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The dead economy theory

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Re: The dead economy theory

#731

Post by fendy3002 »

jameslk wrote: post #555

> OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta AI, Microsoft: the combined investment in large-scale AI infrastructure now runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars, with projections into the trillions over the next decade. These numbers need an addressable market large enough to justify them. There is only one market that large: the global labor market. It's getting tiring hearing this alarmist view unchallenged hon…

If they (AI) able to compete with even 30% of workforce, that alone is a big enough leverage over the already powerful companies. At minimum it will cause another phase of wealth inequality, which is already a big problem atm.

Open model with affortable computing power can be the alternative, but we don't see it soon.

Re: The dead economy theory

#732

Post by patrickk »

peonicles wrote: post #662
iliaxj wrote: post #457

The article doesn't seem to take his train of thought quite far enough. If AI suddenly makes it possible for a law firm to be run with a skeleton crew, then what's stopping all those people you fired from starting new law companies, where AI also does most of the work, and competing with you for the same market? And ultimately, if AI gets to be so good that it can competently do a lawyer's job, what reason do big law…

We can take your train of thought further still. If AI ever becomes super good at lawyering, why would we even need law firms and lawyers at all? We could feed legislation and constitution into the model and have it argue against other lawyer bots in court in front of a judge bot.

Brand value of the ‘prestigious’ law firms will still count for something in the minds of C suite executives (who of course will ensure they themselves are not trampled on by AI). The same dynamic will likely happen with high-powered consulting, big 4 audit/accounting firms and so on, even if inside those companies it’s just a shell of its former self.

Re: The dead economy theory

#733

Post by balamatom »

aleqs wrote: post #81
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…

Yeah, people need a creative output, not just for creativity sake but something that feels productive/constructive and beneficial to them and their society/community. Open source is an example of such work, and amazing things have been achieved - arguably far more impressive and useful than any private tech company has achieved ( and arguably more than all for-profit tech companies combined). We should focus on expan…

> I don't see why people couldn't organize at the grassroots level and build/solve real problems their local (or global) communities may be facing.

Usually it's because when they do, their de facto owner - "the state" - goes after them with guns and trained sadists.

>I really don't see why we need all of the VCs, marketers and MBAs... No offense to anyone but the typical SV tech company structure and operations just don't even seem efficient... much of the focus is on marketing/manipulation, enshitification, dark patterns and other dishonest and ultimately counter-productive bullshit.

That's called value creation: manipulating human populations to perceive certain arrangements of matter (or of notions) as "valuable", i.e. that those forms have some inherent quality which legitimately causes individual volition to subject itself to outside command for the sake of the given arrangement.

Re: The dead economy theory

#734

Post by thisisit »

iliaxj wrote: post #457

The article doesn't seem to take his train of thought quite far enough. If AI suddenly makes it possible for a law firm to be run with a skeleton crew, then what's stopping all those people you fired from starting new law companies, where AI also does most of the work, and competing with you for the same market? And ultimately, if AI gets to be so good that it can competently do a lawyer's job, what reason do big law…

Here's another train of thought because you don't seem to understand how incentives or even lawyering works.

> then what's stopping all those people you fired from starting new law companies, where AI also does most of the work, and competing with you for the same market?

Your thinking is similar to the someone saying you can use LLMs to "research" stock market edges. The rub lies in knowing what research to do and what inputs to provide.

Big law firms are not big because they create similar outputs and that can be done using AI. They are "big" because they have connections and also know how to create better outputs.

Still to your point:

> I foresee a wave of entrepreneurship coming. AI will empower more people to provide useful services directly to other people, with less middlemen and menial work, and more direct problem solving.

If this was true then what you are saying is every thing is going to be commoditized due to AI. There is no quality difference.

That will drive prices down in the short term and in the long term people will form cliques like "Forum for AI enabled lawyers" or something similar to OECD and drive prices up. Thereby delivering even lesser value for increased cost. Enshittification at its finest. Not exactly the utopia you seem to be picturing.

Re: The dead economy theory

#735

Post by Finbel »

I feel there's an interesting juxtaposition between these two quotes:

"The economy has absorbed automation before; agricultural employment collapsed from ninety percent of the American workforce to two percent and civilization continued. David Autor at MIT has shown that roughly sixty percent of today’s jobs didn’t exist in 1940. New technologies create new categories of work. True. But there’s a difference between an observation about the past and a law of nature, and the optimists consistently confuse the two."

and

"The assumption is that if you send people checks, they’ll find meaning in hobbies and community. They’ll paint. They’ll garden. They’ll finally write that novel.

This is ahistorical bullshit."

In the former the author establish that you can't make a observation about the past and take it as a law of nature. In the latter they refute arguments as "ahistorical bullshit" for not doing exactly that.

Especially since they then proceed with historical example, all of which had poverty as a strong contributing factor.

Re: The dead economy theory

#736

Post by mile3island »

dron57 wrote: post #393
logicchains wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the early 1900s the majority of Americans were self-employed. The equilibrium will likely shift back towards this, because AIs cannot be business owners, cannot have a bank account, cannot be held liable for their mistakes. And AI are unlikely to be given economic rights any time in the near future, because doing so would facilitate an overwhelming amount of crime; an AI that can make hundreds of copies of its wei…

The US already has a legal concept of personhood for companies. We are soon going to lose control to these “people” and businesses overrunning the economy, the internet and our culture.

Soon? Hasn’t this ship already sailed?

Re: The dead economy theory

#737

Post by palmotea »

iliaxj wrote: post #457

The article doesn't seem to take his train of thought quite far enough. If AI suddenly makes it possible for a law firm to be run with a skeleton crew, then what's stopping all those people you fired from starting new law companies, where AI also does most of the work, and competing with you for the same market? And ultimately, if AI gets to be so good that it can competently do a lawyer's job, what reason do big law…

> If AI suddenly makes it possible for a law firm to be run with a skeleton crew, then what's stopping all those people you fired from starting new law companies, where AI also does most of the work, and competing with you for the same market?

Money. They won't have the money to pay for the tokens, or the best models, because they'll be unemployed. They also won't have the connections to get the clients.

When you're playing a game of "who has the best capital," the scrappy underdog worker with vastly less won't win.

The idea that making the economy even more capital intensive will some how equalize things is an insane fantasy only a software engineer could swallow.

Re: The dead economy theory

#738

Post by thesuavefactor »

BoneShard wrote: post #647
iliaxj wrote: post #457

The article doesn't seem to take his train of thought quite far enough. If AI suddenly makes it possible for a law firm to be run with a skeleton crew, then what's stopping all those people you fired from starting new law companies, where AI also does most of the work, and competing with you for the same market? And ultimately, if AI gets to be so good that it can competently do a lawyer's job, what reason do big law…

but just imagine the brave new world, where a law firm has super-duper-frontier model and you're trying to argue with it in a court with your latest best local oss model (only 6 month behind the bestests ones).

Interestingly, I have a conflict with my municipality. I fed the articles of law and their arguments of why and how they apply to notebooklm and asked it for fallacies. It not only gave me the fallacies in their reasoning, but also an excellent counter argument and motivation why they are interpreting this law incorrectly. The result is now that they are handing over the entire case to an independent third party to evaluate which interpretation is valid.

Re: The dead economy theory

#739

Post by palmotea »

nerdsniper wrote: post #154
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,…

> Strictly speaking, they don't even need us as customers. I think they'd employ some number of humans for entertainment.

> I think they'd employ some number of humans for entertainment.

The key point is: some number. Chances are you and everyone you love won't make the cut.

If 10 billionaires control the all the capital of the planet, they could exterminate 99% of humanity and not even notice any change in their day to day life. 83 million NPCs are more than enough for 10 people.

Re: The dead economy theory

#740

Post by epsteingpt »

Not going to be popular, but this article misses the point entirely.

The reason we are pursuing AI so quickly is the same reason we (the West, US) pursued the atomic bomb so quickly: not because having it was great (we've only used it twice), but because 'the other guys' having it is worse.

As bad as anyone thinks AI is for a free and democratic society with oligarchs, you can be assured that a future in a China or Russia controlled totalitarian AI state would be infinitely worse.

The US at least in principle values an individual human life, as judged by its conduct in roughly 3 centuries of conflict.

China and Russia emphatically do not.

It may be cold comfort when the terminator eventually comes for you, but I'd trust an American Skynet over a Chinese, North Korean or Russian one any day.

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