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The dead economy theory

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Re: The dead economy theory

#241

Post by dwedge »

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…

Aside from filling in the timesheet (which I assume could be done from a CSV import - I appreciate this is another step), I have almost the same setup as you, without AI. I have bugwarrior pulling JIRA tickets and github PRs into taskwarrior. I have an integration from task warrior into time warrior and from there another hook back into JIRA to get titles and summarise.

All of that is done with two API keys and no AI. A local agent could easily put it together for you.

Now sure, I had to put this together and I lose the AI summary you have plus the auto filling, but what I'm trying to say is that I have 80% of this without any AI.

I also have a script parsing git from my emails and a little tui that translates them into git diff and a key binding to pull the PR but I find it a little cumbersome and don't really use it, and trying to parse todo from maildir is also a little useless so I accept that AI would be better there.

I also accept that your example is just one prompt of a dozen and I have to plan the solution for every one of your prompts, but I also don't find prompting to be terribly useful for occasions where I don't think the solution through- because it probably means I don't know what I want or don't really need it.

What I do find it really useful for is digging through Kubernetes and asking how two services are connected. Claude is better than local for that but there's nothing inherently non-local about that usage.

Re: The dead economy theory

#242

Post by PaulHoule »

10xDev wrote: post #165
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 you…

The odd thing about games is that there are quite literally a handful that push the envelope (Genshin Impact stands almost alone, a few other Chinese and Korean titles come close) in terms of graphics, art, gameplay and story complexity and then there are thousands and thousands of slop games that you can hardly call "games".

Re: The dead economy theory

#243

Post by Ancalagon »

What's the endgame here? Like the group of psychopath capitalists own everything, automate everything, and devise ways to separate themselves from or un-alives the remainder of the population and live, trade, and war amongst themselves with their armies of robots?

Edit: Also this article has so many AI-generated images. I hate that I can't tell if the words themselves are AI-generated or not as well.

Re: The dead economy theory

#244

Post by rootusrootus »

logicchains wrote: post #234
rootusrootus wrote: post #226

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. M…

>What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger I thought the point was to minimize the amount of talented devs who instead try to do their own startups that could compete with Messenger, by hiring them and paying them well so they've got no appetite to try their own thing.

So now we have every tom, dick, and harry in the world using Claude Code to compete with Messenger. Sounds like a disaster :)

Re: The dead economy theory

#245

Post by fragmede »

zozbot234 wrote: post #104
idopmstuff wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is this time different? That depends if AI gets to the point where it can fully replace workers, as opposed to just augmenting them. I heard Alex Imas on a podcast recently talking about how a SWE can be running 10 agents to be 10x as productive, then that SWE is more valuable so firms should want to hire more SWEs and pay them more. That works for a while, but what if AI gets to the point where it can manage t…

Someone will always have to prompt the AI, it can't just do that on its own. Or rather, maybe it can (you can just prompt it to "kindly do the needful" in a completely unspecific way) but the results won't be any good.

Always? I mean, that's the hope, but they only have to be good enough to be of use for the rest of us to be unneeded.

Re: The dead economy theory

#246

Post by BeetleB »

Zigurd wrote: post #172
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…

> later this year One can hope that reality intrudes before the bubble gets even more dangerously inflated, but how many years has Tesla had a ridiculous P/E ratio. Even after growth stagnated and market leadership was lost in Asia and Europe. Number still goes up.

I hate Musk, and I'm not going to justify Tesla's crazy stock valuation, but consider the following:

Outside of China, Tesla's probably the only company that can compete on battery prices. I don't know how accurate it was, but a news report was comparing the cost the manufacturer's pay to build the battery. Chinese companies were around $6000. Tesla was at $7000. Everyone else was around $12-15K. This is why a number of companies have exited the EV market - they just can't compete. This is why Ford lost money on every EV, despite the high MSRP. This is why the Ford CEO says "We're f####d" when he saw Chinese cars.

The only hope regular Japanese/American/European auto manufacturers have is if EVs do not gain substantial market share.

If the future is EVs, Tesla is the only non-Chinese company that has a chance.

It's depressing.

Re: The dead economy theory

#247

Post by FuriouslyAdrift »

some_random wrote: post #65
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…

Star Trek isn't real life, when human labor stops being valuable the humans who's labor was previously vital will be at best left to rot in squalor.

The Expanse would be an apt sci-fi example where almost no labor is needed and everyone survives on a bare minimum UBI unless they want to risk it all and go into space.

Re: The dead economy theory

#248

Post by Animats »

India has the problem with farming that the US is starting to have with AI. Farming in India is still far too labor intensive by world standards. 43% of workers still work in agriculture. [1] For the US, that number is under 2%. China is at 22% as of 2023, and dropping steadily.

This inefficient agricultural system is not by accident. It is supported by heavy subsidies. Attempts to cut the subsidies resulted in riots.[2] Trouble is ongoing. Comments from someone who knows more about this than I do would help here.

The US and most of the EU went through that transition over several generations, and farming is still heavily subsidized in both areas. The transition happened faster in China, and a hukou system was put into place to prevent people from migrating from farms to cities faster than the cities could absorb them.

Looking at how countries coped with a fast transition from labor intensive agriculture to an urban society gives hints on how an AI transition may look. All the Asian countries that went from poor to rich in a generation did this, with different approaches. How that took place may provide more useful info than philosophy.

[1] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/indicators...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024%E2%80%942025_Indian_farme...

Re: The dead economy theory

#249

Post by cestith »

kalleboo wrote: post #119
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…

The solution is The Matrix. The "real world" is just computers/AIs running everything in a pointless loop. Humans aren't "batteries" (that never even made sense to begin with) but instead are living their happy lives in the simulation to provide something to simulate investment and shareholder value. It's dumb, but it still seems more plausible than people accepting an overnight switch into the "space communism" of n…

The original idea I think was they were biological components in a digital/biological computer complex. The Matrix sets up scenarios, and the human brains interact with them in human ways which are sometimes of use to the machines. Meanwhile, the machines see all of it and can monitor for problem humans. ISTR this was tossed as too intellectual for an action movie.

Another option to either The Matrix or Star Trek is Idiocracy, only there’s an elite group of humans and AI in charge over the deteriorating masses. Let’s not count out The Hunger Games or Elysium.

Re: The dead economy theory

#250

Post by fragmede »

rglullis wrote: post #125
treis wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The construction worker it replaces isn't going to start managing a team of robots construction robots Some of them will. You've slashed construction labor cost to 5% of what it was before. With that and a similar reduction throughout the supply chain means we're going to start building a lot more stuff.

Labor costs are not the limiting factor on production.

If they were suddenly cut to near zero, a lot of projects that were previous uneconomical become viable.
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