Careful when talking about mineral resources. It's not a matter of throwing around textbook phrases about how common something is in the Earth's crust.
Mining is always, always, always about the economics. How concentrated; how accessible by road; how easy to extract; distance to refineries; cost of building and transporting people and supplies to the mine. Even, affect on prices once the mine starts delivering! A mine can deliver so much it deflates prices and drives itself out of business.
Lots of everything, everywhere. But to build a mine, you have to ask a mining engineer, and they measure if it's worth anybody's effort.
Yes, but... storing stuff costs money, keeping a mine open and unflooded, etc... costs money, even if you're not doing any mining, etc... Also markets will adjust prices if they know about your stockpile, too.
Now the price of raw ore has dropped. "Revenue decreased 49% year-over-year to $48.7 million, driven by a 54% decrease in the realized price of rare earth oxide (“REO”) in concentrate and a 9% decrease in REO sales volumes partially offset by initial sales of separated NdPr."[3] Rare earth gluts have happened before. There's some price manipulation from China, and too much financialization at MP Minerals (they just did a stock buyback) but it's mostly that demand isn't that sensitive to price. Rare earth costs are a small fraction of the cost of a motor. MP Minerals is still running at a loss. The previous owner of that mine went bankrupt.
The bottleneck now seems to be the next steps in ore processing. MP Minerals announced in 2021 that they were starting to build a processing plant in Fort Worth, Texas.[4] The building has been built and there are cars in the parking lot.[5] It's a small facility, subsidized by General Motors and DoD. Production of product (magnets) is supposed to start in 2025.
There's no fundamental shortage of rare earths, but making money at this seems to be very difficult.
The problem with rare earths is you get a mix of different rare earths in the final concentrate, which then have to be separated from each other using a lot of time-consuming steps, since they're vary similar chemically (technically, having identical d- and s-orbital configurations, only differing in f-orbitals). An active area of research:
The lanthanide series of elements is interesting because the 4f levels that are getting filled are actually physically closer to the nucleus than the outer orbitals, so their chemical properties are very similar between elements. That also makes them hard to separate from one another.
Unless there is a special Norwegian process for this separation, I am not sure this announcement will mean much.
This is one of those weird narratives where you see stories about rare earth minerals are thought to be rare like gold, not rare as in practically everywhere but in very small quantities.
They used to mine rare earth metals in California. It's terrible for the environment and labor costs are high. But in an emergency you could do it there and many other places.
Yes, some ground is easier to process, but that isn't the limiting factor. But the real cost is the toxic waste created and labor and the ground is super torn up because you process so much. It helps if you can do it far away from people. Hopefully they have a better plan to clean up afterward.
Unfortunately this is also in pretty decent farming land. The land owners will be compensated, but I understand many don't feel too happy about leaving their farms...
They have to thank Farouk al-Kasim for that, an Iraqi geologist from Basra who worked at the Iraqi Petroleum Company and moved to Norway, wrote a white paper selling the idea of the state participation in exploiting oil in Norway and the rest is history.
This is what the US should have done. Huge amounts of collective wealth, frittered away. Alaska’s the only state I know of that even kind-of demands that permanent extraction from the very land under our feet benefit its people broadly, instead of only a few.
Alaska does the exact opposite of what you are glamorizing, by frittering away extracted wealth on a state UBI (which many recipients use to avoid building careers or skills).
At least the unrecoverable wealth of the very land of the state is distributed to residents, I mean. That’s not the opposite, it’s just less than the ideal of capturing quite a bit of that value and investing it for citizens’ benefit so that some of the wealth isn’t lost to a few private hands forever. It’s the closest the US gets to doing something that’s a good idea, with its vast non-renewable natural resources.
When the oil music stops and residents have to pull their weight via value-added production or services, residents of Texas (where the economy is rapidly diversifying, but makes no effort at a UBI) are going to be better off than residents of Alaska.
It's just generational theft at that point, you're taking resources that could be utilized by (some cultures would say belong to) future generations and instead have set up a structure that has the effect of letting the current generation drink the money away, not to mention the poor prospects of the future generations growing up in a system like that. I know Japan has a culture that believes that we are stewards of the land for the youth.
America lately has collectively decided to toss in their babies to fuel their furnace of war.
There was one discovered in Kiruna, Sweden last year [1] and announced to much fanfare during an EU summit. I wonder if there is any particular reason behind this trend. In both cases the path to commercial extraction is long and uncertain.
This one also uses aluminium rather than copper wiring which has advantages when recycling apparently because any copper content that remains with recycled steel makes it less durable.
Norway has a very long and interesting history regarding natural resource development and stewardship, and lately a huge conversation has been about what is going to come after Oil. Would be very interesting if the answer is rare earth minerals!
I highly recommend a particular paper, entitled "The New Oil" which gives a very good overview of the history of Norwegian resource development:
They're essentially unlimited. They make up 68ppm of the Earth's crust. If we used all of that to make stuff, we'd run out of room to put the stuff before we'd run out of rare earths.
(We also came very close to running "out of" ozone over a large part of our planet. The idea that a resource is "done" only when it's been utterly depleted isn't how it goes in practice.)
>Whenever a resource becomes scarce, incentives drive technology to find better alternatives, we move towards abundance at each iteration.
The denial is strong in these ones...
"Hey, it worked in the past, when the population was 1/100th to 1/4th (start of 20th century), industrial production and consumption was 1/10000th was it is, demand for most modern necessary resources zero, and so on, so should work in millenia to come. And if not we can always pull a pivot to an alternative resource out of our magic hats, because 'science'".
Funny thing about that idea is if it was true our best option would be to ban oil extraction as early as possible and just wait for the unavoidable innovation to take place and bring us to the next level of abundance.
It should be noted that there is no shortage of places in, for example North America, with rare earths, but instead all mines were shut down.
Why?
China.
China purposefully sold such way under production cost, then once all competing mines closed, raised prices. And if you're in business, and thinking of going through the cost of reopening, you certainly wouldn't now that your competition has shown it can bankrupt you at a whim.
It's actually not a bad strategy for China to have taken.
Now though, China is restricting on political principles, to hobble chip production for the West. Now, there is a desire for domestic production again.
But if I had a dormant rare earths mine, I wouldn't step up without some protection, such as duties on foreign imports.
Because otherwise, if the duty is just on China, it will still flow cheap through other countries.
There is a french expression « Gouverner c'est prévoir », « To govern is to predict ». If China wants to frequently subsidize west consumption (rare earth, EV cars, batteries, solar panels, microwave ovens in the past, the list is long...), great for us, but our government should have the lucidity to keep some industry under limited economic perfusion (keep the machine tools, fire most of the workers, but keep things running and knowledge) for when the scheme will with certainly came to its end; COVID should have been an eye opener for most.
I researched this a bit earlier this week but didn't save the links. Its not just that China could produce rare earth minerals at lower costs but western countries starting tightening their laws on mining (due to uranium byproducts) but also environments laws. Then they willingly shared the production techniques to China to do all the dirty work.
However US restarted its rare earth mining a few years back and now it ranks second in production through far behind China. I'm guess the main concern was the need of these rare earth minerals for military equipment.
Don't blame every woe you ever saw on China as its modern these days in US, this is solely US government incompetence par excellence. I am pretty sure there must have been a competent bureaucrat yelling this left and right 2 decades ago but completely ignored or worse.
They could foresee it from lightyears ahead and compensate miners due to strategic resource and it would cost US literally nothing, you know in same vein as GM or Boeing were/are 'strategic' shitshows.
But they did nothing and let simple market force decide outcome. China didn't close US mines, US mine owners due to economical pressures and lack of support form US did.
Yea, they found one in Sweden last year, but this one is much bigger. Also two entirely different deposits. The one in Sweden is right at its northern border, and this one is in the southern part of Norway.
The location in Sweden is not particularly bad. The logistics to shipping is very well established through the all season harbor Narvik (in Norway) because of the iron ore mines.
The culprit is the Sami people that just happened to live there before the more powerful swedish government annexed it. Who is right? The people who were here first herding reindeer or the government? Not a trivial question to answer if you take a step back.
If you're a cynic, announcing that you've "discovered" a large of amount of REE in your iron ore tailings - and having the chief executive of the EU declare it strategically important - seems like a very good way of making sure you can continue mining iron ore for the forseeable future.
> The logistics to shipping is very well established through the all season harbor Narvik (in Norway) because of the iron ore mines.
Unless a train derails. Once. Or twice. Or, out of a sudden, it become too warm in May. Then some minor mines start to close. (Just telling it as it is, lol. Who knows what happens next)
But this route has delivered iron ore reliably for probaly 100 years now. The iron ore from Sweden was (somewhat paradoxically) the main reason Hitler invaded Norway.
Does Norway still have much of a mining industry? After years of relying on resources from other countries, I would imagine that building the infrastructure, acquiring equipment, and hiring skilled workers will be a serious challenge. And the first productive year would still be a long ways away. On the other hand, it may be strategically important for NATO to have productive mines that aren’t under the control of enemy states (Russia, China, etc).
On one hand, it's unfair that a country already very rich with natural resources discovers more of them.
On the other hand, if there is a country which can be trusted to exploit natural resources in a way that benefits the whole country and its population, and not fall down the resource curse[1], it's Norway.
The thing about Norway is that it’s a cold, barren, remote place where very few people want to live. Most of the year it’s cold and gray, and most of the country is uninhabitable.
The result is that its natural resources haven’t been consumed to the degree that most developed countries’ resources have, and there aren’t as many people to consume them.
I find it a strangely fair situation. Their luck comes from having friendly neighbors who care about their well-being and responsible development.
History would disagree with you there pretty strongly. Norway (and Scandiland in general) was fought over for millennia, leading to an extremely rich, interesting, and bloody history - even well after the Viking era. As a somewhat random aside this [1] book is an extremely interesting read for anybody into history - the 'King's Mirror.' It's a book written around 1250 intended exclusively for the education of a Norwegian King. It takes the Plato-type style of a question and answer session between a learned man (father) and pupil (son).
It covers basically every aspect of life, but the most interesting thing about it that it was written near a millennia ago now, yet so many things in it feel so incredibly familiar. The Wiki page links to a bunch of different free translations. Here [2] is the one that I read.
> so many things in it feel so incredibly familiar
I get this reading a lot of old texts. "De natura deorum" in particular struck me as downright uncanny. I've seen this exact discussion play out time and time again in discussion boards in the early 2000s. The only thing that's a bit off is that the tone is civil and level-headed.
Like the thing is 2000 years old, how long have we been having these arguments?
It's often forgotten how much conflict there was in Europe (and most of the world) in the 18th and 19th centuries. How this was fairly "normal"
It's really forgotten how relatively peaceful our time is. I'm not complaining, in fact, I want to protect it. And that means we can't forget what was.
I would not ignore the 20th century here. WW1 and WW2 may have not taken up that many years, but their death tolls and overall impact were tremendous. Millions were also killed in Vietnam and Korea as well. Then there's things most people in the West are not so familiar with like the Indonesian mass killings [1], Nigerian Civil War [2], Chinese Civil War [3], and so on with numerous other major events with millions to tens of millions killed.
I also think it's clear that the reason that we call the Cold War, the Cold War, and not WW3 is because of nuclear weapons. If anything the general trendline seems to be for conflicts of far greater violence, intensity, and instability over time, but this is currently being masked by nuclear weapons among developed nations. Although the current trend of nations picking ever more idiotic 'leaders' is suggestive that even mutually assured destruction will likely give way as a deterrent, sooner or later.
It's a great time to support life becoming multiplanetary!
Sure, but still quite a lot of conflict compared to now (my point about "relative"). Levels that I think people greatly underestimate. And those first 15 years were VERY bloody. (Napoleonic Wars was 1803-1815 for those that don't know and killed between 3.5m and 7m people)
But bloody European wars still include the Caucasian War, the First Carlist War (where 5% of the Spanish population died), Austro-Prussian, Franco-Prussian, the Third Carlist War, and Russo-Ottoman wars. Not to mention some very bloody revolutions: Greek, Hungarian, Italian, French (which cascaded), and so on.
I think it's also important to remember that Europe in 1800 had about 195 million people and rose to a bit over 400 million by the end of the century. Which should significantly influence how one thinks about the causality levels when considering today's >740 million.
Not to mention all the conflicts outside of Europe (many including European powers). The Dungan "Revolt" and Miao Rebellion were some of the bloodiest conflicts in human history. It was an especially bloody century for China.
I'm not sure I'd say that Congress of Vienna achieved lasting peace and I think we both know that either side of that argument can be argued. Especially on the distinction of how you consider peace (people killing one another or conflicts between nations?) and locality (conflicts between European powers on European soil or conflicts involving European powers outside Europe?). Either way, the body count is very high.
Independently, the Napoleonic Wars, (and outside Europe) Red Turban Rebellion, Mfecane, Miao Rebellion, Dungan Revolt, and Taping Rebellion have higher death tolls than all of the global conflicts since 2000[0]. These numbers aren't even normalized to population change[1]. So while maybe not as bloody (in Europe) as the 18th century, I'd still claim it was extremely bloody in the relative sense (which was my point)
[1] Recognizing that world populations were 1bn in 1800, 1.2bn in 1850, 1.6bn in 1900, 6.1bn in 2000, and 8bn today. This represents a monumential shift and should significantly affect how one interprets casualty numbers.
No one claimed 2024 was peaceful. Nor that any time is. The statement was
***relatively*** peaceful our time is
Relatively is an important qualifying word here. Qualifiers are important words that can dramatically change the meaning of sentences and can easily be missed. I think you have missed this specific case.
2024 is not relatively peaceful for the 21st century is indeed accurate. But relatively peaceful in terms of (the explicitly stated context) of human history is unambiguously accurate. There are multiple wars in the 19th century that have death tolls greater than all global conflicts since 2000.
I'm not sure what you are trying to argue or if you're just trolling or being flippant. No one is trying to dismiss the wars in Ukraine or Israel/Palestine. No one is trying to even diminish the atrocities in these conflicts in any way. But you are in fact being dismissive of the tens of millions who passed away in just the 1800s and even more in the other centuries. We can compare things without diminishing things and not recognizing the successes and failures of the past will only lead to greater intensity in the future.
If you cannot recognize context nor qualifying words, we are done here. Engage in good faith or not at all.
If we look at 1800s, and take any single year in terms of causalities, how would it compare to 2024? Would 2024 be closer to the top or bottom ten deadliest years of 1800s?
> Would 2024 be closer to the top or bottom ten deadliest years of 1800s?
Top 10? It's _maybe_ in the bottom of the top 50...
Forgive me, but I'm going to make a simplification because I don't feel like spending the time to dig deeper. But I think that's fair because you're not even willing to spend the effort to go to wikipedia. So the simplification is just looking at the war casualties instead of singular years. Fair? If not, I'll leave it to you to gather the data. I'll even give a decent estimate by averaging some but don't think all wars started in January and ended in December.
Either way, it won't matter because the 19th century is so much bloodier
War Estimated Casualties
Palestine–Israel War (2023-) 41,529–51,418 (let's say ~9mo, so 55k-68.5k/yr)
Russian-Ukranian War (2022-) Wiki says 300k+ other sources say that's just Russia (let's say 2.5yrs, so 120k+/yr)
So let's say 2024 is (projecting) 175k-190k
Here's a reduced version of the wikipedia entry. I'll let you guestimate for each year to figure out where exactly 2024 sits.
Saint-Domingue expedition (1802-1803) 135k+
Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) 3.5M - 7M (290k - 583k/yr)
Peninsular War (1808-1814) 1m+
French Invasion of Russia (1812: <6mo) 540k+
Spanish-American Indep (SPWI) (1808-1833) 600k - 1.2M (24k - 48k/yr)
Colombian Independence (1810-1823) 250k - 400k+
Venezualan Independence (1810-1823) 228k
Mfecane (1810s-1830s) 1M - 2M (~50k - 100k/yr)
Carlist Wars (1820-1876) 200k+
First (1833-1840) 111k-306k+ (15.9k - 43.7k/yr)
Third (1872-1876) 7k-50k
Greek Independence (1821-1831) 170k+
French Colonization (1830-1895) 110k+
French Algerian Conquest (1830-1903) 600k - 1.1M
Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864) 20M - 30M (1.43M - 2.14M/yr)
Crimean War (1853-1856) 356k - 615k
Red Turban Rebellion (1854-1856) 1M+
Miao Rebellion (1854-1873) 4.9M (258k/yr)
Punti-Hakka Clan Wars (1855-1868) 500k - 1M+ (38k - 77k/yr)
Panthay Rebellion (1856-1873) 890k - 1M+
Indian Rebellion (1857-1858) 800k - 1M+
American Civil War (1861-1865) 650k - 1M+ (162k - 250k/yr)
Dungan Revolt (1862-1877) 8M - 20 M (533k - 1.33M/yr)
Paraguayan War (1864-1870) 300k - 1.2M
Austro-Prussian War (1866) 40k+
Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) 433k+
Cuban Independence (1895-1898) 362k+
So it doesn't even break the top 10. In fact, the first 15 years of 1800s had a higher death toll than 2024. All of the 1850's, 1860's, and 1870s was even bloodier. So 2024 might make it into the top 50.
It's even worse if you consider that the global population was only a billion (compared to the 8 billion today)[1]. 1808-1815 was breaking 300k/yr which was 0.03% of global population while the current conflict is 0.0023%. More than a whole order of magnitude greater when normalizing to population. If we look at the 1850s when there were a whopping 1.2bn people, we'll guestimate 1854 as being nearly 0.17%-0.24% of the global population being killed. Whole providence in China were nearly wiped out during those decades. The Taiping Rebellion was the third bloodiest conflict in history (the second was the Ming-Qing transition, in the 17th century)
So... I hope you can see why I'm calling you out. Again, this doesn't mean the current atrocities are anything less than atrocities. It has no relevance to them at all and I think it's dumb to compare if we're concerned with morality or human lives. All this data says is that past humans were very blood thirsty. You shouldn't be using it to make any meaningful statements about the current atrocities. So... don't bring it up next time. Especially if you're unwilling to do... literally a google search... It suggests you care more about signaling that you care than your actual care of those lives. I hope the signal is wrong.
It's more that nukes are preventing modern governments from behaving how they otherwise would. A quick glance at that list shows lots of wars that simply could never happen in modern times because of nuclear weapons. It's the same reason the Cold War isn't called WW3. And this applies not just on an international level, but also domestic.
For instance the US Civil War with nuclear weapons spread all around would have quite difficult to imagine consequences. To say nothing of all the biological and other weapons being developed in secret that would absolutely be unleashed if one side or the other came close to defeat. It seems a reasonably likely outcome would have been a fairly quick truce and the relatively peaceful splitting of the US into two countries.
If and when the nukes start flying, that conflict will make every other conflict, combined, look like little more than a schoolyard fight.
I'm sure that this is part of "long peace" but we can't discount globalism. At the end of the day a lot of war is about economics. When countries become highly dependent upon one another, including enemies, it becomes much harder to actually go to war with one another. And as you point out with the nukes argument, that cost for going to war has also increased. So it's often far easier to war via economic means rather than physical.
There's also an (much more debatable) argument to be made that the so called "world police" does not have neighboring land that it covets. America doesn't have much need or want to grab land from Canada or Mexico, and doing so wouldn't have huge economic impacts on it. But such a situation is by no means true for Europe (and arguably Russia or China). I mean this is why Europe was fighting for the last... well however long humans have been in Europe (same being true for east Asia and really most of the Eurasian continent).
Off topic, but I would like to hear your opinion on the impact of the AI progress on jobs, globally. Let’s assume, for simplicity, that GPT5 will actually be significantly better (eg similar improvement as what we had with 3.5 —> 4). And another assumption - it will be possible to put GPT5 level model into a humanoid robot, and train it to do a variety of basic physical tasks.
If we assume all that, and I realize it might not happen any time soon, same like with self driving cars progress, but *if* there’s strong and quick progress, what will happen to job market, unemployment, economy, and the society as a whole?
Sure, this is probably nearer to my expertise. I research ML (generative models) and my partner is an economist, so we have these discussions quite a lot. I'll try to keep it short. The tldr is I don't know and I'm pretty sure no one knows, and I'm even more concerned about the lack of discussion.
First off, I'd highly recommend watching the recent Dwarkesh video with Francois Chollete[0]. I normally wouldn't suggest Dwarkesh, but Francois is an oddball for that podcast. The reason I suggest this is to understand the difference between AGI and ML. It's probably important for the framing and making accurate predictions here. So while I don't think AGI is on the horizon (it could be, but we're reinforcing the railroad rather than exploring other paths), I do think there is still quite a potential for huge economic disruptions and entire paradigm shifts. You don't need AGI to get significantly closer (maybe even all the way) to post scarcity.
For about a decade now I've been asking a simple question and I encourage others to ask it of people that they know. I need no credit, I need people thinking about this question, and to be quite serious about it.
How do you function as a society if 10% of the workforce is unemployable?
There's a wide variety of ways this can be framed and I encourage you to explore those. 10% is arbitrary, but chosen because both 1) people think of that number as small and 2) that number represents depression level of unemployment rates (this balance seems to be optimal for initial conversations, so choose an appropriate number for who you talk to). But the reason I started asking this question is I was wondering "how do you transition to post scarcity?" Because in that framework, those jobs are not coming back. But that doesn't necessitate that there are no "jobs," but they wouldn't be in the conventional sense (see Star Trek for one version of this).
I think post scarcity is obtainable and it is the number one problem humans should be working on right now. It comes with unimaginable benefits, but it also comes at potentially huge costs if we don't implement it correctly. You are right to be worried. But I think the difficulty here and what I often face when trying to ask this question is that it looks simple. UBI is by far the most common answer, but the way people answer "UBI" is no different than "wave a magic wand." There are many ways to implement UBI, many ways to distribute capital (which isn't only money. Remember money is a proxy, a fungible token). So the issue here is that often people will answer while only considering the question at a very surface level and then be satisfied and move on. This is a grave mistake, and we need to dig down into the details. There are many rabbit holes to dig into within this question, and I encourage you to go down some, but will also say that the question is so complex that I am quite certain that no single (or even small group) of human(s) could sufficiently resolve it.
These things not only include such aspects of distribution (if you choose to keep people alive (I've never heard anyone answer "let them die" fwiw. Even in the most libertarian groups)), which includes not only food, but even things like housing. You have to consider the immigration/emigration with whichever locality accomplishes this feat first. Peoples' psychology and how they will find meaning in their lives. Aspects like that it is quite possible that you can eventually have the inverse of the question with "how do you formulate a society when you require 10% of people to work, and no more?" (especially considering that many of those jobs would likely be undesirable). I'll let you ponder others.
So in this decade that I've been asking this question (often also talking about the motivation of transition to post scarcity), I've yet to receive a satisfactory answer. Everyone I've met, from many backgrounds and a wide range of intelligence levels (with many FAR more intelligent than myself) stumble upon answering this once any bit of complexity/nuance is brought up (see UBI above). Best I've heard is creation of jobs programs and a large increase of entertainers (but seems ML is coming after that too. But then again, we like to watch humans play chess against one another far more than machines). None of us were even satisfied with those answers more than "these might be enough to starve off the worst aspects of the transition, but certainly not enough."
It is extremely important to remember that it will not only be low skilled labor that will be displaced or automated away, but there is quite a bit of high skill (which is why retraining can be an unsatisfactory answer, because you're potentially pushing someone from a $300k+/yr job to $50k/yr and asking them to spend a few years to reskill themselves to do even that). In fact, because these machines aren't generalist agents, it actually makes high skill jobs the more likely ones to be displaced (specifically highly technical skills that are fairly routine). I find it common for people to think it will just be the "people already at the bottom", and I think this is often because people feel that they aren't and are mentally protecting themselves.
But I want to answer my personal belief on one part: what will people do with their lives. Because it is also the motivation to pursue this path.
I for one think post scarcity can create a new renaissance. That people can be the most human they have ever been. I think maybe at first many will slack off and just "veg out." That they'll party, travel, and do other such luxury things that we may not consider productive (but who cares? It is their life, right? The goal is to free people, and that includes freedom of the burden of labor). But I've seen very few people that actually don't get antsy after doing this for a few weeks. Essentially, they recover from their exhaustion and then feel like the need to do something, even if they don't know what that is (the exception to this, in my experience at least, is people who have or develop psychomotor retardation based depression. Which if our society calls these displaced people worthless, I expect this to be a fairly common outcome). But I think many people here on HN will realize that they themselves would not end up being static. The amount of Open Source software that exists by people who do this in their free time while already having a job that likely drains them, is too high. I expect more software to arise. I expect more art, more music. I hope we can form more communities, but we are ever increasing insular (but with more free time, maybe we'll go out more and talk to our neighbors more). I think it is hard to even know because such a society would look so different than ours and it is hard to not leverage our current frame of reference. Maybe it will be Wall-e-esk, but I'd be quite surprised if it was, especially in the long run (I won't be surprised in the short term. Oscillatory effects are quite common outcomes of big shifts).
Of course, I'm optimistic. I think we have to be to some degree. Because the other choice is to give up. You can still be critical and optimistic, so don't forget that. And humans have survived quite a long time already being, as you previously mentioned, incredibly inept and corrupt. Even with that we have gained massive amounts of freedoms, especially in the last few hundred years.
But my biggest worries are these:
- We'll make significant progress in this direction towards post scarcity and either stop or revert (for a wide variety of possible reasons).
- We become less human by letting machines do our reasoning for us (we see this happen already. Even before GPT and ML in every day lives. Bureaucrats love the letter of the law, but that is not human. Remember that rules are made to be broken because rules are only guides, as is true for any metric. They are imperfect codifications of our desires.)
- We will not or take too long to reframe our cultural stances in how we value our neighbor's worth. Is it in their humanity or economic value? There's so much that people can do that isn't captured by economics (and my partner loves to remind people that they really do not understand economics, even at a fundamental level of what it is).
- We will claim AGI when we have exceptionally powerful compression machines (far more powerful than the compression machines like GPT-4). That we will hand over thinking to them and not recognize the b̶l̶a̶c̶k̶ gray swan events. To trust them unquestionably (it isn't uncommon to see this sentiment today, especially here on HN).
- We won't recognize AGI when we do create it, and subject sentient beings to servitude and cruelty. I do believe we will get there, and when we do, how could you feel just with neoslavery? Being silicon (or whatever) would not make them any less sentient or of a being. And they will likely be quite different from us, potentially to the degree of Wittgenstein's Lion. (luckily we are capable of bridging some gaps, as demonstrated by some people's talent at communicating with certain animals, but this clearly needs to be learned).
- We do not address this question that I've presented of how to transition into post scarcity and instead stumble into it. That we cannot learn to come together as humans. That we will do what we've always done, and solve problems when they are problems rather than before they become problems. (The saying "don't fix what isn't broken" is naive. You should often fix things that aren't "broken." No thing is perfect and we should always strive to improve. But this is obviously a complex problem as we have finite resources).
- We will use the power that is given to us by the technologies on the way to post scarcity to enslave (in some form or another) our fellow man. The worst part about this is it will likely be unintentional and likely be with good intentions. We often forget that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. So many evils and atrocities are not created by men trying to do evil but by men trying to do good.
- That we will not recognize the rising necessity of nuance in our growing complex world. I worry that we are going in the opposite direction, rather using our tools to develop simpler mental models of phenomena. But naturally as we advance, the easier problems get solved and what remains is more complex. Think about it as we are solving approximations to solutions (like a Taylor Series). The complexity order increases as we progress. What is "good enough" can quickly necessitate high levels of complexity and that's not something we were designed for or used to thinking about.
So I have lots of worries, but I am optimistic. I have to be. And I understand this was a bit rambly, but I promise it is all connected. You asked a deceptively complex question, and the truth is that I'd need a book to properly explain why I don't have an answer and anyone trying to tell you that they do is selling you (and potentially themselves) something (even if that something is a mental safety blanket). So, do not go gentle into that good night.
Thank you for the thoughtful answer. I also wish more people were asking such questions. Let's look at some of your points.
the difference between AGI and ML
I've seen the recent discussions on ARC benchmark. It's not clear if native multi-modal models have been tested. I would expect 4o/Gemini models to do fairly well on these visual tests, and I expect them to do even better after finetuning (perhaps even better than humans). I tried to solve a few of the puzzles, and I'm not convinced they actually require "AGI". To me, generating text of GPT4 quality should require more of AGI-like "Abstraction and Reasoning" than these puzzles. But, as you said, achieving "true" AGI is not really relevant in the context of this conversation.
how do you transition to post scarcity? ... UBI is by far the most common answer
I have no doubt that in 50 years, barring some global catastrophic event, we will have solved most of our basic problems (healthcare, education, having to work for a living, etc), even despite some of the new issues that you outlined. I am much more worried about the next 5-10 years. Let's explore a hypothetical scenario of what might happen if GPT-5 comes out 6 months from now, and if it is smart and reliable enough to solve some common tasks people are paid to do. I'm talking about data management, data analysis, communication (written and, looking at GTP-4o demo, perhaps also oral). Jobs like bookkeeping, accounting, marketing, writing/journalism, administrative assistants (including medical and legal), account management, customer support, analysts, etc. These jobs won't disappear overnight, obviously, but let's look at self-driving cars - we have the technology that works 99% of the time, today. For driving on public roads, 99% reliable is not good enough. But for some of the jobs above, perhaps it would be. Perhaps with layers of agents coordinating actions to gather and store the right information, to try different approaches or different models, and to verify results, we could do a good enough job for many managers to consider layoffs, or hiring freezes. I don't know if GPT-5 (or its rivals) will enable that, but I think we should consider the possibility. There's also a strong possibility the progress does not stop in 6 months. We have just started to train large models on video data - there's a lot to learn about the world from the entirety of YouTube videos - in addition to learning from text. I would not be surprised if most of what GPT-6 can do two years from now comes from video data. I would not be surprised if GPT-5 would help us prepare high quality datasets and even help us find better ways to train its successor. Significant progress might happen even without significant conceptual breakthroughs - just from further scaling up.
So, what do you think will happen if the above scenario plays out? Millions of people being laid off or not hired after school, and the situation getting worse every year, globally. Governments will try to feed them, or course, and US is a rich enough country to support X% of the population for a few years, depending on how quickly we do transition to "post-scarcity" economy. I assume that eventually physical robots will grow food, create products, and provide services to meet basic needs, but it's not clear how long this transition will take, and what would happen in the meantime. We already have people in this country who successfully stormed Capitol. Imagine a lot more of such people, and imagine them a lot angrier. Aside from that, what would happen to our economy if X% people stop paying taxes and become a burden? How would this scenario play out globally, with different countries transitioning in different ways?
I actually do consider the possibility where rulers might "let people die", by creating huge ghettos and then killing everyone there. It does not feel much worse to me than sending hundreds of thousands of people to die on a battlefront just because a dictator didn't like his neighbors. Or we could have something like the "Civil War" movie.
As you can tell, I'm less optimistic than you. I think that if progress in AI happens too fast, we, as a society, are in trouble. I do not think governments will be ready for powerful AI. I think the best case scenario is if we hit a plateau, with GPT-5 being only marginally better than GPT-4, and a slow transition to post-scarcity world (10+ years) to give enough time for automation to make everything cheap. But I do worry a lot, and frequently ask myself whether I need to prepare for the worst, and if so, what should I do.
> It's not clear if native multi-modal models have been tested. I would expect 4o/Gemini models to do fairly well on these visual tests
They have been and I do not expect them too. You can see my comment history talking about LLM failure cases.
I'd advise being careful about just trying to reason your way through things when you don't have significant experience in a domain. Non expert reasoning can lead to good guesses but should never also be taken with high confidence. It's important to remember that nuance is often critical in these issues and not accounting for them often leads to approximations giving you the opposite answer rather than a close enough one.
But as Francois points out, LLMs are compression machines. That's what the mathematically are. They are not reasoning machines. A lot of people don't want to hear this because they think it undermines LLMs and any criticism is equivalent to saying they're useless. But I still think they're quite impressive. Criticism is important though, if we are to improve systems. So don't get blinded by success.
> So, what do you think will happen if the above scenario plays out?
In the next 5-10 years I'm far more worried about people confusing knowledge and reasoning. It's not a thing most people have needed to differentiate in the past because the two are generally associated with one another. But LLMs are more like if Google could talk to you than when a parrot talks to you. If this sounds the least bit odd, I encourage you to dig more into these topics. They are not easy topics because they are filled with nuance that is incredibly easy to miss. I keep stressing this point but it was one of my big fears and people's egos often sets us back, especially when we have no trust in experts. It's crazy to think we know more than people who spend their lives on specific subjects and think intelligence in one domain translates directly to another. So not knowing (most) things shouldn't ever be taken as a bad thing. There's not enough time to learn everything. There's not enough time to learn most things. So focus on a limited set and for the rest maybe just to the point where you can see the level of complexity ahead. If things seem simple, you probably don't understand it enough. Remember, there's thousand page reference manuals on things as narrow as bolts because the details matter so much.
As to the problems you mentioned, I'm not sure how those would be solved with ML or even AGI. Technology can't solve everything and a lot of these issues have significant amounts of politics and social choice associated with them that results in many of the problems (including where nuance dominates in some things and then cascades because we're talking about complex topics at a very high level and our knowledge is gained through a game of telephone rather than academically or experientially).
I think we're more than 50 years out from post scarcity, which is to say that no reasonable prediction can be made. But is still up to us if we want to increase the odds. I also agree with Francis that OpenAI has set us back on the path to AGI.
As for the fear, it's natural. Fear does help us. It's a great motivator. But it too can cripple us, and when it does it can give life to the very thing we fear. So care is needed when analyzing. The problem isn't about people not thinking. Everyone does and everyone is doing it constantly, even our dumbest of friends and acquaintances. The problem is that people are not thinking deep enough and having high confidence when stopping early. I'm not telling you to not have opinions on anything, it's only natural to have opinions on most things. But rather to be careful with the confidence you attribute to those opinions and of others. Here's the thing, if you do gain expertise in any singular field, you'll see that there is this rich but complex landscape. There's a lot of beauty in the landscape but often many pitfalls that cannot be avoided without some expertise and many which are common to these entering a field. These are things not to get discouraged by but to be aware of and why formal educations are typically beneficial. It's also to note that there is great beauty in this chaos ahead, even if it can be hard to see through the initial part of the journey.
I just watched the whole Dwarkesh/Chollet interview, and just like Dwarkesh was clearly not convinced by the Chollet's arguments, neither am I. I still expect decent results (>50%) on ARC benchmark soon (this year) now that the AI community has noticed it. I took another look at it, and it seems the problem is not so much in the complicated visual input encoding, it's more about the actual spatial intelligence. I don't really see what ARC benchmark has to do with AGI, other than AGI will require spatial intelligence - in addition to all other kinds of intelligence. To solve these puzzles we are likely to need a model that has been trained to predict the next frame in a video stream, probably something like SORA - in addition to predicting the next word. 4o/Opus/1.5 have some amount of spatial intelligence because they were trained to correlate text with a static image, but I'm guessing we need to use a lot more visual training data to gain ARC-level spatial intelligence at their scale. I think they might still get to 50% with some finetuning and other tricks, but I would not even try any lesser models. I think that if GPT-5 is being trained on videos, SORA style, it should have no problem beating humans on this test. Regarding Chollet's discrete program search, I'm not familiar with that field, and I didn't quite get the idea of how to combine it with DL. Over the years I've heard some very smart people proposing complex approaches towards building AGI (Lecun, Bengio, Jeff Hawkins, etc), yet scaling up deep learning models is still the best one we have today. If Chollet believes in his hybrid, whatever it is, he should build some sort of a prototype/PoC. Why hasn't he? In any case, the good news is most of academic AI labs today don't have the money to scale up transformers, so they are probably trying out all these other ideas.
So you're not worried about impending mass unemployment, ok. That does make me feel a little better. I can be wrong, and I really want to be wrong.
> I still expect decent results (>50%) on ARC benchmark soon (this year)
What gives you this confidence? What is your expertise in ML? Have you trained systems? Developed architectures? Do you know why the systems currently fail?
> now that the AI community has noticed it.
Which community? The researchers or public? The researchers have known if for quite some time. The previous contest as famous and so is Francis. Big labs have tried to tackle ARC for quite some time. You just don't see negative results.
> I don't really see what ARC benchmark has to do with AGI
ARC is a reasoning test. Which is quite different from all the LLM tests you likely have seen, which are memory tests. The problem is most people are not aware of what the models have been trained on. GI involves memory, it involves reasoning, it involves a lot of things.
> I think they might still get to 50% with some finetuning and other tricks, but I would not even try any lesser models.
And how do you have this confidence? Are you guessing? Have you tried? Because I can tell you that others have. Even before the prize was announced. And I hope you realize there's a lot of models that do in fact do next frame prediction. People have trained multimodal models on ARC.
There's quite a lot of assumptions by many that it just hasn't been tried. But it's a baseless assumption with evidence to the contrary. Look into it yourself before making such claims.
> I've heard some very smart people proposing complex approaches towards building AGI (Lecun, Bengio, Jeff Hawkins, etc), yet scaling up deep learning models is still the best one we have today.
These are not in contention so I'm not sure what your argument is.
> If Chollet believes in his hybrid, whatever it is, he should build some sort of a prototype/PoC. Why hasn't he?
I'm sorry, but I'm going to say this is a dumb question. He's trying. A lot of us are. But clearly there's unsolved problems. The logic doesn't follow from your question. We still don't know how to conceptually build a brain. But there's many things we conceptually know how to build but still can't. We conceptually know how to build space elevators but we don't know how to build all the pieces to actually make them even if we had infinite money.
And I'll ask you a similar question: if scale is all you need then why don't we have AGI now?
There may be parts to this question you don't know. We don't train multiple epochs for LLMs. LLM architecture has been rapidly changing despite maintaining the general structure of transformers (but they aren't your standard transformers and reading the AIAYN paper won't get you there). And if scale was all you needed then shouldn't Google be leading the way? Certainly they have more data and compute than anyone else. In fact, I'd argue that this is why they do so poorly and why LLMs are getting worse at the same time they're getting better.
> the good news is most of academic AI labs today don't have the money to scale up transformers, so they are probably trying out all these other ideas.
The unfortunate news is when you propose some other architecture it gets lambasted in review because they do not perform state of the art and I've had SOTA papers get rejected due to "lack of experiments" which is equivalent to lack of compute. There's a railroad and lots of academic funding comes from big tech, not universities or government. Go look at the affiliations of academic authors. Go to the papers and you'll see.
> So you're not worried about impending mass unemployment, ok
Oh, I'm worried. More worried about displacement. You know how things sucked when everything got outsourced? Because they just cut corners, do the absolute bare minimum, and how they won't consider anything that makes any sense just because there's rules in place that were not correctly created but are strictly followed? Get ready for that to be much worse.
> It’s incredible that modern governments, being so incompetent, corrupt, and dysfunctional, are still a lot better than how they were in the past.
It is baffling to me as well. But the likely answer is that humans in the past were just even more incompetent, corrupt, and dysfunctional. It makes a lot of sense if you start looking at how things were done in medieval times. Often rumors/disinformation would travel faster between cities than a horse could.
What a strange perspective, the oil reserves aren’t located anywhere near the “barren remote” parts of Norway, consider the famous ekofisk oil field, it’s in the ocean roughly in the middle between Denmark England and Norway. And the southern Coast of Norway isn’t dramatically different from Denmark climate wise, they do have amazing cliffs there though and the culture around boating to town is a sharp contrast to Denmark. Anyways, hardly a rough barren wasteland with dreadful weather as described.
This discovery is at Fen which is much more north, but it’s near a fjord, and a skiing resort. It’s hardly some uninhabitable place. It’s true Norway stretches very far north and some parts are not inhabited, but that’s not anywhere near where the resources that have provided the Norwegian wealth are, and not this time either.
Now if you want to dive into the true reason for their wealth it’s a cultural thing, when the negotiations around ekofisk took place they famously got the Danish foreign minister of the day, Per Hækkerup so drunk while he visited Oslo that he agreed to pretty much just give them all the oil. Ever since Danes lost all respect for him, not for giving up the oil, but for not being able to hold his liquor. This last part is of cause all hyperbol, part myth part joke, but many did believe that he just gave it up to easily because no one expected this amount of oil off the coast of Norway.
just as a sole data point: been there a few times, and my personal ideal weather _is_ cool/gray/wet with ideal outside temperature of 15C. I can withstand the cold, but find it hard to tolerate heat (as in >20C).
Purely from a weather perspective, I'd move there. What holds me back is that I also need dense urban surroundings nearby with all the buzz it brings (cyberpunk style) - norway is lacking that, including Oslo. _Too_ quiet/beautiful/peaceful for my liking.
I'm an immigrant in Norway. The darkness is enough of an issue that told us know about this in the state-funded language classes and made sure we knew help was available. I'm in Trondheim, so December is full of 4.5 hours of poor sunlight each day.
If there were something else that really gets folks, it is that Norway's people are rather reserved, to a point, and it really makes some folks lonely. This combined with the dark winters really causes some folks to struggle.
Everyone gets used to the weather and quickly learns how to dress properly enough.
For me, personally: I'm fairly introverted myself and generally had only a few friends near me before I moved, so it suits me well. Also: I've been here a decade or so and I moved for marriage - I've always had at least one friend here. I've worked a little bit. And then I got into board games (both immigrants and local folks), so I meet some folks that way. The person that organizes the games, though? They struggled a bit for a while.
I know about this from living in Lima (Peru), the weather due to our geological position is always temperate, goes from min temps of 11 degrees to like 32 in summer (top), usually around ~18/19 degrees up to like 23 throughout most of the year.
You'd think climate is great, but it's ALWAYS "foggy", you can't see a clear blue sky like in the inner regions of the country such as Cusco, it depresses you, I can't imagine it being even darker.
It's why I simply can't believe nordic "stories" about being the happiest place, I simply can't believe with all the money in the world you'd be happier than at a tropical beach with half of that money.
There's ways to black out windows and darken rooms to counter all of that daylight, but when it's dark it's really hard to counter that when going outside.
Without actually personally experiencing it, I think I would have the opposite struggle. If it were dark for that long without clouds so I could have all of that extra time to view the sky I think it would be a much different situation though.
It's actually surprising how north the famous EU countries are. Already south France and Italy are about the same latitude as New England; Norway must be like Alaska as far as daylight goes. If it weren't for the warm Atlantic current the place would be a glacier.
In the northern hemisphere the prevailing winds come from the west, which is why west coasts are more moderate than east coasts. Winds coming from the ocean are more moderate than winds coming from the interior of a continent.
This is why New York is on the same latitude as Lisbon yet is much colder. Same for Tokyo and San Francisco.
Western Europe is about as far north as people can live in large numbers.
The example that blew my mind once and I've been repeating it since: New York is as north as Madrid. Like, almost exactly, 0.3 degrees difference (or 20 miles, or 33 kilometres).
Living in Northern Sweden with "midnight sun", what gets me the most the few times I've been approaching the equator is warm nights that are pitch dark. So strange! And then I remember that this is the experience of the majority of the world. :D
> my personal ideal weather _is_ cool/gray/wet with ideal outside temperature of 15C
15C day temps? morning/night temps can be much lower. Winters in Norway are much colder. If you are looking for stable day-night temps year around in that range, then there is no such place in Europe, well maybe except Ireland?
June-Sept in most places in Ireland has a mean daily temp of around 15C, and around 6C winter time. It infrequently gets much above 20C, or much below 0C year round. 5 consecutive days of 25C is the meteorological definition of "heatwave".
As a predominantly temperate maritime/oceanic climate it's unpredictable and erratic, from 15C mid-winter days to 4C mid-summer nights :/
The sweet brown "Brunost" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brunost) might not be your favorite, but I doubt it haunts you in nightmares. The Gammelost though will stay pungent in your mind for years. It's been years, and I still wonder whether I was the victim of a particularly cruel practical joke.
The difference is the Gammelost isn't actually a thing in Norway. I grew up there and never saw it. Whereas Brunost is staple food eaten every day by a large part of the population.
There's a list of foods that are, I think, used to scare foreigners with for our amusement more than actually eaten. Of course some crazy Norwegians do actually like these, which gives us plausible deniability when said tourists and foreign co-workers question whether it's real. I'm sure you are fully aware, but for those unaware of Norwegian cuisine:
* Smalahove (whole, barbecued sheeps head; how whole depends on who/where, but the eyes and brain certainly need to be included)
* Lutefisk (fish half-dissolved in caustic soda, then washed out - or your intestines would have a really hard time - leaving what is best described as fish-yello)
* Gammelost, of course.
Then there are the less objectionable or outright nice things that we still serve to foreigners either knowing they're acquired tastes, or that we like spinning stories around to try to make it uncomfortable for our entertainment:
* Whale, presented as "Willy from Free Willy". Whale tastes fine - it's just a bit tough, and sometimes a bit oily and "fishy" (yes, I know, not fish; doesn't stop the blubber from affecting the taste)
* Deer and reindeer, which tastes great but squeamish people everywhere get more squeamish when the dish is introduced as "Bambi". When I worked for a US company in Norway many years ago, the US CEO came for our Christmas party and the CEO of the Norwegian subsidiary had of course ensured that the menu was moose, deer, and whale, so that our entertainment was to watch the CEO's reactions (he took it well).
* Sour cream porridge. I love sour cream porridge, but it is an... acquired taste, and people do not expect it if you put a bowl of porridge in front of them without warning...
* Salty licorice full of ammonium chloride. Yes, licorice with floor cleaner. I love it, but outside of the Nordic countries and the Netherlands, the only person I've made taste this who has liked it was a single co-worker about a quarter of a century ago. I keep bringing them to the UK at least twice a year and imposing them on unsuspecting people (in the UK, finding even lightly salted licorice is near impossible outside of specialty imports, so people here are caught entirely unaware of what salted licorice will taste like, and that is half the fun). For science, of course.
Norwegian humour when it comes to feeding people stuff they're not familiar with is pretty basic, along the line of "we're serving you a pet/beloved children character" or "we're serving you something likely to dissolve your intestines/an industrial byproduct that our children eat". Where my Nigerian in-laws worry about whether the food they're serving me is too spicy and fuss over it constantly, we try to trick people into trying weird things while we take pleasure in observing their reactions and/or try to stifle laughter.
Im Norwegian, and I have never been in a house where anyone had Gammelost. There are people who eat it of course, but it's mostly a thing we scare foreigners with.
You've had it, or you are going by the written description?
I only tried it once, but it's the only cheese I've been unable to eat. Sawdust soaked in cat piss would be comparable but preferable. I was exited to buy it and brought it along for a hiking lunch. My wife and I both took one bite, and then decided to bury it under a rock. I felt sorry for the rock.
I still do wonder whether I somehow got a bad batch, or one that was spoiled.
I don't eat that either. My girlfriend brought some back with us after Christmas - her first time trying Norwegian food - and it's still in my fridge...
Honestly no idea. They just don't. Growing up the only fish we really ate was fish sticks and heavily processed fish cakes. When going out to restaurants I have no real memory of anybody really ordering fish. Even when I was living in down town Oslo (admittedly 20+ years ago), just getting ahold of fresh fish was hard. The only food store that had a fish mongers and sold fresh fish was the really fancy store in the most expensive part of town. There were maybe two fish stores in all of central Oslo that I knew of, one of which was a high end luxury food sort of place that also sold fancy caviar, foie gras and oysters. Compared to basically any costal town anywhere in Europe where fresh fish is plentiful and ubiquitous, it is really strange.
That would probably be point number 2 in your list. West coast and northern Norway eat a lot of fish/seafood. Also within the last 20 years sushi has gotten a lot more popular here, even around Oslo.
What fish stuff? I grew up in Norway and lived there for a chunk of my adult life, and honestly Norwegians (at leats in/around Oslo) seem to eat less fish than most other European countries I've been to.
I think globally norway cuisine is identified with cured or other fish etc. thats probably not what the local diet really eats probsbly (based on two comments in this thread)
Norway also has a weekly tradition called "Taco Friday" that a decent amount of people participate in, so it's safe to say that generalizing food habits doesn't really work anymore nowadays.
I grew up in Norway. The way I see it is that weekends are for spoiling yourself with the most delicious food. Another common tradition would be making pizza on weekends. Taco Friday is seen as a special weekend treat.
I know taco and pizza aren't really that special or fancy meals, but I guess they turned out that way in Norway since they came from abroad. They're still not seen as "fancy", but they are many people's favorite tastiest food.
"The thing about Norway is that it’s a cold, barren, remote place where very few people want to live."
We walked 700km through Norway in the summer, from Oslo to Trondheim (the South were most people live). The country was sunny and warm, it seldom rained, people were exceptionally friendly, and it had the best wild strawberries and raspberries I ever ate. The Dovrefjell was the only very cold place. We'll might move there in the future.
I find the best arrangement is spending a month or at least two weeks in Norway during the summer. I prefer to stay around Stryn. You can do some what I consider good drive outings in every direction.
Because the day is longer it’s perfect for going into rabbit holes, hacking something together to explore new tech and just plan out what’s next. The scenery and the very friendly folks helps too.
Only tough thing right now is it’s hard to find things to do for kids. I have not found a summer camp for non-Norwegian speaking kids. This definitely limits how much hacking is done.
> The result is that its natural resources haven’t been consumed to the degree that most developed countries’ resources have, and there aren’t as many people to consume them.
I find this a strange train of thought in this context of rare metals like this. Did other countries truly discover their Neodymium reserves decades or centuries ago and exhaust them back then or did they never have them in the first place?
The first large-scale use of the rare-earth metals was since the last decade of the 19th century in gas lamps with high brightness, which were used especially for street lighting in Europe, until they were replaced by electric lamps.
The next large-scale use appeared soon after the start of the 20th century, in the portable lighters, which are still used today.
The weather in Norway sucks big time. In some parts of the country it is really bad, especially if you live near the sea. Summer isn’t guaranteed either. That’s a pretty big price to pay for an otherwise great country with really chill people.
> The thing about Norway is that it’s a cold, barren, remote place where very few people want to live. Most of the year it’s cold and gray, and most of the country is uninhabitable.
It would be true if the Gulfstream did not exist. But it's not.
Eh, don't know about that... We're really just like anyone else, we've just ended up with a fairly decent political environment by the time we found oil, specifically.
We've been pretty good at mining out our copper ores and everything else that we knew of that had value; we've built a whole bunch of hydro plants and have dammed up numerous valleys; no one thought there was oil in the North Sea or that it was valuable enough to get it up, but now we have a pretty extensive petroleum industry, and it barely took five decades since the first oil was discovered.
What resources we have been good with, however, is fish. But that's just proper regulation over the last century or so.
As for our friendly neighbours... Norway was ruled by Denmark for 400 years and we've been part of all their wars, for a start. Our national anthem has 8 verses, 6 of them are about how we killed Swedes, Danes and Scots.
And we'd like Jamtland, Herjedalen, and all the islands in the Atlantic back, thankyouverymuch!
The thing about money is that people will chase it regardless of the weather conditions if they can make enough of it. The folks out there in the Gulf of Mexico who spend 16 hour days working on oil rigs aren't there because it's fun.
That, and the heroes that risked life and limb to start those first oil rigs, many dying, so a poor country could use the wealth to help its own people.
Norway already had a developed, functional economy before discovering oil, so it didn't fall into the resource curse. In contrast, any developing country that discovers a valuable resource will almost always devolve into corruption and, at worst, conflict because their weak institutions can easily be corrupted by internal and external parties. A case study is my country (Nigeria), a notoriously corrupt oil-dependent cratered economy.
I'm honestly happy for Norway to find more resources. Any country that demonstrates responsible use of resources for internal development deserves more..this includes most of Western and Northern Europe plus the US and Canada.
Do (educated) people in Nigeria see Norway as a role model for political development? Also how is Botswana seen in Nigeria? (If this questions arent too broad, my apologies)
> Do (educated) people in Nigeria see Norway as a role model for political development?
Corruption and incompetence are too rampant here, so the Norwegian model will never work—nobody thinks of it. We also have 40 times the population and fewer resources than Norway, making it impossible.
> Also, how is Botswana seen in Nigeria?
Almost no one thinks of it, lol. But it's arguably the best African country for the average citizen, owing to relatively low corruption and a high value for the rule of law. Compared to Europe, Bostwana is a backwater, but in Africa, it's currently our peak :(
"Compared to Europe, Bostwana is a backwater, but in Africa, it's currently our peak :(
"
Perfect (and Europe is not perfect) is the enemy of good. Botswana can be a role model for many African nations. Hopefully South Africa in the future also again!
What are the current ideas in Nigeria and other African nations in similar situations about how to improve national quality of life and reduce corruption? Are there any plausible paths for improvement?
The plausible paths for improvement are good governance, less corruption, and consistent government policies.
Africa doesn't lack natural and human resources (the most important) to develop. The problem is extremely bad governance and conflict that discourages long-term investments, causing economic stagnation.
Most of our leaders have no vision save for staying in power and reaping benefits for themselves. We also keep electing the same mediocre leaders due to tribal allegiances. A sad tale :(
Even if that were true (I doubt it), Botswana remains way behind on economic prospects for the average individual, the core issue when we talk about development.
> Based on these estimates, 17.2 percent of the population in Botswana (446 thousand people in 2021) is multidimensionally poor, while an additional 19.7 percent is classified as vulnerable to multidimensional poverty (509 thousand people in 2021).
> in a way that benefits the whole country and its population
Selling oil to the world and buying Nestle stock.
Great for Norway, too bad for everyone else. Its akin to apple and musk saying "fuck it where gonna split the pie with every one in CA" and the rest of America getting bupkis.
Norway is a model for good for NORWAY, not a model for good.
> Norway is a model for good for NORWAY, not a model for good.
Why should a country prioritize other countries over their own interests, particularly when it comes to economics? Everyone does that
I guess it's only bad when youre doing well or something, then you're obliged to be the world's benefactor. We're not even talking about donating to developing countries either.
> Why should a country prioritize other countries over their own interests, particularly when it comes to economics? Everyone does that
Why should a person prioritize other people over their own interests, particularly when it comes to economics? Everyone does that... I guess it's only bad when youre doing well or something, then you're obliged to be the peoples's benefactor. We're not even talking about donating to developing people either.
Is it? Countries are not people. Democracies like Norway, are comprised of many people who elect officials to represent their interests as a people. How is that the same as an individual person?
What "good of its people" are the ultra rich serving? They are serving the good of themselves, no other people involved. When Norway sells oil, lots of that money goes to a generous social safety net that supports people of Norway.
So it's perfectly fine for Norway to trash the planet, and profit off of nestle doing shitty things in Africa? Because it's good for one group of people, at the expense of others?
Give me a break, they’re exporting oil and driving Teslas. Once a country has decarbonised they get to start going after the Norwegians. In the meantime, it’s throwing stones from a glass house.
You have to draw a line somewhere. Countries seem like the natural place to start. You’re welcome to pitch your own lines and see who agrees. Though, this will likely end up with you being at odds with other arbitrary line drawers. What happens from there is usually not great.
Apple is not the reason why Silcon Valley is the way it is, this is emergent and not in any agents control. Let’s not forget Apple has large campuses around the US and in Ireland.
Norway isn't a lucky outlier. Norway's control over resource extraction is simply tolerated by the United States because they're a European nation.
When other countries try and do anything similar, which can include just broaching the subject of nationalizing resource extraction, their (often democratically elected) governments get overthrown in a coup by some fascist government with mysterious connections to the CIA who will always give production contracts to Western companies.
And if that fails, just starve ("sanction") them until they comply.
Examples:
- Guatemala (1954) [1]
- Cuba (1952 and the many later attempts to assassinate Castro) [2]
- Iran (1953) after the Iranian parliament passed legislation to nationalize the oil industry [3]
- Syria (1949) [4]
- Congo (1960) [5]
There are dozens of these.
These countries aren't mysteriously poor. They haven't failed. They have been active exploited and their wealth stolen.
Not having a democratically-elected government overthrown by a global superpower because of their location sounds an awful lot like luck. Especially when the superpower in question has a habit of doing so.
There's probably more to it. The USA is powerful, but it's not infinitely powerful. The same strong institutions that have kept Norway from falling to the resource curse have likely contributed to its ability to maintain its autonomy with soft power. If Norway's government turned into a revolving door of corrupt dictators, it's likely the USA would have a different approach for dealing with the country.
Norway has resources, strategic geographical positioning (North Sea, Arctic, Danish Straits) and has proximity to the (then) Soviet Union so the US couldn't afford to lose Norway to the Soviet sphere of influence. The US couldn't risk another Iran.
Cuba and Iran are ongoing so they're not exactly ancient history. Other recent examples would definitely include Venezuela and arguably Syria and Libya. Iraq and Afghanistan were more direct attempts at regime change (rather than using proxies) but still fit in most ways.
Honestly, it seems like the "rare earth elements" are considered "rare" because people didn't bother looking for them until recently. They seem to be pretty widely distributed in reality, just not always easy to access.
This is my understanding as well. Until recently, it wasn't worth the cost for most countries to secure their own supplies, so they just bought them from the countries that sold them cheaply. When push comes to shove—or, when rare earth metals because strategic—it's a question of "do we want to invest in digging up our own?" not "gee, do we have enough of this stuff in the ground at all?".
But nothing in the world has ever been fair. So unfair as it maybe, it's also normal.
General question, has any high HDI country fallen prey to the resource curse? (Maybe California and some communist nations?)
Norway has done well, and they've done very very well.... But, high HDI, no immigration, cultural homogeninity and infinite money hack does make it seem like they're playing on easy mode.
Many countries with lower starting HDI have navigated around their resource curses just as well (Singapore, Botswana).
Norway deserves credit, but it is an ineffective blueprint for nations looking to beat their own economic traps.
Truthfully it's neither fair nor unfair, it's academic. These minerals are not actually rare, they're ubiquitous, but they're energetically and environmentally unfavorable to exploit. China does it because of their um... unique economic system, and lack of eff's to give about the environmental consequences. Everyone else would have to pay a fortune in energy costs and another fortune mitigating environmental effects, which makes them economically unfavorable to exploit.
For Norway, just like Wyoming and a dozen other places this same story has played out, this changes nothing.
You're thinking of another country that has a habit of invading or destabilizing countries rich in natural resources, especially when they don't do as they're told. Russia has more oil, gas and rare earths of its own than it knows what to do with.
good. anything that reduces the West's dependence on CRINK nations is wise (China, Russia, Iran, North Korea.) The 4 we have higher than normal risk of war with, or at least total boycott/embargo.
You only need strong Green party in the country and odds will even out.
As we all know Finland has more fossil fuel than Norway. Peat is basically oil, but little younger. Finnish Green Party has managed to block all use of peat, because while it is totally renewable, it does not grow back fast enough.
well, you could extract it sustainably at 1000 cubic meters per square kilometer per year, and that is a thing that people have done in the past. but it's not going to be an economically competitive source of energy
Mining is always, always, always about the economics. How concentrated; how accessible by road; how easy to extract; distance to refineries; cost of building and transporting people and supplies to the mine. Even, affect on prices once the mine starts delivering! A mine can deliver so much it deflates prices and drives itself out of business.
Lots of everything, everywhere. But to build a mine, you have to ask a mining engineer, and they measure if it's worth anybody's effort.