Only energy consumption will explode
What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?
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Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suppose, if a huge proportion of workers get replaced by AI software, leading to mass unemployment, there will be impetus for governments to step in and force corporations to contribute to some sort of UBI or social wealth fund. If AI grabs everything and few consumers are left then it is zero-sum. I'm looking forward to seeing how this might play out. Pessimistically, it seems very bubblish.
> I suppose, if a huge proportion of workers get replaced by AI software, leading to mass unemployment, there will be impetus for governments to step in and force corporations to contribute to some sort of UBI or social wealth fund. I looked for any comments that expressed this sentiment, and as of writing this, I only found one. It's like people don't know or remember history. I mean, look at the French Revolution—l…
> a superintelligence that is smarter than any human and can continuously improve itself. At that stage, it will always allocate resources more efficiently than any individual or corporation.
This kind of magical thinking still baffles me.
This is sci-fi. There is absolutely zero evidence that such a thing is actually possible to create. Even if we stipulated that LLMs are AGIs, or can become them if we just cram in a few billion more parameters, it's painfully clear that they are not superintelligent, they cannot improve themselves, and there is no credible pathway to them becoming anything of the sort—not to mention they're already guzzling absurd amounts of energy, and taking up massive amounts of hardware, just to do the bad job they do now.
Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?
#83The biggest change I anticipate is larger cities. When I ask people what they would like to change about their life, pretty much everyone mentions that their apartment is too small and too expensive. Because everyone wants to live right in the center of a big city. While at the same time, when I look at Google maps, big cities are tiny. I zoom out a bit and every big city is just a tiny speck in the middle of nowhere…
If land was taxed (the physically exclusionary resource that should be taxed), but property/development on it was not, the economics of building big and building up would be much cheaper. No more annual wealth tax (on the same value, year after year!) on development. And holding land to parasitically benefit from neighbors improving the neighborhood would become unprofitable. With land no longer a money parking/hedgi…
This seems like a system that can only work in a fully urbanized country.
Otherwise, a nonexhaustive list of problems it seems guaranteed to cause:
- Push those currently in rural poverty over the edge into homelessness. Their homes will stand vacant and fall to ruin, leaving large swaths of land dotted with the wreckage of houses, trailers, and even whole villages. Some of it will be highly toxic. Many of the people will die, because the area they're in has precious few services for them, and they're too far from cities, with no means of getting there (because their cars have already been repossessed).
- Destroy green spaces. Parks, wildlife refuges, and even fallow fields are vital for the health of our ecosystems, the conversion of CO2 into oxygen, erosion prevention, temperature mitigation, and even mental health. And that's assuming there are explicit exemptions for farmers.
- Wreck entertainment businesses like theme parks, water parks, etc.
I'm deeply skeptical that a land-value-tax system can be calibrated so that it's sufficient incentive for developers to build up within a city, while not also causing these devastating knock-on effects in rural and suburban areas. And regardless of one's feelings about urban vs suburban vs rural living, I think we can probably all agree we don't actually want to make the entire surface of our planet into skyscrapers.
Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?
#84I'll issue just one counterpoint to the comments here: Biology
I'm not a CS person, but much more of a 'hacker' in the old MIT sense. I work for a biotech company and with a lot of bio people. I've taken big-boy CS classes before, but just as a fling really. I'm mostly a self taught 'programmer', and barely that.
Look, LLMs and vibe coding are going to increase the research rate of biology and biomedical research at least 10x (today), if not 100x.
Bio people hate coding. Its not their scene, its not their interest, and they stink at it. They're not going to take a 4 year detour in their career to learn how to code. I've been 13 layers deep in 'if' statements before with colleagues before I've had to up the price of 'help me real quick' from a 6-pack to a case. They really do not care at all for code, let alone anything resembling 'passable' code. They want their results and they want out.
Most of you have probably never worked with MatLab before. It's pseudo-code that complies. The help docs are famously good. Baby's first program level stuff. Its all over bio. And still, the bio people hate it.
And bio these days is just filled with data. There's so much of it being collected and mostly badly processed, if at all. You'll get grad students spending 6 months just trying to code up their experiment and it's results for some stupid solenoid valve pair, a laser, and a diode. It's stupid how much time is just wasted. Just dumb.
Vibe coding has changed all of this.
Yeah, it doesn't work on the bespoke rig the first time out. But it does work, at all, within a week. The code is not perfect, but it is a hell of a lot better than what was there before. There are comments in the code, at all! They have for loops now! The can ask the LLM how to make it faster or smaller or what the code is doing, bit by literal bit! And the LLM doesn't have a meeting to weasel out to. It's patient! Even at 2am!
Vibe coding is not for programmers, its for the rest of us. Its not going anywhere and it is affecting your health.
Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe the issue with society is that we don't care about efficiency? We throw away 1/3 of the food that we make. We're overweight and waste energy from carrying that excess weight. We're less physically active as a result so we require motorized transport that is predominantly single passenger cars so we build all our infrastructure around cars which in turn causes us to be even more inactive and unhealthy. This also…
That's not how capitalism measures efficiency. It all comes down to profits. Everything else is bureaucracy and marketing. There just aren't any incentives to drive these macroecononic efficiency goals you mention.
So...down with capitalism?
Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?
#86I'll issue just one counterpoint to the comments here: Biology I'm not a CS person, but much more of a 'hacker' in the old MIT sense. I work for a biotech company and with a lot of bio people. I've taken big-boy CS classes before, but just as a fling really. I'm mostly a self taught 'programmer', and barely that. Look, LLMs and vibe coding are going to increase the research rate of biology and biomedical research at…
My first reaction was, "But what if the AI generates incorrect code, and the bio people don't realize it?" But then, without the AI, what if the bio people generate incorrect code and don't realize it? Can the AI be more accurate than a non-programmer? Probably; in fact arguably they already are.
So I think I buy the parent's point. In fact, I think it's wider than biology. I bet there are a bunch of other fields with non-programmers doing a fair amount of coding. Economics research, say. Business process automation. I'm sure there are others.
Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?
#87I'd rather just have a world where people move a little slower, care less about efficiency, appreciate the smaller things in life, and stop forcing endless upgrades of every kind on everyone with new phones, new apps, soulless art, and new ways of doing things. But that's just me.
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Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
If stuff is 1/10th as expensive as it is now, you can also work 1/10th as hard for 1x as much stuff as you have now, instead of 1x as hard as you work now for 10x the stuff.
I'm not making a value judgement on how much I would or other people should consume in the first scenario. I'm simply saying that you could have profound effects due to AI without it being evident in the top-level metrics like economic growth, unemployment, and so on. It seems like we often say that either we see explosive economic growth or AI has either no, or at best very minimal impact in our lives. I don't think…
I agree that that dichotomy is not necessarily true, but also you gave your reason for being "more excited" about one side of the dichotomy being that you "don't want 10x the stuff," and my point is that you're undervaluing the flexibility of material abundance.
Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only if you have found an end to old age, sickness and death. Until this ^ there are no guarantees in life. You cant eat money
Well you can’t drive money, fly money, surgery money, publish money, build a house out of money that doesn’t melt in the rain… If you want to put it that way. But given we agree it is absolutely useless, you should probably periodically trade some of it for food. Etc. That works out really well, since money doesn’t mold as quickly as food, and doesn’t require refrigeration. So accumulate money, let it work for you in…
money gets inflated into monopoly money.
Re: What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode?
#90What if it also redistributed more wealth to the billionaires who own and control AI?