A blog
11/22/2023
This is a old blog post I wrote last year, back when I had a zola website.
The goal of this was to explore how technology could fix the major industries which I saw as stagnant and doomed to fail.
If you are curious about my political views you will not find them here. What you will find is my strong support for technology as a solution to societal ills, and unwavering support for the capitalist machine.
Wether I still hold these opinions or if I have changed, I am sure will be obvious in future blog posts. I am however quite proud of this one, even tho it is a bit too much surface level to give any enough analysis on society and technology to be of any use to those looking to create solutions.
I did have an idea for a second part, maybe I will still do this someday. There are some ideas I want to explore.
I care a lot about the first principles, or at least what it means to support certain policies over others.
The reason I am writing this today has a lot to do with how I hope that society develops in my lifetime. I care a lot about decentralization not because it is a better, or if it is a more efficient system (it is not). But more to do with control. I wish I could trust a bureaucrat as much as I trust a random Swedish citizen or my neighbor. It is not even that, I want my worst enemy to use it too. If its that resiliant, it would be amazing.
I think the fundamental issue is that according to David Friedman:
"There are essentially only three ways that I can get another person to help me achieve my ends: love, trade, and force."
So why do we really have taxation, welfare, and laws (among other things)? Because we somewhere agreed that we can not trust the average Sven to donate for what we think is the "better good". Instead, we use force to create the society we want. The biggest issue with this is that we can not tax 70% of someone’s income without complaints, so instead we use hidden taxes like "arbetsgivaravgift" which allows us to tax a citizen’s income twice. In order to create a better society we therefore can only use the other two methods, trade and love.
Love does not scale, this is what we knew even before we created countries based on this idea (communism). Why should I pay for some drunk in Gävle, expecting him to do the same to me?
So we are left with trade. The way that you disrupt the state is by making their services as irrelevant as they can be. The goal is to make it impractical for them to even have the services that they provide. Look at the shipping service, Sweden used to have their own postal service, but now it is all privatized. Except that the state got cold feet and actually own 60% of postnord. A company so bad it made an ad in 2018 about their incompetence and lost an entire city’s votes during the 2018 election.
Keep in mind, that a company is the same as a state in this way. This is why startups can win.
So let us think about the biggest services the state provides and how we could disrupt it.
With our current focus on "neurodivergence" in the corporate world, why do we still cram all kids in the same year, learning at the same pace as others? Ideally, we would have a situation where every child would get a personal teacher who would help them understand the concepts thoroughly. Instead of making sure that each student passes the final exam in the name of "equity", we could instead help each student individually.
The obvious problem with this is that we do not have enough teachers for each student, but why do we not allow AIs to do this for us? An AI is infinitely patient and will make sure you get as much work done during school hours as possible. Make this as cheap as possible and all of a sudden you do not need to pay for a public school if it does not benefit your child. Today we have debates over whether some schools are better than others, with this system all kids will get a better education than any school can provide today.
In Sweden homeschooling is illegal, and I suspect it will remain that way for a while, it is after all a big reason why Swedes move to Åland. I suspect as AI teaching becomes more mainstream, if we allow homeschooling will be a massive debate. Most likely it will change slightly to allow kids to jump grades in certain subjects if it is not completely banned. If it does not go to the benefit of my kids’ education, I know I will move my family to a country that allows me to give them the best education they can get. This will create a substantial brain drain. Something countries can not afford.
Healthcare is an interesting industry. It is an industry based on fixing permanent problems with temporary solutions. Vaccines seem to be the only medicine that actually solves the problem, which is that we as biological creatures get sick. It does kind of baffle me how the only disease we have managed to eradicate is smallpox.
Subsequentially, medicine and healthcare is the most regulated industry on the planet. There does not exist a single free market healthcare system on the planet. If you think the United States has free-market healthcare you should read up a bit. We have a law about the stagnation of biotech Eroom’s law, that says the inflation-adjusted cost of developing a new drug roughly doubles every nine years. To be fair it makes sense if you think about the job of the regulator. If he legalizes a drug that kills patients, he will lose his job. If it cures them nobody praises him. So it is in his interest to make it harder to legalize new drugs.
What is also quite interesting is the amount of people who are scared about genetic engineering. After all genetic engineering is allowing us to alter the software that we run on. We should probably have a genetic ecosystem similar to that of our open-source ecosystem for code. Allow people to publish genes, make small modifications, and allow others to fork and improve it. This seems to be the only way that we can truly solve this problem permanently, by fully eradicating diseases that exist. Allowing consenting adults to make their own modifications should not be a radical position, if you think that it will create a society where smarter and more beautiful people will rule society, boy do I have bad news for you. Remember the result of this tech could be that kids get a single shot to get rid of cancer. If you would rather ban this instead of curing all diseases, you are a monster.
The bureaucracy seems to be the only issue why this has not happened yet, maybe we just need a e\acc firm to solve this.
Recently I was told by my mother about something she saw on the news. They had an interview with a European politician about chatGPT and other LLMs. The politician was complaining or arguing that we need an AI that is aligned with European values instead of American ones. The problem with LLMs is that they are controlled, not who controls them. The problem is the nature of power over people, the problem is not who runs it.
The issue with education and healthcare is the system, not who runs it. The only way we can improve these systems is by innovating to such an extent it makes no sense to keep the system we have today. So let us build!