Tag technology

Hopefully, AI will create a perpetual housing crisis

I don’t know how successful artificial intelligence will be. But let’s agree, for the moment, to consider a reasonably optimistic case where AI delivers significant productivity gains across a broad range of tasks – but not in a way that radically alters our Newtonian constraints. What would happen to housing economics and, consequently, housing politics? TL;DR Construction won’t be much affected by AI. Consumers will be richer and spend a bigger share of their incomes on housing. The stakes around housing policy will only grow. Inscriptibility Karl Marx divided the economic world into capital and labor. More recent economists have frequently (and self-regardingly) divided labor into low-skill and high-skill. In an AI world, we need to start talking about inscriptible and uninscriptible labor. I’m using a circular definition on purpose – AI will replace inscriptible labor because inscriptible labor is the type that AI is good at replacing – because I have only a fuzzy idea what AI will be good at. (A diversion) (Why inscriptible rather than legible, in a James C. Scott sense? I thank Bard for the suggestion. Think about visual art – AI is probably no better than humans at guessing what nuances a human artist intended, but it can produce human-quality visual art rich with nuance. Since AI’s value is partly predicated on repetition speed, it will thrive in arenas where failures are costless. Thus, AI may be formulating 99% of new drugs in a few years even if nobody trusts it to perform a simple surgery. That’s an inscriptibility difference, not a legibility difference. The most inscriptible human tasks are presumably those that simpler software replaced long ago, usually called “routine.” The big surprise of 2023 AI was the advances that software made with tasks we have considered creative. The “routine” concept was valuable […]

Y-Combinator, Tech, and “New Cities”

Monday, Y-Combinator, an early-stage technology startup incubator, announced it will “study building new, better cities.” Some existing cities will get bigger and there’s important work being done by smart people to improve them. We also think it’s possible to do amazing things given a blank slate. Our goal is to design the best possible city given the constraints of existing laws. They are embarking on an undertaking of noble intentions, and I will explain why the technology sector needs to be at the forefront of thinking about cities.  However, in the pursuit of designing “new” cities from a “blank slate” they have begun their quest with one fatally flawed premise, that wise technocrats can master-build entirely new cities catering to the infinitely diverse set of needs and desires of yet-to-be-identified citizens.   Any visions of city-building must first humbly acknowledge that cities are an “emergent” phenomena.   According to wikipedia, “emergence is a process whereby larger entities, patterns, and regularities arise through interactions among smaller or simpler entities that themselves do not exhibit such properties.”   What makes cities vibrant are the “spontaneous order” which emerges among city dwellers as they pursue their individual desires. Cities are like the internet – networks, patterns, and interactions emerge not through design but from spontaneous order.  Like no entity could conceivably understand or control the internet, no entity has the knowledge to anticipate the desires of millions of individual agents, and design a city accordingly.  This is called the “knowledge problem.” According to economist Friedrich Hayek: If we can agree that the economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place, it would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the […]