Lugh

I don't have sources for the 2024 deflation in China and AI. (I qualified my initial statement "hard to know").

Robotics are a proxy for AI in manufacturing.

I suspect AI is about to give us a type of deflation no economist has ever seen or modeled before. What will happen when AI gives us the expert knowledge of doctors, lawyers, technicians, teachers, engineers, etc etc almost for free?

You can't talk of this scenario in terms of past models, because it's never happened before, but we can clearly see that it's just about to happen to us right ahead.

The last 12 months have seen the most sustained period of deflation in China since the late 1990s. It's hard to know how much AI is responsible, but I would guess it is to some extent. It's driving the reduction in prices in the manufacturing of so many things, EVs especially.

Many people assume unemployment will be AI's most destructive economic effect. That may be true, but before it causes a problem, there will be a far more immediate one to deal with - deflation.

Deflation is so destructive because it shrinks businesses' incomes while increasing the size of their debt relative to this income. If there is sustained deflation, then this leads to a spiraling collapse that takes asset prices like the stock market and property values with it. This was the main mechanism that caused most of the damage in the Great Depression.

If AI is on the cusp of giving us lawyers, doctors, and other experts knowledge for practically free, then it follows that there is massive deflation to come. There is already a backlash against AI in some quarters, I would expect it to grow when the deflation problem arrives.

If ever there was an industry that could do with some technological overhaul - its housing. 3D Printing threatens to do the job, and seems to have the right tools, but never takes off - will this be the one that does?

At $1,000 per module they offer solutions to homelessness in western countries.

ew data show both have stopped increasing. Is the change permanent? People are planning for this, though it's possible both power sources have a final spurt ahead of them.

This is still a few years ahead of expected schedule so it's hard to tell.

Link to info about China's coal.

When might it integrate Lemmy?

I won't be surprised if Chinese astronauts reach the Moon before American ones return to it. Boeing's SLS seems to go from bad to worse, and SpaceX's Starliner is nowhere near ready to completely replace it.

Some people seem to expect SpaceX to work miracles. It has formidable problems to solve before using a Starliner to land astronauts on the Moon. The capability of refuelling Starliner in space, landing on the Moon, refueling there and taking off from it may take to the 2030s to solve.

The EU is to change the law to make social media owners and company executives personally liable with fines, or potential jail sentences, for failing to deal with misinformation that promotes violence. That's good, but teaching critical thinking is even more important.

AI is about to make the threat of misinformation orders of magnitude greater. It is now possible to fake images, video, and audio indistinguishable from reality. We need new ways to combat this, and relying on top-down approaches isn't enough. There's another likely consequence - expect lots of social media misinformation telling you how bad critical thinking is. The people who use misinformation don't want smart, informed people who can spot them lying.

capitalist hellscape

It's hilarious seeing Elon Musk taking up the issue of plummeting birth rates, while simultaneously saying people who work for him who won't commit to giving their life to his companies and sleeping in the office are lazy losers.

People often focus on the environmental benefits of renewables, but they have another huge advantage - they can be used as decentralized energy sources. One benefit, you're not at the mercy of price fixing by semi-monopolized corporations obsessed with increasing profits every quarter. Even better, you can break free from other people's incompetence, corruption and inefficiency.

This seems to be what is happening in Pakistan, and it's a hopeful lesson for many other parts of the world. Plagued by a corrupt increasingly dysfunctional traditional grid infrastructure many people are now able to bypass it entirely thanks to rooftop solar.

I find the idea of destroying the International Space Station very depressing. Centuries from now, when hopefully humankind will have widely expanded into the galaxy, our ancestors will be fascinated by it. We know this because of our own deep connection to ancient artifacts preserved in the world's museums.

The current plan is to destroy the ISS circa 2030 by burning it up in the atmosphere with a deliberately destructive deorbit. It seems with just a little more effort and imagination we could transport an unmanned ISS to somewhere like an Earth-Moon Lagrange point L1 and park it there for future generations and a future space museum.

I suspect we are going to see more measures like this. Prices are continually falling for rooftop solar+battery systems, and as every year goes by it becomes feasible for more and more people to generate much of their electricity at home. Climate change will exacerbate the trend too, as home setups are an obvious insurance measure as hurricanes and flooding worsen and degrade national infrastructure.

In the 2030s & 40s much of today's fossil fuel infrastructure will become stranded investments that some people will want compensation for. If fully paid for, that bill could run to trillions of dollars globally. Choices will have to be made. Nationalization of some legacy energy companies might make more sense if they can no longer survive in a free market system.