclear advocates like yourself seem wont to do.
I agree fossil fuels should go, but that's not an argument they should be replaced by nuclear. It's the argument nuclear advocates used to be able to lie back and comfort themselves with, but then you all got blindsided by renewables and storage zooming past you. You have to address those now, not the old competition you wished you were still running against.
Of course regulation is necessary. My point is that current nuclear regulation is disproportionate to actual risk, and that this mismatch has made nuclear uncompetitive relative to energy sources that are demonstrably far more dangerous on a per-unit-of-energy basis.
Even compared to solar, nuclear has a stronger safety record when measured by deaths per TWh, and this is when taking into account the worst nuclear catastrophe, Chernobyl. I am not arguing that the future should be all nuclear, or even predominantly nuclear. I am arguing that the present regulatory regime reflects a mispricing of risk, particularly relative to hydrocarbons, and that this has pushed us into a suboptimal energy mix.
On cost overruns: the strongest correlation is with regulatory ratcheting, which also had harmful second order consequences for cost control from failing to reach larger scale construction, like bespoke designs and loss of construction continuity.
That’s not true. They are physically massive, incredibly complicated machines with all kinds of large scale pressure welding, forging, containment systems, 100s of miles of plumbing, and other serious large scale engineering. They will never be anywhere close to as cheap as something as dead simple & mass manufacturable as solar.
If they were intrinsically costly, they would have been costly in the U.S. in the 1960s, or in France in the 1970s-90s, or in South Korea today. It is because of regulatory ratcheting, and the effects of that (both direct and second order), that costs escalated.
NPPs are intrinsically Big Projects. The western world is almost universally suffering from Baumol’s cost disease - we cannot build Big Projects at a reasonable price anymore. Subways, bridges, NPPs, you name it - all cost many multiples of their inflation adjusted 1970 cost. And that’s before they inevitably blow their budget by 2-3x. Until you can somehow fix the labor / housing / management cost issues NPPs will not be affordable, even if you relax nuclear specific regs.
Mass manufactured things like solar and wind turbines do not suffer this.
It's clear from the development trajectory that AGI is not what current AI development is leading to and I think that is a natural consequence of AGI not fitting the constraints imposed by business necessity. AGI would need to have levels of agency and self-motivation that are inconsistent with basic AI safety principles.
Instead, we're getting a clear division of labor where the most sensitive agentic behavior is reserved for humans and the AIs become a form of cognitive augmentation of the human agency. This was always the most likely outcome and the best we can hope for as it precludes dangerous types of AI from emerging.
The 1870-1900 period experienced the greatest expansion of U.S. industry, and the fastest rise in both U.S. wages and U.S. life expectancy, in history.
It could have some teeth considering that the whole point is the executive office is going to establish a task force that investigates state laws in opposition of this federal deregulation of AI. Any states deemed to be out of sync will have certain kinds of federal funding cut from them.
There are a lot of states, and especially state universities, that will not like that.
The Executive can't actually cut approriated federal funding, since budgets are congress's job.
The executive, in fact, must spend money that congress appropriates. Unless it is illegal/et al to do so, or the funding otherwise allows prseidential discretion, they are required to do so.
Yes, they did some EO's purporting to cut funding. None that related to non-discretionary funding have been upheld, even by "trump" judges, and so far all non-discretionary (IE explicitly directed by congress) funding cut has been restored, AFAIK. All are a wildly clear violation of separation of powers, and so far no judge has disagreed.
(Though don't confuse whether they have to spend the money the way congress directs with whether they can or can't fire federal employees, etc)
There is a path to the president impounding appropriated money through the impoundment control act, but they haven't done it or followed the process so far.
Isn't it more dangerous that people live their life out without ever trying anything, because they are beset by fear and doubt, and never had anyone give them an encouraging word?
Let's say the AI gives them faulty advice, that makes them over-confident, and try something and fail. Usually that just means a relatively benign mistake — since AIs generally avoid advising anything genuinely risky — and after they have recovered, they will have the benefit of more real world experience, which raises their odds of eventually trying something again and this time succeeding.
Sometimes trying something, anything, is better than nothing. Action — regardless of the outcome — is its own discovery process.
And much of what you learn when you act out in the world is generally applicable, not just domain-specific knowledge.
I am confused by the tone and message of your comment — are you indeed arguing that having corporations use country-scale resources to run unsupervised psychological manipulation and abuse experiments on global population is one of just two choices, the other being people not doing anything at all?
I'm saying that what you have referred to as "psychological manipulation and abuse experiments" is in reality a source of motivation that helps people break the dormancy trap and be more active in the world, and that this could be a significant net benefit.
I just want all sides of the question explored, instead of reflexively framing AI's impact as harmful.
"Healthcare administrator's growth in the US. Healthcare administrator's growth by 3200% between 1975 and 2010 compared to 150% Physician growth according to Athena Health analysis of data from Bureau of Labor Statistics, the National Center of Health Statistics, and the United States Census Bureau's Current Population survey in accordance to [26]. Admin: administration; HIPAA: Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act; HITECH Act: Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act; DRGs: diagnosis-related group's."
The only class of medical services that has become more affordable over the last 50 years is cosmetic procedures and laser eye surgery:
What value addition do the administrators provide? It might be helpful to understand why competing hospitals still find it useful to employ these people even if the cost is so high.
If a competing hospital can provide equivalent service while also not spending so much on an administrator, why didn't they already do it?
The administrative overhead is necessary in order to get money from the insurance companies. Without the administrators too administrate and fill out copious amounts of paperwork, the hospital won't get paid by the insurance companies, and if the hospital don't get no money, they can't pay their staff, and staff tend to like getting paid.
This is how the world ends. Administrators on both sides being replaced by AI and consuming all the worlds available compute arguing with each other about healthcare bills.
Answering myself, apparently it is a fight between administrators on the hospital end and the administrators on the insurance company end.
The insurance administrators are fighting to provide as less reimbursement as possible and the hospital administrators are fighting to provide as much reimbursement as possible. The administrators are probably doing compliance work, negotiations.
I wonder whether regulations can be used to cap the role of administrators at the expense of slightly less efficient market - this might work if administrators are just adversarially interacting and reducing their scope can help the overall picture.
The actual problem here is the regulations that restrict insurance options to comprehensive ones and eliminate the option of getting catastrophic only insurance. This effectively leads to overconsumption of insurance. The other big problem is tax incentives that encourage people to get insurance through their employer.
To elaborate on that, when one gets health insurance from their employer, they effectively get a tax cut, and this in turn leads to larger proportion of employment compensation being paid through health insurance benefits than it needs to be, which translates to extravagant health insurance plans for those who are employed.
When people don't rely on insurance and pay out of pocket, generally prices go down over time and the industry as a whole becomes more efficient. The opposite trend has been in place in healthcare, with a growing percentage of healthcare spending being through insurance. And the result is the opposite of what's seen in more market-based industries: prices going up over time.
You assume that there is any meaningful competition. What we are seeing, across industries including education, is a type of indirect collusion that is keeping prices crazy, not competition. Over regulation is a big piece of what enables all this.
Some states require a "Certificate of Need" to open a new hospital so we ought to do away with those to promote competition. But beyond that, which specific regulations are harming competition?
You misunderstand. We only have a degree of interoperability for patient records due to federal regulation. Regulation in that area actually helps competition.
"In 2018, 51,302 new startups were founded. Last year, that number was down to 1,202."
That's the cost of authoritarian centralization. But it would also be dishonest not to concede the other side of the ledger. A government that eliminates all challenges to its authority also doesn’t depend on coalitions or election cycles, so doesn’t need to bargain with public-sector unions, entrenched lobbies, or party factions to stay in power. That concentration of authority can give Beijing a longer planning horizon than governments that live inside a permanent 18-month election cycle.
That’s the structural trade-off:
fewer constraints and more long-term maneuvering room, at the price of suppressing bottom-up initiative, i.e. entrepreneurship.
This is not a value judgment: it’s just the logic of political institutions. Centralized regimes can move quickly, avoid gridlock, and pursue 20- or 30-year industrial policy. But the same mechanisms that let them think long-term also deter the kind of decentralized experimentation that produces new firms and new ideas.
It would be interesting to know if there are any modern economic implications from these ancient road networks. Like economic advantages that regions that had Roman roads 2,000 years ago, have today, with all other factors being held constant.
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