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The dead economy theory

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Re: The dead economy theory

#441

Post by Aurornis »

spondelkryp wrote: post #91

>The US horse population grew from nine million in 1840 to twenty-one million by 1900, seemingly immune to technological change. Within sixty years of the internal combustion engine, the population collapsed by eighty-eight percent. I think this is a very interesting and chilling point, especially if you draw the parallel literally. For quite some time, I was pondering the question:"Who is buying though?". I.e if you…

The horse analogy fell very flat for me. Those horses were bred and maintained as single purpose machines. There isn’t really an analogy to humans with self-determination and broad abilities, other than they both have a heartbeat.

Re: The dead economy theory

#442

Post by throwaway27448 »

fragmede wrote: post #429
throwaway27448 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economics of a service economy really just don't make sense. We pay way too much for software (which should trend towards zero-cost to distribute), we pay too much for ads. The value of it is inherently downstream of the real economy, which is about making and distributing goods and stuff people actually need to live. Especially a company like facebook only provides a glorified forum, which should be free or coll…

Start by understanding how to price a product. Say a chair. From first principles, you'd take however much wood it takes, plus however many hours it took you to turn that wood into a simple chair, then add in whatever you consider a reasonable profit margin, and that's how much you should sell the chair at. Which is totally and utterly wrong. You throw away that number, and look at how much other chairs are selling f…

> You throw away that number, and look at how much other chairs are selling for, compare features, the landscape of the whole market, and set your prices that way.

Maybe this is true. Price is inherently bound among what people will pay, upstream (material/supply chain) costs, and labor. The west has overpriced its labor and material values by probably orders of magnitude for a long time, and people will pay less than ever. The rest of the world has been undervalued both in the effort for it to gain access to the markets that allow increased quality of life. But the market correction will lead to severely reduced market evaluation in terms of demand and price for all three factors in the west for many decades, I think.

Selling out our supply chains was suicide. I am too young to understand why people let this happened, but I think people bought into the idea of progress a little too hard to keep in mind their own civilizational health.

Re: The dead economy theory

#443

Post by TFYS »

izzydata wrote: post #418

This 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.

Maybe they aren't and never will be capable enough to do this, but if there's even a 1% chance that they are, then it's very important to consider the consequences and take the necessary precautions before it's too late.

Re: The dead economy theory

#444

Post by hunterpayne »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #389
zozbot234 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is possible to have excess productivity. The most productive places in the world are also those with the highest incomes and wealth generation. "Excess productivity" is either temporary or a sector-specific phenomenon, it doesn't apply to society as a whole.

Temporary excess productivity can linger a very long time and sector-specific excess productivity can still be broadly damaging. Detroit and southeastern Michigan were devastated by the collapse of American automotive industry in the '00s, taking something like 10-15 years before starting to recover.

That collapse happened in the late 1970s. And many would debate if its recovered to this day.

Re: The dead economy theory

#445

Post by VinLucero »

hax0ron3 wrote: post #433
wcfrobert wrote: post #299

> Turn three: the company that fired its workers to save money discovers that its customers were, in aggregate, other companies’ workers. Revenue growth stalls. The AI subscription that was supposed to be an investment in efficiency turns out to be a contribution to the destruction of its own market. If we take it to the extreme, the final solution to this problem is secessionism: a fully non-human AI economy where t…

>It's all so obscene. Instead, why don't we try to protect human dignity and move towards a more humane future? I think the Darwinian logic of reality might make this hard. If society A and society B are both developing AI and one of them stops in order to protect humans, society B may continue to develop AI and then it might either outcompete society A economically to the point of reducing it to poverty (it is theor…

Yeah, it’s the same problem as nuclear proliferation.

We see what happened with Ukraine when they gave up their nukes in exchange for a promise of protection.

The same could be true of countries who forgo AI development directly in exchange for promises.

Re: The dead economy theory

#446

Post by Aurornis »

omcgrann wrote: post #201
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…

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…

> Whether people find meaning in work or outside of it is a separate question the piece doesn't take a position on

There’s an entire section in the middle about this exact position. Search for “opioid” to find the part where he says people fall into suicide, drug use, and despair when they lose their jobs.

Re: The dead economy theory

#447

Post by phkahler »

Matticus_Rex wrote: post #333
deepsun wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every country subsidies their agriculture for national security purpose. You don't want an enemy to starve you in case of a big war.

Even if one grants this, it does not make the case that any particular set of subsidies is justified by that reasoning.

You want to have stable food prices so people don't have to worry about basic survival.

Re: The dead economy theory

#448

Post by CamperBob2 »

riazrizvi wrote: post #374

There 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…

That allowed the assimilation of language operations, intellectual operations, into a machine.

The important part is how we've recently learned just how much of our reality is embodied by language. Language does vastly more than anyone thought it did, and that means that language models can do vastly more work than anyone thought they could.

There was no reason on Earth to think that "stochastic parrots" could solve original math problems and write novel proofs, for instance. The fact that they can do that sort of thing is a huge, huge deal... too big a deal to express in the terms you're using here.

Re: The dead economy theory

#449

Post by tim333 »

vitally3643 wrote: post #289
graemep wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The industrial revolution was enabled by more efficient agriculture feeing labour to do other work.

The flipside is that there must be other work to be done or people starve to death .

Not necessarily. In the UK:

> Over one million young people in this country are now neither employed, in education nor in training...

yet no starvation. I'm not sure it's a good situation but it is what it is.

Re: The dead economy theory

#450

Post by ptsneves »

5701652400 wrote: post #420
ptsneves wrote: post #398

If 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 weigh…

> we rapidly moving to territory where you would need literally all your income from government, or else you would not survive.

Yes, I share the sentiment of dread don’t get me wrong. But this also has happened before, and it gave us communism. There are people that said it was ok to live in those times. I guess if the state actually delivered the necessities for people to survive as opposed to how it happened historically, I think many people would be fine with that status quo. Not all but perhaps the majority. I think it is worth seeing a shitty way out than a despairing wall…lol this came out more desperate than i thought.

> it is not about "open weights" or "free tokens". you can not eat tokesn, nor weights. it is about "food on the table".

The idea is that anyone will be able to use these new means of production to answer more demanding tasks that would not be possible to fulfil without the llms. If we are all hopelessly automated though, yeah, we will either be living in a slum or in a utopia.

Given history and my trusty Hobbes social contract I believe society will come up with a way to not predate on each other.

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