… and all the devices and nutrition necessary to sustain that Terran life until it can become self sufficient—without the help of preexisting humans to teach them or impart physical skills—on a rock with either no life, inhospitable life, or nutritionally incompatible life.
You’re forgetting food. And supplies, information, and know-how to get these lab-grown terrans to be capable of survival on a completely foreign celestial body that lacks soil, vegetable, or animal life.
And for what? What do we actually accomplish after pouring vast resources into the dystopian science project of bootstrapping a society of a handful of permanently isolated terrans on a planet we weren’t evolved to survive on light years away?
There’s zero hope of meaningful trade or exploitation of resources. Who is going to light the money on fire to make this happen and why?
Without new physics that isn’t even remotely visible on the horizon and that utterly contradicts most of what we believe to be true, this isn’t going to happen. Robotic AI probes sent to other star systems to send back telemetry? Sure, fine. Flesh bags sent to self-replicate on terraformed worlds out in the stars? Not a whisper of a microscopic chance.
> By definition market makers are earning a fraction of the price improvement they provide
By definition, they’re making in aggregate essentially whatever the difference was between the “misprice” and the “true price”, assuming sufficient belief in both of these things. One of the parties in the hypothetically mispriced trade is bearing the loss. Their cut had to come from somewhere.
> As an index investor you should absolutely care! How do you think you are able to buy into the fund at a reasonable price?
You are relying on an interpretation of “reasonable” to intuitively mean “cheap” when in reality it means “accurate” in this context.
As an index investor, as long as it is accurate enough I don’t care. Any mispricing of assets up and down will come out in the wash.
Index funds existed well before HFTs were endemic. I have seen zero evidence that HFTs have caused index funds to net more of the gains from their underlying indexes.
The argument is not that you get better prices, it’s that you get accurate prices.
First, this definition has always been circular: what’s the most accurate price? The one the market comes up with. More market, more accuracy!
Second, there is never any reconciliation of the costs society is saddled with in order to chase arbitrarily more accurate prices, the most obvious of which is the massive quantity of fat skimmed off by the financial services sector.
Third, as an index investor, I more or less couldn’t care less. This hyperfixation on accuracy only really matters to people who are actively trading, which is already a fool’s game.
This is quite literally government control of the means of production, which is the central tenet of the economic philosophy that the right repeatedly claims is their greatest mortal fear: socialism.
Honestly this is because an enormous segment of the population has offloaded their critical thinking skills and moral evaluation to large media conglomerates, who mostly serve the interests of those at the top who would not benefit from these things.
If a politician does want to shape policy based on research evidence for what would improve society, this captured segment of the electorate is weaponized against them.
I’m reasonably familiar with cryptography but the formalism of obfuscation given here makes no sense to me.
> The precise formalism typically used, indistinguishability obfuscation, says that if you are given obfuscations of two different programs that have the same functionality, you can't tell which is which.
This seems… not that useful? A sufficiently advanced optimizing compiler would be capable of transforming two input programs with identical functionality into one or the other, or both into some third representation. Either approach meets this criteria but doesn’t seem to me to provide any useful purpose.
And in practice, do two identically-functioning but different programs even exist in the wild? Two superficially identical programs of nontrivial complexity will almost certainly have divergent behavior somewhere (bugs, edge cases), at which point this formalism becomes moot.
Food has gotten progressively cheaper. At the same time, both the compensation demand for farm labor have plummeted.
Demand for the output of knowledge work can increase while demand for those who produce it falls. “Knowledge work” is not a product with inherent demand, just like you and I don’t go to the store to buy farm labor.
And what happens when the “investigations” are malicious, politically motivated, and prosecuted by a DoJ that’s been bent to the will of a tinpot dictator, and adjudicated by overtly political actors?
Successful nations haven’t had enough young people to care for the elderly because they’ve all been employed as knowledge workers. Knowledge work is going away rapidly. The only work that will be left are things that require actual human bodies (for now).
In short, jobs like elder care are suddenly going to have an enormous number of new job seekers, since it requires human presence and isn’t taxing physical labor.
If we build a terawatt of green energy capacity then turn around and immediately use it for datacenters rather than to replace fossil fuel generation, we haven’t gained anything. If anything we’ve lost out.
… and all the devices and nutrition necessary to sustain that Terran life until it can become self sufficient—without the help of preexisting humans to teach them or impart physical skills—on a rock with either no life, inhospitable life, or nutritionally incompatible life.
You might as well call that device a magic wand.