Prediction markets don't uniquely enable it, but they make it far more effective and easy.
Insider trading is illegal. And for trades that aren't technically insider trading, often having some information ahead of time isn't as useful as it seems. Markets are known to react unpredictably to news; sometimes they move the opposite way from what you'd think, especially over the mid-long term, and there are many other influences on the price.
With a prediction market though, if you know what'll happen in the world, you know exactly what you'll win in the market.
>When you see a device like this does the term 'sonic fidelity' come to mind?
Your straw man is funny, because yes, actually. Certainly when it was new. Vintage speakers are sought-after; well-maintained, and driven by modern sound processing, they sound great. Let alone that I was personally speaking of the types of sets that flat-panel TVs supplanted, the late 90s/early 2000s CRTs.
> If we limited individual wealth to $999 million--just outright capped it, and enforced that--it would not impact these people in the slightest.
It would certainly impact their willingness to do the company-building that creates all those innovations and jobs.
With such a rule, Tesla wouldn't exist, no electric cars, no SpaceX, no cheap advanced launch tech; basically most of the modern world would be choked in the crib by taking away the incentive to build it.
If some person isn't willing to do company building because they are already at the cap so it won't make them any more money, that just means that someone else will do that. We have a planet of 8 billion humans; there's no shortage of human talent.
This is an untested assumption, as it takes quite a bit of CapEx without return to start a rocket company, or a tunnel boring company, or a car company.
There's thousands of Einsteins kicking around. The majority of them are in places like India and Africa, not having access to resources that would allow them to realize that potential.
The problem is that for the vast majority of people to be psychologically healthy they must have a job. This isn't a societal decision, it's a reality about how humans are.
The alternative is like feeding an animal instead of letting it live the lifestyle it's adapted for. That helps it in the moment but over time its capacities atrophy and it ends up weakened, twisted and harmed with nothing to spend its natural instincts on.
> The problem is that for the vast majority of people to be psychologically healthy they must have a job. This isn't a societal decision, it's a reality about how humans are.
The "job" can be things like volunteering, artwork, finding a cause, inventing, raising children, teaching...
Work can be subsidized and based around personal interest and achieve the "psychologically healthy" aspect that you describe.
> If we get working AI, humans will be unemployable at inventing useful things.
The point you're responding to is that humans would be able to do it for personal fulfillment and thus preserve their mental health, not to be useful to someone else.
When they used to say that you'd make more money going to university, that is what they were talking about. The idea was that if you went into the research labs you'd develop capital to multiply human output, which is how you make more money. Most ended up confusing the messaging with "go to university to get a job — the same job you would have done anyway..." and incomes have held stagnant as a result. It was an interesting dream, though.
But not really what everyday normal people want. They like to have somewhere they can show up to and be told what to do, so to speak.
They must have something interesting to do. It doesn't have to be a job.
The ideal society is one where humans only do things that they actually enjoy doing, whatever that is, and automation does the rest. Any human being forced to perform labor not because they want to, but because they need to do so to survive, should be considered a blight on the honor of our species.
I would wager that more jobs accelerate psychological and physiological issues than, say, volunteering or unemployment with active community engagement do. At the very least, the psychological benefits of unemployment are objectively an incidental side-effect of its actual purpose, which is labor for a profitable enterprise. That is to say that employment is still "functional" if it generates that labor even while destroying someone's psychological health. If that health is paramount, the structure of employment probably needs to change in order to privilege health over productivity, even to productivity's detriment. Otherwise, the vast majority of people would be better off with some other institution.
Studies on basic income have shown that it's harmful to the people who receive it.
They report no improvements on any measured outcome. Not lower stress, not more education, not better health. They work a bit less but that doesn't help them or their kids.
Over the long term it harms them because their productive skills, values, and emotional capacities atrophy away from lack of use.
It's one of those things that can be tricky to research because almost all the researchers and journalists on the topic very much don't want to see this conclusion. So there's a tremendous amount of misrepresentation and wishful reasoning about how to interpret the data. The truth comes out from actually reading the data, not researcher or journalist summaries.
What’s the alternative, if AI does turn out to be able to replace large swathes of the workforce? Just kill everyone?
You could ban it and then turn all existing employment into a makework jobs program, but this doesn’t seem sustainable: work you know is pointless is just as psychically corrosive, and in any event companies will just leave for less-regulated shores where AI is allowed.
Yes, but not for the reasons you state. It harms them because we have an zero desire as a society to effectively combat inflation, which negates any benefits we can give people who receive the basic income.
The powers-that-be don't take action to make sure the people who get basic income can actually use it to improve their lives. Food prices rapidly inflate, education costs skyrocket, medical costs increase exponentially almost overnight.
Much like how the government backstopping student loans basically got university costs to jump, promising to give people a basic income while not addressing the root causes of inequality and wealth disparity just makes things worse.
If you want basic income to truly work, you have to engage in some activities in the short term that are inherently un-capitalistic, although if done correctly, actually improve capitalism as a whole for society. Price controls and freezes, slashing executive pay, increasing taxes on the wealthiest, etc.
Insider trading is illegal. And for trades that aren't technically insider trading, often having some information ahead of time isn't as useful as it seems. Markets are known to react unpredictably to news; sometimes they move the opposite way from what you'd think, especially over the mid-long term, and there are many other influences on the price.
With a prediction market though, if you know what'll happen in the world, you know exactly what you'll win in the market.
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