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The dead economy theory

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Re: The dead economy theory

#211

Post by daxfohl »

dangus wrote: post #188
daxfohl wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, and assuming local open AI models start catching up, which they seem to be doing, the foundation models' hold on society gets a lot slipperier. If there's a "what to do about all this" from an engineer's standpoint, pushing the needle toward local models, whether in research, agents, or just using them, understanding how they work, and advocating for them when it makes sense (which is more often than they get…

While I agree with you on open models getting better, I have been starting to see how the value, the reason you pay for Claude, isn’t in the models. For example, I just hooked Claude desktop up to my outlook to build a report for my timesheet then I used the chrome extension to fill it out automatically with that data. It could read Jira tickets if that’s where the information was. A local model can’t do that for me…

So far there's no moat though. A lot of that kind of stuff is available open source too if you look for it (and was available before claude desktop). And for anything that doesn't exist, with coding agents now you can write one up in an afternoon.

It's kind of paradoxical in a way. By making writing software cheap, they've made it much harder to create a moat for themselves that involves only software. It'll be interesting to see how they respond.

Re: The dead economy theory

#212

Post by stego-tech »

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…

You're absolutely right, and people will cite this while pointing to The Culture and saying "see, this is what we mean, everything will be fine."

Except nobody wants to get into the guts of how those systems came about. Nobody wants to discuss policy changes needed to ensure these sorts of outcomes, opportunities. Nobody wants to discuss regulations, tax schemes, land use requirements, accountability, ownership, shared prosperity.

Citing a potentiality as a certainty without any discussion as to how to get there is about as productive as daydreaming you're a billionaire and how you'd spend all that money. You have to do the fucking work, first, before any sliver of that outcome even becomes possible.

And if there's one thing the AIBros are adverse to, it's doing fucking work.

Re: The dead economy theory

#213

Post by PaulHoule »

daxfohl wrote: post #195
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,…

Reminds me of the old short story "With Folded Hands" from 1947. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_Folded_Hands_ ...

The sequel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humanoids

is even better!

Re: The dead economy theory

#214

Post by rootusrootus »

asdff wrote: post #193
coffeemug wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How low do we go before that happens? Look at how poor people are in other countries and still aren't threatening their ruling oligarchy at all. And that is going to happen when all we have are what maybe some AR15s, and they have drones firing precision targeted ordinance at us from 50k feet?

> And that is going to happen when all we have are what maybe some AR15s, and they have drones firing precision targeted ordinance at us from 50k feet?

We have enough guns for every man, woman, and child to have at least one. There aren't enough drones or expensive precision targeted ordinance in the world to defend against that for any length of time. It's another version of the lessons recently taught in Ukraine and Iran.

Plus I think it is different when a poverty stricken population tries to rise up as compared with one that is historically wealthy. I expect we won't wait until we are actually poor before we collectively decide to refactor our government.

Re: The dead economy theory

#215

Post by brightball »

daft_pink wrote: post #163

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 sili…

Google really needs to work on the user experience. The Google Cloud based approach to Gemini for coding is so clunky.

Re: The dead economy theory

#216

Post by omcgrann »

idopmstuff wrote: post #72
hexator wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not only is the premise wrong The blog post offers several studies as evidence, where's yours?

The problem with the studies is that they're cases in which specific groups within the broader economy lost jobs. Those aren't really comparable to the (theoretical) path of job displacement of AI for a couple of reasons: 1. Those people didn't get substantial, ongoing financial assistance. If we end up in a UBI world, particular one where the UBI people get is high enough to get more or less anything that's not very…

Let's grant the premise. UBI, significant enough to live well on, luxury cars and dinner parties for all.

Who sets the amount? Who controls the infrastructure producing the unlimited resources? What happens when you vote the wrong way, or protest the wrong policy, or simply become inconvenient?

A population with no economic function has no leverage with which to resist a reduction, a condition, or a withdrawal. You're describing a world where 99% of the people are entirely dependent on the goodwill of whoever owns the machines, and you're treating that goodwill as an unchanging variable. The history of every human institution suggests that power without accountability eventually behaves like...power without accountability. Even assuming the benevolence of the people holding all the cards isn't naive optimism, it's the same mistake that makes people say real communism just hasn't been tried yet.

Re: The dead economy theory

#217

Post by beachWholesaleS »

Can someone point me to credible evidence/examples of productivity increases from AI spending, among non-ai providers? And if you'd bear with me, I'm asking for productivity in the sense of "accelerating the businesses pursuit of its existing goals" rather than quantity. I think that in most sane business's, output quantity bereft of output quality is utterly useless in said pursuit.

Re: The dead economy theory

#218

Post by asdff »

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 give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money

I think people get hung up on "job bad" and forget what the job is actually doing, functionally.

We are animals, on earth, attempting to survive. We have evolved where we actually really suck at doing it alone, but we do really well if we delegate the various needs of survival. Now, how do we make it so if you chopped wood in the forest you get a piece of the fishermans take? You can do it in kind, although that would quickly become logistically complicated due to the size of the logs and fish catches. Instead, we use money out of sheer convenience and its amazing properties of being a store of labor both past, present, and future.

So give everyone no jobs. Who fishes? Who chops wood? Someone or some thing has to do it right? And it needs to be delegated in some way. We can't all go happy go lucky and rave all day and fuck all night and have dozens of kids. Resources on the earth are finite. Forests will be depleted, fisheries crushed. There needs to be some counter to what would otherwise be runaway hedonism and resource depletion.

Re: The dead economy theory

#219

Post by cindyllm »

stego-tech wrote: post #212
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…

You're absolutely right, and people will cite this while pointing to The Culture and saying "see, this is what we mean, everything will be fine." Except nobody wants to get into the guts of how those systems came about. Nobody wants to discuss policy changes needed to ensure these sorts of outcomes, opportunities. Nobody wants to discuss regulations, tax schemes, land use requirements, accountability, ownership, shar…

[dead]

Re: The dead economy theory

#220

Post by fragmede »

dangus wrote: post #188
daxfohl wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, and assuming local open AI models start catching up, which they seem to be doing, the foundation models' hold on society gets a lot slipperier. If there's a "what to do about all this" from an engineer's standpoint, pushing the needle toward local models, whether in research, agents, or just using them, understanding how they work, and advocating for them when it makes sense (which is more often than they get…

While I agree with you on open models getting better, I have been starting to see how the value, the reason you pay for Claude, isn’t in the models. For example, I just hooked Claude desktop up to my outlook to build a report for my timesheet then I used the chrome extension to fill it out automatically with that data. It could read Jira tickets if that’s where the information was. A local model can’t do that for me…

Unfortunately for Claude, you can have it set up local models to do that for you and then you don't need to renew it. Codex's computer use is better than Claude's, imo. I'm a Mac, no idea about windows but I know there's no Linux version. Haven't had enough time with Opus 4.8 but GPT 5.5 > Opus 4.6 and 4.7.
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