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The dead economy theory

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Re: The dead economy theory

#221

Post by rootusrootus »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #175
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.

hasn't happened in the US yet, and probably won't. and they have all of the guns and trucks and toxic masculinity culture that requires survivalism and toughness and defending muh freedom if the yanks won't, why would the public elsewhere?

> and they have all of the guns and trucks and toxic masculinity culture that requires survivalism and toughness and defending muh freedom

Nothing will happen so long as the people are gleefully fighting one another, but if we reach a point where populism rules across the board and bridges the left/right culture war, things could get exciting. There is a reason the elites are spending so much effort stoking culture rivalry in the US.

Re: The dead economy theory

#222

Post by rf15 »

neutronicus wrote: post #166
unsnap_biceps wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Ah, the good old days!

Re: The dead economy theory

#223

Post by kingleopold »

brightball wrote: post #215
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.

they really dont care I think. Only Sergey brin cared for a while and he is silent again

Re: The dead economy theory

#224

Post by mrdependable »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #54
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?

If you know happy rich people that don't have a job, you got your counter example, and one is enough. I do. People usually need to have a purpose, but it doesn't need to be a job.

You may not need to have a job to be happy, it varies person to person. However, the idea that the billionaires will save us and our leverage is not needed is ridiculous. It is much more likely we would see poverty like is seen in much of the rest of the world.

Re: The dead economy theory

#225

Post by asdff »

ggambetta wrote: post #10

> And the public funded the research that made it possible. The transformer architecture, Errr pretty sure that was Google?

The engineers at google did not sit in a blank room and come up with these ideas out of nowhere. They read the literature to figure out what the hell to do. If you look at the Attention is All You Need whitepaper, you will find there are 32 references, like most ~10 page manuscripts.

Re: The dead economy theory

#226

Post by rootusrootus »

I know this isn't exactly related, so maybe a low value comment, but it itches in my mind. Years ago I talked with a recruiter at Facebook and they bragged about how many floors of developers they had working on Messenger in just one location (Seattle).

What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger? I mean, really?

I feel like in a way, AI just adds to that weird situation of overcapacity. Maybe we were already oversupplied with talent. In which case why the heck were we still hiring more, more, more developers? Before the AI craze, Musk chopped an awful lot of headcount at Twitter, right, and proved it was overkill, has that panned out?

I just struggle to imagine how the economics of SWE really work in reality, outside of the niche that I am in. I have never worked for a pure software company on products that ship directly to outside customers, I've always been an internal developer. Maybe that is why I have such a big blindspot.

I won't be surprised if the net result of this wave of LLMs is ... not much. A change in tooling, but otherwise not revolutionary. On paper it should be revolutionary, but the more I use it (for both coding and non-coding tasks) the more I think it isn't anywhere near magic enough for that. It does have its moments though.

Re: The dead economy theory

#227

Post by stego-tech »

cjs_ac wrote: post #79

This is a great article, but it under-emphasises the fact that it’s middle-class jobs under threat. The studies that are summarised show what happens when working-class people are kicked out of the economy, but the historical record shows that when middle-class people are kicked out of the economy, they use their education to form and lead revolutions. Unless the bubble pops and destroys all these companies, I don’t…

Not sure why you're downvoted for citing historical fact, but I guess some folks are quite scared at the implication that they're the baddies.

You don't even have to go that far back. The New Deal that everyone fawns over was in large part the compromise of the wealthy with the workers to form the Middle Class, in lieu of being murdered in their own homes like had been going on for decades prior. The rise of Communism and Socialism in the US was a dire threat to their power and wealth, and even leveraging the US Military in bombing union workers couldn't stop the momentum of a populace in need of basic necessities that corporations and industrialists had stolen from them for personal profit (shelter was increasingly in Company Towns, payment was in scrip, jobs were precarious and dangerous and unreliable, the government offered nothing but harm). The deal on the table was they surrender power and keep the wealth, or they fucking die when the masses finally had enough of their bullshit.

Thus the New Deal was struck. Communists and Socialists were weakened by Capital and Politics immediately thereafter to try and ensure a future uprising couldn't occur, but the real saving grace was a citizenry who, at least for the white majority, had all their needs met with stable employment and had ample time to engage with their community as a result. That is what ended up building the Middle Classes everyone wants to "go back to" but without enacting the policies that brought about its rise (like a +70% tax level on the wealthy, for instance).

Fire bombing of personal residences, gunning down CEOs in broad daylight, firing shots at politicians supporting further theft from the populace or outright ignoring their plight - all of it is reprehensible, but also completely foreseen by literally anyone with a cursory knowledge of World History.

Re: The dead economy theory

#228

Post by FuriouslyAdrift »

brightball wrote: post #215
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.

I thought most people used Antigravity to code with Gemini?

https://antigravity.google/

Re: The dead economy theory

#229

Post by asdfman123 »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #181
asdfman123 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because AI now can do what only humans could do previously: analyze open ended problems and make decisions. There's the horse argument the author touches upon: eventually, technology got to the point where there weren't any profitable reasons to keep a horse.

"You're on to something! I will decide to delete this entire database, for some reason. Also run this command even through it will brick everything."

I'm just articulating the argument, not saying it's a done deal.

AI can actually make decisions based on open ended information, and if it gets good enough it can fully replace humans.

Will that happen? I don't know. But I will say there's an AI agent that is doing my job for me right now and it's able to now do complex refactorings, rebasing, etc. with minimal guidance.

Re: The dead economy theory

#230

Post by cute_boi »

brightball wrote: post #215
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.

Things went down why they hired anti gravity team. This thing is very had and isn't even opensourced.
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