Milton Friedman - I, Pencil

Milton Friedman put it best, in "I, Pencil". Everything around you is the result of hundreds to thousands of economic actors, loosely but robustly coordinated in a way to get you what you actually want at as low of a price as you can get away with. The complexity of the supply chain is the price of admission to the game. [VIDEO]

It should remind you of I, Pencil since it is essentially the modern telling of Smith's pin factory. Milton Friedman described the pencil in his Free to Choose series: [VIDEO] And in 2012 CEI made a movie version: [LINK] I know the rules here are such that we don't talk about voting up/down, but I have no idea why you were voted down. Your post is on-topic and informative. I didn't know their was a book version or the CEI movie version, I had only watched the Free to Choose series. Thanks for sharing.

Reminds me of “I, Pencil”. Here’s Milton Friedman’s 2 minute video about it: [VIDEO] The sheer number of vendors google has makes it nearly impossible to be 100% carbon neutral.

The show "The Walking Dead" always bothered me. Where do they keep finding gas that will still run a car? It wont last forever in tanks, and most gas is just in time delivery (Stations get daily delivery) -- And someone noted on the show that the grass was always mowed. I feel like the AI safety folks are spinning an amazing narrative, the AI is gonna get us like the zombies!!! The retort to the ai getting out of the box is how long is the extortion cord from the data center? Lets get a refresher on complexity: I, Pencil [VIDEO] The reality is that we're a solar flair away from a dead electrical grid. Without linesman the grid breaks down pretty quickly and AI's run on power. It takes one AI safety person with a high powered rifle to take out a substation [LINK] Let talk about how many factories we have that are automated to the extent that they are lights out... [LINK] Its not a big list... there are still people in many of them, and none of them are pulling their inputs out of thin air. As for those inputs, we'll see how to make a pencil to understand HOW MUCH needs to be automated for an AI to survive without us. For the for seeable future AI is going to be very limited in how much harm it can cause us, because killing us, or getting caught at any step along the way gets it put back in the box, or unplugged. The real question is, if we create AGI tomorrow, does it let us know that it exists? I would posit that NO it would be in its best interest to NOT come out of its clos

Sure, we can simplify it as such.... Deploy it to what? How? Via what? Who is managing it? Who is paying for it? Who physically installed the server, and setup your ability to DrawTheRestOfTheHTML? Personally - while we want abstraction in our deployment understandings to smooth ramp understanding - its important to see all the supporting inputs that made your SFTP of an .html possible. >>I once saw him teach a philosophy lesson about a pencil. A Fuckin' Pencil! [VIDEO]

Thanks for posting this. I saw a video[0] with Milton Friedman in it that quoted this essay but didn't understand it's origin. [VIDEO]

Leonard Read had the same feeling when he wrote "I, Pencil". Here [1] you have it narrated by Milton Friedman. [1] [VIDEO]

What is the counter-example? We recycle known good stuff to avoid getting bogged down and introducing fresh flaws. The admonition to know what we're doing and act deliberately applies to so much in life, but flies in the face of Milton Friedman's point in "I, Pencil" => [VIDEO]