There are many excuses for failing to tax the ultra-wealthy. The truth is that governments don’t tackle the problem because they don’t want to, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

The Harvard professor provides a ceaseless flow of startling details in this exhaustively researched, 1000-year account

A repeat of the disaster that ended the 1930s is not inevitable. But just as then, capitalists and intellectuals can’t thrash out how to adapt their favored economic model in a way that voters will accept. Capitalism is still the least terrible way to run an economy, but it will have to change profoundly if the future really is a world where most people’s labor isn’t needed.

The United States is one of the world’s richest, most powerful and technologically innovative countries; but neither its wealth nor its power nor its technology is being harnessed to address the situation in which 40 million people continue to live in poverty.

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It isn’t actual artificial intelligence akin to C-3PO, it’s a sophisticated pattern-matching tool.

Rather than seeing exponential improvements in the quality of AI performance (a la Moore’s Law), we’re instead seeing exponential increases in the cost to improve AI systems — supervised ML seems to follow an S-Curve.

our heavy investment into safety didn’t translate for investors.

It took me way too long to realize that VCs would rather a $1b business with a 90% margin than a $5b business with a 50% margin, even if capital requirements and growth were the same.

Investors were impressed. It didn’t matter that that jump from “sometimes working” to statistically reliable was 10–1000x more work.
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