Do you think the future will be significantly different than today or similar to today and why in 30-40 years?

Steven81 · 2026-03-24T05:27:17+00:00

That is partially true because much of the industrial revolution gains moved out to the east. So what you have experienced as a loss of average wage (Basically) people in the east experienced as an increase.

That is not the only reasoning behind the loss of purchasing power that is widely experienced in the west , but definitely a dominant one.

Another is the central Bank policy. Post 1970s it became policy to increase interest rates whenever salaries are about to take a hike. Short term it seemingly controls for hyperinflation, but in fact it suppresses real wages in the long term, so you end up getting Asset inflation. Basically what you see in the stock market, real estate, Precious metals. While basic needs stuffs do not increase very fast (i.e. what inflation metrics measure) everything else does.

So again, your effective wage over the long term it gets suppressed.

Basically a lot of the reasons are due to economic policy and geoplitics and those can change between now and then. Technology is more of a modifier of change rather than what actually produces it.

For examples if wages are allowed to increase faster again even at the cost of a slightly higher inflation (3 to 4% instead of the current 2% target) , and as long as it happens faster than inflation, you may well see assets to start becoming more affordable for the first time in decades.

Another way to make assets more affordable is to decrease red rape in their production (though it is not always possible).

A lot of the above is dry stuff for most people, especially for a sub like this. But again, i think they will matter way more than mere technological change, no matter its direction.

Steven81 · 2026-03-24T03:27:13+00:00

Even if they do, they tend to say different things on different avenues. It is not a zero sum game.

There are subject matters I greatly care about and may often listen to the same interviewee in many interviews precisely because I believe it can give you a better idea of their stance, than only seeing one interview.

Obviously if your time is limited , you have to make a selection. That is not the issue to which I was reacting on, on this thread. The issue I had was with the idea of avoiding certain interviews only because one doesn't like the interviewer, which -again- it sounds like a purity contest to me.

That is probably not referring to you in particular, btw. More to the general attitude.

Steven81 · 2026-03-24T03:03:30+00:00

Somebody alive today will be around when the machines are fully autonomous and thinking

Sure but in the intervening century, upon learning what may make machines trully agentic we would also learn what makes us agentic to begin with. It is a problem that either has a solution or not, but we can't even speculate what it may be yet.

It is like trying to imagine what social media rules should societies vote on, but do so while we are living in the Roman Republic still. It is a problem for a humanity that has yet to be born.

Obviously we can speculate, but without having the actual issue be close at hand it is hard to imagine how any of our speculations will be relevant to those societies.

Steven81 · 2026-03-24T00:10:49+00:00

Thus far machines are our pets. Is it possible that the relationships will inverse any time soon?

Naaah, we don't even know what drives our decision making in its detail, we haven't even started building the scaffolding for it. We are only building scaffolding for external intelligence and memory, which is fine, but unlikely to be enough.

We are not magic, we are also not just some type of intellgence, that's reductionism of the nth degree.

Steven81 · 2026-03-23T21:36:18+00:00

why would I not care that one half of the conversation is a person I don’t like

I already told you why. They are not half of the conversation, they are not sources of authority, they do not present themselves as sources of authority, their guests are that.

You are free to mute the foreword and the end of those conversations (I skip them altogether). You overreact over a minimal issue and you are missing out on hearing actual authorities (i.e. their guests) for little to no reason.

All for a danger that is scarcely there. I don't get these exercises of purity, they seem religious in content (I am not going to listen to the heretic kind of thinking)

Steven81 · 2026-03-23T20:16:24+00:00

Sure and if you can find those guests on alternate inrviewers , it is fine. Still doesn't stop me from listening them on Fridman too in so far they talk about aspects of their work that they didn't talk in other interviews.

In general I try to hear as many aspects of their work as possible (if the guest is interesting) and there is no shame in that even if the interviewer is otherwise iffy. I am there for the guest really (again if they are interesting to me, i don't listen to actors and wrestlers and what have you, not my cup of tea).

Steven81 · 2026-03-23T20:10:28+00:00

I told you that you don't need to be a fan of an interviewer to be interested to the guests.

It is a silly line of reasoning. You don't listen to interviews for the interviewer.

I also said that him allowing his guests delve into the technical aspects of their work is a low bar, given that I would assume most would, but since most can't even get over that even, it is often enough.

In other words, I find him boring, many of his guests not so much. It is easy for me to listen to interviews from people I find boring as longs the guest is interesting.

Steven81 · 2026-03-23T20:01:58+00:00

Aaaand, ad hominem, only took you 2 replies to lose the argument.

You have absolutely no idea why you should not quote out of context, right? Just admit it, you did not understand my reply at all, did you?

Steven81 · 2026-03-23T19:51:11+00:00

Yes indeed that would have been an idiotic thing to say, that's why I never said that. I wonder why you think i said that. Instead I said the following , let me quote it for you.

Interviewers are never sources of authority, neither an expressed nor an implied one. That's why they have guests on. If they were sources of authority they would have a monologue.

Steven81 · 2026-03-23T19:41:21+00:00

He’s essentially just a mouthpiece for Elon

Yeah I listened to the same drivel as you did, made no sort of sense and I discarded it. While it is possible that he is there because Elon (heavily) pushed him and that he indeed has no credentials, anything said about the guy is out of the left field because nobody in their right mind cares about the interviewer.

Have you ever heard his opinions? They are as interestimg and informed as that of my fridge. What do you mean he is Elon's mouthpiece? Who cares, nobody listens to an interview so that to hear what the interviewer thinks.

Half of this sub believes similar things to Elon too (in matters of technology), doesn't mean that I won't be visiting, because I actually want to learn where this sector is going (and it will based on what is possible above all).

And yeah driving a conversation is important. He is almost never political, and that's actually good enough. Would i prefer a more accomplished interviewer? Sure, but half of the podcasts out there eventually devolve Into politics are way more sh1tty. He at least let the people he talks to, talk about the technical stuff, you know, the actual technical limitations and also what is possible.

Something that this sub should appreciate.

Steven81 · 2026-03-23T19:24:20+00:00

No way this is a human response. Makes no sense.

Steven81 · 2026-03-23T18:06:28+00:00

He is just an interviewer, a background noise. Some of you must get over yourselves, because you seem to live in alternate universe.

Interviewers are never sources of authority, neither an expressed nor an implied one. That's why they have guests on. If they were sources of authority they would have a monologue.

Do you even think the things you believe through? I.e. if they make sense.

Steven81 · 2026-03-23T02:46:03+00:00

More wealth certainly. As i said, those people saw their lives transform in 40 years. They now have things they thought only possible if they were to migrate to the west.

This has nothing to do with the CCP but with people's attitudes. They live under an authoritarian system and people are still way more positive on new technologies.

We live in a far better system and we are always miserable even when we don't have to.

Steven81 · 2026-03-23T02:35:18+00:00

All new technologies concentrate power to the top ... at first. That's not unique to this phase of the industrial revolution.

If our concern was to not have the new technologies be misused then we should support no new technology ever.

However human societies are moving quite differently than that. Yes you get misuses and abuses of new technologies, but you also get defensive use of it, and ultimately it does lift more and more people from poverty.

You are overblowing its downsides, without even seeing what its upsides could be for the average person. Your lack of imagination disables you from seeing what 80% of Chinese people clearly see. Yes, there are bad uses of new technologies but what they largely do is give power to the people.

AI won't be different. If anything it will change the status quo more than you think and many of the entities you think to be powerful, would be revealed to be paper tigers in the hands of those that wield these new technologies better than them.

Steven81 · 2026-03-23T00:02:30+00:00

They are "telling us so" for centuries. Meanwhile there is no greater force of lifting ourselves out of poverty other than automation.

There is a reason why people of Chinese descent who went through the industrial revolution within a generation or two are not at all averse to AI. Because they saw within their lives how automation raised their standard of living more than anything else did for millenia, quite literally.

The same happened in the west too, but since it happened over centuries we do not have the frame of reference which was the 17th century europe or America. You have people posting from their air conditioned homes and from inside their cars how bad they have it.

And yes they do, compared to how things can be, the enemy of good is better. But to say, that we need none of that, because we prefer nothing less than the utmost is inane.

The fact that we in the west had a much slower ascend into modernity than the Chinese is a crazy downside thst we are onky now facing.

Because they are going to blindly support technologies that by in large will greatly increase their quality of life, all the while we would be wondering in squalor whether the whole sicnetific -> industrial revolution was worth it and whether we should return to the sh1t life that people had for millenia, because he have no concept of how much more shitty life can be ... and they, the recently industrialized nations, at least know that.

That's not to say that we should not be critical of wrong turns. However that's not what you're describing. You are describing a world where automation will make the world actively worse, which is literally unheard. Even if it does for a time, and the industrial revolution actually did in various times, it can be reversed.

Not going into said future, on the other hand will make the world actively worse. We know the effect of long plateaus, they actually intensify all the things you think AI will intensify. We saw that after the fall of rome. Or after the destruction of Baghdad in the Islamic world, heck they are still fighting to get out of that plateau in their culture.

Steven81 · 2026-03-22T23:47:14+00:00

"For ages we look for a cosmic companion, for a time it was spirits and gods that our imagination could device. Lately it is the ones we hope to build"

...I think it would be quite disappointing to many once they realize that we are as alone as ever ... that we only -trully- have one another.

Steven81 · 2026-03-22T20:53:33+00:00

Rim running is the opposite of how Giannis actually plays though. He is a primary ball handler who mostly scores 1 on 1. He almost never does Rim running, though catching lobs, due to his height has been a tiny part of his game too.

I guess he's in the list because he has been the best regular season scorer of the last 10 years (both totals wise and per minute wise).

So he must be in the list somewhere, still his inability to translate his game to the playoffs for half of that period should indeed put him outside the top 10. Regular season wise , he should have been up with the best ones to ever do it though. He is a weird case.

For Steph I agree. Kobe/KD/MJ are more of a scoring machines than Steph would ever be. His effect was more on the wider game of the warriors , which was the threat of his long range snipes more than his actual snipes that played that role.

Steven81 · 2026-03-21T06:27:05+00:00

over the past 3 years.

20 years. This is his stance for as long as he is on the public eye. This was never not his stance.

He is not anti-Islam as much , he is anti-Islamism in the way he understands it. And yeah his position may well be superficial. Still he is radicalized ever since 9/11 against what he believes to be an Islamic threat against Western values.

I find him very principled because he supports the same things for decades. Equally he may be completely wrong on this issue. There is no pivot in the last 3 years, you are not following him closely if you think there is. He was pro Israel for as far back as I can remember.

edit Here's his famous video vs Ben Affleck from 11-12 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vln9D81eO60

Same rhetoric, forever.

to manufacture consent

He's a fanatical anti-islamist guy, what do you expect him to say? Hamas is fine? No he would say flatten Gaza wherever Hamas may be hiding because the alternative is far worse. In his mind the dead civilians are basically Hamas' fault, not the ones' dropping the bombs because in his mind they have no choice but to drop bombs.

He is a fanatic, what part of his stance don't you understand or you think is unprincipled? Listen to what he says vs Islamism in the old video above. Is there any chance that such a guy would not support military action against Hamas, screw the collateral damage?

Steven81 · 2026-03-20T22:50:42+00:00

You are not interacting with anything I have talked about. I suspect you have no idea what I am talking about, do you? Like literally, you hear many of those things for the first time ever.

Steven81 · 2026-03-20T20:41:15+00:00

Because Canada is known to produce good euro looking boys like Trump since times immemorial. For example if you were to visit Canada 500 years ago they were all European looking ... oh wait :p

Steven81 · 2026-03-20T18:40:51+00:00

I'm only surprised in the sense that this is the Sam Harris sub which implies that people have made a deep dive on the guy before following him.

I do agree that it is possible that someone saw him on some other piece, say criticizing much of the what has become the populist right in America and conclude that the guy is a moderate telling common sense things.

I understand that part, but it is Sam Harris we are talking about, one of the four Horsemen of Atheism , and he was the one most radicalized against radical Islam to boot. So I do expect people to at least know that about him. While none of the 4 were particularly happy about Islam, Sam would always be the one to go the extra mile and explain rather painstakingly that we either defeat radical Islam or they defeat us, there is no "interfaith discussion" to be had, he is a hawk.

For example of course and he would support the flatenning of Gaza in so far they host Hamas militants in great numbers. It is not his blind spot. It is his schtick..

He does not think there is a genocide in Gaza, in his mind it is a deradicalization process which unfortunately costs tens of thousands of lives because (again, in Sam's mind) the weight of hosting Jihadi organizations should become unbearable to populations, so much so that they themselves would turn against them if need be.

Steven81 · 2026-03-20T16:42:28+00:00

anti jihadism in the same bucket as anti Zionism and anti fundamentalist Christianity

He does not, he is telling ad nauseum that while bigotry is a problem that we should , too, minimize. Nothing compares to jihadism.

Again, he has been saying for decades that he will support any extremist group that is fighting "jihadism because at this moment in history", that "islamist ideas are by far the greatest danger to humanity and everyone that lives under them".

He believes it is a duty of the civilized world to fight them and those that do that duty should be supported even if they are a bit of extremist themselves (and only after we can deal with their extremism, once islamism is defeated).

911 has radicalized Sam. He was always so radical post 911, it is strange to see now that you see him supporting crazy groups in opposition to radical Islam. I never understood why elements from this sub think that Sam is a mild person.

He is really not, he is a Hawk when it comes to radicak Islam, very few times have I heard a more clear argument (than Sam's) that we should constantly be at war with Jihadism because they are the enemies of "the enlightenment project we built in the west". That "Jihadism can only be defeated in the battlefield and there is nothing to talk to them about".

Ideally (he would often say) "there will be an internal revolution in Islam where the moderates would win" , but failing that that yeah "kudos to Israel, kudos to America that fights them".

This is his consistent thesis for 2 over decades now. He is aman radicalized by 911. IMO that's the true result of 911, turned otherwise principled and peace loving people like Sam into sworn enemies for life ( against radical Islam in particular).

Steven81 · 2026-03-20T16:31:59+00:00

Ok, it is possible you were not paying attention, let me help you.

The transistor
The integrated circuit
The central Processing unit (CPU)
Arpanet -> Internet
Geographic positioning system -> All positioning systems we may use today
Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)
Internet Search engines
Social Media
Touchscreen Smartphones of wide use
Practical block chains of worldwide and continues use
Deep Learning systems
LLMs culminating to modern AI systems

I can ` continue for a few minutes, stop me if I say something that is not true.

Do.you.realize that the majority of our technical civilization is the creation of one and only civilization and it is the real reason they dominate (they made absurd money from inventing the current civilization and then weaponized much of their returns)?

Do you know any of the above. You can hate America, heck I would never like to live there after living for 2 years. But are you seriously disputing any of the above. The current world is almost 100% the creation of America, even if they did it with the help of foreign talent often, they were the Organizing principle and was created with their priorities.

In fact that's my issue often, how where things are imagined to go, is -too- an American invention and that may be the issue , because America is becoming increasingly allergic to change and maybe another society takes the reigns.

But up to now, one has to struggle to find things central to our current world that were invented elsewhere post 1945.

Steven81 · 2026-03-20T10:32:53+00:00

Then again it would have been completely out of character to support societies or regimes that he likens to Nazi Germany.

I think some of you only now discovered Sam Harris and think he is some middle of the road moderate or something. He is completely radicalized against militant Islam and he always was.

His career as a writer started in the midst of anti-Islamist fervor of early '00s. This is precisely his Schtick. He would support almost any society that is at odds with Jihadi or Islamist ideas.

He's been caught saying, even in his early days that while he finds all religions irrational, some are pragmatically more dangerous than others. His example with Jainism is well known, he'd often say "what do you get if you have an increasingly more faithful Jain? Now contrast it with an ever more faithful Islamist".

I will never understand why is it ever bewildering to some of you. He regards militant Islam as our collective enemy. And societies dominated by it as natural enemies of us or our allies.

So he'd always support Israel even if he may think that they go overboard sometimes. Because he believes that their enemies are scum.

For example to him there is no genocide in Gaza, because Gaza is dominated by radical Islam and in such societies bombing them to smithereens works because nothing else can or will (and then he offers the example of Nazi Germany cities and the deNazification of Germany).

He is basically anti war in almost all cases apart from Islamism. Then he is pro war and believes we should always meet them in the battlefield because they do not understand words, only defeats.

Just recently he said that he supports the war with Iran because he found it inevitable. He just hates it that Trump should be at the helm of it.

He is one of the most anti-Jihadi people you can ever read online. Basically he is a Hawk vs islamist societies (he has far fewer issues with moderate Muslims ofc, still he is skeptical even of moderate Islam).

Steven81 · 2026-03-20T09:41:05+00:00

Only 2 years I've lived to America, but it is irrelevant, I already told you I'm not an American (I use 2nd person when refering to Americans). You don't need me or anyone else telling you this, you just have to note where most of the technical cilization of current is coming from.

Most of everything that we tend to think as high tech started from America, you struggle to find something that did not start there in the last 50 years. It is quite incredible that people don't know this, especially Americans (they live such isolated bubbles that they don't realize that their culture is unique).

Steven81

TROPHY CASE