I've been finding it rather odd lately that the companies that make phyiscal things that run the world bring in significantly less money than a handful of companies whose main function is stalking people across the internet for advertising purposes.
The dead economy theory
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Re: The dead economy theory
#412I 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…
If it's any consolation, this is also a mystery to non developers like me. And developers likewise wonder why a business needs so many managers and what they do all day.
> And developers likewise wonder why a business needs so many managers and what they do all day.
I wondered, too, until I spent some time as a manager.
I thought I’d have all this time to mentor juniors and updated documentation and maybe even code still.
Nope! Too much communication, negotiation, and dealing with drama. What the team sees is a nicely distilled and cleaned up version of a lot of meetings and conversations. Looks minimal but it’s the final product of all the work, not a sum of the inputs.
I was also disappointed by how much of my time went to dealing with a very small number of problem makers. I expected a bunch of management politics but 80% of the junk I had to deal with came from a small number of problem ICs, mostly on teams we worked with.
Re: The dead economy theory
#413this 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…
This isn't what the piece argues. It doesn't claim people need jobs to be happy, and the word "happy" doesn't appear in it. The argument is structural: when capital depends on labor, labor has political, economic, and democratic leverage. When that dependency ends, the leverage ends with it. Whether people find meaning in work or outside of it is a separate question the piece doesn't take a position on, because it's…
The leverage doesn't end unless the AI-owning capital class Terminates the rest of the population.
Re: The dead economy theory
#414This article's premise is entirely built on the idea that CEOs who layoff people citing AI aren't just lying. And, well, of course they are. If AI was really making these companies meaningfully more productive, they could use that to out-innovate competitors. Instead, they're doing cost-cutting. That only makes sense if you're entirely out of ideas! It's a terribly embarrassing thing to say for a CEO! Really what's g…
AI for the fortune 500 seems so misplaced, its for the 3 person startup trying to take on an existing fortune 5000 enterprise with lower overall costs.
Re: The dead economy theory
#415I've been finding it rather odd lately that the companies that make phyiscal things that run the world bring in significantly less money than a handful of companies whose main function is stalking people across the internet for advertising purposes.
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Re: The dead economy theory
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought about that a lot too, and in the end I think it just comes down to stupid economics: What do you want them to do with all this money? 1) Most top US tech companies are flooded of money. Everyone dumps money in the SP500. 2) This money has to go somewhere. You can't just redistribute it as dividends, otherwise it's an admission that you won't grow and giving you more money would be a 0 sum game. 3) So you ha…
> You can't just redistribute it as dividends, otherwise it's an admission that you won't grow and giving you more money would be a 0 sum game. I don't understand the logic behind this.
"Tech stocks are growth stocks", that's pretty much how the market sees them anyway.
So essentially, they are not expected to be boring businesses yielding stable dividends to investors. That's your aristocrats stocks postioning: J&K, P&G, etc.
What is expected from tech stocks is the opposite: small to no dividend, reinvesting inflows into ever growing new businesses and technologies. A tech stock distributing dividends to shareholders instead of reinvesting in new projects would be seen as a mark of failure to innovate, incapacity to grow.
Re: The dead economy theory
#417There are two problems in the line of thinking being criticized here that weren't touched on. 1) When machines automate a previously human endeavor, we recalibrate our concept of what is granted by nature, and that stuff becomes commoditized and less interesting, focus moves to where automation is lacking. So all the stuff the AI takes over will just become a far smaller part of the economy which will reorient itself…
Generalized intelligence paired with generalized machines (i.e. humanoid robots) = ubiquitous disruption that may simply remove large swaths of useful / productive human endeavor. At some point 99.9% of people simply don't have economically worthwhile skill vs a 10k robot sustained by a few $s of compute and power.
Re: The dead economy theory
#418This is making an assumption that LLMs are even capable of doing what these companies claim they can or will do in the future. Stop doing the marketing for them by believing what they tell you at face value.
Re: The dead economy theory
#419I feel like people have said that about every technical revolution. I dont think this article would have been out of place in the hay day of the industrial revolution. Its never been true in the past. Otoh, there always has to be a first time for everything. I think to be convincing though it needs more evidence on how this differed from other technical revolutions.
It's been true in the past for the generation that's living through the technical revolution. The Industrial Revolution was a very grim time to be a worker.
Re: The dead economy theory
#420If AI or any of the means of production are too concentrated, societies around the globe have found a solution: tax or nationalise. Even taxing might be enough to tilt the scale in favour of labor. If whole countries have their socio-economic fabric damaged because the means of production are locked elsewhere this constitutes a sovereignty issue and it will be dealt with. The Industrial Revolution had the same pains,…
right, but if you do not have income, how you going to pay for those utilities?
in fact, many people struggle to pay for electiricy and water and gas. and without subsidies from government would not afford them.
we rapidly moving to territory where you would need literally all your income from government, or else you would not survive.
it is not about "open weights" or "free tokens". you can not eat tokesn, nor weights. it is about "food on the table".