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The dead economy theory

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Re: The dead economy theory

#161

Post by amanaplanacanal »

rayiner wrote: post #51

The random aside blaming "Trump and MAGA" is bizarre considering who actually is in the upper echelons of these AI companies. Last I checked, Peter Thiel doesn't run Anthropic. AI isn't being brought to you by rural Iowa or bumfuck Alabama. The people who will be replacing your job with AI are the same people who championed mass immigration and outsourcing industrial production to China. It's neoliberal globalists, w…

I'm pretty sure people like Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg don't really have any ideology beyond "what will make me more money".

Re: The dead economy theory

#162

Post by siriusastrebe »

Miner49er wrote: post #25
ismaelyws wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, if AI gutters the middleclass and small budinesses who you gonna sell to?

Well that part of the economy and anything that caters to it might just die. The whole economy would be whatever AI/robots need: compute, energy, raw materials, software, data, etc.

Perhaps the economy is a greater entity than even the human race. When robots are mining the raw materials for robots and creating more robots, maybe with a bit of human labor in the mix, then what drives the demand for more robots?

Currently the narrative is that AI is positioned to eat human labor's lunch. But it could also be that once robots are in space mining raw materials and maybe even spreading to other planets long before humans could be ferried for interstellar, these robots end up driving the demand for more robots.

I'm not sure where I'm going with all this, besides that currently humans are the ones with goals and motives and therefore drive demand. But that doesn't necessarily need to be the case, and it seems these AI CEOs are hellbent on changing the best thing about AI which is that it has no ulterior motives, no overarching goals, no prime directives. They just do what we ask, the best servant we could have hoped for.

Re: The dead economy theory

#163

Post by daft_pink »

I think when these companies IPO later this year, we’re going to see the reality of the PNL numbers and whether they are sustainable etc as all the financials will become public.

Rumor mill suggests that Anthropic might be profitable (but at what magnitude), OpenAI is not profitable, Google is mostly vertically integrated and has a low cost structure as they are have pre-existing data center buildouts, their own silicon and experience that suggests they will be able to operate at a very low cost, but they still have to justify their spend.

I think having to report numbers publically on a quarterly basis will bring the whole thing into reality.

Re: The dead economy theory

#164

Post by ReptileMan »

alex_young wrote: post #53

Why is this time different? Won't super power AI tools allow companies to do more with the same number of people? Don't you think a smarter way to run a business is to capture more of the market if you have the resources to do so? If company A decides they just want the same slice of the market they have now and can fire half of their employees and pocket $$$, can't company B hire the same workers and compete harder…

>Why is this time different?

Because the intelligentsia is being bent over. The people that were jolly of the various rust belts of the world decaying.

Re: The dead economy theory

#165

Post by 10xDev »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #134
10xDev wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does every business scale that way? Sure video games for example have only required more people and resources to develop games as the ability to create larger scale games have increased. But does that really apply to accounting? Not a rhetorical question.

Does it need to? 99% of people used to work on farms. Now they don't. Maybe ~99% of engineers won't write code in the future. They'll do some other engineering like thing... Maybe ~99% of accountant type people won't do accounting things. They'll do some other financial thing... We haven't even seen a rounding error in total unemployment directly attributed to AI, despite people saying the sky fell 24 months ago, and…

Whether it "needs to" is its own debate.

I'm just pointing out that even with mobile phones becoming dramatically better over the past decade, that hasn't really led to the transformation of mobile apps (outside of games) that take advantage of those resources. If anything, developers have arguably become more lazy and we are seeing lower quality software being deployed because people now have enough RAM even for your 500mb static webpage. Do we really believe people will start becoming more ambitious with AI or will most suffer from skill atrophy and less agency?

Re: The dead economy theory

#166

Post by neutronicus »

unsnap_biceps wrote: post #142
ekidd wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is this time different? If it was just programming being automated, then whatever. Lots of professions have been automated and society adapts. The underlying worry here is that current AI provides a partial automation of intelligence. The endgame for the investors and the corporations using AI is complete automation of intelligence (and manual labor, too). They want a $25,000 robot that works around the clock,…

> Strictly speaking, they don't even need us as customers. They can just have the robots build them yachts and mansions directly. And act as security guards. That sounds like we'll devolve into wars over resources so houses can build more war-bots and get more resources....

Once there are like 150,000 humans resources will be functionally unlimited

Re: The dead economy theory

#167

Post by convolvatron »

alex_young wrote: post #130
dleslie wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Won't super power AI tools allow companies to do more with the same number of people? Don't you think a smarter way to run a business is to capture more of the market if you have the resources to do so? It is possible to have excess productivity. AI allows an existing labour pool to rapidly surpass necessary productivity levels for the existing demand. IE, let's say I live in a small town and I open a machine shop.…

The small town constraint is a bit artificial to this problem isn't it? If you operate a machine shop in a large urban area, have competitors, and access to much improved low cost tooling, would you: a) lay off a bunch of workers, or b) lower your prices and capture more orders? Same thing with accounting firms or marketers or business consultants.

the number of functioning machine shop in the US in large urban areas has been plummeting for decades. where there were 50 there are now 3. the customers for machine shops are large production facilities with a need for custom parts. they're all gone. now its little bits of rnd work and some custom architectural design kind of stuff. and the margins are punishing.

ok, so machine shops aren't really central to the argument, but the collapse of demand is.

Re: The dead economy theory

#168

Post by idiotsecant »

coffeemug wrote: post #157
ekidd wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is this time different? If it was just programming being automated, then whatever. Lots of professions have been automated and society adapts. The underlying worry here is that current AI provides a partial automation of intelligence. The endgame for the investors and the corporations using AI is complete automation of intelligence (and manual labor, too). They want a $25,000 robot that works around the clock,…

The future you're describing doesn't seem likely to me because in this event the public will force redistribution through political action.

No they won't, not if they have just enough bread and circuses and someone below them to hate. Boil the frog slowly enough and it'll work out just fine for the capital class.

Re: The dead economy theory

#169

Post by rayiner »

bayarearefugee wrote: post #90
spongebobstoes wrote: post #15

this whole blog post is basically "people need jobs to be happy, so we should design our society such that they need jobs" not only is the premise wrong, but forcing people to work is not a good or ethical way to address this problem most people like the social aspect of work, but not being beholden to their boss we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money we can do…

> we can do better than this In theory we can do better than this, in practice we can't. 40% of the people in the US would rather starve to death themselves than live in a world where people they hate for their skin color get anything without toiling for it.

[flagged]

Re: The dead economy theory

#170

Post by deaton »

mrdependable wrote: post #136

I think a lot of this would be solved if the government would actually enforce anti monopoly laws. The penalties against Google were such a damn joke it makes me sick. Companies aren’t going to hold off on trying to automate tasks AI performs poorly at. They are going to change the task so AI can do it, putting the burden of making up for the deficit on everyone else. The only reason this is able to happen now is bec…

Well the effects of the standard oil breakup were great. We can't allow that to ever happen again!
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