Will they, though? Automation has replaced highly expensive, artisanal, high quality things with much more cheaply made, worse quality things. And yet we buy the latter because the quality-to-price ratio is much better.

Most clothes people wear are garbage compared to bespoke clothes. Most industrial food is garbage compared to what a chef might make. And yet.

> All it means is you cant retrain 10,000 factory workers to be front end developers, and that even If they find a job its often not as well paid.

An important effect is the speed of change - it _might_ be possible to train the next generation such as those who would have been factory workers become front end developers, but it's an entirely different challenge to take actual factory workers and train them for another job. That is to say, even if in the long run automation doesn't lead to unemployment, the short term effect may be quite different.

Short term in this case could be decades.

Do you plan to make smaller laptops, like 11” or so?

Landlords are able to capture the efficiency gains through higher rents. What makes it so much more expensive to live in NYC is not that (e.g.) construction costs are that much higher, it's because the land costs so much more because it is more desirable.

Let's do a simple experiment. Say skill is normally distributed. Let's take 1000000 people and draw their skill levels from a standard normal, and sort them by the skill levels. What is the difference in level between the 500000th person, and the person 1000 spot above them? 0.00252225 (in this simulation). What's the difference in skill levels between the 1000000th person and the person 1000 spots below? 1.596959. The 1000-person gap is 633 times larger at the top than the middle.

    skill_levels <- rnorm(1000000) %>% sort()

    skill_levels[501000] - skill_levels[500000]
    skill_levels[1000000] - skill_levels[999000]

As far as I know my partner next to me is just a big sack of carbon based biological matter that inputs food and outputs hear over and over again. I do keep it in mind, but I feel just looking at the internals is a bit limiting, isn't it?

There's a fellow that kinda predicted it in 1950 [0]:

> These arguments take the form, "I grant you that you can make machines do all the things you have mentioned but you will never be able to make one to do X."

> [...]

> The criticisms that we are considering here are often disguised forms of the argument from consciousness, Usually if one maintains that a machine can do one of these things, and describes the kind of method that the machine could use, one will not make much of an impression.

Every time "learning machines" are able to do a new thing, there's a "wait, it is just mechanical, _real_ intelligence is the goalpost".

[0] https://www.espace-turing.fr/IMG/pdf/Computing_Machinery_and...

>Every time "learning machines" are able to do a new thing, there's a "wait, it is just mechanical, _real_ intelligence is the goalpost".

Just because people shift the goalposts doesn't mean that the new position of the goalposts isn't closer to being correct than the old position. You can criticise the people for being inconsistent or failing to anticipate certain developments, but that doesn't tell you anything about where the goalposts should be.

Openfisca started a bit earlier, in 2011.

Yep, I fixed the timeline a bit after checking out the history page, as my original memories were incorrect. I guess because I'd first heard of openfisca around the time of the lawsuit.

It is my understanding that before it became an Etalab project, it was quite obscure.

The French "income tax" (which, confusingly, is only one of the several taxes on income in France, and not the largest) is open source (https://gitlab.adullact.net/dgfip/ir-calcul).

There's also the OpenFisca project (https://openfisca.org/en/) which is a Python framework for coding tax and benefit system - France being the most complete - which is used in many things, like a web app to see which benefits you might be eligible to (https://www.mesdroitssociaux.gouv.fr/accueil/) or the French National Assembly tool to compute the effects of changing tax law (https://socio-fiscal.leximpact.an.fr/).

Well it's a consequence of lock-in, not lock-in itself.