Michael Matulef
MichaelMatulef@nostrplebs.com
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Know Thyself | Everything Voluntary✌️ | Follow the Tao
Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state represents a complete defeat for the civilized world, while a totally voluntary society represents its ultimate success.
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The real lesson is to accept scarcity, respect prices, and seek your comparative advantage in a world where AI is just another tool—not to retreat into a lonely, inefficient attempt to do by hand what your tools could help you transcend.
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Even if AI seems superior at many specific tasks, it cannot replace the human ability to set aims, make judgments, and shoulder uncertainty. In that sense, AI remains a tool—a powerful one—while humans supply the values and intentions that steer it. The relationship between them is not rivalry but interdependence.
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However powerful the machines become, you still face the same basic constraint: you are limited. You have only so many hours, so much attention, so much energy. Every decision you make is an attempt to move from a state you value less toward one you value more. Choosing one course of action always means leaving another undone. The value of that forgone alternative—the thing you could have done instead—is your opportunity cost. Now add AI to the mix. You still have the same 24 hours, but you also have access to tools that can draft emails, summarize documents, generate code snippets, sketch marketing copy, and filter noise. These tools are not magic. They are ways of rearranging scarce resources—your time, your employer’s capital, server capacity—in the hope of satisfying people’s wants more effectively.
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Scarcity and the Machine: Opportunity Cost in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
My latest piece with the Mises Institute
https://mises.org/mises-wire/scarcity-and-machine-opportunity-cost-age-artificial-intelligence
You're gonna carry that weight.
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jazz is for ordinary people
berlioz · jazz is for ordinary people · Song · 2023
The challenge, then, isn’t to beat the machines but to learn to work meaningfully alongside them.
What individualism teaches us is that society is greater than the individual only in so far as it is free. In so far as it is controlled or directed, it is limited to the powers of the individual minds which control or direct it. If the presumption of the modern mind, which will not respect anything that is not consciously controlled by individual reason, does not learn in time where to stop, we may, as Edmund Burke warned us, “be well assured that everything about us will dwindle by degrees, until at length our concerns are shrunk to the dimensions of our minds.”
- F. A. Hayek
While it may not be difficult to destroy the spontaneous formations which are the indispensable bases of a free civilization, it may be beyond our power deliberately to reconstruct such a civilization once these foundations are destroyed.
- F. A. Hayek
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
— J.R.R. Tolkien
The real lesson is to accept scarcity, respect prices, and seek your comparative advantage in a world where AI is just another tool—not to retreat into a lonely, inefficient attempt to do by hand what your tools could help you transcend.
Regardless of the advancements in AI, the central question does not change: given scarcity, what should you do with your time, and what should you let the tools do?