alt Hacker NewsThis is the trade-off to connectivity and removing frictional barriers (i.e., globalism). This is the economic equivalent of what Nick Land and Spandrell called the "IQ shredder". Spandrell said of Singapore:
Singapore is an IQ shredder. It is an economically productive metropolis that
sucks in bright and productive minds with opportunities and amusements at the
cost of having a demographically unsustainable family unit.
Right now, AI is a "capital shredder". In the past, there were barriers everywhere, and we've worked hard to tear those down. It used to be that the further the distance (physically, but also in other senses too, like currencies, language, culture, etc.), the greater the friction to capital flows. The local rich guy would start a business in his town. Now he sends it to one of the latest global capital attractors, which have optimized for capital inflow. This mechanism works whether the attractor can efficiently use that capital or not. That resource inflow might be so lucrative, that managing inflow is the main thing it does. Right now that's AI, but as long as present structure continues, this is how the machine of the global economy will work.
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Apologies but either I don’t understand your post or it is nonsensical.
What relevance does AI have to being an IQ shredder if the talent has gone into (productively) developing capable AI?
If anything, AI completely disproves your notion of IQ shredder because this is an instance of lack of barriers actually hastening progress. Look at all the AI talent. Very few are American or ethnic Americans.
What amazes me about this theory is that being the 115 IQ guy in a town where the next guy is 105 isn’t better than being the 115 IQ guy in and office averaging 120.
Or put more plainly, being a big fish in a small pond is not better than being a small fish.
> Singapore is an IQ shredder.
Heh, I've just realized about 2 years ago that it's worse.
Cities are people shredders. Based on the information I've found, cities have lower fertility rates than rural areas and this has been the case ever since they were created.
I absolutely love cities, but with ever increasing urbanization and unless we make HUGE changes to facilitate people easily having kids in cities (and I'm talking HUGE, stuff like having stay at home parents for the first 6-7 years of their childhood, free access to communal areas that offer all the services required to take care of kids of any age, free education, etc), humanity will probably not be able to sustain a population of more than say, 1 billion people. Probably much fewer.
Which I guess, could work, but we will be in totally uncharted territory.
And then AI comes in and things become... very interesting.
What’s the alternative. Keep the smart physically separated, can never collaborate to make anything paradigm shifting and we just prod along with small town paper mills and marginally better local government?
this is genius
This is hogwash. It's incel and eugenic reasoning wrapped up all together.
Not every smart person (or even most) are engineers, and of the ones that are they don't all move to tech hubs, and the ones that do not all of them can't get laid.
And I'll give you a great reason why it's hogwash, the "brilliant" engineers that can't get laid in Singapore are the same "brilliant" engineers that can't get laid in their home town