Thread

1. briffle · 1790345941 · focus · HN ↗

   Great to know that everyone's RAM, GPU, and SSD costs have skyrocketed over the last year, so that companies like Oracle can fill giant buildings full of RAM and SSD's (and GPU's) and then not even be able to turn them on..

   1. DarkNova6 · 1790346089 · focus · HN ↗

      That's the decentralized nature of capitalism working as intended. Distributing resources in the most efficient way possible. Thank you invisible hand.

      1. bunderbunder · 1790349151 · focus · HN ↗

         Ironically, Adam Smith himself spent plenty of time worrying about the risk that allowing wealth to concentrate and an oligarchy to form would undermine the invisible hand. Much of what he was responding to was English society's tendency toward extremely rich people and organizations (e.g., the East India Company) hoarding resources on a mass scale, to the detriment of everyone else. So what's happening with AI right now is very much the antithesis of the free market he envisioned.

         He wrote at lest one very thoughtful essay expanding on his belief that idolizing the wealthy undermines the basic principles of free and civil society. He criticized large accumulations of wealth as "a monopoly against one's countrymen." And something like half of The Wealth of Nations was committed to suggesting government policies to prevent an entrenched uber-wealthy class from forming, precisely so that capitalism could work as intended.

         1. thrance · 1790410220 · focus · HN ↗

            Adam Smith never believed in an "invisible hand". He uses the concept to disparage the fantasy of "self-regulating" free markets. Even before capitalism did we understand that markets needed rules and regulations, it took centuries of propaganda and of demonizing the opposition as "luddites", then "communists" to convince the majority that we needed to abolish all rules for the economy to flourish.

            A deregulated market is terrible for the environment, the economy and pretty much everyone and everything. It only gives more relative wealth (and power) to the oligarchs, who then lord over us unopposed.

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