The big issue I feel like he underrates is the massive incentive to take control of the agency that's supposed to be doing objective assessments. These are now effectively the most powerful people in the country. Even if they start off as saints the political incentive is going to be to find ways to influence it. And once that agency is captured then you have a dictatorship in all but name.
I feel like this reflects a common problem in political theorising, of coming up with an ideal institutional structure without thinking about the incentives around it and how it need to be sustained.
Historical analogues would be how originally non partisan district drawing processes are politicised, the politicisation of science and medicine, or soviet or Chinese gdp figures. The simplest solution is always to just rig the game.
What sinister Atlanticist goals do earthquake updates serve?
It's an entirely opt in system. Nothing stopping other bots opting in as well. The only ones who wouldn't would be ones trying to pretend they're not bots
The cheapest way to automate something is always poor people.This applies even more so in the developing world. Where the vast majority of new construction is happening.
Though it would be interesting to see what the state of construction is like in developed countries that don't have access to a vast pool of cheap immigrant labor. Maybe New Zealand? Northern Europe?
In most major cities the real cost is the land and paperwork to be able to build there. The actual physical materials the building is made of are mostly aesthetic
If you have bugs in an app or website people get mildly annoyed, if you have bugs in a bricklayer a building can fall down. The cost benefit calculation is very different
In my experience "working for yourself" means in practice "working for your clients." You still need an external party willing to give you money for your work. And they will have requirements about how it is done and when it is delivered that you won't necessarily like
> SOME of the 0.1% who can work 18 hours a day nonstop for a decade with extreme natural ability
I'm sceptical of whether they actually exist as described tbh. There's an obvious incentive for rich business people to emphasize the amount of work they put in, and I've not seen any independent verification of their supposedly high output
I feel like a lot of it is the same stuff that you get in generic self help books, but explained in contemporary techie language and cultural references.
Not that that is necessarily bad per se, there can be a lot lot of value to reminding people of things that may seem obvious. But it's annoying when people treat him like a genius for saying fairly standard platitudes in a clever way