> Baumol effects might have raised wages a bit, sure. How could the relative positions of these workers not fall as all these tech-enabled and scale-enabled neighbors come on to the scene?
Supply and demand? If the population of hairdressers was small, so they could charge more and more, then their wages could keep up as a percentage. And that would be possible if for example so many people moved into high productivity work that only a small percentage remained in low automation work. But if you have a constant influx of new hairdressers or a constant influx of people willing to do low automation work, that doesn’t happen.
ChatGPT did much better but I cannot paste it into this text box no matter how many times I try with different formatting to get the white space preserved. chatGPT also could not figure out how to format it for pasting here.
You may be correct, but I wonder if we'll see Mac Mini sized external AI boxes that do have the 1TB of RAM and other hardware for running local models.
Maybe 100% of computer users wouldn't have one, but maybe 10-20% of power users would, including programmers who want to keep their personal code out of the training set, and so on.
I would not be surprised though if some consumer application made it desirable for each individual, or each family, to have local AI compute.
It's interesting to note that everyone owns their own computer, even though a personal computer sits idle half the day, and many personal computers hardly ever run at 80% of their CPU capacity. So the inefficiency of owning a personal AI server may not be as much of a barrier as it would seem.
It doesn't sound like a lot to me, either. I have known many people who moved to another country for graduate study. Some of them ended up settling in that country, but others pursued further study or employment in yet other countries. And perhaps the largest group among my acquaintances are those who eventually moved back to their home countries. They feel more comfortable there, they have family there, or, in many cases, returning home is what they intended to do all along.
It really depends on which 25% it is. Is it evenly distributed or is it the best and brightest, or the worst who are leaving. In addition, its institutional knowledge you are losing. I care much more about losing the guy with 15 years of experience than a fresh post-doc.
The value of that airplane would be astronomical. I would split it up into dozens of flights just to reduce risk if one of them had a mechanical problem.
I’m looking forward to the day when the cost of taking one of these falls to somewhere 20% above the cost of fuel and wear and tear on the vehicle, making it incredibly cheap to take a ride anywhere you’d reasonably want to be driven to.
Uber estimated that it costs Waymo $2/mile to operate.
Google says they charge $1.60 to $2.60 a mile, depending on location and demand, so Waymo is already almost certainly at the price you claim you'd be taking it.
I think you dramatically underestimate how much it actually costs to operate a car. Most people think they pay $0 to garage their car, for instance, since the cost was rolled into the price of their house purchase and mostly invisible. But it isn't $0 to a business. Likewise, very few people depreciate their car over just 5 years. Or clean it inside and out every single day.
Here's one attempt at costs for Waymo that finds it costs them about $60,000 a year to operate a single car. Also notice the comments talking about how the per vehicle price is high, how that flows into higher insurance, and all kinds of other things.
Maybe someday there will be a discount AV taxi company using 10 year old beat up Honda Civics that only get cleaned once a month and provide extremely barebones support to pull the costs down to $1/mile. That's a 50% drop in costs from today, so hard to see it coming very quickly. But that's still pretty expensive to be using as a daily commuter!
And note that the IRS per mile rate is $0.70/mile. It's not perfect but it is a decent third party estimate of the true cost of operating a car. Hard to see any taxi company charging anything less than that. So a 10 mile commute every day is still going to cost you $280/month in an AV taxi for the foreseeable future.
You get completely different numbers if you go by overall cost / distance vs taxi pricing models. In the latter, you separate out the flag drop fee (~$10 for Waymo) from the mileage and time process. Here's an experimental Waymo price tracker trying to estimate these numbers:
$2 is a good target for the AV mileage rate. It's actually somewhat high if I put my industry hat on for a second. It's not a good estimate for the number you'll get from doing total_price/distance.
> Uber estimated that it costs Waymo $2/mile to operate.
Waymo costs are immaterial right now. Their cars are not production cars, and they have spent billions on R&D that they can't even hope to recoup with the current fleet.
That being said, $2 is super-low. The IRS rate for car depreciation write-off is 71 cents per mile.
> But that's still pretty expensive to be using as a daily commuter!
The true cost of a transit ride in NYC or Seattle is around $20-$30 per ride. People don't actually pay that much because it's heavily subsidized.
Once self-driving matures, it'll also be subsidized and it will completely kill off transit. Maaaaaybe excluding subways in some areas.
> Most people think they pay $0 to garage their car, for instance, since the cost was rolled into the price of their house purchase and mostly invisible. But it isn't $0 to a business.
And on the other hand, each Waymo parking spot is probably a lot cheaper per unit time than 250 square feet inside a house in a residential area. And presumably they need a lot less than 1 parking spot per car.
> Here's one attempt at costs for Waymo that finds it costs them about $60,000 a year to operate a single car.
Doesn't that sound cheap? If a car can average 10 rides per day, that's $16 per ride.
Supply and demand? If the population of hairdressers was small, so they could charge more and more, then their wages could keep up as a percentage. And that would be possible if for example so many people moved into high productivity work that only a small percentage remained in low automation work. But if you have a constant influx of new hairdressers or a constant influx of people willing to do low automation work, that doesn’t happen.
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